Blake came back ten minutes later. He walked to the cooler, got a few beers, handed one to Josh, who thanked him, and gave me one. Then he sat behind me, his legs on either side, and wrapped his arms around my stomach again. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in my ear.
“Me, too,” I told him.
Then Josh spoke up. “Remember that time when we came here, and I tried to grind along the bleachers?”
Blake laughed. “The first time we came here and smoked?”
Josh nodded. “That was so fucking bad. I was tripping so hard.”
Blake laughed harder.
“What happened?” I asked
“Well, C-Lo,” Josh started. He pointed his beer at Blake, and Blake returned the gesture. “We were what? Fourteen?”
“Thirteen, I think,” Blake answered. “Fuck, we were such cocky little punks.”
That made me laugh.
Josh continued, “We smoked, like, two puffs of weed, and we were gone—”
“Josh thought he was Superman,” Blake cut in.
Josh rolled his eyes. “Okay, kid-that-wore-a-cape-to-school-for-a-month-in-third-grade.”
“What?” I laughed. I tilted my head to look up at Blake, but he was already watching me.
His eyes danced with amusement when he said, “I also believed I could shoot lasers out of my eyes.”
“Oh yeah!” Josh yelped. “Squinty!”
Blake threw back his head and laughed.
“The entire school called you Squinty for months. I fucking forgot about Squinty.”
“Tell your story, asshole.” He took a swig of his beer and winked down at me.
Josh told his story—about when he’d tried to grind on the edge of bleachers but failed. He’d fallen off the side of the railing, but his pants—which they admitted had hung way too low, almost at their knees, but they’d thought was so fucking cool at the time—had gotten caught on a bar at the end. It had made him flip over the edge of the rail, but he’d caught himself by throwing his arms out over his head.
“He was stuck there, upside down, with his pants down to his ankles,” Blake said through his laughter.
Apparently, he’d been there for so long his face had started to turn red. But the best part was that somehow Josh had managed to knock out two of his teeth. Probably from the board, but really, they had no idea. So there’d been Josh, hanging upside down, off the edge of the bleachers, for who knows how long, with his pants down—and Blake, also high, had been so busy laughing at him that he’d been unable to even grasp the concept of trying to help him down.
“He was rolling around on the fucking ground, pointing and laughing at me!” Josh yelled. “My mouth was full of blood from my knocked-out teeth. And I kept trying to spit it out, but I was flipped over the edge, and high, and had blood rushing to my head, and my balls were sore from being so cold.”
“Help me, Hunter! Help me!” Blake mocked in a feminine tone.
“What happened?” I couldn’t stop laughing. “How did you get down?”
“Some guy walking his dog saw us and called an ambulance,” Josh said.
“Why the fuck didn’t he just get you down?” Blake yelled.
“Why the fuck didn’t you just get me down?” Josh retorted.
“What happened?” I was laughing so hard my sides hurt.
Josh answered. “So the guy called an ambulance. It took them forever to get there.”
“It was, like, two minutes, you *,” Blake said.
“Fuck you, Squinty. It felt like forever.” Josh’s eyes moved to me. “So the ambulance gets there, and the dudes help me down, check my teeth and shit, and then they asked us what’d happened.”
Blake laughed again and pulled me closer.
“And?” I placed my hands over his and linked our fingers. “What did you tell them?”
“This is so fucking bad.” Josh shook his head. “Hunter and I looked at each other, and I don’t even know what happened . . . I think we were both so paranoid from the weed that we thought we couldn’t tell them the truth.”
“What did you say?” I needed to know.
“Hunter here—” He stopped, unable to speak through his cackle. When he finally calmed down, he continued, “Hunter said that vampires came and tried to attack us! We tried to fight them off, but they got me, hence the blood, and then they hung me off the end of the bleachers as a warning to the werewolves that they’d been there!”
We all roared with laughter.
I looked up at Blake, with teary eyes. The good kind. “Vampires? Werewolves?”
He just shrugged and said, “Twilight had just come out.”