Page 168 of Rules of Association

An excited puff of air left her, bordering on a squawk as we began to cut through the sanded area. Then she was howling, our speed increasing with her volume. I pinched her. Urging her to quiet down, but I’m pretty sure as soon as I put the helmet on her head, she had gone wild. I couldn’t stop her if I tried. And I didn’t want to.

The four-wheeler would have obviously worked better on a course or along some sort of dunes, but there was something beautiful about the way the flat horizon blended together in a blur of color and light and sound. Wind whipped around us, and Cee’s hair blew back into my face as she sped along the long stretch of beach. She tried to stick to a straight line, but oftentimes jerked suddenly to either side because she “thought she saw something”. Each time causing me to shoot hands out to her waist or legs or stomach going, “Woah,woah.”

And each time she’d say the same thing over her shoulder. “Calm down, I got this.”

I knew I was smiling as I sat back and let Ceci take us over forty down miles and miles of beach. I couldn’t help it. On top of seeing Ceci back to being herself, this was just plain fun. The truth was, I’d bought two ATVs after a passing comment from Cee while we watched tv. She’d thought they were cool and I thought making her happy was cool, so a couple weeks later they were delivered.

I could have brought the second one out too, but tonight I wanted to be close to her. Especially after such an emotional week—hell, an emotional summer, and it wasn’t even over yet.

Wind whipping ferociously around us, Ceci tossed a shielded glance over her shoulder.

“Watch this,” she said. Then she yanked the handlebars abruptly to the left. The cart swung swiftly across the sand, the back two wheels tail spinning before jolting to a stop. We were close enough to the shoreline that as she swung to a stop, sand and water sprayed haphazardly into the air, raining down over us in an elemental shower.

“Aghhh!” we both gasped out through laughter. And then—like kids, we both looked at each other saying, “Again!”

I felt sort of bad for the amount of tire tracks we left in the sand from all the tricks we attempted. But I quickly forgot about that every time I heard the melodic sound of Ceci’s laugh. And when the sunlight finally started to seep from the sky, leaving the beach in this half-dark half-glowing yellow underneath the cover of clouds, we turned back to head toward my beach.

I thought she’d want to go inside after that. It was the warmest part of the summer here in Rhode Island for sure, but the water wasn’t exactly hot springs temperatures at night.

But no. When Ceci parked the ATV just at the junction of the shore and the water, she started peeling off her gear with continuous buzzing energy. Gloves and helmet gone, she leaned down to toe off her shoes and in a second she was jumping off the car and splashing into the water.

It wasn't deep. Not even shin deep, but she shrieked as the waves hit her legs at the exact time that she landed, sending her toppling over into the cool water.

“Jesus,” I said, rising from my seat and pulling off my own gear. When I got to my shoes, I had barely pulled my second sock off when I felt a cold wet hand latch onto my wrist and pull. I groaned, but it was fake. I could never not want her hands on me. “It’s like your birthday all over again.”

“Which birthday?”

“You don’t remember?” I asked, jumping down off the four-wheeler, my feet splashing into the cold water and sinking into the moving sand of the sea. “Let me jog your memory, then.”

There were still slivers of light peeking through behind the dark clouds. They mixed together with the light of the moon and cast Ceci in enough glow for me to see all of her. Her reddish-brown hair, lithe and curvy frame, her big smile. I ate her up. And then, Ipickedher up. Swift and easy before swinging her horizontal in my arms and laying her into the water.

She jerked, screeching. “Connor!”

“Don't tell me you forgot your‘Arctic Baptism’birthdayalready, you freaking weirdo,” I said.

Fighting me and the cold water, she tried to get up, but I held her down by her waist letting her head rise above the splashing current but not the rest of her body. She shrieked again. “I remember! I remember!”

“Good,” I said, not letting up. “You’ll appreciate another one, then.”

She yelped. But she was laughing. Gasping for air as she did. Then suspiciously she said, “Fine. If I get one, you get one too.”

And before I could process what she intended, her arms were around my neck and I was plummeting face first into a wave as it broke the surface and buried both Ceci and I under the sea. I sputtered, flailed, and smashed Cee to the sand under us as I tried to orient myself. Salt assaulted my eyes, nose and mouth, and just as I thought I was pushing it all away, another wave came crashing into us.

I swore, but there was no maliciousness in it. There couldn’t be when I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. Cee had wriggled out from under me and was on her knees trying to pull me back under by a spider monkey hold on my back. I just grabbed her under the thighs, lifting her as I rose to my feet to wade us deeper into the ocean before it got too dark for safety.

We played like kids. Splashing and laughing and jumping and claiming the ocean as our own. My heart felt light in my chest. Like at any moment it would pick up and fly away, and I'm certain it was Ceci’s laughter giving it wings. When I looked at her in the setting sun and rising moon, I looked at my everything, just as I’d told her when she was asleep.

As the moon reached its perch in the night sky, we started to tire out.

Slowing down showed us how cold it was. Our soaking wet clothes heavy and not doing anything to counter the cool night air. I stood close to the shore near the ATV wringing my wet shirt and hanging it on one of the handlebars. When I turned around, there was Ceci stealing my breath away for the second time as she stood there in a little triangular bra thing pulling her own shirt over her head.

My eyes didn't know where to go. To her smooth honeyed skin, to her perky breasts, to her little belly button ring with a blue star dangling in the middle.

Anywhere, everywhere.

My eyes drank her in so much, they almost drowned. And when they finally ventured up to her eyes—where they should have landed in the first place—she gave me a weird look. Guarded, maybe. Cautious, definitely.

“What?” I asked.

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