Me:I swear, I won’t let you look like a creampuff.
Cheryl:Thank you! So am I getting you girl or you meeting me?
Me:I’ll meet you. Where at Rockdale?
Cheryl:Big fountain entrance next to Maggie’s.
Maggie’s was a reallynice boutique and catastrophically out of my price range. But she did say we were going to be looking.
Me:Deal. I’ll be there.
The doorto the house opened, and Ian stepped outside in his trunks. The taper of his waist and the very clear lines where his abdomen descended into his Adonis belt had my mouth watering.
“You’re smiling,” he said.
“Yeah—Cheryl wants me to go dress shopping with her, and she’s hijacking my Saturday night.”
“What color are you getting?” He set his backpack on the table and reached for the Coke.
“I don’t know… do you have a preference since it’s your Homecoming date, too?”
“Whatever you wanna wear. I don’t think there’s a color that looks bad on you.” The ease of that compliment had my toes curling. “Just make sure you tell me so I can match you.”
“I promise,” I told him, then took a drink.
“Swim?” He curled his hand in invitation.
“You just want to make out in the pool again,” I teased him.
“I didn’t hear you complaining,” he retorted as we linked our fingers together.
“And you won’t—” I might have spoken too soon because he tugged me to him, and then we were airborne before plunging into the water. Even though the water was far from cold, it was definitely cooler than the air, and I came up spluttering as he laughed. With a growl, I launched toward him and he let out a shout as I managed to land on his shoulders and just barely dunked his head.
Before I could streak away though, he caught my leg and towed me back to him. Then he lifted me up and tossed me. Laughing when I came up this time, I pursued him across the pool. We spent the next hour laughing, dunking, and wrestling in the water, until I finally moved over to the steps and sat there, panting.
All the earlier nervous energy had been burned away, and my muscles protested the vigorous play, but I didn’t care. It had been fun. When Ian came to sit next to me, I leaned my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes as we just rested there.
“Feel better?” The quiet question nudged me from my near-doze state.
“How did you know?”
“You’ve been pretty wired the last few days,” Ian said. “Yesterday when you crashed out like that, I knew you’d probably had enough, and you worked so hard today at not letting anything bother you.”
I sighed. “Apparently not hard enough.”
“I pay attention,” he said, trailing his fingers up and down my arm soothingly. “I’m trying to anyway, and you have a way of smiling when it’s the last thing you want to be doing.”
Lifting my head, I twisted to face him. “I do?”
“Yeah. The smile is here,” he murmured, tracing my lips with his finger before gliding his touch up to brush against the corner of my eyes. “But it doesn’t reach here. You distract people because you can be solemn and you get harried and busy, so you don’t have to focus on any one thing. I still saw it.”
I swallowed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be seen like that.
“I’m not going to dig at you. This weekend had some epic suck moments.”
Yeah, it had.
“But,” he continued, cupping my face. “I think it had some good ones, too.”