20 The Inner Shark #3
“See,” I said, “isn’t this nice how family brings people together? You two never agree about anything.” I thought my comment was funny, but my smile vanished when they both glared at me. It was almost frightening how similar they looked in those moments.
Mr. Ross’s silence was weird, and when he left the table, long before anyone else, I almost thought Jack would say something, the way he stared at him. Then Agnes stood, left the room, and returned with a sneaky smile and a bottle of liqueur.
“Uh-oh,” Jack said.
“Now the fun can start,” Mary announced, rubbing her hands together.
“Jenna, hand me your glass please,” Agnes asked. I tried to comply, but Jack put his hand on top of mine, telling both women, “Sorry, I didn’t bring my girlfriend out here so you two could get her drunk.”
My girlfriend. It still sounded so strange. And yet so right.
“Come on!” I said. “I want to try.”
“Do you even know what absinthe is?” Jack asked.
“No…”
“Then trust me.”
But I told him he was being a party pooper and pushed his hand aside. Agnes agreed with me, chided him, and poured me a small glass. All of us drank our first glasses in one gulp—all of us except Jack, who abstained. He murmured, “Everybody take it easy.”
The taste was… I wouldn’t know how to describe it, but it brought the biggest frown imaginable to my face. How it burned! All the way down. Unable to control myself, I started coughing, to the amusement of everyone but Jack, who said, “OK, that was fun now, but nobody give her any more.”
“I’m fine,” I argued, but I couldn’t help adding, “God, it tastes awful!”
“It’ll get you drunk, though,” Mike said.
Jack tried to stop his grandmother from refilling my glass, but she told him cheekily to respect his elders.
Soon enough, I was feeling… Let’s just say tipsy, even if the truth was I could barely stand.
Agnes was perfectly in control, even if she had a chronic case of the giggles, and it was nice to hear her like that, laughing from her stomach, from her soul.
Mary did the same. Mike was sitting next to me guarding the bottle as I caught Jack staring at me.
“Why are you staring at me, stalker?” I asked.
“I like seeing you have fun,” he said.
I nestled close to him. “Funny enough,” I told him softly, while everyone else had their attention focused on Agnes, “you seem to be the person I have the most fun with. Good, clean, innocent fun, you know.”
“Is that all?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The night is young. We’ll have to see where it takes us, won’t we?”
I gave him a quick peck on the corner of his lips, and when I turned around, I saw that everybody had fallen silent and was watching us. The two women looked happy. Mike was refilling his glass.
“Don’t hold back on my behalf,” Agnes said. “It’s so rare to see Jackie actually being sweet with someone.”
“I’ll have you know I’m very sweet,” he said, sounding like a little kid.
Mary butted in. “Well, I’ve known you for twenty years, and this is the first I’ve heard it. To tell the truth, I thought you’d never end up with a nice girl…”
“Yeah,” Mike added, “there wasn’t much in his past to suggest it would ever happen.”
“It’s true,” Agnes said, “Jackie doesn’t usually have very good taste. But that finally seems to have changed.”
I tried to keep from grinning as Jack turned back and forth, scowling at everyone, including me, and saying we were getting on his nerves and he was going to go to his room.
I stood to follow him while everyone else hooted and made fun of us.
But instead of going up, he walked out onto the back porch.
With his long legs, he had nearly made it to the dock before I reached him.
The people inside couldn’t see us anymore, but we could still hear their laughter.
“Jack, don’t get mad at me,” I said, reaching out to him.
“Great, they got you drunk,” he hissed, but he did take my hand and squeeze it.
“I’m not drunk. I’m just happy. Aren’t you?”
It occurred to me then that I’d never seen him drinking anything stronger than beer. As I wrapped my hands around him, I asked why, but he pretended he hadn’t heard me and said, “We should go for a jacket. You’re going to freeze out here otherwise.”
“Jack, I’m fine. Just stay here and have fun with me.
” Feeling the cool breeze from the lake, I told him, “You know, my parents live by the ocean. And on the first day of winter, all the seniors go out there and jump in with all their clothes on. I didn’t do it, and my brothers still throw it in my face. They say I’m chicken.”
He seemed to be wondering what I was thinking, and that only worsened when I let his hand go and walked to the end of the dock.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his brow furrowed.
“Mushu’s not going to be a chicken anymore,” I joked. “Mushu’s a dragon!” I stumbled as I took off my shoes. He tried to catch me, but I sidestepped him, saying, “Uh, uh, uh.”
“Jen, don’t be stupid,” he called out, but I just smiled at him, walking backward.
He cursed, and I laughed and turned around, running toward the edge of the dock, hearing his footsteps slam behind me on the wood.
Of course he reached me quickly, when I still had four feet to go.
Given our difference in size, I’d actually made it pretty far, I thought.
He went on telling me to chill out, and I called him boring.
We went back and forth for a few seconds, and finally, I tried a different tactic.
“All right, then,” I said, “take me to your room. I’m dying to see it. ”
“What are we going to do there?”
I brushed against him hard, awakening his perverted little smile, and said, “Come with me, and you’ll see.”
He started following me, and I turned around. “Psych!” I shouted, proud that for once, I’d managed to fool him, and as his expression turned to horror and he shouted, “Jen, no!” I threw myself into the water, screaming, “Woo-hoo!”
Splash!
It was freezing, and all my senses awakened at once. I stayed under the surface for a moment, feeling my hair and clothing hovering. Then I emerged. Up on the dock, Jack looked like he was going to kill me.
“Relax, dude,” I said, smiling ear to ear as I treaded water. “You’re acting like a frightened grandmother. Get in! It’s not that bad!”
“You get out before you get hypothermia.”
I repeated what he’d said in an exaggerated, high voice, and he said, “Don’t make me call you Michelle.”
I stuck out my tongue and said, “Come on, Jackie!”
“Yeah, no, thanks.”
“But Jaaaaaack.…I’m all alone out here in the dark. What if a shark comes?”
“In a lake?” he asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know,” I said, “anything’s possible.
Maybe you’re the shark and I should be watching out for you.
” I tried to give him an innocent look, hoping it wouldn’t work, and soon I saw a face I was more used to and liked better: the face I often saw when we were together in bed.
My tricks were working… I didn’t let up, reminding him that it was dark, that no one would see us, and finally he said, “Fuck it,” taking off his shoes, and I shouted, “Yesss!”
He ran, jumped, and landed a few inches away from me, and I had to close my eyes to keep the splashing water out of my eyes.
When I opened them, I didn’t see him anywhere.
I didn’t have time to ask where he was before he grabbed my legs and pulled me under.
We struggled for a few moments before he let me go, and when we both came up, I saw how sexy he looked with the water dripping from his hair.
I’d never thought water droplets could be sexy before, but I was learning new things every day.
“You’re right,” he said, “it’s not so bad.”
“You jerk, you made me swallow a bunch of water. I’m probably going to get a disease or something.”
“It wasn’t me. It was my inner shark.”
“You could have killed me!” I said.
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
I splashed his face. I realized then that his feet touched the bottom and mine didn’t. I had to tread water the whole time. So I decided to grab onto him like a koala. He didn’t seem to mind.
“You know,” I whispered, “we probably don’t need a bed.” I kissed him, following a line from his lips to his cheek to his jaw, feeling the short, sharp hairs on it, then moving up to his ear, wishing I could kiss him all over his body.
“I was complaining,” he said, “but if this is what being drunk does to you, maybe I could get used to it.”
Thank you, alcohol . I told him I was in the mood to do something crazy, something that was a complete break with the person I had been before.
“You want to have sex in the lake?” he asked.
I kept kissing him, both lips, his neck, his chest. But when he came in for more, I pushed him back.
“I want to get a tattoo,” I said. “I was hoping you’d go with me.”
Jack’s smile froze on his face as his excitement drained away, and finally he managed to get out the words: “Are you fucking serious? I thought you wanted to…”
I climbed the ladder attached to the dock. The cold water had sobered me up completely, and I didn’t even sway or stumble on my way out. Jack followed me, still looking shocked.
“I’m not trying to be selfish, Jen, but most tattoo artists don’t work the night shift, and they usually turn away drunk eighteen-year-olds in soaking-wet clothes.”
“I can put on something dry. Plus, you probably know someone who can do it, right? There might be a reward in it for you afterward…”
I had been half-joking, but his eyes lit up. I think the idea of me doing something bad turned him on. He tossed me a towel and we walked over to the deck chairs and lay down.
“OK, maybe—let me repeat, maybe—the guy who did my back piece can help. He’s been my friend for a long time. But he might also tell me to go piss up a rope.”
“Can you try, Jack? Please, please, please, please, please?”
He frowned, dried himself off, and went inside to look for his phone.
I could hear his family laughing when they saw his wet clothes.
When he came back out, he was already talking on the phone.
He hung up, looking resigned to my little adventure, but he warned me, “This little lark of yours is going to cost you double the normal price.”
“No worries,” I said.
“Let me get this straight: You’ve complained about how you’re broke ever since I met you, and now all of a sudden you want to waste a pile of money on a tattoo?”
I responded, “I never told you I wasn’t a hypocrite.”
He smiled, shook his head, and asked, “Where the hell did this idea come from, anyway?”
“I don’t know, I’m just in the mood to do something ridiculous.”
I dried my hair as best I could and tiptoed up to my room to change clothes.
I asked to borrow one of his T-shirts. I don’t know what it was, but I just needed to wear something that smelled like him.
Without telling the others where we were going, we walked outside and got into his car.
He kept asking me if I was sure, if I knew what I was doing.
He told me he was worried I’d regret it the next day.
“Trust me, I’m never going to regret anything that happens tonight,” I told him.
An hour later, I found myself lying on what looked like a massage table with my T-shirt pulled up over my belly. The tattoo artist gave me a surprised look when he saw the bruise on my ribs, which was just starting to fade away.
“That must have hurt,” he said.
“It’s nothing compared to what the guy who did it has in store for him,” Jack assured him, grabbing my hand as the needle approached my flesh.
“I’ll tell you,” the artist continued, “I’ve been asked to do some strange things, but getting up at one in the morning to give a drunk chick a tattoo is pretty high on the list.”
“I’m not drunk,” I protested, and both guys looked at me as if to say, Yeah, right .
“Maybe I should get a new one, too,” Jack said. “I could get your name on my butt.”
“How romantic,” I replied, trying not to grimace as the tattoo gun moved across my flesh.
By the time we returned to the lake house, everyone was asleep.
We tried to walk silently up the stairs to his room.
As soon as I entered, I stopped in front of the mirror and lifted my shirt to look at my waist.
“You sure that was a good idea?” Jack asked.
“I like it,” I said.
“Copycat.”
“Loser.”
I’d gotten the same eagle he had on his back, but just above my hipbone.
“I guess if it gives me an excuse to get you to take your shirt off, I’ll deal with it,” he said.
I smiled and turned to wrap my arms around him.