Float, page 27
It was thus of the utmost importance that I dive headfirst into a book, immediately.
“Check the bookshelf in the living room,” Rachel said gently. “I’ve got some good ones.”
I was a little distracted, so I didn’t really stop to think about what Rachel’s standards might be for good fiction. Instead, I loped into the living room and squatted in front of the bookshelf, completely unprepared for the sight that greeted me.
Two words: Romance. Novels.
We’re talking a gross abundance of male torsos. Every book I pulled out had some kind of half-naked man on the cover. Doctors with stethoscopes around their necks. Professional athletes with their biceps flexed around footballs. Firemen carrying hoses in what was clearly an attempt to appeal subliminally to heterosexual women.
And not a single one of them was wearing a shirt.
Isn’t that, like, very unprofessional? was my first thought.
The second was, Oh my God, my aunt reads porn.
I tugged more books out by their spines and slammed them back into place, searching frantically for something that looked even remotely family friendly.
And then, on the bottom shelf, I found it. It was a romance novel, like all the others, with a similarly obscene stock photo of a male model on the cover. But this particular book caught my eye. And I wish I could say that I pulled it off the shelf and tucked it under my arm because I found the plot summary on the back to be well written and intriguing. I wish I could say that I recognized the author, or knew, somehow, that I was in for a good story with a fine-tuned plot, complex characters, and feminist undertones.
Nope. The shirtless pirate on the cover just looked a lot like Blake.
I darted across the living room and bounded up the stairs like a gunslinging bandit on the American frontier who’d just heisted bars of solid gold from a moving locomotive.
The pale blue of my bedroom walls looked washed out and grey in the dim light that poured through the white plantation shutters. I pulled the door closed behind me and hurried to my dresser so I could tug off Lena’s dress and slip into a pair of flannel pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I jogged back to the door and turned the lock until it clicked softly into place.
Aunt Rachel was great—and this was her book, after all, which she’d seen in the store and made the conscious decision to buy with her hard-earned money—but I really didn’t need the embarrassment of her knowing what I was reading.
I crawled into bed, tugged my duvet up over my legs, and settled in.
The cover really was a work of art.
I think the man on the cover was supposed to be a pirate. He had a rope from the ship’s rigging in one hand and a sword in the other, and behind him was a hint of crystal-blue water. I wasn’t all that concerned with the context. What really mattered was that his cream-colored shirt was unbuttoned and billowing in the wind, he had abs for days, and his dark hair and (photoshopped) blue eyes sort of resembled Blake’s, if you squinted.
The Prince of Turning Tides.
Yeah, who cares.
I flipped it open and scanned the first few pages for any grammatical errors or strikingly misogynistic sentiments. Thankfully, it passed inspection.
And ten pages later, I was no longer in my aunt’s guest room waiting for the best summer of my life to end. I was on a ship docked in a quasi-European coastal town, where nobody had to worry about graduating high school or mediating between their divorced parents. They were just getting in a lot of fistfights at the local pub and thinking about stealing shit.
And then there was the hero, Jem Blackheart, whose name was eye-roll inducing but, in my mind, looked exactly like my boyfriend, so I wasn’t complaining. Jem Blackheart needed a ship and a crew, fast. It was all very contrived. But then, in the middle of what had to be the tenth bar fight in three chapters, something plunked against my window. I assumed it was a very fat raindrop or water falling from a crack in the gutters that lined the roof.
But then, about a minute later, there was a heavy thump outside—like someone had climbed onto the roof of the wraparound porch—followed by the gentle but insistent tap of knuckles against my window. I looked up from my book. There were really only a handful of people who could’ve been knocking on my bedroom window. One lived next door.
I chucked off my duvet and stomped over to the window to flip open the shutters. Sure enough, there stood Blake Hamilton, his hair plastered to his head with rain and his hands pressed to the glass of the window.
He smiled sheepishly.
“Son of a—” I muttered, tossing my book over my shoulder and tearing open the shutters so I could grab the bottom pane of the window and lift.
I had the muscle mass of a small tropical fish. It took me a moment of grunting and grappling to get the window open. When it was, I stuck my head out, glaring as a few drops of rain smacked me in the face.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
Blake blinked at me like it was the dumbest question I could’ve asked. “Trying not to fall off your roof.”
“You know what I meant. Why are you on my roof?”
“Well, Waverly, I was just wondering if you had a minute to talk about our lord and savior—”
I grabbed a fistful of his sweatshirt (the dark-green crew neck he’d worn on our date at Bayside Burgers after my surfing career began and ended in the same afternoon) and yanked him in through the window, stepping aside so he didn’t crush me as he fell into my bedroom and landed on the hardwood floor in a heap.
“Jesus Christ,” he groaned.
I tugged the window shut behind him.
It closed with a heavy wooden thunk that made me flinch.
“You have to be quiet,” I whisper-hissed at the boy sprawled at my feet.
Blake grunted as he sat up. “It’s not like Rachel would actually kick me out of here. Right?”
He had a fair point. She was pretty laissez-faire about the whole guardian thing. It was more that I didn’t want her knowing that I had a boy in my room. I turned and stared down at Blake, who was soaked from the rain—his hair, his sweatshirt, his jeans, his canvas sneakers, everything. He was leaving a puddle on my floor.
I had a boy in my room. What an odd turn of events. I’d never had a boy over before. Not like this. Was I supposed to provide snacks and beverages? I had a half-eaten box of parmesan-flavor Goldfish on the desk and tap water from the bathroom sink, but that didn’t seem very hospitable.
“Could you please take your shoes off?” I asked.
He grinned.
“And then what?” he teased, using the toe of one shoe to scrape off the heel of the other as he blinked up at me through his unfairly thick eyelashes.
I huffed and folded my arms over my chest, quietly relieved that I’d been so pumped to read my book that I hadn’t stopped to take off my bra.
“And then put them in the corner so you don’t get mud all over the floor.”
“Not the dirty talk I was hoping for,” he mumbled.
I pressed my lips together, willing myself not to crack a smile.
Blake got to his feet and set his sneakers against the wall under the window. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, pushing his bangs back from his forehead so they stuck straight up, and took a seat on the edge of my mattress.
“Not on the bed!” I scolded. “You’re all wet.”
Blake’s smile was scandalized.
“If your aunt hears you talking like that—”
I grabbed the sleeve of his sweatshirt and tugged.
“Get off.”
“Again, you’re saying things that could really be taken out of context.”
He let me pull him to his feet and position him in the middle of the room so he wasn’t dripping onto any furniture.
“Better,” I said, more to myself than to him.
“So this is fun. I’ll just stand here,” Blake deadpanned.
I frowned and hurried across the room to my dresser.
“Let me see if I have anything . . . here we go!”
I tugged out the largest sweatpants I could find—a pair of grey Fruit of the Loom ones with holes in the pockets and a frayed elastic band. They were Rachel’s, from a distant period in time she referred to as her stress-baking phase.
Blake plucked them from my hands and held them up against his waist.
“They’ll fit you,” I insisted. “Just don’t knot the elastic.”
Blake shrugged. Then he reached down to unbutton his jeans.
“What are you doing?” I squawked, clapping my hands over my eyes.
“Well, I’m not gonna put them on over my pants.”
I jabbed a finger at the bathroom door. “Go change in there.”
“It’s gonna take me, like, four seconds. Just close your eyes.”
I huffed loudly and overdramatically so he’d know I wasn’t happy about it and buried my face in the crook of my elbow. What I should’ve done was covered my ears, too, so that I wouldn’t hear the slide of his zipper or the wet thump of his jeans hitting the floor.
There’s a boy in my room, and he’s taking off his pants.
Aunt Rachel would have a heart attack if she knew.
“Coast is clear,” Blake announced.
I sighed and dropped my arms. Now, here’s the thing about grey sweatpants: for whatever reason, when we as humankind decided to make these a thing, we accidentally stumbled upon an article of clothing that’s simultaneously the most unassuming and the most revealing thing a boy can wear. I cast my eyes toward the ceiling, my face on fire.
“They’re a little snug,” Blake commented, fidgeting with the waistband.
“Mm-hm.”
“Can I sit on your bed now?”
I was going to pass out. Blake would be too slow to catch me, and I’d hit my head on the floor and get my second concussion of the summer, and my aunt and all the nurses and doctors at the hospital would ask, How did this happen? and I’d have to point at my boyfriend’s crotch.
“Well, your sweatshirt is soaked, too, so maybe you should just sit on the—”
Blake grabbed the back of his crew neck between his shoulder blades and tugged it off over his head. His plain white T-shirt rode halfway up his chest.
“Would you quit undressing?” I snapped.
Blake offered me a grin as he dropped his pile of wet clothes on top of his shoes, then sprawled on my bed.
His foot nudged The Prince of Turning Tides off the mattress.
It tumbled to the floor.
“Whoops. Sorry, I got it—”
Blake rolled onto his stomach and stretched one arm off the side of the bed to grab the book.
In moments like this one (in which a boy who happens to resemble the shirtless pirate on the cover of the romance novel you’ve just been reading—with all the guilt-ridden secrecy of someone on a diet who’s stashing packets of Oreos under their bed—is reaching for said romance novel) you have a choice to make. And whenever I face tough decisions, I think of my nana, who used to spend hours in the rocking chair in the living room of my mom’s apartment listening to the Bible on tape.
“Waverly,” she’d say, voice all shaky and, I don’t know, old. “There’s no reason to feel lost. You’ll find your way. You just gotta ask yourself, what would JC do?”
She meant, of course, Jesus.
But as Blake reached for my book, another JC popped into my mind: John Cena.
What better way to distract someone than to body slam them?
Chapter 22
I launched myself onto the bed with all the might (and none of the grace) of a professional wrestling champion. When I came down on Blake’s back, I landed hard—which was great, because my pirate romance novel tumbled out of his hand, but also decidedly not great, because when I bounced my momentum carried me right off the side of the mattress.
I hit the floor with a thud so tremendous it shook the walls.
Blake coughed (I’d knocked the air out of both of us, it seemed) and stuck his head over the edge of the bed to peer down at me where I lay sprawled on the carpet.
“Is it just me,” he asked, “or are you superaggressive today?”
Then, in unison, we turned to regard my fallen book. And as my luck would have it, the damn thing had landed cover up.
“Wait a second—”
I lunged for it, but Blake somersaulted off the bed and beat me to it.
“—what is this?”
He leaped to his feet, examining the cover with wide eyes and a shocked smile. I popped up, hair in my face and chest heaving, and made a move to grab it from him. He just held it up out of my reach and stared at me, mouth open with amusement.
“Nothing,” I blurted. “It’s nothing.”
The corners of Blake’s lips twitched.
“Well, I had no idea I was interrupting your—uh, reading time.”
I folded my arms over my chest, trying to look stern rather than humiliated.
“The plot’s really captivating,” I said.
“Right,” he replied, nodding solemnly. “The plot.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Did you just come over to mock my taste in literature?”
“No,” Blake said. “I came over here because my stepmom dunked my phone into a pitcher of sweet tea, and to be honest, it’s been kind of a shitty afternoon. I just wanted to see your smiling face. But apparently, you just want to beat me up and then read—I don’t know, some stupid pirate romance novel.”
My shoulders fell. “Blake.”
He shouldered past me and crawled back onto my bed. “Don’t give me that look.”
I watched him settle so his back was propped upright against a blockade of pillows, his eyebrows pinched and his lips curled into a slight frown despite how utterly comfortable he looked. He turned The Prince of Turning Tides over in his hands and scrutinized the back cover, then set the book down on his lap.
“You want to talk about it?” I asked.
Blake shook his head.
“You sure?”
His chest rose and fell with a breath. “I shouldn’t have said it. That thing about her pretending to be my mom. I know it was a dick move. It just came out, like—like it wasn’t even me.”
I plopped down on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under my weight.
Blake reached out one hand and traced the plaid of my pajama pants with his fingertip.
“She just treats me like a child,” he added.
“Well, her only experience being a mom is with a toddler.”
Blake was quiet for a moment.
“I guess,” he mumbled, stubborn as ever.
“Look,” I told him. “I think Chloe’s trying her best. Neither of you has any idea how to do this—this whole stepmom, stepson thing. You’re both crap at it. You need to sit down and have a conversation about what you want from each other.”
Blake tugged his hand back from my leg to rub the heels of his palms against his eyes.
“We’ve tried,” he groaned. “Every time we talk, we just end up fighting.”
He let his head fall back against the wall, then dropped his arms to his sides.
The hurt in his eyes was more than I could bear.
So I blurted out the first thing I could think of.
“Knock, knock.”
The corner of Blake’s mouth twitched.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
It occurred to me, suddenly, that I didn’t know any knock-knock jokes.
“Give me a second.”
“Give me a second who?”
“No,” I huffed. “I mean—ugh. Sorry. I really thought something would come to me.”
Blake blinked at me for a moment. And then he absolutely lost it.
His laughter was the heaving, silent type—the kind that made your shoulders shake and your eyes well with tears. I sat there and watched him, my arms folded over my chest and my face what surely had to be the brightest shade of red ever witnessed.
“I was trying to cheer you up,” I snapped.
“I know,” Blake said, wiping his fingers under his eyes. “It worked. How the hell do you not know a single knock-knock joke? What about ‘Orange you glad I didn’t say bananas’? You had, like, hundreds of years of comedic discourse to pull from.”
I huffed and threw myself back on the mattress so my head was beside his hips and one of my legs dangled off the edge of the bed.
“All I wanted to do,” I grumbled, “was read my book in peace, so I don’t have to think about the fact that my dad is coming to Holden tomorrow.”
I’d meant to deliver the news more delicately, but there it was.
“What?” he asked, eyebrows furrowing. “I thought he wasn’t coming for another week.”
“Change of plans. His research trip ended early, so he’s trying to fly in before the storm hits.” I swallowed hard. And then, more softly, I added: “He rescheduled my flight out. I’m leaving on Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” Blake repeated. “You’re—that’s—Tuesday.”
I didn’t know what to say. And he didn’t, either, clearly, because the silence dragged on for several seconds, the pattering rain drowning out my shattering heart. At last, Blake picked up The Prince of Turning Tides and began flipping through pages.
“Where’d you leave off?” he asked, voice hoarse.
“Chapter three,” I whispered. “Bar fight with the duke. Why?”
Blake muttered something under his breath about historical accuracy, then, having identified the page on which the aforementioned bar fight began exercising some real artistic license, cleared his throat and started to read aloud.
