“There’s no fighting during girls’ sleepover night,” Harper declared.
“Seriously,” Tia kept on anyway, “because there’s different kinds of sex.”
“Now you’re baiting her,” Harper scolded Tia. “Just tell her what she wants to know.”
Tia scowled at me, then opened her free hand. “Okay. The last time I did anything with him was about a month ago, before Will and I got together.”
“Well, after you and Will had been together,” I corrected her, “but before you actually went on a date.” I happened to have heard about some of the things she’d been seen doing with Sawyer one weekend after she’d already made out with Will.
Tia grimaced and rubbed her brow like I was giving her a headache. “The past is past. I don’t see why this matters.”
I couldn’t believe I was doing it, but I laid my biggest fear down flat on the table for them to peer at. “Because if Sawyer slept around before, he’ll do it again.”
“People change, Kaye,” Tia said solemnly. “I’ve changed.”
I frowned at her. “You’re not wearing a bra.”
She looked guilty, then pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and peered inside. “I couldn’t find it on the band bus. Nine times out of ten, I’ve changed. I definitely would not run back to Sawyer or to anybody when I’ve made a promise to Will. Will is too fucking awesome.”
Sawyer finally stirred—whether because she’d said his name again or she’d said the F-word with such gusto, I didn’t know. He rolled onto his side, shifting his head on her thigh. Now that he might be awake-ish, I was even more alarmed at what she said next: “As long as you’re on a break with Aidan anyway, why not experiment, so you won’t spend your entire life since you were fourteen with one guy? I’m sure Sawyer would be glad for you to use him.”
I cut my hand back and forth violently across my throat, hoping the horrified look on my face told her how serious I was about her shutting up. Even Harper shook her head.
Ignoring Harper, Tia gave me her best Who, me? face and put her hands up like she couldn’t imagine what she’d done wrong.
I already felt vulnerable because Aidan had broken up with me and Sawyer seemed to have rejected me. If Sawyer was playing possum and heard this discussion, I would die of embarrassment. Desperate to keep her from saying anything else, I found a notepad printed with the B and B logo, plucked a pen out of the side-table drawer, and wrote her an angry note. “Sawyer wld not b ‘glad 4 me 2 use him,’ WTF. And if I did, Aidan wld never go out w me again.” I tore it off the pad—silently—and reached across the coffee table with it. Harper half stood to grab it, then delivered it to Tia. Harper read it over her shoulder.
Tia snapped her fingers, meaning she wanted my pen. I winced at the noise but handed the pen to Harper, who delivered it. Tia scribbled an answer below my note. This took so long, and I was so afraid of what she’d say, that I had half a mind to look over her shoulder while she was still writing. I was afraid this might rouse Sawyer—with my panicked breathing or the sound of my heart palpitations. Finally she gave the paper to Harper, who read it with a perplexed expression, then handed it to me.
“Aidan wld b more likely 2 go out w u again bc he wld see ur not waiting around 4 him & his Higgs boson BULLshit. In the meantime u cld experiment w Sawyer. Tell me u don’t want 2 & ur lying like a dog.” Under this she’d drawn a dog stick figure with its tongue hanging out, lying on what appeared to be several yards of shag.
“Shhh,” Harper said, even though nobody had said anything for several minutes. I listened, though. Underneath the drone of TV brides, I recognized Will’s voice and Brody’s laugh on the other side of the front door.
“We’d better go out there before they ring the doorbell and wake up my mom,” Harper said more quietly than we’d been speaking before, as if my written exchange with Tia had caused a pall to descend over the night.
“They won’t,” Tia said as loudly as ever. “Brody wouldn’t risk her wrath. They’re plotting something.”
“Then we’d better go out there before they execute their plot and get me in enormous trouble,” Harper said.
“I’m curious what they’ll do,” Tia said. “Wait.”
We waited. The only lights were still the flickering color from the TV and the soft glow from the streetlights through the window curtains. The only sound was the whisper of televised voices. Then Will’s voice again, hushed, and Brody’s.
Suddenly the fireplace seemed to explode, making me squeal and Tia jump. Sawyer grunted and rolled all the way over on Tia’s thigh with his back to the room.
Harper peered into the fireplace. She rummaged in the ash and brought out a tennis ball.
“Brilliant,” Tia said. “You’re right, Harper, we have to stop the rogue teens before they cause more harm.” She half rose. Sawyer threw both arms over his head to block out sound and light.
“Kaye, come over here right now.” Tia said it with such authority, and I was so surprised at this, that I obeyed, edging between the sofa and the coffee table. She rolled out from under Sawyer and held his upper body suspended until I sat down where she’d been. She laid Sawyer’s head in my lap.
And then . . . I’m not sure what I’d expected to happen next, but it wasn’t this: Tia and Harper left the room as fast as they could go, closing the front door carefully behind them.
Warmth washed over me, followed by a case of the shivers. I couldn’t believe, after all the teasing I’d suffered at Sawyer’s hands for the past two years, he was in my lap. The night had suddenly come way closer to a wild fantasy I’d only half acknowledged: that we would end up together.
But he was asleep. I was convinced now that I felt his deep, even breaths against my hand. An Oscar-winning actor couldn’t fake it this well. And when Tia had ordered me over, it almost seemed she was calling on me to protect his rest, not to wake him or flirt with him or make Aidan jealous.
In front of the house, somewhere just beyond the door, Harper talked in a low voice. “I’m surprised you’re still up. You got hit pretty hard in the third quarter.”
“Yeah,” Brody responded. “I don’t feel that kind of thing until the next day. You have about eight hours left to use me.”
“Oh, really. Use you how?” Harper’s tone was knowing and provocative—like Tia’s was all the time. I’d never heard Harper speak this way before. I recalled what she’d hinted to me in the van about Brody and her exploring each other.
I’d lost my virginity with Aidan not long after Tia had lost hers with Sawyer. Harper hadn’t had sex even now. But suddenly I felt like the naive one, because Harper and Brody were in love, and my time with Aidan hadn’t meant what I thought.
Their voices faded as they wisely walked away from the house, where Harper’s mother wouldn’t overhear. I was left with only the TV wedding preparations and Sawyer’s warmth in my lap.
He rolled farther forward and slipped his hand between my legs, propping himself in that position, like my thigh was a pillow. I suspected at first he was awake after all—but he never snickered, and if he’d meant to take liberties with me, his hand would have been six inches higher.
I put my hand in his hair, lightly so as not to rouse him, and fingered those baby-fine strands all over again, while I watched all my past goals play out on television like the most mindless reality show.
* * *
I lay stretched out on the sofa, with an actual pillow underneath my head, and covered in Harper’s psychedelic first attempt at quilting. The TV was off and the room was black, but I knew where I was because of the big window on one side of the chimney, glowing faintly. My arm hung down, touching something warm—and when I peered in that direction, it took me a few moments to recognize Sawyer on the floor right next to the sofa, with his back against it, in a sleeping bag that Harper had owned since at least third grade. My hand was on his shoulder.
Harper and Tia must have bedded us down when they came back inside. They sure hadn’t woken me u
p when they moved me. But they must have woken Sawyer, or he would have landed pretty hard on the floor. And after he’d given me his place on the sofa, he’d stayed as close to me as possible.
I took a satisfied breath, for once wholeheartedly enjoying the tingles in my fingers and the feeling of doing something slightly wrong, and went back to sleep.
* * *
The window was pink with sunrise. A tinny alarm sounded quietly.
“It’s mine,” Sawyer whispered, fumbling with his watch. “Lie back down.”
I was bone tired and sore from my night of cheering. I never complained because I would sound silly compared with football players like Brody getting sacked, and because my mother might use my whining as an excuse to suggest I quit. This morning Sawyer’s order to sleep more was almost as delicious as my light touch on him had been the night before. Gratefully I collapsed on the sofa again and curled into a ball, warming myself in the chilly air conditioning.
Covers rustled. A cozy weight fell across me as he draped the sleeping bag over my quilt.
“Thanks,” I muttered, snuggling lower.
A shadow descended over me. I felt his lips brush my forehead.
I listened as he crossed the room, opened the front door, locked it from the inside, and quietly shut it behind him.
* * *
“Breakfast!” Harper’s mom sang. “If you don’t get it while Sawyer’s cooking it, you don’t get it.” Before I even saw her, she’d walked out the front door, headed for the B and B.
I sat straight up into bright morning sunlight with a horrible realization, which must have been growing in my subconscious while I slept: I’d lost my back-and-forth note with Tia.
I jumped up and shook out the quilt, then the sleeping bag, then my pillow, then Sawyer’s pillow, which he’d tossed into a chair. No note. I looked under the furniture and behind the sofa. Next I scanned the tables. My note could have gotten stuffed into any one of these art books.
“Morning!” Harper said brightly, coming around the corner and blinking behind her glasses. Tia stumbled after her. Tia was not a morning person.
“Do y’all know what happened to that note we were passing around last night?” I asked, trying my best not to sound hysterical.
“No,” Harper said, turning upside down to peer under the furniture herself. Her glasses fell off with a clatter. “Maybe it got thrown away.”
“Didn’t I have it last?” I asked Tia, who stared back at me like she was still in REM sleep and someone had glued her eyelids open.
“Never mind,” I told Harper. “But if you find it, burn it.”
“Okay.” Harper laughed like it wasn’t a big deal. We all washed up and changed into clothes that wouldn’t scare the guests at the B and B. But my mind was racing. Harper was probably right. I could tell by looking around that she’d cleaned up the mess of Tia’s midnight snacks. Her mom might have been through too, tidying up while I was still asleep. One of them had thrown the note away like trash.
Or Sawyer had found it.
And the last thing he’d done before leaving was to kiss me. If he’d read our note about me having a fling with him, the kiss was his way of saying yes.
Over in the B and B, we sat down to a full breakfast with Harper’s mom and her eight guests at the biggest dining room table I’d ever seen, all dark scrolls like the rest of the towering Victorian. That is, Harper and Tia and I sat down. Sawyer kept getting up to check food in the kitchen or pass around a fresh basket of orange rolls.
He used his best waiter persona. He was polite and conversational to the elderly people at the table, offering them ideas for tourist attractions and the best roads to get them there. He was mature like a maître d’ in a three-piece suit at a fine hotel, except that he was still wearing his Pelicans T-shirt and sweatpants. I actually had seen him in gentlemanly waiter mode before, when Barrett and I ate at the Crab Lab with my parents.
Several of the guests went off to start their day. Harper’s mom was deep in conversation with the last two couples. Harper nodded toward the kitchen door, meaning it was safe to make our escape. We took our dishes with us so Sawyer wouldn’t have to bus them. He was methodically working through a huge pile of plates, dumping food in the garbage, rinsing the dishes, and setting them in the dishwasher or dropping them to soak in an industrial-size sink. He was doing the work of probably six people at the Crab Lab.
He looked up when we walked in. “Sorry I flaked out on y’all last night,” he said.
“What’s the last thing you remember hearing?” Tia asked playfully. She winked at me.
Oh God.
Sawyer said without missing a beat, “The girl who had her heart set on a strapless dress, but her mama said she looked like a harlot.” If he’d really been awake when we started talking about Aidan—and him—he hid it well.
Harper grabbed the first pan out of the drying rack and toweled it off. “You don’t have to do that,” Sawyer told her. She ignored him, talking to Tia about our walk to the beach in a few minutes. She turned to him only to ask if he could go with us.
“Thanks,” Sawyer said with a quick glance at me, “but I’m working a double shift at the Crab Lab. I need to make up the hours I’m missing on Friday nights.”
My heart went out to him. I would spend the morning relaxing by the ocean and trying to recharge for more school on Monday. He would be working and apparently needed the cash rather desperately. It didn’t seem right that we both had gotten to play hard at the game last night, but he had to pay for that now, and I didn’t.
“I’ll dry,” I told Harper, “and you put away, since you know where everything goes.” She wasn’t really paying me any attention, but she moved when I pushed her and dragged the dish towel out of her hands. I took her place. Now I stood beside Sawyer.
“So, you’re going to stay at Harper’s house until a room opens up here?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said absently, concentrating on scrubbing something sticky out of the bottom of a pan.
“What are you going to do when you can’t have the room here anymore? Harper said that will happen in December.” I hoped I sounded like a concerned friend, not the girl in the van last night who’d made the comment about the box. I felt like I’d aged a year since then.
Tia chose this moment to wake up and pay attention. “I want him to move in with us at my house,” she interrupted. “We should have the whole main floor done by December, so we’ll have plenty of room. I just have to . . .” She glanced at Sawyer. “It’s complicated.”
“Complicated how?” I asked.
Sawyer looked up from the sink and gave me a warning glance. He didn’t want to talk about it.
But Tia didn’t understand warning looks, and there was pretty much nothing on the planet she wouldn’t talk about. “I have to convince everybody,” she said. “The main problem is Will. He says”—she broke into an incredibly bad imitation of a Minnesota accent—“ ‘I trust you, and I trust Sawyer, but I don’t trust you and Sawyer. He’s quit drinking, and you’ve cut down, but what if you both fall off the wagon and something happens?’ ”
Sawyer glanced over his shoulder at her and wagged his eyebrows.
She laughed. “Will worries about these things. I’m like, ‘But I am totally devoted to your body, and your accent is so sexy.’ ”
I should have been glad her family might give Sawyer a place to live. I was glad. But my jealousy wouldn’t let go. I knew how Will felt.
“The main problem is my sister,” Tia went on.
“Which sister?” Harper asked.
“Violet. You know, she’s moved back in, and she doesn’t want a guy moving in too, because she’s sworn off guys for the next five minutes. But the main problem is my other sister.”
“Which other sister?” Harper asked.
“Izzy,” Tia said.
“Do you realize there are three main problems?” I spoke up, trying not to sound as irritated as I felt.
Tia look
ed at me. “What?”
“You’ve said ‘The main problem is . . .’ three times.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to get across here. It’s an uphill battle. So the main problem is Izzy.”
“She doesn’t even live with you anymore,” Harper pointed out.
“That’s what I say,” Tia said, “but she’s working on my dad. She’s like, ‘I got pregnant at seventeen. Tia’s going to college. Trust me, you need to protect her from boys. The last thing you want to do is invite one to stay in your house.’ Of course, this whole conversation is going on in Spanish, which I’m not as fluent in as they are, and the word for ‘pregnant’ sounds like ‘embarrassed,’ so I misunderstood what she was saying at first. I’m all like, ‘I don’t need to be protected, and I’m not embarrassed to have a boyfriend! Why should I be embarrassed just because you got pregnant?’ The discussion kind of devolved from that point. I’ll spare you the details.”
Sawyer didn’t speak through any of this. He left the sink to pull yet another fresh batch of orange rolls from the oven. Passing behind Tia with the basket, headed toward the dining room, he tugged on one of her braids. She responded by patting his shoulder.
“Let’s get going,” Harper said. “I love the beach in the morning.”
I didn’t have an excuse to hang around the kitchen until Sawyer came back. We left for Harper’s cottage without me exchanging another word with him, or a glance, or gaining any more insight into whether he’d really found our note, or what the kiss was for.
At Harper’s granddad’s private strip of beach, just across the road and a block down from her house, I grilled her and Tia on ideas for where we could hold the homecoming dance. Tia predictably opted out because she didn’t like being told to think too hard. Harper, who was good at thinking outside the box because that’s where she lived pretty much all the time, couldn’t come up with a single idea when I really needed her.