Undertow Page 3

  **

  I was 12 when it first came up. Too old to be skinny-dipping with the opposite sex, too young and naïve to realize it. I made it all the way to the water before I discovered he wasn’t with me.

  “Slowpoke!” I taunted, exultant that I’d beat him to the water, an event that had never happened before and would certainly never happen again.

  He said nothing, but waded in after me, still in his shorts, keeping his distance. I splashed him, and he splashed me back half-heartedly. I dove deep in the water, feeling for his legs so I could pull them out from under him. When I found them, though, he kicked me off.

  “What’d you do that for?” I gasped, jumping up. He turned away from me.

  “Maura,” he said awkwardly. “You need …”

  “What?” I prompted, a little annoyed by his weirdness.

  “A swimsuit.” He sighed deeply, in a way that made me feel very young and freshly annoyed with him, and looked away. “You know. You’re, uh, getting older.” I’d given the idea so little thought until that moment that I had to look down to see if he was right.

  He was. There they were. Barely bigger than a boy’s, but definitely not a boy’s. I wasn’t a late bloomer – I was just late to realize it was happening.

  I rolled my eyes. It still didn’t seem like a big deal. “So what?”

  “Just wear a swimsuit,” he said tersely, still refusing to face me.

  I wore a swimsuit from then on, and so did he, but it still seemed like he was being weird about it for no good reason.

  My friends – Heather, Kendall and Elise — grew boy crazy without me, and Nate was at the center of their fantasies. Most of it was innocent – they argued over who would marry him, who was the most like him. But they also alluded to tongue kissing, even to sex, and I moved quickly from disturbed to disgusted. I could no more imagine doing that with Nate than with my brother.

  But when I finally did start liking boys, I arrived at my grandparents' house to discover that Nate was a not just a boy, but a spectacular one. The little boy who’d been my best friend through all those summers was gone, and in his place was the teenager my friends had seen long before me. He had the same challenging gray eyes, the same smile that lifted high on one side, sweet and devious all at once. But the things that were so innocent in him as a boy no longer were. Now they colluded to create something dangerous, something that affected me in ways even I didn’t understand.

  He was only 15, but he seemed so much older than me, all of a sudden. Not helped by the fact that he came over and mussed my hair like he was my grandfather.

  “Well hello there, Maura Leigh,” he said with that crooked grin. He was treating me like a little girl, and it made me irrationally angry.

  “You’re taller,” I said, and for some reason it sounded like an insult.

  “So are you,” he said, and it sounded like a compliment.

  Over time, the oddity of the situation eased off. The parts of us that had always been there emerged, and the parts of us that had changed fell to the background.

  But the one thing that had changed and would not fall to the background was Tina, Nate’s beautiful, inane girlfriend. I’d have hated her anyway, but I grew to hate her a little extra for the way she treated me, the way she rolled her eyes when I was with him, clicked her tongue disapprovingly, was always trying to drag him off.

  She wouldn’t swim, I suppose because she’d mess up her perfect hair and her face full of makeup. Instead, she’d stand at the water’s edge, squealing like a girl every time the water ran over her toes, giggling whenever he came near, pouting if he stayed in the water too long instead of paying attention to her.

  “Your girlfriend’s an idiot,” I told him one night when she was blissfully absent.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “She’s not that bad.”

  I looked at him scornfully. “She doesn’t swim, and she acts like a moron all the time.” I mimicked her, jumping up and down squealing “Oooh it’s so cold!”

  He laughed.

  “What do you even see in her?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak, then took another glance at me and clammed up. Finally, he shrugged again and said, “It’s hard to explain.”

  She didn’t like me either. “Do you always have to bring the little girl with you?” she sniped one night, glaring at me as she said it.

  “Yes,” he said simply, staring her down. She stomped off, and he made no move to follow. And soon she was replaced by Ashleigh, even prettier than Tina and a thousand times nicer. She treated me like a little sister, painting my nails and braiding my hair and scolding Nate for teasing me.

  Which made me realize that it didn’t matter who he dated. Because I hated Ashleigh too.

  CHAPTER 6

  Within 48 hours of Ethan’s departure, my mother calls.

  I know immediately, just by the way she practically sings her “hello”, that she knows I went out with him.

  “A little birdy told me you had a date this weekend!” she trills. She sounds more excited than she’d be if she’d had the date this weekend.

  I pinch my eyes shut, already regretting the whole thing. Ethan is great, but he’s not worth this. “Yeah, we went out,” I say, trying so hard to sound casual that I almost seem comatose.

  “That’s so exciting!” she sings again. I swear to God I can almost picture her with a heart over her head and those little cartoon bluebirds flying around.

  “It’s really not that exciting, Mom,” I warn her. “It was just a date. I’ve had a lot of dates.”

  “You’ve had a lot of dates, but not with Ethan!” she cries. “He’s practically family.”

  “If that’s the case, then maybe dating him is legally questionable,” I suggest dryly.

  “Oh, Maura, stop. Let your poor mother be excited for once.”

  “Mom, you know what’s exciting? That I’m going to law school. That I’m graduating with a 3.9 average. That’s what’s exciting.”

  “Fine,” she sighs. “I’ll call Stephanie Mayhew. I know she’ll share my enthusiasm.”

  “Oh my God, Mom! This is freaking crazy. Please tell me you are not seriously planning to call Ethan’s mom and tell her!” I cry.

  There is silence on the other end.

  Crap. “You already told her, didn’t you?”

  “No,” she says defensively. “She told me at the club this morning.”

  “Great,” I moan. “Did the two of you come to a decision about the flowers and catering for our wedding already, then?”

  She giggles. Jesus Christ. She did discuss a wedding. Like I thought last weekend, if I don’t marry Ethan now, it will be a disaster of unmitigated proportion.

  **

  In spite of my irritation with my mother, it seems unfair to penalize Ethan for it, and the truth is that I do want to see him. When he suggests coming up to Chapel Hill, I don’t say no.

  “I have a paper due on Monday,” I warn him beforehand.

  “I’ll just come up for dinner and be out of your way,” he promises.

  This time we head out of town, to a vineyard I’ve never even heard of. This is different than a standard college date, where you meet at a bar, you meet at a party, you go to a game. And I like it. I like how comfortable it is with him, how quiet. I like how easy things are, that he’s planned in advance, taken care of the details so things are seamless. Maybe this is what all adult dating is like, but I suspect it’s just Ethan.

  After dinner we lounge on the restaurant’s back deck, where the two of us can just squeeze into an oversized chair with a second bottle of wine and watch the stars come out.

  “Who do you stay with when you come up here?” I ask him, realizing it’s a question I should have asked the week before.

  “I stayed with a buddy from college and his wife last weekend,” he says.

  “But what about tonight?” I ask. “You can’t be planning to drive two hours home.”

  He grins. “Are you invit
ing me to stay?”

  “To sleep?” I ask sternly. “Just sleep?”

  “Of course,” he assures me. “But feel free to change your mind about that last part.”

  And when we wake up the next morning, I’m glad he’s there. Unlike with Tyler, and the guys who came before him, there’s no part of me that feels like I’ve made a mistake, chosen him for the wrong reasons. I don’t wake up and see all the ways he’s not who I thought he was. He’s just Ethan. Good-looking, fun Ethan who I’ve known all my life.

  The room is cold and I snuggle up to his back. “Why is your body temperature like 20 degrees warmer than mine?” I laugh.

  “I don’t know,” he smiles. “Maybe you should bring me up north with you so you don’t freeze to death.”

  “That’s asking a lot of you when an electric blanket could accomplish the same thing.”

  “There are still a few things I can do that a blanket can’t,” he says, and his mouth moves to my neck, to my collarbone, and farther down.

  CHAPTER 7

  I wonder sometimes if there was a different path Nate and I could have taken, one that would have allowed us to stay friends. Probably not. Definitely not. It’s all wishful thinking anyway. If his friendship wasn’t enough for me by the time I turned 14, it couldn’t possibly be enough now.

  If I’d been wiser, I’d have known as I arrived that summer how much more I needed from him. Instead, I put on a bikini and makeup and refused to admit even to myself that I was doing it for Nate.

  He walked out of the water toward me, and I barely recognized him. I’d grown over the past year, but he had metamorphosed. He was huge, nearly as tall as Jordan, who was the tallest person I knew. And his face. Gah. The easy smile and the gray eyes that stood out against his tan, his dark hair turning light with sun. He was gorgeous, like something straight out of an Abercrombie ad. He roughed up his wet hair, looking a little surprised, as if he hadn’t expected to see me. In spite of his crooked smile, he seemed slightly off-balance, like me.

  “You want to swim?” he asked awkwardly.

  “Okay,” I shrugged.

  I headed for the water, and he walked behind me. I’d gotten plenty of attention from boys over the previous year, and I didn’t have a lot of experience with self-consciousness, but I made up for lost time in the 30 seconds it took to get to the water. I felt naked, acutely aware of his presence and the fact that I probably looked like a giraffe from his vantage point. I’d grown up, up, up but not out, really – my body a bewildering mix of long, gangly parts. I had a chest but no curves to speak of otherwise. I had never wished more for a curvy figure like my mother’s than I did at that moment.

  We paddled out into the water silently, his sudden awkwardness coinciding with my inability to speak. I began to panic that we would never talk again.

  We watched the waves coming in.

  “That one?” I asked, nodding toward the horizon.

  “Nope. It’ll break before it gets here.”

  He was right.

  I saw another one forming. “That one?”

  He grinned. “I think you’re losing your touch, Pierce.”

  “Fuck off,” I replied, made irritable by the situation.

  He laughed.

  “That one,” he said decidedly. We both caught it and rode it in, my body dragging against the rough rocks and shells along the shoreline. It nearly wrenched my bikini top off too, and I struggled to fix it before anyone saw.

  “Ouch,” I said, looking at the scratches across my stomach and chest.

  He shrugged and ran back into the waves. “That’s what you get for dressing like a girl,” he smirked. And once the handful of wet sand I’d gathered and aimed at his head made impact, things became – almost – normal.

  He had a job, so I saw less of him, but when he was home we were together. And on our bikes, in the canoe, doing things that preoccupied us, we fell back into our old ways. But there were plenty of other times, times when he’d look at me oddly, or he’d catch me watching him, that lent an odd tension to the air. A tension that made me want to seek him out, as if it had magnetized us somehow.

  Heather and Kendall, though they had a crush on every boy we knew between the ages of 15 and 20, focused entirely too much on Nate. They could barely function when he was around. They slept at my house more that summer than they had all the other summers combined, and spent the bulk of that time staring out my window hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Only Elise knew about my crush, and I could tell from the sympathy in her eyes that she thought it was as futile as I did.

  There was no one girlfriend that summer for him, but several, rotating in and out of our little group at the beach. He’d leave me when it got late to wander off with one of them, and I’d stay behind trying to pretend I wasn’t sick with jealousy.

  Now that I had to fight for my hours with Nate, between his job and the girls, I guarded them ferociously. Teddy and Robert, two boys from home who’d taken to following me around, became a constant thorn in my side. They annoyed Nate too, and I began to worry that if they annoyed him enough I’d get no time with him at all.

  Nate and I treaded water, waiting, as always, for a good wave. I sighed to myself as I watch Teddy swim toward us.

  “Hey, Maura,” he said, ignoring Nate entirely. “What’s going on?”

  Nate rolled his eyes.

  “Not much.” I replied, still training my eyes in the distance, as did Nate, waiting for a wave. Nate said nothing.

  “You going to the pier tonight?” he asked. The kids no longer played games in the street at night. Instead, we’d walk down the beach until we hit the pier, and sit beneath it. Quietly, if we’d been able to get beer.

  Nate made a small noise of exasperation, a deep sigh with a click of the tongue. I glanced at him speculatively. It was unlike him to be testy, but he was clearly annoyed right now.

  “I suppose. Not much else to do.”

  “Any good waves?” he asked.

  “Here comes one now,” said Nate, and got his board in position. I looked at him quizzically. I’d never doubted Nate before, but it was clearly going to break too quickly.

  As it hit, Nate dove off his board into the water, while Teddy took it. We watched as it dragged him under.

  “That was mean,” I chided, narrowing my eyes at him. I didn’t want Teddy around either, but he was still our friend.

  “I didn’t tell him to take the wave,” he said dismissively.

  “You kind of did.”

  “He’s annoying.”

  “Since when?” I asked. Teddy had never bothered him before.

  “Since he decided to fucking follow you everywhere,” he scowled. “That’s when.”

  **

  It was Elise who first suggested that Nate’s irritation might mean something else. A week after the incident with Teddy we were at the beach when Robert came up, squeezing into the open spot beside me. I saw Kendall frown. He was one of her crushes – maybe number 4 out of 20 — and there was an open spot beside her too.

  Just as he sat down, Nate walked out of the water. He stood in front of Robert. “I was sitting there.”

  I looked at him in confusion. “No you weren’t.”

  “I am now,” he told me. Then he turned to Robert. “Go sit somewhere else.”

  “You’re not her brother,” Robert scowled.

  Nate’s face grew hard. “No, but I’m a 16-year-old who’s going to kick your ass if you keep mouthing off.”

  Robert did as he was told.

  I’d never seen Nate act like a bully. He was usually the one protecting kids like Robert from the locals. “What the hell was that, Nate?” I asked under my breath.

  He shrugged. “He took my seat.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Well it was going to be my seat.”

  “You’re a dick.”

  He just smiled and collapsed in the sand, looking content.

  “I think he likes you,” whispered Elise later
that night.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head even as hope surged up and prepared to carry me off entirely.

  “You should have seen the look on his face when he saw Robert next to you,” she giggled. “The second he saw it he came charging out of the water looking like he was gonna beat someone to death.”

  “No,” I shook my head again, wanting her to be right so badly that I could barely breathe as I argued against it. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  But it was too late. The tiny seed of hope she’d planted was already growing like an out-of-control weed, and taking over.

  **

  The water was calm one night and we were competing to see who could back float the longest. Our late night swims were infrequent now, and somewhat uncomfortable, both of us refusing to admit things had changed. I felt strung tight most of the time we were together, but never more so than when we swam alone in the moonlight. But tonight we were competing, and it made us forget somehow, and relax.

  I laughed as I failed at it, again and again. Eventually I just started splashing him in the face to make him stop floating entirely.

  “You must have more body fat,” I argued, as I tried it again. “That’s why you can float.”

  He laughed. “Right.” Few things were less likely, given how lean he was.

  “You’re doing it wrong,” he said, standing up beside me while I attempted to float. The moon was like a spotlight across my bare stomach and I suddenly felt exposed, splayed out in front of him. “You’ve got to push down here, he said, placing a finger in the center of my ribcage, producing goose bumps across the surface of my skin, “and then you’ve got to lift up here.” His hand went under the water, palming my ass, pushing it upward just as he described. The pressure of his hand, the way it forced me to arch upward, made something spasm tight in my stomach and I gave a small gasp of surprise. We looked at each with sudden clarity, and for a single breath our faces were stripped of pretense. We weren’t children anymore and we weren’t merely friends anymore either. And then he jerked his hands away as if they were on fire, diving under the water, not emerging until he was several feet away.