Except not, because he had never been this carefree as a teenager.
“Sorry,” he said through his laughter. “I’m no Patrick Swayze.”
“It took Baby and Johnny a few tries if I recall.” She said it as if issuing a dare.
He raised his eyebrows. “Again?” She nodded. “All right, let’s do a countdown this time—we lift on three.” She grabbed his shoulders, and he found the points of her hips. “I think I need a better grip. I’m going to hold you tighter this time.” God help him. “Does this hurt?”
She shook her head no, looking at him with an uncharacteristically serious expression that caused him a moment of unexplained panic. But then they were gone—her serious face and his hint of panic. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks, and she wore a grin so wide it looked like it might crack her face in two.
God, he just liked her so much. He was so happy to be here, in the sun, in the ocean, in this moment, in what felt like grace, though grace was not a state Max had much experience with.
All right. Enough. He was being ridiculous. “Ready?” She nodded. He splayed his fingers around her hips and planted his feet in the squishy sand. “One, two, three!” He lifted, and up, up, up she went, extending and tightening her body as she lengthened her arms out in front of her.
“Eeee!” she called when his arms were fully extended and they’d reached an equilibrium. “We’re doing it!”
They were, and as he tilted his head back to look at her, a sharp spike of satisfaction, of pride even, rose in his chest, as if this were an actual accomplishment. She looked like a dancer. No, like a superhero. “We’re doing it,” he echoed, but it came out more a whisper than the triumphant shout that would have matched the sentiment.
She looked down, and he knew they were going to fall—the slight movement had been enough to nudge them out of alignment—but their eyes locked for a moment before it happened. She’d been laughing, gleeful, but her face suddenly went serious, contemplative. There wasn’t time to ponder it because the fall was underway. “Dive!” he called, and she did, bringing her arms together and tucking her head. She dragged him along with her as she moved through space, and as he fell back into the water, he started laughing again.
She popped up, the laughing, jubilant version of her pushing her hair out of her eyes. She flung her arms into the air in victory and started splashing toward him. She had one hand up, so he thought she was coming in for a high-five. He lifted a hand to meet hers, but she didn’t seem to see it, just kept coming until she was there, winding her arms around his neck and pressing her chest against his, pressing her breasts against him.
He was frozen, momentarily stunned, but after a second, his brain caught up, shoving three observations into his consciousness. The first was that she was hugging him. She had come over here with the express purpose of hugging him. The second was that it was merely a friendly, triumphant hug. The third was that if he kept standing there like an idiot, he was going to miss it. So he wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up, letting himself notch his face into the crook of her neck. She smelled like salt and sunscreen, and he never wanted to smell anything else. He never wanted to be anywhere else.
It was only a few seconds before the world intruded in the form of . . . applause? He set her down, her face mirroring the bewilderment he felt. A group of middle-aged women stood maybe thirty meters off, smiling and clapping. “Nice job!” one of them called. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” another shouted.
He smiled and bowed. “Thank you!”
“Oh my god, we looked like such idiots!” Dani said.
“No, we were glorious. They’re applauding us.”
She swatted his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
At that moment, he would have followed her anywhere.
“Have another, Max.” Dani’s mom pushed a plate of brownies toward him.
“I can’t. I’m positively stuffed. But thank you.” They were in the backyard of Dani’s parents’ house, where they had feasted on clams Dani’s dad had caught—collected? Max didn’t know the correct verb—and grilled, locally raised Atlantic salmon, potato and green salads, and gooey chocolate brownies. “Everything was so delicious.” It might even have been the best meal he’d ever had, but that was probably as much to do with the company as with the food. He already knew Dani’s mom was a delight, but her dad was great, too, regaling Max with tales of clamming adventures and life at the UN. Max even got to practice his Spanish a bit, which wasn’t as good as his French, but Mr. Martinez, who had insisted on being called Carlos, was patient.
“What about Italian?” he asked. “I’m slightly better at Italian than Spanish.”
Carlos answered him effortlessly in Italian, and Max whistled. “Exactly how many languages do you speak?”
“My parents bought a little hotel on the beach before I was born,” he said. “They worked on it gradually over the years and eventually it became kind of fancy—almost by accident. It drew people from all over. I was always interested in the languages everyone spoke, and I turned out to be pretty good at picking up bits of them. That’s why I applied to the Model UN program. And the rest”—he gestured at Val—“Is history.”
“My sister and I only speak English and Spanish,” Dani said, “so my parents used to speak French when they wanted to talk about us without doing us the courtesy of leaving the room.” She stuck her tongue out at them. “They still do.”
Everyone was so at ease with each other. It wasn’t that Max didn’t understand, intellectually, that families like this existed. Marie and her mother had been this way. It was just so strange to have crash-landed in the middle of one. Unsettling at first, but then utterly relaxing. It felt as if someone had dispensed a narcotic as he listened to them talk and tease one another. Soon all the relaxation had him yawning. “I beg your pardon. I’m afraid all the food and the sun have done me in. I should be going.” Darkness had begun to descend, and he couldn’t stay forever, though he wanted to do exactly that. “Thank you for a wonderful evening.” He looked at Dani. “And day.” As lovely as Val and Carlos were, the dinner had been merely the icing on top of his beach day with Dani.
When had he last been that carefree? Truly carefree, not tabloid-headline carefree?
“You’re not staying over?” Dani’s mom said to him with seemingly genuine confusion.
It took a moment for her question to penetrate his brain, so fixated had he been on Dani. “Oh, no, I have a hotel room in Manhattan.”
“Nonsense!” Valerie said. “You’ll stay, and you kids can hit the beach again tomorrow. If you want to, of course. We only have a sofa bed. You probably don’t want to.”
He did want to. He wanted to more than anything. He looked at Dani, who said, “I don’t know, man, suite at the Four Seasons or the awful sofa bed here?” She performed an exaggerated shrug but mouthed, “Stay,” as she did so.
Which was how Max found himself tucked into a lumpy sofa bed in the living room of a bungalow in a town on Long Island. As tired as he’d been earlier, once he was stretched out in the dark in a pair of Carlos’s sweatpants, he didn’t sleep. It wasn’t his usual brand of frustrating, involuntary insomnia, though.