“You know what I could go for,” he says. “A hot fudge sundae.”
Suddenly that’s all I want for dinner.
“I think the Scoop Shop’s still open till one on Fridays.”
He extracts his arm from around my shoulders and checks the time on his phone. “I think we can make that. You sure it’s open? Places like that usually close after Labor Day.”
“They announced on their site that they’d be open through the end of the month. It’s been a really warm September. That’s why Mom hasn’t closed up the pool yet.”
He swirls the contents of his half-empty beer bottle. “You may have to drive.”
I can’t recall ever having seen Finn drunk, and certainly not after a single Corona. Then I catch the playful tilt of his smile. Gran must’ve said something about me not driving.
“You’d let me drive your truck?”
“Sure, why not.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Dory says you’re a great driver.”
“I think she meant was a great driver. I haven’t been behind the wheel since they sold her Caddy.”
“Now’s your chance to get in some practice.”
I smile. “Okay. Let’s get ice cream.”
We go inside. I wedge my feet into my sandals and then lock up the house. Finn tosses me his keys and I climb into the driver’s seat of his pick-up truck. The seat’s been pushed so far back to accommodate his long legs that my feet don’t even reach the pedals. I feel like a little kid playing pretend in her dad’s car.
Finn settles into the passenger’s seat and says, “I’ll move that up for you.”
A gasp floats from my lips as Finn reaches between my legs, under the seat, to where I realize the adjustment mechanism must be located. There’s a soft click and then a growl as he drags the seat forward until my soles touch the pedals.
“Better?” He’s so close that I can feel the gentle gust of his breath on my face, a cloud of peppermint with just the faintest tang of beer. I nod, swallowing hard as he extends the seatbelt across my body and buckles the latch plate at my hip. His gaze meets mine, and for a moment, it’s as if God has pressed pause on the universe.
Finn isn’t just looking at me. He’s studying me, tracing my features. I wonder what he sees, and if he can read the longing in my gaze as plain as the words on a get-well card.
I don’t know exactly when my platonic love for Finn turned into something romantic. It’s not like I can’t point to a specific instant and say, there, that’s the moment I looked at Finn and thought, I want to marry him someday. Though, Gran says, when I was really little, I used to show off my ring pops and proclaim to anyone who’d listen that I was going to marry Finn, in that childish way kids do when they don’t know what marriage is.
I remember asking Leena about boys and crushes when I was about ten, knowing she’d have the answers. She’d already kissed a whopping three boys in her class. In my pre-adolescent eyes, that made her an expert.
“A crush is when you really, really like a boy and you want to be with him.” At thirteen, Leena was remarkably assured.
“Be with them how?” I asked.
“Like hang out with them and hold hands and kiss and stuff.” She tore open a package of Starbursts with her teeth and handed me a pink one.
“What’s it feel like?”
“Like a funny feeling inside,” she said. “You’ll know when it happens because you’ll feel like you need to dance and pee at the same time.”
It would be years before I felt anything approaching that description. Some of the boys in my high school were cute, but that antsy, excited feeling I’d eventually come to recognize as attraction only ever struck when Finn came to visit.
I didn’t want to entertain the possibility that I might be attracted to him. Finn was family. I didn’t know much, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel that way about family. When he hugged me goodbye or wrestled with me at the beach, I’d bite my lips and fight to ignore those funny feelings Leena had talked about.
But I can’t control my attraction to Finn any more than I can change my natural hair color. I can dye it, cover it up, but my true color will still be there at the roots, threatening to expose me.
Finn lets go of my seatbelt buckle and aims his gaze at the windshield. “It’s a Friday night, so there’ll probably be a line. We should get going.”
Something in the way he smooths his shoulder-length hair back with both hands makes me think he might be...nervous. But what does Finn have to be nervous about? I’m the one who’s obsessed with a man more than twice my age.
A man who doesn’t even trust me to buckle myself in properly.