“I know. I was just wedged against your half nakedness.”
“And it wasn’t weird.”
“Weird isn’t the word I would have used.”
“What, then? Come on you can tell me. We’re friends here.”
“If you think I’m going to sayamazingyou are sorely mistaken.”
“No, I don’t think you’re going to sayamazing. I think you were going to sayenormousandgrossandmisshapen, like something you dug up that might one day come alive and destroy humanity.”
“Dude, you can come up with all the great movie premises you want, I’m never going to give in to such a blatant fish for compliments. Compliments that you do not need, I might add. I mean, of the two of us,youare not the one who spent high school feeling like the blob.”
She turned back to him, still laughing.
Then stopped dead the second she saw his face.
He was serious, somehow. Really deadly serious.
And he kept on being serious, all through his next little speech.
“Yeah, but you totally get now that I never meant any of that shit. Whereas I know for a stone-cold fact that my size still completely freaks you out. In my dorm room you couldn’t get away fast enough—and the same thing just happened here. As soon as you realized how close I was you swam away. You even turned as soon as I stood up, like my body burned out your eyes.”
“I was just trying to get out of my jeans,” she said.
Then she wrestled with the buttons, to make it look like the truth. She even got her arm out of one sleeve of her sweater, to back it up—but could see it was having no real effect. He looked almost morose. He’d submerged every inch of his torso, as though her eyes on him were just a little too much.Hereyes onhim,Tate Sullivan, the guy who’d once made her attempt to cut off her love handles with a pair of scissors.
It was incredible, unbelievable, infuriating.
Yet the ache to tell him otherwise remained.
“And besides, your body doesn’t burn out my eyes, Tate. I doubt it could ever do that to anyone, considering you’re a six-foot-five-inch athlete in the prime of his life.”
“What difference does being an athlete make?”
“Oh come on. Youknowwhat kind of difference it makes. Just look at the way girls drool all over your hot bod constantly. I swear to god the other day some babe tried to take an up-skirt picture of you, even though you weren’t wearing a skirt. Last Tuesday this incredibly hot cheerleader asked me if I would be interested in getting you involved in a threesome. And when I told her that we aren’t even doing a twosome, she said:‘Come on, no one on earth could spend that much time with him without at least sucking his cock.’ ”
“Yeah, but that’s not the same. They alllikethe gigantic meat head and the enormous pecs and the total lack of any visible neck. They find it super hot, whereas you kind of gag over it.”
“Andtheiropinion is the one that matters. Mine doesn’t.”
“Feels like it does though. I don’t want you to find my body gross.”
Now he was almost up to his neck in the water.
Apparently, hiding his nipples wasn’t enough.
“I don’t, Tate. I really don’t find it gross at all.”
“Boring, then. Boring and stupid.”
“I don’t think musclescanbe boring and stupid.”
“No, but they make the people who have them look that way. They make you look like a big, lumbering oaf or….” He paused, clearly struggling. Though it was only after the next part that she realized why, exactly. “Or like some brainless lunkhead,” he finished.
And then it hit her, hard and right in the heart.
That was whatshehad calledhim.
