Page 71 of Bloom

“Fuck you,” I snap.

“Fine. Just give me that.” He nods to the small scrap of red-and-white striped fabric in my hand.

“You want my bikini?” I ask, sure that I’m misunderstanding him. He nods. It would be a small price to make this conversation end, but I shudder at the thought.

“It’s not your size.” I turn to walk away but he grabs my arm again, this time managing to pull the bottoms from my hand. “Give it back,” I demand.

He tucks it into his pants. “Come get it.”

I am absolutely not doing that.

“Keep it,” I snarl. “It’s probably as close as you’ll ever get to a real girl anyway.”

Chapter 40

“Do you think there’s any way we can keep Martin out of our parties?” I ask, watching Max pull a pony keg to the back deck. I’ve actively avoided thinking about what Martin might want to do with my bikini bottoms, but I sure as shit won’t be able to avoid it if he’s standing on my deck at tonight’s party.

I never told James what happened. It goes without saying that James would overreact, and Martin’s father is apparently some big-shot attorney. It’s not a stretch to imagine the ways things might turn out poorly for James if he knew.

“Is he bothering you?” he asks. There’s a small surge of tension in him that suggests I was right not to say anything.

“No,” I say. “He’s just creepy.”

I should feel worse about lying, but I don’t. It’s for James’s own good, first of all. And it’s entirely James’s fault that I had to climb off the balcony in the first place, since he’s the one insisting we keep it a secret.

Personally, I’d welcome being discovered. I’m sick of sneaking around. I’m sick of forcing myself out of James’s bed in the middle of the night. And I’m particularly sick of listening to Ginny assure me that James and Allison will get back together once school starts.

Her comments only hold weight when I’m not with him. As I sit across from him later that night, the idea of him with anyone but me seems laughable.

It’s one of those nights where my whole body feels stretched thin, waiting for him after an entire day built of stolen moments – kissing him in the car before work, his hand grazing mine at the bar, the weight of his eyes on me and the way my stomach flips over when he gets that dirty little smile on his face.

Martin has been successfully avoided (he took it “poorly”, I’m told) which has allowed me to focus on James to the exclusion of all else. It’s only when James and Ginny begin ridiculing me that I really pay attention to the conversation at all.

“She was a total germaphobe. She wouldn’t even touch door handles when she was little,” James is telling Max.

“Maybe she just had a good idea where your hands had been,” smirks Max, which leads James to kick over his chair. Boys.

“Remember that time you couldn’t get out of the women’s locker room at the pool?” Ginny laughs.

“Shut up, Ginny.”

“She used to open doors with a shirt or a paper towel because she didn’t want to touch the doorknob,” Ginny tells Max. “But they only had those air dryers and she was wearing a swimsuit. So she stood in there until someone came in and she could slide out.”

“I was seven!”

“You’re still a germaphobe,” Ginny says. “Remember that hotel over spring break?”

“That hotel was filthy.”

“She had a heart attack because I put her clothes on the bed.”

“On the filthy bedspread!” I cry. “Do you know what you’d find if you took a blue light to that room? There’d be you-know-what everywhere.”

“I don’t know what the hell you and Ryan were doing in hotel rooms, but most people aren’t getting it everywhere.”

I don’t need to look at James to know he didn’t appreciate the mention of Ryan in that context.

“I wasn’t basing it on personal experience,” I say hurriedly. “Haven’t you ever watched ‘Dateline’? They’re always going into hotel rooms with a blue light.”