“I didn’t get you into trouble, did I?” Roland asked. “Mailing you at your boss’s company address?”
“My boss? Oh,” she said, flushing pink. “My boss. No. Not in trouble.”
“I wasn’t stalking you, I promise. Just Googling. I found your name in an article about some big hotel grand opening. Said you were Cooper McQueen’s assistant and you planned the party?”
Allison tensed. McQueen was not a topic she wanted to discuss.
“Sort of,” she said. “It was a temp job. I don’t, ah, I don’t work for him anymore.” McQueen’s real personal assistant had been sick one week, and he’d sweet-talked Allison into taking over managing the guest list. At the party, a society reporter had cornered her and asked her what she did for Cooper McQueen. Since the truth would have been unreportable, Allison had lied through her teeth.
“I’m glad the package got to you, anyway,” Roland said. “Couldn’t find an address for you anywhere. You’re a little off the grid, kid.”
“I’m, ah, sort of subletting,” she said, not ready or willing to tell Roland the truth yet. Or ever. “The apartment’s not in my name. I’m glad I’m not too late.”
“Never too late to come home,” Roland said, and squeezed her hand.
They fell into another silence but this one far less awkward, more companionable. Maybe it was because he was still holding her hand. Maybe it was because she was getting used to this tall handsome man who shared her former brother’s eyes and smile.
“So...anything new with you?” she asked. “Married? Kids?”
He shook his head slowly. “No wife. No kids.”
“What about Deacon and Thora? Either of them married or anything?”
“We’re all on our own out here. What about you?”
“Free as a bird,” she said.
Allison waited for him to say something else, more small talk, more catching up, but he didn’t seem in the mood for it.
“Let’s walk down to the water,” Roland finally said.
“I don’t know about that. Are you going to throw me in like you used to?” she asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Not while I’m wearing suede boots.”
“Got it. I’ll take off your boots, then throw you in. Come on,” he said, standing. He held out his hand to help her up and she took it. He dragged her to her feet with ease, and she followed him down the deck steps to the beach below. The wind whipped through their hair, clean and cool, as she and Roland strode across the sand, Lawrence of Arabia in blue jeans. The water rushed up the shore. Allison danced backward away from the wave but Roland let it hit him, and the water turned his brown boots to black.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, and went on before she could answer. “Is it my fault that you never came back after you left?”
“Your fault? Why would it have been your fault?” she asked.
Roland looked at her, a long look, almost a guilty look, and all of a sudden it came back to her, a memory she’d either forgotten or repressed.
From her first day in this household, she’d been treated like the baby of the family. The youngest child, the smallest, she’d fit into that role like she was born for it. Thora did her hair. Deacon walked her to class. Roland carried her on his back or his shoulders when they went anywhere because her legs had been too short to keep up with the older kids. But time passed and by her twelfth birthday, she and fifteen-year-old Thora were sharing clothes, even bras.
It was the first week of June in her last summer at The Dragon. Allison had turned twelve the month before, and Roland had one more week left of his sixteenth year. A heat wave had hit and they were all miserable. Like every other house on the Oregon coast, it didn’t have air-conditioning, and Dr. Capello had taken the kids to the state park nearby where they could hide from the heat in the cool of the damp, dense forest. But Roland was going to start his summer job as a waiter at Meriwether’s the next day and had wanted to stay home. And if Roland was staying home, so was Allison.
They were out on the deck in the hopes the ocean breeze would give them some relief from the stuffy house. Roland stripped out of his shirt but the heat was still too much for him, so there was nothing left to do but throw himself into the ice-cold ocean. Allison followed him out to the beach where they’d both stripped to their underwear. Roland went straight to the water, not even pausing once to acclimate himself to the cold. She ran in after him, watching him dive like a dolphin into the lively waves. He stood up in the waist-high water to push his hair out of face and that’s when she’d noticed something about him she’d never noticed before. His biceps. Of course she’d known he had biceps. Everyone with arms had biceps. Even she had biceps, though her body was too soft to see any definition. But Roland had them. And triceps. Deltoids. All those muscles they’d studied in PE. Except in gym class, the muscles had looked like raw meat, but on Roland they were like...art. Like beautiful works of art, and when you saw beautiful works of art, you were supposed to stare at them, weren’t you? So she had stared.
She’d stared at the water running down his arms and over his shoulders as he stood up. She stared at the lingering droplets on his stomach and had this strange strong urge to lick them off him, which was bizarre because nothing tasted much worse on the tongue than ocean water. Deacon always called it “whale piss.” She’d stared so hard she hadn’t noticed the wave until it had knocked her under. Roland grabbed her quickly and pulled her out of the water and into his arms. Without thinking, she’d wrapped her arms and legs around him like she’d done a hundred times before, and he’d carried her out of the ocean. He dropped down onto the soft sand, her still in his arms.
When they hit the sand she’d had to straddle him or fall over. So she’d straddled his hips. And then she’d stayed there. There was no reason for her to stay on top of him as long as she did, and there was no reason for him to let her sit on top of him for as long he did. There was no reason for her to wrap her arms around his shoulders, and there was no reason he should let her kiss him. But she did and he did.
Allison had kissed him a million times before but this kiss was different. It wasn’t a pucker-upper sort of kiddy kiss, but she opened her lips a little against Roland’s and he must have, too, because she remembered feeling his breath inside her mouth. Some sort of instinct made her move a little on top of him. It wasn’t much, a mere shifting of her hips against his hips and then a second hard shifting after that. Roland moved once under her, then winced like it had hurt, though it hadn’t hurt at all when his hands lightly scoured the backs of her thighs. It lasted an eternity. It was over in two seconds. Without a word, he’d lifted her off him, dumping her onto the sand, and rolled onto his side away from her.
Lying there, under the hot sun, she told herself she was shaking and quivering because of the wave that had knocked her over. She willed Roland to face her and say something. When he didn’t, she’d rolled over toward him. She’d studied his long lean back, the line of his spine, the smooth skin caked with sand. With her fingertips she counted his ribs—one, two, three, twelve on the left; one, two, three, twelve on the right. It had never felt wrong to touch him before and yet it did now. And yet she still did it. Until he stood without warning and started back to the house.