He pressed his lips to mine and paused. Maybe he was waiting to see whether I would push him away. Maybe, like me, he savored that precarious moment perched at the top of a climb. We could have fallen backward to Earth, pretending we’d been teasing each other and it was all a mean-spirited joke. Or we could have continued forward and pitched over into a weightless and euphoric free fall. In that moment of decision, his warm hands on my skin and the cold air around me confused my body. Electricity surged through my middle. The only sounds were the low hum of the refrigerator and Grayson sighing sexily.
I shifted my hand in his waistband, shoving my fingers farther down and flattening my palm against his bare skin.
That was it: we went over. He kissed me hard on the mouth, my stomach was gone, and we sped toward the ground. I stopped thinking. Nothing was left but the rush, the high, the sensations of his tongue in my mouth and his body underneath my hands.
After we had kissed like this for a long time, he scooped me up and sat me on the counter. I didn’t protest, didn’t even consider resisting when he slid his hands between my legs.
I wasn’t expecting much. I let him touch me there because he wanted to. The boy who’d taken my virginity had touched me there too. But he’d been satisfying his own curiosity. Grayson was satisfying me. He watched my eyes and kissed my neck as he explored. Long minutes later when we rested with our foreheads together, panting into each other’s mouths, he reached behind me and untied both strings of my bikini top.
We were back to the place with each other where we’d been at the beach. I wanted him desperately, but nothing would make me go through with this if I couldn’t handle the consequences later. I nudged his blond curls aside with my nose and whispered in his ear, “Do you have a condom?”
“I do,” he whispered back, his voice a sexy grind. But the mood cooled now that we needed to think. He fished his wallet from his pocket, placed it beside my thigh on the counter, and peered into the various compartments. “I thought I did.” He removed a crumpled receipt. “Oh God, please.”
I watched his long fingers search his wallet and slide inside to check for hidden condoms. Then I watched his face. He bit his lip, so concerned that he wouldn’t find this condom and we wouldn’t get this experience together after all. So eager and hot for me. I’d crushed on him for years and fallen in love with him over the past few days. But as he paused and frowned at me, then looked past me as if searching his mind for where else he might have left some of his things, I fell further.
Scowling at his wallet again, he slid out his pilot’s license and his driver’s license and the Hall Aviation credit card. “Come on now. Ha!” He grinned at me and held up two packets. “Two.”
“Impressive.”
“Oh.” He laughed nervously, and a blush darkened his cheeks in the dim kitchen light. “Yeah, this all seems overly confident of me, doesn’t it? Like I go around with condoms all the time just in case.” He looked into my eyes and said, “I had a girlfriend. Before Jake died. Then I lost her because I was an as**ole to her.”
He sounded apologetic. I didn’t know what to say to this. Of course he’d had a girlfriend. Of course he’d been hard to get along with after Jake died. I felt sorry for him and for this girl. If she had any sense, she was brokenhearted that they hadn’t been able to hold on to each other until the worst passed.
Though Mr. Hall had died then. Maybe this was the worst, right now.
I could be this girl for him. I could be exactly what he needed. He was so full of life, but unsteady, and I would be steady for him and help him through.
He was squinting at the condoms. “They might have expired. No, that one’s okay.” He put one packet down on the counter. “That one’s okay too.” He gazed at me again. “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
Oh no. I’d wanted this with Grayson so badly for so long, way before I knew I wanted it.
But that was selfish of me. I swallowed and nodded, trying to understand. “Because of the condoms?”
“Hey.” He gave me a long, chaste kiss on the lips, then one on the forehead. “No. They’re really okay.”
Now I knew. “Is it that girl you were dating?”
His brows arched in surprise. “What? No!”
I huffed out a little sigh of relief that he wasn’t pining for his lost girlfriend. But now I was confused. “Why, then?”
“Because I’m your boss. And I’m taking advantage of you by coming over here when I know your mom has split.”
“Is that all? You’re realizing this a little late.” I cupped his face in my hand and stroked my fingers down the blond stubble on his cheek. “We’re both eighteen. What’s really bothering you?”
His soulful gray eyes looked deep into my eyes as he said, “My dad would kill me.”
He likely was right about that. But his dad wasn’t here. And we were.
Slowly I slid off the counter, down his body. When I reached the floor, I looked way up into his eyes. I took his hand and led him down the hall to my bedroom.
eighteen
Afterward he lay on top of me. His cheek pressed against my neck, but I didn’t want him to move. With all of him pinning me, I felt oddly comfortable. I only tried to slow my panting, quiet my breathing, to the point that I could hear he was breathing hard too.
He propped himself up on his elbows, blinking at me, his long, blond eyelashes and the edges of his blond hair lit only by the streetlight through the tiny window. “God, I’m sorry, Leah,” he whispered. “I was crushing you.”
“Maybe a little,” I said.
He smiled at me then, not an embarrassed smile, and that put me at ease. He had a look in his eyes I recognized from times when he’d pulled a prank on Mr. Hall, or he’d landed after a series of touch-and-go’s when he was first learning to fly. Unlike a lot of people, he wasn’t drained by a rush of adrenaline. His expression said, I want to go again.
I laughed. After that adrenaline rush of a flight, I’d come back to Earth now. But just like with flying, I was already looking forward to the next time too.
He couldn’t, at least not yet. Boys had to recover first. I knew that much from TV and dirty talk on the school bus. He reached to my bedside table and fumbled with the alarm clock. The radio shut off for the first time since he brought me back from the airport basement two nights before. Normally silence would have descended on the room like a shroud. With Grayson here, the quiet was bearable. Even nice. I didn’t mind the idea of a long, empty space.
He rolled to his side and settled on one elbow with his chin in his hand, watching me. “This is going to be kind of a downer after that, but I want you to know something. When we were at Molly’s café the night of the party, you said something that got me thinking. You said sometimes people have problems, and they get stuck.” He raised his eyebrows, asking if I remembered.
I nodded. I’d been talking about my mom.
“That’s exactly how I’ve felt for the past two months,” he said, “since my dad died. No, for the past three months, since Jake died. There have been moments—actually, a lot of moments—when I’ve thought I’ll never be happy again. But I’m happy right now. You make me happy.”
“Good,” I said, smoothing a hand across his bare chest and trying to act natural. It was Grayson, I kept telling myself, Grayson whom I’d loved from afar for so long. But he was different in the flesh. This man’s body would take a lot of getting used to.
“And whenever you and I are talking—” he went on.
“—or doin’ it,” I broke in, because this was getting so heavy.
He laughed. “Or doin’ it,” he agreed, but then his smile faded. “I’m serious.”
“I know,” I said, feeling like the worst friend, the worst person. I’d thought making a joke would help him out of this, but he wasn’t ready to go yet.
“When I’m with you,” he began again, “it’s like… I still don’t feel normal. But I can see normal at twelve o’clock on the horizon.” He pointed past me, through the windshield of an imaginary airplane. “At least I know normal is still out there. I’ve spent the last three months not sure of that at all.”
On a sigh he brought up his hand and used one long finger to brush a dark curl away from my face. With the saddest look in his eyes, he said, “A girl needs to be held right now, and comforted, and told that everything is going to be okay. I’m sorry I can’t do that for you. I don’t have any of that left.”
“I have a little,” I said, “and I’ll lend it to you.”
He kissed my lips twice more, wrapped his arms around me, and nestled his head under my chin. I worked my fingers through his blond curls. They sprang up and tickled my cheek.
He said low, “One down, one to go.”
I laughed.
“I didn’t want you to bed down for the night and get comfortable and think we were done.”
“Thanks for warning me. That is so sexy.” There really was nothing about the sex we’d just had that was sexy at all, except Grayson himself. The air conditioner was running, but the pit bull was faintly audible over the roar. My mom had bought the comforter on my bed at a thrift store when I was seven. It depicted a cartoon girl who hadn’t been on TV in two decades.
And on the wall opposite from my pink bed, where I could see it first thing every morning, was a poster of US Airways flight 5149. Captain Sullenberger had taken off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City one January afternoon, his Airbus headed for Charlotte, North Carolina. A flock of geese hanging around the runway flew into his plane and took out both engines. He managed to land perfectly in the Hudson River that ran along Manhattan Island. The poster was an iconic photo of the plane floating in the river, with the skyline of Manhattan behind it. All 155 passengers and crew stood precariously on wings, in business shirts rather than overcoats on the frigid winter afternoon, surrounded by icy water, waiting for boats to take them back to the wharf for hot chocolate. Afterward, Captain Sullenberger was acclaimed as a hero. He wrote a book and did the talk show circuit. And then it all became a joke. Movies made fun of the crash and said people in New York were so protective of this captain’s heroic status, but modern automation meant those planes flew themselves.
We pilots knew Captain Sullenberger was a bad-ass. He could have crash-landed that plane and taken out half of Manhattan. But he kept calm, and the outcome was perfect.
Grayson’s eyes had fallen on the poster too. “Hey, where’d you get that?” He nodded toward the poster. “My dad—”
“—had a poster like that,” I interrupted him. “I know. It’s his. After he died, I used the key the airport office had for your hangar and I took it, but that’s all I took, ever. I’d gotten used to seeing it every day and I just wanted that one thing to remember him.”
I must have sounded really strange, because he propped himself up on both elbows to look at me. “Leah, it’s okay.” He sank down with his chin on his crossed arms, watching me. “He’s a good hero to have.”
I wondered whether he meant Captain Sullenberger or his dad. As my heart raced, dragging my mind with it, I decided it was best to come clean before I got caught again. “The poster is the only thing I took, but I already had this.”
I rolled away from him and felt around on my bedside table for The Right Stuff. The paperback had been well worn, with a cracked white spine and missing corners, when Mr. Hall loaned it to me years ago. I’d read it a million times. When the cover had come off, I’d secured it to the book with a rubber band from the airport office. I handed the frayed bundle over to Grayson.
“Oh!” he said through a laugh, recognizing the book. He removed the rubber band and opened the front cover, setting it next to the book.
At the top of the inside cover, Mr. Hall had written Brian Hall. His name was crossed out, and underneath it, in a different handwriting, was Jake Hall. This too was crossed out. A third handwriting proclaimed, Alec Hall. A fourth, by far the messiest, claimed the book for Grayson Hall. Then Alec Hall again. The last Grayson Hall was the only name in the column that didn’t have a line through it.
Grayson touched the cover in the space between Brian Hall and Jake Hall, then swept his fingertip down the page. “Dad tried so hard to get us to read it. When Jake finally did and told Alec and me how good it was, we fought over it. I guess buying your own copy of a book doesn’t occur to you when you’re twelve.” He bit his lip.
And then, without moving his head, he brought his eyes up to meet mine. His look was hard to read. I’d known him for years, yet I’d had so little face time with him that his expressions were practically a stranger’s. The basic look of chagrin I recognized. The subtleties were lost on me. I couldn’t tell whether he was embarrassed that he’d accidentally accused me of freeloading, or he was accusing me on purpose.
And asking for his book back.
“You should have it,” I said quickly.
Now his lips parted in surprise. “No! Of course not. You should have it. You were the last one to…”
He took a breath, and so did I. Neither of us wanted to delve into Mr. Hall’s death right now. That much I understood about Grayson. We’d shared something that had to do with him and me, not Mr. Hall, not Alec, not Jake, just the two of us. We wanted to enjoy the afterglow and we were trying our best to bond, but it was difficult with so many people between us, even though most of them were ghosts.