The Real Thing (9 page)

“You should come in the water.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“Emmy …”

“Nope.”

He stops splashing and crosses his arms. “What exactly are you afraid of?”

I dig my toes into the now-cool sand and start burying them. “Jellyfish. The undertow. Sharks. The tide. Propellers. Surfboards. Rocks.”

With each thing I list, Eric shakes his head. “Do you see any of those things where I’m standing?”

“Not going to happen.”

His chest rises as he pulls in a deep breath. “Fine,” he says, then plops his butt right there in the water. “Ah, shit …” His lips quiver as they form a perfect O. “That’s colder than I anticipated.”

“Then get out of it, you dork.” I laugh, and more of the tension from earlier eases out the longer he stays here with me.

“In one second,” he says through shivering lips. He splashes a bit more to soak his T-shirt, and I open my mouth to stop him, but snap it shut when I see the white fabric become wet and see-through.

After he’s thoroughly ocean-sprayed, he gets to his feet and gives me a wide smile. My eyes narrow. “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t answer. And before I can bolt, he charges, tackling me and pinning me to the sand. My dry clothes are soaked within seconds.

“Eric!”

“If I can’t get you in the water, I’m bringing it to you.”

I smack his shoulder, then remember his weakness and go right for his knee. One squeeze and he’s off me, jerking away before I can tickle him silly.

“Damn my Achilles’ heel!”

A chill runs up my spine as he settles next to me in the sand. I grab the hem of my shirt and wring it out. “Now I’m cold and wet, too.”

“We can go to the fire and warm ya up. Or …” He scoots closer in the sand, resting his hip against mine. His arm wraps around my shoulder, and he pulls me in to his side. “We can rub our bodies together like this.”

Laughter shoots from my mouth as he squirms in the sand and nearly lifts me from the ground to generate some friction between us.

“Are you drunk?” I ask through my giggles. He stops moving our bodies together and rests his forehead on mine. I inhale the faintest scent of beer when he breathes out.

“Not drunk. I’ve been
drinking
, but I’ll totally remember all of this tomorrow.”

“You sure about that?”

“Hells yeah.” He pulls back, holding up three fingers. “I only had two.” His brow crinkles as he looks at his hand. “Maybe three.”

“Did you use your fake ID? Or did Miss America buy them for you?” It comes out of my mouth before I can stop it. Eric’s eyebrows pull in, and I immediately start burying my feet again so I don’t have to look at him.

“Kenzie?” He laughs. “I think she was too busy hitting on the bartender to notice what I was drinking.”

“Olivia’s bartending.”

“Exactly.”

He’s probably joking just to make me feel better, since he’s intuitive like that. Or maybe I’m waving a lit sign that says
Paws off my best friend!
But I look over my shoulder and spot the redheaded beauty sitting with Olivia, clearly pulling all the moves I saw her trying with Eric earlier.

“Oh.” Apparently, hiding my relief isn’t high on my priority list, because I swipe my forehead in a dramatic fashion and go, “Phew!”

He nods at me and smiles. “What’s that about?”

“Well, that girl is …”
Not me.
“Never mind.”

An exhausted sigh floats out of his mouth and he falls back in the sand. “Are you worried someone’s going to take your place?”

“What? No.” Then
I
sigh and fall back next to him. He gives me a look like he knows I’m full of total bull. Even buzzed, and after three years of not seeing me in person, he knows me. “Okay, yes. I just got you back, and I got territorial.”

He turns and leans on the heel of his hand. Why does he keep smiling like that? My lady parts are going wild.

“You don’t need to worry about that stuff, you know. I’m not into girls like that.”

“Lesbians?”

His head tilts back, and he laugh/growls. “No. I mean, girls who are obviously paying attention to me now, but no way in hell would they have given me the time of day three years ago.”

My smile drops, even though his doesn’t. “What do you mean?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure I know what he’s talking about.

“Come on, Emmy. You know I was fat.”

“Eric …”

His finger comes up a little hard against my mouth, smooshing into my lips. “Don’t argue with me. There was one person who said she found me attractive back then, and even she never made me feel that way.”

“Ali?” Whoa, when did I get so breathless? I clear my throat and inch back from his face. “She never made you feel attractive?”

He shrugs, then rolls onto his back. He blinks a few times as he stares at the sky, but I stare at him. I don’t get it
at all
. He still has the same eyes, the same smile, the same gorgeous soul that makes him beyond attractive. That didn’t change with age, or when he dropped the weight.

“Well, she was a bitch,” I say, happy I finally feel like I can. A small chuckle rumbles from his lips, and I take a deep breath and inch my way toward him. “And trust me, there were more people who thought you were attractive back then.” I stop inching, because if I move any more, there’s no way I’m going to stop myself from attacking him.

He turns, giving me the look he gave me before, when he caught me lying. But I’m not lying this time.

My voice drops. “I guarantee you of at least one.”

Then I point a shaking finger at myself.

Eric Matua is at Caribbean Jack’s

2 hours ago

I want to laugh, but Em’s reddened cheeks make me think she’s not joking. After a few seconds of studying her expression, I say, “Wait … are you serious?”

She rolls her eyes and sits up. I sit up with her, ignoring the dizzy spell I get from moving too fast.

“Of course I’m serious. And I would’ve told you if you weren’t, you know, dating someone at the time.” Her fingers drag down her thigh, wiping at a drop of water. “I don’t understand why
you
don’t think you’re an attractive person.”

There are plenty of reasons. But I’m not in the mood to get into my deep-anxiety shit, especially buzzed like I am. I’d probably spill what I’ve only shared with Dr. Shuman. So I keep quiet, drawing patterns in the sand.

“Fine, don’t say anything,” she teases, then drops her head on my shoulder. “But even though Ali was a bitch, she was, you know, pretty. And you guys dated for a while.”

“Yeah …” My buzz is slowly dying.

She retraces the pattern I put in the sand by our hips. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Why you still feel like you were, I don’t know, ugly or something.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?”

She turns so her chin rests on my shoulder. I don’t make eye contact, choosing to stare at the ocean waves instead. I’m probably not ready to share with her the verbal attacks Ali used on me. They make me feel weak—and a little embarrassed, if I’m honest. Weak because I feel like I should be stronger than I am, and embarrassed because most of me still believes her.

But there is the obviously unattractive part of me, even if some of that is gone now.

“I kind of hated football.”

“What?” Her small laugh heats up my neck, and without thinking about it, I turn to look at her and smile.

“Yeah, I only played because I felt like it was expected of me.”

“Really?” Her bottom lip juts out when I nod. “Wow. I had no idea. I thought you loved it.”

“I liked the team, and training was good for me.” I pat my stomach, and she pinches my elbow. “But the game itself? I wasn’t nearly as into it as the other guys.”

“Why do you feel it was expected of you? If I remember right, your mom fought you on signing that roster.”

“No, it wasn’t her.”

“Then who?”

I shrug. “Everyone, I guess.” My mouth pulls up at the corner, and I knock foreheads with her so she knows I’m okay with what I’m about to say, even though I can’t believe I’m going to say it. “Seemed like there was one spot for the ‘big guy’ that was acceptable. Usually it’s okay to be heavier if there’s a purpose for it. I wasn’t the funny guy, or the outgoing clown. I’m the shy dude. So I signed up for football, hoping my bulk would be of good use.” I keep smiling even though she’s frowning. “It was.”

“But you didn’t like it.” Her eyes are getting shiny with tears, and I wonder what the hell it is I said that’s making her upset. So I backpedal.

“It was okay. But I couldn’t do it for the rest of my life.” Which is why I didn’t. Not that working at a nursing home was something I planned, either.

Her head leaves my shoulder, and she stares at me dead on. After a few weird seconds, I make a face at her and she laughs.

“Well, just so you know, I thought you were attractive
before
you joined the football team.”

“Bullshit.”

“Stop that,” she says, shoving my arm enough to rock me over in the sand. “Are you saying you’d never find a ‘heavier’ girl attractive?”

“What? No.”

“Then why is it so hard to believe when it’s about you?”

I run a hand over my face and grunt. I have absolutely no argument for her without going into the Ali shit.

“Hey,” she says, moving so she’s kneeling in front of me. She crosses her arms, resting her elbows on my knees. I feel my heart rate pick up, and I count breaths so I don’t panic at this small amount of touching. Platonic stuff is usually okay, but the way her hooded eyes look into mine, it feels like more, even if she’s not meaning it to be.

“People change, you know. They grow, they shrink, they go bald, they get zits, they wrinkle. But each person is attractive in their own way, and they’re attractive
to
someone else.” She stops, takes a deep breath, and lets it all out through full lips that I can’t stop looking at. “No matter how much you change out here”—she motions to, well, all of me—“I’ll
always
find you attractive because of the person you are in here.” Her finger reaches out and pokes me lightly in the chest … at first. Then she heightens the pressure until I’m laughing, saying ouch, and rubbing the sore spot.

I wait till she’s back to her relaxed position, leaning on my knees, then I grin at her and spread my legs so she falls into my lap. She punches my stomach, but before she can crawl away I wrap my arms around her waist and settle her back against my chest. I’m controlling my breathing, and I push away the voice in my head that tells me she’ll run from my touch.

“Thank you, Emmy,” I say into her ear through my grin. And before I can overthink it or panic about it, I press a kiss to her temple.

The shower stream pounds on the back of my neck as I press the suction cups of the stupid shower caddy against the tile. I got about four hours of actual sleep last night, and may have started dozing between the shampoo and soap cycles. My elbow went right into this thing, and if you touch it even lightly, the suction cups pop right off and spill every shower accessory in it to the bottom of the tub.

I hear Em laugh down the hall as I curse at the damn thing for the millionth time this week.

“We should just get one that hangs from the showerhead!” she calls through the door.

“Put it on the whiteboard!” I laugh back, and if she actually does it, I’ll look for other signs I’ve fallen into an alternate universe where Em uses something other than her phone for reminders.

I ease back, palms raised to make sure the caddy won’t tumble from its spot on the wall. It didn’t used to give me so much trouble, but Em added a lot of weight to it. I have a washcloth, bar of soap, and a bottle of shampoo. She has a big bottle of body wash, shampoo, conditioner, and facial scrub … oh, and a creepy looking fruffy sponge thing with a blue frog head and legs. I know there’s a name for these things, but I can’t think of it. The demonic thing looks like it’ll come alive and eat my junk off while I’m showering.

Once I’m sure that caddy won’t come off again, I turn from the creepy sponge and turn up the heat.

“Hey, you almost done?” Em says, her voice muffled by the door. “I gotta head to work, but I wanted to talk to you about something.”

I move my face from the stream and wipe it free of water. “Sure!”

“Oh, uh … okay …”

A cold draft pushes through the steam in the room when Em opens the door. I check the shower curtain, because I meant I’d be right out, not “Come in and talk.” But I can see how she’d take it that way.

“So, what’s up?” I ask, the nervousness in my voice accentuated by the echo in the room.

“Okay, this is going to sound like it came out of freaking nowhere, but I didn’t think about it till last night when I saw you with what’s her face, and I thought … you know, before I
knew
you weren’t going to … well, I just thought maybe there was a possibility that you might, sort of, I don’t know … bring her back here. And that’s totally okay, I mean if that was the case, but I didn’t know … I mean, where would you want me?”

What the hell is she talking about? I poke my head from behind the curtain to get a read on her expression, but she’s sitting on the top of the toilet, biting her thumbnail and flipping her phone over and over on her thigh.

“Um … what?” I ask, ducking back into the shower stream.

She groans, and I hear her drop her phone. She doesn’t swear, so I’m thinking the phone is fine.

“I just want to know, if you end up bringing a girl back to the condo, do I need to find somewhere else to sleep?”

I can’t help it. I laugh.

“Why are you laughing?” she squeaks, then bats at the shower curtain. I jump away and hit that damn shower caddy again. The suction cups stick, but her body wash falls off, nearly landing on my foot.

“Geez, stop picking on me.”

“Tell me why you’re
laughing
at me.”

I bend over, pick up the big bottle of glittered soap, and set it carefully back on the unreliable caddy. “Because I thought you were joking.”

“I’m serious. There are going to be more parties. There’s another one
tonight
.”