I slid my hand down the outside of his bathing suit to cup him.
He did pause, and gasp. He didn’t stop. His kisses grew more focused, more intense. His tongue forced its way into my mouth and swept inside me. He kissed my ear, licked my neck, and made his way down toward my breast, gasping again every time I stroked him.
Now I wondered where this was going to end. I hadn’t wanted to do it without a condom at fourteen. Eighteen was not much of an improvement. My mind said, Stop him. My body said, Let him. I had never felt so good, not flying, not ever.
Molly giggled somewhere in the darkness. Grayson froze on top of me.
He gave me a deep kiss, then whispered against my lips, “I’m going in the water. If they see me like this, they’ll know exactly what we’ve been doing.”
“And that’s not okay?”
He set his forehead against mine. “No.”
I pushed his shoulders away so I could look him in the eye. “You still want me to go out with Alec?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes!”
“Tell me why,” I insisted.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “You’ll give it away, even if you don’t mean to. I can’t let you do that. It’s a matter of life and death.”
I shoved him angrily. “Come on, Grayson.”
He rubbed his nose against mine, melting me all over again. “Would I kid you about a matter of life and death?” He pushed himself off me, his long body taking a while to make it up to his full height. The moonlight outlined the blond edges of his hair and made him seem to glow as he grabbed up his surfboard and splashed into the darkness.
“No,” I murmured, “you wouldn’t.”
In the end, my anger at him was wasted. For four days I’d tried in vain to get him to tell me why we were playing Alec. Less than twenty-four hours later, I found out.
sixteen
For most of the next day, Grayson acted like he’d forgotten what had happened between us the night before. During my final break in the afternoon, Molly was putting together a banner for him out in the field. He paused on his way out of the hangar, behind Alec’s back, and shot me one lingering, hungry look that sent vibrations through my body.
After he left, I sat in a lawn chair. Alec lay on the dusty sofa. He was grilling me about how a girl who’d lived in a beach town for three years could possibly not know how to swim. He and Molly had both asked me a hundred questions about it the night before. I was on the verge of cutting my hand across my throat to shut him up. But as Molly had pointed out, Alec wasn’t like Grayson, and I doubted he would understand that blunt message like Grayson did.
Suddenly, underneath the lingering shivers I felt from Grayson’s gaze on me, under the hum of the fan blowing warm air around the hangar, something low and sinister shook the building. Alec felt it too. We frowned at each other.
“Someone’s coming,” I said.
“We have to get Molly,” he exclaimed, jumping up.
We both ran for the wide-open doorway of the hangar. Way across the field, Molly was already dashing for the airport office. Luckily the banner she’d been about to hook up was still rolled in a heavy ball on the grass. If it had been stretched out, we would have been chasing it halfway to town on the breeze that the approaching helicopter was about to stir up. Grayson left his plane parked in front of the hangar and stalked in the direction of the airport office. In the sky, still too far away to be making that much noise, hung a Chinook.
Alec and I walked over to the airport office. Grayson stared up at the helicopter with his hands on his hips like he thought the Army had some nerve. Molly leaned over and shouted in my ear, “What is that?”
“Chinook.” I stuck up both my pointer fingers and twirled them in opposite directions to represent the fascinating twin helicopter blades. Then I realized she had no idea what that meant, and I put my hands down. “Probably from the Army base.”
The Chinook sailed low over the trees and set down on the runway, its gentle movements belying the head-splitting noise it was making. We all had our hands over our ears now. Everyone at the airport lined the unforested side of the tarmac—more people than I would have imagined, like ants escaping from a mound kicked by a malicious little boy. The pilots among us watched because it was a Chinook and we longed to fly one. The secretaries and janitors from the airport-based businesses watched because the Chinook shook the ground and charged the atmosphere. Nobody could clean a floor or type a report, much less answer the phone, with that going on.
Camouflage-clad figures began to climb down from the helicopter. Two descended from the front door, three from another. The five of them met in the middle, yelled to each other with their headphones on, and walked toward us. One of them was a girl.
I wondered whether anybody was left in charge of the helicopter.
The lieutenant leading the group was a tall blond. I couldn’t tell for sure since he was wearing mirrored shades, but I thought he was boyishly handsome, like Alec. He came straight for me because, dressed in a bikini top, I was obviously in charge of this airport. He grinned at me. “Got any vending machines?” he yelled, even louder than necessary. He was deaf from sitting in the helicopter with his headphones on.
I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.
“I’ll show you!” Alec said, leaping in front of them and opening the glass door, ushering them inside the building. He followed them in, calling, “You guys from the Army base?”
Grayson stared at the Chinook, hands still on his hips, both fists white. He looked like he was about to explode.
“That’s funny,” I yelled at him conversationally. “They land their Chinook at our airport and act like they’re driving on the interstate and pulled over at a rest sto—”
“You want to go with them too?” he bit at me.
“What?” I asked, realizing even as I uttered this word that Grayson was jealous. Of an Army lieutenant who had talked to me on his way to the snack machine. And then, even though I’d figured it out, I asked, “What do you mean?”
Because I wanted to hear him say it. If he was really jealous, he wanted me for himself.
He opened his mouth. Inclined his head toward the door where the lieutenant had disappeared. Cut his eyes back at me. And then stalked through the door after them.
All the while, the chopper blades cut through the air and the gigantic motors throbbed. When it had approached, the Chinook had been loud. When it had landed, it had been absorbing. Now the noise became overwhelming but inescapable, a full-body vibration that shook me awake and insisted that something was about to happen.