Page 2 of Always Been His

I’ve been avoiding him since the day he pulled into the driveway at the start of summer, and I made the mistake of waving at him from Iris’s bedroom window. He waved back and got out of the truck, and stretched his arms over his head the way he stretches after a long drive, and his t-shirt rode up over the waistband of his jeans. And that was the moment I realized the six-year-long crush I’d been telling myself I’d outgrown because I had a boyfriend I was madly in love with had come back at full force. It came back worse, with new opinions about his forearms and the way he holds a coffee cup and the laugh he does when he is trying not to laugh, and I’ve spent every day since, trying to figure out what to do with it.

The answer, every time, has been the same. Nothing.

First, there’s Iris. If I did anything with her brother, she would kill me. Slowly. Creatively. Probably with one of her own baking utensils. And second, I’m leaving for UCLA in two days, he is going back to Brown in a few weeks, and there is nothing left for me to do with how I feel about Grayson Douglas except wait it out.

I was doing such a good job of waiting it out before he turned up behind Iris’s Jeep and appointed himself ‘adult supervision’ for the night.

“What number beer is that?” he drawls, his hand sliding down to the leather belt looped through his jeans.

My eyes follow the movement lazily, openly, in a way I would never allow them to follow it sober. The bottle opener is clipped to his belt, steel catching the firelight. His thumb drags along the metal and then the leather, and my eyes track to the flat of his stomach under the cotton, to the cut of his hip where the denim sits low. He drags back the other way and my mouth goes dry. When I look up, he has caught me. The smug little tilt at the corner of his mouth gets deeper.

“Three.” I cough, holding up the unopened bottle.

“Funny.” He tips his head, looking down at me through his lashes. “I’ve been counting, and I make it six.”

“You’ve been counting?” I arch my eyebrows, trying to look disappointed.

“Your buzz limit is six,” he says, taking a slow step closer. “Has been since you were sixteen.”

“You’re watching me,” I press, stepping closer to him in the sand.

“You and Iris need adult supervision,” he counters, the opener still spinning lazy between his fingers. “And here I am.”

“I’m an adult, Gray,” I huff. “Turned eighteen last week.”

“I know.”

He stops spinning the opener. His eyes don’t leave mine. The Heineken in my hand is slick with condensation, my grip on it has gone slack, and I have to clamp my fingers around the body of the bottle so it doesn’t slide out of my hand and onto the sand.

I break eye contact first and clear my throat. “Are you going to give me the bottle opener or are we going to stand here for the rest of the night while you count my drinks?”

He doesn’t give me the bottle opener. He pulls it back an inch, hooks it over his thumb, and tips his head toward the bottle in my other hand.

“Are you trying to get drunk?” he asks, his voice dropping a half register.

“It’s a bonfire,” I say, shrugging and tipping the bottle neck against my collarbone. “The only two things you can do at a bonfire are get drunk or get fingered, and I am pretty sure everybody is already partnered off.”

“Is that an invitation?” Grayson murmurs, his voice dropping low enough that I feel it in my sternum.

I open my mouth and close it again, my throat working around nothing. He’s closer now, and I didn’t notice him do it. He is half a foot from me now. Close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to peer into his eyes. Close enough that I can see the firelight catching the crystal blue, blown out around the edges from the dark, the same eyes I’ve been drawing in the margins of my notebooks since I was twelve years old.

My fingers slacken around the Heineken bottle.

“The opener, Gray,” I rasp, sticking the unopened beer out between us. “Please.”

“You’re past your limit,” he says, glancing past me toward the birch tree which is now missing Iris and Marcus. His jaw ticks once, hard, before he drags his eyes back to me and reaches for the bottle. “We can share this last Corona.”

“You drinking out of it first is not the move you think it is,” I say, trying for casual, my voice coming out half an octave higher than I want it to.

“Pretty sure it’s exactly the move I think it is, Birdie,” he murmurs, his knuckles brushing mine when he takes the Heineken from my hand. The brush sets off a flare under my skin that I have to clamp my teeth around. He pops the cap on his belt opener in one easy motion, lifts the Corona to his lips, and takes a long swallow with his eyes on my mouth the whole time. The line of his throat moves under the five o’clock shadow. He lowers the bottle and holds it out to me by the neck. “Walk with me.”

“Walk with you where?” I ask, my hand wrapping around the bottle below his, my fingers finding the warm spot his palm left on the glass.

“Down the beach,” he says, not letting go. “Away from your ex.”

I should say no.

I should march back to wherever Iris disappeared with Marcus and demand we go home so I can lie in bed and pretend the last five minutes never happened. I should invoke girl code and stick to my plan filled with California boys and stumbling through my twenties. That plan does not, cannot, include Grayson Douglas.