Winger (23 page)

Do not kiss her, Ryan Dean West.

Ugh.

I am such a loser. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She started back to the house and said over her shoulder in her singing voice, the voice that knew everything and made nothing matter, “Don’t even tell me that you didn’t almost do it just now, Ryan Dean.”

Damn.

I couldn’t say anything.

Annie stopped and looked back. “So there. We’re even. Admit it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I followed after her, and when I caught up beside her, I held her hand.

“I bet JP would be jealous,” I said.

“Don’t even go there, West. You said we shouldn’t talk about JP to each other.”

“Okay.”

I sighed. In the fading light, we hadn’t noticed that her mother and father had been standing just down the beach, watching us. But we didn’t let go of our hands.

Her father’s arm was around her mother’s shoulders. Doc Mom smiled and said, “You look so nice walking on the beach together.”

After dinner, Annie and I went out to the pool house to go for a swim.

Unfortunately, her parents came along. They just sat there reading in lounge chairs, but they were keeping an eye on us too, and I think they enjoyed doing it. But when we sat in the hot tub, I started playing with Annie’s feet and rubbing her legs with mine. It was the best feeling I could ever have dreamed up, and I could tell Annie liked it too, but it was really making me crazy. So I leaned my head back on the deck and closed my eyes because I wasn’t about to let her think I wanted to kiss her. Or something else. But I will say that all Annie would have had to do was whisper, “Let’s go skinny-dipping,” and those goddamned red lifeguard trunks would have been hanging from the rafters.

IT FELT SO COMFORTABLE SLEEPING
in that bed that I guess I must not have wanted to wake up. When I did, the sun was already pouring through my window and someone was knocking on my door.

“Ryan Dean. Are you still sleeping?”

It was Annie.

“I was. Until maybe two seconds ago.”

“Sorry.”

I rubbed my eyes.

“You can come in,” I said.

The door cracked open, and she cautiously peeked her head into my room. I could see she was dressed for a run.

I folded my hands on the pillow beneath my head. This was like a dream come true: Annie Altman waking me up in the morning after we practically took a bath together the night before.

“Come get some breakfast, and let’s go for our run. It’s beautiful out there.”

It’s not so bad in here, either, I thought.

“Okay.” I sat up and rubbed my chin. “I’ll be right there after I get ready. I think I need to shave.”

Annie laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“Hey. I have
one whisker
. Right here under my chin. Just one. I’m thinking of giving it a name, but I don’t know if I should let it grow out or chop its head off.” I tilted my head back and put my finger on my jaw. “See it?”

“No.”

“Well, you can’t see it from way over there. You have to get close.”

She moved to the edge of the bed.

Score.

“Look,” I said. “It’s even dark and everything.”

I kept my chin up, and Annie leaned over me.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I can see it.”

She was so close.

She said, “It looks so lonely and lost, maybe you shouldn’t shave it. And maybe you should name it ‘Ryan Dean.’ ”

I looked into her eyes.

“I better get out of here,” Annie said, straightening. Then she spun around and went to the door.

“We’re not even anymore, Annie.”

Then I heard her call “Pedro,” and that little disgusting animal came nail-tapping-panting-slobbering-excited-grunting into my room. Annie left, shutting the door just as Pedro sailed up onto my bed and began frantically mounting my foot. I scooped him up by his little sweaty armpits, his hips still pumping at the air, opened the door with my elbow, and scooted him like a shuffleboarded puck-puppy to the opposite end of the hallway.

Annie was smiling, standing there, watching me.

I looked at her and said, “So, are you going to give me time to get dressed, or is it okay if I come to breakfast in my underwear?”

She laughed, and I said, “And, no, we are not even. Ryan Dean West has officially pulled into the lead.”

“It’s not fair if you count getting Pedro to think about kissing you.”

“Good one, Annie. In that case I’m
way
ahead of you.”

I went back inside my room and got into my running gear.

DOC MOM FED US BAGELS
with butter and sweet tomato jam she’d made from her own summer garden, and we drank black coffee and orange juice. And throughout the meal, the doc parents were both trying to talk to us, but our feet were twitching and we needed to get outside.

“I’m sorry, Doc Mom,” I said. “I don’t usually sleep this late, but this place sure is a beautiful spot for resting.”

“Thank you, Ryan Dean.
Doc Mom
—I like that. Poor boy, you sleep as late as you want. You can do whatever you feel like when you’re in our house,” she said.

I fired a quick and perverted, arched-eyebrow-(it hurt my stitches)-remember-the-Jacuzzi look at Annie, who rolled her eyes.

We ran so far that morning.

I’d almost forgotten that Annie’s being on the cross country team meant that anything under ten miles was a warm-up for her. I followed Annie along trails and streets, heading south along the shore of the island, and we came to a park where a stream cut a V-shaped harbor. The place was deserted, too; I saw just one small fishing boat rocking like a lazy walrus off the shore. We stopped running, and walked through wide fields of knee-high grass that made our legs wet.

The park was the site of an old sawmill, now abandoned, but the
outer walls of the mill building still stood, square, like a fort, in the middle of the field. And you could tell from the outline of the perimeter of the open space, and how the forest butted up against it, that there had been tall trees there at one time, before the mill was operational.

“Come on,” Annie said. “I want you to see inside the building.”

I followed her.

It was kind of a surreal place. What was left of the old mill—the floor and side walls—had been entirely constructed of concrete. Huge openings in the sides and in the roof were the gutted remains of former doors and skylights. And just about every available surface inside was painted with bizarre and colorful graffiti, some of it very artistic, and a lot of it just nasty and drugged out. There was even a tree growing from a hole in the floor, all the way up through one of the open skylights, about twenty feet over our heads.

“Who did all this?” I said, turning in my place and scanning all the images.

“Just kids. They get bored living here.”

“They do?” I couldn’t believe anyone would ever get bored here.

“I remembered seeing something here one time,” Annie said. “And I wanted to see if I could find it again, if it hasn’t been painted over.”

She moved past one of the thick steel girders that supported the roof.

“Come here,” she said. “Look. I thought about you when I saw this last time I was here.”

Annie pointed down to the base of one of the walls, and there, beneath a big red word that spelled out
SOMEDAY
, in interlocking letters, was a painting of two overlapping black circles.

“You remember that?” I said.

“It was about your wish, that last time we were at Stonehenge,” Annie said. “And I thought about it a lot. I felt bad because I’d been so mean to you that week, and I realized that I was pretty unfair to you too. I mean about the ‘little boy’ stuff.”

“Oh?” I knew we were standing too close again. I was practically sweating on her, and I didn’t want her to just be playing. But she was. I backed away, but just a bit, and I looked at the circles. “So, did you get over it? The outside-the-overlap part of me, I mean?”

She looked at me. Her eyes had that relaxed, smiling look in them. She didn’t say anything. We just looked.

Then she stepped closer to me and touched my hand.

I said, “Okay. I don’t care. I lose.”

And then I kissed Annie Altman.

For, like, twenty straight minutes.

And there was no interruption from the visually abrasive Mrs. Singer; there was nothing in the entire universe except for me and Annie finally getting something over with that had been making us both crazy for so long.

I didn’t care that she’d won our little game, because for those incredible minutes, pinning her body between mine and the coolness of the painted concrete wall in that old mill, my hands holding the back of her neck, feeling the softness of her hair falling across the sweat of my arms, I finally didn’t feel like such a loser.

I was shaking.

I said, “I told you I’d do it when I wanted to. And I decided I wanted to.”

We got back to her house at lunchtime, and her father said, “Wow, you two must have gone pretty far.”

Annie smiled at me, and I know she was thinking about the perverted comment I’d normally be tempted to make at such a statement, but this was not a normal time for Ryan Dean West, and she said, “Oh, it was the perfect run, Dad.”

And I said, “Yeah. Completely perfect.”

THAT AFTERNOON, ANNIE KEPT HER
promise to fix my school pants, but her mom helped. So I stood there in the “sewing room” in my socks and underwear doing the on-off routine with my pants while hot Annie pinned and her hot mother worked the sewing machine.

You know, it’s easy to play all cool and stuff about how hot certain females are, but it’s another thing entirely to then find yourself actually standing in front of them in your underwear. I’m not really sure if I was handling the opportunity in the most advantageous manner.

I wondered if there were many guys out there who actually could.

I was so red and embarrassed, and Doc Mom tried to make small talk about how nice it was to have a boy in the house, but it was like my tongue had been bee-stung, and I couldn’t say anything because I just wanted to keep hearing both of them tell me to take my pants off again.

I am such a loser.

All I could think about was how I’d actually kissed Annie that day, and I wondered if we would ever have the guts to say anything about it, or if we’d even have the guts to make it happen again.

Then I had to stand there, waiting in my boxers while Doc Mom ironed the old hems out and made me try on every pair of slacks one
last time before she was satisfied they were perfect. All I knew was that I wished I’d grow another two inches by the next morning so we’d be required to do it over again, and maybe next go-round, I’d be all suave and debonair and stuff, and make witty comments instead of just gurgling like a goldfish on a linoleum floor.

“There,” Doc Mom said. “I think you look very handsome.”

“Thanks, Doc Mom,” I said, and unbuttoned my pants and began pulling them down.

“Uh, Ryan Dean, you can leave them on now. We’re finished,” she said.

I am
such
a loser.

“He got strip-searched at the airport, Mom,” Annie said. “I think he’s traumatized by it.”

“Really?” Doc Mom said.

Oh, yeah. She’s a psychologist. So now she needed to hear the whole story about what happened, and how poor Ryan Dean had been mentally abused. I gave Annie an ultraterrified, oh-my-God-please-don’t-tell-your-mom-about-the-Band-Aid-on-my-balls look, but it was too late for that. Annie launched into the entire story, going all the way back to Wednesday when Sean Russell Flaherty stepped on my nuts at rugby practice and I went to the doctor for it.

And Doc Mom, being the compassionate therapist that she is, laughed until she had tears in her eyes (just like Annie does) and said that was one of the funniest stories she’d ever heard.