Happy Place

“I THOUGHT YOU weren’t staying for the second movie,” I whisper to Cleo as we settle back into our seats. This time, Wyn and I are in the middle, and I can’t help but wonder if Sabrina nudged us into this position so we wouldn’t run out again.

Cleo shrugs. “This clearly means a lot to Sab. Plus, I don’t want her hanging it over me that I left early.”

“Pssst.” Kimmy leans forward around Cleo. She holds a plastic sandwich bag out to me.

I squint at the contents. “Are you trying to sell me drugs?”

“Of course not,” she says. “I’m trying to give you drugs.” She swings the little red gummy bears in front of Cleo’s face and tosses them into my lap.

“You are,” I say, “so discreet.”

“I don’t have to be discreet,” she says. “It’s legal here.”

Wyn leans in. “Is Kimmy selling drugs?”

“Want some?” she asks.

Sabrina shushes us, eyes glued to the screen as she shovels popcorn into her mouth.

Wyn looks at me, then back to Kimmy. “If Harriet’s in, I am.”

“How strong are they?” I whisper.

Kimmy shrugs. “Not too strong.”

“Not too strong for you or not too strong for me?” I say.

“Let’s put it this way,” she says. “You’ll have a great time, but you won’t make me call the hospital and ask them if you’re going to die. Again.”

What the hell. When in Rome.

Each of us takes one. We tap them together in a toast before throwing them back.

“Hey,” Sabrina says at full volume, “are you guys doing drugs down there?”

“We’re taking tiny weed gummies,” I say.

“Got any more?” Sabrina asks. “I haven’t gotten high in forever.”

Kimmy passes the bag down the line. Parth and Sabrina each take one. Cleo waves off the offer. “I don’t smoke anymore, really.”

“And I’m cutting back too,” Kimmy says. “So whatever we don’t finish this week, you all can fight over.”

“Okay, is it possible this is already making me hungry,” Sabrina asks.

“No,” Cleo, Wyn, and I all say in unison.

From the back of the theater, someone shushes us. We all duck down in our seats.

“Holy shit,” Kimmy hisses. “Did anyone know there was someone else back there?”

Parth sneaks a look over his shoulder. “I think he’s a ghost.”

“He’s not a ghost,” I whisper.

“How can you be sure?” Parth says.

“Because,” I say, “he’s wearing his sunglasses backward. That’s Ray. He’s a pilot.”

“Just because he’s a pilot doesn’t mean he’s not a ghost,” Kimmy says sagely.

•   •   •

THE GRAY-SHINGLED BUILDINGS on Commercial Street steadily drip, but the downpour has ended, and everyone is out for the first night of Lobster Fest. The concerts, contests, and parade of red-gowned former Lobster Ladies don’t start until Friday, but the food trucks and carnival games are open, their lights flashing not quite in time with the Billy Joel hit piping through the speakers. Kids in lobster and mermaid face paint dart through the crowd, couples in matching windbreakers dance in front of the wine-slushie stand, and glassy-eyed teenagers pass around suspicious water bottles.

“Do you smell that?” Sabrina literally skips ahead of us. “If there’s a heaven, this is what it smells like.”

Salt water and burnt sugar, garlic simmering in butter and clams frying in oil.

“I want a cup of extremely foamy beer,” she says dreamily.

“I want french fries covered in Old Bay,” Kimmy says.

Cleo’s nose wrinkles on a laugh. “I want a video camera so tomorrow you can see how high you all are.”

“I want to win at Whack-a-Lobster,” Parth says, peeling off toward the game’s flashing lights like a hypnotized magic show volunteer, and Wyn follows in a daze.

I hook an arm around Cleo’s shoulders. “Now aren’t you glad you didn’t miss out on all this?”

“It wasn’t this I wanted to miss,” Cleo says. The others have moved on to a milk-bottle toss game. She jerks her head toward the lobster beanbags and the bottles painted to look like nervous lobstermen. “What do you think the narrative is here? The lobsters fighting back?”

“Let’s hope it’s not prophetic, or this town’s the first to go,” I say.

She turns back to me. “I guess I feel like . . . this week’s already half-over, and we’ve all barely gotten to catch up. And I know how important this is to her—to everyone. Doing all these things one last time, and I get that.

“But it’s also been a long time since we’ve been together, and today just felt like kind of a bummer. Sitting through hours of movies when we could be talking.”

I grab her hand. “I’m sorry. That makes complete sense.”

She glances back, to where Sabrina and Parth are taunting each other in front of the game, and smiles a little. “I just want this week to be perfect for them.”

“Me too.” I squeeze her hand. “But hey, the night is young and so are we. What do you want to do? I’ll go on any ride or play any game. I’ll even let you monologue about mushrooms.”

She laughs and tucks her head against my shoulder. “I just want to be here with you, Har.”

The weed must be hitting me hard, because I instantly tear up a little.

It’s that happy-sad feeling, that intense homesick ache. It makes me think of my semester abroad. Not the old cobbled streets or tiny pubs overstuffed with drunk university students, but Sabrina and Cleo FaceTiming me at midnight to sing me “Happy Birthday.” The feeling of being so grateful to have something worth missing.

We walk, we talk, we sweat and frizz and eat. Funnel cakes and lobster rolls, overstuffed whoopie pies and battered-and-fried fiddlehead ferns, caramel corn and salted popcorn.

“Does anyone else feel like time’s moving really fast?” I ask when I realize it’s full dark.

Cleo and Sabrina look at each other and burst into laughter.

“You’re so high,” Sabrina says.

“Says the woman who spent like nine minutes making us stand in one place while she googled whether corn is a nut or a vegetable,” I say.

“I wanted to know!” Sabrina cries, eyes shrunken.

“A nut, babe,” Cleo says. “You thought corn was a nut.”

“Well, they look like little nuts before you pop them,” Parth says, coming to Sabrina’s defense. Cleo is now laughing so hard she’s doubled over.

Wyn is wandering toward the Ferris wheel, saucer-eyed.

“Dude, Wyn’s about to be beamed up,” Kimmy says, and I have no idea what she’s talking about, but it makes me laugh anyway.

Wyn looks over his shoulder and says, “Look at it. It’s beautiful.” Sabrina stares at him for one second, then throws her head back and cackles.

But he—and his not-quite-tiny gummy—is right.

Everything looks soft around the edges, dreamy.

Parth leads us into the Ferris wheel line. I try to pair up with Sabrina, but she sidesteps me in the queue, switching places so she’s with Parth and I’m with Wyn.

“Okay, okay,” Parth says. “Raise your hand if you’re high.”

“What if we all close our eyes first?” Kimmy says. “Just so no one’s embarrassed.”

Wyn’s head droops against my shoulder, his laughter spilling across my skin, dripping down my spine, lighting up my nerve endings as it goes. A mixed metaphor, sure, but when are you supposed to mix your metaphors if not at thirty years old, high as a satellite?

“I feel young!” I cry, which makes Sabrina cackle again, throw her arms out to her sides, and spin twice.

Parth grabs my shoulders and says urgently, “We are young, Harry. We’ll always be young. It’s a state of mind.”

“Now seems like a good time to tell you,” Cleo says, “Kim buys this shit from a neighbor who makes it at home. It’s not regulated. Hope you’re all prepared to go to the fucking moon.”

Kimmy’s eyes have essentially disappeared at this point. “Listen,” she says, “you’re gonna have a great time. Moon’s beautiful this time of year.”

Normally the idea of unregulated weed gummies might make me a tad anxious. Or, like, have a full-blown panic attack. But the way Kimmy says it and the goofy look on her face make me snort-laugh some more.

“Wait,” Wyn says, face stern and serious, “how do you make gummies at home?”

“Listen,” Kimmy says. “It’s a mystery.”

“Listen,” Sabrina says. “I love it.”

The very unimpressed twentysomething Ferris wheel attendant waves us up the metal steps to the loading platform.

Sabrina and Parth take the frontmost open bench, and Wyn steadies me as we climb in the next one, my breath still coming in giggly gasps.

“These,” he says, “are not my mother’s weed gummies.”

I chortle into his shoulder, then pull back quickly. Well, in all honesty, I doubt I’m doing anything quickly, but I do remember to remove my face from his neck region, and that’s not nothing at this point.

We lift our arms as the attendant checks our lap bar, then drop them again as he moves to the bench behind us to latch Kimmy and Cleo in.

“Remember the maritime museum?” he says.

I wipe my laugh-tears away with the back of my hand. “Remember might not be accurate. I have bits and pieces floating around inside my hippocampus like little soap bubbles.”

“It was the trip right before your last year of medical school,” he says.

“Seriously?” My hand flops onto his on the lap bar. I pull it back. “It was that long ago?”

He nods. “It was the same trip where Sabrina and Parth first hooked up.”

The memory feels like it’s being broadcast from another life. Sabrina and Parth had stayed up later than all of us, caught in a viciously competitive game of gin rummy, wherein they took turns winning. Late the next morning, they’d come down to the kitchen together, cranky but glowing. “Don’t say a single word,” Sabrina warned. “We aren’t going to speak of it.” And we’d all nodded and hid our smirks, but that night, they’d shared a room again.

“Later that day we all shared one joint,” Wyn goes on, “then went to the museum, and you watched that boat-making presentation for like thirty-five minutes without blinking.”

“He was an artist!” I cry.

“He was,” Wyn agrees. “And for like two hours, you were convinced you were going to quit medical school to make boats.”

“I’d never even been on a boat at that point,” I say.

“I don’t think that’s strictly required,” he says.

“I was probably just scared I wasn’t going to match with any residencies,” I say.

“You told me you wouldn’t even care,” he replies. “You said it would be a sign from the universe.”

My chest pinches with guilt. As if I’d cheated on my future, had an emotional affair with boat making. I’d devoted my entire adult life to this one thing, and all it took was one puff of the right joint for me to contemplate throwing it all away.

“It was fucking adorable,” he says. “I high-texted my dad to ask what we’d need to get for you to be able to make a boat in the shop.”

“Seriously?”

“He was extremely excited,” Wyn says. “He was going to ask around to see if someone could come show you how to get started.”

“You never told me that,” I say.

“Well,” he says, “you never mentioned boat making again, so I kind of figured it was the weed talking.”

“It was exceptionally talkative weed,” I muse.

“What about the gummy?” he asks. “Is it telling you we should impulse-buy some heavy machinery?”

We. Hearing him say it is like biting into a Maine blueberry, the way you taste the salt water and the cold sky and the damp earth and the sun all at once. When we lands on my tongue, I see everything:

His moonlit shoulders leaned against the Jaguar.

The moment he pulled his hoodie down over my shoulders, my hair pushing out around my face.

A kiss in the wine cellar.

Falling asleep crammed in one twin bed, his sweat still clinging to me.

The night he asked me to marry him.

“Harriet?” he says. “What do you think? Should we invest in your boat-making dream or not?”

The morning we found out Hank was gone.

The deep, painful silence in our San Francisco apartment.

The night he broke my heart.

I shake myself. “What have we got to lose except for thousands of dollars we don’t have and limbs we’re fairly accustomed to and—” I scrabble for his arm as the Ferris wheel lurches to life, sweeping forward along the loading dock and then shooting us skyward.

As the ground drops away, Wyn’s face lights in alternating hues of neon, colors pulsing in a nonsensical rhythm.

For a few seconds, I’m hypnotized.

Okay, realistically, I have no concept of how long I’m hypnotized. The weed is still making time stretchy as taffy. Some colors paint his face for eons, and others flash so fast I hardly have time to register them.

The bitter salty breeze runs through his hair as we lift higher into the night, the smell of burnt sugar still clinging to his clothes.

“You’re staring, Harriet,” he says, the corner of his mouth twitching.

“Am I?” I say. “Or are you just high?”

When he laughs, I become intensely aware of my fingers, still clutching his forearm, and of the smooth, dry texture of his skin. Up close, whenever he’s been out in the sun, there are millions of tiny dark freckles, small as sand grains, scattered over his skin. I want to touch all of them. In my current state, that could take days.

Wedged together like this, I feel his breath moving in and out of his lungs, his heartbeat tapping out messages in Morse code.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks.

“Like what?” I say, a bit thickly.

He tucks his chin. “Like you want to eat me.”

“Because,” I say, “I want to eat you.”

He touches his thumb against the middle of my chin, the air taking on an electrical charge. “Is that the weed talking,” he teases gently, “or is it that I’ve still got powdered sugar on my mouth?”

For someone who’s spent a lifetime living inside her own mind, I become nothing but a body alarmingly fast, all buzzing nerve endings and tingling skin.

“This is confusing,” I whisper.

“I don’t feel confused,” he says.

“You must not be as high as me.”

His smile unfurls from one corner of his mouth, never quite making it to the other. “I know I’m not as high as you. You look like you ate a trash bag full of catnip.”

“I can feel my blood,” I say. “And these colors have tastes.”

“You’re not wrong,” he says.

“What do they taste like to you?” I ask.

He closes his eyes, his nose tipping up, the breeze ruffling his T-shirt. When he opens his eyes, his pupils have overtaken his irises. “Red gummy.”

I snort. “How astute.”

His eyes flash, lightning crackling in the pre-tornado green of them. “Okay, fine,” he says. “You want the truth?”

“About what these lights taste like?” I say. “Dying for it.”

His hand slides off the lap bar, the tips of his fingers dragging up the outside of my thigh all the way to my hip, his eyes watching their progress. “They taste like this fabric.”

I’m trying my best not to shiver, not to nuzzle into him, because the light pressure of his fingers against the satin of my sundress does in fact have a taste right now, and it’s delicious.

“Soft,” he says. The backs of his fingernails drag back down my thigh, sliding past the hem of my dress to the bare skin above my knee. My head falls back of its own volition. “Delicate. So fucking light it dissolves on your tongue.”

His eyes meet mine. His nails drag back up, a little heavier. For several seconds, or minutes, or hours, we hold on to each other’s gazes while his hand makes slow passes, up, down, up a little higher.

“Can I see more pictures?” he says.

I startle from my lust haze. “What?”

“Of your pottery,” he says.

“It’s not good,” I say.

“I don’t care,” he says. “Can I see it?”

Our gazes hold again. I’m really struggling to move at a normal pace. Every time I look at him, everything else stops, like we’re floating outside time and space.

I fumble my phone out and flip through my pictures.

Aside from a handful of targeted ads for murder mystery TV shows I wanted to remember to watch, there isn’t much to get through before I make it to shots of my last few projects. A mug, two different vases, another bowl that doesn’t really look butt-like at all. Or hardly, anyway.

I pass him my phone. He studies it, his tongue tracing over his bottom lip as he slowly flips through the pictures. We’ve done at least one full rotation on the Ferris wheel by the time he reaches the last one and starts flipping back the other way, pausing on each, zooming in to see the details of the glazes.

“This one.” He’s staring at the smaller of the vases, streaked with shades of green, blue, purple, and brown, a horizon of earthy colors.

My heart squeezes. “That one’s called Hank.”

He looks up, face open, with the expression that used to make me think of quicksand, a face that could pull you in and never let you go.

“You named it?” he says. “After my dad?”

“Isn’t that humiliating?” I try to pull my phone away.

He doesn’t let go. “Why would it be humiliating?”

“Because I’m not Michelangelo,” I say. “My vases don’t need names.”

He holds the phone up. “This one needs a fucking name, and that name is Hank.” I reach for it again, but he yanks it out of reach, goes back to staring at the screen, creases rising from the insides of his brows. Quietly, he says, “It looks like him.”

“You don’t have to say that, Wyn,” I reply. “It’s a vase, by an amateur.”

“It looks like Montana,” he says. “The colors are exactly right.”

“Or maybe you’re just really high,” I say.

“I am definitely really high,” he says. “But I’m also right.”

Our eyes snag, warmth gathering at my core. I hold my hand out. He sets my phone in it.

“Did you show this to my mom?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I was thinking about giving it to her.”

“Let me buy it,” he says.

I laugh. “What? Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not worth anything,” I say.

“It is to me,” he says.

“Then you can pay for shipping,” I say. “It will be from both of us.”

“Okay. I’ll pay for shipping.” After a pause, he says, “How’d you get into it?”

“Ceramics?”

He nods.

I let out a breath. “It was about a week after we broke up. I was walking home from a shift, and I was a couple blocks from ou—my apartment.” I correct myself at the last second, but my face flames anyway.

I hadn’t wanted to go home that day. I’d scrubbed in on another rough surgery. The patient pulled through, but I’d felt sick ever since.

All I wanted was to be wrapped up in Wyn’s arms, and I knew if I walked into our apartment, there’d be shadows of him everywhere but no trace of the real thing.

I swallow the lump burgeoning in my throat. “And I saw this shop. And it reminded me of being here, because, you know . . .”

“You can’t go four feet without hitting a ceramic nautilus shell vase?” he guesses.

“Exactly,” I say. “And I’ve never been super interested in all those pottery shops while we’re here, you know? But when I saw this place, I felt like . . . like it was a little piece of home. Or, you know, whatever the cottage is for us.”

“So you just went in?” he asks.

“I just went in.”

A smile teases at the edges of his mouth. “That’s not like you.”

“I know,” I say. “But I was having a bad day. And there was an ice cream shop next door, so I got a scoop there, and by the time I was leaving, people were showing up at the studio for a beginners’ class, and the alternative was to go home and watch more Murder, She Wrote, so I just went in.”

Softly, he says, “And you liked it.”

“I really liked it,” I admit.

“You’re good at it,” he says.

“Not really,” I say. “But that’s the thing. Nothing’s riding on it. If I mess it up, it doesn’t matter. I can start over, and honestly, I don’t even mind. Because when I’m working on it, I feel good. I’m not muscling through to see how it turns out. I like doing it. I don’t have to stay hyperfocused. I don’t have to do anything but stick my hands in some mud and be. I zone out and let my mind wander.”

He must see something in my expression, because he says, “What do you think about?”

My cheeks tingle. “I don’t know. Places, mostly.”

“Which places?”

I look down to the festival stretched out beneath us, watching a little boy and girl zigzag through the crowd with cotton candy bouquets twice as big as their heads. “Anywhere I’ve been happy,” I say.

There’s a long pause. “Montana?”

My throat twists. I nod.

“That bowl that looked like a butt—I was thinking about the water here in Knott’s Harbor,” I say. “About the waves, and how weird it is that they don’t really exist. Like the water is just the water, but the tide moves through them and the wind moves over them and they change shape, but they’re always just water.”

“So I guess,” he says, “some things change and stay the same.”

I know we’re high. I know he hasn’t actually said anything profound, but when his pale coyote eyes lift to mine, my heart seems to flip over, everything inside me turning a full one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s like I’ve been upside down all this time, and the motion has finally righted me.

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks.

They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places.

You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

I shift on the bench. His fingertips graze my thigh. His focus homes in on the contact.

His lips knit together as he traces the fold of fabric, and while he’s not exactly touching me, the nerves along my hip still whir to life, heat, fizz.

“You have to feel this, Harriet,” he says dreamily.

I break into giggles. “That gummy was not tiny.”

“On the plus side,” he says, “it’s making this fabric feel amazing.”

“You mean taste amazing,” I say.

“Like red gummy,” he agrees, dropping his mouth toward my shoulder, running his parted lips over the strap. My breath catches. I set my hands against the lap bar, where I can be reasonably sure they won’t spontaneously climb up the inside of Wyn’s shirt.

“Is this what silk is?” he asks, lifting his face, eyes sparkling earnestly beneath the flashing purple lights.

“Satin,” I tell him. “A poor man’s silk.”

“A poor but lucky man’s silk,” Wyn says. “It feels like . . . damp skin. Here.” He takes my hand from the lap bar and brings it to my own thigh, watching for my reaction as he lets our hands drift over the hem until the very ends of our fingers are on skin. “See?”

I nod, breathless.

His eyes darken, pure black now except the outermost edge of silvery green.

“Do you remember what you told me,” I say, “about your brain?”

His hand pauses.

“You said it felt like a Ferris wheel,” I say. “Like all your thoughts were constantly circling, and you’d reach out for one, but it was hard to stay on it for too long because they kept spinning.”

The lines of his face soften. His fingers curl, the backs of his nails pressing into my skin. “Except with you. You’re like gravity.”

I couldn’t have pulled myself away from him then if he’d burst into flames.

“Everything keeps spinning,” he says in a low, hoarse voice. “But my mind’s always got one hand on you.”

The night air warms between us until it crackles. We’re about to break the rule. We’re about to kiss with no one looking, and I don’t care. Or I do care, in that I need it. I need his gravity. I need his mouth and hips to pin me in place, to anchor me in this moment, to slow time even further, like he always has, until this becomes my real life, and everything else—the shoebox apartment, the aching back and knees, the sweat pooling under my gown and mask, the nights staring up at a ceiling that has nothing to say to me—is the memory.

“HAR!” someone shouts above us. The moment snaps.

We both look up.

“CATCH!”

I don’t see which of them shouts it. All I see is Kimmy and Cleo—now above us as we’re descending the back of the Ferris wheel—leaned out over their lap bar, laughing hysterically, and then something flamingo pink fluttering, flapping, twirling down toward us.

It lands squarely in my lap.

“Hold on to that, would you?” Kimmy shouts. Cleo doubles over, her shoulders twitching with laughter.

Wyn takes hold of the pink thing and lifts it, spreading it out so the hot-pink bra cups jut from his chest.

Above us, Cleo and Kimmy are shrieking now.

“This,” Wyn says, “is exactly why I hate getting clothes as presents. Nothing ever fits.”

“At least it’s your color,” I say.

He tuts, laughing, and shakes his head. “Thanks, Kim.”

Kimmy hurls herself forward, squawking something through her guffaws, but Cleo yanks her back against the bench.

“Excuse me, Wyn.” I pull the tiny bra out of his hands, holding it in front of me. “In which universe does this fit on Kimmy’s boobs?”

He gapes, looks up at Cleo and Kimmy, who are still falling all over each other in fits of laughter, then back at me. “Damn,” he says. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

“Me neither,” I say. “I always assumed Cleo was die-hard Free the Nipple.”

“What’s going on up there?” Parth calls from below us.

They’re starting to level out on the loading platform. “We have to act fast,” Wyn says, expecting me to read his mind.

I do. “You’ve got better aim than me.”

“I’m not even going to politely argue,” he says, and takes the bra.

We lean forward, and as Sabrina and Parth are about to dock, Wyn tosses the bra straight onto Sabrina’s head.

“WHAT THE—” she screams, her words cut short when Parth pulls the bra off her head and holds it aloft for examination in the neon light, right as they’re drawing to a stop beside the long-suffering Ferris wheel attendant.

Even from here, his grumble sounds like “millennials,” which makes Wyn and me burst into laughter so forceful that tears are literally sliding off my chin.

“It happened!” I squeal. “We’ve replaced our parents as the drunk-mom-on-vacation generation.”

“Excuse you,” he says, “I think you mean the high-dad-on-vacation generation.”

Below us, Sabrina climbs out of her seat, head held high and dignified. She hands the bra over to the attendant and, loudly and clearly enough for all of us and everyone in line to hear, says, “Do you have a lost and found? Someone seems to have dropped this on the ride.”

“Are we about to get kicked out of Lobster Fest?” I ask Wyn.

His head falls back with another wave of laughter. “It was bound to happen eventually.”

“End of an era,” I say.

“Nah.” His eyes slice sideways. “Another beginning.”

•   •   •

WE’RE STILL GIGGLY when we spill out of the Rover in front of the cottage, Sabrina leaning heavily on me, Kimmy leaning even more heavily on Wyn behind us. We’re almost to the front steps when our fearless (braless) designated driver takes off toward the side of the house.

“Where are you going?” Parth throws his arms out. “You have the keys!”

Sabrina and I exchange a look, then take off after her, around the dark side of the house. Cleo throws the gate to the patio open, kicking her shoes off as she runs through, unbuttoning her pants.

Sabrina thumps my arm to get me to run faster, and we round the bend in time to see Cleo, now pantsless, leap into the pool. The others come around the bend, and Sabrina spins toward Parth, uses her full weight to shove him in.

Without hesitation, Kimmy cannonballs in after him, one shoe still on. Sabrina whirls on me. I shriek and swat her hands away. “We’re too old!” I cry. “Don’t make me do this!”

I get hold of her wrists. Her yelp turns into laughter as we struggle at the water’s edge.

I’m swept off my feet from behind. An arm tight around my rib cage, a clovey smell, as I’m pitched off-balance.

We fall together, tangled, breathless. The water folds around us, and I open my eyes beneath the surface, turning in his arms. Everything is glitter, shimmering bits of silver blue at first, and then there he is, paled by the pool’s strange light. His hair waves out, dancing around his face, and bubbles slip from his nose and the corners of his mouth.

He catches my hands and draws me closer. I don’t even think about holding myself back. I’d like to blame the weed, but I can’t. It’s him and me.

My thighs skate over his, nesting loose against his hips. He brings my hands to the back of his neck, and we sink like that, descending from the glowing legs treading water. He pulls me flush to him, his heart pumping against my collarbone.

And then we’ve reached the bottom of the pool. We can’t go any deeper. He pushes off against the tile, sending us back to the surface.

Cold air, laughter, screeching from the edge of the pool, where Kimmy and Cleo have now teamed up to get Sabrina into the water.

And I don’t feel young. I feel alive. Jolted awake. My skin, muscles, organs, bones, all somehow more concrete here. Wyn’s face and eyelashes glisten, his shirt plastered to him. His fingers are gentle on my jaw, his thumb tracing over my bottom lip as his eyes watch it drop open, as if to breathe him into me. Our lungs expand, pushing into each other, and his gaze lifts to mine, and here, with everyone to see it, where the rule I set won’t be broken—where I can act like it’s an act—I tip my mouth up under his.