One Golden Summer(40)

“It’s hard not to stare when you’re sweating like that.” Perspiration runs in rivulets down his chest. I follow it down the flat expanse of skin to his belly button and the line of hair that dips below. He’s breathing heavily.

Charlie does a double take when he stops working to accept the glass from my hand. “That’s new.”

I’m wearing a yellow bikini that I bought at Stedmans earlier this week, after Willa got back to me about the swimwear photos. The email was two letters.

    Ok.



No greeting. No salutation. I stared at the screen, a hand covering my mouth. And then I started to laugh. I might not work for Swish again, but I’d held my ground. No one is going to give me permission to be the kind of photographer I want to be except for me. I needed to do something to celebrate, so I drove into town and purchased a thirty-four-dollar string bikini (number two). It shows a lot more everything than I’m used to, but it’s sweltering, and I feel emboldened.

“It’s new,” I tell Charlie.

“Make sure you stay in the shade,” he says. His face is flushed. He rests his hands on his knees and bends over, panting.

“Are you all right?”

“Just out of shape.”

“The state of your abdominals says otherwise.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I think it’s time to quit. You’ve been in the sun all day.”

I lead him inside, past Nan, who’s snoozing on the screened porch sofa despite Charlie’s ruckus. He pauses in the entryway to the living room, laying a hand on the wall to steady himself.

“Charlie?”

He stares at me, wide-eyed.

“It’s just the heat,” I tell him, and he gives me a look that says he doesn’t believe me. He seems genuinely frightened.

“Here, sit.” I take his arm and guide him to the couch, then leave him to get a cool facecloth. His head is in his hands when I return. I sit next to him and dab the cloth on the back of his neck.

“That feels nice.”

Charlie closes his eyes, and I move the cloth to his forehead, then his temple, and his breathing begins to slow.

“This is embarrassing,” he says after a moment, head still dropped.

“This is nothing. You read my bucket list. You’ve got to do a lot worse than mild heatstroke before you reach that level of mortification.”

He turns his cheek toward me. His eyes meet mine, searching and serious. “Tell me why you wrote it?”

I hum. “Nostalgia?”

Charlie slowly sits up, leaning all the way back on the couch, his head resting on the cushion, slanted my way. Waiting.

I chew on my cheek, thinking. “It’s been a rough year. Being here made me think about the summer I was seventeen—and how I’d go back and redo it if I had the chance. I know when September rolls around, I’ll have to face everything that’s waiting for me in the city. But I want to leave it behind while I’m here—do all the silly things I’d do if I were seventeen again.”

“And you love a list,” Charlie says, voice gentle.

“Precisely.”

For a moment, I slip into the pools of green in his gaze.

I crinkle my nose. “It’s silly, right?”

He shakes his head. “I think I get it. If I could go back, knowing what I know now, I probably would.”

“Really?”

“Sure. There are things I’d like to do differently. That feeling of being invincible. All of life stretching before you. Not to mention no sixty-hour workweeks.”

“No bills. Or real responsibilities. No exes with fiancées named Astilbe.”

Charlie smiles. “Specific.”

“No compromising my integrity.”

“No serious consequences,” Charlie says.

“Exactly.”

“Can I see that list again?”

My smile falters. “Didn’t you get a good enough look at it?”

He makes a wishy-washy movement with his hand.

“Come on, Alice. I’m not going to laugh at you,” he says, the twinkle returning to his eyes.

“You might.”

“Okay, I might. But I won’t think less of you.”

And I believe him. I blow out a breath and fetch my notebook. Charlie reads it as I stand over his shoulder, arms crossed in front of me.

He glances up. “?‘Low-key drugs, question mark, question mark, question mark’?”

“I was the kind of girl people assumed wouldn’t touch a joint. I was literally passed over more than once.”

“What would you have done if you’d been offered a toke?”

“I would have declined,” I say.

Charlie beams up at me. “You were a good girl.”

“The goodest. What about you?”

“The opposite. I was reckless. Cocky. Jealous. Competitive. I was a little shit.” There’s no humor in his smile. “I guess not much has changed.”

Hearing Charlie talk about himself like this pulls at something in me. I sit beside him.

“Charlie, I don’t think there’s enough room in an airplane hangar for your ego. But you’re not a shit. I doubt you were back then, either.”

“I was. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t meet when we were kids. I did a lot of stupid stuff to distract myself from how I was really feeling. You wouldn’t have liked me.”