99 Days(63)

I look at our faces in the photo, grinning and silly. I smile at the screen in reply.





Day 70


I’m looping the lake early the following morning, legs burning and swallowing giant mouthfuls of air, when I spy a familiar figure heading in the opposite direction. “We gotta stop meeting like this,” I tell him as he slows to greet me, and Patrick raises his eyebrows.

“It’s early,” he says, and it is, still—the sky just getting light around the edges, all that smudgy pink and gray. It’s going to be nice out today. I can hear the waking calls of the birds up in the pine trees.

“Uh-huh.” I nod as he falls in step beside me, him doubling back in the direction he came from. The back of my warm, damp hand brushes his for a moment before he takes it, lacing his fingers through mine.

“Patrick,” I tell him, low and warning. It occurs to me that possibly we aren’t meeting here by chance.

Patrick ignores me. “You know what we haven’t done yet?” he asks instead, grinning like a little kid with a secret.

“I can think of a lot of things,” I retort without thinking, and Patrick tilts his head like, Fair enough, before inclining it toward the placid surface of the lake, morning-tranquil and empty. Right away I pick up what he’s putting down.

“No way.” It’s a thing we used to joke about constantly, half-kidding and half-serious—both of us testing each other’s boundaries or something, both of us feeling it out. Neither one of us ever called the bluff. “I’m not skinny-dipping in this lake with you right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not on Dawson’s Creek! Like, to start with.”

“And to end with?”

“Shut up.”

“You don’t have to take everything off,” he tells me.

“Oh, how generous of you,” I snap, and Patrick wrinkles his pretty nose.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” he says, a flash of flinty anger in his deep gray eyes. “I’m not some gross guy who wants to—” He breaks off.

Get naked with his brother’s girlfriend? I almost supply. Not like we’re not both thinking it. On top of which Patrick is that guy, clearly. He’s exactly that guy.

And I guess I’m exactly that girl.

He can feel me considering it, he knows me that well; we’ve stopped moving entirely, standing here beside somebody’s rotting old dock. There’s not a soul here to stop us. There’s not a soul here to know. “Mols,” Patrick says, and his voice is so quiet. “Get in the water with me.”

I look at him for a moment. Then I sigh.

“I’m not losing all my clothes right now,” I tell him firmly.

“Noted.” Patrick nods.

“And neither are you.”

That makes him laugh. “Noted.”


We don’t talk a whole lot as we pull our various clothes off, my shorts and tank top and Patrick’s T-shirt hitting the weathered wood of the dock in a cascade of quiet swishing. All I want in the world is to stare. My heart is thudding away inside my chest, the animal build of anticipation, the feeling of finishing what we started before everything crumbled away like wet sand. I swallow a breath down, trying not to shiver. Goose bumps prickle up and down my arms. When I glance up I see Patrick’s staring back at me, watching, curious and overt.

“Sorry,” he mutters when I catch him, rolling his eyes a bit.

“S’okay,” I reply, gazing back at him evenly, both of us standing there in our underwear. It occurs to me that this is the first time since I got back from Bristol that I don’t feel self-conscious about how I might look.

You can stare, I want to say to Patrick. It’s fine, it’s me; I promise you can look.

He shrugs, rubbing at his neck a little, looking out at the chilly black water. “You ready?” he asks.

“Uh-huh.” I clear my throat, swallow once. “If you are.”

“Yeah, Mols,” Patrick says. “I’m ready.”

We jump.

It’s exhilarating, hurtling through the air like that—the sensation of flying just for a second, the chilly morning air buffeting my skin. We smash through the placid surface of the lake like twin explosions.

“Holy shit,” Patrick swears once we’ve surfaced—it’s freezing, he’s not wrong about that, the cold sharp and immediate and aching. He barks out a frigid-sounding laugh. “Whose f*cking idea was this again?”

“Some dummy’s, certainly,” I tell him, voice shaking a bit with the force of my shivering. I swim a few strokes toward the center, splashing around to try and warm up. Patrick turns a fast somersault, flecks of water sticking to his eyelashes. His bare collarbone juts in a way that makes me want to trace it with one gentle finger. I wonder what would happen if I did. I can feel my chest moving underneath the surface of the water. God, it is so, so cold.

“Now what?” I ask, a little breathless.

“I don’t know,” Patrick says, water dripping from his hair and skimming over his cheekbones, and puts his surprising mouth on mine.

It’s a good kiss. God, it’s the best kiss, it’s the kiss I’ve been waiting for all summer and maybe my whole life, Patrick’s warm mouth and the slickness of his wet shoulders sliding under my palms, his neck and the damp hair at the base of his skull. Every inch of my skin feels like it’s on fire, the prickle and pop of nerve endings coming to life all over my body. I swear I can hear the steady hum of my blood inside my veins.