The rain started about five minutes after Rachel and I got home. We were in the kitchen playing fridge Tetris with all the leftovers the Fletcher family had forced upon us when I heard it—little pitter-patters against the roof, like the world's tiniest drum circle.
I gasped in delight and said, "It's raining!"
It was like all my brain cells had jumped ship.
And only Captain Obvious remained on deck.
Rachel shoved the last of our Tupperware containers into the few remaining square inches of fridge space, then stepped back to admire her handiwork.
"Well," she said, "it's a shame the barbecue ended like that—"
With the complete decimation of Blake and Chloe's relationship, she meant.
"—but look at all this food! I think we've got enough leftovers to last us until the end of summer, if we freeze some."
The end of summer.
Which was two and a half weeks away.
"Do you have any books I could read?" I blurted.
I needed to be away from myself for a while.
If I was left to stew in my own thoughts, I'd undoubtedly come up with a laundry list of things I'd miss about Holden. And then I'd end up sitting in the bench under the window in my bedroom with my forehead leaned against the rain-streaked glass, like some kind of early 2000s music video, and I didn't want to be that girl.
It was thus of the utmost importance that I dove headfirst into a book, immediately.
"Sure!" Rachel said. "Check the bookshelf in the living room. I've got some good ones."
Then she winked.
I was a little distracted, so I didn't really stop to think about what Rachel's standards might be for good fiction—or, you know, why she'd winked.
Instead, I loped into the living room and squatted in front of the bookshelf, completely unprepared for the sight that greeted me.
Two words.
Romance. Novels.
We're talking a gross abundance of male torsos. Every book I pulled out had some kind of half-naked man on the cover. Doctors with stethoscopes around their necks. Professional athletes with their biceps flexed around footballs. Firemen carrying hoses in what was clearly an attempt to appeal subliminally to heterosexual women.
And not a single one of them was wearing a shirt.
Isn't that, like, very unprofessional? was my first thought.
The second was, oh my god, my aunt reads porn.
I tugged more books out by their spines and slammed them back into place, searching frantically for something that looked even remotely family-friendly.
And then, on the bottom shelf, I found it.
It was a romance novel, like all the others, with a similarly obscene stock photo of a male model on the cover. But this one particular book caught my eye. And I wish I could say that I pulled it off the shelf and tucked it under my arm because I found the plot summary on the back to be well-written and intriguing. I wish I could say that I recognized the author, or knew, somehow, that I was in for a good story with a fine-tuned plot, complex characters, and feminist undertones.
Nope.
The shirtless pirate on the cover just looked a lot like Blake.
I darted across the living room and bounded up the stairs like a gunslinging bandit on the American frontier who'd just heisted bars of solid gold from a moving locomotive.
The pale blue of my bedroom walls looked washed out and gray in the dim light that poured through the white plantation shutters. I pulled the door closed behind me and hurried to my dresser, so I could tug off Lena's dress and slip into a pair of flannel pajama pants and an oversized T-shirt. Then, after a moment's hesitation, I jogged back to the door and turned the lock until it clicked softly into place.
Aunt Rachel was great—and this was her book, after all, that she'd seen in a store and made the conscious decision to buy with her hard-earned money—but I really didn't need the embarrassment of her knowing what I was reading.
I crawled into bed, tugged my duvet up over my legs, and settled in.
The cover really was a work of art.
I think the man on the cover was supposed to be a pirate. He had a rope from the ship's rigging in one hand and a sword in the other, and behind him, there was a hint of crystal blue water. I wasn't all that concerned with the context. What really mattered was that his cream-colored shirt was unbuttoned and billowing in the wind, he had abs for days, and his dark hair and (Photoshopped) electric blue eyes sort of resembled Blake's, if you squinted.
The Prince of Turning Tides.
Yeah, who cares.
I flipped it open and scanned the first few pages for any grammatical errors or strikingly misogynistic sentiments.
Thankfully, it passed inspection.
So ten pages later, I was no longer in my aunt's guest room, waiting for the best summer of my life to end. I was on a ship docked in a quasi-European coastal town, where nobody had to worry about graduating high school or mediating between their divorced parents. They were just getting in a lot of fistfights at the local pub and thinking about stealing shit.
It was a big mood.
And then there was the hero, Jem Blackheart, whose name was eye-roll inducing but, in my mind, looked exactly like my boyfriend, so I wasn't complaining.
Jem Blackheart needed a ship and a crew, fast.
He was trying to steal shit from a guy who'd stolen his shit.
It was all very contrived.
And then, in the middle of what had to be the tenth bar fight in three chapters, something plunked against my window. I assumed it'd just been a very fat raindrop, or water falling from a crack in the gutters that lined the roof.
But then, about a minute later, there was a heavy thump outside—like someone had climbed up onto the roof of the wraparound porch—followed by the gentle but insistent tap of knuckles against my window.
I looked up from my book.
There were really only a handful of people who could've been knocking on my bedroom window.
One lived next door.
I chucked off my duvet and stomped over to the window to flip open the shutters. Sure enough, there stood Blake Hamilton, his hair plastered to his head with rain and his hands pressed to the glass of the window.
He smiled sheepishly.
"Son of a—" I muttered, tossing my book over my shoulder and tearing open the shutters so I could grab the bottom pane of the window and lift.
I had the muscle mass of a small tropical fish.
It took me a moment of grunting and grappling to get the window open. When it was, I stuck my head out, glaring as a few drops of rain smacked me in the face.
"What are you doing?" I demanded.
Blake blinked at me like it was the dumbest question I could've asked.
"Trying not to fall off your roof."
I suppressed the sudden urge to shove him.
"You know what I meant," I huffed. "Why are you on my roof?"
"Well, Waverly, I was just wondering if you had a minute to talk about our lord and savior—"
I grabbed a fistful of his sweatshirt (the dark green crewneck he'd worn on our date at Bayside Burgers after my surfing career began and ended in the same afternoon) and yanked him in through the window, stepping aside so he didn't crush me as he fell into my bedroom, landing on the hardwood floor in a heap.
"—Jesus Christ," he groaned.
I tugged the window shut behind him.
It closed with a heavy wooden thunk that made me flinch.
"You have to be quiet," I whisper-hissed at the boy sprawled at my feet.
Blake grunted as he sat up.
"It's not like Rachel would actually kick me out of here. Right?"
He had a fair point. She was pretty laissez-faire about the whole guardian thing.
It was more that I didn't want her knowing that I had a boy in my room.
I turned and stared down at Blake, who was soaked from the rain—his hair, his sweatshirt, his jeans, his canvas sneakers, everything. He was leaving a puddle on my floor.
I had a boy in my room.
What an odd turn of events.
I'd never had a boy in my room before. Was I supposed to provide snacks and beverages? I had a half-eaten box of parmesan-flavor Goldfish on the desk and tap water in the bathroom sink, but that didn't seem very hospitable.
"Could you please take your shoes off?" I asked.
He grinned.
"And then what?" he teased, using the toe of one shoe to scrape off the heel of the other as he blinked up at me through his unfairly thick eyelashes.
I huffed and folded my arms over my chest, quietly relieved that I'd been so pumped to read my book that I hadn't stopped to take off my bra.
"And then put them in the corner so you don't get mud all over the carpet."
"Not the dirty talk I was hoping for," he mumbled.
I pressed my lips together, willing myself not to crack a smile.
Blake got to his feet and set his sneakers against the wall under the window. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, pushing his bangs back from his forehead so they stuck straight up, and took a seat on the edge of my mattress.
"Not on the bed!" I scolded. "You're all wet."
Blake's smile was scandalized.
"If your aunt hears you talking like that—"
I grabbed the sleeve of his sweatshirt and tugged.
"Get off."
"Again, you're saying things that could really be taken out of context."
He let me pull him to his feet and position him in the middle of the room, so he wasn't dripping onto any furniture.
"Better," I said, more to myself than to him.
"So this is fun. I'll just stand here," Blake deadpanned.
I frowned and hurried across the room to my dresser.
"Let me see if I have anything...here we go!"
I tugged out the largest sweatpants I could find—a pair of grey Fruit of the Loom ones with holes in the pockets and a frayed elastic band. They were Rachel's, from a distant period in time she referred to as her stress baking phase.
Blake plucked them from my hands and held them up against his waist.
"They'll fit you," I insisted. "Just don't knot the elastic."
Blake shrugged.
Then he reached down to unbutton his jeans.
"What are you doing?" I squawked, clapping my hands over my eyes.
"Well I'm not gonna put them on over my pants," Blake drawled.
I jabbed a finger at the bathroom door.
"Go change in there," I told him.
"It's gonna take me, like, four seconds," he argued. "Just close your eyes."
I huffed loudly and over-dramatically, so he'd know I wasn't happy about it, and buried my face in the crook of my elbow. What I should've done was covered my ears, too, so that I wouldn't hear the slide of his zipper or the wet thump of his jeans hitting the floor.
There's a boy in my room, and he's taking off his pants.
Aunt Rachel would have a heart attack if she knew.
"Coast is clear," Blake announced.
I sighed and dropped my arms.
Now, here's the thing about grey sweatpants. For whatever reason, when we as mankind decided to make these a thing, we accidentally stumbled upon an article of clothing that's simultaneously the most unassuming and the most revealing thing a boy can wear.
I cast my eyes toward the ceiling, my face on fire.
"They're a little snug," Blake commented, fidgeting with the waistband.
"Uh-huh," I croaked.
"Can I sit on your bed now?"
I was going to pass out. Blake would be too slow to catch me, and I'd hit my head on the floor and get my second concussion of the summer, and my aunt and all the nurses and doctors at the hospital would ask, how did this happen? and I'd have to point at my boyfriend's crotch.
"Well, your sweatshirt is soaked, too, so maybe you should just sit on the—"
Blake grabbed the back of his crewneck between his shoulder blades and tugged it off over his head. His plain white T-shirt rode halfway up his chest.
"Would you quit undressing?" I snapped.
Blake offered me a grin as he dropped his pile of wet clothes on top of his shoes, then sprawled onto my bed.
His foot nudged The Prince of Turning Tides off the mattress.
It tumbled onto the floor.
"Whoops. Sorry, I got it—"
Blake rolled onto his stomach and stretched one arm off the side of the bed to grab it.
I panicked.
In moments like this one (in which a boy who happens to resemble the shirtless pirate on the cover of the romance novel you've just been reading—with all the guilt-ridden secrecy of someone on a diet who's stashing packets of Oreos under their bed—is reaching for said romance novel) you have a choice to make.
And whenever I face tough decisions, I think of my Nana, who used to spend hours in the rocking chair in the living room of my mom's apartment listening to the Bible on tape.
"Waverly," she'd tell me, voice all shaky and, I don't know, elderly, "There's no reason to feel lost. You'll find your way. You just gotta ask yourself, what would JC do?"
She meant, of course, Jesus.
But as Blake reached for my book, another JC popped into my mind.
John Cena.
What better way to distract someone than to body slam them?