Such a Rush(36)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Whatever the reason, he just smiled at her, almost shyly in the streetlights. “Not anymore. My dad sank most of that money into the business. Banner towing doesn’t pay all that great.”

“If your family is from here,” Molly said, “did you live here before your parents got divorced?”

I cringed. I guessed, sometime in the two years Molly and I had been friends and I’d crushed on the boys, that I’d told her about their family situation. I didn’t want Grayson to know this.

He didn’t seem to notice, though. Again, Molly got away with that nosey question. “Yes,” he said, “we lived here.”

“You must know a lot of people at our high school,” Molly said. “We’ll probably run into them when we’re out partying this week. It will be so weird, like a class reunion!”

I was still puzzling through the idea that all of us were going to be partying together all week—or maybe Molly just meant herself and Grayson—when he laughed. “I didn’t know you until today.”

“I just moved here two years ago,” Molly said. “My purpose in life is to keep mean girls away from Leah.”

“Mean girls don’t like Leah?” Grayson asked, looking around at me.

“I think it’s the hair,” I said.

“You always think it’s the hair,” Molly said.

“It’s all I’ve got.”

Grayson looked at me again. This time his gaze traveled from my hair down, and he let me see that he was looking. What he meant by this was that he thought I was beautiful, it was not just my miraculous hair, and we shouldn’t get distracted from our true love by the pesky detail that he was blackmailing me into dating his brother.

Right. I hung back and let him and Molly walk together up the wooden ramp to the shack. I’d never had a chance with Grayson anyway. All I wanted to do was fly. I needed to remember that or I was going to get myself in even more trouble.

The shack was so tiny that I was thinking Molly and I should stay outside while Grayson showered. But Molly followed him right through the door, exclaiming, “This is so cool! You can hear the ocean. When you wake up in the morning, it’s right there.” She must have thought I was going to hang outside myself, because she stood in the doorway, put her hand behind her back, and wiggled her fingers at me, coaxing me in. I didn’t want to cause a scene or seem weird, so I stepped into the shack behind her.

“It’s pretty cool,” Grayson agreed, looking around. The shack was made of weathered, smoothed boards on the ceiling, walls, and floor. A futon took up one wall, a surfboard leaned against another, and a mountain bike hung from hooks in the ceiling. An air conditioner took up half of one window, but it was off, and the sound of the ocean filled the tiny room.

“I guess the condo has stuff you’re missing here,” Molly said. “Like a kitchen. Why did one of you take one place and one of you take the other? It seems like you guys would want to be together, whichever place you chose. You’re not getting along?”

“You could say that.” Grayson opened his hands. “You know, our dad died recently.” This time he didn’t hesitate as he said it.

Molly nodded, oblivious to what a touchy subject this still was. She sounded like she was consoling an elderly neighbor on the death of his even more elderly father, a natural and expected ending, as she said, “Leah told me. I’m sorry.”

“And our older brother died,” Grayson said. “We’ve been through bad times before, but never without our brother. He was…” Grayson splayed his fingers and looked through the wooden ceiling toward heaven for an explanation. “… the leader. The peacekeeper. Alec and I didn’t realize that until we talked about running this business together. We have no idea how to get along. We can’t even order a pizza without being at each other’s throats.”

Grayson changed as he said this, from an angry, bullying boy into a kind young man with a horrible problem. He looked taller in the small room. The bare bulb cast dark shadows under his eyes.

Molly had been the one to draw these feelings and this truth out of him. I’d known him three and a half years. Molly had known him five minutes.

She made a joke of it. “Good thing you and Alec are living apart this week, then. And I in my infinite wisdom insisted that we should go out together.”

“It’s okay.” He dismissed the problem with a wave designed to make her feel better, something he would never have done for me. He told her, “We don’t have Jake, but at least we have someone to run interference so we don’t need to talk to each other. We have you. And you.” He finally looked at me.

His expression turned uneasy as he read my face. I don’t know what he saw there—my stupid jealousy of Molly, maybe, or my sense that he’d betrayed me in confiding all this to her instead of me, when he and I had never been friends in the first place.

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll just be a minute. Make yourselves comfortable. Or try.” He disappeared into a bathroom carved into the corner.

“Come on.” Claustrophobic in the shrinking room, I pushed Molly all the way through the shack to another door that opened onto a porch.

Weathered stairs led down to a hundred yards of clean sand pitted with dry footprints. Beyond that lay the dark blue ocean. “Want to walk down there?” I asked her.

“God, no. I’ve been at the beach all day. Sick of it.” She sank behind me into a wooden lounge chair and closed her eyes. I waited for her to tell me her opinion of the boys. She was meeting them for the first time, and they were hot. Their suffering made them dreamy. She would want to tell me this and scold me for keeping them to myself all this time. But she didn’t say a word. She must be very tired from her long, hard day of lying on the beach.

I turned for the ocean again, inhaled the clean scent of it. Folding my arms on the porch rail and setting my chin on my arms, I watched the white waves slowly roll in. Like everything, the ocean looked completely different in person than it looked from the air. Hypnotized by its beauty, I forgot where I was and why. I jumped when Alec put his hand on my bare shoulder and asked, “Ready?”

Grayson’s insistence that we have an early night worked out well. When we arrived at the club, we could still get in the door. The place was already packed, though, mostly with strangers, lots of them seedy, and a few seniors from my high school, all of them drunk.