Tighter (14 page)

The house next to the gas station was hardly more than a paint-chipped shed, though the twin pots of geraniums on the stoop added a painstaking measure of dignity. The thought preoccupied me as we got gas and drove home, the wind clean on my skin, my body warmed just right between the car’s expensive leather and the canopy of sun and trees. Wondering what it had been like for Peter to grow up with that brooding parent, in that humble house, with all this wealth, this summertime paradise all around him.

Back at Skylark, Milo finally got bored with playing the third wheel and vanished around back. Sebastian and I were left alone on the porch. “I should shove off soon—there was a post-regatta bash over at the club last night. Heard it turned pretty wild toward the early hours. So today’ll be nothing but red-wine stains and gossip about who had a few too many and who made a pass at whose wife.” Sebastian rolled his eyes but made no attempt to shove off; instead, he sank into the swing chair, rocking himself back and forth with the ball of one foot.

“I’m not sure I really get Little Bly,” I said.

“What’s to get? A town this small isn’t exactly complicated.”

“No, but there’s an intimacy to it. How everyone’s got information on everyone else. How you literally know their dirty laundry. Look, I’m not knocking it—this island is beautiful. But it’s not a place I’d want to live for keeps, with people whispering about where I was last night and who I might have been hitting on and how I stained my shirt. No offence.”

“No problem.” Sebastian leaned over and jabbed a finger lightly between my ribs. “None taken.”

I poked him back. He yelped and twisted away. “Aha!” I crowed, moving in to get him harder. “And now I know that you are ticklish.”

“Oh, game
on
, babe.” But not really; or, rather, a game that quickly turned into something entirely different as Sebastian pulled me down on his lap, and the poking and pinching ceased as his mouth found mine. “See, this is the sweet part about being in the family business,” he said softly. “ ’Cause the family understands when you tell ’em you need to leave work on account of a cute girl.”

“Is there an un-sweet part?”

“Yep.” That flash of smile.

“Which is?”

“Ducking the thousand questions that my family’ll interrogate me with after.”

“So you think I’m cute?”

Sebastian made a show of considering this question. “Submitted physical evidence indicates that,
oui, mademoiselle.
You are cute. No debate.”

It was a moment when he might have worked in another kiss, though he didn’t take it. Skylark didn’t feel like the most private atmosphere anyway, what with Connie’s presence like a creeping mold, dampening from the sidelines.

Minutes later, walking back to his bike, Sebastian opened the seat, where he flipped me a tattered paperback. “When does Isa roll home?”

I checked the cover—
Romeo and Juliet.
I glanced at my watch. “She’s not due back for another hour. But if that’s for her, she’ll be psyched.
Romeo and Juliet
’s her favorite movie, she told me.”

“Her favorite movie was Pete’s favorite play,” Sebastian explained. “Our high school put it on this past spring to honor his memory. I was Romeo, and I used Pete’s own script with his notes from junior-year English lit. It was a strange kind of access, being inside his mind. Intense. Anyway.” He shook off the chill of the thought.

“I’d have liked to see you in your cute little Romeo tights.”

“Sorry, blue jeans. We staged it like
West Side Story.
School budget restrictions.” He was talking about one thing, but his index finger was moving up and down my arm. I shivered.

“I’d have liked to see the blue-jeans version, too,” I said.

“Well, I wish I’da known you then.”

“I’ll be sure that she gets this.” I riffled the pages. Peter’s spiky handwriting leaped out at me.

Sebastian straddled the cycle seat and pulled on his old-fashioned helmet, buckling the padded strap. “Hey, I almost forgot. There’s this kick-ass band, Eight Feet Deep, and they’ve actually made a date to play at Little Bly, which pretty much never happens. Not this Saturday, but next, and it’s on Finley Beach. I’d guess ninety percent of the island’s going, or at least the music-loving percent. You want to come, too? With me, I mean?”

“Okay.” A date. With Sebastian.
Yes yes yes.

“I’ll pick you up here at eight.”

I got bold. “That’s days and days away,” I said.

He looked embarrassed. “Way too planned, Brooks. Way, way, too, too.”

“No,” I laughed. “It’s not that. It’s just, I mean—you can come by here anytime before. You know, if you want.”

“Yeah, okay. Sounds good. You’ve got the best pool.”

“Well, come for the pool, then.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, I mean, obviously, there are better incentives. Okay, you know what? I’m gonna stop talking.” Then he took the moment, and the kiss. Definitely leading-man material. He smelled perfect, like starch and sunshine. As soon as the kiss was over I wanted another, identical one. And another, and another, like a bunch of sweet grapes. Whatever else this summer had been or might become, I’d met Sebastian—and there was nobody here, or back home, whose kisses I’d craved more.

I watched him take off down the drive before I went around back, to Connie’s kitchen garden. She’d turned on the sprinklers. Thyme, basil, mint, flat parsley … I inhaled the wet warmth of fragrance. I dropped to lie down on my stomach in the grass, then propped up on my elbows to open the play. Light and leaves cast its pages in a lacy pattern.

Languid and heat-warmed, I drifted into Verona, the warring Capulets and Montagues, the dense language of another era … this no-pill day was turning out to be no problem after all … I dozed.…

“You look like an angel when you sleep.”

I twisted and sat up, too fast. Pain nailed blunt rivets up my spine.

“Sorry.” Aidan McNabb was kneeling over me, his face blocking my sun. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“How’d you get here?” I scrabbled back, creating some space between us since Aidan was, as usual, a touch too close. “I didn’t hear a car.”

“I walked. My landscape job’s right there.” As he pointed inland.

“The Grosvenor place.”

“Right.” Without my asking, he reached for my hand and pulled me up. Aidan was a lot of person, more beefy than strong; even his hand was well fed and round as a mitt.
Aidan Aidan, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.

“Was that Sibby Brooks’s putt-putt I heard a few minutes ago?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Guess he beat me to it.”

“To what?”

“Checking up on you. You seemed kinda out of it last night.” As Aidan shook his head, his gaze was unnerving; it seemed to lick me up and down like a tongue. “It’s unreal. You could be her sister.”

“So is this checking up on me, or checking me out?”

“Ha, yeah, good one.” Aidan was wearing crisp khaki work shorts and a spotless nectarine-orange polo. I could see the recent track of comb marks in Aidan’s hair; the thought of him combing and preening before he set off to find me gave me a tiny shudder. He sure didn’t appear worried about being away from work, and he didn’t look like he’d done much heavy lifting for old Mrs. Grosvenor today, either. I started walking toward the house. I didn’t exactly love being cloistered in the back garden with this guy.

“Wait up,” he said. “What’s the rush? You in a hurry to get somewhere?”

I turned. Aidan’s hazel eyes were warm, almost girlishly pretty, with long curling eyelashes. But the greedy way he kept staring at me negated anything attractive about his eyes. “I’m just waiting for Isa is all.” I glanced at the kitchen door and hoped Connie wasn’t witnessing any of this—Sebastian at lunch, Aidan in the afternoon: yeesh.

Aidan was standing too close again. “You coming out next Saturday? Finley Beach? I could pick you up.”

“Actually, I’m going with Sebastian.”

“Uh-oh. I was afraid of that.”

“What do you mean?”

A smile thinned his lips. “You should know Brooks has got a college girlfriend. And, word of advice, you might not want to get too exclusive with the local talent.”

I gave him a look. “What’s that mean?”

“Look, Sebastian’s way chill. We hang. But Jessie got wrapped up in her own local, and we all know how that ended.”

It was a harsh thing to say, but in Aidan’s face I also could read something different, more deeply buried and maybe even more tender than he was used to admitting. “You were close with Jessie,” I said. It was why he was here, of course. He was looking for her, in me. “You miss her.”

He’d gone tense, as if trying to assess what I knew. Whether I was bluffing, maybe. “Sure. She was a great girl.”

“Really close, I meant. Or maybe it was that you wanted to be close. Am I right?”

“Why would you … I …” There was an almost audible slamming up of Aidan’s defenses, but before he could speak, I caught a movement on the other side of the hedgerow.

“Hello?” I pivoted. “Who’s there?”

There wasn’t any way to get around the hedgerow. I sprinted for the driveway.

“There’s no one,” Aidan called from behind me. “I’ve got twenty-twenty. I can practically see through walls.”

I was convinced I’d detected something. One of the gardeners? Pool guys? People showed up at Skylark all day to mow, weed, water, prune and filter. “Hello?” I repeated, my ears pricked, my body poised to pursue one direction or another.

In answer, the rustle of a warm wind in the trees.

The butt of the cigarette was pinched. I leaned down and picked it off the flagstone. It was cold and stale, discarded months ago.

Then I saw it, scraped hard into the slate:
J + P
8/16

The day they died. My heart was slamming around like a racquetball against my ribs. Who’d done this? When?
As if you didn’t know. The
J
looks exactly the same, a perfect match to the third floor.

Aidan was on my heel. “Was it anyone?”

Using my foot, I quickly pushed over a couple of stray magnolia leaves to conceal the letters. “Nobody,” I told him. “False alarm. And seriously, Aidan. I think you’d better go. Now that you’ve seen me up close in the light of day, you can tell beyond all doubt that I’m not Jessie, right?”

“It wasn’t about …” His roundly handsome face looked baffled, then just plain annoyed. “Guess I can’t compete with the laundry boy,” he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and, thankfully, backing off for the first time.

“Oh, don’t worry. It was never a competition,” I told him, keeping my tone bright. “And last I checked, you were officially seeing someone else.”

“It’s what you’re doing unofficially that makes life interesting,” Aidan quipped lightly. Still, in some bizarre way, trying to charm me.

“I’m sure Emory would be fascinated to hear that,” I said. Not lightly.

His eyes narrowed. I held my ground and my gaze. After all, he’d started it. No matter who he wished I were or what he wanted me to be. But I was relieved when Aidan finally gave up on me and left.

EIGHTEEN

“Who was your last boyfriend?”

Isa and Connie had gone up to bed hours ago. But Milo and I had stayed down in the family room, watching a spy thriller now gone to commercial.

The smack of his question had me on immediate guard. “Why’re you asking?”

Milo’s face was sly. “Just, if you’re into Sebastian Brooks these days, I hope you’ve had some experience. Sibby isn’t gonna like a tease.”

In answer, my yawn. But I was a coiled spring.

Until this moment, we’d had a good night. Surprisingly. I’d let go of my paranoia about Milo, that he was testing and undermining me. I wanted to make the effort for Isa, who’d noticed the change enough to comment on it.

“Good, you’re talking to Miley again,” she’d said. “Everyone’s friends.” Though I could tell that Connie was less enthused, since any of our allegiances tended to shut her out. But it had been an easy evening, as we’d all helped Connie prepare a pasta-salad dinner, followed by fresh rhubarb cobbler, and then even indulged in a few of Isa’s disorganized, boring rounds of twenty questions.

But now Milo was at it again. Expertly jabbing at the place where I was most vulnerable. “You think a guy like Brooks only wants to hold hands with you, you’re on the wrong side of wrong.”

“Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

Lazily, he began cherry-picking objects—a plastic cup, his wallet, and one of Isa’s sandals—to juggle. I watched them spin, seemingly lost to the laws of gravity. Juggling also kept Milo from having to look me in the eye directly as he continued talking. “I’ve got private intel about that guy. Insider stuff, the kinds of things an outsider like you wouldn’t have a clue about.”

“Uh-huh, sure.” But I was listening. Waiting for it.

“Like, for example, he’s totally gone on this college girl. Some blonde. I remember last year how she’d come down—”

“You know what, Milo? You’ve got a big ole yap. And it’s gotten you in trouble in the past, right? So, before you say anything markedly stupid, think about it.”

“Hey, I’m only trying to protect you. It’s not my fault you’re working that sulk.”

“What sulk?”

“That sulk of a chick who’s been burned. Who was it—some football tool who threw you over for a cuter pair of pom-poms? Or a sensitive hipster boy? Or maybe your teacher. You can tell me. How’d he break your heart?”

“Word of advice—don’t become a private investigator, Milo. You’ll go out of business in a month.” Though once again, I was in a pure reaction state as Milo worked his uncanny ability to whittle me down to my weakest self.

“Look, I’m only warning you, Bass has seen some lovin’, no doubt—hey!” As my foot, acting almost with a mind of its own, suddenly kicked up and sideswiped him, buckling his knee, throwing him off balance. The plastic cup fell out; he tried to catch it back and couldn’t. Cursing, he dropped back on the couch, nearly on top of me.

“What’s your problem?” As I scooted out from under him, Milo jettisoned himself forward, smoothly pushing up and over my body and pinning me into the couch cushions.