What I Thought Was True (19 page)

maps. Some were framed, and looked like something a little

kid would draw, on construction paper, with
x
leading to pirate treasure. Some were just on big sheets of white thick paper.

Almost all of them were hand-drawn.

Cass, who’d been silent while I studied my surroundings,

finally spoke up. “Just so you know, I had almost nothing to do

with this room. My mother hired some decorator while I was

away at camp two years ago and he went all ‘carrying the nau-

tical theme through the house’ . . . There was also a wooden

marlin on the wall and a statue of some guy in a yellow rain-

coat with a pipe. I ditched those because it was like sleeping

at Red Lobster. I kept expecting to wake up and have some-

body ask me whether I wanted tartar sauce with that.” Cass was

talking a little fast. He took a deep breath and glanced at me.

“So no crusty old Sailor Man watching over you in your

sleep?”

“Buxom mermaid, maybe. Old sea salt, no way.”

I’d come up close to one of the maps now, close enough to

see that it was the coastline nearby, the mouth of the river, the

bridge to Seashell. In the corner, tiny, were the initials
CRS
.

“This is all your work? You drew this?’

“Most of them. I like maps.” Cass shrugged. He’d sat down

on the bed now, elbows on knees, hands dropped between

them. Casual pose, but he kept flexing and unflexing one hand.

I was waiting, at this moment, for The Pass. I wasn’t as expe-

rienced as everyone believed, but let’s face it. I was in his room.

He was on the bed. But he was just sitting there, staring at his

215

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 215

9/4/13 8:02 AM

hand. Now we were both doing it.
See Cass’s hand flex. See Cass’s
hand unflex
. Maybe I’d totally misread him. Maybe he was gay?

But then I looked over and saw his eyes. Alert, intense, full of

something that made my throat catch. Nope. Not gay. Besides,

there was that kiss . . .

Another quick look in his eyes, and I had to turn away again,

try to get back the thread of what we were talking about . . .

This was ludicrous. I spent most of my time around

boys. The island guys. Dad, Nic, Emory, Grandpa. The swim

team. The largely male staff at Castle’s during the summer. I

wasn’t some convent-educated virgin who fainted at the sight

of facial hair.

I cleared my throat, sat down on the bed next to him, tossed

my hair back again, this time without endangering anyone.

“So . . . what is it about maps? I mean—why do you like them?”

“Uh. Well, I’m not really good at putting this into words. I

guess no one’s ever asked.” He paused, looked up at the ceiling

as though the answer might be there. “I like the way you can

represent the terrain of something curved or bumpy on a flat

surface. I like the way you can chart all these different direc-

tions, so you can look at all the possibilities, from every angle.

I like to just get in the car and pick an area, see if I can map

it . . .” He shook his head, looked down. “It’s just kind of my

weird thing, what I do when I need to think.”

I glanced down at the map on my hand. So did Cass.

“You didn’t wash it off,” he said, smiling.

“It’s been a day and a half. You used a Sharpie. I’m not going

to never wash this hand again or anything. Like you were the

Pope or something.”

216

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 216

9/4/13 8:02 AM

“I’m definitely not the Pope,” Cass said. Now he rested far-

ther back on the bed, on his elbows, and looked up at me

through his long lashes, very still. I edged a little closer.

He smelled so good, like beach towels, a pool in the sun.

Sharply clean.

I was
smelling
him now? Also, I had not tried very hard to get the Sharpie off my hand. What was happening to me?

Before I did something else creepy and random, the door

opened abruptly and Trevor Sharpe stuck his head in. We both

startled back. “Sundance, where’s the second keg? Please tell

me there is one. We’re seriously low on ice. Tell me there’s

more of that too. Channing says we really need to change up

the lame music. It’s killing the vibe, man.”

Cass shook his head, sighed. “The keg’s in the garage. Ice too.

Tell Spence to do whatever the hell he wants about the music.”

Trevor muttered something I didn’t hear that made Cass say

“Shut
up,
” in a surprisingly angry voice.

When the door shut, he flopped back on the bed, laced

his knuckles behind his head. “I didn’t really think this party

through. I wasn’t too keen on multiple kegs, but . . . Do you

want the rest of the tour or—do you want to tell me what

weird thing
you
do? After all, I showed you mine.”

His breath caught, as though he hadn’t expected to say
that.

He disentangled one hand, pulled at his collar, then jiggled his

foot back and forth.

“Well, um, for starters, I have an unnatural attachment to

my peacoat. We’re very close.”

“Good to know. So it was a big deal that you allowed me to

take it off you.”

217

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 217

9/4/13 8:02 AM

“Huge. A milestone.”

“That so?” His voice dropped lower, so I leaned forward to

hear him better. I mean, of course that was why I did it. “And

besides that?”

A loud chorus of “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”

erupted from downstairs, then a hammering on the door.

“Sundance! One down already! Mitchell threw up on the rug

in that gray room.”

“Clean it up,” he called without looking away from me.

“No way, man. Your house.”

I almost offered to go clean it. Really.

Then Cass’s cell phone rang and he answered it, lowering

his voice and turning slightly away from me. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ve

got it handled. This is a bad time, but it’s all under control.”

If his buddies were going to use his cell to get his attention,

it was only a matter of time until they barged in again. I stood

up, twirled my hair into a knot, let it go loose.

“Any more?” Cass pressed. “The peacoat can’t be
it
.”

Abruptly I pictured the words on the girls’ bathroom wall

after Connie Blythe caught her boyfriend pushing me up

against the lockers to kiss me freshman year. But Cass wouldn’t

have heard of that—this was his first year at SBH. “Oh, I have

no secrets.
Everyone
knows about me.”

That came out in a way I didn’t intend, sadder, more ashamed,

and Cass gave me a sharp glance, then stood up quickly. “Hey . . .

d’you want to head out to the beach? Take a walk?”

The beach. Okay. That was good. The beach was my home,

my safe place, evened the playing field. Which I desperately

needed leveled, because as we walked through the house again,

218

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 218

9/4/13 8:02 AM

I kept, despite how pointless it was, cataloging all the differ-

ences between Cass Somers’s life and my own. At our house,

we have stacked blue plastic milk crates to hold Mom’s love

books and Nic’s training manuals and Em’s brightly colored

children’s books and my . . . whatever. This house had glass-

fronted cases with low lights and leather-bound editions. Our

paint is dinged, and where we have wallpaper, it’s faded and

peeling. They’d had an interior decorator and a “theme.”

But the beach, with the sand and the familiar sigh of the

ocean, the beach was an equalizer.

It was a full moon shining across the water. Freezing. Hardly

any stars. Cass exhaled a puff of white, chuckling silently as

we crunched over leftover snow. When I looked back, I could

see several intertwined silhouettes on the porch. Evidently the

music hadn’t
completely
killed the vibe.

Cass was walking purposefully. It suddenly made me falter.

Maybe there was a guest house. Maybe that’s where this had

been intended to go all along. He was silent and the sound of

nothing but our footsteps clomping along was making me ner-

vous. Each step seemed to say a different thing, like when you

pull the petals of a daisy. “He really likes me, No he doesn’t,

This isn’t about a hookup, Yes it is.”

“Do you know,” he said softly, “did you know the first maps

were all of the sky, not earth? The ones on cave walls? I always

thought that was cool.”

“Why were they?” I ask. “Do you know?”

“Not for sure. I’ve made up explanations—like that back then

they thought the earth was too big to map, but they thought

they could see the whole sky—didn’t know it was reversed.”

219

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 219

9/4/13 8:02 AM

It isn’t about a hookup, I thought. It can’t be. That’s not

a line. That’s nothing like something Alex would say. Or Jim

Oberman.

“Sorry about that back there. Like I said, I underestimated

the party thing. I just had one . . . so you would . . . um, come.”

I stopped dead. “You did not!”

He shrugged, smiled, his ears going pink. Or maybe that

was just the cold.

“You couldn’t have just asked me on a date?”

“I didn’t think you did those.”

What was
that
supposed to mean? I’d landed hard on the

“He likes me not” foot. “What? You think I just put out? Is that

what the kiss in the car was about?”

Cass took a step backward. “No! I mean, yes, I do like you,

but I didn’t just . . . that is, yeah, I’ve thought about that, I mean you . . .”

My temper was now rising fast enough to banish the cold.

“Do you have any idea what you’re saying? ’Cause I have none.

You’ve thought about
what
?”

“Oh for God’s sake!” Cass said, kicking away a piece of ice

with his foot. “What do you want me to say? You. I’ve thought

about you.”

Me? Or sex with me? Or both?
“Why don’t we just go back to the party? Since I don’t
do
dates.”

He huffed out a breath of exasperation, white in the dark air.

“Because whatever you want to believe—or hear—I really like

you. You. Come on, Gwen. Let’s just keep walking.” He reached

out his hand, palm up, holding it steady, letting me measure

the sincerity in his eyes.

220

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 220

9/4/13 8:02 AM

I took his hand. His fingers curled around mine and he

tucked both our hands into his parka pocket. We walked for a

while in silence. After a few minutes, Cass said, “You’re shaking

again. I seem to keep leading you into hypothermia.”

By this point, what with all the high emotion, I had abso-

lutely no idea where we were. When I looked around, I saw to

my surprise that we’d walked a full circle around the house,

and wound up standing right near my truck. Was it a sign?

Should I leave now?

“Gwen . . . I just want everyone to go away. Except you. I

don’t know why I thought all this was a good idea. Safety in

numbers or something. Do you think we could just get in your

car, get away for a bit before we have to face the keg-heads

again?”

It seemed like a simple question.

The house was throbbing with loud people and even louder

music. The night air was still, breeze soft and salty from the

ocean, peaceful. I couldn’t read Cass’s expression, but I wanted

to. I wanted to stay outside with him and talk the way we had

in his room. “We could just warm up a little,” I said, nodding

my head at the Bronco.

He opened the door for me. The front driver’s one, not the

backseat door, waving his hand to gesture me in, in a gentle-

manly way. Then he came around to the passenger side, sliding

himself in. I flipped the key in the ignition, turned on the heat, swiftly muted Raffi talking about his Bananaphone.

“So . . .” I started, wondering where to go from here,

whether I should tell him some private and personal thing

about myself in exchange for knowing about his maps. I went

221

BOM2_9780803739093_WhatIThougtWasTrue_TX.indd 221

9/4/13 8:02 AM

for: “Does this ability to map things mean you never get lost?”

“I get lost,” he said firmly. “Like now. I can’t tell what you’re

thinking. About me.”

But then maybe he could, because his eyes widened and he

bent toward me, so slowly I almost didn’t realize he was mov-

ing. Or was it me?

Then his lips were on mine. One cold hand rubbed the back

of my neck and the other slid slowly down the curve of my

side, coming to rest just above the waistband of my jeans. I

made a sound, which should have been shock, or protest, not

a hum of pleasure.

But that’s what it was, because Cass Somers was the virtuoso

of kissing, the master, compelling and accepting in equal mea-

sure. Like before, he didn’t rush immediately into deep kissing,

just a soft firm pressure, then sliding to kiss my cheek, slipping back, hovering, waiting for me to fall into him.

And I did.

Before I knew it, I was running my hands all over his back,