“YOU LOOK . . .” HANDEL stopped before he finished the sentence.
It was late, almost midnight.
Handel and I decided to meet up on the docks by the wharf after I left the Ocean Club, way out over the water where the fishermen kept their boats. There was no one around on a Friday night at this hour.
I could barely wait to get there. Here. To see him.
He was all I wanted.
“I look what?” I asked him. “Like someone I’m not?”
I followed Handel to the place where his father’s boat was tied up. My high heels dangled in my right hand. It felt good to be on solid ground again, heading along the boardwalk, that familiar rough wood underfoot, the type you had to know how to walk on so you didn’t get splinters. It was a relief to be with this boy who made me swoon just by standing there and looking at me. Handel got under my skin without having to try, and I think I got under his, too. I could tell, the way the electricity was flowing off him and reaching out to me, wanting me with such intensity, that this was true.
“No,” Handel said, glancing at me. “You look beautiful, and you’re always beautiful, which means that you’re being exactly who you’ve always been.”
My face flushed. I loved what Handel just told me. “You think I’m beautiful?”
“Yes.” His reply was so blatant. So unabashed.
“That’s new for me.”
“What is?”
“Someone saying I’m beautiful like it’s a given. A boy, I mean. Like you.”
Handel held out his hand to help me step onto the boat. “How could that be new?”
I climbed over the bow and hopped to the floor. His fingers were gentle but firm. “I haven’t dated too many people before.” I hesitated, then decided to keep going. “I’ve always flown under the radar, I guess.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
I gave Handel a skeptical look. “You can honestly say you knew of my existence before this year?”
Handel busied himself arranging a place for us to sit on one of the benches that lined the side of the boat, piling lobster crates off to the side so there was more space, pulling out a couple of cushions from a storage cubby. “I might not have known,” he admitted.
“See. I told you.”
When the seat was ready, Handel settled himself onto it, and I settled myself next to him. “But once I did notice you, I couldn’t stop seeing you. Or thinking about you. You have that effect.” He took my hand into his, inspected it, drew his fingers across the lines on my palm.
“I do?”
He raised my hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “Yes. It’s like you’re . . . fragile and unbreakable at once.”
“I don’t feel unbreakable. But it’s a nice thought.” Handel’s mouth brushed my skin again. The feel of it stole my breath.
Then he looked up at me with a grin. “So how was your date?”
I laughed. “It wasn’t a date. Not really.”
“How was your group date, then?”
“Fine. If you insist. It was fun actually. Not as bad as I’d feared.”
Handel’s eyes were amused. “You actually felt fear? Now you’ve got to tell me more.”
I elbowed him. “You would, too, if you were expected to show up at the Ocean Club.”
He whistled. The sound cut low over the water and the dinging of the boats against the docks. “Fancy.”
“Very.”
“Did they pay for your beer at least?”
“Yes. Though it was just a Coke. An expensive Coke,” I added.
Handel nodded over at my heels, now piled one on top of the other next to an orange life jacket and a lobster crate. “So the shoes and the dress tonight were for them and not me?”
“Afraid so.”
“Did they behave themselves?”
This question got a look of disbelief from me. “Of course. What, were you worried?” I asked with a laugh.
“I am human,” he said, laughing along with me. “Most of the time.”
“And don’t forget, I’m part unbreakable, so you don’t have to worry so much.”
Handel looked down at his hands. “It’s the fragile part I worry about.”
“I want my friends to like you,” I said suddenly.
“Oh yeah?”
“If they got to know you better, they would.”
Handel pushed aside a lock of hair that had fallen across his eyes. “You seem confident about that.”
“I am,” I said, reaching up to shift it aside after it had fallen right back. Handel’s eyes were so steady, so full of feeling. He made me never want to look away. “How could they not, when I like you so much?”
“I like you, too,” he said, so sincere.
Those words washed over me like the tide, leaving me with chills.
Handel reached over, his fingers grazing the tender skin just above the dip in my dress. He took the blue mosaic heart into his palm. Inspected it. “This is new.”
I swallowed. Nodded. He placed it gently back against my chest. His hand lingered there a moment, eyes flickering up to mine again. I leaned in for a kiss, just a quick one, but just as quickly, the kiss turned into something else, something much more intense. Handel’s mouth parted, and his hands went to my face, gently pulling me closer. The light touch of his fingers along the curve of my jaw, then sliding down across my neck and over my shoulders, stole the air from my lungs. I don’t know that it was a conscious decision—I don’t remember there being a decision at all, honestly—but I found myself shifting positions, moving in such a way that I had one knee pressed into the seat next to Handel’s left thigh and the other pressed near his right, sitting across him. We never stopped kissing, not even for a moment, and now I was looking down at him from above, the blue heart of my necklace swinging and swaying between us, my long hair flowing around us like a curtain. The low back of my dress was gripped tight in Handel’s fists, as though he were afraid of where his hands would travel if he let go. His lips tasted of salt and the sea air and I couldn’t get enough of him; I could never get enough of him, so I pressed myself closer until there was no room left between us. I didn’t even care that the hem of my dress was riding up my legs, or that I could feel the fabric of Handel’s jeans rough along the inside of my thighs. It’s what I desired. It’s all I desired. Wherever this led was where I wanted to go.
When we finally pulled apart, we were both gasping for breath.
My heart pounded and pounded in my chest.
Handel’s eyes were wild. Then he said, “You make me want things, Jane.”
I felt a sudden burn in my cheeks, laughed nervously, a little shocked at myself, at whatever possessed me to act the way I just had, so uninhibited, as though I was a girl with far more experience. As gracefully as I could manage, I extracted myself from Handel’s lap and returned to the seat next to him, adjusting my dress, tugging it lower.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he backtracked. “Though you make me want those things, too.”
I combed my fingers through my knotted hair and tried to steady my breathing. “What did you mean, then?”
Handel was silent awhile, and I let him think. It was so quiet out here. Just the sound of the waves against the dock, the activity along the beach by all the bars too distant to interrupt all this peace. The moon shone bright over the water, shimmering and sparkling with the gentle movement of the boat as it rocked.
Handel took my hand again. Ran his finger in circles across my palm, and I felt the electricity of it in my core. “When I’m with you, I think I could have a different life.”
This answer surprised me. “Do you want one?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why?”
“I wonder what it would be like to have been born into a different family.”
“Speaking of, I met your cousin today,” I said, his comment reminding me. “Jenny.”
Handel seemed startled. “What?”
“Jenny Nolan. She was at my house for a fitting with my mother. I guess she’s getting married?”
“Jenny Nolan,” he repeated. “I guess she is. Yeah, she’s my cousin.”
“She’s pretty.”
Handel just nodded.
“Was it her father who died? Your uncle?”
“No. Her father’s brother,” Handel said. “How’d you know she was related to me?”
I smiled a little, feeling a tad smug about the fact that members of Handel’s family would find me important enough to gossip about. “She told me straight out.” I leaned into him. “Apparently, your mother liked the idea of us going on a date. She told Jenny about it, and how she was disappointed we didn’t work out.”
Handel shook his head. “God, my ma is always talking.”
“Everyone’s ma is always talking,” I corrected.
“True enough.”
I watched Handel. There was a look on his face that made me sad. He was like a lost boy in that moment, the bad-boy mask fallen away to reveal the lonely boy who’d seen enough tragedy in his life to have it change him forever. “Sometimes I think you’re more vulnerable than you give off,” I said. “That you’re completely different from what people think you are.”
“Nah. I’m probably just the way they say.”
But I shook my head. “I don’t buy that. And if you don’t want to be, you don’t have to.”
“If only it were that easy.”
“It is, though,” I said. Closed my eyes. The circles Handel was still making on my palm lulled me into a swoon. I wondered if that’s what he’d intended.
“I wish that were true,” Handel said.
Then I felt his mouth on mine again, and that was the end of our conversation.