Sabrina plucks them from him. “Thank you.”
He looks down at my breasts, which I’m covering as much as I can with my arm.
Then at my face.
Then back at my breasts.
And thenhisface goes a deep purple.
“Out you go before I tell everyone what you were doing in the clubhouse bathroom yesterday,” Sabrina sing-songs.
Decker takes one more look at my arm covering my breasts, then scrambles out of the pool.
And then the very worst thing in the history of worst things happens.
Theo speaks.
He’s on my other side. “Lose this too, Laney?”
My face goes so hot that it could make this entire pool boil in under ten seconds. But I turn my head to look at him with my bikini top dangling from his fingers.
Sabrina doesn’t snatch it from him.
She doesn’t threaten to tell his secrets if he doesn’t hand it over right now.
She just squats there next to the pool, silent, soaking it all in.
“I d-did.” My teeth chatter even though the pool’s warm.
“Need help putting it back on?”
“S-sabrina can get it.”
His dark eyes bore into mine, right there in broad daylight for everyone to see, no sunglasses to shield me from staring straight back.
I liked you in high school.
We likedeach otherin high school.
And we both knew we shouldn’t. And neither of us ever acknowledged it. Me especially, even to myself.
Until now.
Here.
In a place that’s foreign but so warm and welcoming that it makes me want to do things that I’vecravedbut denied for a very long time.
After an eternity, he shrugs and plops the soaking-wet top onto the pool deck. “Don’t say I didn’t offer.”
When the pool starts boiling, it won’t be from the heat of my face.
It’ll be from the heat of the tension in our gazes.
He breaks eye contact and heads across the pool, not looking back. When he surfaces, he’s right next to Claire and the other sorority women again.
He says something I can’t hear, and they all laugh.
I look back at Sabrina.
