3. Tamra
TAMRA
The dress was wrong. I'd known it was wrong when I put it on, and I put it on anyway.
It was a sundress I bought two summers ago and never wore. It had thin straps and a tie at the waist and a hem that hit higher than I usually liked. It had been hanging in my closet for two years for the same reason I'd never gone hiking, never gone tubing, never come up the mountain.
It wasn't me. I was the woman in cardigans and long skirts. I was the librarian. I read at lunch.
I'd put on the dress and gone back up the mountain anyway, and I was paying for it now.
The open house had been running for two hours. Families had been coming and going since two o'clock, kids on the kids' line, parents at the grill—a steady cheerful afternoon noise I'd been photographing from the edges. I'd taken sixty pictures. The flyer would have what it needed.
What I needed was to leave.
I wasn't going to leave.
Alec had been working the whole time. He had a T-shirt on now—a faded gray one—and jeans, and a baseball cap pulled low. He moved from the platform to the grill to the family at the office and back without slowing down.
I'd watched him crouch to put a helmet on a six-year-old. I'd watched him laugh at something a dad had said. I'd watched him keep his eyes off me for two hours, and it had been louder than anything he could've said.
He looked now.
He was at the grill, taking a tray of buns off the flame, and he glanced up, and our eyes caught across the gravel lot. He held there a second, then came down off the porch step toward me with the tray in his hand.
He walked through the families. He came right to me.
"You haven't eaten."
"I've been taking pictures."
"You've been taking pictures for two hours. You haven't eaten."
He held the tray. He waited. He wasn't going to walk away until I took one.
I took one.
"There's water in the cooler on the porch," he said. "Drink some."
He went back to the grill. I stood there with a bun in my hand and watched him walk away. A woman my mother's age standing near me with her grandson looked at me and grinned. I felt my face go hot all the way to my collarbone.
"Honey," the woman said. "You're cooked."
"I'm fine."
"Drink the water."
I drank the water.
The afternoon wore on. The dog-day heat settled in heavy by four, and the families started thinning out—kids exhausted, parents loading coolers back into trucks, somebody's grandmother saying she'd never make it back down the mountain without a nap.
I packed up the camera. I was thinking about my keys.
I was thinking about the twenty-minute drive back to Hartsville and the apartment I would walk into and how I would sit on my couch in the wrong sundress and think about Alec Hollister until I went to sleep.
That last thought was so bleak I actually laughed at it.
"What?"
He'd come up behind me. I hadn't heard him.
"Nothing."
"That wasn't nothing."
"I was thinking about going home."
He looked at me.
He didn't say anything for a long moment. The last family was pulling out of the lot. The grill was down to embers. Jeb—I'd figured out which one was Jeb during the afternoon—was on the porch coiling an extension cord. The day had emptied out around us without my noticing.
"Don't go home," Alec said.
"I really should."
"Group's heading down to the swimming hole. Couple of locals, Jeb and his girl. We always go after the open house. Heat like this, you swim it off."
"I don't have a swimsuit."
"You're wearing a dress that'll dry in twenty minutes."
"Alec."
"Tamra."
He had not moved a foot closer. He'd stayed exactly where he was.
Yesterday he'd stood too close on purpose.
Today he'd stayed too far on purpose. I'd noticed both, and the second noticing made me realize he'd been careful with me all afternoon—the opposite of careful yesterday, and just as deliberate.
He hadn't touched me once. He hadn't stood too close to me in front of the families.
He'd held that line, and the line had been a courtesy.
I knew it because the line was about to come down.
"Come swim," he said. "An hour."
"An hour."
"After that, you can head home if you want."
I stared at him a long moment before finally saying, "Okay."
He didn't smile. He nodded once and went back to the porch to help Jeb finish up. I walked over to my car and set the camera bag in the back seat with hands I noticed were shaking. I pretended they weren't.
The swimming hole was a ten-minute drive on a gravel road off the back of his property.
I followed his truck. We came down a track through trees and out into a clearing where the river ran wide and deep against a granite ledge.
Three other vehicles were parked along the bank already, and I could hear people in the water before I could see them.
I parked next to Alec's truck.
He came around to my door before I opened it. He didn't open it for me. He just stood there. When I got out, he stepped back enough to give me the space to stand, and then he didn't step away again.
"You good?" he asked.
"I'm good."
He turned toward the bank. He pulled his T-shirt off over his head in one motion and threw it in the bed of his truck.
He kicked off his boots and pulled off his jeans, and he was in dark swim trunks underneath.
I made the mistake of looking, and his shoulders in the late-afternoon light were now permanently etched in my memory.
"You coming?" he asked.
"In a minute."
"Take your time."
He walked down the bank to the water. Jeb was there with a woman I assumed was his girl, and two other guys I'd seen at the open house, and they whooped when Alec came down.
Alec went into the water in a clean shallow dive that barely splashed and surfaced halfway across the pool. I stood by my car and watched him swim.
It took me four minutes to get to the water.
I left my sandals by the truck. I left the camera in the back seat. I walked down to the bank in the wrong sundress with the hem too high, and Jeb's girl waved at me. One of the other guys whistled, and Alec said something short and the whistling stopped. That's when I waded in.
The water was cold. So cold it shocked the heat right off my skin. I waded in to my hips and the dress floated up around my thighs, at which point I pushed it back down and laughed, because what else was I going to do?
Jeb's girl laughed with me. "First time?"
"First time."
"You're in for it."
She dove backward under the water and came up ten feet away with her hair slicked back. Alec was treading water on the far side of the pool, watching me. He had not come closer.
I went under.
I held my breath and let the cold close over me. When I came up, the heat was gone from my skin and my hair was heavy down my back, and I was a person I had not been this morning.
I looked across the pool at Alec.
He hadn't moved. He was watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before.
I swam to him.
I didn't plan to swim to him. I'd planned to stay near Jeb's girl, paddle along the bank…
basically act like a woman who hadn't just looked across the swimming hole at the hottest man I'd ever seen.
But my arms moved before my brain caught up, and I was already halfway to him when I realized what I was doing.
He caught me at the waist when I got there. One hand. He didn't pull me to him. He just steadied me, his palm warm against my skin in all that cold water. Every nerve ending I had went straight to where he was touching me.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi."
"I'm here."
"I see you."
"Alec?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know what I'm doing."
"That's all right."
"Is it?"
"Yeah, Tamra. It's all right."
His hand stayed at my waist. The current moved against us. The locals had drifted off to their own corners of the pool, and there was a stretch of water around the two of us that was just water and us in it.
"Alec?"
"Yeah?"
"Stay in the water with me. A little longer."
"As long as you want."
The sun was gradually lowering behind the ridge. The water went from gold to blue. Jeb's girl called something out and Jeb called something back and truck doors slammed up the bank. Alec didn't look at any of it. He looked at me.
The locals were leaving. Alec wasn't leaving. I wasn't either. The last of them called out a goodbye, and Alec lifted a hand, and just like that, they were gone.
We were alone in the water.
"You can still go home if you want to," he said.
"I know."
"Tell me what you want."
I put my hands on his chest in the water, feeling him against my palms. The cold and the heat of him and the heavy wet weight of my hair and the dress floating against my legs all happened at the same time.
I lifted my face to his and said, "I want to stay here with you."