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There aren’t any fans or anything on the bus Cormac has to take—the third bus Cormac has to take, because Camp Whatever-The-Fuck is located smack dab in the middle of the dictionary definition of “nowhere”—so he’s hot and tired and coated with a truly heinous layer of sticky, half-dried sweat when he finally arrives at his cabin.
No one else is there yet.
He grunts. Lets his sunglasses slide down the bridge of his nose. Kicks the screen door open, and drags his duffel bag inside, and doesn’t bother unpacking. Picks a bunk after testing out all the mattress springs.
Eventually, a tall, prissy blond guy in salmon pink tennis shorts and a too-tight white polo comes barging in, haughtily lifting his pale, pointed chin and sneering at the sight of—well, Cormac isn’t really sure. The dust? The cobwebs? The pine needles? The faintly alarming buzzing noise that’s coming from the sad, lonely lightbulb that’s swinging from a chain of safety pins over by the cheap-looking wooden dresser?
There are a lot of options.
Prissy Blond Guy introduces himself last name first—“Malfoy. Draco Malfoy. Are you one of those McLaggens?”—and after about fifteen minutes of depressingly awkward, increasingly hostile small-talk, Cormac decides he’d rather staple his own balls to the splintered, termite-infested porch steps out back than waste another goddamn second listening to Malfoy brag about his dad’s vintage Porsche collection.
“Beer,” Cormac says firmly. “We need beer.”
“Oh, yeah? Which one of your remaining brain cells told you that?” Malfoy drawls, rolling his eyes, but he shoves his feet back into his Sperrys and wrestles a beat-up, grease-stained, neon pink flyer out of his front pocket, an only vaguely murderous expression on his face, so he probably doesn’t mean it. “This starts at nine. Don’t embarrass me.”
The flyer is for a summer kick-off party that’s inexplicably being thrown on the far side of the lake in, like, a semi-forgotten Friday the 13th backlot in the woods—there’s a keg, dented and scratched and plastered in Dead Kennedys stickers, weirdly enough, not that Cormac’s gonna fucking ask, and a shiny black garbage bag full of ice cubes and Natty Light sitting in the bed of someone’s rust-spackled pick-up truck.
Everything smells like burnt sugar and lighter fluid.
Cormac crushes a few beers and meets some of the other counselors and crushes a few more beers and stares from all way across the bonfire, enthralled, incredulous, biting down on his fist to stave off a raucous bark of laughter, as Malfoy flirts aggressively—belligerently? Reluctantly? Kind of violently?—with a dark-haired guy who isn’t wearing a shirt but does have what may or may not be a prison tattoo inked around his neck; and time passes slowly, and then quickly, and then in a dim, floaty haze of minutes that feel like seconds and hours that feel like days, and Cormac’s edges are blurred and his senses are cloudy but his perception of all of them is so pleasantly, delightfully heightened—
It’s a good goddamn night, and that’s before he bangs a townie in one of the outdoor shower stalls by the boat dock.
Cormac doesn’t catch her name, not before or during or after, but she makes this sound when he first thrusts into her—quiet, high-pitched, gasping, like she’s surprised, like she’s overwhelmed, like she can’t quite fucking help herself, like she doesn’t even mind that her shorts are still hanging off her ankle and that the cups of her bra have been hastily, roughly yanked down and that they’re not on a bed of candlelit rose petals or whatever.
When she comes, her thighs squeeze his hips hard enough to bruise and her fingernails dig into his shoulders, leaving behind little crescent-shaped indents.
He, like, really isn’t expecting to see her again.
There are worse ways to meet girls, Cormac is sure.
Mostly sure.
Pretty sure.
He’s heard the horror stories about spilled drinks and thrown drinks and drinks with adorable pinstriped diner straws that get fumbled, that get dropped—sodas, milkshakes, lemonades, wholesome and nice—and he’s watched his buddies strike out in the shadows of spotlight-studded dancefloors, at homecoming, at prom, watched the splotchy red handprints bloom across their cheeks after they laid it on a little too thick. A little too sleazy.
The balance between aiming for the stars but settling for the racetrack—it’s precarious. Delicate. More of a fine art than an exact science. Girls are a different breed, is the thing. They have expectations, ideas, about sex and romance and how suspiciously, deceptively easy it is to conflate the two.
So, yeah, there are absolutely worse ways to meet girls.
Cormac just can’t fucking think of any right now.
“Hey, can I talk to you?”
Cormac wants to say no. He does. He wants to say no—charmingly, disarmingly—and maybe go crush another beer or five with whichever unlucky bastard got saddled with canteen cleanup tonight. Unless it’s Malfoy. Fuck that guy. This is literally all his fault.
“Cormac?” Cho Chang’s voice is quavering. Curious. Sweet. Oh, yeah. Cormac remembers that voice. That sweetness. In explicit, graphic, vividly technicolor detail. “Are you—did you hear me?”
He winces, scrubbing at his mouth with the heel of his palm and trying real goddamn hard not to look down. At her. At her face, so much prettier than feels fair, currently—dark, clever eyes and a soft, lush mouth. She has her hair braided today. In pigtails. Tied off with lacy gingham schoolgirl ribbons. Like she’s rummaged around all the scummiest, seediest, dirtiest parts of his hindbrain and figured out the best way to tease him—to tempt him—to punish him.
“Yeah,” he finally sighs. Christ. He didn’t sign up for this shit. For a part two. For a sequel. For clingy. What if she cries? She seems like a crier. “Yeah, no, I heard you.”
Cho pauses. “Okay.”
He shifts his weight around, porch steps creaking beneath his feet. All the lights are off in the cabin, and the breeze is lukewarm, summer-still, mostly swishing through the surrounding tree branches. They’re alone. Painfully alone. Just them and the clouds and the moon and the scraggly nest of ornery, unkillable yellow jackets up on the roof.
“I didn’t, um,” Cormac starts, inwardly swearing at himself. “I didn’t know you would be here?”
Her lips part. Full, pillowy, Chapstick-slick. “Is that a question?”
He winces again. “I probably wouldn’t have . . . I mean, I’m not looking for anything serious, so—”
“Yeah, me neither,” she interrupts, toying with the hem of her shirt. It’s the same camp-issued ringer tee he has a dozen of balled up on the floor around his bunk, but she’s done something to hers, something girly and fashionable, so that the extra fabric is knotted tightly in front, emphasizing the curve of her waist. Exposing a narrow strip of smooth bronze skin. “I’m, um, kind of on the rebound? So. Yeah. I don’t—I wasn’t looking for anything serious. With you. At all.”
And that’s.
Well.
Cormac is relieved. Really. Like, shit, fuck, of course he is. No part two. No sequel. No clinging. No crying. This is an optimal, no-strings-attached result for what could’ve been a massively inconvenient fuck-up. It’s just—okay. Okay. There’s some subtext there, right? To what she just said? Some subtle, deliberate slight, some needle-sharp implication that he’s not, what, boyfriend material? Not good enough? He’s not imagining that, is he? Nah. No. Fuck, no. He isn’t.
“Well, why not?” he blurts out, frowning.
She blinks at him. “Why not . . . what?”
“Why aren’t you looking for that with me?” he demands, crossing and uncrossing his arms. “I’m a fucking catch. You should want to date the hell out of me. I would.”
She blinks at him some more, visibly startled, apparently at a loss for words, but then—
Her lips twitch.
Her eyes crinkle at the corners.
A laugh escapes—no, a giggle, muffled and melodic, so breathless, so helpless, that she has to cough to cover it up. Clear her throat. She isn’t laughing at him, exactly; there’s nothing malicious about it, about her, about how open and friendly and inviting her body language is. Still is. Might always be.
Frankly, it’s a little goddamn disconcerting.
“You’re—oh, it isn’t about you, Cormac,” Cho says, almost apologetically. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s not?”
“No, no, you’re very . . .” she trails off, gaze flitting from his face to his arms to his chest. Lower, too. Much lower. “Um.”
Cormac hesitates. “I’m very what?”
A blush, deep and hot and berry-pink, stains her cheeks. “You’re a very, very bad decision,” she says, sounding amused, maybe self-deprecating, but she steps forward and dips her chin and hooks her fingers through his belt loops, slowly peering up at him through the thick, feathered fringe of her lashes, biting her lip, and it’s such a blatant, practiced move, such a fucking cliché, like she isn’t putting any effort in at all—
He gets it.
He respects it, even.
“Yeah,” he agrees, and grins, unabashed, slinging an arm around her waist and flattening his palm against the small of her back, drawing her in closer. “We’re definitely on the same page.”