Page 4 of Our Hearts Knew Better

And practically skipping along behind this boy, and he didn’t miss it, giving me another smile over his shoulder, as I was ratted out by my shoes.

“I got it,” I murmured through my flush when he held his hand out to me again. I wanted to take it, but climbing onto this boat was much easier than climbing down a trellis.

“Welcome aboard the Gilligan,” he said once my feet landed beside his, nodding with an adoring look around, just over my head, as if the boat were his and not his dad’s.

I chuckled, then his gaze slid down to me. “Gilligan?”

“Gilligan’s Island?” he asked back, and I shook my head, no bells ringing.

He waved it off as he turned and bent for a mini fridge. “My dad’s old.”

I chuckled again, but it was silent, stalled in my chest as I watched him—Levi—taking more of him in. Mostly how his light green shirt stretched along his lean muscles as he pulled out two sodas.

And I was suddenly aware of howIlooked. In my pajamas. My dark, curly hair more frizz than curl.

I was fingering the few locks draped down my shoulder when he passed me one of the cans, giving me the chance to occupy my hands and my thoughts with the coldness and popping the tab.

We ended up sitting beside each other on a bench seat, silent and sipping, exchanging small glances, until the music he was listening to reregistered, and I shimmied in my revived excitement as I said, “You’re listening to my favorite band.”

His swallow of soda went down slowly as he looked at me, intensifying the goosebumps I already had from Kai Coleman, lead singer of Ten Decembers, as he crooned his heart out.

Then he took another sip, still looking at me, and there was a spark of something there, like he was thinking what I now was.We’ve met each other at a time when no one should and now we like the same music.

“I’m listening to my favorite band too,” he said, confirming and adding a weight to the thought, with a subtle flutter in his lids—the spark.

My hand wrapped around the can was still cool but my chest was warm. That’s the feeling I’d go on to associate with Levi. Varying degrees of warmth.

“This your favorite song?”

He bobbed his head with his next swallow, between a yes and a no. “It’s one of them. You?”

I copied him, the head bob and all. “It’s one of them.”

He chuckled, as I hoped he would, his smile holding to his lips, and I tried to subdue another shimmy as my brain sang,cha-ching!

When the guys of Ten Decembers’ hearts broke, they bled the saddest and, sometimes, angriest ink. “Going through a broken heart?” I asked him now, going off the song, my fingernail picking at the can tab, the clinking getting louder the more I regretted the question.

His headshake stopped the noise, and I managed a smile through another question I gave myself an inner facepalm over.

“You’re just a soft boy?”

The facepalm? More forhowI asked. I was flirting, and I’d never flirted before, and the awkwardness in my voice told me I needed to work on it.

“Is that what you like?” he said right after me, sounding like a real questionanda flirt back, and a couple things happened at once. My eyes widened and I blinked them back to normal as his mouth formed a cringe, like his words were as much of a slip as mine were.

We looked down at our cans at the same time, laughing at ourselves and each other.

I didn’t think either of us knew what was happening, but we were here, making equal fools of ourselves, and here was where we wanted to be.

“I like their soft stuff the most,” he told me after swallowing a big drink, with a kind of settled tone that I could forget his question. But it’d already settled in me. The whole reason I was out.

I didn’t really know what I liked…wherethatwas concerned, but I liked him. I liked having his company. And I thought he liked me and mine too. He seemed like hewaslike me. He wasn’t a Rapunzel, but maybe a bit clumsy, too, with stuff like this.

We were both sitting more comfortably now, his legs stretched out and mine criss-crossed, when he moved us on with, “How strict is your dad?”

I told him. I told him my dad was the only person I had in my life. I told him how my dad vetted anyone else I could want in my life and decided they weren’t good enough. And how if I disagreed, he would give me silent treatment, when he was all I had to talk to.

Like the other time I was on one of those school-hour field trips and a school friend’s family had invited me for dinner, and I’d braved the call to ask my dad. He’d hung up on me. I’d felt so guilty, and I was already in the car with them, because I’dhoped, and I had them take me straight home. I was crying. He was shaking, really worked up.You can’t put me through that, Summer.

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