Such a Rush(56)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“I don’t think you are either,” I said haughtily, then stood. “I’m going up.”

“Leah, I’m really sorry,” he said again. His eyes pleaded with me.

I stopped thinking. Instinctively I stepped back across the divide between us and put my hand in his hair. His curls were surprisingly soft, unlike the wires on my own head. I weaved my fingers through them, down to his scalp.

This time he didn’t stiffen when I touched him. He leaned his head against me and let me comfort him for five seconds.

Then he pulled away and stood, towering over me. “I’ll be up too, as soon as I pull myself together.” He headed for the restroom.

Yeah, I knew that feeling. Thinking I had a handle on the grief. Being overwhelmed with it all of a sudden, where other people could see me. Running for the restroom and wishing I could wash it down the sink. Though he’d said he was sorry, he hadn’t acknowledged he was doing exactly what I’d done Monday morning, when he accused me of acting.

I tamped down that flash of anger. Nothing like that would make sense to Grayson right now. Nothing mattered as much as what he had lost.

Grayson was the one who suggested we go surfing that night. Alec and Molly thought this was a great idea. They guessed I didn’t have a surfboard, but Molly had one I could borrow. They guessed I couldn’t surf, but it was easy and they would teach me. This wasn’t going to happen. I was confident I could wiggle out of it somehow.

All in all, it sounded like a terrific alternative to the last few nights. We would eat at Molly’s café. She would bring her boards over from her house, Alec would carry his from Mr. Hall’s condo, and we would go into the ocean at Grayson’s shack. With any luck, Alec and I wouldn’t get much time alone. Even his kiss good night at my trailer would follow the trend and get shorter still. We would all call it a night early, and Grayson could claim some sleep.

By the time we got to the beach, the sky was bright pink with violet clouds, and the warm ocean rolled dark blue underneath it. I couldn’t blame Molly and Alec for hitting the beach running with their surfboards. They slid right into the water and paddled for the horizon.

With them gone, I felt like I’d dodged a bullet. I settled the board Molly had loaned me into the sand and sat on it with my toes in the water. I didn’t mind the ocean touching my toes.

The surf was so loud that I didn’t notice Grayson until he was right behind me. He’d gone to pull his surfboard out of the shack. Setting it upright in the sand and leaning on it, he looked every inch a hard-bodied, sun-bleached surfer dude.

Only his words gave him away. Always plotting, he never relaxed, even at the beach. “Did they leave you?” He gazed out to the horizon. “Are you going to pout like you’re jealous? That’s good, but then you won’t get to go surfing. Come on, plan B. We’ll catch up with them.” He held out his hand to pull me up.

I didn’t take his hand. I said, “I can’t swim.”

His mouth dropped open. “You can’t swim!”

There wasn’t a good answer to this. He shouldn’t have countered my “I can’t swim” with “You can’t swim!” in a disbelieving tone, like he was asking me if I was sure I couldn’t swim?

I watched the waves and wished I could shove my whole body down beneath the sand, not just my feet.

He wouldn’t let it go. “You’re eighteen years old,” he insisted.

I huffed out an exasperated sigh.

He couldn’t hear my frustration over the ocean breeze. Or he didn’t care. “Why haven’t you ever learned to swim?”

Finally I looked up at him. I was surprised at how clearly I could see him in the dusk, his blond curls glowing in the sunset. I must have appeared just as clearly defined to him, and exposed.

“Who taught you to swim?” I asked.

He answered without thinking, “My da—Oh.”

I’d never had a father. “Oh,” I echoed Grayson in a dead tone.

I cringed as soon as I said it. Sarcasm was a weapon for children. I had used it a lot in grade school and middle school, and all it had gotten me was slapped in the girls’ bathroom. I used it too much now. Grayson would realize, She is reminding me she is pitiful! and he would try to apologize. Best to let it pass. The less said the better.

He dropped his surfboard on the beach and sat beside me on my board. “Hey.” His foot burrowed under the sand, the dry mound moving like a blanket, and his toes nudged my heel. “I’m sorry.”

“Hooray.” I gazed where Molly and Alec had disappeared, the sunset gone now, the black sky and the black ocean different from each other only because the ocean was striped with white waves. I wished I were viewing the scene from the air, where I had control.

“Next summer I’ll teach you to swim,” Grayson said. “This isn’t the time or place, in the waves and the dark, but in the summer we’ll go to the pool at my dad’s condo and I’ll teach you.”

I didn’t have anything to say to this. I just wanted him to get out all his guilt and shut up. I had no idea what I would be doing in the summer, except that it would not be frolicking with Grayson in the pool at his dead dad’s upscale condo on the swanky end of town. I could fantasize about it all I wanted, but it would never happen.

“You can’t just sit there and sulk about it, Leah,” he told me. “You have to do something about it. Same thing with not knowing how to drive. You can’t go on this way. Your world is very small.”

Wearing a pained expression I wasn’t able to control, I chopped my hand across my throat, telling him to shut up. I could see him dimly in the moonlight, and I knew he could see me.

He refused to shut up, though. “I’m not insulting you. I’m just saying that if someone offers you an opportunity to learn something new, do something different, get out of this town, you should take it. I even feel kind of bad about running you off Mr. Simon’s crop-dusting job.”

“You said Mark just wanted in my pants,” I growled.

“He did just want in your pants.” Grayson sounded outraged. “I’m not sorry about that part. I just think you would be the world’s best crop-duster pilot. You want that thrill, but outwardly you remain calm. You would never get yourself killed. Mark wants that thrill and he does not remain calm. He’s so busy looking back at how close to the barn he flew that he forgets to look ahead of him. One day soon he’s going to smack into a tree. I know this because I want that thrill too, and I don’t remain calm either. Lately I’ve learned better than to get myself into that situation. In the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader, ‘If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.’”