Page 58 of Find Me in California

“How so?”

“It implies you’ve made a conscious choice not to fall in love.”

He clears water from his ear. Her observation hits too close to home.

She tiptoes her fingers over his chest, and he flattens her hand. “Stop that.”

“How’d you lose your mom?”

He shakes his head and looks away.

“It helps to talk about it.”

“I don’t talk about her,” he says, feeling like a song on repeat.

She tilts her head like an inquisitive bird. “It couldn’t have been all bad.”

“It wasn’t.” Until the end, it was idyllic. He couldn’t have asked for a better set of parents.

“Then tell me something good.”

Words escape his mouth like birds released from a cage. “She was radiant.” The sun in his universe. And the memories of her are suddenly there, vivid and dynamic. Him waking up to her singing “Good morning” as she opened the blinds in his room. Him running home after school to the scent of oranges on her fingers from the snack she’d made for him. The notes she’d leave him in his lunch bag, positive affirmations that disappeared with her. The kisses she’d bless him with every evening before bed. Her checking in on him at night before he drifted to sleep. Moments he’s forgotten in his struggle not to remember that last day with her. They knock the wind from him.

“I wish I’d had the chance to meet her,” Magnolia whispers.

So does Matt.

He shoves off the wall and crosses the pool with an aggressive stroke. On the opposite side, he stands in the shallow end and wipes the chlorine from his eyes. Water falls in rivulets off his shoulders. Magnolia doesn’t give him a chance to get sucked into his dark thoughts. As if she knows she’s the distraction he needs, she swims to the shallow end and, like a nymph, rises from the water with her head tipped back. Her hair falls in a glistening sheet behind her shoulders, her breasts polishedand gleaming in the single lamp lighting the pool deck, thoroughly distracting him.

Everything inside Matt tightens. It hurts to breathe.

“You’re fucking hot.” The words slip from him.

Magnolia’s hands rise to cup his face, and eyes locked onto her mouth, Matt feels himself leaning over. She kisses him, and he jolts, her touch an unexpected shock. Then he’s melting into her arms as his wrap around her, lifting her as he straightens. Her legs cradle his hips, and he groans into her mouth. She kisses him and kisses him, her fingers tangling in his hair.

Matt has never felt anything like this. He’s never felt so lost and found—understood—at once. His head is spinning. He feels himself falling and falling.

They crash into the water. He comes up gulping air, disoriented.

Magnolia comes up sputtering. “You!” she shrieks, laughing.

Matt holds up his hands. “My bad.” He lost his head with her and eyeballs the empty beer on the side of the pool. He tries to calculate how much he’s had tonight, what he’s taken, when a shout comes from outside the fence.

“Quiet down in there,” a man wearing nothing but a rumpled cotton shirt and loose boxers hollers.

Magnolia yelps and sinks to her shoulders.

“Pool is closed,” he complains.

“We were just leaving,” Matt says.

The man glowers, then returns to his room.

Magnolia stares at Matt with swollen lips and huge eyes. Water sparkles like black diamonds on the tips of her lashes. “We should go,” he whispers.

“What about California? Your grandmother—”

“I can’t—” He stops before he says more. The very idea of confronting Elizabeth is triggering. Someone else will come through on her behalf. Best to return home tomorrow and coordinate her relocation from there. As for tonight ...

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