It was a boat house.
And a car house. I would just say garage, but that was what we passed on the other side of the arched driveway.
A fancy white boat, rimmed in crisp blue, was the first thing to catch my attention. Two jet skis and a rogue snowmobile were lined up perfectly next to the boat. Then three fancy cars stacked in tight next to each other filled out the other side of the building. I had no idea what make or model the cars were, but they were sleek and sporty and looked like something you’d see on a magazine cover. To the left of the main door to the garage were two bathrooms, each with a man and woman sign over them.
He propelled me toward the woman’s door. He was hurrying us, which seemed out of character for the man who hadn’t been in a hurry all night. I wanted to linger and appropriately gawk at all the details. For some reason, seeing Duke’s childhood home—though the wordhomenow seemed laughably modest—relaxed me. I didn’t have anything to worry about. This date was indeed a one-night-only kind of date. Even if I hadn’t been moving, Duke and I were from two different worlds that rarely collided. My weird attraction to him would stay just that…attraction. I knew this wasn’t 1800s England, but it only took living in a run-down apartment in the city to understand that the class system hadn’t totally dissolved.
“Are we going to wake up your parents?” I asked, my hand on the door, ready to enter with Duke’s clean pair of gym clothes tossed over my shoulder.
Another sheepish look crossed his face. “They’re in Europe right now.”
I froze. “What?” I smacked him with his shorts. “I said we needed a place with witnesses!”
“You want people to watch us attempting the lift?” he asked. “You said you needed a pool. This is the only place I knew I’d be able to get in at one in the morning.” He must have seen a look on my face that didn’t convince him I was okay, so he added, “If it makes you feel any better, my parents have cameras all over this place. They’re probably being alerted to someone on their property right now.”
I blew out a sigh. I did my best to go about my daily life, making the kind of decisions where I wouldn’t wind up the victim on a true crime podcast. This whole night had blown my cautious nature to bits, but so far, my decision to live in the moment with Duke had been rewarding. Fun, even. Duke no longer felt like a stranger. We had inside jokes, for Pete’s sake.
“Alright, let’s do this.”
He gave me a salute. “I’ll meet you out here in two minutes.”
The bathroom smelled like the perfect mixture of lilacs and chlorine. I hadn’t thought of the logistics of my wearing his clothes like a swimming suit. After deciding it would be too weird to completely strip down in his clothes, I kept my bra and underwear on underneath. I’d probably freeze the rest of the night, but according to my calculations, our night would be over soon. I checked my complexion in the mirror. To my surprise, my skin didn’t seem the pale color it had been at the start of my date. I wasn’t used to seeing a splash of color on my cheeks, but for a long moment, I couldn’t look away. I wasn’t sure who I was tonight. My hands shook as I pulled my hair up in a familiar high ponytail, looking the most like myself I’d been all night long.
I didn’t allow my mind to overthink the grand marble counters, or the fancy above-counter sinks in the bathroom, or the toilets that flushed themselves. And this wasjustthe boathouse. I’d kill to see the inside of Duke’s actual home. I pushed open the door and found Duke waiting for me, wearing his “used” set of gym clothes that looked almost identical to what I was wearing—black shorts and a gray top.
My eyes trailed down his shoulder to his arms before I remembered myself and yanked them back up. In all reality, I should have felt frumpy. The clothes were too big and awkward, and I didn’t even like the gym whose name my shirt boasted proudly, but the way his eyes drifted down my body, taking in the shorts that went past my knees and the oversized shirt with sleeves that hung past my forearms…I felt anything but frumpy.
“You ready?”
“If I say no, can we be done here?”
Placing his hands lightly on my shoulders, he led me out the door and into the night, which suddenly seemed significantly colder than when we had arrived, which was probably due to the fact that I was wearing shorts and was now barefoot.
“Wait here.” Duke’s warm hands left me as he jogged over to the pool and pressed a button. The cover began retracting, opening up to a glittering pool filled with water. I danced on the balls of my feet for warmth.
Duke walked back to me, his arms folded across his stomach in an attempt to ward off the chill. Though, with his arms folded, it only made his muscles seem to burst out—
Never mind.
Rubbing my arms briskly, I began searching for which side of the pool was the shallow end when Duke stopped me with his hand on my arm.
“We have to run and jump.”
“What?”
The brisk air turned the concrete into shards of ice at my feet as we moved barefoot past patches of snow.
“That’s how I’ve always imagined they did it inDirtyDancing.”
“No, you haven’t!” I said to his laughing face. “It was a lake. They HAD to walk in.”
“Nah. I’m sure they had a dock. They totally jumped.”
It wasn’t true. And by the gleam in Duke’s eyes, he seemed determined to create zero shortcuts in our bucket list scheme. I didn’t want to jump, but I was also standing in Duke’s clothes in the middle of the night, ready to re-enact a movie scene. I was already fully committed to this bit, and I wasn’t about to back down now.
“Fine.”
His eyebrows raised. “Fine? Really?”
