One Moment in Time (12 page)

“Okay,” I say. “Sounds good.”

Twenty minutes later, we're joining the crowd of people on their way down to the beach, bags of food in our hands. Well, actually not in our hands. In Abram's hands. He insisted on carrying my bag for me.

“So have you been to Florida before?” he asks as we walk.

“Um, just once when I was really little. My grandparents took me and my brother to Disney World.”

“Did you have fun?”

“All I remember is throwing up on the teacup ride and then crying.”

Abram laughs. “So, no then.” He turns and looks at me. “Well, hopefully this time your trip will be a little more memorable.”

It already is,
I want to say. But I don't. I can't. I don't know if he knew I was a virgin, and I'm not going to tell him. I don't want to freak him out, make him think that I'm going to become all psycho obsessed with him or something.

We walk all the way down the main road, past the main part of the beach, until we're almost at the very end of the street. There are beach access points all off the main road, and we end up at the very last one, following the path until we hit the rocky part of the sand.

“This is going to be tricky,” Abram says, looking over his shoulder at me. “Do you have good balance?”

“What do you mean by good?” I ask warily. My balance is not the best. I almost got a B in gym because I kept falling off the balance beam during our gymnastics unit. I had to do a whole bunch of extra credit so I could get my grade up. (I couldn't end up with a B in anything, because that would have brought my whole grade point average down,
and if I wanted to get into Stanford, I needed it to be perfect. Looking back, I should have just let myself fall off the damn beam and not worried about it.)

Abram laughs. “Just pay attention, you'll be fine.” Obviously he never saw me in Ms. Mercurio's fifth-period coed gym class.

I take a breath and keep walking. At the very end of the beach, right before the sand curves around and disappears out of sight, there are a bunch of vacation houses with stone walls in front of them. Abram jumps up onto one and disappears around the bend.

I stand there, hesitating, until he pops his head back around and looks at me.

“You coming?”

“I don't know.” I glance at the wall. I can't see what's around the corner. “Isn't it . . . I mean, isn't it trespassing?”

He cocks his head and thinks about it. “I guess. But only for a second. Think of it not like trespassing but more like cutting through someone's yard.”

“I guess that's not so bad.” But I still stay frozen in place. I don't like breaking rules.
You already broke a pretty big one; walking on someone's stone wall in the middle of the day is not the end of the world.

Abram holds his hand out, and I reach up and grab it.

He pulls me up beside him in such an unexpectedly fluid motion that I almost lose my balance.

“Whoa,” he says, steadying me with his hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I'm dizzy from his closeness. I drop his hand. “I'm fine.” I regain my footing and follow him around the wall. We have to walk single file because it's so narrow, but it gives me a chance to try and slow my heart rate down.

When we get to the end of the wall, Abram jumps off, making it look easy. He's holding our bags and everything, and he doesn't lose his footing on the sand below for even a second. I sit down on the wall, then gingerly push myself off, and even then I have to take a big step forward to keep myself from falling over.

“Nice job,” Abram says.

“Sarcastic?”

“No, not at all. I'm impressed you didn't fall or ask for help.”

I wonder why he's surprised. Does he bring girls here a lot? Is this just the last step in an oft-repeated performance? Has he let tons of other girls sleep over before taking them out to breakfast while they're wearing his sister's clothes? Maybe he doesn't even have a sister. Maybe she's completely made up, and he just buys the clothes and then puts them in a random room. I
thought
it was kind of suspicious that the clothes fit me so well—he must pick things out in a variety of sizes.

We walk farther and farther down the beach, past different houses and apartment buildings, until we get to a stretch
where there's nothing but sand and water. Right when I'm about to ask him where we're going (let's face it, he's pretty much a stranger—what if he's taking me somewhere shady?), the beach narrows and a small inlet appears.

We turn the corner into a rocky cove, and the view is breathtaking. Palm trees cast shade onto the sand, the ocean sparkles in the morning sun, and gulls dance and swoop across the sky.

Abram sits down on one of the huge rocks that line each side of the inlet.

“Worth it?” he asks as I take in the view.

“So worth it.” I sit down next to him, then kick my flip-flops off and let my toes dangle into the ocean. The water is warmer than I would have expected.

Abram rustles through the bags and hands me a Styrofoam box. I open it to reveal the most delicious-looking pair of chocolate chip pancakes I've ever seen—plate-sized and covered with a pat of butter that's just about finished melting. A small plastic container of dark maple syrup is nestled in the corner of the box, along with three strips of crispy bacon and a small fruit salad.

“Thanks,” I say as Abram opens his own box, showing an identical breakfast.

“Sure.”

“You got the same thing as me.”

“No,
you
got the same thing as
me
.”

I shake my head and take a bite of pancake. It's light, fluffy, and sweet. I close my eyes and take a moment to savor its taste and the feel of the sun warming my skin.

“Good, right?”

“So good.”

We sit there for a few seconds, not saying anything, until finally Abram wipes his mouth and looks at me seriously. “So listen,” he says. “I think . . . I mean, I need to talk to you about last night.”

“Oh. Um, okay.” The pancakes immediately turn to stone in my stomach. Why do we have to talk about what happened last night? That definitely can't be good. What can really be said about it, anyway? That it was fun? That it was nice? That he doesn't want me to think it means anything? Because those are things that don't really need to be said.

Oh god. Maybe he's going to tell me something even worse than that. Like that I'm really bad at sex. Am I horrible in bed? How does one even fix that? Can you learn to be good at sex, or is it just a natural talent?

Maybe I'll just have to become a virgin again. Then I can say I'm saving myself for marriage, and whatever guy I end up with won't have to know I don't know what I'm doing until it's too late. Of course, it won't
technically
be true, the whole saving-myself-for-marriage thing, since I've already had sex with Abram, but still. I can become one of those born-again virgins.

I saw a show about that once—these three girls were all, like, forty or something and they lived in a house together and they were all waiting to have sex until they were married. And one of them was a born-again virgin. She'd had sex with a bunch of guys when she was younger, and then she decided not to do that anymore until she got married. Is that what I should do? Have a bunch more sex before I decide to become born-again?

But isn't that kind of . . . dangerous? It sounds like a surefire way to end up with an STD. Oh my god. Does Abram have an STD? We used a condom, but still. Those things aren't one hundred percent.

Abram takes a deep breath and sets his container of pancakes down on the rocks next to him. I immediately take it as a bad sign. Why does he have to set his pancakes down? You only set your food down in the middle of eating it if you have something really serious to say.

“I just want you to know that I don't do that all the time,” he says.

“Do what?”

“Take girls back to my house.”

I look at him incredulously. “You've never taken a girl back to your house before?” Seriously? Does he really expect me to believe that? There's no way. I saw the way he was on the beach yesterday, handing out those flyers, the way girls were responding to him, looking at him like they
wanted to jump on him right there.

“No, I didn't say that.” He grins at me, but I look away.

“Look,” I say. “If this is the part where you try to make me feel better about sleeping with you, you can save it.”

“No!” He shakes his head. “Wow, I'm really screwing this up.” He takes another deep breath and then turns and looks at me. “Yes, I have hooked up with girls I've met on the beach before, or in the club. But what happened last night, that was . . . I just want you to know I don't do that all the time.” He's looking at me, his eyes serious, like he wants me to know last night meant something to him. Longing fills my body. I want to believe him so badly. But how can I? Of course he's going to say he doesn't do that all the time, if only because he knows it'll make it easier to sleep with me again. I feel like he's expecting me to say something, but I don't know what to say that won't make me sound completely crazy.

“Okay,” I say finally. “Well, thanks for telling me that.”

“You're welcome,” he says, and a brief look of disappointment crosses his face, and then there's a bit of an awkward moment between us, and I wish I could go back and say what happened last night was special to me, too, but before I can, he picks up his pancakes and starts eating.

I do the same. “So you've lived here your whole life?” I ask, in an effort to gloss over the weirdness.

“Yup,” he says. “Born and raised. Same house and everything.”

“You've lived in the same house your whole life?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. My mom would never allow that. She loves to move.”

“Really? So you've gone to a bunch of different schools?”

I shake my head. “No, we always stay in the same town. She likes the school district. But she loves to move all around, looking for the best houses. She's kind of a snob.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Sitting here with a perfect stranger, telling him my mom's a snob, seems like a breach of trust. I've never called my mom a snob before, to anyone. So to call her that to a guy I don't even know seems really unfair.

“Is that why you were so concerned about coming off as snobby last night?”

My heart does a double beat. Coming off as snobby last night? Did he think I was inhibited while we were hooking up? But then I remember telling him at the restaurant that I probably sounded like a snob since I was complaining so much about not getting into Stanford. “Yeah, maybe,” I say. I dip my toes farther into the ocean. The sun is rising higher in the sky, and I turn my face toward it, not caring that I'm not wearing any sunscreen, not caring that I might get a little bit of a burn. It feels good, and so I'm going with it. “I shouldn't put it all on my mom, though. I mean, she's set up all these expectations for me, but I'm the
one who bought into the whole thing.”

“What kind of expectations?”

“Mostly school stuff,” I say. “Stanford.”

“But you didn't get in.”

I shake my head. “No.”

“So what will you do?”

I shrug. “Go to Yale, maybe. Or Georgetown.”

Abram gapes at me. “You got into Yale and Georgetown?”

“Yeah.” Suddenly, I'm embarrassed. I don't like it when people make a big deal about where I'm going to school or how smart I am. You'd think I'd be used to it by now—it's been happening since I was in kindergarten. But it makes me uncomfortable.

“That's insane,” he says. “That's amazing.” He shakes his head. “You must be so happy.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I am.” But now I'm embarrassed for another reason—the truth is, I'm
not
happy about Yale or Georgetown. I'm just upset about Stanford. Talk about the glass being half-empty. “Actually,” I say, “that's a lie. I'm not happy about it.”

“You don't want to go to school at either of those places?”

“I wanted to go to Stanford,” I say. “At least, I thought I did.” I shake my head. “Now I'm just . . . confused.”

“It's okay to be confused,” he says simply, like he doesn't care about the fact that I didn't get into the school I wanted,
that I'm sitting here next to him complaining about having to choose between two great schools. “But if you didn't get into Stanford, it probably happened for a reason.”

“You think?”

“Yeah.” He grins. “I think everything happens for a reason.” He turns to look at me, his eyes locking on mine. “Like how you were on the beach yesterday at the exact moment I was.”

I grin. “Oh, yeah,” I say. “And what was the reason that happened?”

He grins back. “So we could be here, right now, together.” He kisses me softly on the lips.

“Talking about what a snob I am?”

“I don't think you're a snob at all.”

“Thanks,” I say. I don't know why, but it means something to hear him say that. He's just so easy to talk to, so nonjudgmental, such a good listener. I can tell he's not the type of person to say something just because he knows you want to hear it—so when he tells me he doesn't think I'm a snob, I believe him.

I'm done with my pancakes and bacon, and all that's left in my container is fruit salad. I fork up a strawberry and eat it.

Abram's food is completely gone, and he takes his fork and sticks it into my fruit salad, spearing a piece of pineapple.

“You really don't care about taking other people's food, do you?” I ask.

He grins and pops the pineapple into his mouth. “Hey, I left you the good stuff,” he says. “I took the pineapple. Everyone knows that's the worst part of a fruit salad.”