Such a Rush(59)
Author: Jennifer Echols

No, you wouldn’t, I thought. Grayson’s mother would have been taking better care of him than that.

“One night,” I said, “this guy didn’t just steal a roach from his brother. He stole a roach and a condom. And we did it.”

Grayson frowned. “And it was awful?”

“No, it wasn’t awful. I wanted to do it again.”

“But you didn’t? There’s more to this story than ‘We did it.’”

“He was willing to do it with me again, but he couldn’t steal another condom. I had to choose whether to do it without one, or not do it anymore. I walked away. Thinking back, remembering what I was like then, how angry and how lost, I can’t believe I did that. Right before I moved here, I was smoking pot. Drinking the little I could get. The airport job ended all that, and your dad made me quit smoking and kept me off everything else by putting so much trust in me. He couldn’t stop you, so he stopped me instead.”

Grayson chuckled ruefully, like it was a joke.

Looking him in the eye, I told him, “I mean that.”

He gazed at me somberly.

“But this one decision,” I said, “I made for myself before I ever met your dad. My mom had me when she was sixteen, which means she did it when she was fifteen. My dad was probably some idiot exactly like that boy I lost my virginity to, a fifteen-year-old with a dick and nothing else. Nothing.”

Grayson didn’t respond. The crashing waves filled his silence. For the first time since he’d sat down, I remembered Alec and Molly, out there in the ocean somewhere. I hadn’t heard their voices after they disappeared. Probably the current had moved them down the beach. I knew that much from my observations the few times I’d been to the ocean.

“I would have started a relationship with that guy,” I said. “If he’d come back to me with a condom, I would have been willing. But right after that, my mom said we were moving to Heaven Beach. He went straight to my best friend and hooked up with her instead. Both of them acted like they’d never met me. That’s when I realized that people use each other, Grayson. They define their relationships by what they’re getting. The only good relationship I took away from my years in that town was with an airplane. Those beautiful, scary airplanes flying right over me.

“So, you blackmail me into dating your brother,” I said bitterly, “and you think it won’t be a big deal for me to kiss him. Mark thinks the path to my pants is smoothly paved and well traveled. Girls at school make comments about me constantly. But I hear this stuff and think, Me? I was headed in that direction a long time ago, yes. Now, no. I must exude something. Do I exude something?”

Grayson laughed. “Yes, you definitely exude something.”

“What do I exude?”

“Super, super sexy.”

In the moonlight, he was so sexy himself, his blond hair glinting, the shadows of his long lashes hiding his eyes. If I were his girlfriend and he had told me how sexy I was, I would have melted right there for him, just like I had last night. But he was my boss. We were having a matter-of-fact conversation about a business deal.

“A few days ago,” I said, “Molly told me I exude that too. Only she didn’t put it as politely as you put it.”

“She wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re lucky she’s your friend. Most girls at your school hate you, don’t they? That was clear at the party last night. But the boys like you a lot better. Patrick, for instance.”

I laughed. “Patrick! We’re just friends.”

“Only because he knows you’re looking for something else,” Grayson said. “And if you’ve been holding all these boys off since you were fourteen, you’ve been working very hard at that. And then there are the male teachers.”

“I never asked for anything special from my teachers,” I said quickly.

“You don’t have to ask. They can’t help it.” When he inhaled, I thought it was the wind picking up across the sand, but when he exhaled, sighing the longest sigh, I knew he was bracing himself for something. “Do you promise that you and my dad never…”

“Screwed?”

“Leah,” he said reproachfully.

“You’re saying it, not me.”

“Okay.” He folded his arms awkwardly on his chest. The self-conscious movement made him seem younger than eighteen, more vulnerable, and didn’t match his strong arms and muscular chest. He asked, “But did you?”

“No!”

“Okay.” He paused. “Did you want to?”

Though this line of questioning was rude, I didn’t want to upset him. His dad was dead. Grayson really was trying to deal. He wanted to know this stuff. Maybe even deserved to know.

But I didn’t think I should tell him the truth. I loved being around Mr. Hall because he was kind to me and we were friends. Other people around the airport—Mark, for instance—had insulted me when I was as young as fourteen, hinting that I was so worthless a person, Mr. Hall couldn’t possibly be doing anything nice for me unless I was giving him blow jobs in exchange. When people implied this, I understood where they were coming from. I knew how it looked. Otherwise, it never crossed my mind. Mr. Hall was much older than me, and honestly kind of asexual, at least as I saw him. Like a really good father.

I told Grayson another, simpler version of the truth. “If your dad had been the same person but my age, then yeah, I would have fallen for him.”

Grayson watched me, arms crossed, in exactly the pose Mr. Hall had struck in that old photo of himself as a jet pilot, when he was only a few years older than Grayson. And they looked exactly the same.

I realized what I’d said.

The air between us was charged with electricity, the waves echoing the sound of it.

“Really?” Grayson asked.

“Really,” I said.

Considering the ugly things we’d talked about tonight, my mind had doubted this moment would come, but my heart had known. Leaning forward until he was on all fours, he crawled one pace toward me. His lips met mine.

The rush was so intense that he was like a predator taking me by the throat. I opened my mouth.

His mouth wrestled with mine. He kept moving forward until he pushed me down on my back on the sand. His warm body covered mine, skin to my skin. His thighs hugged the outsides of my thighs, and his erection pressed against the center of my bathing suit bottoms.

I let him do anything he wanted, eager to find out what was next. At the same time, I was vaguely aware that we’d been archenemies a few minutes before, and now he had me on my back on the sand. I waited for him to realize what he was doing and stop with a gasp of horror, just as he’d stopped himself in the basement of the airport office. But he kept kissing me. Finally I decided I’d better do something to end this, and it wasn’t going to be pulling back.