“Pah!” I exclaim. “Nice try, but no.”
His eyes crease in the corners when he chuckles. “Guess you don’t want to work in the Hotbox forever, though, huh?”
“God no,” I say, pulling a sour face. “Not the Hotbox.”
Just mentioning it by name makes us both thirsty, so we head inside the Honeypot and grab some drinks. By the time we’re done with those, the sun’s breaking through the fog—sucking it up, now that I learned that tidbit of science—and the warming midday air smells like my dad’s backyard, of pine and redwood, clean and fresh. I breathe it in deeply. De nitely doesn’t smell like this out east.
When we nally get back on the chairlifts, we’re sitting closer. A lot closer. I feel Porter’s arm and leg, warm against mine. His board shorts are longer than my skirt, his legs longer than my legs, but when the lift sways forward, our calves press together. I stare where our bodies are joined. For the tiniest of moments, I consider pulling away, making myself small again, like I did on the ride up. But—
I don’t.
And he doesn’t.
?e bar comes down, trapping us together. Arm against arm. Leg against leg, esh against esh. My heart beats against my rib cage as if it’s excitedly keeping time with a song. Every once in a while, I feel his eyes on my face, but I don’t dare look back. We ride in silence the entire way down, watching the town get bigger and bigger.
A couple of yards before we hit the ground, he speaks up in a voice so quiet, I can barely hear him. “What I said the other day about you having champagne tastes?” He pauses for a moment. Mr. Reyes is smiling, waiting to unhitch our bar. “I just wanted you to know that I like the way you dress. I like your style… . I think it’s sexy as hell.”
LUMIÈRE FILM FANATICS COMMUNITY
PRIVATE MESSAGES>ALEX
*NO NEW MESSAGES*
“If what I think is happening is happening, it better not be.”
—Meryl Streep, Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
12
I’m a mess. It’s been eight hours since Porter and I parted at the Bees and I haven’t been able to get his words out of my head. Sexy as hell.
Me!
He!
What?
He didn’t say anything else, barely even looked at me when he told me he had to “skedaddle” because he promised to help his mom unload something at the surf shop that afternoon. I think I thanked him for the muffins and the chairlift ticket. I’m not even sure. I was so ustered. I might have told him I’d see him at work. Mr. Reyes asked me if I was okay, so I know I stood there too long, looking like a complete lunatic. ?en I walked a half mile in the sand to the wrong parking lot and had to backtrack to get to Baby.
“?at’s all you’re eating?” Dad asks from my left elbow.
I look down at my bowl. It’s mostly full, but not because it’s bad. It’s really, really good, in fact. I’m sitting at a pink picnic table on the northern end of the cove, far from the madding crowd of the boardwalk. Wanda—sorry, Sergeant Mendoza—sits across the table. It’s hard to think of her as a cop now, because she’s dressed in jeans, and we’re eating dinner with her on the beach in front of a pop-up food truck, the infamous posole truck. Also because Dad keeps calling her Wanda, and every time he says it, he smiles a little, only I don’t think he knows he’s doing it. I think they might be playing footsie under the table in the sand, but I’m too distracted to check.
Posole, it turns out, is this amazing Mexican slow-cooked stew made from dried corn, broth, chilies, and meat. ?ey have red, green, and white posole for sale at the truck, and I’m having white, which is the pork kind, and the mildest. It’s topped with sliced fresh radishes and cabbage, and there’re plates of lime wedges at the tables. ?e sun is setting over the Paci c, so the sky is this crazy gold-and-orchid color, and the posole truck has these multicolored lights strung up over the tables, so it’s all festive and fun. At least, it should be. But we can see a few surfers silhouetted in the dusky waves, and that’s making me think of Porter, which freaks me out.
So no, I can’t eat.
But I have to. I’m starving, and this is silly. I’m not going to be one of those girls who goes all woobly-woo over a boy and picks at her food. It’s Porter Roth, for Pete’s sake. We’re practically archenemies. Look at our stupid compatibility quiz— didn’t we fail that? Or did we? I can’t remember now. All I remember is how cute and earnest he looked, talking about phytoplankton and ocean currents, and how the tiny hairs on his leg tickled when the chairlift rocked.
I feel feverish, just thinking about it again now, God help me.
But then, maybe he didn’t even mean it. He might have only been teasing me. Was he only teasing me? A fresh wave of panic washes over my chest.
No, no, no. ?is cannot be happening is all I can think, my mind gleaming with terror.
I cannot like Porter Roth.
“Bailey?”
