9. Ivy
nine
Ivy
Russ announced it somewhere between the mashed potatoes and Annie's peach cobbler last night. Saturday had eaten our scheduled day off, and operational needs being what they are, Monday is ours instead.
The whole table reacted like Russ announced a national holiday.
“Alder Lake,” Tessa said, before he'd even finished the sentence.
Nobody argued.
That's how I end up hauling chairs out of the truck bed at nine in the morning, shoulders aching, legs still stiff from a full day of fire line work on Saturday.
Everyone else looks about the same. Tessa's moving like she slept wrong on every part of her body.
Reid rolls his neck and winces. Even Beck, unloading a cooler, has the careful, deliberate movements of someone whose muscles have filed a formal complaint.
None of it stopped anyone from being at the lake today.
I've had a day to recover from Saturday, and I have.
Mostly. The physical part was easy. The other part is proving slower to shake.
There's still a small, persistent part of my brain that keeps circling back to the couch, falling asleep against Beck's shoulder for the better part of an hour.
The fact he never woke me. He could have.
He had every opportunity. Instead he sat there, apparently content to be furniture, until I woke up on my own.
The cat excuse doesn't really hold up. I remember what happened after I stood. He moved her to the couch and got up, like sitting there had not been about the cat at all. I decide not to think about that too hard. Which is, of course, what I'm doing.
We settle into our usual spot. Towels, coolers, an unreasonable amount of sunscreen, and enough snacks to survive a small siege.
Tessa's already eyeing the rope swing. “We are not doing round two of last time,” she tells Nolan.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were thinking it.”
He was. Everyone knows he was.
Beck settles onto a towel near Reid, already part of the landscape. A week and a half ago he was a guest sleeping on our floor. Now nobody treats him like one. Nobody asks if he wants to help with the coolers. He just does. Nobody explains where the sunscreen is. He already knows.
Everyone spends the first hour floating on tubes and splashing each other.
Cassidy brings up whether Reid is allowed to dunk people without warning.
He is not, according to everyone but Reid.
I drift near Tessa for a while, half listening to her complain about her shoulders, half watching Beck across the water where he's got Nolan in a headlock over some joke I missed.
I like the sound of him laughing. I like watching him fit into the crew.
Eventually Nolan climbs out, shakes water off like a dog, and announces his intentions to the group. “I'm redeeming myself.”
“Oh, good,” Tessa says. “We were worried you'd forgotten.”
“I haven't forgotten. I've been thinking about it. I have a plan.”
His plan, once he explains it, involves releasing earlier than last time, which prompts immediate and conflicting advice from everyone.
“Release later,” Reid says.
“No. Earlier,” Cassidy says.
“Don't think about it,” Trevor offers.
“That seems like the opposite of a plan,” Nolan says.
“Ignore Reid,” I add. “That's the one piece of advice you actually need.”
Nolan finally tells everyone to be quiet, takes the rope, backs up, and runs.
This time, he lets go.
It's not spectacular. It's not going to win a competition. But he releases clean, drops feetfirst, and comes up grinning like he's won something enormous.
“Six,” Dani calls.
“SIX?” Nolan responds.
“Solid form. Minimal splash. Room for improvement.”
“I redeemed myself, and you're giving me a six?”
“Seven,” Beck offers generously.
“Thank you, Beck.”
“You're still four points behind Ivy's personal best.”
“I don't care about Ivy's personal best.”
“You should,” I call from my tube. “It's excellent.”
Nolan swims back to shore muttering about corrupt judges, but he's smiling, which tells me the redemption worked regardless of the score.
The volleyball comes out not long after, and teams start forming with the usual chaos. I drift toward one side. Beck starts toward the same side.
“No,” Dani says, before either of us gets there. “You two aren't on the same team.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“You already won the pool-noodle championship together. It's not fair to the rest of us.”
“That seems arbitrary,” Beck says.
“It's evidence-based.”
Nobody argues with Dani when she uses that tone, so Beck and I end up on opposite sides of the net. I don't think about it too hard until the game starts, and I realize what it means. I have an excellent, unrestricted view of him for the next thirty minutes.
He's good. Not showing off good, just genuinely coordinated, the kind of athleticism that comes from using his body for a living instead of a gym. He dives for a ball that has no business being save-able, digs it anyway, and pops back to his feet before anyone else has finished being surprised.
“Lucky,” I call across the net.
“Skill.”
I spike the next point directly past him, and he throws both hands up in mock outrage.
“That felt personal,” he says.
“It was.”
“Noted.”
The game settles into an easy rivalry, the kind where nobody's really trying to win so much as trying to make the other person laugh while losing. Reid heckles everyone equally. Nolan takes his own performance far too seriously for a casual game, diving for balls that were never his to dive for.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Beck goes up for another impossible save, gets it, and comes down laughing at something Reid says, brushing sand off one arm, sunlight catching the moisture on his shoulders, turning an ordinary guy laughing at a joke into something closer to a problem.
I've seen him without a shirt before. That's not new information.
Somehow it still gets my attention, and I forget, for one costly second, that I'm supposed to be playing volleyball.
The ball comes back over the net.
Toward me.
Tessa and Reid realize I’m not moving for the ball. They dive and collide into each other in a tangle of limbs, the ball bouncing uselessly away while they end up in a heap on the ground in the sand.
I look at them. “Interesting trajectory.”
Tessa freezes mid-untangle, then points at me. “That was your ball.”
“I wanted to see how fast you two could react.”
“And?” Reid asks, still on the ground.
“Room for improvement.”
When the game resumes, I risk a glance across the net.
Beck's looking right at me, one eyebrow raised, like he's asking a question he doesn't plan to say out loud.
I can't tell if he's amused by Reid and Tessa, or if he saw why I missed that ball in the first place.
I decide the safest possible course of action is intense, unwavering focus on the volleyball for the remainder of the game.
My team wins in the end. I get the final point, a clean spike Beck almost gets to but doesn't. I make sure he sees how pleased I am about it. I throw both arms up and turn a slow, deliberate circle so he gets the full view.
“Rematch,” he says, hands on his hips.
“You lost.”
“That's generally why people ask for a rematch.”
“I'll think about it.”
“Take your time. I'm not going anywhere.” He says it lightly.
Overheated from the game, we drift back into the water. Reid claims the flamingo tube, right up until Dani shoves him off and into the water without so much as a warning. He surfaces sputtering, and the flamingo drifts away triumphantly with nobody on it.
I float in my tube for a while, half listening to Nolan relitigate his rope-swing score with anyone who'll engage.
Tessa floats near me for a bit. “Need a pillow?” she asks innocently.
I splash her.
“I'll take that as a yes.”
I let it go, mostly because I don't have a good response ready. I float in silence for a while, watching Beck a little farther out. He's not looking at me. He's just laughing at something Trevor said. I watch him a moment too long and finally admit what the problem is.
I like that he gave Nolan a generous seven out of pure kindness. I like that he sat for an hour with a sleeping cat and a sleeping me and didn't seem to mind either one. I like … him.
By the time we're packing up, gathering towels and dragging coolers back toward the trucks, I've stopped pretending I don't know what's happening.
Beck takes one end of the cooler I'm carrying without asking, the same way he helps with everything.
“Still want that rematch,” he says.
“I’ll think about it.”
We carry the cooler between us, the kind of small, ordinary teamwork that shouldn't mean anything, but does. It used to be easy to let Beck go every summer, because there was never much to hold onto. A few days. A crush I could set down the second he left town.
There's nothing easy about it this time. The problem was never that Beck was nice to look at.
The problem is that I like him. All of him. And he may not be leaving anytime soon.