Most Likely to Succeed

I swung my car around to park exactly where Aidan and I had parked all three times we’d had sex. My headlights caught Sawyer waiting for me.

He stood on the threshold. The dark palm forest was in front of him, and behind him, the open beach, bright with moonlight. He wore his usual flip-flops and shorts, plus his blue polo shirt that matched his eyes exactly. This shirt didn’t make an appearance as often as his madras one, presumably because it was so old that the collar was turning white at the edges.

His arms were folded across his chest. His blond hair played across his forehead in the ocean breeze. His eyes were on me, and he looked miserable.

Good.

I turned off the engine and the lights, got out, and slammed the door. His expression didn’t change as I stomped toward him as best I could in slick flat sandals on mounds of sand. I stopped right in front of him and poked him on the forearm he was using to protect himself. “Why does everybody in the senior class know about this except me, huh? Am I just a big joke to you?”

He looked over his shoulder. The other guys—I recognized the three I’d known about, Will, Brody, and DeMarcus, plus Noah and Quinn—sat in a circle about halfway down the beach. The sound of the ocean must have muffled my voice, but they still heard me and turned. Will’s dog thumped her tail in welcome.

Sawyer faced me again. “No!” Eyes wide, he sounded almost desperate. “It’s just that I’m going to ruin your life, Kaye.”

“Don’t you think that should be my choice?” I shouted. “Do I get a say at all? In anything?”

He bit his lip, frustrated. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand. He pulled me into motion down the beach.

We passed within a few yards of the other boys and the dog, but I was too mortified by this entire fiasco to say hi. I did notice a beer bottle next to Brody, and across the circle, the tiny orange glow of a cigarette or a joint. I called to Sawyer, “Are you stoned? Getting stoned because of me is not the way to win me over.”

He stopped so suddenly that I smacked into him. He grabbed me by both arms to keep me from sliding down. “I told you, I quit all that,” he said over the roar of the tide. “You don’t believe anything I say.”

“I have believed you,” I snapped. “That’s the whole problem. You’ve acted like you wanted us to get together. I bought it. I tried to follow through, and you decided on your own that you don’t want me anymore.”

“I do want—” He looked over my shoulder at the guys behind us. “Come over the hill.” He took my hand again and led me up and over a rise in the beach, where we were hidden. Now we could see the pier and the pavilion of the public park. It was closed for the night. We were alone.

He pulled me toward the ocean until the water lapped at my toes and made the bottoms of my sandals slimy.

“You’re getting my sandals wet,” I said.

Toeing off his flip-flops and kicking them up the beach, he said, “For once in your life, kick your shoes off.” He made it sound like a challenge.

I rolled my eyes to show him that he didn’t fool me. What I meant was, it was okay with me if he manipulated me, as long as he knew I knew he was doing it. I wiggled one shoe off the end of my toes, then the other, and stepped into the water with him. The warm tide raced around my ankles.

He walked forward into the ocean, tugging me after him. I thought we were just going for a wade. But he kept going until the warm water reached the middle of my calves and crept toward my knees.

“Sawyer,” I called, digging my heels into the sand and pulling against his grip. “My skirt’s getting wet.”

He turned to me with an evil grin. “Take your skirt off for once.”

Oh, as if he thought I was innocent, and Aidan and I had never done it? “I’ve taken my skirt off before,” I said archly, before I gained complete understanding of how stupid that sounded.

“That’s what I heard about you,” he said.

I gaped at him. What had he heard? I was furious with Aidan now, and sorry I’d gone as far as I had with him. But I’d never suspected he’d given a third party the play-by-play—especially a third party who wouldn’t keep that information in confidence, with the description eventually getting back to Sawyer.

“I’m joking,” Sawyer said. “Take your skirt off anyway.”

I might have if he’d given me any assurance that he wasn’t setting me up again. I put my hands on my hips. “I thought you were afraid to get too close to me, and we were mad at each other. You wanted to talk it out.”

“I do want to talk it out, but knowing us, we’d be mad at each other again in an hour. Maybe it would help if you took your skirt off.”

“If you take your shorts off.”

I made a mental note never to use Sawyer taking his clothes off as a countermeasure. Instantly he was wading closer to shore, where he could take off his shorts without getting them soaked. He unbuckled his belt and shoved his shorts down his hips, exposing his plaid boxers. Most girls would stare at him, straining to gauge the shape and size of him in the darkness. I got stuck on the fact that he was wearing a belt. He often wore a belt, in fact. It showed whenever his shirt rode up or he tucked it in. Knowing his personality, I would have thought he’d dress like a slob, but his casual clothes were neatly pressed. I felt like I was having another epiphany about the puzzle that was Sawyer, but really I was standing in the ocean, avoiding thinking about what was about to happen.