That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

“Just piss in the ocean!” Hal urged, but Danny was already halfway to the cottage door. Hal got up and followed him. Once he was inside, he stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, breathing in the smell of sun-warmed garbage and sour spilled beer. The place was getting seriously rank. Oh, well, he thought. They’d be leaving on Sunday, and it would be someone else’s job to clean up once they were gone.

He waited until he heard the toilet flush, then positioned himself outside the bathroom door. When it opened, he grabbed Danny in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet, and wrestled him onto one of the unmade beds.

“Dan the Man!” he shouted, lying on top of him as Danny wriggled and kicked, finally working himself free. “So what’s the count?”

Danny shrugged. Hal didn’t even try to conceal his disappointment.

“Blow jobs?” he asked, and thumped Dan’s bony shoulder. “Come on. Tell me you’ve gotten at least a few of these townies to gobble your knob.”

“Three?” Danny said, with a question in his voice. When Hal stared at him, Danny dropped his gaze. “I remember two of them for sure. That night we all went to the Boatslip?”

Hal nodded. Dan had been talking to a girl at the bar, and they’d slipped out together, and Danny had come back grinning, which they’d all assumed meant that he’d gotten some. That was good, but not enough.

Hal shoved Dan back on the bed and straddled him, planting one knee on either side of his chest.

“Have you gotten laid this summer?” he asked. “Don’t even think about lying to me.”

Danny shoved at him, struggling to buck Hal off, but Hal had at least fifty pounds, plus gravity, on his side.

“Have you?” Hal demanded, and Danny looked away.

“The girls here are pigs. I’m not really into any of them.”

Hal shook his head. “Danny,” he said. “Danny, Dan, Dan.” The girls were not pigs. More to the point, there was one for every taste, petite freckled redheads, dark-eyed, sultry brunettes, or busty blondes, his personal favorites. Some guys said that anything more than a handful was wasted, but Hal thought those guys were full of shit. He loved nothing more than motorboating a girl, putting his mouth on her chest and wrapping her boobs around his ears, like sex earmuffs.

Sex earmuffs. He tucked the phrase away, hoping to remember it later. Meanwhile, Danny had squirmed out from underneath him and was sitting on the edge of the bed, picking at a scab on his knee. “Look,” Dan muttered. “Maybe it’s okay if I just—you know—don’t.”

“Are you a homo?” Hal demanded.

“Fuck you,” said Danny, and shoved him with both hands, which was the minimum acceptable response to such a query. Hal didn’t actually think Danny was a homo. He wasn’t sure what Dan’s story was, if he was shy, or just picky or what, but it didn’t matter. Hal was the class president, he was Vice Admiral, and if he had to personally drag each one of his men between some girl’s spread legs, like a lieutenant hauling his wounded soldiers off the beaches of Normandy, he’d do it.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Tonight’s your night. You know that girl I’ve been talking to? Little chickie from the beach?”

Danny looked queasy, which Hal ascribed to either the afternoon’s beer or the epic amounts of Fireball whiskey they’d consumed the night before. Maybe both. “Isn’t she your…” Danny’s eyelashes, absurdly long for a boy, fluttered as he groped for a word, knowing that nothing like “girlfriend” could apply. Not to a local, a townie they’d met a few weeks ago.

Hal thumped Danny’s shoulders, grinning. “Lucky for you, I don’t mind sharing.” Hal had been flirting with her, chatting her up, cultivating the girl, like a farmer tending his fields, for just this purpose. She wasn’t his type, but she was a type: young for her age, and starry-eyed, a girl who’d be honored that these prep-school gods, these future masters of the universe, were even paying attention to her. A girl who’d do anything, with a little fifty-proof inducement. A break-glass-in-case-of-emergency girl, and Dan was an emergency, if ever there’d been one. Hal clapped him on the back, the way his own father had frequently clapped him on the back. It was the single gesture of affection Vernon Shoemaker was capable of deploying with his boys.

“Get ready, soldier. Tonight’s your night.”

Most of the other girls at the bonfire wore cutoffs and college sweatshirts and practical ponytails to keep the wind from whipping their hair in their faces, but the girl from the beach was floating around in a stupid white dress, like the angel on top of a Christmas tree, with her hair down around her shoulders. Worse, she was clinging to him, like a barnacle stuck to a ship’s bottom. Hal knew he’d have to get things going—obviously Danny was not going to take the lead—so he gave her his most charming smile and handed her a cup of punch, which was mostly vodka, with just enough juice mixed in to hide the taste. “Here you go, beautiful,” he said. “Bottoms up.” She gave him a shy smile, and drank. For the next hour he kept her cup full, being his most charming, solicitous self, even though he had his eye on a blonde who was filling out her cutoffs and her UMass sweatshirt in a way this girl never would.

She touched his arm. “I need to go for a li’l walk,” she whispered. Hal mentally kicked himself, wondering if he’d given her too much to drink, if she’d puke while Danny was fucking her. He’d had that happen a few times, plus one girl had gotten so drunk that she’d peed in his bed when they’d finished. Not fun.

Hal watched as she stumbled off into the dunes. When the girl had disappeared from view, he summoned Brad Burlingham, aka “Bubs,” to keep an eye