Drift (Lengths) by Steph Campbell, Liz Reinhardt Page B

undeniable.” She says it like she’s pleading a lost cause. “When you’re together, you’re about to set the room on fire. He brings out something in you I’ve never seen before. And I think that might be a really good thing.”
    I blush. And stammer. And think of him, his white shirt, the buttons sliding out of their holes, my fingers creeping places they have no business creeping...and wanting to creep to other, more expressly forbidden areas...
    “I...he’s very...we—”
    Before I can finish flopping around, looking for words, Cece interrupts me.
    “He’s nineteen!”
    I stare at her face, but she doesn’t look back. Her eyes are squeezed tight and she’s tensed, like she’s waiting for me to explode or weep or break down in front of her.
    But I can’t muster a single reaction because the shock is so profound and so damn embarrassing. I’m thoroughly numb.
    “The cougar comments…” I say slowly, numbness replaced by deep shame.
    The kind of shame that comes when you realize you’re the pathetic butt of someone else’s joke.
    Cece shakes her head, her eyes glinting. “That was uncalled for on my part, Lyd. I’m so sorry. I was drunk, and I honestly thought I was being funny. Now I realize I was being crass. And an asshole. I should have told you that night.”
    Nineteen?
    I think about those green eyes, drinking me in like he knows what to do with a woman’s body.
    Nineteen?
    I think about the soulful, educated lecture I took diligent notes on, delivered in that rich voice tinged with that gorgeous accent.
    Nineteen?
    I want him. Want him so badly, my body takes a running start and butts my mind out of the way just for the chance to get one more grab, one more touch.
    But I can’t.
    I absolutely cannot . My first instinct was the right one: he and I are trouble. Not a risk I’m willing to take.
    This new fact is as much a relief as it is a letdown. Nineteen is way too young to even consider, so I won’t.
    Because I can’t.
    But I can pretend that the lump in my throat is just a trapped circle of candy, and not my rising, growing regret.
    And so I do.

 
    9   ISAAC
     
    California beaches are all ragged coast and luminous, breaking waves. The artist in me should want to paint them, but they don’t appeal to my eyes as much as they do my body. They call to my muscles, my bones, my flesh.
    My father fancied himself the Ernest Hemingway of the art world. I was twelve the first time he ordered me to go shot for shot in a midnight rum drinking contest with him. Six months later he let me smoke a Cuban cigar so strong, it was all I could taste for days even after I was sure I’d puked the last remnants of it into my mother’s lavender bushes. He took me to Sicily and pushed me into the churning water, spear gripped in my hands, when I was thirteen, telling me not to come up for air til l I had a fish. By fourteen, I was being treated for altitude poisoning when he wanted to keep climbing a mountain in Tibet against the guide’s strict instructions to stop.
    My mother encouraged me to go on these “father/son bonding” outings. My uncles took me aside and told me my father was a lunatic and a masochist. That I had nothing to prove and could stop at any time.
    But I wasn’t doing it to bond, like my mother assumed. And it wasn’t because I was being bullied, like my uncles thought. I did it because I couldn’t stand to have him look at me with those mocking eyes. The ones that said, Ah, I thought you couldn’t handle it. And I was right!
    I guess, in the end, I did have something to prove.
    I’m scarred and tough because, even if my father was right about me inheriting my mother’s love of leisure and inability to tap into true passion, I absolutely inherited his stubbornness.
    Which is why I’m on a surfboard again today when I should be finishing my chapel painting. I was able to see the enormous lantern cross shining from the glow of the candles the parishioners held last night, and