I said nothing. He dipped his head lower, trying to catch my gaze, his black hair dripping salt water. I jerked my face to the side. “You weren’t breathing,” I said to the waves. “You didn’t have a pulse.”
His voice gentled. “I’m sorry, Ruth. Okay? It was a joke.” He leaned in so his lips were near my ear. “Don’t be mad.”
I twisted my head even farther away, the sand biting into my cheek. He’d nearly given me a heart attack.
“Don’t be mad,” he repeated, squeezing my shoulders. I felt the slightest pressure of teeth against my skin, and whipped my head to look.
Everett was biting my bicep. My mouth dropped open.
Wordlessly, his hands grazed down my arms to my elbows. He gripped them, then gently bit my wrist.
I didn’t say anything, and his hands slid to my hips. His mouth hovered over my stomach, right below my belly button.
I took a deep breath.
“Don’t be mad,” he whispered. I could feel the words in the air he exhaled.
His thumbs rubbed my hip bones. Caught and tangled in the bow ties of my bathing suit.
I watched him, transfixed.
Ever looked up at me through his lashes. Slowly, he lowered his mouth and bit me very, very gently, canines pressing into skin.
I lay still. If I moved, even blinked, I felt sure I’d disrupt whatever was happening, this glimpse of the surreal. Ever’s mouth was warm on my cold stomach. I could feel the points of his teeth push deeper into my skin. Once, then twice, then the swipe of his tongue.
He lifted his head and rolled off me, falling to his back in the sand. He was breathing fast. We lay there side by side, my eyes wide and unblinking. Finally, he turned to face me. His wet hair fell sideways over his forehead, his eyes darker than the water I’d rescued him from.
“Like your vampire,” he said softly.
“You,” I whispered, “are the strangest person I’ve ever met.”
He leaned closer. “That’s why you should leave Bottom Springs. Go meet some stranger people to put me in perspective.”
Above us, a flock of gulls swooped low, wings dipping to ride the wind. “I think the only way I’ll make it out of here is if I wake up one day as a bird.”
A drop of water slid across his forehead and fell into his lashes. He blinked it away. “A scarlet Ruth-bird.”
“If I was a bird, what would you be?”
“Whatever hawk eats birds.”
A laugh burst from me. “What?”
He grinned. After the water and the sun, his lips were watermelon-red. “To keep the other birds away.”
I shook my head.
He bit his lip, which I knew meant he was going to say something silly. “‘Having a lemonade with you is even more fun than going to San Sebastian.’”
“You’ve lost me. Where’s San Sebastian?”
“I don’t know, actually. It’s a line from a Frank O’Hara poem.”
“He wrote about lemonade?” I’d pictured Frank O’Hara as a New Yorker in a black beret. “I guess he really is playful.”
A small, secret smile curved Everett’s mouth. His hand came to rest on top of mine in the sand. Gone were the days he shied from contact. Now I could always count on him to find some way to touch me. “‘In the warm Louisiana 4 o’clock light,’” he recited, “‘we are drifting back and forth between each other.’”
I rolled my eyes. “Now I know you’re making this stuff up. There’s no way Frank O’Hara wrote about Louisiana.” But still, drifting between each other—that was exactly how it felt with him on the best of days, like today.
