Midsummer Fling Read online

  I smile. “It’s not ideal,” I tell him. “But as long as we stay out of each other’s way, we should do just fine.”

  We gather our keys and head out, to the astonishment of the owners, and I think I’m going to reward myself with a good look at the stranger’s ass as he walks ahead of me toward our cabin. Yet another memory comes rushing back like a boomerang to smack me in the head when I take notice of his swagger, the way he holds his head, rubs the back of his scalp for no reason.

  He’s Joshua. That’s why he feels so familiar. That Joshua.

  My heart pounds, my head explodes, and the inner child in my soul lights up like a sinking ship’s signal flare.

  He holds open the cabin door and I step inside, enveloped in the scent of wood and floor cleaner. Even the light fixtures and the sink spouts haven’t changed. I’m now taller than the vintage fridge that had at one time housed the gallons of homemade lemonade that my sister and I used to make with far too much sugar (which I now realize we were allowed to do on rainy days just to keep us occupied with projects).

  And now I have all of this to myself, as well as Joshua, my vacation crush, after more than 15 years.

  I wonder if he remembers. If he doesn’t remember, how embarrassed will I be when I eventually blurt it out because I can’t take the suspense?

  Chapter 4

  Josh

  When I see her haul in a three-piece set of matching luggage, I know there’s no way I can let her stay on the futon in the great room.

  “Take the bedroom,” I say, grabbing her garment bag from her hands and carrying it into the small bedroom. I hang it up for her in the tiny closet while she follows me, protesting.

  “That’s not necessary. You had the cabin booked before I did; it’s only fair.”

  I shake my head and hoist her matching suitcase onto the bed, the old springs creaking in protest under the weight of it. The sound of bed creaks brings to mind dark thoughts of scooping up this woman and tossing her on the mattress, climbing on top of her, getting lost in her curves, nestling myself between her legs while we create our rhythm on those springs…and then wrapping her up and settling in to sleep, adjusting our bodies until we’re both comfortable, my hand blanketing the dip of her waist as she lies on her side, pressed into my chest.

  The images pinging around in my head make my throat dry. “No,” I rasp. “My bed at home is so shitty, that futon will be an improvement.”

  This is a lie, of course. And my king-sized bed at home will look good with her in it.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “Listen,” I say, showing her my palms to signal I want the arguing to stop. “Let’s dispense with the Midwestern politeness and get to the heart of the thing. I’m a dude, and I can’t let a woman sleep on a futon. If that irks your feminist sensibilities, then you’re free to drive an hour to Whitefish Bay and take a souped-up deer blind with no electricity. I’ve got no more than a duffel bag with me for luggage; I can stow my clothes in the bathroom.”

  She gives a sly smile and finally relents, coming over to me. “Fine.” For a second, I think she might be coming over to hug me, and I suck in my gut and flex my abs because I’m an idiot whose lizard brain thinks chicks will fall for that. But she’s not coming to hug me. She’s just unzipping her suitcase. Still, she’s close enough that I can smell her scent, mixed with her laundry detergent. Something strangely familiar and nostalgic settles into my nostrils and calms me. I’m probably just feeling some kind of way about being at the same place I used to visit in the summer as a kid. I’m probably feeling lucky on so many counts: snagging a last-minute reservation and having a gorgeous woman more or less forced on me.

  I leave her to it, and she adds, “Just so you know, you’re not a ‘dude.’ You’re a real mensch, Joshua.”

  Weird, I don’t remember telling her my name. But maybe I did.

  I turn back toward her. “Thanks…”

  She beams at me. “Penny.”

  “Penny,” I repeat, knitting my brows together. Some vague memory is trying to get my attention. When I was a kid, there was a Penny…but that’s not her. That Penny used to run around this place in her rainbow two-piece swimsuit, hair perpetually up in wet pigtails, hands covered in colored chalk dust, mouth always painted with a Kool-Aid mustache.

  But this woman has the same eyes as that kid. But no. There’s no way it’s her.

  “Penny…have you ever been here before?”

  She smiles and nods, not saying anything.

  “As a kid?”

  Another nod, and if I’m not mistaken, her eyes are welling up.

  “Wait…did you have a sister?”

  She laughs. “Still do.”

  I return the laugh. At my silly question and at the overwhelming coincidence that’s happening to both of us.

  “You remember me?” Don’t freak out, Josh. Be cool.

  “Of course I remember.” Her voice drops to a whisper. She blinks a bunch. Oh shit. Did I say something to make her cry?

  “I’m remembering more stuff now. You were like, always in the water. Or fighting with your sister.”

  Penny’s cheeks flush, but I don’t know what she might feel embarrassed about. “Is that all you remember?”

  Honestly? Yes. But I feel like there’s more and I’m wracking my brain because I know she’s wanting me to say it so she doesn’t have to.

  “I feel like such a crazy fateful reunion calls for a hug or something,” she says, biting her bottom lip.

  “I…I agree,” I say, hesitant only because I’m not great with hugging, and I don’t want to mess this up.

  I breathe in slowly and hold open my arms while she walks toward me. It only lasts a second, but I feel it everywhere when she squeezes me around my middle. My arms fold around her shoulders for a millisecond, and everything shifts into focus. I am not just attracted to this woman, but she feels like she belongs there, held close to me. The hug is criminally short. Her body is warm and soft in all the right places, and it fits up against all of my peaks and valleys like we’re a couple of puzzle pieces.

  I felt it, and so did she.

  “Well,” she sighs shakily. “I’d better finish unpacking.”

  At the same time, I blurt out, “I’m going to hit the lake.”

  We part ways as I imagine we did as pre-teens: awkwardly.

  Chapter 5

  Penny

  He doesn’t remember kissing me. Or writing me letters.

  But that can be discussed later. Right now, the distant horn of a freighter ship overpowers all the overthinking. Almost.

  Quickly, I pour myself a glass of chilled white wine and claim my rocking chair on the porch of the cabin, lemon balm spritz bottle in my hand. It’s a glorious twilight, but the mosquitoes are unreal up here. My mother always brought Deep Woods Off, but I prefer the natural stuff, and it works just as well.

  Joshua has a spring in his step as he makes his way down to the dock.

  The way he’s walking, the way he behaved after that hug—that adorably clumsy hug—I can tell. He has no clue that he was my first kiss or my first pen pal. Or my…anything. I was just Penny from summer vacation and her annoying little sister.

  The footfalls on the rickety dock call up more nostalgia. How many times every summer did my sister and I get yelled at for running on the dock? And who knew I’d be sitting here as an adult one day, all the sights and sounds tugging at my heartstrings?

  Joshua stows his tackle box and poles and tosses aside the life vest that’s been placed on the captain’s chair. None of us ever appreciated being forced to wear those things when we were kids. Of course not. We were wild, largely unsupervised children having the time of our lives. The wearing of life jackets was the only rule of vacation, it seemed.

  Joshua starts up the engine on the pontoon boat—one of the same stripped-back vessels that that cabin offers for its visitors to use—and smoothly steers the boat away from the dock, pausing before he crosses the channel.
The freighter must be closer than I thought.

  The gigantic cargo ship with its long, flat deck causes chills to run down my spine. Joshua’s pontoon boat looks like a bug floating on the water in comparison.

  Everything comes to a halt when the ships chug by. No matter what’s happening, I never get tired of stopping and staring. I’m glad I’ll never get used to it the way the locals do.

  The ship passes, and Joshua is on his way across the choppy channel to the cove. I wonder if the cranky old tugboat captain still lives in that little shack over on that island. I wonder if Joshua’s memory about that salty old geezer is better than his recollections about our letters and the kiss. All I can do is screw up the courage to ask.

  I sip my wine and recall that those letters were hastily scrawled on notebook paper, torn out, and stuffed into a borrowed business envelope from his dad. A teenage boy would think of letter writing as an obligation to be carried out, if he felt compelled to write to a young girl at all.

  So I should not be surprised that he might have forgotten.

  The pontoon disappears behind the captain’s island. Does Joshua know he’s now in Canadian waters? Guess we’ll find out soon enough if their border patrol stops his boat.

  All those things I can understand forgetting.

  But a kiss?

  All right, Reeve, let’s break it down. I had been upset because it was the last night of vacation and I was about to start fifth grade. Nothing about fifth grade seemed fun. My swimsuit was washed, dried, and packed away. Mom handed me actual shorts and a shirt for the end-of-vacation cookout. But I wasn’t hungry, so I wandered off to the end of the dock.

  After a while, Joshua came down and sat next to me. I remember he smelled like bug spray and campfire smoke. He asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he said, “I’m going into eighth grade and trust me, it gets so much better. You’re right: fifth grade sucks.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  “But you could just go on vacation in your brain,” he said.

  “How?” I replied.

  “You just close your eyes and remember the good stuff.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “You look different with your hair dry,” he said, changing the subject.

  I replied, “You look like a gamer nerd in that Super Mario shirt.”

  “Well, your shirt is super girly,” he responded with neither admiration nor disdain.

  “Thanks, I hate it.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Look at me and close your eyes and concentrate on the happy memories.”

  I did as he instructed, secretly hoping what was about to happen would happen.

  And then it did. A small kiss. More than a peck. It lasted two seconds, but it was the warmest, sweetest, deepest experience I’d ever felt up to that point. I had wanted him to kiss me, and he did. It was a dry kiss, a chaste kiss. But it was a religious experience, and I suddenly felt five years older.

  “I wasn’t expecting that,” I lied.

  He smiled at me, a mouth full of braces glinting in the sun.

  Whenever I’d bonded with girls my age, the one thing we always did was exchanged addresses. So I asked him for his.

  “If I write to you, will you write me back?”

  “I could just call you on my cell phone,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t have my own phone and Dad won’t let me talk to boys if they call the house.”

  He’d scrawled out his address later and handed it to me while my sister and I loaded up the truck to leave the next morning. It was a jaggedly torn piece of paper, but it was there.

  “Three-seven-three Cambridge Street.” It sounded so fancy. All the way home that day, and every time I carefully wrote his address on an envelope that school year, I imagined the letter was being delivered to a mansion in the countryside.

  I’ll never forget the first time he wrote me back. I screamed and tore the letter out of my mother’s hand and bolted up to my room and shut the door.

  It read, “Hey, Pigtails. I hope the rest of your summer was great. I miss the diving raft. Eighth grade is awesome. Have a good time at school. Don’t be like me, haha. Get good grades. Your friend, Josh.”

  All of these recollections, along with the wine, warmed me down to my toes.

  Maybe it’s not all bad if he can’t remember kissing me or writing me letters. It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  And it doesn’t mean it can’t happen again.

  Chapter 6

  Josh

  When I return from fishing later that evening, after having caught nothing that I can legally keep, I hear a strange noise coming from the bedroom in the back.

  “Penny?”

  She doesn’t answer. Apprehensively I ninja-sneak into her room and see that she’s fallen fast asleep on top of the covers while watching some romantic movie on her laptop. I silently back out of the room and go to the bathroom to shower.

  When I finish, I can still hear the movie blaring from her computer.

  I can’t let her fall asleep like that. Wrapped in my bath towel, I carefully pick up her laptop and shut it down. Using my phone as a flashlight, I find her charging cable and plug it in so it will be fully charged overnight. Then I carefully slip off her shoes and look her over. She’s holding something to her chest. I wave my light over her and see that it’s a box. A nice cedar box with hand carving in it, and it would be a shame if it fell on the floor while she slept. Carefully, I remove the box and place it on the floor next to her charging laptop. I go to the living room, fetch the fuzzy blanket off the futon, and cover her with it. It’s my only choice; I have no way to properly tuck her body under the covers without waking her.

  I slink away, quietly retrieving a set of sheets from the linen closet and make up the futon. I make sure the front door is locked before I hit the hay. I’ve never seen a bear in the resort, but all of us kids had seen the claw marks on the sides of our cabins. If any hungry black bear thinks they can help themselves to a snack, well, I suppose I’m not going to stop them. But it’s better if I am the one to face the task of shooing away a bear in the middle of the night.

  As I make myself as comfortable as I can on the futon, which is not very, I find that I enjoy the feeling of protecting her. The primal instinct is real. Yeah, workaholic aquatics director who spends half his day answering email. What a badass protector I am, I think self-deprecatingly.

  Still, truly wild thoughts cross my mind as I lie there in the dark, enjoying the breeze from the ceiling fan on my damp, naked torso.

  Thoughts of slipping into that creaky bed next to her sleepy, warm little body. Thoughts of sliding that body on top of mine, shocking her with my habit of sleeping naked. Thoughts of her hair blanketing my chest, exciting my nipples. Wondering what she normally wears when she’s not going to bed fully clothed. A frilly nightie or a simple T-shirt and undies? Both images make me horny as fuck.

  I cup my tight balls as images of her float through my mind. My cock aches. I can’t help myself; it’s been too long since I’ve been with someone, and the darkness welcomes all kinds of fantasies about the two of us together, reaching for each other in the middle of the night…my fingers slipping into her heat…the tip of my tongue teasing her hard nipple… I can almost hear her moan, but that can’t be real. It’s just a hallucination from all the blood leaving my brain and headed straight to my dick.

  Pardner, you’re never going to get to sleep if you don’t get your mind off her.

  But wait. She did make a noise. That wasn’t all in my head. Clearing away the brain fog, I also hear shuffling and creaking in the next room. Penny has woken up, and she’s rooting around in the drawers, mumbling softly. I still myself to listen, smoothing my hand over the fuzz of my stomach and up to my chest.

  My cock twitches at the unzipping of her cut-off shorts.

  In the moonlight, I see her shape exit the bedroom. I hold my breath. The bathroom light flicks on. Before she closes the bathroom door, I gl
impse her in a tank top and cheeky pajama shorts, her hair mussed from the pillow, her hand feebly blocking out the light from her eyes.

  She’s so cute, shuffling around half asleep in the dark, I’m almost mad about it. Mad that she’s not mine yet.

  If the sight of her round ass wasn’t enough, I get a view of the front when she exits moments later, her full, pink lips still talking to herself. Her brows knit together in concentration as she quietly mutters something about having drunk too much wine and not remembering putting her laptop away. A screenprint of an old monster movie is displayed on the front of her tank top, which makes me like her even more. The light clicks off, and I’m shrouded in darkness again, listening to her journey back to bed. The springs creak, the blankets rustle, she stretches, yawns, sighs, and settles in, whispering to herself about what, I don’t know. I love it that she talks to herself. Not to mention how sexy she is without even realizing it. Her bed noises conjure up another, new type of ache that I’ve never experienced before.

  To my surprise, the longing isn’t just about me being a horndog stuck in a small space with this woman. The yearning for connection, to protect, to care for her. I realize I want to someday come back to this same cabin together, the two of us sharing that bed. The caveman in me wants to get her pregnant.

  Her body shifts on the mattress, and she lets out a muffled noise as she settles into the pillow. I roll over on the futon and think about spooning her from behind, my forearm sandwiched between her breasts while we sleep.

  The fantasy of her wanting me just as bad, finding me, and taking what she needs…

  “Fuck,” I whisper, grasping my shaft in my hand. Tonight is only our first night here, and I can’t stand being apart from her.

  If I have to rub one out every night just to get to sleep, then so be it. It’ll have to do until she’s even the slightest bit interested in me.

  If she ever will be.