Hale Maree (14 page)

Oh my God, what do I say? Do I tell him that
he surprised me, and melted me, and that he’s worn me down to the
point of accepting the whole idea? Do I say that I’m falling in
love with him, when I’ve never done it before and have no idea if
that’s really what this is? Do I tell him that the chemistry
churning between us has made me want to wad up my virginity and
throw it right at him? I have no idea what to say, so I play it
safe and say, “I’m really starting to like you, Oscar.”

“
You
like
me?”

“
I do.”

“
Oh Hale,” he chuckles. “I
want more than that from you. A lot more.”

I see why Oscar wanted to take a walk on the
beach now. He’s got me in the eye of a perfect storm. His warmth
prickles against my ribs, and the waves are lulling me with their
methodic lapping on the shore. Most of all, the pitch darkness
makes me feel like anything we say, or do, right now will be erased
anyway, once we’re back in the bright lights of civilization.
Nothing matters except this moment. I feel brave beside Oscar’s
shadow and, when he leans closer to me, his breath dancing on my
cheek, I don’t move away.

“
I want everything,” he
whispers. “Will you kiss me?”

In the darkness, my brave fingers reach for
him, moving into the short hair at the nape of his neck. I pull him
to me. I open my mouth against his lips and accept his tongue. His
atomic waves come crashing through me all at once, and my entire
body explodes in tingles. I let out a low moan that seems to get
lost in his throat.

Oscar lays me back in the sand. He trails
gentle kisses down my neck, pausing at my collarbone.

“
Let me,” he murmurs. I
don’t bother to answer or stop him as his hand slides beneath my
shirt, his touch like a combination of radioactive particles that
sends shocks of excitement blasting through me. I arch my back as
he takes my breast in his palm, but this time, the moan we share is
his.

His knee slides between mine. Oscar slips
his arm beneath my back, while his mouth remains warm against mine.
He lifts me off the sand, and pauses only long enough to peel away
my shirt. The moment it is off, his reassuring, kiss returns.

The dark is so dark that it feels like my
eyes are straining trying to see anything, so I just shut them and
let my skin just feel. The sand is cold on my back and I
shiver.

“
Too cold?” Oscar asks. He
sits up and pulls off his own shirt. He presses his bare skin to
mine, and all my senses mix in delicious confusion. The definition
of his muscular chest against my soft breasts, the heat of his skin
on top of me, and the cold sand beneath my back, it all tangles
into a beautiful kiss that engulfs my entire body. The begging
words are suddenly in my throat, arching my spine again, but they
dissolve as soon as his tongue warms my nipple.

I moan out loud again and Oscar stops long
enough to murmur against my skin, “That feels good, doesn’t
it?”

I open my eyes as Oscar’s lips move over my
ribs. My ear is against the sand and in the darkness, a ways off,
there is a sudden flash of light. It is a quick flash, but I see
it, like a flashlight beam that grazes through the tree line and
then dips out of sight.

“
Oscar,” I whisper, wiggling
away while I try to cover the upper half of my exposed
body.

“
What’s the matter?” He sits
up, and I scoot around to cling to his back, raising my shadow-hand
to point in the direction that I saw the light.

“
I saw a flashlight.” I
whisper. We stare into the darkness. “Shine the lantern on
it.”

“
The light won’t reach. Are
you sure it was a flashlight?” Oscar asks, when the light doesn’t
reappear. He waits a minute longer before turning to face me. “You
know, it’s okay, Hale. If we’re moving too fast, you can just tell
me, and I’ll slow down.”

“
It’s not—no, that’s not
what happened,” I say, with a hot blush warming my face. “I saw a
light, I swear I did.”

“
Maybe it was just a
shooting star,” Oscar says.

“
On the ground?” I ask. “It
wasn’t a star, and there’s nothing else out here.”

“
Exactly,” he says. “I think
you’re just nervous. It’s okay.”

“
I saw something,” I tell
him, swooping down to feel around for my shirt. I find it and slip
it on, without shaking out the sand. Oscar retrieves his too, but
doesn’t put it on.

“
Come on,” he says, taking
my hand. “Let’s get back to the house.”

#

Although we don’t see a
trace of any other flashlights, Oscar doesn’t rub it in when we
enter the wide ring of light cast by the beach house floods. We go
in the front door, after Oscar announces us through the screen. Amy
yells,
Come on in,
like her life’s been ruined. She’s sitting at the kitchen
table, when we walk in.

“
Landon’s sick,” Amy says,
pointing to the bathroom. “Diah-screama. He’s been locked in there,
howling and hanging onto the towel rack, ever since you guys
left.”

“
Serious?” Oscar says, and
shouts toward the bathroom, “Land? You okay, buddy?”

“
I’m going Sea Cucumber in
here, baby,” Landon hollers back. The toilet flushes. “Stay
out!”

“
No problem,” Oscar says.
“Hale and I can just hang out upstairs.”

I gulp. Just like I suspected, back here
under the regular lights, I feel a little more self-conscious and
reserved. How good it felt to let go with Oscar, out on the beach,
seems a little fast and loose now that Sophia’s best friend is
staring at me again.

“
Hey, don’t go,” Amy says,
before Oscar can grab my hand and drag me upstairs. “Let’s play
Scrabble or something. I don’t have anything to do if Landon’s
locked in there all night.”

“
Sure,” I say, but Oscar
flashes me a look that is pure disappointment. I slide into a chair
at the table and turn to Amy. “Were you out looking for
us?”

“
Outside?” Amy asks. “No,
why?”

“
I swore I saw a flashlight
out there. This isn’t hunting season, is it?”

“
It’s always some kind of
hunting season,” Amy says. “Good thing you didn’t get your heads
blown off.”

Oscar, who had wandered out of the room,
wanders back in with the Scrabble box. He lays it on the table and
takes off the top.

“
I think her eyes were
playing tricks on her," he says, shooting me a grin.

“
Out there?” Amy says.
“There’s no light to play tricks with.”

“
Thanks for helping,” Oscar
says. He lays out the board and tiles, as the toilet flushes
again.

“
Sophia’s been blowing up my
phone,” Amy says. “She’s saying you won’t talk to her?”

“
I tried,” Oscar says. “Help
me out, would you? Talk to her. I understand she’s upset, but like
you said, just a couple of weeks ago, she was thinking of breaking
it off too. I wouldn’t mind talking to her, if she’d listen to what
I have to say.”

“
Oh no, she doesn’t want to
hear any of that,” Amy says. She glances at me. “Don’t worry about
it. She’s just slammed that you ended everything first, and had
someone waiting in the wings. The rejection stings a little, but
I’ll straighten her out.”

“
I’d appreciate it,” Oscar
says.

We play two rounds of
Scrabble, in which I seem to get the tiles that spell nothing more
complicated than ‘cat’ and ‘sit’, but Oscar strings together ‘x’
words like
infix
and
Xis
that
I challenge and lose on. Amy tries to make every word have some
dirty root to it, spelling out suck, nip and lick, and then insists
she should get extra points for working all her words into close
proximity on the board. Landon flushes the toilet enough times that
we lose count.

“
Tomorrow,” Amy says, when I
object to another game. “Let’s go shopping. There’s that great
outdoor mall...”

“
What do you want there?”
Oscar says.

“
Stuff,” Amy says, as if she
can’t believe he’s asking.

“
Oh...stuff. Actually, I
could do with some stuff,” Oscar laughs as the toilet flushes
again. “If your old man can get off the toilet, we
could.”

“
He’ll be fine, I gave him a
bottle of Pepto.” Amy says. She leans back off her chair and shouts
toward the bathroom door, “You’re drinking the Pepto,
right?”

“
Yeah,” Landon
answers.

“
Romantic weekend, his ass,”
Amy says, giving me a wink, and blowing some hair off her forehead.
She smiles at me. “Better stack your wallet for tomorrow, Hale.
We’re going to be gone a while, because my man owes me all kinds of
stuff tomorrow.”

The bathroom door opens and Landon steps
out, looking a little pale.

“
Stuff?” he says, closing
the door behind him. “We’re going on a stuff trip?”

“
Yup, shopping. Our
favorite,” Oscar says with a dry smile. “You gonna make it there,
buddy?”

“
Hope so. Must’ve been the
fish and chips I had in town.”

“
Poor baby,” Amy croons,
jutting out her bottom lip. “A shopping trip will make it all
better.”

“
Sure will.” Landon grimaces
as Oscar grabs my hand and pulls me up out of the chair.

“
We’re going to hit the
hay,” Oscar says. I would object simply on the grounds that I don’t
want to be told what I’m going to do, but it’s not like I’ve got
options. There’s no TV, no bookcases, no nothing. Only Amy, putting
away the Scrabble board, and Landon fanning at the bathroom door
with his newspaper. The prospect of staying down here, versus going
up and fending off Oscar if I need to, seems like a
no-brainer.

We say our goodnights and skitter past the
bathroom and up the stairs. I go in first, and Oscar closes the
door behind me. I hear the snick of the lock and turn back to
him.

“
Just so you won’t feel
uncomfortable,” he says, and his expectation sends a shot of
resentment straight through me.

“
You’re making a pretty
enormous assumption,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “Just
because things got nuts at the beach doesn’t mean I’m just falling
into bed with you now.”

“
It doesn’t?” He tips his
head to the side with a grin. He steps forward, and I step back.
“You’re shy now?”

“
I lost my head,” I say. His
hands reach out and wrap around my waist.

“
I could try and help you
lose it again,” he says, but he doesn’t try to kiss me. He keeps
his gaze on mine. I can’t help it when my eyes dart away. Oscar
brushes his thumb against my shirt to bring me back.

“
Listen,” he says. “I told
you before, if it’s going too fast, you just say so. We’ve got the
rest of our lives to figure this part out. I don’t need you to rush
into it. What I need is for you to trust me.”

“
We’re going too fast,” I
blurt. “I mean, I liked being on the beach with you, but--I just
think—I don’t know.”

“
Ok, I think I understand
what you’re saying,” he says. “We’ll just keep it at the beach
level for a while, okay?”

“
Okay,” I say, but even
agreeing to ‘beach level’ feels kind of dirty. Then again, when I
think of his hands on me, an excited shiver radiates over my skin,
covering me in goose bumps. I’m not going to say I don’t want what
happened on the beach to happen again, but I’m not sure that it’s
going to feel like that again either.

I stand there, rigid, waiting for him to try
to kiss me or make a move for the edge of my shirt. But he doesn’t.
Instead, Oscar reaches into his pocket, takes out his phone, and
steps away, touching buttons to turn it back on.

“
If you want to talk to your
friend, after I check my messages...” he begins, holding the phone
to his ear. He frowns, presses his finger to the screen, listens,
and frowns again. I scoot closer to listen. My stomach turns upside
down, as he repeats the action several times. He paces across the
room, too far for me to hear anything but a nondescript murmur that
is probably actual yelling up close. He turns the phone off and
hands it to me.

“
What’s the matter?” I ask,
taking it from him.

“
Sophia,” he sighs, turning
away to remove his shirt. He draws the fabric over his head, and I
almost forget what he said the moment the weave of his back muscles
are exposed. I suck in a breath and bite my lip, so the pain will
jar Sophia’s name loose.

“
What did she say?” I ask.
His skin is such a perfect shade of brown, as if he’s been poured
from a cappuccino machine. I think of how Sher once said she had
fantasies about covering a boy she liked in whip cream. I lick my
lips at the thought of sliding my tongue over Oscar’s sweet,
cappuccino skin.

“
I don’t know. I’m not
listening to the messages. She’s taking this way too
hard.”

“
What do you
mean?”

“
The first message, she said
we needed to talk, but she sounded pretty calm. Then she left a
message that just said
call me.
Then,
Call Me NOW.
The last one, she was yelling. Hale, we were
together for three months. Not years, months. We tried making it
work, but it’s not like we were the perfect couple. We were having
problems from the start.”