CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(24)
I nodded a greeting as I set the water bottles on the counter and handed over my money.
“You know the Gentry triplets?” she asked as she painfully counted out my change, all in nickels. “Saw you hanging around with them last night.”
“Sure,” I smiled proudly. “They’re my cousins.”
Ebbie frowned. She dropped the nickels into my palm. They felt sticky. “Thought they were f*cking kings in high school,” she muttered as her lazy eye roamed the potato chip display.
“Oh,” I said. It was a rather useless syllable but there was really nowhere else to go from there. I started to pocket the nickels, then changed my mind and dropped them into one of those plastic collection boxes that promise to cure childhood diseases. Then I grabbed my water bottles and left as Ebbie Crack stared in several directions at once and flared her nostrils.
Once I was outside I downed a bottle of water in about six seconds. A pair of girls, babyish freshman types, passed me and tittered.
“Hi, Conway,” one of them giggled.
“Hi,” I answered. I was pretty sure I’d never noticed either of them in my life.
The Emblem pool was right next to the high school, which was one of the few good looking buildings in Emblem. It was all brick with white trim, an architecture utterly mismatched to the southwestern stucco and adobe of the rest of the town. I could get to the pool in five minutes by crossing to the other side of Main Street right here and cutting through the back parking lots. But in order to do that I’d have to pass by Earnshaw’s Drugstore, where my mother worked. It wasn’t like I thought she’d coming running out to screech at me on the street, but the idea that she would be glaring at me from somewhere within as I passed the wall of glass windows was just too much to take. Instead I stayed on this side of Main Street and waited to cross at the single traffic light.
There’s nothing worse than what you come from.
My fists clenched. I wished there was a way to safely remove certain moments from your memory. That one would haunt me, of that I had no doubt. Still, it was the closest Tracy Gentry had ever come to admitting out loud that the question of my paternity, and Stone’s, was up for grabs. I wondered if my cousins had ever heard the rumors that we might be more than cousins. Maybe one day I would get around to asking them about it.
The pool was crowded already. Somewhere along the way I’d kind of lost my enthusiasm for swimming. Plus now that my head was cooler I regretted snapping at Erin. She’d apologized for her comments about Stone and when Erin said she was sorry she meant it. I shouldn’t have gotten all irritated that she didn’t want to tag along to the pool today. The girl had a right to keep some time to herself without explaining it to me.
Anyway, at this point I didn’t much feel like hanging out with the belly floppers and the doggie paddlers and the sun bathing attention seekers, but hell, I’d walked all the way down here. And it was hot. Might was well take a dip and cool off.
I quickly shed my shirt and shoes and dove into the deep end, shooting like a torpedo beneath kicking legs and flailing arms as I traveled near the floor of the pool. By the time I reached the concrete wall on the other side my lungs were bursting so I moved to a shallow area to catch my breath. I relaxed and closed my eyes. I liked being here. The pool was in need of a lot of expensive repairs but I felt happy here. This was almost the exact spot I’d been hanging out in two years ago when the girl next door strode casually into the water and got my attention. She’d kept it ever since.
Thinking of Erin and about the pool led to thoughts of Erin in the pool. That led to thoughts of Erin in a bikini. Which led to thoughts of Erin without a bikini. Which of course led straight to a stiff boner.
I flattened my back against the concrete wall of the pool and crouched in the water, trying to tame my own mind and body. Some little kid in green goggles and a duck-shaped donut float paddled by and I felt like a high-ranking pervert, cowering in the Emblem public pool with my dick at full salute.
I managed to shove away thoughts of my naked girlfriend. It wasn’t hard, mostly because I’d never actually seen her naked. Erin was shy. To me, it was part of her charm. In fact I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen her in a bikini. Generally if she came swimming she kept her t-shirt on, complaining that the sun was too strong.
I had just managed to tamp down the fire in my shorts and was hanging out there minding my own business when Kasey Kean sidled up to me.
“Hi, Con-man,” she said with a head tilt and a brilliant smile that she probably practiced in front of a mirror at least four hundred times a day.
“Hey, Kase,” I said, friendly but not overly enthusiastic, careful to keep my eyes away from the bobbing boobs that were barely contained by her American flag string bikini top. I’d known Kasey since kindergarten. She was okay but since I’d also hooked up with her in a major way before I got together with Erin I made a habit of keeping my distance from her.
Kasey, on the other hand, seemed determined to close that distance. Right now.
“Erin not here today?” she asked with fake honeyed sweetness as she glanced around and floated to my side.
“Nope,” I shook my head, staring at the water, at my own feet, anywhere but at the display of supple, suntanned skin that was only inches away. “Not today.”
“You guys have a fight?”
Goddamn, girls were f*cking supernatural sometimes. I felt myself flinch at the question. No, Erin and I hadn’t fought. Not exactly. But I didn’t like how we’d left things. We weren’t one of those couples, the ones who barked at each other and sulked and endured epic break up soap operas. We weren’t one of them because what we had was better than what the rest of them had.