Free Lucky by Rachel Vail

she would freak out if he had a date at our party and she didn’t. But what could I say?
    “Awesome,” William said, trailing his long fingers in the water. “My mom says no way we can get a pool, too much liability or something. You’re so lucky.”
    I closed my eyes. Lucky. Yeah, except, maybe not so much anymore.
    When I opened my eyes, William was on his back, his eyes with their long dark eyelashes shut and his hands behind his head, but Luke was lying on his stomach, staring at me.
    “What?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “What are these thingies for, these circles?” William asked.
    I squinted over at him. His eyes still closed, he was pointing at the cup holders in his raft.
    “Sodas,” I said. “You thirsty?”
    “Yeah,” he said.
    Hooray for William. I was instantly, overwhelmingly thirsty myself, and grateful for a getaway. “I’ll get some.” I hoisted myself out of the pool and headed for the pool house.
    “I’ll help,” Luke offered, and before I could say I really didn’t need any help getting sodas from the pool house fridge, he was out of the pool, dripping on the hot stone deck.
    “Okay,” I said. He followed me across the deck and into the pool house, where he closed the door behind us.

10
    I T WAS DARK IN THERE UNTIL I opened the refrigerator door. I grabbed two Sprites and handed them to Luke, but didn’t look him in the face. It’s not the first time he’d been in the pool house; we have parties all the time and anyway I could see his and William’s T-shirts on the bed in one of the rooms, the one to my right. But there we were, in the pool house, dripping wet, alone together.
    “You want a towel?” I asked, going quickly around him, trying not to look at his flat stomach and tan chest on my way to turning on all the lights and opening the closet. When did he get arm muscles? I flung a towel back toward him. He caught it on top of his soda cans.
    “Phoebe,” he said.
    I took a breath and forced myself to look up at him. Water was dripping off his hair.
    “Yeah?”
    He took a deep breath, too, and looked at his feet. “So,uh, what’s going on?”
    My mouth opened but nothing came out. Going on? With me and him? Me and Kirstyn? My family? “I honestly have no idea,” I whispered.
    He smiled, frowned, then smiled again, so quickly that if I hadn’t been staring at his face I’d definitely have missed the frown.
    “What?” I asked, echo-smiling.
    “Nothing, just…” He bit his lower lip. “I just know exactly what you mean.”
    “You do?”
    “No.” When I squinted at him, he smiled again. “Not exactly, I guess, I mean, but yeah. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
    “What?” I tried to keep smiling, but it was a challenge.
    “Everything,” he said.
    “Yeah,” I said. Okay, so here’s the thing. He really is incredibly cute. He’s fun and hot and maybe Kirstyn was right about me liking him again, and I had just been in denial.
    How intense and black are his eyes? Were they always like that?
    He isn’t the clingy little mama’s boy he was when we were five, I thought, but hello, I’m not in a little pink dress anymore, either. And the way I acted to him the first week of seventh grade was so long ago, I was probably remembering it all wrong anyway. Maybe I hadn’t been as much of a jerk as I thought. Maybe he’d forgotten, or decided wehad all grown up a lot and forgiven me.
    There was really nothing stopping us from hooking up, since that’s what we clearly both wanted to do.
    Well, anything other than the fact that my best friend would think I was crazy, and an idiot, and a loser. But maybe she would never know anyway.
    He took a step toward me. We had only kissed a few times, back when we went out in sixth grade, and all those kisses (other than the last one) were in front of everybody, at those dumb parties we used to have. Still, I could remember how soft his lips were, how lightly they brushed mine, so different from gross Dylan Baker at camp with his