“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.