His smile faded a bit. “I haven’t been making the best life choices.”
The honesty surprised me. I had expected boasting or a joke. “What’s stopping you from making good life choices?”
“My dad being six feet under, probably,” he replied dryly.
My stomach dropped. I started to sputter an apology, but before I could, Finn raised his hand to stop me. “Don’t freak out. Poor attempt at humor on my part. Though humor might be a better coping mechanism than what I’ve been doing of late.”
The small ripples I made from treading water lapped softly against the side of the pool. After a few moments of quiet, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Finn took a deep breath, running his fingers across the water. “I—can’t. Not yet.” He cleared his throat and turned to look at a tuft of lavender growing beside the pool. “Definitely not without crying.” He blinked quickly, but when he turned back to me, he was smiling. “And I make it a rule not to cry in front of beautiful girls.”
I took my own deep breath, trying to convince myself that the lightness I felt was from the alcohol, not that Finn thought I was beautiful. At that moment, I needed not to be looking at Finn, so I leaned my neck against the sandstone edge behind me and let my legs drift up to the surface. Something between us had shifted, and I needed a moment to figure it out. Finn was never this openly flirtatious with me before. It was like we’d moved on from childhood, and come back slightly changed, a little more grown-up—but still with a little recklessness clinging to our final year as teenagers. It made me want to test the boundaries of this complicated relationship, simultaneously familiar and startlingly new. My skin, always pale, reflected the glow from the pool lights, and my bare stomach took on the teal-gray of a mermaid’s ghost. Finn let his body come to the same position beside me, and we both looked up through light pollution to the few stars bright enough to outshine a metroplex’s worth of electricity.
Finn’s voice cut through the hum of cicadas. “I’m sorry how everything went down junior year.”
It’s the last thing I expected him to say—especially after we were talking about something as real and important as his dad. In comparison, it was hard to feel like prom mattered anymore. I was tempted to offer him some platitude to keep the moment going—it was so nice to feel like things were back to normal. Buttelling him it was okay would be a lie. Hehadhurt me. I took a beat too long to respond, and Finn kept talking. “We made a great team. We definitely would’ve won state again senior year.”
I nodded, even though Finn couldn’t see me, his eyes still skyward. It felt so good to be with him floating on our backs and looking up at the stars that I agreed with him because it was the truth. “Wewerea pretty good team.” I pushed off from the wall. We had drifted to shallow enough waters that my feet brushed against the bottom of the pool as I turned toward him.
He gave me a half smile and turned toward me too. “The best,” he whispered, his face leaning into mine. The fabric of his swim trunks brushed against the front of my thighs, and tornado sirens started blaring in my brain:Finn is going to kiss me.Get to shelter.But I didn’t want to. I wanted to know what it felt like to kiss Finn Hughes. I wanted to get swept away, so I took half a step toward him.
His eyes didn’t leave mine as his hand came up to my cheek, tucking a strand of wet hair behind my ear. He moved slowly as if he wasn’t sure what I would do.
“Emma.”
“Finn.”
“Can I kiss you?” No one had ever asked me if they could kiss me before. I guess it had always been clear enough to other guys that I wasopento being kissed, in moments like this, so they just went for it. But Finn’s question forced me to acknowledge out loud that I wanted to kiss Finn as much as he seemed to want to kiss me. He’d very simply maneuvered me into a position where I was fully complicit in the kiss, and it thrilled me.
“You can kiss me.” Saying the words out loud set my wholebody on fire, and I started worrying that if hedidn’tkiss me, I’d self-combust.
And then he did.
It started out like his question, his lips against mine for the first time, tentative and yet confident. I answered by putting my arms around his neck and pulling him to me. The weightlessness of the water made it easy to bring my legs around his waist and lock my ankles at his back. Finn’s hands grabbed beneath my knees, and I pulled myself even closer to him, my flimsy bikini suddenly feeling outrageously, well, flimsy. My bare back pressed against the rough ledge of the pool, and the front of my body pressed against the slick warmth of Finn’s chest. Finn’s hands left my legs to tangle in my wet hair instead, tipping my head further back and deepening the kiss.
In that moment, I wasn’t worried about being Fun Girl or Serious Girl. I was just Emma, and all I wanted was to get as close to Finn as I possibly could. Because no one had ever kissed me like this before. Like I was air and water, vital and precious. My entire body thrummed against Finn’s, and when his tongue brushed against mine, I felt my grip on rational decision-making about to slip away. But as Finn’s fingers twisted around the straps of my bathing suit top, starting to fiddle with the knot at my neck, a familiar spike of insecurity stabbed through my chest. I pulled back slightly, and Finn’s hands instantly stilled.
“Is this okay?”
“Yes,” I said breathlessly, and Finn leaned back in to kiss me again, his fingers resuming their mission of trying to undo my bikini top, and I flinched back once more. “It’s just… what does this mean?”
Finn blinked twice. “I—Does it have to mean something?” His breathing was as ragged as my own, but something crystallized for me. Itdidneed to mean something to me. Finn needed me to confirm I wanted to be kissed, and I needed Finn to confirm that this kiss wasn’t just a drunken one-off. I had tried to bluff my way through it with Scott and pretend like I didn’t care. But if I was going to have sex with someone, I knew now it needed to mean something to both of us. I needed to know I wasn’t disposable. Finn just stared at me, his eyes dark and unreadable. A few excruciating seconds passed before it dawned on me that he was probably looking for a way to let me down easy.
My heart sank. “Forget it.” I untangled myself from Finn and exhaled. “I shouldn’t have expected this to mean anything to you.” I splashed out of the pool before I could change my mind and wrapped myself in my towel.
“Hey. Emma. Sorry. I… I took it too far.”
Now I had to struggle to hold back the flood of humiliation. “No, no, don’t worry about it, it’s all good! It meant nothing. Just a little stupid drunk moment.” I forced myself to try to laugh. But the look in Finn’s eyes was completely sober.
“I’ve been a wreck this past year. Like I said, I haven’t been making the best decisions in the world…”
He was making it worse. Now, kissing me not only meant nothing, it was also abaddecision. A grief-induced mistake.
“Honestly, it’s fine. I just need to get back because, you know, that flight tomorrow.”
“At least let me get you home. My last beer was a few hours ago. I’m good to drive.”
I looked around for any other possible option, but no onewas left. Sybil had fallen asleep on Katie’s couch hours ago, and I knew she’d be crashing here for the night. I had already ruined one pair of shoes walking home after Finn disappointed me. I wasn’t doing it again. I could handle a few minutes in a car with him. After all, it wasn’t really his fault. There are lots of people who can be casual with sex. It just took kissing the guy I’d wanted to kiss for years for me to know I wasn’t one of those people—at least not right then and not with Finn.
