“But Grayson.” I reached out and put my hand on his knee. His skin was cool to the touch. “Your dad wasn’t so cruel that he would want to die as a message to you. And if that’s what you honestly believe… you need to find a better way to deal with this.” I rubbed his knee, just one pass, and drew my hand away.

“You know so much about him,” Grayson murmured. “You knew him better than I did.”

“I saw him almost every day,” I explained. “Last December, whenever y’all weren’t here, every waking moment I wasn’t at school or at work, he was training me in the tow plane. It’s funny but I think a lot of people spend less time with their own families, especially if they don’t all live together, and more time with complete strangers.”

It was certainly true of my own so-called family. I knew who my mother had been spending her time with last week: her boyfriend Roger. But that could have changed by now. It often did. I wondered who my dad spent time with. Could have been anyone. Anyone at all.

Grayson turned to face me, bracing himself with one hand on the surfboard and tucking his long legs beneath him in the sand. “You and I have never talked like this before. But my dad kept telling me what I’m finding out about you now.”

I smiled. “You mean the chip on my shoulder?”

Grayson shook his head. “No, nothing could be more obvious than the chip on your shoulder. But my dad liked to tell this story about you. He said you were fourteen and you’d been working at the airport a few weeks. He knew you by sight from the airport office. One day you stomped into his hangar and said you wanted a flying lesson, sort of demanded it, and threw the money for the lesson down on his desk in front of him, plus tax, in cash with exact change.”

I hadn’t stomped. The rest was accurate. “I wanted a lesson,” I said, “and wanted to take away all his excuses not to give me one. If I paid him up front in cash, he couldn’t say no. Why did he tell you that story?”

“He said he knew from that moment that you had strong character and drive. You were everything I wasn’t. Whenever he got tired of comparing me with Jake or Alec, he would compare me with you.”

Wow, to be compared unfavorably with the strange loser girl? No wonder Grayson was bitter. “Did you believe him?”

“Believe what?” Grayson asked.

“That I have a strong character and drive?”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “No, I thought he was screwing you.”

fifteen

So much for our friendly conversation. I turned to face Grayson on the surfboard. “As long as we’re being honest, two Christmases ago, I walked into the hangar while you were telling Alec and Jake I was trading sex for flying lessons with your dad. You hurt my feelings, and I’ve thought less of you as a person since then.”

He stared at me for a moment, then opened his mouth to say something.

Before he could utter more bullshit, I went on, “Men always do that to women when they feel threatened. They tell everybody the woman must be giving out bl*w j*bs because there’s no way she could be successful otherwise.”

Grayson had found his voice. “First of all,” he said loudly enough that he blinked when he heard himself. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was listening. The beach was empty. He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “I never felt threatened by you. He was my father.”

I looked down at my hands, tracing patterns in the sand, feeling ashamed all of a sudden. I’d been angry with Grayson about this for a year and four months. With good reason, I still thought. But yeah, my anger had come out as an insult to his relationship with his father, which I never intended.

“And second,” he said, “you walked in on us while we were talking. I didn’t know you were there, and I didn’t say it to insult you. I would have no reason to do that. I hardly knew you. I was making that assumption about you because of my dad’s end of the equation. My parents got divorced when he cheated on my mom. That girl was twenty-five. It was disgusting.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t he in his midforties at the time?”

“Yes!” Grayson exclaimed, outraged all over again.

“They were both adults,” I reminded him. “Forty-four to twenty-five is a big age difference, but it’s nothing compared with fifty-one to seventeen, which was how old your dad and I were last year when this entered your head.”

Grayson scowled at me. “You’re awfully defensive of him.”

“Your father and I were not lovers,” I said firmly. “Ever. You don’t believe me?”

Grayson’s face opened. He was less angry now but not quite ready to let go. “I believe you, but I don’t see how you can say what he did with that girl wasn’t so bad. He left us, not the other way around.”

“Because your mom didn’t want him to fly anymore,” I said. “It’s one thing to marry somebody and then ask them to change their annoying little habits. Ask them not to drink a six-pack every single night. Ask them not to pawn the TV. She asked him to become somebody else.”

“Of course she didn’t!” Grayson exclaimed. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to fly at all. She wanted him to stop doing that as his job. My uncle had another job for him at his insurance agency.”

“Can you hear yourself?” I yelled back. “Can you picture your dad working at an insurance agency? Can you picture him taking any job that his brother-in-law had for him? Working for somebody else? Someone in your mother’s family?” I tried to calm down. To my own ears, we sounded like an old couple bickering, except our roles had been reversed. He was the wifely voice of reason, and I was Mr. Hall, flying off the handle.

But I couldn’t believe Grayson didn’t understand his dad’s side. The point needed to be made. “And your mom may have said he could keep flying on the side, as a hobby, but she would have found a way to take that from him too. The Cessna would have been downgraded from a tool of the trade to a toy, and she would have made him sell it.”

Grayson shook his head. “And you’re saying that was a reason for him to cheat on her?”

It didn’t seem like a reason to give up on working things out, turn his back on his wife and three children, and walk out. But I was no expert on why men stayed or didn’t stay. “All I know is what he told me. I’m just saying I’ve seen worse.”

He smiled with no humor in his face. “You mean you’ve done worse?”

“No,” I said loudly, “but that’s what you thought when you asked me to come on to Alec, right? You think I open my legs all the time, for anybody. You’ve gotten this idea that I’m the airport whore.”

He laughed shortly. “Mark was living with you.”

“Only for a week, and it was actually my mom’s idea.”

“Your mom!” Grayson barked.

“Yeah.” Most moms didn’t want help with rent, and most teenagers had never heard of moms who did. I’d learned a lot from being friends with Molly. Sometimes it was better to change the subject. “And in that week… I won’t say nothing happened between Mark and me, but what you’re thinking must have happened didn’t happen.”

One of Grayson’s blond brows shot up in disbelief. The expression was stern and effective. “What about before that?”

“Never with Mark,” I said.

“With anybody?”

This was none of his business. But we were way past getting in each other’s business tonight. Turning back toward the ocean and stretching both legs in front of me until my toes touched the dangerous waters, I said, “Once, when I was fourteen.”

“Fourteen!” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t tie my own shoes when I was fourteen.”

“Yes, you could.” I remembered Grayson at fourteen. We’d both been fourteen when I moved to Heaven Beach. My first glimpse of him was outside the Hall Aviation hangar, where he was rigging a bucket of water to fall on his dad’s head when his dad opened the side door. Mr. Hall hadn’t been amused. That was the day my crush on Grayson had started.

“How did it happen?” Grayson prompted me.

With difficulty I shifted my brain from my memory of Grayson to my memory of that lost boy who’d taken my virginity. “I was living in a trailer park very close to the Air Force base. At night some guys and I would lie down in the grass right outside the fence at the end of the runway, get stoned, and watch the planes take off over us.”

Grayson laughed. “I’ll bet that was cool. I would have been there with you.”

No, you wouldn’t, I thought. Grayson’s mother would have been taking better care of him than that.

“One night,” I said, “this guy didn’t just steal a roach from his brother. He stole a roach and a condom. And we did it.”

Grayson frowned. “And it was awful?”

“No, it wasn’t awful. I wanted to do it again.”

“But you didn’t? There’s more to this story than ‘We did it.’”

“He was willing to do it with me again, but he couldn’t steal another condom. I had to choose whether to do it without one, or not do it anymore. I walked away. Thinking back, remembering what I was like then, how angry and how lost, I can’t believe I did that. Right before I moved here, I was smoking pot. Drinking the little I could get. The airport job ended all that, and your dad made me quit smoking and kept me off everything else by putting so much trust in me. He couldn’t stop you, so he stopped me instead.”

Grayson chuckled ruefully, like it was a joke.

Looking him in the eye, I told him, “I mean that.”

He gazed at me somberly.

“But this one decision,” I said, “I made for myself before I ever met your dad. My mom had me when she was sixteen, which means she did it when she was fifteen. My dad was probably some idiot exactly like that boy I lost my virginity to, a fifteen-year-old with a dick and nothing else. Nothing.”

Grayson didn’t respond. The crashing waves filled his silence. For the first time since he’d sat down, I remembered Alec and Molly, out there in the ocean somewhere. I hadn’t heard their voices after they disappeared. Probably the current had moved them down the beach. I knew that much from my observations the few times I’d been to the ocean.

“I would have started a relationship with that guy,” I said. “If he’d come back to me with a condom, I would have been willing. But right after that, my mom said we were moving to Heaven Beach. He went straight to my best friend and hooked up with her instead. Both of them acted like they’d never met me. That’s when I realized that people use each other, Grayson. They define their relationships by what they’re getting. The only good relationship I took away from my years in that town was with an airplane. Those beautiful, scary airplanes flying right over me.

“So, you blackmail me into dating your brother,” I said bitterly, “and you think it won’t be a big deal for me to kiss him. Mark thinks the path to my pants is smoothly paved and well traveled. Girls at school make comments about me constantly. But I hear this stuff and think, Me? I was headed in that direction a long time ago, yes. Now, no. I must exude something. Do I exude something?”

Grayson laughed. “Yes, you definitely exude something.”

“What do I exude?”

“Super, super sexy.”

In the moonlight, he was so sexy himself, his blond hair glinting, the shadows of his long lashes hiding his eyes. If I were his girlfriend and he had told me how sexy I was, I would have melted right there for him, just like I had last night. But he was my boss. We were having a matter-of-fact conversation about a business deal.

“A few days ago,” I said, “Molly told me I exude that too. Only she didn’t put it as politely as you put it.”

“She wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re lucky she’s your friend. Most girls at your school hate you, don’t they? That was clear at the party last night. But the boys like you a lot better. Patrick, for instance.”

I laughed. “Patrick! We’re just friends.”

“Only because he knows you’re looking for something else,” Grayson said. “And if you’ve been holding all these boys off since you were fourteen, you’ve been working very hard at that. And then there are the male teachers.”

“I never asked for anything special from my teachers,” I said quickly.

“You don’t have to ask. They can’t help it.” When he inhaled, I thought it was the wind picking up across the sand, but when he exhaled, sighing the longest sigh, I knew he was bracing himself for something. “Do you promise that you and my dad never…”

“Screwed?”

“Leah,” he said reproachfully.

“You’re saying it, not me.”

“Okay.” He folded his arms awkwardly on his chest. The self-conscious movement made him seem younger than eighteen, more vulnerable, and didn’t match his strong arms and muscular chest. He asked, “But did you?”

“No!”

“Okay.” He paused. “Did you want to?”

Though this line of questioning was rude, I didn’t want to upset him. His dad was dead. Grayson really was trying to deal. He wanted to know this stuff. Maybe even deserved to know.

But I didn’t think I should tell him the truth. I loved being around Mr. Hall because he was kind to me and we were friends. Other people around the airport—Mark, for instance—had insulted me when I was as young as fourteen, hinting that I was so worthless a person, Mr. Hall couldn’t possibly be doing anything nice for me unless I was giving him bl*w j*bs in exchange. When people implied this, I understood where they were coming from. I knew how it looked. Otherwise, it never crossed my mind. Mr. Hall was much older than me, and honestly kind of asexual, at least as I saw him. Like a really good father.