Page 5 of Tan Lines & Trouble
I scrub a hand over my face and through my hair, finding even more sand there. “Yeah, you’re right. Shit.”
“Why?” she asks, tapping her foot, the movement drawing my gaze to her breasts.
Momentarily, I lose my words as I watch the twin mounds jiggle beneath the yellow rash guard she’s rocking like a second skin.
“Why?” she asks again, snapping her fingers in front of my face, freeing me from my titty-trance.
“Why what?”
Dots huffs and clenches her tiny fists at her sides. “Why did you pretend not to know me?”
“Honestly? At first, I really didn’t recognize you. I mean, you’re all grown up, if you catch my drift. By the time I realized you were you, I…” I shrug my shoulders, feeling helpless—which is a foreign feeling when talking to a woman.
“You what?” she asks, her hands on her hips. My Dots was never one to back down from a fight, and while it seems like a lot about her has changed, a lot has also stayed the same. “Because I can’t think of a single way to end that sentence that will justify your behavior.”
“Fuck Dots?—”
“Thea.”
“—Dots. You want me to be honest, fine. I’ll be honest. I don’t know why I acted like an ass. At first you were just some girl, some crazy hot chick I wanted to take a spin on my dick. When I recognized you, it threw me for a loop. I mean, you’re you and even knowing that, I was still imagining sliding inside you and fucking you senseless. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I slid into ‘Douchey Dane’. It was shitty and I’m sorry. Okay?”
Dots stares blankly my way. Thanks to her reflective sunglasses, I can’t tell if she’s actually looking at me, much less what she’s feeling. Finally, after eons have passed, she says, “Douchey Dane? What does that even mean?”
I sigh. “It’s what my PR teams calls my public persona. It’s how I keep most people at an arm’s length.”
“Let me get this straight. You have a douchey alter ego you adopt to keep everyone at a distance and decided to try it out on me because you were imagining fucking me and it made you uncomfortable?”
I shift on my feet. “Well, when you say it like that…”
She huffs out a breath. “There’s no good way to put it. But whatever, you’ve always been a little bit of a d-bag, so I’m not really surprised.”
Now I’m huffing, because what the fuck? “Me? How?”
Another stare down—I think, damn tinted lenses—ensues before she finally says, “Uh, does the summer before high school ring a bell?”
Well, shit. She’s got me there. Now the question is how do I play this? I contemplate bullshitting her for about point-two seconds before dismissing the notion. Telling the truth has worked well so far, plus, Dots would call me on my shit faster than I can pop up on my board—which is pretty damn fast.
“I’m gonna be real with you Dots. You’re not gonna like what’s about to come out of my mouth.”
“Because I’ve loved everything else you’ve said?” Is it wrong that her sass gets me hard?
“I was fourteen. I was noticing girls and they were noticing me. I wanted to…” I trail off, trying to think of the best way to phrase what I want to say. “…I’m just gonna say it. I wanted to round the bases, Dot, and I couldn’t very well do that with you tagging along. Sounds harsh, but I was a shit then and I’m sorry.”
She laughs, but I can’t tell if it’s in humor or spite. “You’re a shit now Dane Foster.”
I shuffle a step closer. “But I’m a sorry shit.”
“You’ll hear no arguments from me there. Lord knows, only a sorry shit would ditch a lifelong friend to get his dick rubbed.”
“Wait, that’s not what I meant.”
She shrugs. “Your words, I’m just choosing to interpret them differently.”
“You’re impossible,” I tell her, all the other times I’ve said those exact words to her playing through my mind like a highlight reel. Like the time she wanted to scale the side of my house and jump from the roof onto the trampoline so that she could bounce into my pool. I tried like hell to talk her out of it, but she insisted. Spoiler alert: she broke her ankle and spent the entire summer in a cast.
Or the time she begged the neighbor on the other side to pull her behind his car on her rollerblades—thankfully he refused and told her parents. She was grounded for a week.
Oh, and I can’t forget the time she talked me into marrying her. We couldn’t have been older than seven. I came over like I did every weekend and instead of wearing her play clothes, she was dressed up in a white church dress with flowers plucked directly from her front yard, roots and all, clutched in her small hands. I asked her what in the heck she was up to and she proudly announced to me that she was a woman now since she’d lost both her front teeth and that we were getting married. I told her guys usually did the asking. Dots shoved me down and told me that was stupid. I told her she was impossible. We exchanged vows and dandelion stem rings all the same.
