I craned my neck back, blinking against the bright sunshine, and his face swam into focus. The sob caught in my throat as air halted in my lungs. Distantly, I felt the throbbing pain in my foot, the burning agony of the spines still embedded in my flesh, but I swear in that moment, I didn’t even process it. That face, up close, without shades to obscure it, had commandeered every one of my senses.
And what a face it was.
Dark brows, furrowed together as he examined me. Straight nose, high cheekbones, and a firm, square jaw. His eyes locked on mine and I saw they were a startling shade of green, almost jade, and feathered by dark, thick lashes. They slid away far too soon for my liking and locked on the foot I was still clutching tight, my knee bent inward at an unnatural angle as I pulled it toward my chest.
“Shit,” he clipped, exhaling sharply. “You’re not all right.”
I shook my head. Tears were still streaming from my eyes and my nose was beginning to run. “I st-st-stepped,” I hiccuped. “On an ur-ur-”
“Sea urchin. Nasty little buggers.”
Before I could say anything else, he dropped down in the sand before me, his knees hitting the beach mere inches away. His eyes slid back to mine for a moment as he took hold of my knobby-kneed leg and gently twisted it to get a better look. I tried very hard to hold still, but I was shaking. From the pain, yes, but also from the sheer emotional overload my body was experiencing as this beautiful, fallen-angel of a boy in his bright red bathing suit held my foot up to his face, examining the bottom with acute concentration.
“It’s not so bad,” he told me in a steady tone that instantly made me feel calmer. “Most of the spines didn’t lodge. There are a few in there still, but they’re shallow. Tweezers should do the trick. We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.”
I sniffled indelicately. I would’ve done it delicately, but there was too much snot leaking out my nose to be delicate. “Okay.”
He looked at me, his face serious. “It must hurt.”
My bottom lip was quivering, as was my voice when I whimpered, “Not too bad.”
“Uh huh,” was all he said, like he didn’t believe me in the slightest — I blamed the snot, it was very hard to be credible with that much snot leaking from one’s nose — and I noticed one of those dark brows arched upward as he lowered my foot back to the sand. For a moment, I thought he was going to leave me there to my own devices, but instead he did something that astonished me. He leaned forward, hooked his muscular arms around me — one behind my back, the other looped under my knobby knees — and rose to his feet with me cradled against his chest. Then, he looked down at me, stared straight into my tear-glazed eyes, and said something I’d never forget.
“I got you, Firecracker.”
And he did.
He had me.
He brought me to the lifeguard tower — not to the top seat but to a smaller bench at ground level around the back side, setting me down like I weighed no more than a feather. I worked to regulate my breathing and get my tears under control as he retrieved his first aid box from somewhere out of sight. I’d managed to rein in the worst of the snot by the time he returned to me.
Once I was settled, he flipped open his kit, knelt in the sand, and took my foot in his large, steady grip. It looked very small and pale in his hands. I watched him, wary at what was to come, but he didn’t hesitate as he wielded the stainless steel tweezers, not even for a second, moving with a self-assurance that belied his years.
I flinched each time he yanked one of the six — yes,six— spines from the soft arch of my foot, but managed not to make a single sound of protest. Not a sob. Not a wail. Not even a wince.
Despite this, he could tell I was suffering. I knew he could tell because, each time he pulled out a spine, he’d purse his lips and blow a soft stream of air onto the small wound it left behind, which was oddly soothing and somehow made me forget all about the sting of pain.
In what felt like a blink of the eye, he’d extracted them all with ease, like it was something he’d done a thousand times. Then, with a tenderness I’d never before been on the receiving end of from a single living soul — surely not a cool-as-heck, teenage boy, and absolutely not a cool-as-heck Lifeguard God such as himself — he applied a bit of gooey, translucent antibiotic ointment to the shallow punctures using a flat wooden applicator and wrapped up my foot with a long strip of gauzy, white bandage. He did this in silence, completely focused on his task.
“That should do it,” he muttered, taping off the gauze. His eyes flashed up to mine and, once again, I noticed how sharply, starkly green they were. Mine were green, too, but they were a pale tea hue. Not like his. I didn’t know the name of his particular color — somewhere between emerald and evergreen on the color scale — but it was, I decided instantly, my new favorite.
“You here alone?” he asked.
I nodded. It was not unusual for me to be out on my own. Aunt Colette was a free-wheeling, former hippie chick turned moderately-successful occult shop owner. As such, she did not only let me wander on my own, she openly encouraged it.
Can’t taste the world through a sheet of glass, honey. Get on out in it. Try every flavor it has to offer.
“Someone drop you off?”
I shook my head.
His lips twitched. “You fly here on a broomstick or something?”
I stared at him, neither nodding or shaking, not knowing how to respond when a cool-as-heck Lifeguard God with gorgeous green eyes and thick, dark lashes was teasing me. Like we werefriendsor something. Like this wasnormalwhen the truth was, I’d never talked to a boy in mylife, except the stupid ones in my homeroom class back in New Jersey. And they didn’tlooklike the LG orsoundlike the LG.
Not even a little bit.
Not evenat all.