Float, page 20
“That works,” Blake said, his tone odd.
“Who do you think this one belonged to?” I said, patting down the front pocket. It was only then that I noticed the little white logo on the left breast of the sweatshirt, the unmistakable lifeguard cross.
Damn. I looked so legit.
“It was mine,” Blake said.
My head shot up, but all I got was an eyeful of Blake’s wide, T-shirt covered back as he walked around to the trunk and tossed the rest of the sweatshirts into their designated spot. He tugged a dark-green crew neck on over his head, mussing up his already windblown hair in the process, and slammed the trunk shut. Then he turned to me and smiled.
“You ready to have the best burger of your life?” he asked.
I was a little caught off guard by how utterly happy Blake Hamilton looked. I’d sort of been worried that he didn’t want me wearing his old sweatshirt, which in turn led me to worry about whether or not he wanted to be seen in public with me. During my first couple of days in Holden, Blake had made it perfectly clear that he didn’t want to be seen with me. But maybe, just maybe, he considered us friends now.
“Bring it on,” I said, rubbing my palms together.
Blake spun on his heels, crossing the tiny parking strip and heading toward the crosswalk. I trailed one step behind him, so when he stopped abruptly to look both ways for oncoming cars, I stepped on the back of his shoe and smacked him in the back with my right shoulder.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, wincing.
Could I go, like, five minutes without fucking up? Although by that point, Blake had already learned from experience that I had all the grace and coordination of a giraffe attempting en pointe ballet, so there really was no recovering.
Blake chuckled, the sound coming from somewhere deep in the barrel of his chest. I was standing so close that I could feel the heat radiating off his back. But then he stepped into the street, and cold air flooded the place where he’d previously been. Blake’s hand drifted back toward me, as if he was going to make a move to hold my hand, but then, suddenly, he straightened his back and shoved both of his hands in the pockets of his black shorts.
I shivered and hurried after him.
Bayside Burgers looked like the kind of ice cream parlor you’d see in an old black and white film. There was an L-shaped bar that took up most of the restaurant, and behind the white marble counters and large menu placards hanging from the high ceilings, I could just make out the hustle and bustle of the kitchen. The interior of the shop was warm and smelled like some enchanted combination of chocolate sauce and hamburger patties. There were two families and a group of senior women in some of the booths along the windows and a handful of individuals scattered around the bar.
Blake strode right up to the hostess’s podium, his hands still tucked in his pockets. The woman standing there looked to be in her late sixties, although her bright eyes gave the illusion of youth, and was incredibly short. When she saw Blake, she smiled the kind of smile a grandmother would use to greet her favorite grandson.
“Well, look at you!”
“Hi, Carol.” Blake grinned back at her.
He pulled his hands out of his pockets as the woman—Carol, according to the golden nametag pinned to her apron and Blake’s greeting—stepped around the podium and gave him an appraising once-over. She tucked a piece of pale grey hair behind her ear, and I caught a flash of her pearl earring.
“You’re too thin,” she chided, reaching out to prod Blake’s sweatshirt-covered abdomen. “This is what happens when you don’t visit me often enough.”
“I was here last weekend.”
“And you didn’t order any dessert,” Carol said, resting her hands on her hips and tilting her head back so she could look Blake in the eye. He was well over six feet tall. She, on the other hand, looked like she couldn’t be over four foot ten.
“I wasn’t that hungry,” he said.
“You’ll be skin and bones before long,” Carol scolded. “Don’t you dare turn into one of those skinny little hipsters, you hear me?”
Blake laughed. “I promise we’ll order the monster sundae today.”
At his use of pronoun, Carol’s gaze shifted and settled on me. I straightened my spine and tried my best to smile, but I felt more nervous than I’d been to sit down and take my AP biology test just a couple of months earlier. And I was horrible at biology.
I wondered, briefly, if this was what meeting your boyfriend’s parents felt like.
Shut up, I scolded myself. This isn’t a date.
“Hi,” I offered up, my voice a little higher pitched than usual.
“Oh, this is my friend Waverly,” Blake told Carol, shifting a couple of steps to stand so close our shoulders bumped. “She’s visiting for the summer. Her aunt is Rachel Lyons.”
“The artist working on that mural over by the hospital?”
“That’s her.” I nodded.
Carol took a moment to stare at me, her gaze assessing, before she looked over at Blake. Her eyes scanned his face for a moment before making their way back to me, but not before focusing in on the lack of air between our touching shoulders.
The corners of her lips quirked upward.
“It’s very nice to meet you, Waverly.”
I took her outstretched hand and shook it, praying to God that my palm wasn’t too clammy or anything.
“It’s nice to meet you, too, Carol,” I returned.
Carol beamed at me. Blake shifted beside me, tugging at the sleeves of his crew neck, as Carol hurried back around the podium. She returned with two laminated menus tucked under her arm.
“Table, booth, or bar?” she asked.
“Booth, please,” Blake responded immediately.
Carol started across the restaurant, the short heels of her shoes clicking lightly against the black and white marble tiles of the floor. Blake tilted his head, motioning for me to follow her, and fell in line behind me. We passed several perfectly decent looking tables, but Carol didn’t stop until we reached the booth tucked into the very farthest corner of Bayside Burgers. She slapped the menus down on the table and turned to face us, smiling like a toddler proud of her crayon masterpiece on her mommy and daddy’s bedroom wall.
“Thanks, Carol,” Blake mumbled.
Carol hurried around him to attend to a man at the bar who had his empty coffee mug raised, her lips flattened into a thin line as if she was trying to hold back a laugh.
I slipped into the booth, choosing the bench with a better view out the windows so I could keep an eye on Jesse’s precariously parked Jeep. But the second Blake Hamilton dropped onto the opposite bench, his bare knees brushing mine underneath the table, I was pretty sure that the car outside could’ve burst into a giant ball of flames and billowy, black smoke and I wouldn’t have noticed.
God, he was big. His shoulders were broad and his long legs didn’t fit all that well under the table—especially not when my too-long legs were occupying the same space—and his hands looked huge as he picked up one of the laminated menus Carol had left for us.
Blake was a physically imposing presence.
I grabbed my own menu and willed my heartbeat to stop fluttering around like a stupid bird. There was no reason to be nervous. Blake was my friend now. He’d said so himself, to Carol. I’d be better off in the end if I tried to remember that this was not a date, Blake was not interested, and I was not going to get any action anytime soon.
I must have sighed self-deprecatingly.
Blake glanced up from his menu and quirked an eyebrow. I couldn’t help but think back to the first time Blake and I had been forced into association, at the bonfire party, and how he’d quirked his eyebrow at me the same way. Then, it had been the kind of subtle expression you make when another driver cuts you off only to ease up off the gas until he’s doing twenty under the speed limit. It was the kind of move that said You’re kidding me, with just a dash of F you.
Now, it was gentle. Familiar. Teasing.
What had changed so drastically in just a handful of weeks?
I tugged at the sleeve of my sweatshirt, pursing my lips as I tried to select my next couple of words as carefully as possible.
“Hey, Blake?” I asked, almost in a whisper.
He leaned over the table just the slightest bit.
“Yeah?” he whispered back.
“Can I ask my first question?”
Blake’s back stiffened and he slid his elbows off the table. He leaned back in the opposite bench—trying to get as far away from me as physically possible, I guess—and eyed me warily. For several seconds, his eyebrows remained furrowed as he tried to figure out what sort of intrusive, malevolent questions I might’ve come up with.
“You’re well within your rights,” he said.
Carol chose that exact moment to appear with a glass of ice water in each hand. The moment she set them down, Blake snatched his glass and started to chug it. Carol turned to me.
“Can I get the two of you anything else to drink?” she asked.
“Water’s fine,” I said.
“Are y’all about ready to order?”
“I think I need another minute to choose,” I admitted, smiling a little sheepishly. I hadn’t even started to read the menu.
“Sure thing, dear.” Carol nodded.
She was halfway across the restaurant before Blake finally slammed down his glass, rattling the ice inside of it.
“You good?” I asked.
Okay, I probably could’ve sounded less amused. The poor guy probably thought I was about to ask something superintrusive or devastatingly embarrassing.
“Fantastic.” He nodded. “So, what’s the question?”
I took a moment to review the wording in my head, then nodded and set my hands on the table—fingers clasped—like I was about to interview Blake for the executive position as my new friend.
“Why did you hate me when we first met?”
Blake stared at me for a second, and then his face scrunched up.
“I didn’t hate you.”
“Yes, you did.”
He was reaching for the ice water again. I slid my hand across the table and snatched it away before he could use it as an excuse to further evade my question.
“I honestly didn’t,” Blake insisted, sighing as he propped his elbows up on the table again. “I mean, I know I probably acted a little like an asshole—”
“A lot,” I corrected under my breath.
Blake winced.
“Okay, a lot. I was a really big asshole. But I didn’t hate you.”
It was my turn to eye him warily.
“But you—”
Carol materialized at the side of the table, almost out of nowhere, and I was cut off halfway through my rebuttal. The older waitress beamed at us, seemingly delighted at the way the two of us were both bent over the table and speaking in hushed voices.
“Y’all ready to order?” she asked.
We were. Carol smiled to herself as she jotted down our order and collected our laminated menus—and let out an audible laugh when Blake requested something called the Beluga Whale Sundae for us to split for dessert.
“It’ll be ten minutes, tops,” she told us.
Blake waited until she was gone to turn to me again.
“You were saying?” he prompted, reaching across the table to snatch his glass of water before I could stop him.
“I was saying”—I scooted forward on the bench, back to business—“that you acted like you hated me at the bonfire party. And on the drive home, too, but you were pretty hammered, so I don’t think you remember it that well.”
“I don’t,” Blake admitted.
“Which is sort of a bummer, because I was hoping someone would be able to vouch for my awesome driving skills.”
“I’m sure you’re NASCAR material.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying my absolute hardest not to smile. “But don’t distract me. You hated me, and I know it. You couldn’t even look at me without glaring. And I just want to know what I did wrong.”
Blake looked down at the table again, tracing his fingertips over the grain in the faux wood.
“You didn’t do anything,” he mumbled.
“See, that’s exactly what you said in the car.”
I remembered that part vividly. He’d said something about how I’d ruined his night—there’d been an expletive in there somewhere—and I’d told him I hadn’t done anything to warrant his hostility. His reply had been one word, peremptory.
Exactly.
As if, somehow, the whole situation made perfect sense in the world of teenage-boy logic.
Blake fidgeted on the other side of the booth, his knees knocking against mine underneath the table. Leave it to Carol to put us in what had to be the smallest booth in the entire restaurant. Blake’s presence was nerve racking enough when I didn’t have to feel the heat of his skin against mine.
“I just thought, you know, that you’d tell everybody at the bonfire about what you saw. You know, when Chloe yelled at me.”
His words startled me.
I had to sit still for a moment to process them.
“When she grounded you and took your phone?” I asked, frowning.
Blake winced.
“Yeah, that,” he mumbled. “I just had this idea that you’d want some sort of icebreaker, you know, so you could talk to people. I thought you’d be all like, Do you know that kid Blake? I just watched him get his ass handed to him by a four-foot-eleven blond chick.”
“She’s really four foot eleven?”
Blake shot me an incredulous look.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, straightening in my seat and reaching for my glass of water. I didn’t bring it up to my mouth to sip it, though. I just wanted something to occupy my hands. “Jeez, you really thought I’d do that to you? Talk shit about you and your family?”
Blake shrugged.
There was such defeat in the hang of his head, the slump of his shoulders. It made me furious.
“Who the fuck even does that?” I growled.
Blake must’ve thought my anger was directed at him, because he straightened suddenly and looked me dead in the eyes.
“I’m sorry, really, I am,” he told me. “I realized once I saw you talking with Lena . . . I mean, I guess I figured out that you weren’t going to do that to me. That you wouldn’t. And by then I’d already had a couple of drinks, and I was still pretty pissed about the whole thing with Chloe, and then on top of that I was mad at myself for being such an asshole to you, and then Ethan came over and, well, you know Ethan.”
I nodded. “I want to punch him when I’m sober,” I offered.
“The urge is only intensified when you’re drunk,” Blake replied. “I shouldn’t have bothered with him, though. I was more mad at myself than anything else. He was just there.”
“Wasn’t he hooking up with Alissa, though?” I asked.
Way to rub salt in the wound, I chided myself the moment the words left my mouth.
Blake shrugged and reached for his water.
“But I knew about that already,” he admitted, then tipped his glass back and took a long drink.
Carol arrived with two large, white, porcelain plates balanced in the crook of her arm. I tried to focus on smiling appreciatively and saying thank you the appropriate number of times, but my head was still reeling from Blake’s admission. He’d known Alissa and Ethan were having some sort of relationship on the side, and he didn’t seem all that upset about it. Where was the cringing in heartbroken agony, the stares into the distance as he reminisced, the clench of his fists as he imagined making contact with Ethan’s nose?
Blake seemed pretty unperturbed for a guy who was talking about his ex-girlfriend’s infidelity. In fact, he looked nothing less than thrilled as he thanked Carol and turned his attention to the massive burger sitting on the plate in front of him.
I watched him pop a couple of French fries in his mouth.
Apparently, I was gawking at him like he’d just told me he had a part-time job working for the Russian mafia, because Blake met my gaze and frowned.
“What?” he asked.
“You never hated me?” I asked again, just to be sure.
“No, never.”
He said it with such conviction, I had to believe him. And so, with the matter of Blake’s initial attitude toward me finally settled, I was able to focus my attention on more important matters. Namely, how fantastic the burger in front of me smelled.
The next few minutes were filled by the same sort of pleasant, comfortable silence we’d experienced on the car ride up to Marlin Bay. Blake and I were actually pretty good at the art of silent communication. When he lifted the top bun off his burger, I’d already grabbed the bottle of ketchup and passed it his way. When I felt a dollop of mustard perched on my bottom lip threaten to slide down my chin, Blake already had a napkin held out. I tried not to focus on how pretty his eyes were or how his smile made something in my stomach feel light and fluttery, but instead on how nice it felt to have a friend by my side.
A friend I wanted to have push me up against the nearest wall and kiss me so hard it’d make a romance novelist blush. And here I’d been doing so well at keeping my mind out of the gutter.
Twenty-five minutes later, Blake had polished off everything on his plate, garnishes included, and I’d given in to his longing gazes and offered him a handful of my fries. Carol gave us a satisfied nod when she came to collect our plates—both of them empty—and said she’d bring out the Beluga Whale Sundae in just a moment.
“I don’t think I can eat any more,” I admitted.
“Fine.” Blake shrugged. “More for me, then.”
But when the sundae did arrive, I found myself reaching for a spoon and leaning forward to calculate the perfect first bite. It was the biggest ice cream monstrosity I’d ever seen in my life. There were at least three chocolate-chip cookies wedged into the side of a mountain of chocolate and vanilla scoops, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, it looked like there was a giant, gooey brownie at the bottom of the large, glass dish the sundae was served in.
