Something Like Normal(22)

“What happens when they reach the water?” I ask. “There’s a whole new set of predators there we can’t do anything about.”

Harper laughs. “It almost sounds like you care.”

“Do you think I’d be sitting out here on a beach in the middle of the night if I didn’t?”

She lets go of my hand, her expression impossible to read, and unzips her backpack. The sound is magnified by her silence. She takes out a clipboard. “I need to keep notes.”

The first little turtle is flipping his way down the trench and I can’t help but like the little dude. Or girl. I wonder how you tell. “Do you name them?”

Harper keeps her eyes trained on her notes. “That would be too many turtles to name.”

I nudge her with my elbow. “But you do, don’t you?”

“No.” The corner of her mouth twitches and I know she’s lying.

“Yes, you do. Admit it.”

“Travis?”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

I turn to protest, but she reaches up and touches her fingers to my lips. I’m not sure what’s happening, so I shut up. Harper’s hand moves to the back of my neck and pulls my head down until our faces are mere inches apart. “This is probably going to be a mistake,” she whispers, before she presses her mouth to mine.

Kissing Harper is different from kissing Paige. For one thing, Harper doesn’t taste like Marlboro Lights. I don’t have to bend down so far. She fits better against me. And, Jesus, she’s a good kisser. So good I want to beat the hell out of whoever taught her.

She’s probably right about this being a mistake, but right now? I don’t care.

“We, um—we should be watching the turtles.” She’s breathless and doesn’t sound at all convinced. I cast a glance over the edge of the tarp. The first two turtles have left the nest and a third—no, a third and fourth are pushing their way up through the sand.

“We should.” The apple scent of her hair tangles around my brain as my lips brush her neck. She shivers in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature, and it pleases me in a way I can’t even explain. This time, I kiss her.

“Travis.” The clipboard comes up between us, killing the moment. I don’t want to let go, but I do.

“I know.” I tap the end of her nose with my finger. “I’ll go check on Alpha.”

“Alpha?”

“The first turtle,” I say. “That’s his name.”

She beams at me and it’s almost enough to make up for the fact that I’m harder than trigonometry right now. Almost.





Chapter 6

It’s full-on morning when Harper drops me off at home. Well beyond the sneaking-in hours, past breakfast, and eighty-seven baby sea turtles later. We stopped naming them after Zulu.

“I hope the one we called Juliet is a girl,” I say. “Or he’s going to have to face the next hundred fifty years being ridiculed by all the other turtles.”

She smiles. “Shut up.”

I kiss her for the first time since the first time. It doesn’t seem strange to me that we spent most of the night not kissing. It’s also not jump-in-the-backseat making out. It’s just… good. Really, really good. “See you later, Charley Harper.”

I don’t tell her I’ll call her, because it would be a cliché. But I already know I will.

“Travis? Is that you?” My mom’s voice drifts down from upstairs as I come through the front door. I find her in my room, taking a dark blue thermal shirt from a paper shopping bag. My bed is so thick with bags I can’t even see the comforter.

“What’s all this stuff?”

“Well, we never went shopping, so I thought I’d pick up a few things for you to wear. I got the sizes from your uniforms.” She’s babbling, nervous I’m going to hate the things she bought. It’s not an unfounded fear. We have history like that. “If there’s anything you don’t want, I can take it back. And I bought you the shoes we never got around to buying.”

“Thanks.” I peer into a bag filled with plaid button shirts from one of those pretentious, prewrinkled stores in the mall. Shirts Ryan wears. I could put them on and they’d look fine, but this fake vintage stuff is not me. The last time she bought me clothes from that store, I complained about how it was manufactured in a sweatshop and refused to wear it. That was me back then, spouting statistics I read on the Internet and thinking I was making a difference in the world. “Did you buy the whole mall?”

Relief fills her face and she laughs. “I did go a little overboard, but—I don’t know. I just felt as if maybe you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” I say. “But if we take some of these clothes back, you could use the money for that school supplies thing you were talking about.”

I haven’t turned into some rabid do-gooder Boy Scout, but spending seven months living around people who live in mud huts and don’t have indoor plumbing has changed my perspective a little. I don’t need this much stuff. Especially when I’m going back to Lejeune in a few weeks and then back to Afghanistan next spring.

“That is a very good idea.” She holds up the blue thermal and makes a what-do-you-think-of-this-one? face. I nod and she starts removing the tags. “Have you been out all this time?”