I blush hard and it feels like my eyes are bugging out of my head. “I might peck you on the cheek or something, but—”
“No,” he says, smiling and quite serious, “it’ll be a full-on, tongue-dancing kind of kiss.”
I smack him playfully on the arm—something is fluttering around inside my belly.
“Geez!”
Luke grabs my hand and pulls me out to the water with him, where we swim and hang out on the cliffs until late in the afternoon. People come and go throughout the hours, sometimes leaving us with Alicia, Braedon, and a few of their close friends to have the area to ourselves for a while before more people show up in intervals.
“Backflip!” someone says just before Luke jumps into the water for probably the twentieth time.
And every time he does it, it ties my stomach up in knots. But there’s something about him that I can’t quite figure out when I watch him leap off the edge of that cliff; it’s not overconfidence or showing off or recklessness, but something deeper, more profound. Maybe it’s a sense of freedom, or a natural high that consumes him while he’s in the air, as if he had been born with a pair of wings that only he can see. But the more time I spend with him, the more intrigued I become. Sure, he’s gorgeous and funny and polite and all the kinds of things—so far—that would make my mom love him to death. But what intrigues and excites me more is how he kind of makes me want to jump off that stupid cliff regardless of how scared I am of it.
ELEVEN
Sienna
After nightfall Luke and I head to the barbecue at Alicia and Braedon’s place. It’s a tiny house just minutes from the beach, and apparently someone else other than them live here as well, because I can smell the food already cooking from the backyard as we walk up. Voices carry around the side of the house, laughter and conversation that may or may not be accompanied by alcohol.
“Luke!” a voice calls out when we step outside into the backyard from the back door of the house. A girl, about my height but maybe a little shorter, springs to her feet from a lawn chair and falls into his arms. She has blond hair pulled into a ponytail at the back of her head, and she’s really fit, like she works out regularly; little knot-like muscles flex in her biceps as her arms hang about Luke’s neck. She’s cute, more tomboy than girly girl, but not so tomboy that I feel like I have nothing to worry about when it comes to Luke—she’s actually kind of adorable.
I stand next to him, coiling my fingers together down in front of me, my eyes straying from them and toward the fresh-cut grass, instead. But then suddenly Luke’s hand hooks around my waist and he pulls me closer.
“Kendra, this is Sienna. Sienna, this is my good friend Kendra.”
She smiles at me close-lipped, her brown eyes studying me for a brief, secret moment that usually only other girls can detect. She glances at Luke once, and something passes between them before she looks back at me.
“Hi, Sienna,” she says, her smile slowly lengthening.
“Hi. It’s nice to meet you.”
We don’t shake hands, but it doesn’t seem necessary. And I don’t detect any territorial vibes from her. I take that back—actually I do, but I can’t place it. It doesn’t feel like jealousy, but something else.
With his hand still at my waist, Luke walks with me down the steps and to the concrete patio laid out in a circle shape over the top of a large portion of the grass. A red grill with a dome-shaped lid just like the one my dad always cooked on during the Fourth of July holiday stands on four legs on one side of the patio. Delicious-smelling smoke billows from the vent at the top and from the sides. A dozen other lawn chairs are set here and there and all of them are occupied.
A guy with a shaved head that has a painful-looking scar running along one side of it raises his arm in the air at Luke. He gets up from his lawn chair with a beer bottle wedged between the fingers of one hand. He’s wearing a pair of black cargo shorts and a pair of black flip-flops and has several black hemp—or leather, I can’t tell—bracelets around his wrists.
He steps up to us and he and Luke do that weird man-shake where they bump fists and whatnot.
The guy looks at me with a big, close-lipped smile, and then back at Luke—there’s an awful lot of inner dialogue going on around here and I’m starting to feel seriously out of place.
“Sienna, huh?” the guy says with a grin and reaches his hand out to me. “I’m Seth, Luke’s best friend and roommate—he wouldn’t know what to do with himself without me.” He looks between us, still grinning.
Luke play-punches him against the arm.
“Yeah right, man,” he says, smiling and shaking his head. “I think it’s the other way around.” He looks right at me. “Really, it is the other way around. I rescued this guy from a very troubled time in his life and now he owes me.”
I chuckle.
Seth laughs and takes a quick swig from his beer, balancing the bottle neck between his thick, rugged fingers. “You’re so full of shit,” he says.
Luke looks at me—his hand has not only remained on my waist, but it just squeezed me tighter—and smiles. “We’ve been best friends for about six years,” he says. “And Kendra, she’s part of our family.”
Kendra, who has been standing with us the whole time, smiles hugely. She has a lot of freckles, just like me, splashed across her nose and cheeks.
“Your family?” I ask Luke.
“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it,” Kendra says. “So how long are you in Hawaii for?”