Endless Summer: The Boys Next Door; Endless Summer (25 page)

“Four more.” He waved his smaller bouquet at me. “Sixteen total. Birthday or what?”

Rachel shoved me forward—which, since I was sitting down, didn’t push me into the boat. It only folded me over like a movie theater seat.

“You can think about it,” Adam said. “The four of us can take our turns, and we’ll come back to see if you’ve changed your mind. But I want you to come with us now.” In a singsong voice he coaxed, “I’ll let you drive.”

McGillicuddy and Cameron stared at Adam, eyes wide with fear. Sean coughed, “Bullshit.”

“I’ll let you drive when I’m wakeboarding, anyway,” Adam said.

“It’s love,” McGillicuddy said, motioning with his head for me to get in the boat. “Let Tammy hold your roses so they don’t go bald in the wind.” McGillicuddy’s blessing was the final push I needed. I held out my arms for the extra roses from Adam and inhaled one last long sniff before handing off the whole huge bouquet to Tammy. Then I took Adam’s hand and let him help me in. McGillicuddy shoved the bow away from the seawall and walked into the back of the boat, muttering, “Freaking femme fatale.”

As we puttered out of the idle zone, I gave Rachel and Tammy a pageant wave. They waved back and clapped for me. The boat reached the open water and sped up. The motor and Nickelback drowned out the clapping. Adam grabbed my waving hand, and we did the secret handshake.

As we sank to the bow seat, I touched his skull-and-crossbones pendant on a new leather string. “They still have these in the bubble gum machine?”

“Sean went under the dock and found it for me.”

I nodded. “He was the best choice to rescue it for you. He has no fear of bryozoa.” Squinting into the sun behind Adam, I looked up into his sky-blue eyes. “One day on the boat when we were kids, did you tell me you wanted me to be your girlfriend when we were old enough?” He slid his hand down a lock of my hair and twisted it around his fingers. “I don’t remember saying that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t lying that day in the truck.

I really have loved you forever. Why else would I wear a skull-and-crossbones necklace you bought me from a bubble gum machine? It turned my skin green.”

“It didn’t.” To make sure, I moved the pendant aside and peered at his chest, which looked the normal scrumptious tan to me. “It didn’t,” I repeated with more confidence.

“It did when you first gave it to me. Any metal coating that might have been clinging to it wore off on my chest years ago.” Come to think of it, the pendant was a funny color not found in nature. I’d probably given him lead poisoning, which was why he acted like that. I ran my fingertips down the bones, and poked the skull in the eyes. “You know, you could have told me you loved me a long time ago, before things got so crazy.”

“No, I couldn’t. I like to take chances. I’d blow a chance on anything but you. You didn’t love me.” Didn’t I? It was hard to believe I’d called him little dolphin just two weeks before. “I didn’t think about you that way. Clearly I was capable of it. Because I love you now.”

He grinned and took my hand. “We should add another step to the secret handshake.”

“Then we couldn’t do it in public.” I turned his hand over and ran my fingertip lightly over his palm until he shivered. “When Sean came up to your mom because a fish had mouthed his toe, and my mom said I should just wait until I was sixteen… That wasn’t Sean. That was you. Right?” He put his head close to mine, watching my finger trace valentines in his open hand. “I didn’t want you to like me because you thought you were supposed to. I wanted you to like me for me.” His breathing sounded funny. He was about to cry—which was going to cause him a world of trouble with the boys. He could live the first time down owing to the shock of seeing me crash into a very large, very stationary object. But if he cried again, he was toast.

I knew one way to stop him. I hollered above the motor, “Oh my God, Adam, are you about to cry?”

“Oh my God!” Sean echoed in a high-pitched girl-voice. Cameron squealed, “Adam, don’t cry!” My brother called, “No crying on the boat.” Adam laughed with tears in his eyes and kissed me softly on the forehead, the side away from the stitches. And suddenly, to my complete horror, I was the one crying, sobbing into his chest. I was happy, but that wasn’t why I was crying. I was relieved. Relieved of a weight I couldn’t even name.

He held me more tightly and kissed my forehead several more times, then made his way down my cheek, dangerously close to my ear. I giggled at the same time I cried.

If he didn’t stop, he was going to give me hiccups—which would be so incredibly sexy, on top of messing up my timing for wakeboarding jumps.

He kissed my lips. “What do you want to do tonight?” he whispered.

What a question!

“Put our names back on the bridge,” I said. “Only, you hold the sailboat this time, and I’ll take care of the handwriting.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, enjoying the warmth of Adam’s arms around me against the wind. We sat back and watched the other boats and the crowded banks of the lake spin by. When the show started, we spotted for the other boys while they took their turns. Then it was Adam’s turn, and mine.

E n dless S u m m er

This book is for all the readers of

The Boys Next Door who asked me

to write a sequel. I would not and could not

have done this without you.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Simon Pulse, for believing in this book; Emilia Rhodes, for a smart edit; my literary agent, Nicole Kenealy, for taking care of me; Erin Downing, for reading an early draft and offering terrific suggestions; and as always, my critique partners, Catherine Chant and Victoria Dahl, for sticking with me every step of the way.

Adam boosted me from the concrete embankment onto the narrow ledge that ran all the way down the highway bridge. From here I’d have the perfect platform to spray paint our names on the six-foot wall separating us from the cars—that is, if nothing went wrong.

I could have painted LORI LOVES ADAM right where I was, above the embankment. At least technically I was still on dry land, or over it. But his brothers would call us lightweights. They’d been more daring when they painted their own names. Using each seam in the metal wall as a handgrip, I walked carefully along the ledge. The embankment fell away. I was over the lake.

A quarter of the way across, which seemed respectable enough, I stopped. Shaking the can of spray paint with one hand and hanging onto the bridge for dear life with the other, I turned to look behind me. My house, Adam’s house, and Adam’s parents’ marina lay across the water from us, but I couldn’t see them in the starlight. Only a few lights edging the marina dock shone in the summer night, their reflections rippling in the water. Everyone must have been pooped from the festival on the lake that day.

Not a single boat motor broke the silence—only the occasional clackclack, clack-clack of a car passing on the other side of the concrete wall and a nervous vibration through the bridge.

“Kkkkkk,” came radio static. “You on the bridge. Lori McGillicuddy. This is the police.”

I glared at Adam standing on the ledge beside me with his hands cupped over his mouth to sound more like a police radio. He wasn’t holding onto the bridge at all.

“You startled me,” I said. “What if I’d fallen?” The lake wasn’t far enough below to kill me, but the impact might still hurt. And we were not here for his adrenaline rush.

We were doing something romantic, and we were in it together.

He touched my elbow. “I would have caught you.”

He probably could have. What he lacked in good judgment, he made up for in strength and coordination. Of Endless Summer course, the poor judgment often trumped the strength and coordination, which accounted for at least one of the times in grade school he’d broken his leg.

But his fingers on my elbow made my skin tingle. His skull-and-crossbones pendant glinted in the starlight, and his strange light blue eyes watched me in the hot darkness. Though I was precariously balanced and about to deface public property, I used my own poor judgment to lean forward and kiss him.

He seemed surprised for a split second. Usually he was the one to start things between us. Then he slid his hands into my hair and kissed me back.

I felt the paint can slipping through my fingers. Gripping it harder, I loosened my hold on the bridge. I was falling.

He pulled me closer and held me steady. “Even I think this is not the best place to make out,” he breathed.

“If you say so.” I was kidding. Personally, my bravado had pitched off the side of the bridge along with my balance.

“I could have fallen instead of you,” he said in mock outrage. “Oh, wait, I already fell.” He touched the tip of my nose with his finger. “For you.”

“Awwww!” I cried. “Adam, that’s so sweet!”

He grinned. “Did you like that? I thought of it about an hour ago, when we were in your basement looking for spray paint. I’ve been saving it.”

“I did like it. You are a very good boyfriend. Who would have guessed?” With a final moony gaze at him—God, we were such idiots, but it was fun to be an idiot in love

—I turned back to the bridge and scanned the surface for a clean space to write our names. Over the years it had gotten crowded with graffiti. Just above me was AOAN

LOVES LOKI, which Adam had painted very sloppily last weekend, then crossed out when we had a fight. I could have moved farther down the bridge or reached higher up for a blank slate, but I was not as fond of playing Tarzan as Adam was. Finally I decided on a space down low that had been painted over so many times, it would make a nice dark backdrop for my red paint. I shook the can one more time, held it out to Adam to pry the top off, and crouched to write.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to do it?” he asked.

“No thanks. When you want your name written legibly in graffiti, you have to do it yourself.” He laughed. “I was in a hurry, and the paint ran when it rained. Besides, you knew what I meant.” Smiling, I started the first downward leg of LORI LOVES ADAM. “Yeah, I knew what you meant.” In only a few minutes I was finishing the M. “There. Some couples swap class rings to show they’re together. Some people switch their online profiles from single to in a relationship. We commit a misdemeanor.”

He took the paint can from me. “The police chief ’s son’s name is up here, so I wouldn’t be too worried. Come on.” He headed for the shore, placing one battered deck shoe in front of the other, but still barely holding on to the bridge, his fingers brushing the metal. Just following him seemed dangerous.

We reached land and hiked up the embankment, over to the city boat ramp, then into the parking lot. The streetlights gently lit the trucks and empty trailers of the night fishermen. No one stopped us as we walked up the steep asphalt to Adam’s truck. We’d gotten away with it.

My fingers were raw from my death grip on the bridge, and my bare toes were rough. Other than that, everything had gone perfectly my whole sixteenth birthday. After our huge fight last night, Adam and I had gotten back together today. We’d had a great time at the lake festival. We and our brothers had performed a wakeboarding show for an enormous crowd. Not even Adam had broken a bone. And now we’d spray painted our love for each other on the bridge without a single mishap? This night was Too Good To Be True.

As he opened the passenger door for me—he never locked the doors, because he liked to tempt fate—I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window. Even after my test run in a life of crime, my hair was gorgeous, I tell you. It clumped a little in the humidity, but it looked like I’d created that piecey effect on purpose with styling gel. I was a vision of blonde loveliness.

That was the last straw. A day this happy and good hair, too? Now I knew something awful was about to happen.

Adrenaline had propelled me through my artistry on the bridge. That started to drain away now. Fatigue set in—from wakeboarding in the festival show that afternoon and worrying the last few days about whether Adam and I would ever get together.

“What’s wrong?” he asked from behind me, tossing the paint can in the payload.

“I’m having a good hair day.”

“I hate it when that happens.” Gathering my hair and pushing it forward over my shoulder, he kissed the back of my neck.

I shivered in the heat. The adrenaline came rushing back, and I was not so tired.

“The night is young,” he growled between kisses. “I have an idea of what we can do now. We’ve kissed before.” Kiss. “We’ve made out.” Kiss. “But we’ve never made out as an official couple, in the privacy of my Secret Make-Out Hideout.”

I turned to look sideways at him. I found I couldn’t do this without denying him access to the back of my neck. So I gave up on the sly look and enjoyed his soft lips on my skin. “You have a Secret Make-Out Hideout?” I whispered with my head bent.

“I do.” His low voice against my neck sent chills through me. “Just for you.”

“What are we waiting for?” I hopped forward through the open door, into the truck.

“You won’t regret it,” he said before he closed the door and rounded the truck to the driver’s side.