I told Grayson another, simpler version of the truth. “If your dad had been the same person but my age, then yeah, I would have fallen for him.”

Grayson watched me, arms crossed, in exactly the pose Mr. Hall had struck in that old photo of himself as a jet pilot, when he was only a few years older than Grayson. And they looked exactly the same.

I realized what I’d said.

The air between us was charged with electricity, the waves echoing the sound of it.

“Really?” Grayson asked.

“Really,” I said.

Considering the ugly things we’d talked about tonight, my mind had doubted this moment would come, but my heart had known. Leaning forward until he was on all fours, he crawled one pace toward me. His lips met mine.

The rush was so intense that he was like a predator taking me by the throat. I opened my mouth.

His mouth wrestled with mine. He kept moving forward until he pushed me down on my back on the sand. His warm body covered mine, skin to my skin. His thighs hugged the outsides of my thighs, and his erection pressed against the center of my bathing suit bottoms.

I let him do anything he wanted, eager to find out what was next. At the same time, I was vaguely aware that we’d been archenemies a few minutes before, and now he had me on my back on the sand. I waited for him to realize what he was doing and stop with a gasp of horror, just as he’d stopped himself in the basement of the airport office. But he kept kissing me. Finally I decided I’d better do something to end this, and it wasn’t going to be pulling back.

I slid my hand down the outside of his bathing suit to cup him.

He did pause, and gasp. He didn’t stop. His kisses grew more focused, more intense. His tongue forced its way into my mouth and swept inside me. He kissed my ear, licked my neck, and made his way down toward my breast, gasping again every time I stroked him.

Now I wondered where this was going to end. I hadn’t wanted to do it without a condom at fourteen. Eighteen was not much of an improvement. My mind said, Stop him. My body said, Let him. I had never felt so good, not flying, not ever.

Molly giggled somewhere in the darkness. Grayson froze on top of me.

He gave me a deep kiss, then whispered against my lips, “I’m going in the water. If they see me like this, they’ll know exactly what we’ve been doing.”

“And that’s not okay?”

He set his forehead against mine. “No.”

I pushed his shoulders away so I could look him in the eye. “You still want me to go out with Alec?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes!”

“Tell me why,” I insisted.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “You’ll give it away, even if you don’t mean to. I can’t let you do that. It’s a matter of life and death.”

I shoved him angrily. “Come on, Grayson.”

He rubbed his nose against mine, melting me all over again. “Would I kid you about a matter of life and death?” He pushed himself off me, his long body taking a while to make it up to his full height. The moonlight outlined the blond edges of his hair and made him seem to glow as he grabbed up his surfboard and splashed into the darkness.

“No,” I murmured, “you wouldn’t.”

In the end, my anger at him was wasted. For four days I’d tried in vain to get him to tell me why we were playing Alec. Less than twenty-four hours later, I found out.

sixteen

For most of the next day, Grayson acted like he’d forgotten what had happened between us the night before. During my final break in the afternoon, Molly was putting together a banner for him out in the field. He paused on his way out of the hangar, behind Alec’s back, and shot me one lingering, hungry look that sent vibrations through my body.

After he left, I sat in a lawn chair. Alec lay on the dusty sofa. He was grilling me about how a girl who’d lived in a beach town for three years could possibly not know how to swim. He and Molly had both asked me a hundred questions about it the night before. I was on the verge of cutting my hand across my throat to shut him up. But as Molly had pointed out, Alec wasn’t like Grayson, and I doubted he would understand that blunt message like Grayson did.

Suddenly, underneath the lingering shivers I felt from Grayson’s gaze on me, under the hum of the fan blowing warm air around the hangar, something low and sinister shook the building. Alec felt it too. We frowned at each other.

“Someone’s coming,” I said.

“We have to get Molly,” he exclaimed, jumping up.

We both ran for the wide-open doorway of the hangar. Way across the field, Molly was already dashing for the airport office. Luckily the banner she’d been about to hook up was still rolled in a heavy ball on the grass. If it had been stretched out, we would have been chasing it halfway to town on the breeze that the approaching helicopter was about to stir up. Grayson left his plane parked in front of the hangar and stalked in the direction of the airport office. In the sky, still too far away to be making that much noise, hung a Chinook.

Alec and I walked over to the airport office. Grayson stared up at the helicopter with his hands on his h*ps like he thought the Army had some nerve. Molly leaned over and shouted in my ear, “What is that?”

“Chinook.” I stuck up both my pointer fingers and twirled them in opposite directions to represent the fascinating twin helicopter blades. Then I realized she had no idea what that meant, and I put my hands down. “Probably from the Army base.”

The Chinook sailed low over the trees and set down on the runway, its gentle movements belying the head-splitting noise it was making. We all had our hands over our ears now. Everyone at the airport lined the unforested side of the tarmac—more people than I would have imagined, like ants escaping from a mound kicked by a malicious little boy. The pilots among us watched because it was a Chinook and we longed to fly one. The secretaries and janitors from the airport-based businesses watched because the Chinook shook the ground and charged the atmosphere. Nobody could clean a floor or type a report, much less answer the phone, with that going on.

Camouflage-clad figures began to climb down from the helicopter. Two descended from the front door, three from another. The five of them met in the middle, yelled to each other with their headphones on, and walked toward us. One of them was a girl.

I wondered whether anybody was left in charge of the helicopter.

The lieutenant leading the group was a tall blond. I couldn’t tell for sure since he was wearing mirrored shades, but I thought he was boyishly handsome, like Alec. He came straight for me because, dressed in a bikini top, I was obviously in charge of this airport. He grinned at me. “Got any vending machines?” he yelled, even louder than necessary. He was deaf from sitting in the helicopter with his headphones on.

I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.

“I’ll show you!” Alec said, leaping in front of them and opening the glass door, ushering them inside the building. He followed them in, calling, “You guys from the Army base?”

Grayson stared at the Chinook, hands still on his hips, both fists white. He looked like he was about to explode.

“That’s funny,” I yelled at him conversationally. “They land their Chinook at our airport and act like they’re driving on the interstate and pulled over at a rest sto—”

“You want to go with them too?” he bit at me.

“What?” I asked, realizing even as I uttered this word that Grayson was jealous. Of an Army lieutenant who had talked to me on his way to the snack machine. And then, even though I’d figured it out, I asked, “What do you mean?”

Because I wanted to hear him say it. If he was really jealous, he wanted me for himself.

He opened his mouth. Inclined his head toward the door where the lieutenant had disappeared. Cut his eyes back at me. And then stalked through the door after them.

All the while, the chopper blades cut through the air and the gigantic motors throbbed. When it had approached, the Chinook had been loud. When it had landed, it had been absorbing. Now the noise became overwhelming but inescapable, a full-body vibration that shook me awake and insisted that something was about to happen.

“It’s so beautiful, isn’t it?” I yelled to Molly. “This massive piece of engineering that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly.”

“What?” she shouted back.

The airport office door burst open behind us. Grayson hollered over the noise of the helicopter. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The four men and one woman in fatigues walked back across the tarmac with drinks and packs of crackers in their hands. They disappeared into the belly of the Chinook. It rumbled even louder and deeper for a few moments, just for good measure, then lifted as easily as a tiny Piper blown on a storm wind.

“What did you say to them?” Alec yelled at Grayson over the fading noise.

“I told him to get his f**king Chinook off my runway,” Grayson said. “I’m trying to run a business here, and I’m not going to be held up and lose contracts just because these idiots think it’s funny to land here.”

“Did you say it to him like that?” Alec asked, horrified. “Grayson, you can’t talk to him that way. He was a lieutenant!”

“I can talk to him any f**king way I want, Alec. I’m not in the f**king military.”

“The Chinook’s gone now,” I pointed out.

Grayson looked around. He wanted to stay and argue, but he realized he was now being held up and losing contracts just by standing there. He walked toward the red Piper.

As an afterthought, he turned around and walked backward. “Molly,” he barked. He pointed toward the rolled-up banner in the center of the field.

Molly saluted him and galloped toward the grass. The other spectators faded into the metal buildings they’d scurried from. Nothing to see here. The last rumble of the Chinook had faded. The airport was as calm as if the helicopter had never landed.

I turned to Alec. “What’s Grayson’s problem? I liked the Chinook dropping by. I thought it was neato.”

“He’s mad because I got admitted to the Citadel.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Alec, that’s great!”

“He thinks I’m going into the military,” Alec said.

“Oh.” Now I saw. As Grayson started the engine of the red Piper and we watched him taxi past us toward the far end of the runway, I realized I didn’t see the whole picture, but I understood the tiniest piece of why Grayson wanted Alec to be smitten with me. The Citadel was in Charleston, the city Grayson wanted me to keep Alec away from.

I asked, “Are you going to join the military?”

“I don’t know,” Alec said. “I can go to the Citadel without joining. I did think it was a great idea. I mean, I want to fly for a living. Where else are you going to get the chance to fly a Chinook? Or, gosh, an F-15?”

I nodded. An F-15 was what Jake had been flying in Afghanistan when he got shot down.

“I told my family a couple of weeks ago,” Alec said, “and Grayson went ballistic.”

We both turned to watch Grayson take off, the tiny plane sailing without incident into the calm sky.

“He got my mom all freaked out,” Alec said. “Then Grayson got this bright idea that we should run Hall Aviation, just like my dad. I’m thinking, Hell no. I couldn’t imagine going into business with Grayson. Could you?” He turned to me, blond brows raised, wanting me to verify his answer.

“Before I saw it for myself,” I started slowly, “I would have said no. But now…” I gestured toward the red Piper skimming low over the grass. Grayson passed the upright poles. The plane shot up at an impossible angle, nearly stalling the engine. Had he missed the banner? Had he missed it? Molly’s banner stayed put on the ground way longer than it should have, it seemed. Then the plane stopped in midair, just for a split second, and kept going. The banner jerked on the ground and lifted gracefully: SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS. It went sailing after Grayson into the sky.

“The business seems to be going okay,” I continued. “I mean, gosh, Grayson knows how to do taxes.”

“Right,” Alec said. “He’s putting forth all this effort now. He’s throwing himself into this like he would have thrown himself into rock climbing before, this wall of energy with no understanding of the consequences, shoot now and ask questions later. That’s just because he and Mom convinced me to try out the business with him over spring break and a few more spring weekends, since Dad already had the contracts. If it goes okay, they want me to come back and fly with Grayson over the summer, and consider it as a civilian career instead of ever going into the military.”

“I get it,” I said. I really did. Grayson had thrown himself into this business, for Alec. He had swallowed every bit of his impulsive, irresponsible personality and redirected it toward a responsibility way too heavy for an eighteen-year-old boy, all for Alec. To fill out the contract schedule, he had needed me to work for him too, just like his dad had planned. To stack the deck, he had needed me to date Alec, so Alec would feel drawn to this place and wouldn’t want to leave for Charleston and the Citadel at the end of the summer.

And when I had refused, Grayson had found a way to make me.

“What do you think?” Alec asked.

I blinked at him. He was wearing aviator shades, just like Grayson, but for some reason his expression was a lot easier for me to read than Grayson’s ever was. Alec needed reassurance. “About what?”

“The military,” he prompted me. “Versus flying tow planes, or some other civilian job. I mean, you’ve got this job now, and Grayson told me that Mark had been dicking you around about a job flying crop dusters for Mr. Simon. But you’re not planning to stay here, are you? The military would be the perfect place for you.”