Hawk (A Stepbrother Romance #3)(10)

It took three more days.

Alex was furious the next time I saw her: She wasn't allowed in at the hospital, my father left instructions to keep everyone out, even my mom's family. When I saw Alexis I just cracked, I lost it. Full on wailing, crying into her stomach for hours. Thinking back it still gives me a twinge of embarrassment, but she never said a word, never complained, she just put her arms around my head and we laid there on her bed and for once her mom didn't throw me out when it got dark. In fact, that night, I didn't get home until almost eleven, and no one seemed to care. I didn't talk to Lance for a month and my father…

There was something off about my father. There was always something off, but then I was sure of it. I could smell it. Something in the air, in my house.

A year later I was ready to get this all over with. I was supposed to meet up with Alex that night, and I had something important to talk to her about. She was getting ready to leave town; she had a scholarship at the University of Delaware and all her ducks in a row, everything paid for but her books and even a living stipend. She was going to move out of the shitty little apartment she shared with her mother and sister above the shoe repair place on Commerce Street.

I had something really, really important to tell her. Thinking about it now I feel awkward and stupid. Why didn't I just say it?

The bell rang a minute late, or the clocks were off. At the time, I really didn't care. Alex would be on her way home. Normally I'd walk with her and then head home myself, but that day I left the high school for the nearly last time (there was still a graduation ceremony in two weeks) and went straight home. The whole way I fretted over what I was going to say, how I was going to say it.

The Friday before we went to the water park something was different.

I remember it perfectly, even the smell. The air smelled like ozone behind the school, like the calm before a storm. Two-thirds of the seniors were going on the trip on nine busses, an almost four-hour ride to Dorney Park. It's not there anymore. Everyone was looking forward to it all year. We left at seven in the morning, and I was there at six thirty. Alex met me halfway to school and we walked together like we did almost every day, not really saying anything, not really needing to. She had a backpack and she was wearing shorts and a loose t-shirt, and the knot of her bathing suit top poked out behind her collar, a big blue bow tied with thin strings. She was tanned up as usual from spending every free moment outdoors, her skin a rich honey color, almost the same shade as her hair.

"You ready for this?" she asked.

"I was born ready."

There was something odd and coy in her voice, a hint of a smirk that wasn't there before.

Alex was always upbeat, but the last two years had been hard on us. First she lost her father, then I lost my mother.

I think we both needed a day like this. I know the last year school was almost a haven; for the first time in my life I wanted to go, or at least wanted to go for reasons beyond seeing Alex.

It hit me as we were checking in with the chaperones and picking up our bus assignments. Alex had swapped hers to make sure we were on the same bus.

We were both… adults. We'd both turned eighteen not long before, me in May and her in January. I felt weird looking at her. It was like I could see her as she was and all that she had been, back to the first time we met in third grade, in Mrs. Vanderburg's class. Standing out in the blazing heat of the morning waiting for the bus doors to open so we could rush inside, it hit me for the first time really how beautiful Alexis is. She was awkward when she was a teenager, long coltish legs, always scratched up and bandaged because she was so clumsy, skinny and lean, but in the last year or so she'd… changed. Flowered, maybe.

I'm a real warrior poet here.

We were among the first to get on the bus and we took a seat to ourselves at the back. It was blessedly cool inside. When I was a kid they took us on field trips on regular buses, no air or anything, but they must have changed a law or something, because we rode fancy motor coaches on any longer trip from then on. I settled up against the window and Alex slipped in next to me.

It was a long ride. They had a movie playing on a tiny monitor up front but we couldn't hear it.

Alexis fell asleep on the way up, and her head fell on my shoulder.

For some reason, I was mortified, but nobody cared. There was something else I noticed, like it was the first time ever.

It was, ah, cold on the bus that day.

Alexis didn't wake up until we got off the interstate, and we chatted about rides and things until the bus came to a stop at the park and we got off.

The next thing I remember the most vividly is when we went to the wave pool. There was a water park there but we spent most of the morning on the other rides-roller coasters, and such.

We changed to swim. For me, it was easy. I just took off my shirt. Alex went into the bathhouse and had to lock her stuff up and wear a key on a little elastic band around her wrist.

When she walked out into the sunlight it set off something in my head.

I'd seen Alexis in a bathing suit before. Lots of times. We used to swim at the pond up at the game lands, swim at the pool at the YMCA before it closed, swim in people's pools. I'd never seen her wear a two-piece before. A bikini. It wasn't particularly risqué or anything, it just bared her midriff and showed a lot of cleavage, more than I'd ever seen her show before, even at the prom. I stared at her. Then she went into the water. It was one of those big, artificial wave pools. She ducked under the first wave and came up sopping wet, water running down her back in big drops and streaming from her hair, and she turned around and swam back into the water and looked back at me.