The Dragon
Summer
I wear my towel like a hood while I walk through town on my second sightseeing adventure, as if we have paparazzi and they’re after me. But I don’t know who I might run into, and I’d like to deal with my emotions incognito, especially when they’re seesawing and trying to tip me over.
I can’t separate anything here. My feelings, my memories, the good and the bad, all my wild worlds colliding into one, right where roots were planted and life bloomed.
I can’t separate them . Adam, from the other boy. The air is thick with our connection. Everywhere I look I’m followed by the younger version of ourselves.
Linda’s Diner is the next beat in our story I’m passing now, my focus fixing right to the window with the booth where Adam kissed me. From across the table. Baskets of burgers and fries and condiment bottles, and thankfully, empty glasses, shifting between us.
We had company, several pairs of eyes on our first liplock.
Including Levi’s.
I locked my gaze with his instead of his best friend’s after Adam sat back, searching for something, anything to show me he was thinking about our kiss, like I was.
And besides having the knowledge that he was watching us, and the smallest freeze in his movements as he did, he only blinked and shoved a fry into his mouth.
I wanted him to choke on it.
I wanted everyone to disappear so it would just be the two of us again, me eating his fries and reading him scenes from my books.
Those are the next memories that follow me, until someone entering the diner looks at me twice and I speed away and up, shielding my face more with the towel, feeling like Rose when she was hiding from Cal.
I’m back less than a couple hours and living another Titanic moment.
But my returning flush is for the first one.
The beach part of the bay is quiet, vacant, when I step onto the sand, people who want to be in the water doing so from their boats. There are quite a few in the distance, other people’s shouts and laughter mixing with the memories of mine and Adam’s and his friends’, echoes off the surrounding trees.
Levi’s is always an edging, coming in like the period at the end of the most run-on sentence.
The water pulls me closer, the rippling glow so inviting. I’m clammy, my hair already curling in places, like it knows where we are, who I’m supposed to be. . .
I spread my limbs so no skin is touching, my elbows poking out and my wedges scraping a sideways path in the sand.
I want these clothes off. But all I have is the towel, my hands not collecting a change of outfit when I was unable to use my brain. I need to be cooled down physically and emotionally. Better to be thrown into a vat of ice water, but what do they say? Beggars can’t be choosers?
I stomp away from the thought with a spark of determination, moving a bit farther down to a more secluded spot in case I do get company. Then I drop the towel, and I strip.
Come on. It’s just us. It’ll be fun!
Swimming with suits is fun too!
Adam tried to talk me into skinny dipping with him several times after his joking first, but I wasn’t ready to show him my body. Not until I was ready for what would come next. Until I felt his hands all on my skin and his mouth tasting me, our bodies learning the waves of the other’s.
But by then, we were leaving this town, heading off on a new adventure.
Now, I’m back, and naked, and squealing like a kid again as I run and splash and slip under the water.
I don’t come up until my lungs ache, familiar but different, gasping in air as I finger my hair from my face. The water is warm, but refreshing, and when my eyes sting and a knot forms in my throat, for the first time in a long time, I welcome the feeling, tilting my head back toward the sun in a tread, comforted by the waves.
If my nipples weren’t out, I’d float…away…
I feel a presence before I hear it moving. Shuffling. Soft rustling.
Despite the warmth of the water and the day, goosebumps tickle along my skin, telling me exactly who I’ll see as I spin around, sinking down some so I’m covered to my neck.
We freeze, my breathing also stilling at the sight of Levi, standing in shorts and a loose white tank top that shows off his muscles.
It hasn’t been too long since we’ve seen each other in person. He visited us in Virginia once in a while. But it’s been a while since we’ve seen each other in person at the scenes of his crime.
He’s glancing down at my pile of clothes, where my panties lay right on top. He stares a long moment, probably processing that I’ve taken a nude swim, and I wish I were closer to see the changes in his expression.
I’m sucked back in time as I watch him, my heart wanting to immediately run away, after him, the boy I should’ve run away with at seventeen.
I also want to shake him for what he did to me.
I want to claw at him with how much I feel I need him, at just this sight, at this place.
I claw at the sides of my boobs instead, leaving dents in my skin, where I’m hugging my chest, concealing myself more.
Everything is being dug up from deep inside me. Like we’ve picked up where we left off back at that bridge, the true aftermath and the years between only hours, our recovered friendship faulty, for all his faults. Vulnerabilities that belong to him, that I haven’t had to feel, while I’m literally naked in his presence.
I’m hurt all over again.
I’m mad .
When he lifts his villainous blond head back up, he appears to lock his eyes with mine, but I spy movement, flutters to his lashes, like he’s blinking.
Or his gaze is…trailing me. Trying to. Searching for expanses of my bare skin beneath the water.
The idea stills more of my breath I’ve managed to sip in and settles like heat between my legs, quickly spreading to my brain, making me more hot headed.
Over his nerve.
Over what he still does to me.
Over what I’m letting him do to me.
I’m not the girl then. I’m the woman now.
I’m a fucking dragon.
And he’s not leaving, not giving me the space to come out without eyes on me—his.
It’s like taking back control, taking myself back, when I drop my arms and walk out of the water, feeling it stream from my hair and down my skin as I fix my concentration to my legs, to keep them moving me toward my clothes, all my shaking hidden inside.
Levi has gone completely still, the heat his earlier trailing had given me now transferred to his gaze, stuck on my body, intensifying my goosebumps.
His lips part with the smallest jerk in his chest—then that jerk jumps to his jaw as those lips that once claimed mine press back together and he forces his gaze toward the bay, both of his hands shoved into the pockets of his shorts.
I watch him struggle, letting him struggle, still hiding my own struggle.
Until I can’t, the shaking manifesting as a tremble from being wet, and naked.
In front of Levi.
My next inhale is a gasp as I yank up my towel to cover myself and dry off, standing in the conflicting emotions of what I’ve just done…before I scrub them away.
I know what I’ve done.
And I know what I saw in Levi’s eyes. The same wanting I felt when he kissed me, still there at the edges, even as he can’t meet my eyes now.
He does once I’m dressed, showing the remnants of his dilated pupils, still more black than blue. “Thanks for the warning,” he says with a strain in his throat, that nerve that has me spitting my fire.
“I didn’t get one,” I throw back, piling my hair on top of my head and almost snapping the tie.
His head rears back in a single almost undetectable movement of surprise—until he’s not, all his tension sighed out into something resolute, sucked back in time, too, as he now looks like that same guilty, lying guy.
The guy who’s been going behind my back to help my father.
Before I can question him, he redirects my thoughts. “Adam’s looking for you.”
So he noticed.
But he’s not the one standing here.
“Right,” I say, stepping into my wedges. “He made you put in the effort.”
“I volunteered.”
I halt, my heel sticking out from my second wedge as I meet his eyes, processing the strength in those words, like he needed me to know, then the shift in his jaw and his single glance off to the side at having admitted that.
Don’t ask. “Why?” I ask.
Don’t say it. “I knew I’d find you,” he says, and I stomp my foot the rest of the way into my wedge at that spark I haven’t seen here in years.
It softens me. Because now I’m seeing the guy who’s also my friend. The guy who knows me. The guy on my side, a couple faulty choices aside .
The guy still in my heart.
His presence alone already feels like healing, and that stirs my madness, making me a bit stir crazy, feeling like I’m being ping-ponged.
“Well,” I breathe out, needing something in my hands so I yank up my towel again, “you might wanna tell him, then, before he—”
Levi’s already lifting a hand, with his phone, from his pocket right before it chimes, both of us knowing that was coming.
It’s a text this time, and while he’s responding, I really take in that this is my life again, taking him in, in a way I haven’t done in a long time. Still in a moment of softness, thinking back to fathers, a dad , and truly realizing this is the first time we’ve made eye contact since we lost Elliot.
Adam and I were dealing with college stuff, graduation and another new future looming, then there was his accident and the year-long aftermath. . .
Isolde didn’t want a fuss. . .
There was no funeral. She doesn’t think Elliot died in that crash, but I’m with Levi. Not because I want Elliot to be gone. . .
I’m just with him.
As he types, I’m wondering what he and Adam are saying to each other, my eyes catching on to his arms, tanned from the sun, a tension coiled through all that muscle he’s gained from hard work. Unlike Adam, who got most of his bulkiness from being in the gym, when he used to care about himself.
I swallow a bitter taste and stop myself from comparing them like I did back then. I’m not seventeen anymore.
None of us are. We had to grow up and work in our own ways.
I know some of Levi’s more recent work was repairing his dad’s boat. And my next swallow refuses to go down, a knot climbing from deep in my chest, as I picture him piecing every shattered one back together. On his own. Wishing I could’ve been here then.
But loss wanted to hit us all around the same time.
I’m watching the breeze blow waves of his hair across his forehead when Levi returns his phone to his pocket and tells me, “They’re waiting.”
There’s no hurry in his voice but I’m already rushing past him.
“Well,” I breathe out again, my fire ebbed to just air, “we shouldn’t keep them doing that.”
I’m some paces ahead when I hear the shuffling of his shoes catching up.
“We shouldn’t,” he says, as more of a calling out and less of an agreement, as he walks on past me.
My eyes narrow in on his back, for that and for the bit of upset in the words. “What are you getting a tone for?” I ask with emphasis in my stalk after him.
He sighs as he pulls something else from his pocket—keys, the set jangling in his hand, the sound, and his denial, rattling through my entire body. “I’m not.”
“You are,” I press as we practically burst out of the trees. “And I know where mine comes from.”
He rounds the truck to the driver side and I approach my side with my stare fixed to him, forced to a stop by the truck itself.
I grip onto the rail of the truck bed. “Hey.”
He stops now, too, his own grip paused around the door handle with such torment swirling in his gaze, my mouth closes on this fight, or whatever this is, and I no longer see where we are but where we’re about to go.
A quick and quiet understanding passes between us before we climb into the truck, preparing ourselves for something bigger than us.