“I’m sorry.”
He parks in front of the bookstore. Just up the street I can see the lighted marquee of the movie house hanging out over the sidewalk. “Do you still want to go to the movie?” he asks.
“Not really, no.”
“Me neither,” he says. “Do you want me to take you home?”
I shake my head. “I don’t really want to have to explain this to Kat yet.”
Connor nods. “She already started planning a double date to homecoming, so—yeah, that’s not going to be fun.”
I open the passenger side door. “I’m really sorry.”
“We’re cool.” He offers me a smile that has sadness at the corners and his fist for a bump. I touch my fist against his, then get out of the car. “See you later, Callie.”
He drives away and I consider going into the bookstore and curling up on that comfy couch until my imaginary date is over. But as I reach for the door handle, the hipster girl with the black glasses turns the closed sign toward me and points at her watch.
Ten minutes later, I’m at the sponge docks.
On my way to Alex’s boat, I pass a small restaurant with a handful of tables arranged on the sidewalk. At one of the tables, a blond girl with freckled cheeks picks at the label of her beer bottle as she flashes a bright smile at the guy across from her. At Alex.
I lower my head so my hair will cover my face, but the damn braids hold most of it back. I walk fast, hoping they won’t notice me, but the flat soles of my sandals slap on the pavement as I pass.
“Callie.” I hear Alex call after me. “Hey, Callie. Wait.”
So. Stupid. So. Stupid. So. Stupid. My footfalls call me out. So stupid. So stupid for going out with Connor. So stupid for coming here for Alex. For thinking I could fit in here. For thinking I could be someone else. I could go faster without these shoes, but I don’t want to waste time stopping to take them off. Even though I have nowhere to go, I want to flee my embarrassment as quickly as possible.
He catches up with me on Athens Street, his hand wrapping around my upper arm. “Wait.”
“Let go of me.” I look down at his fingers. “Now.”
He releases my arm, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans, and his voice drops low. Soft. Melting. “Please.”
So stupid.
“I have this terrible habit of picking the wrong guys. Ones who don’t give a shit about me.” My shoulders sag as I lean against the brick of the building behind me. “I broke my date for you.”
“I gave you the combination to my boat.”
“Yeah, but then you just left and I thought you didn’t want—”
“I gave you the combination to my boat,” he repeats, and the weight of the words hit me.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“You really shouldn’t give the combination to your boat to strange girls.”
The corner of his mouth tilts up and I get this intense longing to kiss him right there on that little crease. He reaches out and touches my neck, his fingertips curling around the back and his thumb resting against my wild pulse. He takes a step closer. “Did I give it to the wrong girl?”
I lick my lower lip and shake my head. “No.”
His other hand comes up on the other side of my neck and his mouth brushes feather-soft against mine. Fleeting and—oh, how I want more, more, more. “Let’s go to the boat.”
“What about your friend?”
“That’s all she is, Callie. We were just having a beer while she was waiting for her boyfriend to meet her for dinner.” His fingers slide down my arm until they reach my hand and he pulls me gently toward the dock. His palm is rough against mine, but I don’t mind. “C’mon. You still want Chinese?”
“Sure,” I say, leaving out the part where I already ate dinner.
On the boat, Alex rummages through a pile of takeaway menus until he finds the grease-stained yellow flyer from the Great Wall restaurant. He hands it to me. “What’ll you have?”
I sit down, handing him the menu without looking at it. “Maybe just an egg roll?”
“That it?” He digs his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans. “You sure?”
“This time.”
Alex grins as he makes the call, ordering an egg roll for me and moo shu chicken—my favorite—for himself. Mom and I never order anything but kung pao chicken because that’s what she likes.
“So where’d you go just now?” Alex cracks open the cap on a bottle of beer and offers it to me. I shake my head as I tuck my knees up against my chest. He drops down beside me and props his bare feet on a milk crate.
I rest my cheek on my knee. “Thinking about kung pao chicken.”
“You like it?”
I’ve never told Mom how much I hate it. “Not even a little.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, catching one of my curls between his fingers. “For next time.”
I want to reach out and touch him, too, but I don’t. I’m not sure why. “Will there be a next time?”
He looks away and takes a sip of beer, and I wonder if he’s swallowing the words he was going to say. But then he looks back at me with those green-side-of-hazel eyes and says them. “As many as you want.”
I can feel the heat blossom in my cheeks and he laughs in a not-mean way. I look past him, out the doorway to the deck where the dark garlands of sponges hang. “So I think you said something about watching a movie?”
“That was before you turned me down,” he says. “I mean, I have a couple of things we can watch, but they’re kind of old.”
“That’s okay. What do you have?”
He opens a sliding hatch behind our heads and takes out a short stack of DVD cases. I shuffle through them. “Princess Bride, High Fidelity, Road House, Coyote Ugly, and—” I side-eye him. “Kinky Kittens 6?”
“We can skip that one.” Alex snatches the case and sends it spiraling out through the cabin doorway. It lands with a thump on the deck. “Not much plot.”
“Well, yeah. After Kinky Kittens one through five, what more is left to be said, really?”
He laughs. “Exactly.”
I fan the remaining DVDs like a hand of cards. “Which is your favorite?”
Alex pulls High Fidelity. “Have you seen it?”
“No.”
“You have to.” He pulls a small combination TV/ DVD player out from a storage compartment beneath his bed and plugs it into the orange extension cord that runs out to an outlet on the dock. As the disk is synching up, he props a couple of bed pillows against the bulkhead and settles against them. He pokes my thigh with his toe. “Come here.”
I shift backward between his legs until my back is against the wall of his chest. The brush of his stubbled cheek against my temple makes me shiver and he wraps his arms around me. His hand slides beneath the collar of my shirt, his fingers resting on my collarbone. It strikes me as both an unusual and perfect place for a hand to be.
“All good?” he asks.
I feel as if I’m inhabiting some other girl’s body, as if something this excellent could not actually be happening to me and that at any moment the universe is going to clue me in to the joke. “All good.”
He reaches overhead and switches off the light.
We stay in this position until the delivery driver from the Great Wall arrives. Alex unwraps himself from me and pauses the DVD before going out on deck to pay for the order. He returns with a stack of takeaway containers. “There are a couple of TV trays in the storage locker opposite the head.” He tilts his chin in the direction of the locker.
I unfold the trays in the middle of the cabin and he spreads out the food. I take my wax paper bag of egg roll and sit down again, as Alex opens the foam carton of moo shu chicken and the greasy fried scent takes me back to the hallway of our last apartment and those little Dora the Explorer shoes outside our neighbors’ door. We’d still be living there if Mom hadn’t gotten the stupid itch to leave. She wouldn’t have been arrested. I wouldn’t be here and she wouldn’t have stolen my computer.