“I wore this thing to school every day, and I told everybody there that I had a boyfriend at the lake.” I close my eyes and feel for the bent spot in the bracelet, the spot where it almost cracked. “I nearly wore it out.” I show him the crack. “Gran had to put some glue on it for me.”
“I have mine, too,” he reminds me again. “It’s in my old room at my mom’s house. In the top drawer of the dresser.”
“You never came back,” I say quietly. “That first summer weekend of that next year, I waited by your campsite. I stood there and ran people away from it for hours, telling them that your family had claimed it. Finally, Mr. Jacobson came and ran me off and told me to get home.” I smile at the memory. “He was so annoyed with me.”
“How long did you wait?”
She grins. “Oh, about twenty years.”
“I would have come back if I’d been able,” I say, brushing her hair back from her face.
“I was heartbroken. I cried that whole weekend.”
I scratch at my nose. “I bet your grandmother loved me at that point.”
“Then Tommy Adams showed up, and he liked the way I looked in my swimsuit,” I inform him with a jaunty toss of my head.
“You fell out of love with me that quick?” He mimes stabbing himself in the center of his chest.
“I don’t think I ever fell out of love with you,” I reply, staring into his eyes. “It’s just a different kind of love now.” I sigh. “What can I say, you do it to me every time.” I throw my hands up in surrender.
“I’m not going anywhere this time.”
“You promise?”
He draws an X over his heart. “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
I lie back on the bed, and his t-shirt rises up my thighs. His gaze immediately falls there. He’s still naked, nothing more than a thin sheet covering his middle.
He grins. “You couldn’t pay me enough to make me go away this time.” He parts my thighs and stares down at me. I pretend to try to hold my knees closed, and giggle as he pushes them farther apart. “You’re stuck with me.”
As he bends his head, I stop him by asking, “You promise?”
He looks into my eyes and says, “I swear it.”
That’s good enough for me. I let my legs fall open and his head dips, and I forget my name, along with his.
And the next morning, I wake up to the feel of him pressed hard against my butt, his dick rocking back and forth, sliding through the slick seam between my legs, as his fingertips roll in big circles over my clit.
He kisses my shoulder. “Are you awake?”
I nod and let out a small cry as he slides inside me.
He kisses my shoulder and the back of my neck as he screws into me, and when I come around him, he follows almost immediately.
“So it’s true, huh?” I say. I giggle, which makes him let out a hiss as it pushes him out of me.
“Is what true?”
“That guys who just got out of prison really are insatiable.”
He rolls me onto my back, and I laugh up at him. “This guy loves you,” he says. “I don’t know about all guys.” He kisses the tip of my nose and lifts himself off me so he can go and take care of the spent condom.
But that’s when I hear the screen door slam. I jerk the covers over m
yself, and he picks up a scatter pillow that was on a nearby chair and holds it in front of himself.
Gran walks around the corner, then freezes in the doorway. “Oh my,” she says. She lets her eyes settle on Ethan for no more than a second, and then she looks at me. “Hello, Ethan,” she says. Her eyes go wide as she looks at me.