Page 34 of When We Were Reckless
The very last thing I needed was an eighteen-year-old virgin fucking with my head.
* * *
Quinn
Thanks to Declan, the pontoon had turned into a party cruise. He’d invited a bunch of friends I didn’t know, and now one of the girls was climbing him like a monkey. He carried her through the lower deck, his hand on her ass, a beer in his other hand.
They disappeared to the upper deck where Declan was hosting his party. He and his friends were planning to stay the night at the lake house. No doubt they’d trash it by morning.
I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, my eyes on the crystal blue water. Two Jet Skiers zipped past the pontoon, and a few kids were diving off the rocks into the lake. When my brothers and Jesse were in their teens, they used to dive off those rocks. One time Jesse did a double backflip, and Mom nearly had a heart attack.
We used to have some good times at this lake. Back when we were a family and did everything together. Earlier, when I’d walked into the lake house to change out of my jeans, it had smelled musty from being closed up for so long. When my parents were still married, Dad used to take his girlfriend to that house. Not that anyone had told me that. I’d overheard them arguing about it the night Dad packed up his things and moved out.
“You good, Bean?” Holden asked, jolting me back to the present. He was behind the wheel, Ray-Ban aviators shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare while he navigated. I was sitting across the aisle from him in a horseshoe-shaped booth with a bottle of water on the kidney-shaped table in front of me.
“Never been better.” I ignored the sound of Jesse and Tasha’s laughter that carried through the breeze. Even though the music was pumping—Dominic Fike’s “3 Nights”—I could still hear them. They were hanging out with Mason and Carly on the sun deck in the front of the boat. Lounging on the plush vinyl sofas. Jesse, in all his shirtless glory, his golden skin kissed by the sun. Tasha with her big boobs in a fluorescent orange string bikini. Earlier, I’d been treated to the sight of Jesse rubbing sunscreen onto her back.
So I’d gone for a swim in the lake with Declan and his friends, and then I’d hitched a ride on the Jet Ski with a tattooed guy, Thor. I didn’t know if Thor was his real name, but he was a funny guy, the size of a mountain, and claimed he had a big hammer. I didn’t stop laughing for most of the ride.
“Enjoying your summer?” Holden asked.
I didn’t even know how to answer that. I’d had such high hopes for my last summer before college. But so far, nothing had gone according to plan.
While I debated how to answer, I watched Holden maneuver around a fishing boat, giving it the right of way.
My brothers were all handsome. Mason looked like a younger version of Dad, and Declan was the dark-haired, tattooed bad boy. But in my opinion, Holden was the best looking out of the three. He wore his hair a bit longer, the ends curling up a little where they hit the collar of his T-shirt, and his eyes were the clearest shade of green.
Holden knew how it felt to have his heart broken.
Last summer, his girlfriend of six years left him for a job in New York City. Avery told him she needed space and needed to figure out who she was without him.
I was tempted to confide in him. Tell him that I was in love with someone who would never love me back. But that someone was his friend who was currently getting cozy with Tasha. And even though Holden wasn’t quite as overbearing as Mason, he still thought of me as his baby sister and felt it was his duty to protect me.
So I kept it to myself. “Yeah. It’s been good.”
“And what about this guy, Walker? Do you like him?”
My eyes sought out Jesse, although I didn’t know why I needed to look at him to answer the question. His hair was all messy, ruffled by the breeze, and he was sitting on the sofa like a king on his throne, his arms draped across the back, and Tasha nestled against his side as if she belonged there. She was looking up at him, her lips moving, face animated as if she was telling him an exciting story.
But he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was looking directly at me. His eyes narrowed as if he knew what I was talking about, even though he couldn’t hear me from where he was sitting. “He’s a good guy. He’s cool.”
“Better be. Or he’ll have me to deal with.”
I rolled my eyes. “You and Mason made that pretty clear on Friday night.”
“We can’t have some douche messing with our little sister.”
Which proved my point. No way could I confide in Holden. Why would I have even considered doing anything so idiotic? Better to let him think I liked Walker than to guess the truth.
Jesse extricated himself from Tasha and stalked toward me. There was something a little bit dangerous about him now. It should have scared me, but it had the opposite effect. My body was humming at his nearness.
He reached into the small fridge next to the booth where I was sitting and pulled out a bottle of water, his back to me.
“Walker’s fun to hang out with, and he treats me right,” I told Holden, noting the way Jesse’s muscles tensed and his body stiffened. I’d felt how tense he was on the motorcycle ride earlier. I saw it yesterday at the track when I watched him ride too. So if we were on friendlier terms, I’d ask him to do yoga with me just to loosen him up. It might even help his riding.
“I like Walker. I like him a lot,” I added for Jesse’s benefit.
I was laying it on thick, but Jesse had been getting cozy with Tasha since we left the boat ramp, so he deserved that and more. “I might as well enjoy my last summer before college, right?”
