They were out on the deck in the hopes the ocean breeze would give them some relief from the stuffy house. Roland stripped out of his shirt but the heat was still too much for him, so there was nothing left to do but throw himself into the ice-cold ocean. Allison followed him out to the beach where they’d both stripped to their underwear. Roland went straight to the water, not even pausing once to acclimate himself to the cold. She ran in after him, watching him dive like a dolphin into the lively waves. He stood up in the waist-high water to push his hair out of face and that’s when she’d noticed something about him she’d never noticed before. His biceps. Of course she’d known he had biceps. Everyone with arms had biceps. Even she had biceps, though her body was too soft to see any definition. But Roland had them. And triceps. Deltoids. All those muscles they’d studied in PE. Except in gym class, the muscles had looked like raw meat, but on Roland they were like...art. Like beautiful works of art, and when you saw beautiful works of art, you were supposed to stare at them, weren’t you? So she had stared.
She’d stared at the water running down his arms and over his shoulders as he stood up. She stared at the lingering droplets on his stomach and had this strange strong urge to lick them off him, which was bizarre because nothing tasted much worse on the tongue than ocean water. Deacon always called it “whale piss.” She’d stared so hard she hadn’t noticed the wave until it had knocked her under. Roland grabbed her quickly and pulled her out of the water and into his arms. Without thinking, she’d wrapped her arms and legs around him like she’d done a hundred times before, and he’d carried her out of the ocean. He dropped down onto the soft sand, her still in his arms.
When they hit the sand she’d had to straddle him or fall over. So she’d straddled his hips. And then she’d stayed there. There was no reason for her to stay on top of him as long as she did, and there was no reason for him to let her sit on top of him for as long he did. There was no reason for her to wrap her arms around his shoulders, and there was no reason he should let her kiss him. But she did and he did.
Allison had kissed him a million times before but this kiss was different. It wasn’t a pucker-upper sort of kiddy kiss, but she opened her lips a little against Roland’s and he must have, too, because she remembered feeling his breath inside her mouth. Some sort of instinct made her move a little on top of him. It wasn’t much, a mere shifting of her hips against his hips and then a second hard shifting after that. Roland moved once under her, then winced like it had hurt, though it hadn’t hurt at all when his hands lightly scoured the backs of her thighs. It lasted an eternity. It was over in two seconds. Without a word, he’d lifted her off him, dumping her onto the sand, and rolled onto his side away from her.
Lying there, under the hot sun, she told herself she was shaking and quivering because of the wave that had knocked her over. She willed Roland to face her and say something. When he didn’t, she’d rolled over toward him. She’d studied his long lean back, the line of his spine, the smooth skin caked with sand. With her fingertips she counted his ribs—one, two, three, twelve on the left; one, two, three, twelve on the right. It had never felt wrong to touch him before and yet it did now. And yet she still did it. Until he stood without warning and started back to the house.
“Better get cleaned up before everybody gets home,” Roland had said. He wasn’t looking at her as they walked. His head was down, his eyes on his feet.
“Okay,” she’d said. She’d agreed without argument, though there was literally no reason to get cleaned up before everyone got home. Nobody would have cared that they’d dunked themselves in the ocean. That wasn’t against the rules. But there was one ironclad rule in the house, and that rule was that the boys should never touch the girls and the girls should never touch the boys. Not touching like hand-holding or playing tag. But touching touching. Kissing and touching. Grown-up sorts of touching. And that’s what she and Roland had done on the beach. They’d broken that rule. She’d broken that rule.
Allison had grabbed a sandy stiff beach towel off the deck and wrapped it around her before heading to the deck door.
“Allison,” Roland had said. Usually he called her “Al” or “kid.” Why all the syllables all of a sudden? She’d looked at him, towel clutched to her body, and waited. “No more white T-shirts in the water, okay?”
Allison had flushed red to the roots of her hair. She’d stammered something along the lines of “Oh, right,” and then fled into the house. In the bathroom, she’d locked the door behind her before looking in the mirror. Deacon’s old T-shirt she’d thrown on so thoughtlessly clung to her body, the outline of the most private parts of her body showing through. If she could see it, Roland had seen it. Allison had brothers. She understood what had happened.
As an adult, she knew it was hardly breaking news when a sixteen-year-old boy got an accidental erection from an adolescent girl in a white wet T-shirt squirming on top of him. As a child, however, she’d been mortified, ashamed and grief-stricken, like she’d broken something between them that could never be fixed.
“I can’t believe it...” she breathed. “I’d forgotten all about that day. Completely forgotten.”
At the water’s edge they stood side by side, precisely in the same spot where it had happened. He’d brought her there to remember, and she had remembered. The memory—so long forgotten—hit her like a wave, and like a wave it left her cold and shaking and wet.
“I always worried it was... I thought that was the reason you didn’t come back.” The solemn, stricken look on his face hurt her worse than hate would have.
“God, no.” She waved her hands in denial. “No, Roland, absolutely not. What happened that day... No, that was not why I haven’t come back before, I swear. I can’t believe you thought that.”
His shoulders slumped in obvious relief.
“I was sixteen and you were twelve,” he said.
“Nothing happened,” Allison said. “Nothing. Yes, I freaked out afterward but that was from embarrassment, not... I don’t know, trauma?”
“I know what a kid freaking out looks like. This was different,” Roland said.
“Was it? I don’t remember much after that day,” she said, realizing as she said it that that day, that incident, was the last thing she remembered from her final summer at The Dragon.
“What do you remember?”
“I remember the wave hitting me,” she said. “I remember you carrying me to the beach and not letting me go even after I was safe. I remember kissing you and, after, you telling me not to wear white T-shirts in the water anymore. I remember running to the bathroom to cry. After that day, it’s all a blank. But that’s... I’m sure that’s because of the fall. I’m the one who was grinding on top of you, not the other way around.”
“I might have done a little grinding,” he said, wincing.
“It was, like, three seconds,” she said. “And I was on top.” She’d hoped the joke would bring back his smile but it didn’t.
“You really don’t remember anything after that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Nothing,” she said. “What did I do?”
“You blanked me. Completely. I tried to talk to you about it, to make sure you were okay, and you wouldn’t say a word to me. You’d hide in your room when I was around.”
“Sounds like a very typical twelve-year-old-girl reaction to extreme humiliation.”
“I hoped that’s all it was, but I never knew for sure. When Dad said your aunt was taking you home to live with her because of your accident... I don’t know. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling it had something to do with me.”
Allison couldn’t believe she’d forgotten that day, that moment with Roland. Her first kiss. And with Roland of all people. What other lovely and terrible memories had her