Chapter 10
“It’s fucking freezing.”
Ethan blew out a puff of smoke from his contraband cigarette as they sat at the edge of the dock, watching the sun make its descent toward the horizon.
The sky was splashed in tones of purple, blue, and orange, the surface of the water reflecting the same colors.
The line blurred between the two, so it was almost indiscernible where one ended and the other began unless you focused on the land on the other side—small dark mounds that seemed far enough away as to be nonexistent.
Lost in his thoughts, and pretending to enjoy the cigarette he had stolen from his father’s stash, Ethan almost didn’t realize how quiet Gem was being.
It was early October, and the initial plan had been for Ethan to come up with his dad to winterize the cottage.
Normally Ethan avoided the task—it was too cold, pointless, boring—but this year, Gem had agreed to tag along, and suddenly it didn’t seem like a horrible idea.
Maybe it was because they had been promised a day off school to avoid the traffic on the drive home.
Or maybe, privately, in the dark corners of his mind, Ethan had to admit it was because he hadn’t seen Gem enough that summer—or at all, really.
She’d gotten a job that year that had continued into the summer months.
Ethan knew she’d been saving up to pay for college, and leaving for days or weeks at a time was simply not conducive to her goals.
Ethan had gotten a job as well. One he’d promptly quit once school had ended for the summer. He’d already saved up a decent amount in his mind, and his parents had promised to help out a bit when it came to schooling. Plus, college was still over a year away. He wasn’t stressed.
Hazarding a glance to his left, he worried that he couldn’t say the same about Julia.
She was sitting beside him in the flared fitted track pants that were popular among girls their age and an oversized sweater that he was pretty sure had belonged to him once upon a time, feet bare, with her flip-flops beside her.
He watched for a beat as she curled and uncurled her toes unconsciously, her eyes trained on the horizon.
“Earth to Gem? Hello?” He flicked the ash from his cigarette toward the water, blowing the smoke out of the side of his mouth.
She turned to him, her gaze snagging on the cloud of smoke dissipating in the air.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re sooo cool?” The sarcasm was half-hearted at best, not quite holding its usual bite. Still, her lip hooked up in a half smirk as she regarded him. “Just wait till I tell Susan.”
At the mention of his mother, Ethan almost stubbed out the cigarette then and there. “Don’t, you narc.”
She laughed, her face lightening, looking a bit like her old self and not the version of her that had gone somewhere else for a minute or two.
He didn’t want to spoil the moment, wanted her to remain carefree, laughing, looking as though she had no worries or stresses aside from the chill in the air and what she planned to do with her day off tomorrow, but the words slipped out of him anyway, unbidden.
“She probably wouldn’t even clue in to what you’re saying.
” The self-deprecating humor was there as always, clouded by a hint of bitterness.
He rarely raised the topic of his mom, especially not in front of Gem, with whom he tried to avoid the topic of moms altogether.
But sometimes it was too much for him to pretend, even for a little while, even for the sake of a joke, that she was an okay mom—the mom he remembered.
He knew she had been through a lot and that things hadn’t been easy on her.
Still, it was hard not to miss the version of her that had existed before—the one who laughed easily, who seemed to still believe in things turning out okay.
Julia, instead of offering platitudes or sympathy, simply shrugged.
“Maybe not,” she acquiesced, and they fell into silence again for a moment or two.
Then she held out her hand and gently pried the cigarette out from between his fingers, bringing it to her own lips and inhaling.
To her credit, only a couple of sputtering coughs came out with the puff of smoke she released, which she quickly subdued.
Grimacing, she handed it back to him, and he found himself grinning at her as he accepted it, finding her charming and endearing and all the soft things he never really associated with her.
Usually she was simpler than that for him—commonplace.
Familiar. But now she was more, she was almost…
Cute?
Before he could contemplate it any further, she was standing up and peeling off her—his?—sweater to reveal a white T-shirt underneath.
“I’m actually hot,” she said, a belated reply to his forgotten comment about how cold it was.
She was lying. He knew this because it was objectively cold out—it had to be about fifty degrees, if not colder, and although they weren’t weaklings in Buffalo, they did know a chill in the air when they felt it—and also because he was a seventeen-year-old boy, and the second her sweater came off, his eyes zeroed in on her breasts.
He wasn’t proud of it. In fact, if he could put a fine point on it, he might even admit to being downright ashamed. This was Julia! She wasn’t a woman to be ogled. She wasn’t even a woman in his mind. She was just…Gem.
And yet.
And yet at some point over the past few years, she’d gotten breasts. And at some point in the past few years, he’d begun to notice. And therein lay the dilemma.
He found himself swallowing hard—gulping, actually. Her nipples were visible through her shirt.
He looked away quickly, but it was too late. The damage had already been done.
He’d noticed.
They never really talked about classmates of the opposite sex or crushes.
There was something about it that felt awkward.
Almost taboo. Neither acknowledged whether the other felt that way, but simply by virtue of the way they both avoided it, it felt like an unspoken rule between the two of them, one of their only hard lines.
They had different friend groups at school, had almost none of the same classes, and hardly ever saw each other around the building, though they would exchange a glance or a nod if they happened to pass by each other in the halls.
He knew she had her crowd—skinny art kids, mostly, and more specifically that one guy, Nick, tall and black-haired, who liked to hang out around her.
And he had his crew—cringingly stereotypical, and yet he was unable to call them anything other than what they were: the popular crowd.
The athletes, the cheerleaders…He hadn’t necessarily meant to fall in with that group—and Gem loved to make fun of him for it every chance she got—but, well, he was really good at hockey.
Always had been. Spent his winters as a kid skating on the nearby ponds with a stick in his hand any chance he got.
And apparently being good at hockey in small-town western New York high schools meant that you quickly got moved to the top of the social food chain.
More than anything, hockey had been the one way he and his dad had bonded best. Frank hadn’t always known how to deal with his unhappy wife, who had wanted another child and couldn’t have one, or his best friend, whose own wife had run away, or his son, who seemed to bounce all over the place like the Energizer Bunny trying to find a place or an activity or a group of people where he fit in, but he did know how to deal with hockey.
He’d been the one to encourage and cultivate Ethan’s interest, buy him the equipment, take him to practices. And now, horror of horrors—
It had made Ethan popular.
Which meant that Ethan—tall for his age, muscular and lean thanks to a hockey diet prescribed by his father and then his coaches, with hair that was a bit overlong, flipping slightly over his ears in bronze waves—knew what it was like to capture the attention of girls.
And to be captured by them in equal measure.
To have their interest and their fawning and their attraction.
The same way he knew, without her saying it, that that Nick guy had Gem’s.
So neither of them was a fool or blindly inexperienced with the opposite sex.
They just didn’t spend their limited free time divulging information about it to each other.
Instead, they talked about everything else—their lives, their futures, their fears, their interests—with very little otherwise that was off limits.
Except now. Now she was sweaterless in front of him, wearing just a T-shirt in the cool autumn air that showed off the impression of nipples and the hint of a toned belly, and he couldn’t even remember a single example of all those important topics of conversation they usually indulged in.
And when she started to tug off her pants as well, he forgot his own name, too.
“What are you doing?” he blurted out, standing up and holding his arms out as though to try to—what? Stop her? Re-dress her? The cigarette fell from his extended fingers, and he had the wherewithal at least to stomp it out before turning his attention back to her.
“I’m going to jump in the water and go for a swim,” she responded, as casually as if she had said, I’m going to go back into the house to grab a drink.
Trying to forget for a moment that she was only partially dressed, he grabbed her by her shoulders in an attempt to talk some sense into her.
“Are you insane?” He gestured toward the lake, dark now with the deepening navy of the sky. “You are literally going to catch hypothermia and die.”
“First of all, you can’t catch hypothermia—”
“Get, catch, whatever!” He shook her slightly. “Don’t be crazy.”
Looking down for the first time, almost forgetting himself, he caught a glimpse of her legs, bare and prickled with gooseflesh, and her black cotton underwear, and he felt his body stiffen—in more places than one.