I gasped. And then laughed. And looked at him with so much love in my heart, I thought I might split in half.
“What did you do?”
“I made you a home,” he said, and his Louisiana accent drawled those words out just the way I liked them. So smooth. “Something childishly grown-up.”
I crawled across the platform and onto an old braided rug I knew came from the floor of his bedroom. And turned to face him.
He crawled up after me. Stalked across that floor on all fours with his blue eyes locked on mine. Until his hands were planted on either side of my shoulders and I could feel his stomach pressing and easing up along mine as he breathed.
He was grinning like a boy who was about to kiss his girl for the very first time.
We were so close. Just an inch or two apart when he stopped and just stared at me. And I stared back. His face was lit up with firefly glow, flickering shadows that softened him and made him deliciously hard in the same moment.
“I have one more thing for you,” he said.
I took another long breath, and let it out real slow. Because I knew he was gonna kiss me.
But he didn’t.
He backed up a little and reached over underneath a thick pile of the mosquito netting, and opened a cooler.
I giggled.
Because inside that cooler, tucked between millions of ice cubes, was a gallon of ice cream from the drug store. And he had waffle cones too. I leaned back on my hands, my stomach a mess of gorgeous misery from the anticipation of what was coming. I watched him scoop out the ice cream and fill up the cone and hand it to me. And when he did that again, to make himself a cone too, I memorized the muscles in his arms, and the curl of his blond hair along the top of his shoulders, and the way he kept stealing looks at me with those eyes that were the color of almonds in the shade.
Then he said, “Come on over here, Indie.”
And we scooted over to the edge of the platform and dangled our legs. The netting tickled my thighs as we gazed though it and watched the night as we licked our cones.
We talked. I told him about how I was in the ocean this time yesterday, sitting in a life raft.
He didn’t ask one question about that. Just smiled at me and told me how this time last night he was hanging the netting and bringing the rug up from his bedroom.
I forgot all about the kiss. I was that lost in him.
We licked our cones and laughed and joked. He sighed a lot. And so did I.
And right when I wasn’t expecting it, after our cones were all gone and we were settled and happy, he leaned over, looked at me as his fingertips brushed along the side of my cheek, and he said, “Close your eyes now, Indie. I would like to kiss you. And I want you to remember it in your mind’s eye when I do that.”
So I closed my eyes and almost lost my head in the two or three seconds it took for his mouth to touch mine.
At first it was a soft kiss. His lips were gentle and easy to kiss back. And then his mouth opened, and mine opened with it, and his tongue was cool and he tasted like mint chocolate chip.
We kissed for a long time. Just like that. Sitting side by side, with our bodies turned inward. One of his hands on my face and the other playing with my hair. My hands on his shoulder, drawing in his heat, and on his thigh. Poking my fingertip through the tattered hole in his jeans so I could feel his hidden skin.
Finally, we pulled back and smiled at each other.
And my life was perfect.
We stayed up there for hours just talking about things. What we would do tomorrow, and the next day. How we would spend the summer coming up here each night before bed. How he loved me and I loved him back.
And then McKay started calling my name from the house and we knew the night was over. Nathan said, “Now we have to let them go.”
And at first, I didn’t understand. But he picked a jar of fireflies and unscrewed the lid. Some of them were clinging to it and they flew off. But still stuck inside the netting. So they were fluttering and flittering around my head the way my stomach was fluttering and flittering when I climbed up here with Nate behind me, pressing his chest into my legs so I would know he would catch me if I fell.
We set them all free like that.
And then he lifted the netting on one side and we climbed down and sat in the dirt to watch them fly off.
But they didn’t fly far. They stayed close. And they lit up the forest all around us.
And that’s how we ended the most magical night of my life.
McKay didn’t say anything when I got home. He was sitting on the top step of the porch drinking a green bottle of beer.
Nate walked me all the way up to the bottom step and said, “Good night, Indie,” and then he turned and walked home.
I smiled at McKay as I pulled the screen door open. He was glaring at Nate’s back as he disappeared into the woods.
But he didn’t say a word.
The next morning, I got my period.
I woke up feeling sick and crampy and then saw the blood when I went to the bathroom. I knocked on McKay’s door, because Donovan had left to go back home the night before and Adam was still out on his delivery errand for the biological sample.
Not that I would’ve gone to either of them over McKay in a situation such as this.
McKay was not in his room so I went downstairs and found him in the kitchen.
I knew what a period was but there was nothing in this house to take care of my new problem. So I had to say, “McKay. Can you take me to town to buy some tampons?”
He was squinting at the newspaper when I said this and when he looked up, he had an expression on his face like I was speaking some foreign language he didn’t understand.
“What?”
“I got my period. I need to go to town. Can you take me?” I asked it softly. My mood was still perfect and calm from the night before. Not even my monthly curse could change that.
He hesitated for a moment. Not because he was gonna say no. There was no chance of that happening. Probably just to consider all the new things he would have to think about in regards to me, from this day on.
And then he said, “I’ll get my keys.”
In the drug store—this was not the same drug store as the river town, a different one that was closer to the mansion—McKay folded his arms across his chest and frowned at me in the feminine products aisle as I tried to make sense of all my options. The pharmacist, who was a woman in her forties, came out from behind the counter and helped me. She must’ve taken pity on McKay’s confused uneasiness because she grinned at him a lot. But maybe that was just because McKay was handsome.
When we got home, he left me alone for a little while as I figured everything out, and then, when I finally emerged from the upstairs bathroom that was reserved for me, he said, “Indie, we need to talk.”
But he didn’t want to talk in the kitchen. He took me outside to the pavilion with the mosquito netting and told me to take a seat on the bed swing. So I did. And he sat in the porch swing, and he talked. He talked so damn long he had to light the citronella candles.
He told me about love. And sex. And babies. And birth control. And how I needed to make sure Nate didn’t talk me into anything I didn’t want to do. And how yes was yes, and no was no, and maybe was also no. He said that part a lot. And that I could come to him with any sort of problem, no matter how personal it was.