Crusted with barnacles and marsh weeds, packed full of sand, the shell would have been an odd gift for anyone but me. I loved it, apart from Boyce and his intentions. But I loved it all the more because he gave it to me. I spent the day digging the sand out of the deep aperture and scrubbing the outer whorls and crevices with an old toothbrush. Once it was clean, I polished it with mineral oil and set it on my desk.

“I wonder who put that shell on our front porch and why?” Mama asked at dinner.

I shrugged and stared at my plate.

I didn’t find out why he left that shell at my doorstep until over two years later—the first and only time Boyce was ever in my bedroom, the day after we graduated.

The fact that I was lying on top of my comforter buck naked—next to an equally naked Boyce Wynn—seeped into my consciousness slowly. Though I’d thought long and hard about who (Boyce) and how (protected) I’d lose my virginity, I couldn’t say I’d seriously contemplated the where or when. In my fantasies, the setting was always somewhat ambiguous but always dark. Because of course it would happen somewhere private, romantic, and dark. Not at ten a.m. on my own bed with at least a dozen people in the house.

After discarding the condom, he collapsed next to me. I stared at the embossed patterns on my ceiling as the sounds of our breathing slowed simultaneously and our shared muteness became a whole different sort of loud. My bikini and sundress were on the floor, on the opposite side of the bed. On the opposite side of the boy lying next to me. The bedding was in disarray beneath us, but not enough to dive underneath without making an awkward spectacle of myself.

I suppressed a panicked giggle. I was lying on my bed with a boy in the bright light of day, naked as a jaybird. I’d rocketed past both awkward and spectacle a ways back.

That was when he rose up on one elbow and pointed at my desk. “Still got that whelk, huh?”

Pretty much the last subject I expected to discuss at this juncture was the shell that had been sitting on my desk for two years.

“Um. Yeah.” I wondered if I could grab the edge of the comforter and roll myself into it without looking like a lunatic. Or a burrito.

“I knew it was meant to be yours the minute I found it. So whatever happened to my T-shirt?”

I blinked as his eyes flicked to mine, and then, as if he’d just remembered the fact that I was completely naked, his gaze moseyed—a Boyce Wynn pastime if ever there was one—over every exposed peak and valley to my toes and back.

“Do you want it back?”

“What?” His eyes returned to mine finally, but his stare was incisive, his pupils dilated, dark.

“Your T-shirt?”

He grinned, his warm palm splaying across my stomach. “Screw the T-shirt. All I want right now is round two—if you’re game.”

Desire surged over me in a landslide as his hand slid higher, thumb stroking the underside of one breast. From the feel of things against my hip, he was definitely game.

He was kissing me before I finished nodding yes.

• • • • • • • • • •

Sleep was impossible in that bed, four years older but not much wiser when it came to Boyce. It was midnight before I got home from our trip to the sandbar. I’d watched him dig that hole and stare into it for several minutes before emptying the contents of the bag and refilling the remaining cavity with soil and sand. Not a word was spoken. Even so, Bud Wynn had been laid to rest in a manner he didn’t deserve—with more respect than he’d ever shown his youngest son.

Melody had texted me earlier, letting me know she’d arrived safely in Dallas and asking what I was doing without her. Not much, I’d responded, revealing nothing about what I was doing or with whom. Boyce and I had never made our relationship—whatever it was—public. We’d both taken pains to do the opposite in fact. I’d persuaded myself for years that it wouldn’t be understood by anyone who knew us, but now I questioned why I cared if anyone understood. The secrecy wasn’t all me, though. Boyce hadn’t ever broadcast it either, or even told his best friend. Lucas had given us puzzled looks the few times we ran into each other that summer between high school and college. He wouldn’t have watched the two of us like we were an unsolvable equation if he’d known.

Melody:  I still can’t believe you want to stay there, GF. That place is VOID of anything or anyone worth doing! Dallas is sooooo much better. Promise you’ll come visit!!

Boyce had returned from parking the car then, dropping his dad-in-a-box into the bow hatch and steering the boat down the canal, toward the bay.

Me:  Sure. Maybe this fall. ☺

Slipping my phone into my pocket, I’d glanced up and forgot what I’d been about to say. The sun had begun its descent on the horizon, and at that exact moment it framed Boyce just as as it had that day on the beach when I’d woken up from drowning to his face hovering above me and his hand grasping mine. Art History, freshman year, I’d memorized various terms for the light surrounding him that day—halo, nimbus, glory—used to depict saints and angels.

Boyce had laughed and urged me to tell him which of those he was, as if daring me to liken him to either. He’d stared at my lips, and they’d prickled as I recalled, like a film on fast-forward, every blessed moment of their possession by his mouth.

Saint, he most definitely was not.

Chapter Twelve

Boyce

Ruben Silva was the only teacher I respected in high school—as much for his awe-inspiring size as his mechanical know-how. I’d given him some hell, but he’d known the best way to deal with me was to threaten to kick me out of his shop or call my dad. I’m sure he never thought I’d end up running my father’s garage alone, but neither had I. If not for how much I craved the purr and smell of a revving motor and the feel of grease on my hands, my old man would have lost me to dealing weed to tourists long ago. I’d come close enough as it was.