Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“Night swimming,” she said. She shook droplets of water out of her hair. “What are you doing up?”


“Waiting for you,” I said, because I wasn’t, but I should have been. “Are you drunk?”

She shrugged. “A little.”

“You shouldn’t swim if you’re drunk.”

“I figured you would have rescued me if I’d needed it.”

“For all you know, I’m drunk, too.” I wasn’t, but I thought I should say that I was, because I didn’t know what was going to happen between us there in the dark, and I wanted to be able to blame something outside of my control if I needed to. If I needed to forget everything about this whole night, I wanted that excuse ready for me.

She shivered. Maybe that’s why the season ends at Labor Day. Because when it’s September and it’s impossibly late at night and you’re wearing nothing but a wet bikini, you get cold. We didn’t have this problem in July.

“I have a towel,” I offered, holding up the one that I’d been using as a makeshift blanket. She walked toward me and held out her hand for it, but instead I wrapped it around her shoulders like a cocoon and pulled her toward me. She fell onto my deck chair so we were looking right into each other’s eyes, my hands still holding her towel in fists.

Reader, I kissed her.

It was a really short, small kiss. I wanted to give her the chance to get up and walk away if she wanted to—though if she had, I don’t know how I would have let her go.

But she didn’t. She kissed me back, and there was nothing short or small about it.

The next thing I knew, her towel was gone and my hands were on her skin, holding on to her as tight as I could, and her legs were threaded through mine, and I was tasting the chlorine on her everywhere.

We didn’t say a word, as if someone would have heard the moment we spoke and come outside to investigate. I wanted to say I can’t believe this is happening and I have been wanting this since the moment we met, but the only sound I made was breathing into her ear, and I trust that she knew everything I meant.

We went inside just as the sun was starting to hint at the sky. And I wrote this all down now. So I won’t forget.

“Arden.”

Arden’s head snapped up in surprise, and she clicked off her phone.

“Are you ignoring me?” Lindsey crawled onto the bleacher next to her, knocking over a mother’s purse as she went. The mom gave her a dirty look and moved up a row. Lindsey went on, “I’ve been calling your name since I walked in the door.”

Arden rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Sorry, Linds. I was reading something and I just … got really caught up in it.”

Lindsey swigged some water. Arden could tell from the sheen of sweat on Lindsey’s face that she had run all the way here, which made Arden’s sedate-walker cardiovascular system want to curl up into a ball and die.

“I was looking at some guy’s blog,” Arden explained, which felt like such an understatement of what Tonight the Streets Are Ours was, or what it meant to her—but she felt like she had to say something about it to Lindsey, because when things mattered, Lindsey needed to know.

“Some guy. Is he hot?” Lindsey asked.

“Please, Linds. I have no idea.” Which was not to say that Arden hadn’t tried to find out. She had searched for every relevant combination of words she could think of: Peter and Bianca. Peter and Leo. Peter and art school. Peter and bookstore. Whatever she tried, she didn’t have enough information to find photos. She suspected he was probably hot, though.

“Yeah, right,” Lindsey said. “‘No idea.’ You are such a stalker. This is going to be like Ellzey’s house all over again. What’s this guy’s last name?”

“I don’t know. His first name is Peter.”

“You’re going to be like, ‘Peter, I read your blog,’ and his mom is going to say, ‘Well, I’m Mrs. Peter.’”