Georgie, All Along (69)
Georgie lasts about thirty seconds before she fidgets again, this time poking me in the side. “Did you?” she whispers, louder this time.
I look down at her, the half of her face I can see cast in the slatted shadows made by the football field’s lone emergency light, filtering through the aluminum stands above us. I’ve been seeing Georgie Mulcahy’s face every single day or night since she showed up on my dock nearly two weeks ago, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve made a study of it. In the early morning, in my bed, she has pillow creases on her pale skin, and her freckles are less prominent, as if they’ve been sleeping, too. In the late afternoon, if I come home from work and find her sitting with Hank on the dock, her cheeks are flushed pink, her forehead and nose cast in the faint powdery white of the sunscreen she never rubs all the way in. In the evenings, her features are more alive than at any other time—her eyes big when she tells me something she did with Bel or her parents that day, her brows furrowed low with concentration when I tell her something about a job I’m working on, her lips soft and shiny when she wants me to kiss her. Tonight, when I can’t see her all that well, I’m grateful for all the looking I’ve been doing at other times.
“Leviiiiiiiii,” she says, poking me again.
“No,” I finally answer. “I was only testing you.”
She clucks her tongue and rolls her eyes, lifting her hands to tug at the straps of the old backpack I’m wearing.
“I don’t need a test,” she mutters, then gestures down at herself. “Look at me! Between the two of us, there’s only one who knows how to dress for criminal activity, and it’s not you, Levi Fanning.”
I’m not going to spoil Georgie’s fun and tell her that dressing in black boots, black leggings, a tight black turtleneck, and a black ball cap is actually not the way to dress when you’re about to do a criminal activity; my inconspicuous jeans and long-sleeved navy T-shirt are the better bet. Selfishly, I’m also not going to spoil the view I get when she wrestles the pack off my back and drops it to the ground, its contents clinking together as she bends over to unzip it.
“Now,” she says, flipping on her phone’s flashlight and aiming it down while she shoves a hand inside. “Bel wants hers done in the gold, so I’m going to start with that. Although, I didn’t ask if I should do the hyphenate as part of her initials. How do you think that would work, would I do A-R-Y for Annabel Reston-Yoon, and leave out her middle name? Oh, except her middle name is Iris, which means I need to include it! A-I-R-Y! That’ll be great. Why am I just now thinking of that? It’s so cute!”
I don’t say anything, because I don’t need to, not when Georgie is in this kind of mood. Back when I was staying with her at her parents’ place, I’d thought she was friendly, quick to talk, chaotic. Now that I’ve been with her, though—now that I’ve given in to all the ways I want her—I see all that plus more. I see how Georgie is always at her most expansive in moments like this: when she’s thinking about someone else, or learning about someone else, or doing something for someone else. At home with her mom, she’s been making dozens more of those tissue paper flowers while Shyla deals with a flare; they’re watching a Netflix series that Nadia directed, and Georgie says Shyla insists on stopping it regularly for Georgie’s “behind the scenes” scoops. Over at Bel’s, she’s helping with a baby memory book and she’s almost done with that junk room, plus, she’s gotten so good at making strawberry milkshakes that three days ago she brought one over to Ernie Nickel, insisting that he do a blindfolded taste test to see if he could tell the difference between hers and his. I get the sense there’s more—that she’s probably involved in all kinds of things over at The Shoreline, even though she doesn’t say a word to me about it. I don’t press her, but sometimes—like when she came over last night, cheerfully exhausted and wearing a different shirt than she usually wears for serving—I almost want to ask.
“Okay, what color do you want yours? I could do black, but green is more you, except green might be too school-spirit-y under the circumstances? Then again—”
“Georgie,” I say, and she looks up at me, lifting her chin extra high so she can see me over the brim of her hat. “Come here.”
“Nuh-uh.” She clutches the bag of spray paint and awkwardly scoots back. “I know that tone of voice.”
“What tone of voice?”
“You know what tone of voice,” she says, scolding. “The same one that got us here at two a.m. instead of midnight. You’re trouble, Levi.”
I grin, thinking about the moment Georgie came out of my bedroom dressed like a cat burglar. The only thing I don’t enjoy about those pants is how hard they were to peel off of her.
It should bother me, maybe, Georgie calling me trouble, should get me in the same place that’d sent me bolting out of her parents’ living room that night I almost lost my chance with her. But I like the kind of trouble I am with Georgie—I like keeping her up late and making her gasp in surprise; I like going to the hardware store and buying five cans of spray paint so she’ll have options for knocking another thing off her list.
She points a can at me now, and though I can’t see much of her eyes, I’ll bet they’re narrowed. “Don’t smile at me that way!”