I wait.
“What’s the point?” she finally says.
“Of sleeping together?” I ask, still maintaining perfect calmness.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sleeping is boring. Why don’t you go out or something?”
Right then, I make a choice.
I choose not to explain euphemisms. I decide not to tell her that sleeping together actually means having sex, because I don’t think she knows what that is yet, and I’m unprepared to tell her right here, right now, on this car ride.
“Adults are weird, I guess,” is all the explanation I give.
“When you sleep together are you naked?” she asks, making a face. “Valerie says adults sleep together naked.”
I look at the double yellow line on the road in front of me and consider my options for a long moment. Then I take a deep breath and look into the rear-view mirror again.
“If I take you to the sliding rocks, do you promise not to tell your dad?”It works.
Rusty doesn’t ask another question about sex for the entire car ride, even though we have to go to my apartment for my bathing suit and then her house for her bathing suit, and the whole thing takes forever.
The rocks are a half-mile hike into the woods, and I think Rusty skips the whole way there, practically floating on a cloud that she finally gets to go. She jumps. She leaps. She uses her towel to pretend that she’s a woodland-themed superhero named The Fearsome Fawn.
There are a few other people there when we show up, and I recognize most of them, but not too much. I’m pretty sure that none of them know Daniel well enough to rat me out, so we’re good.
We spread out our towels on the rocks. We jump into the pool at the bottom to get wet, Rusty shrieking with the cold, and I don’t think about Daniel throwing me into the creek last night even once.
In fact, I don’t think about a single thing that happened last night at all. Not about watching him float, naked, in nothing but moonlight. Not about him tossing me over his shoulder and throwing me in.
And I most certainly don’t think about fucking outside on the rocks, the air cool and his body pure fire.
Once she’s in, I show her the best way to the top of the rock slide, because it can be tricky if you don’t know how to go.
“All right,” I tell her, sitting at the top, watching another kid slip and slide down the rocks, shrieking with delight as he tumbles into the pool at the bottom, “Do you want to go first or do you want me to go?”
She bites her lip, nervous, kicking her water-shoe-clad feet on the rocks.
“You go,” she says.
I clamber over her to the trough where the water escapes the top pool and put my butt in.
“See you at the bottom!” I say, pushing off.
Holy shit is it fun. It’s over in five seconds and then I’m splashing into the pool at the bottom, breathless with the thrill, water up my nose. I surface and wave at Rusty, who waves back, then gets into position.
For a second, my heart squeezes. Just because everyone in Sprucevale takes their kids here doesn’t mean it’s safe. Sliding down a bunch of rocks into a creek isn’t necessarily safe, and for a minute I wonder if taking her here on an impulse was dumb as fuck, and then she pushes off.
And screams with delight the whole way down.
I catch her when she splashes down at the bottom, laughing like a maniac.
“Again!” she shrieks, slithers out of my arms, and is already clambering up the rocks.
She must go down the slide twenty, maybe twenty-five times. The second she hits the water at the bottom she’s already racing back to the top, impatient when she gets stuck behind someone slower on the climb, tapping her foot dramatically if someone else is on the slide when she gets to the top.
I go down plenty more times, but I can’t keep up with her. I swear Rusty’s rocket-powered or something, and after a while, I head to the towel we spread out in the sun and sit down.
Sitting feels great. I lean back on my hands, let the sun warm me up, bright behind my eyelids, and try to wash everything else but this blissful, perfect moment away.
The table will get finished in time. The brewery lost some beer, but they’ll be fine. Crystal will never get custody.
I’m going to be more responsible, quit being impulsive, start remembering shit like I’m supposed to. For once, I’ll get Elizabeth a birthday present next month instead of just texting her at 9 p.m. like I usually do.
A scream jerks me out of my sun-drenched reverie, and before I even know what I’m doing I’m already on my feet, every nerve in my body alive and tense, heart hammering.