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Allura's family had a cottage on an island just outside a little town a few hours north of the city. They had been spending their summers there since long before Allura had been born. The cottage was a huge building with two patios and a pool and more bedrooms than people unless her mother was throwing a very large party. The island was small and only had the one house on it though they also had a boathouse and a handful of out buildings. That island was a piece of her childhood. Allura had counted down the days to the end of the school year when they'd head up to the summer home and not leave until it was time to go back and buy a new uniform and books so she could go back to the expensive private school.
She was an American princess. She was an only child of people who had everything and she was used to getting her own way. She packed up extra toys to take with her to the cottage even though it had a fully stocked playroom. She went shopping with her mother and bought new clothes just for the summer and the beach. The summer was long and slow and her parents were there more often than they were away unless her mother had a movie shoot but even then that just meant that she got to spend more time with her father.
She loved summers.
On Saturday afternoons, her father would take her into town on the little boat. They had staff who brought in groceries but he still called the outings supply runs. By the time Allura was ten, he'd just set her loose on main street with a cellphone and instructions to phone if there were any problems. There were boundaries but no one was checking on her. She wasn’t supposed to go off the main street or farther east than the town’s only set of stop lights but if she did, no one noticed. Those afternoons were the only time in her life that no one was checking on her. She made good use of them.
Age 10
She found the bookshop on the second Saturday in July. The first two times she'd been let free in town with twenty dollars and no supervision, she'd bought snacks and spent her time in the park but now she was starting a careful catalogue of the town's shops. The convenience store had a cat. The butcher had a dog. The lady who rented paddle boats and sold boat tours liked children enough to answer all the questions a precocious ten-year-old could come up with. There was a clothing shop where an old lady had glared at her when she had touched one of the dresses and she wasn't going back there.
The bookshop was next on her list. She stuck her head inside. It was a little dingy with dark wood shelves against every wall and lined up down the middle too. The lights came from mismatched glass lamps hanging from the ceiling or propped up on the shelves themselves rather than florescent bulbs. It smelled faintly of coffee and strongly of dust and paper. Allura wasn't sure if she liked it.
She was a child of glitz and bright light. A movie star for a mother, a brilliant inventor for a father, a penthouse in the city, a private boarding school, staff to do the shopping and bring the car around. Dusty book shops were not her natural habitat. Her natural habitat had more glitter and more people where everything was new or obsessively clean. Dusty deserted book shops were alien terrain.
But that was where she met Shiro and over the next few years it would become one of her favourite places. That day, Takashi Shirogane was thirteen and hadn't picked up the Shiro nickname yet. He would get that up in high school when his homeroom teacher called everyone by their last name but couldn't pronounce his. His aunt ran the bookshop and he helped because his aunt didn't know what else to do with the teenager she had inherited when her sister had died the year before. They were both still working their way through this new normal.
"Hey, kid, kid’s books are back there," he said to the girl sneaking around the shelves.
"I’m not a kid,” she said.
“Yeah you are,” he said.
“Maybe I like to read poetry," she said.
"You're like five, go get a picture book," he said.
She had stomped out of the shop rather than admit that she really had been looking for the kid’s books and had been really hoping to find a Percy Jackson she hadn't read yet. She had come back a few times over the course of the summer and the boy had only gotten a little bit nicer as the time passed. He knew a lot about the kinds of books that her teachers didn't think were improving and once she got him talking about adventure books or mythology, he was actually pretty cool.
She’d sit with him as he sorted donations for the used section. The books all smelled funny and he sat on the floor in a corner of the store room to do it. She was going to get dust on her new pink shorts but after five minutes of standing there being ignored while he worked she sat down and asked him where he lived which turned into comparing apartments.
“My family only has three houses, that’s not too many, Penelope at school has five because her dad is from someplace in Europe,” she said.
“Normal people don’t have three houses,” he insisted.
He was her first friend who didn’t go to the same kind of private schools or the same expensive art classes that her mother signed her up for. Allura knew that they were comfortable but she had never really had a comparison point beyond movies that she knew were exaggerated anyways. She was too old to have never questioned whether having three houses was normal but she never had. Now there was a boy with messy black hair and a little frown line between his eyebrows looking at her like she was crazy for having a second room to keep toys in.
Age 11
Allura was on the dance team. She was good but not the kind of good that meant that she was going to go pro someday. That had never bothered her. Following her mother into show business didn’t interest her. She dreamed of following her father’s footsteps and being so brilliant that no one could ignore her. She wasn’t good enough to go pro but she was good enough to show off. She had taken all the acro classes.
“Acro?” Shiro asked.
“Acrobatics, like gymnastics but with better routines,” she said.
They were standing in the park by the water and some of the kids from his school were there. He was an eighth grader and far too cool to talk to a fifth grader but she was pushy and his friends had been doing flips off the dock and she’d told them that she could do better. Shiro been trying to tell her to go away but she was too stubborn to listen to him. The other kids wanted to see now and so she had done her floor routine from the end of year concert straight down the dock. Instead of landing with both feet planted on the mat, she timed it so she fell off the edge of the dock with both feet straight down and her hands up in a victory salute. She surfaced, shaking water out of her face to see all four of the boys staring down off the edge of the dock at her. Shiro helped pull her out of the water.
She had spent the afternoon trying to teach the boys how to turn a proper cartwheel. They were bad at it. Even Shiro was bad at it. She lost track of time and when her phone started to play a pop song she scrambled up from where she was sitting on the edge of the dock, feeling very cool with her new older friends. She was late to meet her dad at the marina. She pulled her sandals on and waved without stopping as she up toward the road.
“Bye Kid,” Shiro called after her.
Age 13
Shiro worked there now. She could see him through the window. He had a name tag and everything. The problem was that sometime toward the end of the last summer, Allura had lost the ability to speak to him without forgetting words so she’d just started avoiding him. Then he'd suggested that she was just a rich snob and she'd gotten so mad at him that she hadn't seen him at all in August.
That was a long time ago. It was the first Saturday supply run of the new season. Allura nad her father had finished her lunch with her dad and he’d headed off to the marina’s social club to hang out with his friends. Allura had put this off while she visited Eleanor at the boat rental place and stopped to pet the convenience store cat who was sprawled out on the top of the ice cream cooler. Now she was hovering outside the shop trying to get the courage up to go in and say hello.
She had gotten tall over the last year. She was thirteen. Tall and thin and not nearly so happy about being sent up to the cottage for the entire summer when she could have been somewhere, anywhere with her friends. There weren't any other kids on the island and Allura was the other kids in town had only ever treated her as a tourist. Shiro was the closest thing she had to a friend in a hundred miles.
He had only been a little older than her but he’d gone and become a teenager and left her behind. He was sixteen and the last year since they'd fought had made a difference. He did not look like a kid now. Allura was tall and pretty and desperately wanted to be older than she was. She had been fighting with her mother all year over make up and heels and underwear choices because she didn't think she was too young for it anymore. Looking at Shiro through the window display, she did feel too young. He looked like an adult and not the kid she had been friends with.
"Hey, Kid, you need to come inside, I saved you one of the gold first editions and I can't give it to you if you don't come inside," he said sticking his head out the door and making her jump.
He had always called her Kid. She had always hated the nickname but it bothered her more than it usually did. She would have preferred if he'd been like those boys from the boys academy who all assumed that she was in high school too and not a precocious middle school girl who had gotten too tall too fast. No. Shiro called her Kid and probably still thought she was five years old. He was probably always going to think she was five years old. He was even taller than she was and not nearly as skinny as he had been the last time she'd seen him.
But he'd saved her a book.
"What first edition?" she asked.
"Come on, I'll get it for you," he said.
She followed him into the shop and spent the rest of the afternoon there talking books and school. He called her kid and wished her good luck with her eighth-grade reading list for the summer and treated her like a little sister. Like he always did. She just hated it more this year than she had any summer before.
Age 16
The summer Allura turned sixteen, she won the argument to push her time at the cottage down to only three weeks. She was only thinking about the time at the cottage as three weeks of enforced family time to endure. She would go fishing with her father because it made him happy. She would lie by the pool and listen to her mother's stories and advice. The time would pass and then she could go back to the city and the apartment and the drone of traffic. She would get to spend more than half the summer with her friends in the city. They would flirt with boys and wear cute clothes and go to parties and get to enjoy being young and free.
It was also the first summer after Shiro had moved away for university.
She had been proud of him when he’d told her about it. He had gotten into a math program that required incredibly high grades. She had expected him to be an English major since they usually talked about books but he mentioned that he wanted to study space. Astrophysics eventually but the math degree was the first step. He had told her all about it the summer before while she'd sat on the check out counter wearing her cutest summer outfit and failing to flirt. She always failed to flirt with him.
He didn't seem to notice. She crossed her legs and played with the straw of the iced coffee cup he had given her and flipped her hair around but he’d just casually keep talking about books or movies or the composition of stars. Once she’d been impressed that he was into space, he would go off on these mini lessons about space stuff that from anyone else would have made her roll her eyes and walk away but she liked how much he liked it. He loved talking about space and she loved watching him talk about it.
Now he wasn't here.
The first weekend, she thought he had just had the day off but he wasn't there the next either. On her last free Saturday at the cottage that year, she finally asked the teenager behind the desk and found out that Shiro stayed at the university over the summer because he'd gotten a job up there. The boy behind the desk was very willing to flirt but even that didn't hold any appeal. Allura walked out on him as soon as she knew that Shiro wasn't going to be there.
The next summer, she put up a bigger fight, she signed up for extra AP courses so that she would have to stay in the city because she needed those classes for her university applications. She missed the cottage but she had too much too do to pine for it. She was on the school council and they did their planning over the summer. She had the courses. She had parties and new friends and colleges to think about. The cottage and the little town and the bookshop with the boy who called her Kid all seemed so far away.
2016
She spent the last two weeks with her parents at the cottage but there were no Saturday supply runs because they were spending the time as a family before Allura moved away to go to university. She had been accepted to a good school, she had proven every tabloid wrong. They had liked to say that she would be another movie star’s kid who went to rehab before they ever went to university. Not that she hadn’t done some time in high school in the party scene. A couple of terrible boyfriends, a few hangovers, but no drunk and disorderly arrests, no paparazzi scandals. Allura studied more than she partied. She had a plan and getting caught up in the excess wasn’t a part of it.
She watched the little town where she had spent so many childhood afternoons fade into a smudge of gray and brown against the green of the coast as the boat took them back across the bay to where the car would be waiting. Her future was waiting too and she said a silent goodbye to the little town and went to lean on the glass near the front of the boat and watch for what came next.
Age 19
The town was smaller than she remembered it but familiar. She stepped off the boat and was so struck by the familiarity of the marina that her father had to yell her name to remind her to help him tie the boat off. She felt like she was too big for this place. They had lunch at the same place as always, the one with the big windows that looked out over the swimming beach. It was familiar. Then he left her to go wander while he went to do whatever it was he and his friends did at the marina's club house.
Allura was headed into the third year of her bachelors and then it would be onto law school and the future. She'd gotten over the worst of her tendency to flirt with every pretty boy she saw and come to the rather annoying discovery that boyfriends got in the way of her goals more often than they did anything useful. She knew who she was. She knew where she was going. She was twenty and had heard people say that she was a little too earnest and a little too intense and too forceful. They said those things like they were bad things. She disagreed.
The little town near the cottage felt like it belonged to some distant past but it was still right here, same as it always was. The shops had been rearranged a bit. A new cafe. A different seafood place. The outdoors shop had a different name but the same creepy fishing obsessed guy behind the counter. The butcher had a different dog. The convenience store cat was the same but it also just laid in the sun and never moved and might have been taxidermy for all she knew. She pet its head anyways and it didn’t so much as blink at her.
The bookshop was still there.
She pushed inside and took a deep breath. It smelled the same. Coffee, dust, paper. She wandered the alleys between the shelves, trailing her fingers along the spines of the books. She wasn't looking for anything. She was thinking about her first crush and the books they had talked about or the stories he'd told about his rural public school that might as well have been another planet. She was thinking about the boy she had tried so hard to impress when someone came up behind her and asked her if she needed any help.
She turned to smile at him and tell him that no, she was just browsing.
"Shiro," she said instead.
And she was thirteen years old again and she had a crush the size of a small country and she had been very very wrong to think that he was hot when he was sixteen. He had been gangling and awkward. She just hadn't ever been able to imagine him like this. Better than six feet tall with broad shoulders and a weightlifter's arms. He had dark eyes and a little bit of stubble growing in along his jaw line. He wore black and had picked up a scar that slashed across the bridge of his nose and the bit of hair that always fell in his eyes was streaked with white.
He frowned at her and she realized he didn't recognize her. It took her by surprise. She would have recognized him anywhere.
"I used to come here and bother you when we were kids. Picture me a little shorter with braids and slutty tank tops and an unhealthy obsession with Percy Jackson books," she said.
He grinned at her and laughed a little, "You grew up," a beat, "I mean, you look different."
"So do you," she said. "You're supposed to say, 'Hey Kid,' and then pretend that you find me immensely annoying."
"Hey Kid," he said but he said it with a very different tone and a little half smile and she didn't hate it nearly as much as she used to.
He had led her back to the counter where she used to sit and make a fool of herself until a customer came in or his aunt came out of her office to check something on the floor. There was a little coffee bar behind the counter and Allura had never seen anyone order a coffee there but he made them each an iced coffee while they talked. She watched him move while his back was turned and she was staring more openly than she ever did when she had been a teenager. He had a prosthetic hand that didn't seem to slow him down at all.
"How was space school?" she asked.
"Great. You've got to be a senior now? Still at that fancy prep school?"
"I was not five when you met me," she snapped at him.
"I remember you as small and annoying, I have no idea, I'm totally guessing here," he said.
"I turn twenty next week," she said. "Half way through a social anthropology degree at Yale. No, I’m not a high school senior."
"Yale."
"Some people are allowed to be impressed by Yale but astrophysicists are supposed to be too smug and incomprehensible for us arts degree majors to understand. So complex. All the numbers," she said batting her eyes at him. He laughed at her and leaned against the counter and rolled his own coffee cup between his hands. The prosthetic hand was distinctive. It wasn't dressed up to look like a natural hand with skin tone plastic. It was black and chrome and noticeable. She liked it and she liked that he was the type of person who refused to hide it. He was ignoring it so she did too.
"You remember a lot more about me then I remember about you. I remember the books you liked and that your parents have a place out near Blueberry Island and you're rich as hell and that once you almost broke your ankle flipping off the dock at the swimming hole."
"Yes, well, I forgive you for not remember me. I remember everything because I had an epic and embarrassing crush on you when I was kid. Collecting details about you was my summer hobby from the time I was about twelve," she said with a smile. She didn't look away from him as she said it and he gave her a crooked smile and dropped his eyes back to his cup first.
"You have atrocious taste," he said.
"I don't know. Older boy, cute, helps out his family, likes mythology and space, math genius, that's not so bad," she said. "I went on to have much worse crushes on much worse guys though so you're not wrong. You're just wrong about yourself fitting in that category. The frat boy who liked to show off for seventeen-year-old girls by shot gunning beers? He was an example of my atrocious taste."
Shiro laughed again and looked up at her again. "That is bad."
"What's bad is that I dated him for two years just to make my mother angry," Allura said.
"Oh, oh no," he said.
"You were well above my usual standard for crushes," she said.
"He wasn't a crush, he was a boyfriend," he said. "That's worse."
"Are you suggesting that I need to upgrade my standard in boyfriends?" she asked.
Which was flirting. She watched him and he was looking at his coffee cup but there was a little smile tugging on the corner of his lips. She hadn't expected it to work. Her flirting had never worked on him and watching him smile at the things she said and give her his undivided attention instead of doing nine other things while she trailed after him was a bit of a shock. It didn’t matter that it seemed to be going well, that feeling that she was a thirteen-year-old was back and she was painfully aware of all the ways that she could embarrass herself.
"Would you be willing to help me with that?" she asked.
"Upgrading your standards?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "I'm oh so sheltered and naive," he laughed again and gave her a theatrical eye roll like he thought she was ridiculous and that one expression would have been enough to make her like him even if she hadn't been into him since before she was old enough to understand what that meant, "So sheltered, Shiro, really. Poor me."
"Does this act work on people in the city?" he asked.
"Oh god yes. I could go around telling people about how much I love collecting cardboard boxes and they'd all pretend to be fascinated. I don't need to try. My last name makes everyone fall madly in love with me before they've even met me," she said with a wave of her hand, "Which is why I need you to help me raise my crush standards. I am having a birthday party next week and you should come."
"No," he said. "The types of parties that heiresses who go to Yale attend are not the kind of parties where I will fit in."
"Where do you fit in?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said.
"Come on, I'm curious," she said.
"I don't know," he said, "I used to but then I almost died just after my graduation ceremony and most of the last year has been rehab and I've got a deferral for a masters program that I'm not sure is what I want any more. I don't know where I fit in."
Allura let the flirting fall away. Flirting had a rhythm. It was a game and she knew all the rules and was very good at playing it. This had just taken a sharp left-hand turn into being a serious conversation and she wasn't sure how to have those. She knew exactly what she wanted and trying to imagine not being sure just left her stressed out.
"Why don't you want to do the program?" she asked.
"I do," he said.
"But?"
"It's hard to imagine going back. I lost a chunk of the person I was. That's not a missing arm joke, that's a metaphor though I did lose a chunk of myself in the physical sense,” he waved the hand at her. “I was fearless and stupid and confident and now I have panic attacks. I was one of those guys who studied for twelve hours then went to a party and still got up and made it to the exam on time. I was an idiot and now I don't know who I am."
"Well," Allura said hopping up on the counter and spinning around so her knees hung over his side and he had to look up at her. She was wearing a floral sundress and she didn't bother fixing the bit that had rode up her thigh during the spin. "You can sit quietly in a room and try and figure that out but I don't think you're that kind of person. The other choice, is to go out and find him."
"Find him? Who is him?"
"You. This person you are now or will be in the future. Him. You get to choose who he is or maybe a better word is discover who he is. Other people can't tell you who you are but you also can't just wait around to find him or the person you'll discover yourself to be is someone who sits and waits. Accept the program. Become someone who has panic attacks in bathrooms at grad school and then goes back to class once he's pulled himself together. Be someone who is as excited about what they're studying as this dorky kid I used to know who would go on and on about fantasy novels and mythology and the composition of the stars. If you can't be fearless and stupid then be cautious and smart but don't stop being confident," she said.
"I should be confident?"
"Yes, and you should come to my birthday party, and you should go be an astrophysicist or a mathematician or a scholar of ancient mythology or a guy who owns a book shop he inherited from his aunt. But whatever you're going to do, choose it," she said.
"Hey, Kid?" he said.
"Yes?"
He stopped leaning over the table and he took her coffee cup away from her. He was very tall. They weren’t quite eye level; the counter was too high for that. He stood in front of her and was quiet for a moment. His eyes were familiar. He still looked like the kid she had known but the rest of him wasn’t familiar even if it was recognizable but his eyes were the same.
"I needed that today," he said.
"I am a traveling dispensary of wisdom," she said with a little shrug.
"The idea of going to your birthday party still terrifies me," he said. "I'm picturing something out of Gossip Girl."
“Yeah, that’s about right,” she said. “I didn’t even plan it. I don’t know what is going to happen just where it is and when I should be there but if you give me your phone I’ll put in those details and my number so you can come too.”
“Remind me who your favourite Percy Jackson character is,” he said.
“Reyna, why?” she asked.
“Because I need to remember you being a dorky kid trying to be cool,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you grew up very hot and you’re definitely way, way, way, out my league and you seem to be asking me out,” he said.
“I am,” she said. “Asking you out but I am not out of your league. I’m very sure. I checked the standings and everything.”
He was still standing there in front of her and the bell hanging over the door chimed as someone opened it. They both jumped a little and Allura turned to see a couple of tourists coming through the door. Shiro said something cheerful and customer service oriented to them and then pulled out his phone and unlocked it for her. He went to offer to help them find what they were looking for and left her with it in her hands.
His background was a character she didn’t recognize. She opened up his address book and added an entry for herself with a self to go along with it and then sent a message to her own number so she would have his too. Then she opened up his maps app and put in the location of the hotel in the city where the party was going to be. By the time he came back she had followed herself from his Instagram and left a few ridiculous selfies on his camera roll for him to find later.
“How long are you in town?” he asked.
“Four more days but I’ll be back for another week in August when my mom gets off the Marvel shoot. She thinks we don’t spend enough time together and I promised her an uninterrupted week of bonding time before I go back to school,” she said.
He considered all this. His customers were over the local history section looking at books and he glanced over at them. Allura had slid down off the counter when she handed him his phone and she stood on his side like she was another employee. He took the phone back and she slid a little closer into his personal space to show him the location on the map and the message she had left him.
Once his customers had paid and he’d bagged up their purchase and given them a post card with the shop’s name on it, he turned back to her. He leaned his hip against the counter and crossed his arms. Allura raised her eyebrows at him and did not stare at the way his shirt got tight over his chest.
“Can I take you on a country date before you go back?” he asked.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked.
He smiled and told her. It was simple and romantic and Allura found herself smiling just listening to him explain it. He didn’t seem to think it was anything special but it was the kind of date no one had ever offered to take her on. Nothing fancy. No showing off. No one around who might see them together and take a picture and give some boy his fifteen minutes of fame.
She never took the boat out by herself. She knew how to drive it but she still never did it alone and so there was something almost eerie about taking the boat back to the mainland the day after Shiro had asked her out. It was an easy drive. The water as smooth and the wind was down. The engine gave her far less trouble than her father had with all his questions. She tied the little boat up in the usual spot and walked up the dock to meet him out in front of the bookshop.
Where he had parked a motorcycle. He leaned against it and stared off into space and people kept turning to look back at him. It was a very white town and they might have been looking at the fact that he wasn’t white but most people were just glancing at him because he was hot. She watched him from across the street for a moment. The motorcycle was not a scooter. Allura had ridden on scooters before. This thing was bigger than that and obviously built for speed. She finally crossed the street to him and let him see her scan the bike and his outfit.
“Hi,” he said and his faraway look broke down into a big smile.
“This is not what I was expecting,” she said.
“It was my dad’s,” he said.
“We’re going all the way out to the look-out on this?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. He took her things and packed them away into a storage compartment and handed her a helmet and a jacket that was too big. He didn’t seem bothered by the fact that they were taking a motorcycle out onto dirt roads and she didn’t even consider refusing the ride. He helped her adjust the helmet straps and gave her another smile once he had the jacket on her. She sat up on the back seat and experimented with her balance.
“If you’re going to sit like that, hold on here,” he said.
“If I get nervous, can I hold onto you?” she asked.
“If you need to,” he said.
She didn’t bother waiting to find out whether tearing through pine forests on a bike older than she was was terrifying. Once he was sitting, she wrapped her arms around his waist and when he leaned forward to adjust something and get it started she leaned with him. He drove fast. Or maybe he didn’t and it just felt fast but she held on tight and watched the trees and the occasional car whip by around them. When they finally got there, she had to unlock her arms and roll her shoulders because she’d gotten stiff.
Shiro left the leather jackets and helmets sitting on the bike and gathered up her stuff and his and started up the hill. She took her own bag back so he would have a free arm for her to grab hold of. The ride had broken through the ice of casual physical contact and now she wanted a hand on him. It was the prosthetic and she pretended not to notice as he glanced at her. She linked her elbow with his and let him lead her up the rise.
Allura had gone to a handful of picnics in her life but this one was immediately her favourite. The blanket he’d brought was obviously an old table cloth with a hideous pattern on it. He had brought food packed into Tupperware containers and Ziploc bags but that didn’t matter. He took her past where the tourists had gathered to watch the sunset to a little outcropping farther down where they’d be alone. They ate and talked and watched the sun sink down over the lake and light the clouds in pink and gold. She settled in with her head against his chest and he wrapped his arm around her.
“Sorry if I was ever mean to you when we were kids, I was kind of angry when I was younger and I sometimes took it out on people,” he said.
“You were fine. I did fantasize about stabbing you over that time you called me a snob but I forgive you now. I’m sorry for being all slutty all over the desk at your summer job when I was 14,” she said.
He started to laugh. “It was awkward at the time but I’m willing to forgive you for it now.”
Allura didn’t kiss him then. She looked up at him and thought about it but he was looking out at the water and the sunset and she lost her nerve. He had been out of her league for so long that she kept getting caught in the past. He had never been interested. He had thought she was a little kid. He had all but patted her head and asked about her homework. That they were both older now and he had given every possible indication that he was very interested didn’t seem to change the part of herself that kept worrying that she would slip back into being a fourteen-year-old who was trying to hard.
She stayed cuddled up to him as the stars came out and he got lost in talking about constellations. He pointed out the patterns and told her the myths and threw in little details like the distance between this star and Earth. He had a great voice. He laid back and she lay with him and they watched the sky together. He listened as she talked about the social functions of mythology and story telling and then they were trading stories about university.
Then they were driving back and he was walking her to the dock and she did not want to go back to her parent’s cottage. She laced her fingers with his and pulled him down toward the swimming dock. It was late now and the streetlight on the end of the dock was mobbed by moths. Shiro held her hand and let her guide him along to the edge where she kicked off her shoes and rolled up her pants so she could drop her feet in the water. He sat down with her.
“Wanna swim?” he asked.
“No suit.”
“No one’s watching,” he said.
“I’m going to go for a swim, I never get to use this dock because it is always covered in tourists. This is not an opportunity that is going to present itself twice. You can stay up here if you want,” he said.
She looked at him and he shrugged at her. He had told her that he used to be stupid and reckless and she saw some of that in the smile he gave her now. He held eye contact until she smiled back. He pulled his shirt off and she let her attention stray to his chest. He had scars around his shoulder and he unlatched and pulled the arm off as well, dropping it on top of the shirt like another piece of clothing. His arm ended just above his elbow. That might have been distracting but he was standing over her and unbuttoning his pants and that was all she could think about.
“Are you planning on skinny dipping?” she asked.
“I was going to leave my underwear on but I won’t object if you want to go skinny dipping,” he said.
He shoved his jeans down one handed and kicked them off into his pile of stuff and then disappeared into the water before she had a chance to register what kind of underwear he was wearing. He grabbed her foot before he surfaced and she yelped and yanked her feet back out of the water. He shook his hair out of his face and grabbed the edge of the dock beside her. The look he gave her was a challenge and then he was splashing away.
Allura glanced up at the street but all the businesses that looked out over this beach were dark. The patios were closed up and the shops closed at dinner time on Sundays. Out in the ring of the light cast by the streetlight she could see the outline of Shiro treading water. She hesitated for another minute and then pulled her top off and her jeans and dropped into the water in her bra and underwear. It was surprisingly warm and even though she knew that it was deep here, not being able to touch in the dark water made her nervous.
“Come on, you’ve got two arms, let go of the dock,” Shiro said from somewhere to her left. She made a face in his direction and then pushed off and out into the water. She swam toward his voice and he caught up with her outside the circle of light from the ancient streetlamp. “This way,” he said and she followed him farther into the water.
“Here it is,” he said and he caught her with his hand on her waist and she forgot how to swim for a moment as his arm curled around her stomach and pulled her in. She felt his chest, wet and warm against her back and didn’t realize that there was a sandbar beneath them until he told her to put her feet down. They stood in water about shoulder deep.
“My friend, likes to take tourist girls out swimming and he takes them down that way where it’s even shallower and then says, ‘Remember that story about Jesus walking on water?’ and then stands up in the knee-deep water and makes a big asshole presentation about pretending he is chosen by God,” he said.
“Sounds delightfully sacrilegious, my grandmother just woke up from a nightmare and will phone me in the morning to tell me she is worried about my immortal soul,” Allura said.
Shiro was close to her. He had never stepped back after pulling her into the sandbar so she could stand up. She wrapped both arms around him and she could feel his stomach brush against hers in the warm water. When he moved, his legs bumped into hers and she bit her lip to resist the urge to wrap her legs around his waist. She distracted herself by running her fingers up into his wet hair and smoothing the tangles out where it was longer at the top. Her eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that she could watch him smile happily at her.
“You should kiss me,” she said.
“Should I?”
“Yeah, I keep losing my nerve so someone needs to step up and be the brave one,” she said.
He didn’t answer her. He just leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. He was holding her close and his breath made her wet skin tingle and it was too unexpected for her to complain. He kissed the other cheek. Then her jaw. Then the end of her nose before he finally leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. Very soft. Very slow. Then suddenly not. He was pulling her in tighter, kissing her harder. She gasped and he deepened the kiss. Her head spun as his lips moved against hers. She nuzzled into his neck when he backed off from the kiss. He was breathing hard and his heart race raced just like hers did.
They didn’t really swim any more than that. It was hard to swim when you were spending all your time pressed up against another person. He kept grabbing her and then having to let go because he couldn’t swim with no hands. They retreated to shallower water and when it was finally so late that neither of them could really put off going home, they had to walk back from the beach in their underwear to go fetch their clothes off the dock. Watching him pull his pants back on over wet skin was almost as good as watching him take them off.
“Are you ok to drive back in the dark?” he asked.
“I can manage the tiny boat,” Allura told him.
He nodded and kissed her again. It was different when they were fully dressed and standing on solid ground. It was more real. His hand slid around her waist and pulled her in and she forgot that it was very late and she needed to get back.
“Promise me that you’ll come to my party,” she said.
“I’ll try,” he said.
She pouted at him because that wasn’t a promise but he just smiled and kissed her again. He waited until she had cast off the boat and gotten it turned around in the narrow space before he turned to walk back up the dock. She sat there with her hand on the engine and watched him walk from one circle of light to the next. He turned at the last lamp and gave her a wave and she finally got her head back on straight and started the engine.
Age 20
She was not enjoying the party. Her friends had put it together and it was a shimmering fantasy land of a party. The DJ was loud, there were lots of people there to flirt with and dance with and she couldn’t enjoy any of it because her thoughts were still on a boy with a motorcycle and a bookshop and a streak of white in his hair. She wasn’t letting that stop her from being a good host. She laughed and smiled and danced when she was asked. There was no alcohol at the party but that didn’t stop half the room from being drunk on something or other. Her mother was going to be staying up for her and Allura was not going home drunk. She was not.
Her dress was shimmery and baby blue and had lace up to her throat but left her arms bare and had a big cut out at the back that let a lot of skin show and people kept taking that as an invitation to touch her. She had done her hair in a big cascade of ringlet curls that had taken a lot of time but looked incredible. She had straightened her hair through high school but had cut it off within two weeks of moving into the dorms and had let it grow back in natural for the last two years. It had been a frizzy disaster after her late-night swim with Shiro but even that couldn’t convince her to go back to chemical straighteners. She liked that it was big and curly.
Someone else tried to offer her a glass of champagne and she almost said yes because the party was loud and she was busy thinking about everything. Alcohol would help quiet all the thoughts about her campaign for student government that would start with frosh week and her course load for her third year and the boy who hadn’t come to her party. She waved it off instead and wove her way out onto the dance floor to find Romelle and Ariel and dance until she forgot all that.
They were laughing when they pushed back out of the crowd and Allura wasn’t looking where she was going so she didn’t see him until he spoke. Her friends stopped behind her and studied him, already passing judgment and putting together a full report on him like they did for every boy who had the audacity to speak to one of them without an invitation. She ignored whatever Romelle whispered to her.
“Hey, Kid,” he said.
“I’m not a kid,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
She held out a hand and he linked his fingers with hers and even though her friends were standing there goggling at the stranger and the room was full of people, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her height for a kiss.