• • •
“So tell me something,” Clark said to me a few hours later. We were lying on a blanket in the back of his SUV, taking a brief kissing break, the back door open and a breeze intermittently blowing through the car.
After we’d brought the items back to our own cars and cleaned up the impromptu pizza party, and Wyatt and Clark had affixed Tom’s bow tie around Winthrop’s neck, everyone had scattered, and Clark and I had headed to his house to “watch a movie.” Even if there were a movie playing, it would simply be in the background, a pretense for fooling around. We’d been doing this for a while now, so even the pretending to need the movie was starting to get old. But Clark had just gotten to the gatehouse when he’d slowed, then put the car in park. We looked at the time, did some quick calculations, and realized that if I was going to make it back for my curfew—which, since my grounding, I did try to stick to the general vicinity of—we were going to lose most of our time getting to his place and then back to mine. So after a brief discussion, Clark had turned the car around and we’d returned, parked to the side of the road near the statue of Winthrop, beneath the section with no streetlights shining in on us.
Clark’s second row of seats was already down from hauling the mountain bikes, and I was glad they weren’t currently there, taking up precious space. Clark had raised the back and we’d stretched out there for a few minutes, looking up at the stars though the open door, listening to the low hum of the cicadas in the grass.
“What’s that?” I asked. He must have gotten some sun today—the skin on his neck was warm, and I rested my lips there for just a moment before putting my head on his chest. I felt the soft cotton of his T-shirt under my cheek and just breathed in that Clark smell I loved so much but hadn’t yet adequately been able to describe to my friends. It was just him, and it made me feel wide awake and really peaceful, all at the same time.
“You guys,” Clark said, turning to face me a little more fully, moonlight and reflected streetlight falling across his face. His glasses were carefully folded and placed against the window, and he reached for them now and slipped them on, then smiled when he saw me, like I’d just come into focus. “Your friends. This is what you guys do.”
I looked at him. “I’m going to need more than that,” I said after a second of trying to figure out what he was talking about. “I thought you were supposed to be good with words.”
“Sorry,” Clark said, giving me a quick, embarrassed smile. It faded, and I realized in that moment that this was actually something more serious—probably not something I should be teasing him for trying to ask about.
“No, tell me,” I said, propping myself up on an elbow. “What do you mean?”
“Just . . .” Clark gestured to the bag propped by the wheel well, the one that contained half of the scavenger-hunt items, including eight blue gum balls that were all his. “You guys. You do things like this. It’s like the coin of the realm with you.” I smiled at that. “You create quests—”
“Scavenger hunts.”
“You hang out together all the time. You have these games and inside jokes and nicknames and adventures. . . .” Clark looked down at his hands, and I got the feeling he was weighing every word before he spoke, trying to find the one that would let me understand what he was feeling.
“Well, not all the time,” I said, not wanting him to get a false impression of things. “During the school year, there’s a lot more homework and a lot more of Tom attempting to grow a beard so he’ll get cast in the Chekhov play.”
“I guess I just . . . ,” Clark said as he adjusted his glasses. “I’ve never had a group of friends, so I didn’t . . .” He shook his head. “I didn’t know it could be like this.”
“Oh,” I said quietly, finally understanding what he meant. I didn’t want to tell him that it wasn’t always good, or wasn’t always like this, because the fact is that most of the time it was. I’d sometimes look at other people at my school—the girls who seemed to thrive on drama and were always fighting with their friends, the ones who didn’t even seem to like their friends that much—and know just how lucky I was. But I wasn’t sure that was what Clark needed to hear at the moment. “Well,” I said, as I moved closer to him, laying my head back down on his chest and hooking my foot over his, letting our legs tangle together. “Maybe you missed having a group before,” I said. “But you’re part of one now.”
Clark didn’t say anything for a long moment, and it was like I could practically feel him turning over these words, thinking about their implications. Finally, I felt him kiss the top of my head and rest his chin there. “How about that.”
“So next summer,” I said, “you’re going to want to refine your strategy early. If you want a chance of winning, that is, because—” It was like my brain caught up to what I was saying just a moment too late. Clark wouldn’t be here next summer. He’d be back in Colorado, or he’d be somewhere else, but he would not be in Stanwich, doing a scavenger hunt with my friends.
“Oh,” Clark said, pulling away a little so he could look at me and dashing my hopes that he had just not been paying attention to the last thing I’d said. “Um. Are you—”
“Never mind,” I said quickly, feeling like this was a conversation I really didn’t want to have. We had been having a nice moment, and the last thing I wanted to do was spoil it. I stretched up to kiss him, wishing I could rewind the last minute and delete it. “We’re good.”
We had to get moving not long after that. Clark finally gave me my keys back, and we kissed good-bye when he insisted on walking me to my car, even though it was only parked a few feet from his. After we’d kissed as long as we could without me really being in danger of staying out past my curfew, Clark got into his car and kissed me one last time through his open driver’s-side window, and I watched him drive away, his taillights growing fainter until he rounded the bend in the road and I lost them. Then I headed home, yawning.
I let myself in, and stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water. As I was drinking it, I saw a note taped to the kitchen TV, in my dad’s neat, slanted handwriting.
Well?
DID WE WIN?
I smiled at that, then looked down at the phone in my hand. I normally just texted my dad when I got home, so that even if he was sleeping, he could see the time stamp. But I was pretty sure I’d seen a light on as I’d driven up to the house, and as I glanced down the hallway, I saw that there was a light on in my dad’s study and that the door was cracked open.
I walked down the hall and knocked once before pushing the door open all the way. My dad was lying on the leather couch in his study, reading some papers that he was holding above his head. He pushed his reading glasses up and smiled when he saw me.
“Hi,” I said, leaning against the doorway, giving him a small smile back. “I’m home.”
Chapter THIRTEEN
“So Karl and Marjorie are on the run,” I said, as Clark, lying next to me on the couch, pointed the remote at the movie we’d been totally ignoring, silencing it. “But,” I said as I ran my fingers through his hair, “Karl doesn’t know Marjorie’s sold him out. Told the highwaymen about him.”
Clark tossed the remote in the general direction of the coffee table and started kissing down my neck. “Oh, are there highwaymen now?”
“Of course,” I said, twirling my fingers in his hair, leaning in to kiss him. “Every good story has them.”
• • •
“And so I asked Bri what I should do about Wyatt now, since he told me about this other girl he likes, and she had like nothing to say,” Toby said as she paced in front of me in the gallery that was mostly impressionist, except for the unicorn tapestry and the Warhol.
“Hmm,” I said, trying my best to focus on her, but finding that every few seconds, my thoughts were straying back to Clark. His eyes, his lips, his hands . . .
“Andie!” Toby said, waving her hand in front of my face. “Are you even listening to me?”
; • • •
“Of course,” Clark said, as I rolled on top on him on the couch. We’d removed the side and back pillows, since they kept getting in the way. We hadn’t yet moved things into his bedroom—I think we were both a little too aware of the implications that might come with that—but we had pretty much turned every couch in his house into a bed equivalent. “Marjorie doesn’t know that Karl has some plans of his own.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, in between kisses, as I slipped my hands under the fabric of Clark’s T-shirt and pulled it over his head. Ever since I’d seen his abs on the beach, I tended to need constant verification that they were still present and accounted for. “And what might those be?”
• • •
“She needs to let it go,” Palmer said as she glanced away from the stage and to me. I was slouched down in the theater seat, my feet propped on the seat back in front of me. I’d mostly come to the community theater for the free air-conditioning between walks, and had found myself pulled into the Toby-Wyatt conundrum. “And Bri agrees with me. He told her how he felt, and now it’s just getting super awkward.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. There was part of me that agreed with Palmer. But most of me was thinking about the fact that I’d get to see Clark in less than two hours, and my pulse was already racing just thinking about it. “Totally.”
“Oh my god.” I looked over to see Palmer shaking her head at me. “Alexandra. You are so far gone.”
• • •
I was beginning to understand what Palmer, and even Bri, had been talking about now. My boundaries, the ones I’d once clung to so fiercely, had long since vanished. Now I was the one moving us forward, while Clark would stop, his eyes searching mine in the darkness, asking me if I was okay. If I was sure. And with every new threshold we crossed, it was getting harder to remember just why I’d clung to all those rules in the first place. When I could think about it clearly—always after the fact, my brain no longer gone fuzzy at the sight of Clark and the feel of his hands on me—I would realize that it wasn’t a coincidence it was happening now. It was Clark. I trusted him, and I knew him, and it made me wonder, every time we stopped, just why we weren’t going forward. And as I started to care very little for anything that wasn’t the two of us, alone in the darkness, it fell to Clark to pick up the slack.
“Your curfew’s in thirty minutes,” Clark said, breaking away from kissing me, his voice breathless, as he squinted at his digital watch, the glow from the tiny screen the only light in the room.
“Such a long time,” I said, running my fingers over his arm, which was propped above me.
“Your dad got super mad last time,” he reminded me, even as his head started to dip down toward mine.
“He got over it.”
“We’ll have to find your bra.”
I waved this away. “Details.”
“And my shirt.”
“You shouldn’t ever wear one of those,” I said, running my hand over the ridges of Clark’s abs. “Why cover this up?”
“Fine,” he said, pushing some buttons on his watch; they made a little beep! sound, like he’d just programmed the world’s tiniest microwave. “Ten more minutes. But then I have to drive you home.”
“Sure,” I said, stretching up to kiss him as he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close, my skin against his. “Sounds like a plan.”
• • •
“I think she’s getting over him, don’t you?” Bri asked me from across the diner booth.
I started to nod, then hesitated when I realized I had no idea who she was talking about. “Um, remind me again?”
“Toby,” Bri said in the extra-slow way my friends had taken to speaking to me these days. “Getting over Wyatt?”
“Oh,” I said, reaching to snag one of the mozzarella sticks we were sharing. I knew I hadn’t been totally paying attention recently, but even I knew this didn’t sound right. “I’m not so sure about that.” Bri nodded and looked down at the paper place mat in front of her, like she was studying one of the ads for the local businesses printed on it. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Bri said, taking a mozzarella stick of her own. “I just was hoping that Toby was moving on. It’s not good for her, especially when he told her he wasn’t interested.”
“I think she just needs time,” I said with a shrug.
“Or,” Bri said, sitting up straighter, “I need to fix her up with someone!”
I winced. Bri liked to think she was a great matchmaker, but she was absolutely terrible at it. After we’d all been burned a few too many times, we’d made her swear that she was done with it. “What about the oath you swore that you would never do that again? Remember, the one you took after the mullet guy?”
Bri waved this away and shook her head, looking determined and now much more cheerful. “These are extreme circumstances,” she said. “Trust me. It’s a great idea.”
• • •
“Hold on,” Clark said, sounding half out of breath as he fumbled with one hand behind him, trying to find his bedroom doorknob.
“Holding,” I said, and I leaned down to kiss him, even though I knew I was making the situation worse. We’d been on the couch when I’d decided that I couldn’t stand it any longer—I was getting a crick in my neck, and the fabric of the cushions was scratching my skin. It just seemed crazy that we were putting ourselves through that when there was a perfectly good, unused bed right down the hall.
We hadn’t stopped kissing as we walked, and even though I knew it was probably slowing us down. Clark was half carrying me, my legs wrapped around his waist, as he finally opened the door and stumbled for a few steps inside. I kissed him again, and we stayed that way for a long moment before he set me down and I looked around, taking in his room for the first time since the night of Bertie and the chocolate. It looked the same—the neat stacks of clothing, the carefully made bed. Although I did notice that the books on writer’s block seemed to have vanished from the top of his desk.
I looked at the bed for a long moment, letting my mind go places it probably shouldn’t. As things with us had progressed, our discussions over the last two weeks about taking things to the next level had gone from “if” to “when.” Which was exciting and scary and overwhelming and pretty much all I could think about.
“You okay?” Clark asked, squeezing my hand. I squeezed his back and made myself look away from the bed, making myself remember that this random Tuesday would not be the night. I had to get my head around it a little more first, talk to my friends, and actually do my hair, as opposed to just twisting it into a knot like I’d done tonight. I wanted it to be totally special.
“Hey,” Clark said from behind me as his slid his arms around my waist and kissed that one spot on my shoulder. He pulled me closer against him, and I swore I could feel the beat of his heart against my back. I turned to face him, and he ran his hand over my hair, his fingers trailing down my cheek, stroking along my jawline so gently, like I was something precious. He leaned down to kiss me, and I kissed him back, and then we were kiss-walking across the room, until we fell down onto the bed together, and then there was only his lips and his hands and our breath, falling into a rhythm until I couldn’t think about anything except him, and us, and now.
• • •
“Talk,” Palmer said, pointing her Twizzler at me. “Andie. Details.”
I rolled over to look at her, holding my hand up to cut the glare. We were sunbathing on Palmer’s roof, all four of us. Our schedules had aligned for the afternoon, and it wasn’t until we’d set up there, with towels and snacks, that I realized it had been a while since it had been just us—no boyfriends or crushes or Tom. And how much I’d missed just the four of us hanging out. “What?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure I knew. And it was one of the reasons I’d wanted to hang out with them today—I needed some girl talk, and to figure out what I was feeling, in a way I never seemed to be able to except when we were together.
??
?Come on,” Bri said, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head. “You and Clark. Spill.”
I wasn’t quite able to stop myself from smiling as I smoothed out the edges of my towel. This, truthfully, was a new experience for me. My friends and I all knew every detail of what the others had done with guys—but I usually didn’t have anything to contribute to this conversation. I’d been keeping things vague with them and letting them believe I was still safe within my old boundaries.
“Wait, what?” Toby asked, as she paused in applying her spray-on sunscreen to her legs. She turned to me, her expression incredulous. “Don’t tell me the queen of first base is actually doing something.”
“She totally is,” Palmer said, nodding with authority. “You don’t lose that many IQ points if you’re just kissing someone.”
“First of all,” I said, busying myself with smoothing out imaginary wrinkles in my towel, “why does first base get such a bad rap? It’s like the most important base.”
“This is true,” Bri said, nodding. “And I know it’s true, because in every movie, the first baseman is always really cute.”
“I’m just saying, wait until you try the other bases,” Palmer said, waggling her eyebrows at us.
“No,” Toby said, holding up her hand. “Please no. Every time you talk about sleeping with Tom, I end up picturing him naked.”
“You might be surprised to know—” Palmer started, raising an eyebrow as Toby waved her hands in front of her face.
“Seriously, stop it.” She shuddered. “And now I’m seeing it,” she said, shaking her head. “And I can’t unsee it.”
“All I’m saying,” Palmer said, turning to me, “is that the other bases are just more interesting.”
“Mmm-hm,” Bri said, taking a long drink of her soda.
“Yeah,” I murmured without thinking, replaying the night before in my head.
“Wait, what?” Toby asked, suddenly sitting up straight. She raised her sunglasses and looked closely at me. “Are you . . . and Dogboy . . . ?”