Free Blue by Lisa Glass Page A

fireplace just to check my head hadn’t been swapped with someone else’s. Nope. All I saw when I looked in the mirror was someone average with a bit of a tan. Nothing special; just me.
    Zeke guzzled from a bottle of water and jumped on to the floor to do his press-ups. I finished the shirt, hooked it over the end of the ironing board and sat on the bed to watch him.
    I took a swig from my bottle of Corona and said, “So I left a note telling my mom I was staying over at Kelly’s house tonight.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    He was breathing hard.
    “Must be fun to sleep in a penthouse though. Watch the sun come up in the morning.”
    Where had that come from? Had I just been possessed by the ghost of a slutty chambermaid?
    He waited for a few seconds and then said in his lovely accent, “You wanna stay here?”
    Oh God. Didn’t he want me to?
    “Well, I mean, it is nicer than Kelly’s room. Have you lost count?”
    “Nope. Sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two . . .”
    “It was just an idea. Doesn’t matter, I’ll stay at Kelly’s.”
    “No . . . Stay here.”
    “That OK?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Cool.”
    He hesitated again, like he was going to say something else but changed his mind.
    “Cool.”
    What am I doing? Am I drunk on half a glass of wine and two sips of beer?
    No, you’re drunk on him.
    When he finished his press-ups, he rolled over and said, “Anchor me?”
    “Er, sorry?”
    “Gotta do stomach crunches.”
    “Right.”
    “Sit on my feet?”
    He sat back and I squatted down, awkward in my super-short rockabilly dress, and eased myself on to his ankles. His skin felt warm against the cool of my bare thighs.
    I looked at the hair falling around his face, as he came forward with his palms bracing the sides of his head. His eyes were locked in concentration. I stared at him, looked straight at those sea-blue eyes, bluer even than the sky, and caught a glimpse of the competitive, totally driven pro-surfer that lurked behind the chilled-out exterior. Behind all the hippy dippy stuff was a boy who was absolutely going to win.
    He looked across and caught my gaze. His eyes were bright and his face flushed, but he hadn’t broken a sweat. He was crazily fit.
    “Done. Just need to find my cell phone and we can party.”
    Oh dear.
    He looked around his room for the phone but of course he couldn’t find it.
    “I guess I had it in my pocket when I went to the beach. Some local kid’s probably listing it on eBay right now. I’ll have to pick up another one tomorrow. You have an Apple Store here?”
    “No, but Truro does. You’re not bummed about losing your phone?”
    “Yeah, it’s too bad; I had some nice pictures of Fistral on there. But, no worries, I’m always losing cells. I have my planner and contacts backed up to iCloud, so I won’t lose anything important.”
    So the numbers of the eight million girls on his old iPhone would just be transferred over to his new iPhone. It figured.
    He scooped the shirt off the ironing board, buttoned it and tried to straighten out his hair without even bothering to look in the mirror. Then he put his wallet and room key card into his back pocket, grabbed his bottle of Corona and opened the door for me.
    “After you,” he said.
    “Do you want your room card back?”
    There was a moment thick with stuff neither of us was saying, before he said, “Hold on to it.”
    I stood next to him in the elevator and my head was a jumble of thoughts: busted iPhones, Hawaiian shirts, Zeke doing sit-ups, the fact that I had just invited myself to stay over in his penthouse suite . . .
    We walked into the blare of the Headland’s function room.
    “Anders! Come talk to my girl Iris.”

Chapter Eight
    My girl?
    “Golden Boy tells me you’re a natural. Shredding Fistral, so he says,” Anders said, handing Zeke what looked like a pint of some rank real ale.
    “Wouldn’t go that far.”
    “Zeke only tells the truth. This I know. So if Zeke tells me you’ve got