And I gaped at him. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying with fireworks flashing and booming above us, but I did believe that, while trying to put in a good word with me on his brother’s behalf, Sean had managed to insult both of us. Then I shook my wrist out of his grasp. “It’s a terrible plan because I’m not waiting a few weeks.”
Before Sean could stop me again, I leaped out of the boat and into the one next to it. The men relaxing in lawn chairs in the bow hardly had time to turn around to see what blonde goddess had descended on them before I traversed that boat and leaped over the side, onto a pontoon boat loaded with drunks. They braced themselves as the boat shifted under their feet, but they were inebriated enough and fascinated enough with Adam’s light show that they assumed it was the alcohol making them sway rather than a teenage pirate on a mission. They never turned around.
Quite a few boats were like that. A few had more alert passengers who stared at me. One old lady tried to lecture me about boat-hopping among strangers at night, a nice girl like me. And a couple of times I had to convince people to start their engines and putter a few feet forward so I could make it to the next boat without going into the lake. At the beginning of this summer I would have sworn I was not capable of drowning, but my last wakeboarding accident had convinced me I was wrong about that. And it would be my luck to go out that way: floundering in the lake and succumbing under the boats to the jaunty tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
The boats always obliged. Whether I knew the people in the boat or not, the driver idled closer to the next boat, just to stop me from interrupting the fantastic show overhead. I chose a safe path through the boats that would put me onshore at the yacht club wharf, rather than heading straight for the hill where the fireworks were coming from. It would be just our luck for me to get stabbed through the heart by a wayward rocket just as I was making my way back to Adam.
Come to think of it… wasn’t Adam the one more likely to get killed by a rocket, since he was the one setting off rockets? The detail was different, but our luck was the same. I pictured reaching the hill a few minutes too late and the other pyromaniacs pointing to the chalk outline sprinkled with ashes that was the only evidence left of his body.
I leaped from the last boat, hit the yacht club wharf, and ran.
Thick ropes anchoring huge white sailboats crisscrossed the wharf, but I was a master at dodging maritime obstacles. I skittered toward shore as fast as my flip-flops would carry me, all the time watching the hill. Between explosions, the hill was dark and silent. Adam had been killed, and the show was over. Then pink light flickered through the grass, and silhouettes ran away from the light with their ears covered. Funny that I recognized Adam from the way he ran in silhouette. I would have known him anywhere.
I slowed to a walk now that I knew he wasn’t in (immediate) danger of dying. I hadn’t realized how hard I’d been running, but my lungs felt like they were about to fall out as I turned backward to watch the latest rocket arc impossibly high into the air. It paused, quiet. Then it burst into a million golden sparks, and the thunder came afterward to thump me in the chest and take my breath away all over again. The sparks faded into the black sky, then came back in a lovely surprise, bursting suddenly brighter and chasing one another around in circles as they fell. The entire bouquet of golden light reflected in the water. The lake looked like it was rising to meet the light instead of the other way around.
Foop, foop, foop. Three more rockets left the hill. I looked in that direction for Adam’s silhouette.
That’s when I saw him running down the hill—oh no, massive explosion, every man for himself, run for your lives! I did have that thought for a split second, but as I watched him, I saw he wasn’t running away from anything. He was running toward me.
The fireworks exploded in midair and lit him up. Two new burn holes had appeared in his T-shirt, giving me a peek at his chest. Soot streaked his tanned face, and his curls were dotted with small lengths of white straw—courtesy of ducking and covering on the ground, I guessed. He grinned at me.
We were on a collision course. Unless a rocket crashed down to explode just above our heads in the next ten seconds, we would meet in the middle, and I had no idea what to say. I’d told Sean that a few weeks was too long to wait to see Adam again. Now I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I should suggest we forgive each other but let things cool down between us before we started up again. We could have some long talks and discuss where we’d been and where we were going. That would be the adult thing to do—
He threw down his lighter, grabbed me with both hands, and kissed me.
I let him kiss me for a few seconds, shocked and relieved.
Explosions startled me. I’d gotten so lost in Adam, I’d forgotten we were standing in a fireworks display.
Then I moved forward, into him. I kissed him harder and put my hands in his hair, my fingers slipping past the pieces of straw. I wanted him closer.
More and bigger explosions went off behind him. I couldn’t tell whether the percussions in my chest were from the fireworks or from being chest to chest with Adam himself.
He kissed the corner of my mouth, kissed my cheek, and growled in my ear, “Fireworks or what?”
“Stars and Stripes Forever” ended with a flourish of horns. The silence grew, waiting for another rousing patriotic tune to fill it. The silence stretched. Then there was another noise—foop, foop, foop, foofoofoofoofoo—endless launches of rockets. The music had stopped because no one would hear it over the grand finale of explosions.
I put both hands on his chest and backed him up a pace. The black sky behind him was filled with color. I said, “Go. Hurry. You can still help. You’re missing it.”
He pulled me close again and gazed down at me, tracing one finger so tenderly along my cheekbone. His finger was black, and he might be leaving an attractive black streak across my skin. I didn’t mind. The way he was looking at me with those light blue eyes, I had never felt more beautiful.
He bent his head close to my ear again so I could hear him whisper, “I’m not missing anything.”
Check out another
romantic and fun book from
Jennifer Echols:
The Ex Games
seat belt
(sēt’ belt) n. 1. a trick in which a snowboarder reaches across the body and grabs the board while getting air 2. what Hayden needs to fasten, because Nick is about to take her for a ride
At the groan of a door opening, I looked up from my chemistry notebook. I’d been diagramming molecules so I wouldn’t have any homework to actually take home. But as I’d stared at the white paper, it had dissolved into a snowy slalom course. The hydrogen and oxygen atoms had transformed into gates for me to snowboard between. My red pen had traced my path, curving back and forth, swish, swish, swish, down the page. I could almost feel the icy wind on my cheeks and smell the pine trees. I couldn’t wait to get out of school and head for the mountain.
Until I saw it was Nick coming out the door of Ms. Abernathy’s room and into the hall. At six feet tall, he filled the doorway with his model-perfect looks and cocky attitude. He flicked his dark hair out of his eyes with his pinkie, looked down at me, and grinned brilliantly.
My first thought was, Oh no: fuel for the fire. About a month ago, one of my best friends had hooked up with one of Nick’s best friends. Then, a few weeks ago, my other best friend and Nick’s other best friend had gotten together. It was fate. Nick and I were next, right?
Wrong. Everybody in our class remembered that Nick and I had been a couple four years ago, in seventh grade. They gleefully recalled our breakup and the resulting brouhaha. They watched us now for our entertainment value, dying to know whether we’d go out again. Unfortunately for them, they needed to stick to DVDs and Wii to fill up their spare time. Nick and I weren’t going to happen.
My second thought was, Ah, those deep brown eyes.
Maybe snowboarding could wait a little longer, after all.
/> “Fancy meeting you here, Hoyden.” He closed the door behind him, too hard. He must have gotten in trouble for talking again, and Ms. Abernathy had sent him out in the hall.
Join the club. From my seat against the cement block wall of our high school’s science wing, I gazed up at him—way, way up, because I was on the floor—and tried my best to glare. The first time he’d called me Hoyden, years ago, I’d sneaked a peek in the dictionary to look up what it meant: a noisy girl. Not exactly flattering. Not exactly a lie, either. But I couldn’t let him know I felt flattered that he’d taken the time to look up a word in the dictionary to insult me with. Because that would make me insane, desperate, and in unrequited love.
He slapped his forehead. “Oh, I’m sorry, I meant Hayden. I get confused.” He had a way of saying oh so innocently, like he had no idea he’d insulted me. Sometimes new girls bought his act, at least for their first few weeks at our school. They were taken by the idea of hooking up with Nick Krieger, who occasionally was featured in teen heartthrob magazines as the heir to the Krieger Meats and Meat Products fortune. And Nick obliged these girls—for a few dates, until he dumped them.
I knew his pattern all too well. When I’d first moved to Snowfall, Colorado, I had been one of those girls. He’d made me feel like a princess for a whole month. No, better—like a cool, hip teenage girl who dated! The fantasy culminated with one deep kiss shared in the back row of the movie theater with half our English class watching us. It didn’t end well, thus the aforementioned brouhaha.
I blinked the stars out of my eyes. “Fancy seeing you here, Ex.”
He gave me his smile of sexy confidence, dropped his backpack, and sank to the floor beside me. “What do you think of Davis and Liz?”
My heart had absolutely no reason to skip a beat. He was not asking me out. He was asking me my opinion of my friend Liz and his friend Davis as a couple. That did not necessarily mean he was heeding public opinion that he and I were next to get together. Liz and Davis were a legitimate topic of gossip.
I managed to say breezily, “Oh, they’ll get along great until they discuss where to go on a date. Then he’ll insist they go where she wants to go. She’ll insist they go where he wants to go. They’ll end up sitting in her driveway all night, fighting to the death over who can be more thoughtful and polite.”
Nick chuckled, a low rumble in his chest. Because he’d sat down so close to me and our arms were touching, sort of, under layers and layers of clothing, I felt the vibration of his voice. But again, my heart had no reason—repeat, no reason—to skip two beats, or possibly three, just because I’d made Nick laugh. He made everybody feel this good about their stupid jokes.
“And what’s up with Gavin and Chloe?” he asked next.
“Chloe and Gavin are an accident waiting to happen.” I couldn’t understand this mismatch between the class president and the class bad boy, and it was a relief finally to voice my concerns, even if it was to Nick. “They’re both too strong-willed to make it together long. You watch. They’re adorable together now, but before long they’ll have an argument that makes our tween-love Armageddon look like a happy childhood memory.”
Suddenly it occurred to me that I’d said way too much, and Nick would likely repeat this unflattering characterization to Gavin, who would take it right back to Chloe. I really did hold this opinion of Chloe and Gavin’s chances at true love, but I’d never intended to share it! I lost my inhibitions when I looked into Nick’s dark eyes, damn him.
I slid my arm around him conspiratorially—not as titillating as it sounds, because his parka was very puffy—and cooed, “But that’s just between you and me. I know how good you are at keeping secrets.”
He pursed his lips and gazed at me reproachfully for throwing our seventh-grade history in his face, times two. Back then he’d brought our tween-love Armageddon on himself by letting our whole class in on his secret while he kept me in the dark.
Not that I was bitter.
But instead of jabbing back at me, he slipped his arm around me, too. And I was not wearing a puffy parka, only a couple of T-shirts, both of which had ridden up a little in the back. I knew this without looking because I felt the heat of his fingers on my bare skin, above the waistband of my jeans. My face probably turned a few shades redder than my hair.
“Now, Hoyden,” he reprimanded me, “Valentine’s Day is a week from tomorrow. We don’t want to ruin that special day for Gavin and Chloe or Davis and Liz. We should put aside our differences for the sake of the kids.”
I couldn’t help bursting into unladylike laughter.
I expected him to remove his hand from my hip in revulsion at my outburst, but he kept it there. I knew he was only toying with me, I knew this, but I sure did enjoy it. If the principal had walked by just then and sensed what I was thinking, I would have gotten detention.
“Four years is a long time for us to be separated,” he crooned. “We’ve both had a chance to think about what we really want from our relationship.”
This was true. Over the four years since we’d been together, I’d come to the heartbreaking realization that no boy in my school was as hot as Nick, nobody was as much fun, and nobody was nearly as much of an ass. For instance, he’d generated fire-crotch comments about me as I passed his table in the lunchroom yesterday.
Remember when another heir called a certain redhaired actress a fire-crotch on camera? No? Well, I remember. Redheads across America sucked in a collective gasp, because we knew. The jokes boys made to us about Raggedy Ann, the Wendy’s girl, and Pippi Longstocking would finally stop, as we’d always hoped, only to be replaced by something infinitely worse.
So when I heard fire-crotch whispered in the lunchroom, I assumed it was meant for me. Nick was the first suspect I glanced at. His mouth was closed as he listened to the conversation at the lunch table. However, when there was commentary around school about me, Nick was always in the vicinity. He might not have made the comment, but I knew in my heart he was responsible.
Now I chose not to relay my thoughts on our four-year-long trial separation, lest he take his warm hand off my hip. Instead, I played along. “Are you saying you didn’t sign the papers, so our divorce was never finalized?”
“I’m saying maybe we should call off the court proceedings and try a reconciliation.” A strand of his dark hair came untucked from behind his ear, and he jerked his head back to swing the hair out of his eyes. Oooh, I loved it when he did that! I had something of a Nick problem.
His hair fell right back into his eyes. Sometimes when this happened, he followed up the head jerk with the pinkie flick, but not this time. He watched me, waiting for me to say something. Oops. I’d forgotten I was staring at him in awe.
A reconciliation? He was probably just teasing me, as usual. But what if this was his veiled way of asking me on a date? What if he was feeling me out to see whether I wanted to go with him before he asked me directly? This was how Nick worked. He had to win. He never took a bet that wasn’t a sure thing.
And if he’d been listening to everyone in class prodding him to ask me out, the timing was perfect, if I did say so myself. He was between girlfriends (not that I kept up with his dating status) and therefore free to get together with me. Everett Walsh, my boyfriend of two months, had broken up with me last week because his mama thought I was brazen (no!). Therefore I was free to get together with Nick.
Playing it cool, I relaxed against the wall and gave his puffy parka a squeeze, which he probably couldn’t feel through the padding. With my other hand, I found his fingers in his lap and touched the engraving on his signet ring, which he’d told me back in seventh grade was the Krieger family crest. It depicted bloodthirsty lions and the antlers of the hapless deer they’d attacked and devoured—which seemed apt for our relationship in seventh grade, but not for our relationship now, in eleventh. I was no deer in the headlights. Not anymore. Coyly I said, “I’ll mention it to my lawyer.” Ha!
He eyed me uneasily, like I
was a chemistry lab experiment gone awry and foaming over. But Nick was never truly uneasy. He was just taken aback that I hadn’t fallen at his feet. Then he asked, “What are you doing for winter break?”
Winter break was next week. We lived in a ski resort town. It seemed cruel to lock us up in school the entire winter. They let us out for a week every February, since the base might or might not start to melt by spring break in April.
Was he just making convo, whiling away our last few minutes of incarceration at school, or did he really want to know what I was doing during our days off? Again I got the distinct and astonishing impression that he wanted to ask me out. Perhaps I should notify Ms. Abernathy of a safety hazard in her chemistry classroom. Obviously I had inhaled hallucinatory gas just before she kicked me out.
“I’m boarding with my brother today,” I said, counting on my fingers. “Tomorrow I’m boarding with Liz. Actually, Liz skis rather than boards, but she keeps up with me pretty well. I’m boarding with some friends coming from Aspen on Sunday, the cheerleading squad on Monday—”
Nick laughed. “Basically, anyone who will board with you.”
“I guess I get around,” I agreed. “I’m on the mountain a lot. Most people get tired of boarding after a while, which I do not understand at all. And then on Tuesday, I’ve entered that big snowboarding competition.”
“Really!” He sounded interested and surprised, but his hand underneath my hand let me know he was more interested in throwing me into a hot tizzy than in anything I had to say. He slid his hand, and my hand with it, from his lap and over to my thigh. “You’re going off the jump? Did you get over your fear of heights?”
So he’d been listening to me after all.
My friends knew I’d broken my leg rappelling when I was twelve. That actually led, in a roundabout way, to my family’s move from Tennessee to Colorado. My dad was a nurse, and he got so interested in my physical rehab that he and my mom decided to open a health club. Only they didn’t think they could make it fly in Tennessee. The best place for a privately owned health club specializing in physical rehab was a town with a lot of rich people and broken legs.