Snark and Stage Fright (3 page)

After my visit to a bathroom whose opulence rivaled any room in any home I had been in before the Glass Boat, I stood on the edge of the terrace, watching Michael below as he was talking to the football player, when a deep male voice behind me declaimed, “`How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”

I turned to see Forrest Ritter, drink in hand, bowing slightly like a courtier before a queen. I blushed and blurted out, “Shakespeare, right?” before I could stop myself.

The man grinned, downed the rest of his drink and said, “It’s the only line I know,” before accepting another drink from a passing waiter. “Can you bring anything for this young lady to drink?” he asked the waiter, looking at me with the most intense blue eyes I have ever seen on a human being. They were like a wolf’s, wise and feral at the same time. “Something pink and fruity, with an umbrella, perhaps?” he suggested.

I nodded vaguely because I didn’t know what else to do, especially when Forrest Ritter planted his hands on the railing and stood right next to me, taking in the scene, as if he planned to set up camp for the night by my side.

“Um, I bet that’s not the only line you know from Shakespeare,” I said to my immediate regret because it sounded so coy and stupid. Of course he knew more than one line. He was a freaking literary genius.

He looked at me quizzically as he lit a cigarette and the little flame from his silver cigarette lighter illuminated one side of his face. It was cinematic, really, with the little flame and the moonlight, and it made my legs wobble. I feared I would launch myself off that deck again.

“No, I suppose not,” he said. “But who wants to be the middle-aged pedant quoting Shakespeare to pretty young women?”

I think I blushed again and stumbled over, “I just meant that everybody knows the ‘to be or not to be’ line, or ‘Romeo Romeo’ … ”

“And what else do you know, Miss … ?”

“Barrett. Well, Georgia—that’s my name. Georgiana, actually … ”

“That’s a beautiful name,” he said, looking at me with those hypnotic eyes. “It suits you.”

Just then the waiter was thrusting a pink drink forward as Forrest Ritter grabbed from the tray another glass of something darker and no doubt stronger.

“Sip it,” he directed, so I did. “Is it a Shirley Temple?” he asked with a crooked smile.

“No, there’s definitely alcohol in it.”

He bent over my drink and sniffed it, then nodded sagely.

“Sea breeze. Vodka, cranberry juice, and grapefruit juice.”

“It’s good.”

“Could be just what you need,” he said, and I looked at him carefully because I had no idea what that could mean or why this famously brilliant man was talking to me in the first place. “What school do you go to, Georgia? Let me guess. One of the Seven Sisters—you’re a feminist
and
a traditionalist. Or Columbia, maybe, because you’re a metropolitan kind of girl.”

“Actually, I’m still in high school. And I would need to earn some serious scholarship money to pay for
those
places. That and raise my math scores exponentially when I retake the SAT.”

“Forget math. Just get yourself a good accountant when you make your first million.”

“Oh, I don’t want to make a million dollars. What would I do with it?”

He laughed and rested his hand very close to mine, then rubbed my thumb with one of his knuckles.

“You could buy a house as ostentatious as this and invite all of your ostentatious friends over for drinks,” he said. “But better that you not make that million or two. In my experience, most millionaires are insufferable idiots.” He drained his glass again and waved vaguely at the assembled guests. “Present company excepted.”

This was starting to get a little too weird for me, so I was glad when Michael came up the steps, grinning at the sight of me casually knocking back a drink with his old pal, the literary genius.

“Michael, good to see you!” Ritter declared, holding out his hand, and gripping Michael’s for a moment before shaking it. “This charming young lady and I were discussing Shakespeare. And millionaires.”

Michael put a hand on my shoulder, looked at me, and asked him, “Did she tell you that she thinks Hamlet is a total asshole?”

I almost croaked in shock because Michael doesn’t swear, for one thing, and for another, I really didn’t need him revealing my lack of literary sophistication to Forrest Ritter. I was doing a fine job of that on my own.

“No, she had not.” Ritter laughed. “But I am not surprised. She is a lady of uncommon insight and erudition. Tell me, Georgiana Barrett,” he said, leaning so close to me I could smell the whiskey on his breath, “what other wisdom can you share on the great works of early modern England?”

“None whatsoever,” I assured him, and Michael laughed.

“She is as modest as she is lovely,” Ritter told him.

“Do you want to go down to the beach again?” Michael asked me quietly, and I nodded. He turned back to Ritter and said, “I promised my cousins we would meet them, so I’m going to steal Georgia from you for now.”

Ritter nodded, took my hand, and kissed the back of it.

“I hope to catch up with you later,” he said, and as I turned away, I felt a hand stroke my backside, and it wasn’t Michael’s because he was in front of me.

“What?” Michael laughed as I hurried past him down the steps.

“I think Forrest Ritter just grabbed my butt,” I whispered, and Michael smirked.

“Really?” He took my hand and stopped me before we started down the stepping stones to the beach. “Maybe his hand just slipped?” he suggested as he side-tossed a flat, black stone into a crashing wave, skipping it three times.

I dropped the stone I had been trying to aim as skillfully as he had and looked around to make sure Charlie and Megan were not in hearing range. I said, “This was not a casual brush. There was … pressure applied. A squeeze.”

Michael frowned and shook his head. Even in the last dregs of daylight I could recognize that old superior look cross his face, that almost literal looking-down-his-nose in skepticism that used to drive me crazy.

“Hey, I’m sorry, but your idol-slash-poker-coach is a groper,” I shot back.

His frown deepened and he looked out at the waves for a moment, then turned and reached for my hand.

“Well, even if Forrest Ritter isn’t my idol anymore,” he began as he stepped one foot back and dropped his eyes to my backside, “he has excellent taste in booty.”

I snorted in shock.

“I’d be willing to bet the value of this entire estate that you are the first person on this property ever to utter the word booty,” I said.

“You mean when
not
referring to pirate treasure? Yes, probably.” He put one hand on each of my hips and dipped his head so that our brows touched. “I’m sorry he did that. Most of the other guests, I can assure you, will be uptight preppies.”

I kissed his nose and he kissed my lips and we were about to explore the fabled romantic possibilities of a moonlit beach when Charlie appeared, dragging a half acre of washed up kelp behind him like he was hauling a boat into the dock. Middle-aged female voices called for Michael from the not-so-distant porch.

“See what I mean about privacy?” he groaned.

As we walked back to the Glass Boat, hand in hand, I decided I would avoid both the literary genius and the family matriarch as much as possible and focus instead on the good-night kiss I was about to receive at the door to Megan’s room.

That was worth just about anything, including braving judgmental matriarchs and grabby literary lions.

3 
Ghost of Girlfriends Past

The next morning, Michael and I snuck away from the family crowd to lie on a beach towel the size of Lichtenstein, watch the gulls circle overhead, and play a game I had just invented: spelling out words on each other’s bodies.

“What is it? Mustard?” he guessed as I traced the word “luscious” with my index finger, very slowly, over his shoulder and down the hard plane of his chest as he shivered with pleasure.

“No,” I admonished, kissing his shoulder and then demanding, “Concentrate,” before writing the word again with my fingertips. He caught my hand in his before I could finish it, asked, “Are you trying to torture me?” and pulled me in his arms.

Game over.

We kissed and ran our hands over each other with the gulls screeching overhead—though I didn’t really hear them because I was so busy kissing and concentrating on a way to make this moment last for the rest of my entire life. But since my brain never really shuts off completely, the thought that any one of his family members could pop up at any second over the edge of the sandy bluff made me sit up, albeit dazedly. I figured that if Charlie wasn’t away at sailing camp again today he would probably vomit up his Cheerios at the sight of such unbridled PDA and the last thing I wanted was to have Michael’s grandmother pull me off of her grandson and beat me with her cane.

I was soon glad I looked up because I saw a figure coming down the beach to our right. Whoever it was waved to us. Michael groaned and dropped back onto the towel.

“Who is it?” he asked.

I had no idea. But I could see now that she was gorgeous: lithe and long-limbed and wearing a white bikini, a white floppy sunhat with a bright fuchsia flower on it, and oversized black sunglasses.

“A leggy supermodel,” I told him, and he sat up again to look.

Whoever she was, she was calling his name now and waving like she really needed to hail a cab or she’d miss her plane. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a newly arrived relative. When Michael scrambled to his feet and walked a few steps toward her, she broke into a little hop-run and grabbed his hands and planted a kiss right on his mouth.

Definitely not a relative.

I stood up.

“Hi, Catalina! Nice to see you,” he said to her, turning toward me to say, “Georgia, this is Catalina Osborne. Her parents own the house right around the bend in the beach there. And Catalina,” he said, taking my hand, “this is Georgiana Barrett.”

“Oh.
Oh
.” She gaped at me for half a second before she could fix the smile back on her face. She raised her sunglasses; I could see she had very bright green almond-shaped eyes and strawberry blond hair and even though I was pretty sure I would remember it, I had the weird feeling that I had seen her before. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Georgiana,” she said.

“You, too. And everyone calls me Georgia.”

Catalina smiled mischievously and tugged on Michael’s arm for an instant, asking me, “Are you summering here, too, Georgia?”

Michael gestured toward the beach blanket with one hand and Catalina scampered over and took a seat as he said, “Georgia’s staying with us.”

“I was
won
dering when you would get out here,” she groused as she helped herself to one of the bottles of water from the woven bag we had brought down. “Except for that weekend in July you haven’t been here at
all
.”

I raised my eyebrows at Michael because he hadn’t mentioned spending that weekend in the company of a very beautiful and very friendly summer neighbor.

“I’ve been here most of the time since graduation,” she said as she struggled to loosen the water bottle cap and then gave up and just handed it to Michael, who unscrewed it without much effort. There was something so natural, even intimate, in the automatic way she had handed him the bottle and he had handed it back that as they spoke, I found myself staring at the stupid bottle like a genie was about to emerge with some very bad news for me.

“Congratulations,” I said dumbly. “On the graduation, I mean.”

“Miss Porter’s School, class of 2014,” she said with a roll of her grass-green eyes. “And I leave for Paris in a week
, finally
, now that school is over.” She looked at me and said, “For work, not pleasure. Back to the salt mines,” with another eye roll. I was pretty sure that Catalina had never been anywhere near any type of mine in her life.

“Catalina is a model,” Michael explained.

Suddenly the feeling that I had seen her before made sense. I must have muttered, “Cassie’s magazines,” out loud because they both looked at me. So I had to explain, “I guess that’s why you seemed familiar to me. You were probably in one of the magazines my sister gets.”

“Probably,” she agreed.

“So you’re not going to college?” Michael asked.

“Not for a while anyway,” she drawled. She must have sensed his disapproval, because she continued, “I’ve never had the chance to explore modeling full-time and I want to see how I can do without having to shuttle back and forth on weekends and late afternoons between school and Manhattan.”

We heard Michael’s mom calling from the house, “Michael, phone for you!” and he said, “Well, Georgia and I should get back to the house before we miss lunch … ”

“But I just got here!” Catalina pouted for a second, then said, “Why don’t you go take your call and grab something from the kitchen to bring back so we can catch up? It’ll give me a chance to get to know Georgia—and tell her all your dirty secrets.”

Michael looked at me uncertainly, then back at the house, then back to me. I nodded, albeit reluctantly, so he got up and started walking away. I wanted to stay on that beach blanket and dish with Catalina about as much as I wanted a Sharknado to shoot onto the beach and bite off one of my limbs. At least I’d have a story to tell Cassie later, one that she would actually want to listen to—my afternoon in the sand with my boyfriend’s supermodel summer beach house bestie.

Catalina stretched her impossibly long and tanned legs in front of her and cooed, “So you and Michael are going out? He makes an
ex
cellent boyfriend, doesn’t he? He’s a little stiff at first, but once you loosen him up … ”

I could taste my breakfast in my throat when she said that.

“Michael and I have had a little thing going every summer since I was about fourteen, I guess,” she explained, then gave a sharp little laugh, “Guess not this year!”

“Guess not.”

She looked at me, all of me, up and down and back again, as if trying to figure out how she’d lost out on her yearly fling to a troll like me. But as uncomfortable as she was making me, I was determined to hold my tongue rather than upset any more of Michael’s family, friends, and assembled guests, lest they send me back over the Bourne Bridge to the mainland—leaving Michael here with Catalina.