Weathered stairs led down to a hundred yards of clean sand pitted with dry footprints. Beyond that lay the dark blue ocean. “Want to walk down there?” I asked her.
“God, no. I’ve been at the beach all day. Sick of it.” She sank behind me into a wooden lounge chair and closed her eyes. I waited for her to tell me her opinion of the boys. She was meeting them for the first time, and they were hot. Their suffering made them dreamy. She would want to tell me this and scold me for keeping them to myself all this time. But she didn’t say a word. She must be very tired from her long, hard day of lying on the beach.
I turned for the ocean again, inhaled the clean scent of it. Folding my arms on the porch rail and setting my chin on my arms, I watched the white waves slowly roll in. Like everything, the ocean looked completely different in person than it looked from the air. Hypnotized by its beauty, I forgot where I was and why. I jumped when Alec put his hand on my bare shoulder and asked, “Ready?”
Grayson’s insistence that we have an early night worked out well. When we arrived at the club, we could still get in the door. The place was already packed, though, mostly with strangers, lots of them seedy, and a few seniors from my high school, all of them drunk.
I was in a mood to break my no-drinking rule again because of the stress I’d been under that day and the situation I was in with these boys. But Grayson took up residence at a graffiti-covered pillar, watching all of us for bad behavior. So Molly and I danced to the throbbing beat under the spinning colored lights instead. Alec played along with us, doing an unembarrassed white boy dance. Molly asked Grayson to dance three times. He refused. She tried to send me over to ask him. I wouldn’t go. I was having a lot of fun dancing with Molly and dancing with Alec, who was acting like a not-too-interested boy/friend, something I’d never had before. I didn’t want to ruin it by dragging Grayson over—or having him turn me down.
Finally we took a break. Grayson had ordered food for everybody. When I opened my billfold to give him money for it, Alec frowned at me and shook his head. We found an empty table a group had just vacated on the crowded deck outside, overlooking the ocean. Molly went back inside to grab a strawberry daiquiri using her cousin’s old ID. Alec whispered that he’d get me a soda.
Which left Grayson and me snacking alone at the table, if you could call it alone when we were surrounded by four hundred and fifty people. I expected him to insult me over the noise. But he watched the crowd with a half-smile on his face, a lot like the half-smile Alec wore most of the time. On Alec it was the default setting. On Grayson it meant he was happy.
I leaned across the table and said, “You’re back.”
“What?” He jerked his head toward me, surprised that I’d spoken, losing part of the smile.
“You seem like yourself again,” I explained. “The way you’ve been acting, I thought the old Grayson was gone forever.”
He nodded. “I think he might be,” he said slowly. “I mean, if I were the type of person who talked about himself in the third person. I think he might be.”
“You think he might be gone forever?” I asked. “Or you think he might be back?”
“Gone.”
That one word sank deep into me like a hot rock disappearing into a snowbank somewhere up north. I noticed again how tired he was, how he sat low on his stool, broad shoulders hunched, with dark smudges of fatigue under his gray eyes. I felt lost on his behalf. I felt lost myself. As we shared a look of understanding across the table, the drunk spring-breakers and colored lights faded on one side of us. I was more aware of the blackness off the railing on our other side, a black sky and a black ocean we knew were there but couldn’t even see.
“I’m sorry about Jake,” I blurted.
Grayson didn’t take his eyes off me. His only reaction was a little tic of his jaw.
“I talked to your dad every day about what happened to Jake, but I never told you. I guess I never saw you again until your dad’s funeral. And…” I could feel my cheeks burning, but now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop until I’d blabbed everything. “… I’m sorry about you and Alec. I wish you’d tell me what exactly is going on between you and why I have to date him. You spill this whole story to Molly when you’ve just met her, but I’ve been right here the whole time and you treat me like the stranger. Less than a stranger. Like the enemy. What did you mean when you acted incredulous that I’d never been to your dad’s condo?”
Grayson’s lips parted. He watched me for a moment before he found words. As he spoke, his voice was so quiet that I could barely hear him over the music. “I was talking to you about Alec and Jake.”
“You were looking at Molly,” I accused him.
“I was talking to you.” He looked down at his half-eaten food. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to look at you. Just like it’s hard for me to be here. At the shack, at the condo, at the hangar.”
I understood now. He associated me with the tragedy of his family. He would take what he thought he needed from me in order to save Alec. That’s all I was good for.
Molly cackled somewhere in the crowd. I couldn’t make out what she was saying. As she and Alec emerged from the throng, the first word I understood was, “Cocktalls!”
“I was telling Molly about Zeke losing the spelling bee today,” Alec explained, sliding me a soda and slipping onto the stool beside me.
I grinned at him. If I concentrated hard enough on joining his light-hearted conversation with Molly, maybe the tension between Grayson and me would ease, and I would be able to breathe again.
“I can just see the tourists on the beach,” Molly said, “squinting up at the sign. ‘Cock… talls.’ They probably thought it was for real. Some new drink invented by the tourist-trap bars on the boardwalk. They would be bubble gum flavored! They would come with a piece of bubble gum on a toothpick as a garnish instead of a lemon!”
“Spoken like the daughter of restaurateurs,” I said, trying to get back into the swing of her banter.
“Those misspelled banners cost us a lot of time in the air,” Grayson grumbled.
I could see why he wasn’t laughing. The contracts Mr. Hall had made with these businesses specified that we’d fly their banners for a certain number of hours a day. When Alec and I dropped our banners, we circled above the airport, waiting for Zeke to spell everything correctly. Then we picked them back up, but we had to tack that many minutes onto the ends of our flights. Grayson had paid me a little overtime in my check. I hadn’t minded, but Grayson had minded very much.
“Did you talk to Zeke about it?” I asked Grayson. I didn’t see what good that would do, though. A bad speller was a bad speller, and there was no spell-check for banners.
“I fired him,” Grayson said. “I can do it myself.”
“And not fly?” Alec stopped laughing for the first time since he’d sat down. “You have contracts for three planes in the air.”
I puzzled over Alec phrasing it that way: “You have contracts,” rather than “We have contracts.” The business belonged to both of them now.
Grayson didn’t seem to notice the way Alec had put it. “I’ll take some extra time between my flights to get the banners ready,” he said. “After you two are up in the air, I’ll go myself. I’ll have to fly longer to make up that time.” Fly longer, and work longer. He was talking about his eight-hour day stretching into ten, probably more since he was doing the paperwork.
Molly’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Who was in charge of the banners when your dad was still around?”
I watched Grayson and Alec for their reaction, the wince that passed across both of their faces when someone mentioned their dad. I saw it flit across Grayson’s, even in the flickering colored lights from the bar.
Alec didn’t hesitate. He leaned forward and told Molly, “Grayson and I took care of the banners. We couldn’t get our commercial pilot’s licenses until we turned eighteen last October, so we haven’t been allowed to fly for money until now.”
I pointed out, “You also watched the takeoffs to make sure nothing fell off the planes when they snagged the banners. If Alec and I are already flying, who’s going to do that for you, Grayson?”
Grayson glanced at me with no expression on his face and squeezed his fist into a ball.
“Hire me,” Molly piped up.
“Yeah!” Alec exclaimed at the same time Grayson asked “What?” and I said “No.”
“I can spell,” Molly said. “I can drag these banners around if they’re not hugely heavy, right?”
“You’re hired,” Grayson said.
I glared across the table at Molly, but I couldn’t catch her eye. Not knowing what she was up to made me very nervous. She wandered into her parents’ café to help out only if she happened to wake up early enough and was bored. She could definitely work at the airport instead of the café if she wanted to. But why would she want to? The work would be dusty and hot with a side of gas fumes. I couldn’t imagine what good she thought she could get out of this job, unless she intended to meddle in my business with the boys. And I couldn’t let her do that. My flying career was too important. I couldn’t let her give my secret away to Alec, accidentally or otherwise.
“Wait a minute,” I chimed in. “Grayson, I don’t think this is a good idea. You just met Molly. There are things about this job that she won’t be used to.”
“Like what?” she challenged me.
“Labor,” I said.
“Oh,” she said with a threatening laugh, “I will cut a bitch.”
I kicked her underneath the table, warning her that she was making me look bizarre and unglamorous to Alec. “Not in front of the children.”
“You’re hired,” Grayson told Molly again. “But whatever kind of drama we’ve got going on when we’re on the ground, we’re not doing anything that affects what happens in the sky. There is no crashing at Hall Aviation. That means no hangovers. No drinking.” He slid Molly’s daiquiri toward the middle of the table.
“Hey!” she cried. “It’s spring break! Just one drink?”
“None,” Grayson said firmly.
“But I’m not flying,” she pouted.
“You’re aligning the banners correctly,” he said. “You’re watching the airplanes to make sure nothing falls off. You’re spelling.”
She stuck out her bottom lip and fluttered her eyelashes at him.
He laughed. “You can have one.” He slid the daiquiri back to her.
“Thanks, boss. Want a sip? It’ll loosen you up a little.”
“I’ll pass. Loosening up wasn’t my goal for the night. I don’t get involved with my employees.”
I’d been watching this whole exchange in horror. At first they seemed to be flirting. But I doubted he would have made this comment about his employees so flatly if he’d wanted to make a move on her.
She wasn’t offended. She laughed straight through it. “Why are you the boss of this outfit instead of Alec? Are you older?”
“We’re twins,” Grayson and Alec said at the same time.
“I knew that!” Molly exclaimed. “I totally forgot! You’re nothing alike.”
“Yes, they are,” I said. This wasn’t true, but I was feeling territorial again. Molly got along with the boys so much better than I did, and she didn’t even care about them.
“No, we’re not,” the boys said at the same time. They looked at each other across the table. Grayson smiled, and Alec laughed. I got the feeling they hadn’t laughed together in a while.
“How did you and Leah become ‘friends’?” Grayson asked Molly, making finger quotes.
I grinned at him and spoke up. “I stole her boyfriend.”
“You tried.” She reached across the table and patted my arm soothingly.
“What really happened?” Grayson asked.
I looked to Molly to answer this. She didn’t know what had really happened. I did, but I wasn’t going to tell her. We were friends now, and that was all I wanted. Honesty wasn’t worth the trouble.
“I’d just moved to town two years ago,” she said. “I snagged the hottest guy at school, right? And the next thing I know, all these chicks are telling me that Leah Jones is after him so I had better watch out.”
Alec chuckled. Grayson said dryly, “She’s that kind of girl, is she?”
“Apparently,” Molly said, giving me a brief glare as she always did when she mentioned Ryan. She was still resentful about him. “If I’d been at my old school in Atlanta, I might have let it go and watched how things went. But I was at a new school and I felt like I needed to lay down the law so girls wouldn’t mess with my property.” She moved her finger in the air as she said this in a poor imitation of some kind of gangland gesture, which was even funnier coupled with her blue glittery clubbing eye shadow. “So I confronted her about it.”
“Girl fight!” Alec exclaimed.
I giggled, because Alec was funny. Patrick anticipating the same thing outside my trailer last night hadn’t been funny at all, probably because it had been a lot closer to the truth.
Grayson watched me without laughing. “What did Leah do when you confronted her?” he asked Molly.
“She was funny,” Molly said. “Can you believe that? Everything I tried to serve her, she dished right back to me. I realized that I wanted to be friends with her more than I wanted to go out with that hunk of burning love.”