I blamed it on the casserole.
He might not have talked to me otherwise, and he surely wouldn't have touched me.
I was talking about Jamie Jacobs, the guy who irrevocably changed my life. And not just my life. He changed the very shape of my heart.
I'd been crushing on Jamie for going on a year now. Last school year, as a freshman, my eyes lit up like moon pies every time I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of him in the hall or in the cafeteria. My heart would beat wildly when I'd see him pulling in or out of the parking lot in his aqua-blue Bronco. He always rode with the top off, even in the winter. He'd pretty much introduced me to the concept of "sexy" and what it looked like in real life.
And now here he was. At my house. In my backyard.
When he walked through the back gate with Donovan and Lassiter, I seriously thought I'd have a heart attack.
"Erin, you still there?" Ally asked from the other end of the phone I forgot I was holding. Ally was my best friend, and had been since kindergarten. We played on the volleyball team together, and shared most of our secrets with each other. My crush on Jamie wasn't one of those shared secrets. Not because I knew she wouldn't approve, but because the way I fantasized about Jamie being all mine was something I cherished as mine alone.
I dropped the pink eyelet and lace curtain, letting it fall back into place in front of my bedroom window. My window overlooked the backyard, and I'd been checking it regularly for the last hour so I wouldn't miss the moment Jamie arrived.
"Listen, Ally. I gotta go. Some of the guys are here and I need to get the casserole out of the oven."
"You know you're the luckiest girl on the planet, right?" Ally said. "All that deliciously packaged testosterone at your house at one time. How do you stand it?"
"Well, considering their lives have literally been threatened if they so much as look at me, it's all wasted."
"Yeah, but you can still feast your eyes on all that gorgeous flesh." Ally sighed dreamily through the phone.
"Yeah, speaking of feasts, the oven's timer is going off. I really got to go. Bye." I hung up and threw the phone on my bed. I checked myself in the mirror above my dresser, something I'd never done before when the "guys" came over.
Today was different. Today Jamie was with them and just because he was technically off-limits didn't mean I couldn't look good. I smeared on another layer of lip-gloss and coated my eyelashes one more time with mascara. I was going for older, more worldlier than my sixteen years. At nineteen, Jamie wore the look of experience. He looked like he would want things. Like he would expect things. Things a sixteen-year-old girl shouldn't even know about.
Not that me looking older would change anything. Jamie was, and always would be, forbidden fruit. Besides being four years older than me-not an insurmountable obstacle-he was the newest recruit of my dad's experimental team-an obstacle that was insurmountably insurmountable. I wasn't kidding when I'd told Ally all the guys under my dad's command risked life and limb if they so much as turned their heads in my direction.
Jamie was also the experimental part of the team. Meaning he wasn't exactly human. He was amazingly more than human. What better person to recruit to be on a SEAL-type team than someone who was literally born to be in the water?
Jamie possessed the same amount of strength as the other four guys on the team combined. The second he submerged himself in the Gulf of Mexico, the pores in his skin opened up, allowing him to breathe water. He could swim for days, maybe weeks, at impossible speeds without getting tired. Today, when the inevitable happened, and Donovan and Lassie and Ross went for a swim in the pool, Jamie would be forced to sit on the sidelines. He could breathe salty Gulf water. Chlorinated pool water, not so much.
I knew all this because I'd snuck into my dad's office one night where I'd riffled through the files he'd left out on his desk. Jamie's had been easy to find. It was thick, with pages and pages of documented and undocumented facts about his species-waterbreathers. I'd found the up close, clinical pictures of the gills behind his ears fascinating. I'd traced the crescent-shaped layers of skin over and over with my finger. I studied the pictures of the fine almost translucent webs between his toes, waiting to be repulsed, only to find myself more enchanted by the idea of him. I scanned microscopic pictures of his skin, smooth and hairless and oh so touchable. The more I'd read, the more obsessed I'd become. All my friends gushed and fan-girled over Harry Styles and Ian Somerhalder while my every fantasy was right here under my nose, so close I could smell him. And God did he smell good. Like the sun and the ocean and a warm salty breeze. My friends were welcome to the latest CW bad-boy cast member, or the hottest boy band member.
I wanted a man.
I wanted Jamie.
Too bad I would never get him.