Most Likely to Succeed (15 page)

I rolled my eyes to show him that he didn’t fool me. What I meant was, it was okay with me if he manipulated me, as long as he knew I knew he was doing it. I wiggled one shoe off the end of my toes, then the other, and stepped into the water with him. The warm tide raced around my ankles.

He walked forward into the ocean, tugging me after him. I thought we were just going for a wade. But he kept going until the warm water reached the middle of my calves and crept toward my knees.

“Sawyer,” I called, digging my heels into the sand and pulling against his grip. “My skirt’s getting wet.”

He turned to me with an evil grin. “Take your skirt off for once.”

Oh,
as if he thought I was innocent, and Aidan and I had never done it? “I’ve taken my skirt off before,” I said archly, before I gained complete understanding of how stupid that sounded.

“That’s what I heard about you,” he said.

I gaped at him. What had he heard? I was furious with Aidan now, and sorry I’d gone as far as I had with him. But I’d never suspected he’d given a third party the play-by-play—especially a third party who wouldn’t keep that information in confidence, with the description eventually getting back to Sawyer.

“I’m joking,” Sawyer said. “Take your skirt off anyway.”

I might have if he’d given me any assurance that he wasn’t setting me up again. I put my hands on my hips. “I thought you were afraid to get too close to me, and we were mad at each other. You wanted to talk it out.”

“I
do
want to talk it out, but knowing us, we’d be mad at each other again in an hour. Maybe it would help if you took your skirt off.”

“If you take your shorts off.”

I made a mental note never to use Sawyer taking his clothes off as a countermeasure. Instantly he was wading closer to shore, where he could take off his shorts without getting them soaked. He unbuckled his belt and shoved his shorts down his hips, exposing his plaid boxers. Most girls would stare at him, straining to gauge the shape and size of him in the darkness. I got stuck on the fact that he was wearing a belt. He often wore a belt, in fact. It showed whenever his shirt rode up or he tucked it in. Knowing his personality, I would have thought he’d dress like a slob, but his casual clothes were neatly pressed. I felt like I was having another epiphany about the puzzle that was Sawyer, but really I was standing in the ocean, avoiding thinking about what was about to happen.

He snapped me out of it when he held out his hand for my skirt. “Hop to it, Gordon. We ain’t getting any younger.”

I waded after him, shimmied my skirt down my hips, and stepped out of it. Shining drops of ocean dashed dark stains across the fabric.

He bundled it with his shorts and tossed both to the
shore, which was sandy and wet. So much for keeping my skirt dry.

He turned back to me. He looked me up and down, and his lips parted. “The bottom of your shirt’s going to get wet. Why don’t you take that off too, while we’re at it.”

My knee-jerk reaction was to be offended that he was using such a thin excuse to get my clothes off. But I loved that he wanted this. And I did feel a little silly standing in the ocean in my shirt and panties. A bra and panties were more like a bikini, at least.

Before I reached for my first button, I said, “You first.”

Gamely he pulled his shirt off over his head, exposing his flat stomach, then his strong pecs, and finally his arms made of muscle. He balled up his shirt and nodded, prompting me.

I fumbled with the first button of my blouse, fingers shaking. Sawyer had seen me with less on than this. When I got undressed, I’d still be exposing exactly as much in my bra and panties as I did in a bikini. There was no reason for me to feel so nervous as I moved my fingers down to the next button, except for the way Sawyer watched me, jaw hard, eyes serious. The breeze off the ocean toyed with the top sections of his hair, bright blond in the moonlight, and moved one lock back and forth across his forehead. He didn’t brush it away.

He stared at my fingers until they reached the last button. As I pulled the shirt backward off my shoulders, his eyes rose to my face. Still looking at me, he held out his hand for my shirt. He wrapped his own shirt around it and tossed the bundle toward the shore, not looking to see where it went. Neither did I.

“Now we’re seaworthy,” he said, reaching out again, this time for my hand. Facing me, he backed deeper into the water, pulling me with him. I began to wonder if this was one of his practical jokes.

He stopped backing up but kept pulling me toward him until our bodies pressed against each other in the water. His lips found my neck, making me gasp and sending chills rushing across my skin. I felt my nipples tighten, straining against the lace of my bra.

“This is why we needed to come out here,” he said in my ear, “where the guys couldn’t hear or see us. I wanted to tell you how bad I am for you. I’m going to corrupt you. I wanted you to understand that and feel it for yourself.” His hand slipped inside the front of my panties. His fingers found me and started circling.

“Ah.” This was something Aidan had never done to me. In thirty seconds with Sawyer, I already understood why girls went crazy over him. Weak with pleasure, I collapsed into
his shoulder, only caring about the position of my hips so he could still reach me.

With his other hand he lifted my chin from his chest and kissed me. The tentative boy from the van was gone. His mouth was hard on mine, his tongue exploring me. He slid his hand into my hair and tilted my head exactly where he wanted me.

Every minute this went on I got closer to climax—my first in front of anyone. I wasn’t embarrassed. I had stopped thinking. My hands found his boxers on their own, and it was the shocking hardness of him, and the strange possessiveness I felt when I put my fingers around him, that finally sent me over the edge.

He kissed me harder, holding me up against him, knowing exactly what he was doing to me.

When it was over, I leaned against him, catching my breath, and finally pulled away to stand upright. Bare-chested, with the black ocean and the blue night behind him, his golden hair whipping in the wind, he looked like a god. A sarcastic one, smiling smugly at his accomplishment.

I took a deep, shaky breath. “Was that your way of getting rid of me once and for all? Because you have totally fucked that up.”

“Good.” He kissed my cheek. “It was just my one last,
futile attempt to save us both.” He kissed my neck. “I’m glad it didn’t work.” He kissed above my breast, his mouth lingering as if this was going to be his next thorough exploration.

A bright light shone in our eyes from the beach. “Police,” said a man’s voice through a megaphone. “Come out of the water.”

12

“STAY BEHIND ME UNTIL WE
know whether they’re really cops,” Sawyer ordered me, leading me by the hand toward the beach.

He didn’t have to convince me. I’d told myself before that wearing a bra and panties in the ocean was no worse than wearing a bikini. But now that men in addition to Sawyer were going to see me, I wondered how opaque the wet lace of my undies really was.

When we reached shore, the light was still too bright to discern much about the figures who’d found us, but they were big. Sawyer said, “Get your light out of my eyes, and show me your badges.” His words were forceful, but his tone was reasonable enough that the light shifted to the police badges on their shirts. The names appliqued above
their badges were, I swear to God, Sterns and Sorrow.

“Ma’am,” Sorrow said to me, “will you step over here?”

“Don’t make her do that.” Sawyer sounded annoyed now, which I didn’t think was a good idea when talking to policemen. “We’re obviously not hiding anything.”

Sterns said, “We got a call because you’re on park land.”

“We’re not,” Sawyer said. “We’re on Hiram Moreau’s land, and we have permission to be here.”

“You’re on park land,” Sterns insisted. “The line’s right there.” He shone the flashlight toward the palm trees. I had no idea exactly what he was pointing at or how he knew this. Maybe we’d walked far enough that we’d crossed the property line, but we shouldn’t be arrested for trespassing when it had been an innocent mistake.

Well, maybe not an innocent one, considering what we’d been up to—but a genuine one.

“We were on Mr. Moreau’s land,” I insisted. “He’s my best friend’s grandfather. We were with—” I was about to name the other boys, hoping the police would recognize the name of one of them. Surely they’d heard of Brody. Articles about his football performances had filled the local paper lately.

“With her car,” Sawyer interrupted me loudly. “You can check, and Kaye’s car will be right up there.”

I was still standing behind him, so I couldn’t see his face. But he squeezed my hand. He was telling me he didn’t want me to mention the guys. Some of them had been drinking underage, and I’d almost gotten them in trouble.

“Let her put her clothes on,” Sawyer said.

The policemen allowed this. The catch was, they continued to grill Sawyer while I tripped along the beach in my undies in search of our clothing. I was able to shake the sand off my skirt and wiggle into it without much trouble, storing Sawyer’s shorts under my elbow. But our shirts had hit the water. The tide had rolled them in and out and gotten them thoroughly soaked. I washed the sand out of them as best I could, squeezed out the salt water, and buttoned my shirt with my back to the policemen, wondering how in God’s name I was going to explain this to my mother. I slipped on my sandals and snagged Sawyer’s flip-flops. This was not how romantic trysts were supposed to end.

As I walked back to them, Sorrow was asking Sawyer, “Is she your girlfriend?”

“Of
course
she’s my girlfriend. Look at her.” Sawyer glanced over his shoulder at me and winked. I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to reassure me because things were going to be okay, or comfort me because things were very, very bad.

“Do your parents know you’re here?” Sterns asked. We both shook our heads. “Then give me your phone numbers. I’m going to let them know.”

While he wrote on a pad, I recited Dad’s number, not my mother’s, because I wasn’t insane. Sawyer said, “I can give you my dad’s number, but he won’t answer because he’s drunk, and if you did reach him, he sure as hell wouldn’t care I was making out with my girlfriend at the beach
legally
. But you’re welcome to call Hiram Moreau, whose property
you’re
trespassing on right now.”

That was a lot of bravado for him to throw around while wearing wet underwear.

“Let’s step up here to the patrol car while we figure this out.” Sterns led the way over to the park while Sorrow fell in line behind us as if we were already jailbirds being marched from one cell to another.

Sterns put Sawyer in the back of the waiting patrol car. Sorrow led me to the opposite side and asked as I sat down, “What’s the make and model of your car? Do you know the license plate number?” I gave him all that information. He closed the door with a frighteningly permanent-sounding
thunk
, shutting out the roar of the ocean.

“I hope the guys saw the flashlight and left,” Sawyer told me quickly. “Quinn had a joint. I’m about to give them a
little more time before the cop walks over there to look at your car, okay? Don’t freak out.”

“Okay,” I breathed. I’d thought I couldn’t be more horrified at what was happening. I was wrong.

“Hey!” Sawyer shouted at the cops. My ears rang.

Sorrow had taken two steps toward Harper’s granddad’s land. Sterns was on the phone. Both of them turned to look.

Sawyer held up his soaked shirt, which they’d thrown into the car with him. He wrung it out. Seawater streamed onto the floor of the car.

The policemen spoke to each other. Sterns put his other hand up to his ear to have a conversation with Dad. Sorrow stormed to Sawyer’s side of the car. “Come here, bro,” he said, yanking Sawyer out.

The door slammed. Sawyer’s body slammed against it. His bare chest pressed against the window. Sorrow moved up and down behind him, searching him, I supposed. Then Sorrow opened the door again and threw Sawyer in, handcuffed.

Sawyer was wearing that blank expression he got when he was beyond fury. He stared out the window as Sorrow trekked off in search of my car.

Shivering in my wet shirt, I said, “I hope Quinn appreciates what you did.”

“It was my fault he was there in the first place,” Sawyer muttered. “I asked him to come.”

It wasn’t Sawyer’s fault Quinn was smoking pot, but I didn’t argue that point. I said, “I’m afraid it’s my fault we got caught in the first place.”

Sawyer’s face softened as he turned to me. “Not everything that goes wrong can be your fault, Kaye.”

“Why would anybody call the cops on us?” I asked. “You had permission from Harper’s granddad to be here. The park is closed, so nobody could have seen us from there. But Tia and Chelsea ran into Aidan at the movie. Chelsea mentioned you were here. Aidan had no idea
I
would be here. He just wanted to get
you
in trouble.”

Sterns opened my door. I asked, “Officer, did you hear who called you down here? Sawyer has permission to be here, and the park is closed. I think my ex-boyfriend just wanted to get revenge on Sawyer. If you take us to jail, you’ll be contributing to prison overcrowding, all for nothing.”

Sterns shrugged. “All I know is, you are in serious trouble, young lady. I was talking to your dad at first, but then your mom got on the phone.” He shut the door.

“Okay,” Sawyer said soothingly, but I was already gasping for breath, trying not to cry and failing miserably. “Kaye,” he called over my sobs. He was the one with his
hands behind his back in cuffs, trying to make me feel better, and I was the one who was losing it because I’d gotten him into this.

“On a happier note,” he said, “I think I’ve solved the problem of where to hold the homecoming dance.”

Now I was crying and laughing at the same time, and hiccupping as a result. Wiping the tears from my cheeks, I said, “That is of absolutely no use to me in jail.”

“You could hold the dance here,” Sawyer said anyway. “People could leave their cars along the road and walk down here, and we could have it on the beach. Or maybe the city would let us leave our cars over there in the lot at the public park if we told them ahead of time. We could even hold it on the city’s part of the beach. Just have everybody kick their shoes off, string some lights through the trees—”

“We can’t have it off campus,” I said. “Remember? Ms. Chen already shut that idea down. Too much liability.”

“Then what if we made the football field look like the beach?” he suggested. “String some lights across the field, bring in some palms in pots, turn off the floodlights overhead—”

“I thought of that, too,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t think of making it look like the beach, but I already suggested having the dance in the stadium. The school doesn’t want us
standing on the grass and killing it. Grass is expensive and more important than our happiness.” I sniffled.

“Then we hold it in the parking lot right outside the stadium,” he said. “People don’t even have to get back in their cars and drive after the game. It’s on school property. There’s plenty of room. We just cordon off a section—say, where the away team’s buses will park, because they’ll be gone by dance time—and string lights through the palm trees that are already there. It’s not supposed to rain. No hurricanes in sight. If the school says no to that, they just don’t want us to have a dance, and they should ’fess up.”

I gasped. “Sawyer, that is a great idea.”

“Some acknowledgment, please, that I came up with it while handcuffed in the back of a cop car, wrongly accused, in my boxers.”

I patted his bare thigh, which was more solid than I’d imagined. “I’ll give you all the acknowledgment you can handle if we ever get out of here.”

He grinned mischievously at me.

“Our night together was so romantic, up to a point,” I said. “We could recreate it for the dance.”

“Would we ask the police to come and handcuff people?”

“Only if they’re into that sort of kink. We could use it as a fund-raiser for the prom.”

“Always thinking, aren’t you, Gordon?” He glanced out the windshield. “Here they come. Now we’re not trying to create a diversion. We only want to get out of trouble, so be humble and say nothing but ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘You’re absolutely right.’ ”

Two minutes later we were hurrying back across the city beach and onto Harper’s granddad’s beach, hand in hand. Sterns had told my mother that I would drive straight home. I don’t know what my mother had said to Sterns, but he’d seemed afraid for me.

“Listen,” Sawyer said as we walked. “Whatever your parents tell you, you didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t let them make you feel like you did. They can punish you all they want, but don’t let them convince you that you’re a bad person, because you’re not.”

I nodded, hardly hearing him. I had a much more serious concern. “They’re never going to let me see you again,” I breathed.

“We’ll see each other at school,” he said gently. “And after we graduate in May, what they say won’t matter.”

I wasn’t sure this was true. I’d planned to live with my parents until I left for Columbia in August. Even after that, conceivably they could continue to jerk me around by withholding my college tuition if I didn’t do what they said.

Sawyer’s words made me feel better anyway—because he considered how to get around unfair rules, which was totally foreign to my way of thinking. And because he assumed we’d still be together in May, no matter what.

At least, he talked the talk.

When he reached the passenger side of my car, he dropped his flip-flops and slapped his wet clothes across the roof. “Give me a sec to put my clothes on,” he said. “I’ve moved from Harper’s house into the B and B.”

“Oh, have you?”

“Yeah, and I don’t want to frighten the elderly.”

While he got dressed, I fished in my purse and checked my phone. “I have a message from DeMarcus, and one from Brody,” I said as he got into the car. “They must be worried about us. One from Noah, one from Tia—”

“Don’t think about that right now,” Sawyer said.

“—two from Quinn, four from Harper, six from Will.” None from Aidan. Either he hadn’t heard he might have gotten me detained by the cops along with Sawyer, or he didn’t care.

“I’ll call them,” Sawyer said. “You’ve got to get home. I’ll say the cops accused us of trespassing and let us go. I’ll leave out all the near-naked parts. Nobody at school will ever hear about that unless the cops blab.”

“Or my parents,” I muttered.

I started the engine and cruised under the palm trees. It was a very short drive to the B and B, so I didn’t waste any time before telling him what was on mind. “If we’re going to date, Sawyer—”

“If? Wait, what?”

“—I want to make sure that we’re exclusive,” I said. “That’s the only way I want to do this.”

He was very slowly massaging his wrists where the cop had cuffed him, but he was looking at me. He glared at me so angrily across the car that my heart felt like it was failing.

“What?”
he finally exclaimed again. “How long did you date Aidan?”

“Three years,” I said.

“And in that three years, did you
ever
have a conversation with him in which you made sure you were both on the same page about dating exclusively?”

“No,” I said meekly.

“Then why are you asking me?” he demanded.

“Sawyer!” I said, exasperated. “You have a reputation for getting around.”

“When I wasn’t dating
you
! Don’t you think I would automatically stop going out with other girls if you and I were together? I said something like this to you before Aidan
even broke up with you, because you said something like this to
me
. I mean, if you think so little of me, what do you want to date me for?”

I remembered, with a slow burn across my cheeks, the note I’d lost in Harper’s house, in which Tia and I had discussed exactly this. I wondered again whether he’d found it.

I drove up to the gate and punched in the combination. But when it was open, I didn’t pull out onto the road right away. I turned to Sawyer.

He had the same idea. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re both stressed out right now. I know that’s not what you meant, and I didn’t mean to—”

I leaned over and kissed him.

His arms wrapped around me and pulled me closer. He deepened the kiss, making it very, very sexy for a moment. Then he backed off and placed a series of light, sweet kisses on my lips. “You have to go,” he whispered before kissing me again.

“I know.”

His lips lingered on mine. “But I want to stay here forever with you”—kiss—“and get gawked at by passing motorists.” A car zoomed by on the road.