Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(53)

“Wow. First Robin, now you.” I shook my head. “Don’t worry. I’m hoping for an improvement.”

“Actually, Robin’s saved me the effort of worrying.” That ready grin made another appearance. “Knowing him, he has the sympathetic ear and well-meaning advice angle covered, so maybe I can just coax you to let it go and have fun with me for an evening.”

I couldn’t help but grin back. “That sounds awesome, but I’m kind of already committed. Barbecue. Fireworks. You know.”

“I wasn’t inviting you back to my room.” He cocked his head in a quick, offhand shrug. “Yet. But that guy at the beach? The one I danced with? The one I spoke to by the pool? You think he might want to come out and play for a bit?”

God, that sounded good. Jace and I had fallen into such easy, effortless sync that night of my birthday. Flirting. Teasing. Talking with the sort of comfort that came with much longer acquaintance. I would love to feel that way again—alive and wild and carefree. I didn’t think I’d relaxed completely since Memorial Day, when everything had gone crazy.

If not for Brendan, I would do it.

“I can try.” I ducked my head. “Things are a little weird for me today, so I might get tense once in a while, but I can try.”

“Excellent.” He grabbed the fruit platter and tipped his head toward the French doors. “Let’s take this outside. I think the burgers are ready. Then I can tell you all about me until you’re ready to talk about yourself again.”



It was a paradox. Is that what it’s called? A no-win situation when the thing that is supposed to solve a problem turns out to be impossible due to other complications arising from the original problem, leaving you back at the beginning with the problem unsolved?

So, for those of you keeping score at home:

The point of all this—the problem—was to behave as normally as I could so that Adele and Mo wouldn’t clue in to the fact that anything had happened between Brendan and me. The way to solve that problem was for me to actually behave as though nothing had happened. But if I did that, I would be flirting with Jace like no one’s business.

Now, however, even if I could have relaxed enough to flirt with Jace, the overly empathetic part of me cringed at the idea of Brendan’s feelings being hurt by seeing it (after all, the guy had liked me enough to make some rather impressive offers, no matter how insulting they had been). I was afraid that it would come off as petty, as though I were trying to rub his face in it or something. So I couldn’t flirt with Jace, at least not with as much conviction as I would otherwise have had. Therefore I couldn’t behave as though nothing had ever happened between me and Brendan, which meant I was still in danger of doing something to trigger weirdness that would give the whole damn thing away.

Exhausting, right? This was what it’s like to be in my head. All the damn time.

Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—Jace didn’t get the memo that there was a paradox-like thing twisting itself into knots around us. He was determined to drag the playful, flirty, slightly slutty Topher he’d once met out onto the dance floor, so to speak. Since I’d promised to try to relax and enjoy things a little, I couldn’t exactly tell him to cool it. And frankly, I didn’t want to. Damn it, Mo might not know the whole story, but she had a point about punishing myself. Was I supposed to take vows of chastity and self-denial to atone for my affair with Brendan? Just how long did I have to keep to myself in order to prove (to who? Who was going to care, anyway?) that I was really, really sorry for what had happened?

Still, I pitied Brendan. He really didn’t look like he was enjoying the party. I knew Robin, Geoff, and Ling had all tried to engage him in conversation, but he always ended up sitting quietly, sipping his drink, listening to the conversation but not talking to anyone.

“Don’t worry about Dad,” Mo murmured, catching me darting another concerned glance at him. On the other side of me, Jace and Geoff were regaling the rest of us with art school stories. “He’s really introverted. He doesn’t like crowds to begin with, so he gets pretty burned out during the school year and basically becomes a hermit in the summer if he doesn’t have any courses to teach. If I’d realized how much he was counting on not having to deal with people this summer, I probably wouldn’t have suggested making this a party today.”

I wished I could believe that was all. Maybe it was self-absorbed of me to assume his reticence had to do with me. So far he hadn’t done a single thing to indicate he was even aware of me in any unusual way. At least his introversion gave him the perfect cover. If he wasn’t normally outgoing, no one would think it strange if he was withdrawn today.

So that left only my behavior in question.

I nodded and went back to listening to stories about Jace trolling his roommates with sculptures of “ahem, questionable artistic value” in embarrassing places, and afterward we got a story about Geoff trying to find an apprenticeship with a tattoo artist, which was right about the time Jace’s hand brush the small of my back again.

“My designs were fine,” Geoff was saying, “but the big problem was that I didn’t have any tats myself. It’s a thing in the tattoo community, it shows you know what it’s like on the other end, and it also demonstrates commitment. So no one would take me seriously.”