Page 65 of Guy's Girl
“Ooh.” He folds his knees up on the board. “Good one. Hmm.” He taps his chin. “There’s a lot. English is a weird fucking language.”
“That it is, my friend.”
“Okay.” He claps once. “This doesn’t really answer yourquestion, but for a long time I used to get the wordshostelandbrothelmixed up.”
For a long beat, Ginny stares at him in silence. Then, without warning, she bursts into laughter. “What in God’s name,” she asks through gasps, “was a nine-year-old doing thinking aboutbrothels?”
He shrugs. “Little boys are horny.”
She splashes him, and he laughs, batting the water away.
He says, “I can’t believe you remember the age I moved to the United States.”
She shrugs. Dips one hand into the water and spoons out a handful. “I remember everything about you.”
And the funny thing is—he believes her.
***
As he paddles them back to shore, board bouncing in the waves, spraying them with cold water, Adrian watches Ginny’s face. She laughs every time they hit a wave. Her eyes close, but her lips spread wide, teeth flashing, as if she wants to catch the water on her tongue. He realizes, as obvious as one sentence following the next, that he would do anything to keep that smile on her face.
When they reach the sand, Ginny helps him tug the board ashore. She straightens, then turns to look at him.
“What?” he asks.
“I forgot,” she says.
“Forgot what?”
“How easy it is to talk to you.”
“Oh.” He pulls at his swim trunks. “I feel the same way about you.”
She smiles just a little.
“Clay said something funny to me,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“He said you care about me.”
“I do care about you, Ginny.”
“That’s weird,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because you said... in your apartment, after we...” She seems to process several things at once. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You know what? Whatever. Fuck it. I like being around you.”
Adrian tries to follow her train of thought, but she’s like a minnow, darting from one subject to the next. All he can do is swallow and say: “I do, too.”
She nods as if they are discussing the weather. “Good,” she says. “Friends, then.”
Friends.Good. That’s what he wants, right? That’s the safest option. To keep Ginny in his life, not committing to anything serious, ensuring that they don’t explode and lose each other forever.
He says, “Friends.”
Adrian’s best friend does, in fact, join them for the ruin pub crawl. Not only that—he chooses the route. “ ‘I’ll take you to the good spots,’ ” he writes in a text that Adrian translates aloud to the group. “ ‘Not the crap tourist ones.’ ”
