That.
Embarrassment washes over me again. Muttering a bleak thanks, I take the offered bag and look down; my hair slides forward, mercifully blocking his view of my flushed cheeks.
“Mind if I join you?”
I can think of at least twelve things I’d rather do than talk this out right now, but I motion to the ground next to me anyway. “Knock yourself out.”
He takes a moment to toe off his shoes and roll up the legs of his expensive pants before taking a seat next to me and gently lowering his feet into the water. He lets out a quiet, rumbling groan that sends a surge of goose bumps up my legs.
“It’s nice out here,” he says, surveying the patio and then the balconies overlooking where we sit. “My room has a view of the Hooters across the street.”
I laugh. “You’re probably the first straight man to ever say that and sound disappointed.”
“Never was a huge fan of the color orange.” When he grins wolfishly, I am reminded that he has lovely white teeth but very sharp—and oddly seductive—canines. They change his face from nerdy-serious to sexy-devious.
“A shame,” I agree.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a bottle opener and pops off the cap of the beer before setting the bottle on the cement between us. I manage to wait all of two seconds before carefully picking it up and taking a long drink.
I watch the boys roughhousing on the opposite end of the pool. For as long as I can with James, I want to ignore the shrill-voiced, platinum-haired elephant in the proverbial room. I open the fresh bag to reach for a Funyun, and my crunch is comically loud in the awkward silence between us.
“Sorry,” I say around the bite. James laughs and takes the bag, reaching inside for a few and popping one in his mouth.
“You been out here this whole time?” he asks. Since you got your head chewed off, he means.
“I had a really awkward trip to the convenience store on the corner. Who knew sobbing at the checkout while buying junk food would make the cashier so uncomfortable. I’m sure he assumed I was on my period.” I pause, adding inexplicably, “—I’m not.”
I want to slide into the pool and submerge myself for eternity. James is understandably silent for a few beats. Finally, he gives a simple “Cool.”
One of the older boys finds two pool noodles hidden behind a clump of bushes, and he and another kid start whacking each other. When they team up and hit one of the boys so enthusiastically that he falls into the water like a sack of dirt, James looks nervously back toward the hotel.
“Should we go get an adult?”
But the boy pops back above water, grinning wildly.
“They’re just being dumb,” I say. “I’d be in there, too, but I’m not paying eighty-five dollars for a fishnet bikini in the gift shop.” After another particularly loud thwack from the other end of the pool, I glance at James. “Don’t you remember being like that?”
“Like that?” he asks, and picks up the bottle as if to ask Can I? I nod, and just like that, we’re sharing a beer. “Not even a little. Were you?”
“Not that specifically, but goofing around at the reservoir. Tubing down the Snake River with my brothers. Skinny-dipping with friends. There was a lot of skinny-dipping.”
He coughs, choking. I’ve never seen him make this face before, but I daresay he’s impressed. “Oh yeah?”
“We grew up kind of feral. My parents weren’t very attentive. My grandma used to call us ‘free-range kids.’ Summers meant leaving the house in the morning, and barely making it back before the sun went down. We had a lot of space around us, so it’s not like anyone was there to see.”
“I always forget you grew up in Wyoming. You’ve lived there your whole life?”
I reach for the beer and take a sip. “It was different then. Rural. More farms and houses, fewer multimillion-dollar compounds.”
“Did you grow up on a farm?”
“A small one. We’d leave the door open or something and my mom would shout, ‘Were y’all raised in a barn?’ Then we’d get our asses tanned by shouting back, ‘You would know!’ My dad did construction and carpentry around town and grew alfalfa. My mom has sold most of their land now, but we used to make forts and go muddin’ and cause all kinds of trouble in those fields—most of which my parents never found out about. It’s all subdivisions now.”
“Skippin’ rocks and playin’ in the old waterin’ hole,” he teases with a terrible hillbilly accent.
I give his shoulder a nudge and reach for the bag again. “You’re not that far off. I remember someone had a rope swing that hung over the river. It was plenty deep in most places, but some years the water level would be lower, and really shallow along the shore. Some of the more protective parents would cut down that rope every year, but before long someone else would have another one up. I still don’t know how nobody managed to kill themselves on it.”
“That sounds pretty great, actually. The diving part, not the dying.”
“It was. I miss those days. So much room to explore, so much time outside. It was still mostly pre-internet, even though it doesn’t feel that long ago.” I take another sip, washing a tight band of nostalgia down with it. “What about you?”
“I never had any skinny-dipping, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“A travesty.”
“I’m inclined to agree.”
I turn to look right at him. “Come on. You couldn’t always have been this buttoned up. Am I supposed to believe you just sprang up somewhere, fully Tom Forded and preloaded with a degree from MIT?”
“My sister can confirm.”
I study his profile and notice that he isn’t wearing his glasses. Because the universe is never fair about these things, his lashes are long, and dark, and curled. I am immediately envious. He takes a sip of the beer and then swipes a long finger across his upper lip.
James pats my back when I cough, and hands me the beer, careful to make sure I’ve got it before he lets it go.
Like he knows my grip is sometimes weak.
My stomach swoops low.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, recovering with a sip. “Something didn’t go down right.” Composed again, I urge him to continue. “She’s older than you, right? Your sister?”
He looks surprised that I remembered, or maybe that I’m engaging in real conversation. “By four years. Old enough that I was more of a nuisance than a buddy.”
“My brothers are five and six years older, Rand and Kurt. Protective when needed, but if friends were around they were like, ‘That kid? Never seen her before.’”
He laughs, and it’s this scratchy, honeyed sound. Has he always laughed like that? Have I been in a Melly-induced stress haze this entire time, not noticing laughs and forearms, unaware of lashes, lips, and fingers?
“Jenn could be like that, too,” he says. “We’d go to this amusement park in Albuquerque—”
“Wait. You’re from New Mexico?” When he nods, I joke, “No one is actually from New Mexico.”
He laughs this off. “I am, I promise. We moved there when I was three, from Wisconsin. My mom grew up in New Mexico, and after she finished her residency in Madison, she set up her family practice in Albuquerque.”