“See?” Hudson says. “All this love. All this queer love. Doesn’t it just … rock?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I hope one day I have someone special enough to carve my name with,” he says, and looks at me in the dim light, his eyes wide and sweet.
Behind him, Ashleigh barks another laugh.
SEVEN
Last Summer
“Think if I faked drowning myself, she’d give me mouth-to-mouth?” Ashleigh asks, staring at Janice from across the pool like a cat at a bird out the window.
“I think you’d have to stop breathing for that, sweetie,” I say.
“And she’d probably do that thing where she pressed down on your chest really hard,” George adds.
“She could press anything she wanted as hard as she wanted.”
“I don’t know female anatomy well enough to understand that,” I say. “But I suspect it’s too much information.”
“Oh, sure, you can dream about what kind of underwear Hudson wears but one reference to Janice’s hand on my clit is too much.”
George and I stare at her wide-eyed.
“Darling, let’s not talk about anything under the underwear,” George says after a minute. “New rule.”
Ashleigh chuckles. “Fine. Prudes.”
“It could work, though,” I say.
“No,” George says.
“Not the mouth-to-mouth, but, like, a rescue, adrenaline pumping, bodies intertwined …”
“Don’t encourage her,” George says.
“It’s a good scene!” I say. “A rescue, a thank-you, a look.”
“A scene from what? A straight porn?” George asks. “Come on, darling.”
“No, no. It’s a meet-cute. Now Ashleigh has a reason to try to pay Janice back for saving her life, and they spend loads of time together and fall in love!” I clasp my hands.
“You’ve sold me,” Ashleigh says. “I’m doing it.”
“What?” George says.
“Wait, you have to do it safely,” I say, but she’s already swum out to the middle of the deep end and has started to flail. I sigh. “These things need planning.”
“If she dies, I’m blaming you,” George says.
I look across the pool at Janice, whose eyes scan the water but don’t take any note of Ashleigh’s dramatic splashing. But someone else does. Hudson dives in next to us, paddles out to Ashleigh, and grabs her around the waist, then tries to pull her over to us. I suddenly wish I had faked drowning.
“Heroic,” George says with a snicker.
“Hey, it really is,” I say.
Hudson is trying to pull Ashleigh, but she doesn’t want to be rescued by him, so she fights, kicking to get back to the center of the pool. He looks at her, confused. Janice blows the whistle at them.
“Stop roughhousing!” she shouts.
I can see Ashleigh’s mortified face even under the hair plastered over it. She swims back over to us, Hudson following her.
“Dude,” she says, pushing the hair out of her face, “what was that?”
“I was trying to help,” Hudson says, his face all confusion. “You looked like you were in trouble.”
“I mean, that was the idea,” I say to Ashleigh.
Ashleigh sighs.
“What?” Hudson asks.
“Never mind,” Ashleigh says, then grudgingly adds, “Thanks.”
“I just … we have to look out for each other, right?”
“Right,” Ashleigh says.
“Right,” I say at the same time, with much more enthusiasm.
Hudson grins at all of us. This big goofy grin where he knows he’s missed something and doesn’t care, because he tried to help and thinks maybe he did.
“Stay safe,” he says, and swims over to where Brad and some other folks are trying to keep a beach ball in the air.
“Come on,” I say. “He just swooped in to rescue you. It’s not even a sex thing, he’s just that good a guy. You can’t be mad at him.”
“I can be mad at anyone I want,” Ashleigh says, rolling her eyes.
“It was heroic,” George says. “Even I had a bit of a flutter in my pants. But don’t worry, darling, he’s still all yours.”
“Fine, yes, it was very heroic, he’s wonderful, he’s perfect, and he totally ruined my plan,” Ashleigh concedes.
I laugh. “Should have planned it better. Can’t try it again now.”
“It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, right?” Ashleigh says. “I mean, crazy plans to win someone’s heart never work.”
“I think that depends,” I say, smiling and watching Hudson jump out of the pool to tap the beach ball into the air. “If they’re crazy enough, they might.”
That night, we have a big campfire and make s’mores and sing songs. Mark has been trying to get the whole camp to sing “I’m Coming Out,” but it doesn’t work so well with only an acoustic guitar, and we all know it, so we only participate half-heartedly. George is painting Jordan’s nails, and Ashleigh has a system going with five sticks speared with marshmallows, all set up at angles, roasting over the fire, which she runs between, rotating.
“Did she really try to fake drowning today?” Jordan asks, looking down at their nails. They asked if George could do patterns, and George was willing to try, so he’s currently painting black hearts over the sparkly pink base.
“The things we do for love,” I say.
“See, the faking it is the problem,” they say. “In a rom-com, you have to unintentionally almost drown and be saved, and maybe lose your memory in the process. You can’t just splash around. They try that in all the teen beach movies, and it never works right.”
“Not to be that bitch,” Montgomery says from where he sits on a log watching George paint, “but how is it ever going to work? Straight people don’t go gay because they rescued one. If that worked, I’d set fire to our apartment on a regular basis until I’d worked my way through all the men from the LA’s finest firemen calendar.”
“Darling, don’t make me laugh or I’ll screw up Jordan’s nails,” George says, chuckling.
I grab a marshmallow from one of the bags lying on the ground, wipe the ants off, and impale it with my twig, approaching the fire. Hudson is standing there, roasting two on one stick. His flavor of the week, whose name I’ve forgotten, is standing nearby, talking to Brad.
“Thanks,” I say to Hudson as I stick my marshmallow out over the flames. “Ashleigh won’t say it, but what you did was really brave.”
He looks at me and grins. “The pool? So, what was that even about, bro?”
I wave my hand. “It wasn’t a well-thought-out plan, but suffice to say, it was for love.”
“Awww, then I’m sorry I ruined it,” he says. “I love love.” I notice he does not glance over at his current paramour, and that I’ve suddenly gotten very warm, even for standing next to the fire.
“Who doesn’t?” I ask. “But I think this was love that wasn’t meant to be.”