CHAPTER 5

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I did get to stay on beach patrol, as Doc had promised. But I wasn’t allowed on the beach. The next day I landed pool duty, and since I wasn’t allowed to get in and get my head wet, I had to spend all day in the baby zone. A definite downgrade from the beach, but at least it got me outside. Alysha was getting to spend the day at the hospital with Shay, and I hoped to be able to go visit that night.

The town pool was a Pinhold institution. It was where we’d spent our summers until the age of ten, when we started in the Junior Guard. The rhythm of the day there was always the same; a forty-five minute free swim followed by fifteen minutes of adult swim every hour, except for noon, when the adults got the pool for sixty whole minutes. Adult swim meant intense games of wall ball or kickball on the playground throughout the day. It had been years since I’d really spent all day here like this, and I felt pleased that none of it had really changed.

Celeste came for the noon swim. She took one look at my face and, instead of swimming, dragged me to the beach for my lunch break. “Greasy food, gorgeous waves, and a little girl-talk to put things in perspective,” she said. She sighed and looked at me like she could see right through me. “No, Cami, I haven’t asked Blake about you,” she said unprompted, shaking her head at me in a way that made her seem way older than her twenty-one years. “And, I don’t need to. If you want him, then he’s definitely gonna want you, too. That’s how it works. You just don’t know it yet.”

At that moment, a seagull swept down and snagged a french fry right out of Celeste’s hand, flying back to the railing and chomping it slowly with a satisfied look. Celeste and I laughed so hard that the little guy looked embarrassed. Of course, I had to feed him another fry to make up for laughing at him. This time, he took it from my hand and flew with it under the boardwalk to enjoy it—away from our prying eyes. As the seagull cawed its thanks, I thought of another time a seagull ate my French fry, three years and forever ago, and sighed.

“Kaleb always said that he felt about as wanted on this Island as a seagull at a picnic,” I said, letting my thoughts drift. His presence was still everywhere even though he’d managed to steer clear of Pinhold for years.

“Wow, you’re like the first person to ever mention his name without major prying on my part,” commented Celeste. “It seems like everything I know about that kid I’ve found out online.” I nodded, knowing she was right. But my lunch break was limited, and I didn’t want to spend it talking about the wrong brother. “Okay, fine,” she said, rolling her eyes when I went silent. “No Kaleb questions for you, either. But, don’t worry about Blake. He definitely likes you. Haven’t your parents all been planning your marriage since birth?” She laughed, but I wasn’t laughing with her. “Seriously, that picture of you guys naked and kissing on your grandmother’s porch swing? It would make the perfect wedding invitation.”

  “Yeah, sure—if that picture was of me with Blake.”

When Celeste and I got back to the pool, minutes later, Blake had taken over one of the lap lanes for practice. I got to watch each muscle of his eight-pack flex each time he pistoned his hips above the surface, which—thankfully—he did over and over again. As a swimmer, I understood that the upward thrust was necessary to build muscle memory. As his maybe-because-we-hadn’t-talked-about-it girlfriend, the only thing I understood was that watching him pulse his body over and over again made me think very R-rated thoughts that had no place at the baby pool!

Celeste came over, after she finished her own laps, teasing me so that my face turned red. “All those women are judging your boy,” she said, pointing to a row of moms who looked about ready to hold up numbers like Olympic judges. It was almost obnoxious, though I understood the captivation.

“They should just stop it, already. It doesn’t get more perfect-10 than that,” I said, sighing and then shaking my head. I had watched Blake swim millions of strokes and it had never turned me on at all.

“Nah,” she grinned wickedly. “He loses a point for wearing clothes.”

I shushed her, because he was heading my way, but he surprised both of us by jumping back in the pool. I watched as he swam over to the ladder and helped the elderly Mr. Pollack up the steps and into his wheel chair. That earned him a kiss from Mrs. Pollack, who usually did the job herself, with a strength that was at odds with her age.

“All right,” Celeste grumbled, “if he’s gonna be that sweet, he can have the extra point.”

I nodded, glad that she agreed. Not that it mattered what she thought about Blake. I was much more worried about what he thought about me.

I spent the rest of the day watching the pool in silence, grateful that the whistle could speak the most basic commands for me. Blake had asked me to wait to take my dinner break until after he finished hauling in beach chairs for The Guard. I had just blown the “all clear” whistle after the 6:00pm adult swim when his deep laugh pulled me out of the fugue state, brought on by a whole day of baby pool non-activity.

“Heard you got the new record for the kiddie fly! Way to go, Maisy!” Blake said. I shifted my eyes to the entrance just in time to see Blake catch the six-year-old in the air and spin her around. He was great with little kids—just like Billy had been with us.

“I taught her everything I know,” purred Maisy's redheaded mom Stella, slowly peeling herself off of a lounge chair like a not-so-stealth cougar. Even with five years of practice, I could never pull off that move—which was why I found it so disturbing that it caught Blake’s attention.

He put Maisy down gently and stuttered a quick “Hi” to the fake-boobed female who stalked over to him. Watching him struggle to look at anything besides her boobs, would have been hilarious if I wasn’t instantly so jealous. It felt icky.

The ten minutes until my break seemed like an incredibly long opportunity for Stella to sink in her claws. I didn’t want to gift her with that much time to cause drama in my life. The baby pool was empty, so I jumped in with a loud splash and started playing pool-toy basketball with the boats and buckets floating around. As diversions went, it did the trick.

Blake saw me and grabbed the opportunity to break away to help. I tried not to read too much into how quickly he covered the ground over to where I was. He was rushing away from Stella, but I’d take it!

He put down the plastic bag he was carrying and picked up the bucket that held the toys, moving it all over, so I had to work a just little harder to sink the shots. Though she was six—and technically too big for the baby pool—Maisy followed him over and got in on the game. When the clean up was done too soon for her, she jumped out, grabbed the bucket, and dumped all thirty toys back into the pool. I groaned as Blake laughed.

“Maisy, you just gave Cami here a lesson in Karma.”

“Caramel?” the little girl asked, hopefully.

“No, not caramel. Karma. It’s when the things you do come back to you,” Blake said patiently, tossing a fully-dimpled grin right at me. “We used to do the exact same thing to my brother and your mommy at least five times a day when they were lifeguards at the pool.”

I remembered and laughed with Blake.

“Got it,” she shrugged, looking around his back. “Do you have any candy? You could pay me for my help?” Blake smiled, admitting defeat. He reached in his bag, passing Maisy a chocolate-covered pretzel.

“Go ask your mommy if you can eat this,” he said, sending the little girl on her way.

“And you,” he said, pointing to me, ”ready for your dinner? I brought a picnic for the beach.”

Once we got onto the sand, Blake pulled a red-and-white checked blanket out of his pack to lay out by the water. He came prepared—which made me squeal silently to myself.

“Is there a chocolate-covered pretzel in there for me too?” I asked, digging in the bag. We were on "my" rock, a little corner of the jetty where I used to come to fish with my dad. It had little tally marks where we had scratched a line for each fish we had caught over the years.

It wasn’t the best fishing spot—we could catch more right outside our house—so there were only fourteen lines. But my dad liked it best because, he swore you could hear the currents meet. I could never quite hear what he meant, but I liked to watch the waters meet, and swirl, and separate. And, I could be alone in the very center of the action. Since only people fishing were allowed on the rocks, I kept an old pole hidden in a crevice. I would put it up beside me, securing a little solitude even on the busiest beach days.

I went to bite into the pretzel, but Blake grabbed it out of my hand. “Protein first,” he said, touching my hand for a bit longer than necessary, replacing the pretzel with dark chocolate almond bark.

 “Thanks for the sugar,” I said. “But, what makes it dinner?”

Blake’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. “How could you not remember Barf Night?”

Oh. My. God. Blake had replicated the menu from the single-most-humiliating-night-of-my-life!

We were thirteen and Kaleb had just left, and our parents had agreed to let us go to the boardwalk by ourselves for the first time. It was a short ferry ride away on the mainland, which was a big deal at the time. But then, Mica had gotten the flu, and I was crushed, thinking we wouldn’t get to go at all. Blake convinced my dad that he and I could go it alone. He promised to protect me and hold my hand the entire time. So, that’s what we did.

“Could you please forget that night ever happened?” I begged. Blake moved over, nudging me with his shoulder. I jumped when his arm touched mine.

“Cami, I had more fun that night than I’d ever had on the boardwalk—barf and all.”

Thinking back on that night, I remembered that I had felt so full of energy from the rush of freedom and the zip from the rides. We used half of the money we’d brought on wristbands that allowed us unlimited rides, pooling all of our other funds for a candy-store bonanza that would have never been permitted had our parents been around. The huge sugar surge overloaded my system and did me in—resulting in the incredibly disgusting ending. We had to call Billy to come pick us up, so we didn’t have to ride the boat home with my barf covering us both.

“It wasn’t all bad,” I admitted. “You were pretty cool about the whole thing. You even kept holding my hand after I puked on you.”

Blake laughed. “Billy teased the hell out of me for that,” he said. “For years . . .” Funny—Billy had teased me about everything else under the sun, as long as I’d known him, but he’d never mentioned that night to me. Confused, I looked up to see a great big smile on Blake’s face. “He’s the one who called it ‘Barf Night’. Even his college roommate knows the story: ‘How Blake got puked on the first time he managed to go anywhere alone with a girl,’” he said, mocking himself. “I know you’re bummed about missing the Surf Carnival and Shay, so I figured this might cheer you up,” he said, smiling at me. “I’ve always remembered it as a really great night.”

 Lit by the sun shimmering on the waves, I finally heard the currents smack together. Time stopped for just a second to tell me that what was happening with me and Blake was absolutely meant to be. My breath caught again as I looked up at him. I leaned in as his eyes widened and his lips parted.

Every bone in my body, every wave on the rocks, and every bird in the sky screamed for me to kiss him. His eyes closed, and he moved toward me, too. His hand moved from my shoulder and up my neck, right under my hair.

It tickled and I lost my nerve. As the giggles rose and my face turned red, I buried my face in his shirt. The moment was lost and the ocean agreed, picking that exact minute to smack us both in the face with a big wave. We laughed and the moment passed in easy, goofy fun instead of the embarrassed interruption I’d expected. With the giggles breaking the ice, it became all too easy to scootch closer to him. When I closed my eyes and raised my lips, he took the hint and kissed me.

Each time our lips met, my brain blocked everything else out. I could still hear the sounds of the ocean, but only because the waves beat to the rhythm of the truth pounding in my ears that told me over and over again that this felt so absolutely, incredibly, inexplicably right.

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