lot, through town, following Cass’s mumbled directions. He reached out, flexing his fingers, then drumming them against the dashboard.
I tried to drive resolutely but couldn’t resist a few stolen glances.
Always when he was doing the exact same thing.
It was strange. Like a dance. One I’d never done.
“First left up here,” he said. I turned onto one of those quiet, tree-lined streets with wide, paved sidewalks and gener-ously spaced houses with their rolling lawns. So different from the scrubby twisted pine bushes, crushed clamshell driveways, and shoulder-to-shoulder ranch homes of my side of Seashell.
“You turn down this road.” He indicated a right onto a drive with a sign that said “Shore Road.”
I couldn’t help but gasp when I saw the house. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen . . . Modern, but somehow old-fashioned, built along the long strong lines of a sailing ship, a schooner, a clipper ship—something majestic poised to conquer the sea.
One whole side of the house was bowed out with a narrow rail around the second story, high and proud, jutting like the prow of a boat.
“Wow.”
Cass tilted his head at me. “My uncle designed it. That’s what my parents were building—that summer.”
“It’s amazing. This was where you went? When you left us?”
Then I winced because . . . because the Somerses were on the island for one season. It’s not like they abandoned us. Me. But Cass didn’t blink.
“Yeah. My brothers still rag on me because I mostly got 52
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to grow up here and they were already off to college. Down there”—he pointed down the low hill, grass turning to sea grass, tumbling softly down to the ocean—“there’s a good stretch of beach. Just ours. It’s beautiful. I’d like to show it to you. But not now. We’d both freeze.”
A mansion. No one could call this anything but that. Not a house. An estate. It reminded me a bit of Mark Twain’s house, where we went on a school field trip once. But that was built to look like a riverboat, and this could only be a sailboat. The yard had all these big trees, a wrought-iron bench under a willow, a fountain even. It looked like something from Perfect Life magazine.
A mansion and a private beach.
I did not belong here.
“I’m glad you didn’t drown,” I said, at the exact moment he said, “Thanks for wading in after me.”
“It was nothing,” I added, just as he said, “Gwen—”
We both stopped. His eyes were the darkest, purest blue. The ocean in winter.
“Look . . . My parents are going away tomorrow for a week.
I thought I’d live the high school cliché and have a party. Will you come?” He’d somehow moved closer again, smelling like the best of the coast: salt water, fresh air.
I leaned toward him without meaning to, without a clear thought in my head, and he bent forward and kissed me. It was such a good, sweet kiss—a simple press of the lips at first until I opened, wanting more, and he was ready. No jamming tongues or bumping teeth. Just one smooth delicious glide and then a rhythm that made my insides jangle and had me tilting 53
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against him, gasping for breath, then diving back for more. We kissed for a long time—a long, long time—and he let that be it, only brushing his hands into my hair and gently grazing my neck with his thumbs.
“Will you come?” he repeated.
I looked back at his house, that huge house. I’d never heard of Cass having a party. Who would be there? Spence Channing.
The people Cass hung out with at school. Jimmy Pieretti, Trevor Sharpe, Thorpe Minot. The Hill guys—the boys who lived on Hayden Hill, the richest part of Stony Bay. No one I knew well.
A . . . a party.
And Cass.
I swallowed. “What time?”
He reached into the pocket of his parka and pulled out a blue Sharpie. Uncapping it with his teeth, he took my hand, his thumb dancing lightly over the inside of my wrist. He turned my palm closer. “How far, again, is it from your house to your dad’s restaurant?”
“Three miles,” I said faintly, feeling all the hairs on my arm stand on end.
He made an x on the base of my wrist, traced up to the line of my index finger, made another x, and then slid his hand down my palm, making three x’s below my thumb. “An approximation,” he said. Then wrote “Gwen’s” by the first x, “Castle’s” by the next. And “Shore Road” by the three x’s. Then “Eight o’clock Saturday ni—”
“Ha!” my cousin laughs. He grabs my wrist and pulls me under, before hauling me above the water again.
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