Page 5 of A Love Letter to Whiskey
“Where do you go when you do that?”
“Do what?” I asked.
“You have this look, this faraway stare sometimes. It’s like you’re here, but not really.”
He was watching me then, the same way he had the first day we met. I smoothed my thumb over one of the black designs on my board and shrugged.
“Just thinking, I guess.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
He grinned, and I felt my cheeks heat, though no one would know but me. My skin didn’t reveal a blush the way Jenna’s did. “Probably is. You should steer clear.”
Jamie chewed the inside of his lip, still staring at me, and opened his mouth to say something else, but didn’t. He turned, staring in the same direction as me for a few moments before speaking again.
“So what are you thinking right now?”
I let out a long, slow breath. “Thinking I can’t wait to get out of here, move to California, and finally surf a real wave.”
“You’re moving?”
“Not yet. But hopefully for college.”
“Ah,” he mused. “I take it you have no interest in going to Palm South University, then?”
I shook my head. “Nah, too much drama. I want a laid-back west coast school. Somewhere with waves that don’t suck.”
Jamie dipped his hand into the water and lifted it again, letting the water drip from his fingertips to the hot skin on his shoulders. “Me too, Brecks. Me too.”
I cringed at the use of my name. “It’s just B.”
“Just B, huh?”
I nodded. “You want to go to school in California, too?”
“That’s the plan. I have an uncle out there who has some connections at a few schools. You have a specific one in mind yet?”
“Not yet. Just somewhere far from here.”
He nodded once, thankfully not pushing me to expand on that little dramatic statement. We sat in silence a while longer before paddling back in and hiking our boards up under our arms as we made the trek back to the cars. The sand was a bit course under our feet, but I loved the way it felt. I loved everything about the beach, especially surfing, and I glanced over at Jamie, more thankful than I thought I would have been running into him.
He helped me load up after we rinsed off, strapping my old lime green board to the top of Old Not-So Faithful. And just like the reliable Betty that she was, the 1998 Kia Sportage failed to turn over when I tried to start her up.
“Great,” I murmured, my head hitting the top of the steering wheel. Jamie had just finished loading his own board a few cars away, and he made his way back over.
“Not starting?”
“Seems to be my lucky day.”
He smiled, tugging the handle on my door to pull it open. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”
I didn’t know it then, but that one small gesture, those six small words, they would be what changed everything between me and Jamie Shaw.
AS MUCH AS I loved the beach, I hated what it did to my hair.
I was a product of my parents, taking equal features from each. I had my father’s eyes, my mother’s hair, a smooth mixture of their skin tones. With my dad being white and my mom being black, I fell right in-between them with a creamy mocha latte. I was short like my mom and stubborn like my dad, and somehow I inherited the fiercest combination of their work ethic. My mom was petite, with virtually no curves to speak of and I mirrored her in that respect. I loved my athletic build, even if it didn’t grab the attention of boys the way Jenna’s hips did.
All that being said, salt water mixed with my hair about as well as water mixed with oil. I tried my best to tame it in the small visor mirror in the passenger seat of Jamie’s Jeep, using my fingers to try to breathe life back into the tight spiral curls. I wiped my fingers across my cheeks next, rubbing the leftover salt away. My gray-blue eyes looked tired that day, and I let them flick to the freckles on the apples of my cheeks for just the shortest second before flipping the visor back up and settling back in the leather seat.
I’d never seen a Jeep that nice, let alone ridden in one. It was brand new, cherry red, with black leather seats and a tricked-out dashboard. It seemed a little much to me, especially for a highschooler. Did a seventeen-year-old really need such an expensive car?
The answer was absolutely not.
But I’d learned a lot about Jamie in those eight days since we’d first met, thanks to a little social media stalking. Our school was ginormous, there were more than six-hundred kids in mine and Jenna’s grade alone. But, I wasn’t too proud to surf the Web to find out more about my best friend’s new guy, and I learned a good amount. Enough to know that his father owned one of the top privately-owned accounting firms in Fort Lauderdale and Jamie would want for nothing the rest of his life. I hoped to go to college in California, but there was no doubt in my mind he would get there if that’s what he decided he wanted.
