Hearts At Sea

Chapter 7: June 14th, 3:30 pm

And we kept everything professional / But something's changed

("I Can See You")

- - -

"Can we get ice cream now?" Emmy begs for the hundredth time in the past half hour. We finished playing mermaids around then, promising to get ice cream once we'd dried off and weren't so tired. Supposedly, eight-year-olds dry off and re-energize in two minutes. I wish I was eight again. I am still trying to calm my mind which is still reeling from the pool incident by making my way through the Lover album. Honestly, I probably made the wrong album choice because my mind is nowhere near calm.

Carter sits up. "Ugh, fine. Sash, wanna come to get ice cream?" God, this boy just keeps offering me olive branches. Setting up the pull-out yesterday and now this? He knows my order, so he just wants to make peace with me and put what almost happened behind us.

Fine, I could do that. "Sure."

"Yay!" Emily cheers and skips over to the ice cream line across the pool, leaving Carter and me in her dust.

"Why'd she even ask if she wasn't going to stick with us?" I hear Carter mumble to himself. I smile at the familiarity of this. Carter always ranted about Emmy to himself since the moment she was born. The first time he saw her (obviously, he brought me with him, so I know the facts), everyone was crowding around the newborn and he mumbled "It's like I'm not even here." And so the ranting began.

Cautiously, he lays his arm around my shoulder, slowly, as if asking if it's okay. I lean into him as my affirmative. "On a scale from one to ten, how much did you actually enjoy chasing down the characters with Em and I?" he questions. I considered automatically blurting out "one" but it wasn't that bad.

"Five. Right in between."

He nods. "Fair enough. Were my posing scenarios creative enough? You could have suggested some too, you know."

"They were much more creative than what I would have said," I admit.

"What would you have said?"

Make the face you would if you realized you wanted to kiss your best fri– ahem, no. "Something super unoriginal like 'make a mad face' or 'make a you-just-walked-into-your-surprise-party face,'" I reply instead.

He snorts. "You could do better than that, Brooks. Give me a real one."

I think for a moment. "Fine. Make the face you would if your mom found out you've been stealing candy from stores since you were little."

"That's a good one. Thank God it's not true."

"That'd be a long time to be stealing candy. I wonder how much you would have," I muse.

"Too much," he agrees. "Now it's my turn. Make the face you would if a girl rejects your promposal."

I gawk. "Oh my god! Did that happen to you?"

Now it's his turn to make a shocked face. "No! We're doing fake scenarios."

I relax. I have no idea why it made me so wound up and protective. "Ah. Okay." We reach the ice cream line and join the back of it. "Make the face you would if you found out you're getting another sibling, seventeen years later."

"Make the face you would if your dog killed a squirrel." Now he's getting into it.

"If your brother stumbled upon your diary," I suggest.

"If your school had so many snow days you only get one month of summer."

"If you found out you were pregnant."

"If you realize you have feelings– wait, what?" Carter stops talking and walking. "Where did you get 'found out you were pregnant'?"

I feel my face begin to heat for no reason. "Hey! You said the 'dog killed a squirrel' thing."

His eyes widened in horror and concern. "Sasha, are you pregnant?"

Mine widened too. "Hell no! What!? Isn't it a fake scenario?"

He drops his arm from my shoulders as color rushes to his cheeks and he turns away for a moment. "Oh, yeah. That's right." Was he throwing out real scenarios?

"Did your school get so many snow days you only had one month of summer?" I knew enough about Seattle. I knew that it snowed, but I didn't know it snowed that much. I wish we had snow days, but snow is practically scared of California — it only falls in a few parts of the state, definitely not in my town.

He turns back to me, his coloring back to normal. "No. Oh, look. It's our turn to order."

"I know you're trying to distract me, Carter Davidson, and it's not going to work," I say sternly.

His attention stays laser-focused on the guy behind the counter. It's just soft-serve at this window which leaves three options: vanilla, chocolate, or swirl. Whenever faced with those three flavors, we choose swirl. It's the best of both worlds. "Two swirls please," Carter orders for us.

"Just spit it out, C. What scenario was real?" I press. The ice cream man hands Carter the two cones. He thanks him before proceeding to stuff his face with soft-serve. "Carter..."

In response, he hands me my cone. "We'd better find Emily."

I huff a breath. "Bad move on your part. You should have told me."

"So ominous," he teases. I roll my eyes.

"Hey, guys!" Emily runs up to us with another girl. "This is Claire. Claire, meet my brother, Carter, and his best friend, Sasha."

"Speak of the devil," Carter whispers so only I can hear it right as Claire waves and says "Hi!"

"Yeah, so Claire is gonna come to the play with us, okay?" Emily phrases it like a question, but it's obviously a statement.

"What play?" Carter looks at me to see if I know something he doesn't. I shrug.

Emily looks between us. "Oh, I just saw Mom and Dad and they said we're going to the Moana play in about fifteen minutes. You didn't hear?"

"Oh shit."

"Language," Emmy scolds Carter. He grabs my wrist and drags me back to our brothers, calling "sorry!" over his shoulder.

The parents are sitting with Beau and Sean, the girls long gone. "Hey, honey," my mom greets me.

"Where've you two been?" Darla's eyebrow twitches like it wants to go up suggestively, but she's working hard to keep it down.

There's an eye-roll evident in Carter's voice. "We were just getting ice cream, Mom."

"So what about the Moana play Emily just told us about?" I look between all the parents for an answer.

Dad pipes up. "Oh, there's a play going on soon and we thought it'd be fun to go."

"And you didn't think to tell us too?" Carter accuses.

I hum in disappointment. "How soon?"

"Five, maybe ten minutes? So we should get going." He has an eyeball conversation with the parents and then they're agreeing and rising from their chairs. "But throw on some clothes first, would you two?" I forgot we hadn't bothered putting back on our clothes after swimming so I was only wearing my red bikini and Carter was still shirtless. I'm surprised I haven't been ogling his exposed chest this whole time. In fact, I hardly realized he didn't have a shirt on.

I hop into my shorts and pull my shirt on before following the others to find Emily and her new friend.