“I waved to Parker Buchanan.”

“You flirted with Cameron.”

“I knew you’d say that.” She reached me and put her hands on her hips, breathing hard. “He sat close to me in the boat so we could hear each other over the motor.” I believed her. The thing was—and I knew this was unreasonable—I didn’t want her talking to Cameron at all.

She bent over and put her hands on her knees. is gave me a nice view down her bra. “Cameron and I were talking about you,” she panted. “He said that you—” She straightened and looked around us at the woods. “We need to talk, and we can’t do it out here.” I stared her down, trying to stay mad at her, trying not to glance at her boobs.

She tilted her head to one side and grinned. “You’re sexy when you brood.”

I pressed my lips together.

“You’re cute when you try not to laugh.” She tickled my ribs, which were more ticklish than usual because I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

I grabbed her hand. With the middle finger of my other hand, I traced the neckline of her bra. I asked appreciatively, “Sports bra or what?” Her green eyes widened, the same color as the wild trees behind her, and her lips parted.

Suddenly it was too hot, even for me. We stood on an asphalt road that had been melting in the sun all day. I could hardly breathe the thick air. Her heartbeat raced under my fingertip.

I put my hand down. en I walked over to the mailbox and slid out the bottles of water. “Do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?” I asked, handing her a bottle.

“Our parents may have mounted closed-circuit cameras in the poison ivy.” She uncapped the water and took a long drink.

“I wouldn’t put it past my mom at this point.” I drank too, then poured water over my head. Then poured some over hers.

She sputtered. “My hair just blew around a boat for nine hours, and I ran a few miles on the hottest day of the year. You’re ruining my look.”

“You’ll dry in thirty seconds in this heat.” I touched one finger to her wet lips. “And you’re beautiful. You’d have to work pretty hard to mess that up.” She moved her head ever so slightly. Her lips slid one millimeter against my fingertip, and electricity rushed through my whole body. I lost my breath again.

“Come on,” I choked out. With one last glance around our empty yards and the deserted road, I took her hand and pulled her away from our houses, toward the woods.

5

Adam let my hand go when we reached the side of the road. Blackberry brambles crowded the bank. As we tried to find a way through, it was every delinquent teenager for herself, apparently.

Out of habit I plucked a few berries and popped them into my mouth. Too late I remembered we were headed for a tryst in the forest together, not playing army with pinecone grenades and our brothers. I should not eat before kissing.

But three steps ahead of me, he plucked some berries on the fly too. Maybe this afternoon wasn’t as strange as I thought. Maybe we really were headed into the trees for a discussion, as I’d suggested. It was innocent after all. Relieved and disappointed, I bit down on the blackberries. Sweet juice filled my mouth, and then the bitter aftertaste.

I picked a few more berries as I passed. Just as my cheeks puffed out to full capacity in mid-chew, Adam found a break through the thicket and up the hill. He turned around and extended his hand to help me up.

I froze, staring at him in the thick heat, leaves tickling my legs. Boys did not help girls. Not in my experience, anyway. When I was one of the boys, they tromped ahead of me and never once looked back to see if I was still there, much less in need of assistance. Boys had helped me only recently, when they wanted something.

No, this walk through the woods would not be innocent.

Taking his hand, I said, “Fank woo.”

“Hm,” he laughed with his mouth closed.

We crashed through the forest. Since we were sneaking this time together, it seemed like we should have tiptoed along, but there was no way to walk quietly through dry leaves. It also seemed like his brothers and my brother would jump out from behind a bush at any second, or that a snake would fall heavily across my shoulders. Once Sean and Cameron had told me a story about snakes in the jungle dropping down on people from trees. en they hid in Adam’s tree house with a rubber snake and waited for me to pass by underneath. If I had not been six years old at the time and in perfect health, I would have had a heart attack.

e suspense was too much. We’d walked far enough. We couldn’t see the road or the houses that we’d reach if we kept going. e dark trunks of maples and oaks surrounded us, and the late afternoon sun made the green leaves glow overhead. I stopped behind a huge pine—keeping it between me and the road, because it offered extra protection from the prying eyes of boys and parents—and pulled Adam in front of me. “What I wanted to talk to you about was—” He kissed me. At first he gently touched his lips to mine. e more exciting development was that in order to do this, he’d stepped very close. His chest was an inch from mine. I could feel his heat. He tasted of blackberries. He leaned even closer and braced his muscular arms on the tree on either side of me.

When he broke the kiss to take a breath, I whispered, “Tree hugger.”

He opened his eyes, blue as the afternoon sky, and gave me this look. A combination of amusement and exasperation and hunger. He looked like a teenager making out in the woods. Puzzling through this, I realized that I was gazing at him from the perspective of a six-year-old girl playing army and dodging rubber snakes.

But he was this teenager, and so was I. I felt the same need for him that he felt for me, like a force was drawing me forward into his heat. I just didn’t know how to say it.

He cupped my chin with his big hand and watched me. He breathed hard through his nose. His shoulders heaved way harder than they should have after a few minutes of kissing. I was about to suggest some additional conditioning exercises before football season started. I opened my mouth to tell him.

He kissed me again. His tongue passed my lips and played across my teeth. We’d only been kissing like this for a week, but it seemed very natural when I kissed him back the same way. My body was on autopilot as I reached blindly for his waist and dragged him even closer, his torso skin-to-skin with mine against the tree. Who were we? I was turning into any of the assorted older girls who’d been seen leaving the cab of Sean’s truck at night. I’d always viewed those girls with a mixture of awe and derision.

Sexual attraction was funny. Lust was hilarious.

Now, not so much. Those girls had my sympathy, because I totally got it. I ran my fingers lightly up Adam’s bare back.

He gasped.

I opened my eyes to see if I’d done something wrong. He still touched the tree, but his muscles were taut, holding on to it for dear life. His eyes were closed. He rubbed his rough cheek slowly against mine. I had done nothing wrong. He was savoring.

I knew how he felt. Tracing my fingernails down his back again, I whispered, “Stubble or what?” Eyes still closed, he chuckled. “I’m not shaving until our parents let us date again.” He kissed my cheek.

“What if it takes… a… while?” I asked, struggling to talk. He’d made his way down to my neck. His tongue circled there slowly. “ere are only six or seven weeks until August football practice starts, right?”

“Hm.” His mouth moved up my neck, toward my ear. Oh.

“Will you be able to stuff your beard into your helmet?” I croaked.

In answer, he put his lips on my ear. I forgot the next joke I’d planned to make and lost myself in Adam.

I know this is hard to believe. We had a lot to worry about. My dad was threatening never to let us date again. And we were making out in broad daylight, with mockingbirds calling to each other and cicadas buzzing in the trees. We’d watched a lot of DVDs with our brothers over the years—or I had, and Adam had wandered in and out because he couldn’t sit still. We’d made fun of couples who suddenly decided to make out when they’d just escaped from a hoard of alien robots bent on killing them and taking their brains back to their home planet or an insidious, sentient slime that would hunt them down and eat through their flesh to their skeletons in a matter of seconds. Who could concentrate on kissing in these situations?

Now I understood. Adam kissed his way from my ear to my mouth. He hooked one thumb in the waistband of my shorts. I kissed him harder.

I enjoyed it. Really enjoyed it. But in the back of my mind, I worried that if we were gone too long, our parents would find us. And I still hadn’t had a private talk with him.

I pushed him away. “We need to go before our parents wise up,” I panted.

He came right back for more, regaining his balance and bracing his arms on both sides of me again, caging me in. “I was just getting started,” he growled in my ear.

I giggled. I’d never pegged myself as a giggler, but when Adam acted like this I couldn’t help it. “Why couldn’t you get started last night?”

“I was sleeping,” he said haughtily. He buried his face in my hair and sniffed deeply. I hoped this was not too unpleasant an experience after all the running.

That was fine. I would have stood there all day and let him sniff my hair. He could take care of himself. But I couldn’t shake the feeling we were running out of time.

“Seriously, Adam, we need to talk while we can.” I put my hand on his bare chest and pushed him six inches away, where he couldn’t reach my hair anymore.

He gazed down at my hand.

“I was talking to Cameron—,” I began.

Adam grasped my wrist with two fingers, like he didn’t really want to touch it, and removed my hand from his chest.

“—about how rude you were to your mom when she offered to help us,” I finished. “Frances had heard about it too. I know you’re mad, Adam, but it doesn’t make sense for you to dig a deeper hole for both of us.”

He scowled down at me. “I’m right and my mother is wrong.”

“I know…” I almost called him “baby.” I know, baby. I caught myself in time. en I wondered why I’d caught myself. It just seemed foreign for this endearment to come out of my mouth. To Adam. And he would not have appreciated it, anyway. After sixteen years as the baby of the family, he did not consider it a compliment.

“I know,” I said again. “But Cameron said your mom would help us if we stay apart for a while first. In the meantime, if you can keep from cussing in front of her, I have a plan that might convince my dad to let us date a lot faster.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “You make terrible, terrible plans.”

“Hey,” I protested. “One of my plans caught you, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, but you meant to catch Sean.” He took his hand off my shoulder.

I waved his concerns away, along with a cloud of gnats that had found us in the forest. “You’re getting lost in the details. Keep the big picture in mind. e plan is, I will find someone to date who is a hundred times worse than you. You will be the lesser of two evils. My dad will see the error of his ways in banning me from dating you, and he’ll let us get back together.”

Adam nodded.

I nodded with him, grinning. “Good, huh?”

He kept nodding, but his mouth drew into a tight line. “This person you want to date. It’s Sean.”

“Sean!” I exclaimed. Sean hadn’t even crossed my mind. “No! I was thinking about Kevin Ye. Do you know him? He’s two years older than us, but he was in my driver’s ed class last year because he’d flunked it twice. I’m pretty sure he didn’t graduate, what with prison and all. Anyway, one day last week when you and I were driving into town, I saw him mowing the grass with a work-release crew. Maybe I could even convince him to wear his orange jumpsuit on our date. at would really impress my dad.

Do you think Kevin Ye would go out with me?”

Adam’s hand was over his mouth, hiding his baby beard. But his light blue eyes widened with horror. I did not want him horrified. He would be difficult enough to drag into the plan as it was. Instead of just the skull and crossbones around his neck, he needed a more specific warning label that said DOES NOT TAKE DIRECTION WELL.

I wasn’t giving up. The plan was a good one. I could be flexible and change the details until Adam agreed to play along.

“You’re probably right,” I said. “Forget Kevin Ye. Sean would be easier.”

“I knew it!” Adam pointed at me. “You were trying to get Sean this whole time.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What are you saying? I planned to get Sean, I got you instead, but I was always aiming for Sean, and now I’m going in for the kill?”

“You don’t fool me. You play dumb, but you made an A in trig. You’re diabolical without even trying.” I folded my arms on my sports bra. “I’m pretty sure that’s a contradiction in terms, but remind me to look up ‘diabolical’ later.” He put his fists on his hips, which made the bare, tanned chest in front of me look even broader. “I won’t be able to give you that reminder, Lori, because we’re not allowed to see each other, and you’ll be out with Sean.”

“What is this business with Sean?” I insisted. “I thought you and Sean worked everything out. I saw y’all talking Saturday night.”

“Worked everything out? I guess. We agreed that he would not interfere when I tried to get you back, and I would not interfere when he tried to get Rachel back.”

“Oh.” I’d thought they’d talked about something more meaningful and brotherly, like how Sean had mistreated Adam for sixteen years and how Adam had begun to strike back in a big way. I’d hoped they had, because it would have meant Sean might help Adam and me out of our latest predicament. But this was too much to ask.