“Hmm.” She looks up at me with a smile and trust in her eyes. A girl shouldn’t trust a guy with my reputation. The little mouse shouldn’t test the hawk with the happiness in her eyes. She should run away and hide. Except I made a promise to myself that I would never let Sorrow feel uncertain around me.
“So that you know, I’ve never called the girls I hooked up with baby. You’re the only one.”
She lowers her eyes. “I don’t like hearing about them, but thank you for telling me. I do like it when you call me that. I know it’s a common endearment, but it’s not common to me, Trace.” She lifts her gaze to me.
There is too much trust on her face. A twinge starts in my chest. My gut clenches. This girl . . . She undoes me with her words and her innocence.
My throat tightens. “Baby.” I choke on the word. I’ve never felt this way.
Turning from her, embarrassed that an emotion I can’t put my finger on is overwhelming me, I focus on the trees past the gate that surrounds the pool. Me, a guy who doesn’t give a care about a girl’s feelings, suddenly getting all the feels with this timid, quiet girl who is opening up to me in ways I didn’t think possible.
Fuck me, karma is a bitch.
Sorrow takes my hand in hers. “Come for a swim with me. Keep calling me baby. Kiss me too?”
“I can do all that.” I swallow past the lump in my throat.
I can’t decide whether to sink to my knees and bawl my eyes out because I’m having feelings I swore I’d never have after hearing my parents fighting about my mom’s unwanted pregnancy and getting my heart broken by a girl who didn’t want me for me. Or get Sorrow on her back on the lawn chair, press my face to her stomach, and ask her for something I’ve never asked from a girl—her heart.
For the next hour, we swim alongside one another. First, on our backs while we looked up at the stars and she pointed out the constellations to me. Her mother was into astronomy. Then we swam side by side to see who reached the other side first. The loser had to give up a secret. I lost and told her mine.
Man, Sorrow is a great swimmer. Who knew?
“You donated all the turkeys to the food bank for Thanksgiving, and you paid for the ice rink that was put in the middle of the town center?”
Sorrow’s eyes are wide. She’s hanging on to my neck. We’re treading water in the middle of the pool.
“Why does it surprise you so much?”
“You’re a kid. That’s something an adult would do.”
Her eyebrows are low to her nose. She searches my face, undecided on how she should feel—happy that she won the bet and I had to give up a secret, disbelief that a kid could think of such a thing, or mortified at what the price tag must be for a traveling ice rink to be set up in the town center for a month.
“I have the money, Sorrow.”
“A lot of you have money to spare around here.” She isn’t jealous. Sorrow states it like it’s a fact.
“My money is your money,” I say near her ear. “Spend it, Sorrow. You won’t be sorry.” With her legs wrapped tight around my waist, I squeeze her ass cheeks. A tremor runs through her body. Her nipples pucker and push against the wet fabric of her top. I toy with the string on her top. It’ll take one tug and one good lift from my arm to bring her tits to my mouth.
“Don’t you dare, Trace Saints. Skinny dipping is not in the cards.”
“Is that so?” I nip on her earlobe.
“So.” Her body slackens in my arms.
My cock hardens.
Sorrow does something unexpected. I’m finding that she is full of surprises. Instead of dropping her hand to my crotch and stroking my randy beast through my swim trunks, she loosens her legs from my waist, lets go of my neck, and falls backward into the water.
“There’re not enough layers between us.” Her feet kick under the water like scissors. “I’m not ready, Trace. Please understand.”
Her arms move back and forth. There isn’t uncertainty on her face or in her voice. She’s fucking pleading with me, and I am drowning in a different desperation—the desperate need to win over sweet Sorrow’s heart. But I won’t claim her body.
Sorrow’s virginity is hers to give away and has to be separate from our experiment. I’ll experience every fucking emotion rather than cover it up with fake nonchalance, but I’ll be damned if I fall for my timid mouse.
Feeling emotions is different from falling in love with a girl, isn’t it? I’ve never been in love, including with the girl who broke my heart.
Would my parents have fallen deeply in love with one another had my mother not gotten pregnant at eighteen and my father not married her out of obligation? I should call my grandmother and ask her. Better yet, I should visit her. She lives in Montgomery, one of the cities Sorrow is thinking about moving to. Fuck the two-and-a-half-hour drive.
