get all the way into the water right away with them instead of going slowly, like Emory.”
I slow, glance at him, fall in step again. “How do you know this?” A side of Cass I’ve never seen.
“When I’m interested, I get focused.” He kicks a rock away from the road, hands in pockets, not looking at me.
I’m trying to decode his mood, which seems to keep shifting like the wind coming off the water, both of which now have a sort of electricity. There’s a storm coming. I can feel it.
When we get to the beach, Cass reaches into his pocket and pulls out a loop of keys, unlocking the tiny boathouse, which smells both damp and warm, flecks of dust swirling in the air.
The dark green kayak is buried under several others, so there’s a lot of shifting around and rearranging and not very much conversation for a bit.
He hands me a double-handed paddle after we drag the boat down the rocky sand. “Want to steer?”
“I’ve never even been in a kayak before,” I tell him.
“Bet you still want to steer,” Cass says, grinning slightly as he trails his paddle into the water and heads into the inlet near Sandy Claw.
We snake around turn after turn in the salt marsh. I keep sticking my paddle in too far, flipping it out too fast, so sprays of water flip up, soaking Cass. The first few times he pretends not to notice, but by the fourth, he turns around, eyebrow lifted.
“Accident,” I say hastily.
“Maybe we should just use one paddle. You’re potentially more dangerous with this than the hedge clippers. Let’s switch places.”
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Holding on to the side, as the kayak rocks precariously in the shallow water, I wedge myself around him. He settles back, then lowers his hand, gesturing me to sit. I sink down. There’s water in the bottom of the boat and it seeps into my bikini bottom. Cass takes my paddle out and rests it on the kayak floor, lifts one of my hands, then another, situating my palms on the two-sided paddle, under his. “See, you can still have control. I know how you are about that.” His voice is so close to my ear that his breath lifts the stray strands of hair that curl there. “Dig deep on one side, let the other drift on this turn up here.”
I do as he tells me, and the kayak slowly turns, snagging briefly in the sea grass, then moving on.
We’re only a few bends in the inlet from the beach when the clouds finally break and fat raindrops begin scattering around us, plopping, into the water, splattering onto my shoulder. At first just a few and then the sky opens up and it’s a deluge, as though someone is pouring a giant version of one of Emory’s buckets onto the kayak. We both start paddling like crazy, but I’m trying to pull the paddle back and Cass is moving it forward, which stalls us till he again shifts his hand on mine, tightening his grip, says, “Like this,” dipping the paddle in the right direction, so we’re in sync at last.
Finally, we reach the beach and get out. Cass hauls and I shove and soon the kayak is at the door. He shouts, but I can’t hear him above the rain. He hooks his toes under the kayak, flipping it upside down so it won’t fill with water, then kicks the door open and pulls me inside the boathouse, yanking the door shut.
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the barrage of rain pounding on the roof like drumsticks.
I could have pointed out that I knew it was going to rain.
Which I totally knew.
And ignored.
We’re both drenched. His hair’s plastered to his forehead and cool rivulets of water are snaking down my back. There are no lights in the boathouse; only two tiny windows and a dirty fly-specked skylight. Outside, all you can see is a gray wall of torrential water and, suddenly, a flicker of lightning.
“God’s flicking the light switch,” I say.
Cass shoves his hair out of his eyes and squints, assessing my craziness level. Which of course means I keep talking. “Grandpa Ben used to say that, when Nic and I were little and scared of storms and you know, hurricanes and stuff. Lightning was God flipping the switch and thunder was God bowling and . . .”
He’s now cocking his head, smiling at me bemusedly, as though I really am speaking a foreign language.
I trail off.
“Um,” I say. “Anyway. What are you thinking?”
“That I’ve gotten you wet and cold again.” Cass lifts the bottom of his T-shirt, squeezing water out of the hem, then pulls it entirely off. Sort of like detonating a weapon in the tiny, warm, confined space.
I shiver, glancing around the boathouse for something to dry us.
There are a few old tarpaulins piled in one corner, but they look mildewy and rough and smell musty and are probably full of earwigs and brown recluse spiders. There’s another flicker of lightning with a loud crack to follow, like a giant is splitting a 292
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huge stick over his knee. The rain seems to pause for an instant as though gathering strength, then an angry grumble of thunder rolls out.
“What d’you know?” Cass says, bending down and pulling something out from behind the Hoblitzells’ dinghy, named Miss Behavin’. He tosses it toward me. A pink towel, which lands neatly at my feet.
I pick it up. “You can’t get warm if you put the dry clothes on over wet ones,” I quote, wondering if he’ll remember say-ing that.
He grins at me. “As a wise man once said.”
“Man?”
“You’re questioning man? I was betting you’d go for wise.”
“Which would be more insulting?”
He picks up another towel and sets his fingers and thumb at the back of my neck, urging my head down, then starts rub-bing the towel through my hair to dry it.
He’s just drying my hair. With a towel. This should not feel so . . . amazing.
“Insulting each other, Gwen? Is that what we’re doing here?” His voice is low, so close to my ear.
I don’t know what we’re doing here.
Or maybe I do. He stops, dumps the towel to the ground, says gruffly, “I think you’re good.”
“Yes, totally.” I back up, pull my soaking T-shirt up over my bikini, drop it to the floor with a squelch. Cass freezes. The atmosphere inside the boathouse suddenly feels more electri-cally charged than the storm outside.
We’re only a few feet away from each other.
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“You’ve got, um—” He makes this gesture with both thumbs under his eyes, which I can’t interpret.
Another flash of lightning. A really loud rumble of thunder.
For a second, since he’s not moving, I wonder if I should act terrified of storms just for an excuse to throw myself at him, then I can’t believe what a lame thought that is.
He reaches out his thumb, very slowly, and brushes it under one of my eyes. I close them both, and the thumb smoothes under the other one. Both of us take a deep breath in, as though we’re about to speak, but words fail me. It’s Cass who talks.
“Mascara . . . uh . . . here.” Another graze of his thumb.
I step back, rub impatiently under both eyes with the pink towel. “Makeup. Ugh, I’m terrible with it. I mean, I can do it, but just the basics. Forget the eyelash curler, which is like some sort of medieval torture device anyway and . . . Maybe I should just give up completely on trying to be a girl.”
“That would be a shame. Here, you’re getting it all over. Let me.”
“I should at least have gotten . . . the . . . water . . . proof kind.” Now he has set his fingers on either side of my face, tangling in my wet hair, with the pads of his thumbs still pressing over my cheekbones.
“Water would help . . . clean this up,” he says, his voice as quiet as mine. He nods toward the boathouse door. “I could go out and—”
Another crack of lightning, followed almost instantly by thunder. The storm is nearly directly overhead.
“Get struck by lightning? Uh, no,” I say. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I know what I want to do with them, but . . .
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