I step up onto my bare tiptoes to kiss him, wrapping my arms around his naked torso. His lips touch mine. “Where are your clothes?” I ask him.
He shines the flashlight at his lounge pants. “Pop gave me these. Look,” he says. The lounge pants are black and they have tiny naked women on them. “I figured I’d never get to wear them again, so I put them on.”
He’s not wearing a shirt, so I let my fingers skim across his naked chest. He turns away from me. “Hop on. I’ll carry you.”
Since I came out the window with no thought of shoes, I hop onto his back and wrap my legs around his waist and my arms around his shoulders. “Don’t drop me,” I say.
He hitches me a little higher, hooking my thighs with his hands, and looks back over his shoulder at me. “I’d never drop you, Katie,” he says softly. “You should know that by now.”
I hug him tighter.
He carries me all the way to the water, and then he sets me in the sand, and the wet sand oozes between my toes. The full moon shines on the water, and the only sounds are crickets and a breeze blowing through the trees. The water shines like glass, slick and solid, but soft and wild. Jake takes my hand as I step into the canoe. “Where are we going?” I ask.
I sit down on one end and Jake sits across from me. The gleam of his teeth appears white in the darkness of the night. “You’ll see,” he replies.
Jake paddles around the shoreline bend and then moves toward the shore. It’s the same sandy beach we visited when we were sixteen, the night before I left to go home. “Jake,” I breathe, “this is perfect.”
He gets out and spreads a blanket on the grass just beyond the shore, and then he fetches a small cooler.
“I don’t like sleeping by myself,” he says. “I missed you.”
He lies back on the blanket and opens his arms to me. I fall against his chest and nestle in that little spot that’s all mine, right where his shoulder meets his neck. I let my fingers play in the fine dusting of hair on his chest.
He squeezes me tight and kisses my forehead. “How’s Gabby doing tonight?”
I lift up a little, cross my hands on Jake’s chest, and rest my chin on them. “She’s fine. Why do you ask?”
“She knew Jeff the best,” he says. “She had him the longest. I just thought she might be getting a little nostalgic.”
“If she is, she hasn’t told me. I think she’s fine. No matter what, her father is gone. He’s not coming back. And she loves you, Jake.”
He snorts. “She didn’t love me very much last week.”
I laugh too. “That’s because you caught her behind the tree kissing that boy and made her go home early from the dance. She got over it.”
“That little bastard,” Jake grumbles. “Boys are walking hormones.”
“So are girls,” I remind him. “They’re thinking about all that just as much as boys are.”
“She didn’t speak to me for the whole next day.” He chuckles.
“That’s the thing about teenagers,” I remind him. “They get over it. Eventually.” I poke him in the side. “And they’re still kissing. She told me this afternoon.”
“I wonder…do they still make chastity belts?” he asks.
“Yeah, they’re called fathers.”
I immediately realize my mistake. Jake’s not her father. Silence falls upon us like a wet woolen blanket.
“I didn’t mean—”
But Jake squeezes me tight. “I know what you meant. I kind of…wanted to talk to you about that anyway.”
I sit up and cross my legs, and Jake sits up too. He takes my hands in his. “I won’t be angry if you don’t want this…” He winces. “But the kids… I’d like to be their dad.”
“You’ll officially be their stepdad as of tomorrow,” I remind him.
“No,” he says. He growls low under his breath. “I want them to legally be mine. I’d like to adopt them. All of them. They could take my last name, if they wanted to, but they don’t have to. What do you think?”