Page 25 of Wild Like Us
“When I was fourteen,” I say. “It was at a local community pool, but kids kept fake-drowning so I’d save them.”
“Can’t blame them,” Banks says.
“Why? You’d want to be saved by the famous Sullivan Minnie Meadows too?”
“Not ‘cause you’re famous, mermaid.”
Is he…is he flirting? My pulse skips.No way.My brows pinch, and Akara shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He switches a knob on the air conditioning.
No luck.
Akara glances back. “Maybe those kids were trying to see if you’d grow fins and a tail.” He tosses the dirty sock that I threw at him right back at me.
“Jokes on them because I quit after a week.” I chuck it back again. “And I thought you didn’t believe in mermaids.”
“I don’t.” He has trouble facing forward, away from me.
I’m about to speak when a text pings my phone.
Morning, my peanut butter cupcake. Hope you have a wonderful day! Guess what? That new donut shop you’d been talking about is opening up down the street from Superheroes & Scones tomorrow. We should go next time you’re free. Love you to the moon and back xoxo– Mom
My stomach sinks into the fucking Earth.
“Sul?” Akara’s concern leaks from his voice.
“It’s just my mom.”
“Everything alright?” Banks asks.
I swallow hard and toss my cell between my hands. “Yeah, it’s all normal. Which, I guess is the problem. I just…” I exhale into a deeper frown. “I don’t like keeping this from my parents. It feels wrong.” I hug my legs to my chest.
Banks wipes sweat off his brow. “If it’s eating at you, just call them.”
“Exactly,” Akara chimes in, wafting his shirt which looks damp.
“What if my dad shows up and demands you return me?”
Banks nearly smiles.
Akara shakes his head. “We didn’t kidnap you, Sulli. We’re not going to listen to him.”
My brows raise. “You wouldn’t listen to Ryke Meadows?”
Akara rotates more fully to face me. Confidence eking from every small movement. His eyes lock onto mine. “I won’t listen to Ryke Meadows.”
More heat bathes me. As does skepticism. “You remember Red Rocks when I wanted to go off on the long trail by myself. Without you, even. And my dad said, not that day because I’d already done a hard morning swim. You agreed with him.”
He barely blinks. “You were seventeen.”
“So?”
“You’re twenty-one now.” He tilts his head, hair falling over his forehead. “An adult.”
I’ve always wanted to hear him say those words.
You’re an adult now.
My parents had an epic, soul-mate kind of love that started out as a beautiful friendship, and my mom met my dad when she was fifteen. He was twenty-one. And he never even let himself love her in that way until months after her eighteenth birthday.
