Georgie, All Along (61)

Beside me, he stirs and huffs out a heavy, bored sigh, and I suppose I ought to go in. It’s been over two hours since I sent Georgie that text, and it’s fair enough that she’s ignoring it. My plan isn’t going to pan out, and I don’t deserve it to after the way I acted. It’s time I start thinking about other alternatives for how to explain what happened to me when Paul and Shyla had walked in on us the other night.

I’m standing from my chair when I hear her car coming down my drive, close already owing to that quiet engine she’s got. Hank abandons me, of course, because by now he’s well and truly sick of my shit, and by the time Georgie’s parked beside my truck, he’s barking out a greeting and turning in excited circles.

I swallow my nerves, turning my back and pretending I’m checking on a piling, as if a dock I built would ever have that sort of flaw. It occurs to me that I’d only been considering the disappointment I’d feel if she didn’t show; now I’m wondering if I’ll be worse off if I see her here and can’t convince her to stay.

“Levi Fanning,” she calls out, irritation in her voice, and soon enough I hear her feet stomping onto the wood of my dock, and dang, I love that sound. There’s nothing like it, the sound of steps on wood that’s built over water, even if they’re angry ones.

When I turn to face her, at first I think she’s come here in that robe I had my hands all over the other night, but as it turns out, it’s a dress—soft cotton, no sleeves, brightly patterned, long enough that it grazes along the boards. Her hair is a puffy, perfect red-orange halo around her face.

“You are something else,” she says, setting her hands on her hips. Beneath the bottom curve of her big sunglasses, her cheeks are flushed.

She’s pissed.

I open my mouth to speak, but she cuts me off. “After all that, you sent me a you up text?! At eleven a.m. on a Friday?”

“What’s a you up text?”

She shakes her head, mutters something that has the word backwoods or backward in it. Either way, it’s not real flattering to me.

“It’s a text you send when you want to see if someone’s up for . . . you know.”

“No,” I say, but I have a pretty good idea, what with the way she said “you know.”

“Levi,” she says, gusting a sigh that’s more irritated than Hank’s. I shouldn’t like it, but I do. Her saying my name that way—it’s the kind of annoyance that’s somehow knowing. As if she’s saying, Of course this is what Levi would say.

“It wasn’t a you up text. I don’t think.”

She raises her chin. “Well, forget it, either way. You bolted the other night.”

“I know I did. And I’m sorry.”

She drops her hands from where they were resting on her hips, her bare shoulders slumping, and part of me wants to tell her not to give me even this much, because I remember how she looked the other night, how I got quiet and her parents got loud, and how she seemed somehow to do both—smiling and talking with them but shrinking in on herself all the same.

But the other part of me is so disarmed by her softening posture that I lose sight of all the careful things I planned to say.

“I was embarrassed.”

“Yeah, well,” she scoffs, firming up again and crossing her arms over her chest, closing herself off. “Me too.”

I clear my throat, and immediately make it worse.

“I like to keep my nose clean around here.”

It is such a colossally wrong thing to say that Georgie uncrosses her arms, shoving her sunglasses on top of her head. She levels me with a glare.

“Are you kidding me?”

I know exactly what she means. I’ve made what we did together sound dirty, when it was pretty much the sweetest night I’ve ever had. That’s part of what I planned to tell her during all the practice talking I did with Hank, who’s probably glaring at me in disappointment.

“Let me try to explain. Please.”

She recrosses her arms, taps her foot beneath her. The posture might not be welcoming, but the sound grounds me enough to get started.

“You know I’ve got a reputation. You know I was trouble, back when I was younger. You haven’t wanted to say, but I know you know.”

She lets go of the glare.

“That was a long time ago,” she says, her voice softening. I remember that word again, expansive. Even when she’s trying to be closed, Georgie stays open, and it makes me want to protect her from anyone who’d take advantage, including myself.

“This place is full of people with long memories.”

She snorts, one side of her mouth quirking. “Tell me about it.”

“Sometimes,” I say, finally getting to the stuff I practiced, “Sometimes I think there’s not one person in the whole county I didn’t give some kind of hassle to. Vandalizing their property. Stealing out of their sheds. Starting a fight with their kids. Once, I broke into Bob Vesper’s house and stole all of the liquor he kept in his kitchen.”

“Bob Vesper was the sheriff.”

“I said I was trouble, not that I was smart.”

“You’re smart,” she snaps. Then she looks down and kicks off her sandals, her bare, wiggling toes peeking out from beneath the hem of her dress. This seems to satisfy her, and I like that, because it’s one of my favorite sensations, too—the bottoms of my feet on sun-warmed wood. Every once in a while, when I finish a job, I take off my boots and socks and walk the dock, doing the final test of its mettle.