Chapter 12

Esmie woke up in the late morning and looked at the sun streaming through the little window above the bed. Her body lay against Eric’s, both of them naked under a sheet. Her boyfriend was asleep, his big chest rising and falling as he lay there on his back. He looked so peaceful, so cute, so happy.

“Shit,” she said as she woke up became more aware of the situation. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep in his bed after sex. They had slipped off to make love while Nick and Lacey finished breaking down the equipment after the dance, and when it was clear the bullies were long gone. After their evening dancing to all those love songs, she wanted to have sex with Eric and he felt the same way, so they’d taken the only opportunity they saw for some private time.

She rolled over to look at her brother’s bed, but it was empty and undisturbed. They hadn’t even bolted the door, she remembered now, so Nick must have come in, seen them in bed, and gone awkwardly away. She hoped he hadn’t slept in the employee lounge, but she supposed he must have. She would have to apologize to her brother for this too, in addition to having not helped out enough at the dance.

This was getting out of hand. The Mixer was supposed to be fun, a chance to make some money helping her brother set up, then dress up and dance with her summer boyfriend. She’d looked beautiful in her black dress and Lacey had done her hair up almost as good as the girls who went to the beauty shop in town. Eric had been so handsome. She’d had to mend his one suit, which had a few little tears, and he’d grown even since buying the biggest one on the rack at the mall, so she had to let the hems all the way out too. Eric had watched her sew and commented on how amazing she was, which made her feel all melty.

Everything had gone according to plan. Eric looked so dashing in his suit and tie, which she’d had to tie for him (apparently Abby normally tied it, which figured). Once he put the suit on he went from slouching teenager to sharp-dressed gentleman – his broad shoulders and big chest filled the suit out spectacularly. They’d danced to the popular songs and dance mainstays at the start of the mixer. With Eric there no boys even bothered her and she was having a great time, exactly the sort of breezy dance experience she’d always wanted.

Then Nick went and played slow, emotional songs. She supposed he had to, since it was a teen dance and all, but did he have to pick good ones that made her feel so emotional? That was what made her say it. Nothing Compares 2 U, such a beautiful song when Sinead O’Connor hits those high notes. Eric’s body felt so strong, he was surprisingly good at dancing for such a big guy. He was only looking at her, he was so into her, leaning over, unable to resist looking at her boobs down her dress, but she liked that since she knew he’d only ever look at her that way.

She realized at that moment that Eric Frank was all she would ever want in a guy. He was her big, goofy, wonderful man. “I love you,” she said impulsively. She meant it, but she hadn’t meant to say it. It just came out. He said it back quickly. She started to cry. He almost did himself.

“I love you too, Esmie. I want to stay with you, I don’t want this to just be a summer romance,” he said quickly, as if he’d been waiting for the opening.

“Me either, not anymore,” she said softly, leaning into him. The beautiful music filled their ears and made it all feel okay.

How could it be a summer romance – a glorified fling – if they loved each other? She’d never find a man like Eric back in Alabama, and he’d never find a girl like her in Milwaukee. Or if he did, she’d want to kill that girl, or kill herself. She was a mess with emotions, but she loved that boy. She’d had to say it.

They’d sneaked off to the terrace to talk. Eric said he’d been in love with her almost from the start and had been scared to say it. It made her weak at the knees to know a man felt that way about her. She said she’d really tried to make it just a summer romance, and even looked for excuses to start a fight and sabotage the relationship, but Eric never gave her one.

They came back in to help Nick and Lacey and found that the bullies had gone after their friends with Eric not around. That made her and Eric feel real lousy. They were trying to get the group back together and here she was off making out with her boyfriend when her friends needed her. But Nick and Lacey seemed to have gotten through that okay, so Esmie and Eric slipped out again, permanently this time, to be alone in Eric’s room.

Once in the room they tore room and tore off their fancy clothes. “We could run away,” Eric said, standing there naked. “I can make money and we can live together. People still do that.”

“An elopement?” Esmie said, using one of her fancy words even though she’d largely stopped bothering with that around Eric, “In 1990? I dunno. It’s more of a Mexican thing these days if it’s a thing at all. Maybe my brother was right about you being the most Mexican white guy ever.”

Eric shrugged and said seriously, “I’d do it if it meant staying with you, Esmie.”

She shivered. This felt dangerous, like the time she’d found her father’s gun, but it was so exciting that Eric would run away with her. She wanted him to want her that bad, and to be that devoted to her. She walked over and pushed him onto his back on the bed.

“You really love me, Eric?”

“I do, Esmie,” he said. She climbed on top of him, straddling his thighs and he reached up to play with her bare breasts. “Do you love me?”

“I do,” she said, “Nothing compares to you.”

It was such a corny line, right out of that song, but it felt right, especially as Eric looked moved and said back, “You’re the one who’s incomparable. I’m so lucky.”

They made out and groped each other, twisting around on the bed and getting tangled in the sheets. Eric got on top of her eventually, ready to enter, then said, “Shit, just a second.”

He started to reach under the mattress to find his condoms, but Esmie grabbed his hands, stopping him. “No, you don’t need one tonight.”

She knew he didn’t like using condoms, but he still hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“Don’t worry, I need to feel you inside me tonight, baby.”

Looking back, she didn’t know why she’d told him that. It was true that she’d thought it would feel good and sexy, but she knew full well the potential consequences for her. She also knew that Eric would stick with her if it came to that. She hoped she wasn’t so pathetically cliché that she’d try to get pregnant to force events to where Eric had to stay with her, and yet, she had been the one to ask him to not use a condom.

It had felt so good, though. Maybe it was just the emotion, but it felt more intimate than when he’d used condoms. He’d pulled out at the end, ever the responsible and disciplined one. She knew it was the smart move, but it left her feeling disappointed.

“Esmie,” Eric said in a hoarse voice, waking up now. “You spent the night ... good.”

“Well,” she said, not having the heart to say it was an accident. “Yeah, did you sleep good baby?”

“Yeah,” he said, “But where’s Nick?”

“Dunno,” Esmie said.

“Maybe he banged Lacey.”

Esmie laughed. “Oh yeah, they were looking pretty chummy working the DJ booth. Well, good for him then. But I doubt my brother’s that slick. He’s only barely out of the dumps from Abby not being his soulmate.”

Eric sat up in bed to stretch and let out a roar that made her jump in alarm.

“What was that!?” Esmie said. It was the closest Eric ever had come to scaring her.

“Just my stretching sound, baby,” he said, “Letting out all the tension, I guess. You’ll have to get used to it now.”

She smiled at the thought of more nights sharing a bed with Eric.

“I hope my brother didn’t walk in on us sleeping together,” she worried aloud.

Eric shrugged, sitting up now, his curly red chest hair fluffed up. She thought of asking him to shave it like all the male lifeguards did, but the look was growing on her.

“Well, he knows we’re doing it, I think,” Eric said.

“How crude!” Esmie said. She sat up next to him now her breasts uncovered.

“My sister gets back tonight,” he said. “I hope she won.”

“I’m sure she did,” Esmie said, “Or if she lost it was to Nicole.”

“I should have called last night ... I’m being a bad brother this summer,” Eric said.

“Because you’re distracted by me...” Esmie said, “Well, do something with her tonight. If you can pry her away from Nicole.”

“What um, do you think about all of that?” Eric asked.

“Well, I’ve never known a lesbian. Abby is a good person,” Esmie said, “I suppose it is a sin. But so is ... well, what we are doing.”

They both blushed.

“Not of the same degree,” Eric said, “Man and woman have been doing what we do since the dawn of time. It’s the natural way of things.”

She rolled her eyes at his deliberate re-use of the crude phrase but didn’t bother scolding him for it. “Maybe women have always been doing each other too,” Esmie said. “Well not women like me, but some women.”

“Doesn’t make it right,” Eric said. “I guess what really bothers me is like, Abby already gets bullied so bad enough for her looks, and being so athletic, and her personality. Being a lesbian will make things much worse for her. The lady gym teachers at school are lesbians ... they seem so bitter.”

Esmie shrugged. This wasn’t the topic that had been on her mind, but it was on Eric’s so she wanted to help him. “They’re probably just bitter because of the way the world treats them,” she said.

“That’s what I mean though, the world will treat Abby that way, and she’ll end up broken, teaching gym somewhere because there’s nothing else for her,” Eric said. “I love my sister. I want her to be happy.”

“Then you should support her,” Esmie said, “Nothing would make someone go bitter and hate the world faster than their beloved brother turning against them.”

“I’d never turn against Abby,” Eric said.

“Then show her you support her,” Esmie said. “If the lesbian thing isn’t meant to be, maybe this romance with Nicole will just end up being a summer fling.”

“Like we were supposed to be a summer fling?” Eric said, then kissed her on the cheek.

“I don’t regret last night,” she said softly.

“Neither do I.”

Esmie looked at Eric, her big, goofy, wonderful boyfriend. He really would run away with her. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that, maybe they could come to some other solution where they ended up together without getting disowned by their families. Stranger things had happened, right? Well, they still had almost two months to figure it out and that seemed like forever.

“Well, one thing I would regret is my brother barging in on us naked,” she said, hopping out of bed, feeling her dress underneath her feet. “Let’s get dressed, okay? Then find Nick and get some breakfast.”

“Yes, Queen,” Eric said with a grin.

Lacey woke up to a knock on her door. Nick’s arms were draped around her. She felt good, but she was worried about getting caught with a boy in her room. Getting an actual boyfriend and then being fired the very next morning for having a boy sleep in her dorm room, that would be just her luck, wouldn’t it?

But the knocking was soft tapping. She figured if it was Laura Ballard on the other side of that door she’d be pounding gleefully at the chance to bust Lacey Larue. Nevertheless, Lacey walked over with apprehension after throwing on some panties and a T-shirt and opened the door.

To her surprise, it was Eric and Esmie, and Esmie looked almost in tears.

“Oh thank god someone’s here,” Esmie said.

“Yeah, what’s up?” Lacey said, her voice hoarse. What time was it? It was impossible to tell in the windowless hallway, which with its powerful fluorescent lights looked the same at noon as at midnight.

“Have you seen my brother?” the girl asked. Eric was standing behind her sportively. “He didn’t come home last night! We’ve checked the employee lounge, the ballroom ... I don’t know where he could be.”

“Er, well,” Lacey said, figuring there was no real shame in it, and that the group had to find out sooner or later anyway, “He spent the night here.”

“I knew it!” Eric said, in that way boys are proud of their buddies for getting laid.

“Shh! He might have just slept here because we were um, using, his room,” she said with a blush as she looked to Lacey.

“Nope,” she said, “Your brother scored, honey.”

Everyone laughed. Lacey hardly minded. If Nick was her boyfriend, this wasn’t even slutty. These two cuties were boyfriend and girlfriend and obviously sharing a bed, so where was the shame in sharing a bed with her own boyfriend? It felt good to admit it, not dirty.

“Who’s that?” Nick said, waking up now behind them. “Shit, is that Laura Ballard?”

“Yeah this is Laura Ballard, you’re under arrest!” Esmie said, in her best adult voice.

“Oh, hi Esmie,” Nick said. “Might as well come in. I guess the cat’s out of the bag.”

Nick was wrapped up in her covers as they walked back into the room.

“Did you um, come back to your room last night?” Esmie asked, a little embarrassed. Lacey figured she was worried her brother walked in on them banging and slinked out unnoticed.

“N-no,” Nick said, obviously forming the same thought, “Lacey and I had a lovely evening. And we’ll leave it at that!”

Everyone laughed at his modesty.

“Right,” Esmie said, “Well, I’m just glad you’re okay.” She went over and hugged him in his mess of covers, and he hugged her back as best he could.

“How are you guys?” Lacey asked casually.

“We had a lovely evening too,” Eric said, putting his arm around his girlfriend when Esmie went back to her place right in front of him. “Umm, sorry we weren’t as helpful as we should have been.”

“It’s cool,” Nick said, “We got everything put away fine.”

“What’s everyone doing today?” Eric asked.

“I got the 12 to 6 shift,” Lacey said with a sigh. “In like a lamb, out like a geriatric lion.”

“Ooh the early bird dinner crowd,” Esmie said with a giggle. “I’ve got 1 to 7 at the concession stand.”

“I’m gonna try to fix the Denon DN-2600F,” Nick said. When everyone looked at him in confusion, he said “The CD player that got dropped last night when the bullies were messing with us. I think I can fix it.”

“Sorry about that,” Eric said, looking at his feet, “If I’d been there...”

Nick shrugged. “You got paid fifty bucks to help set the place up and take it down at the end, and you did that. You weren’t hired as a security guard.”

“Still...” Eric said, “We look out for each other.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lacey said, “You guys sure looked like you were enjoying the dance. You deserved a good romantic evening ... summer’s over halfway over.”

Everyone looked at each other with a bit of sadness at the realization. “Well, we’ll just have to make the most out of the backstretch, huh?” Esmie said, and everyone agreed.

“Sure,” Eric said, then his stomach growled as if on cue. “Uhhh come on everybody let’s go get breakfast.”

She and Eric headed to the door. “Oh, Are we going to meet the bus when Abby and Nicole get back?”

Everyone agreed they should. “What time?” Lacey asked.

“Well the swim meet’s over at 4, and they leave the other resort at 5, it’s a 2-hour drive so supposedly they get here at 7, but they’re almost always late,” Eric said. “We can just meet out front at 7 and hang out.”

“Sounds good,” Lacey said, and everyone else agreed. “I’ll get changed then meet you guys in the restaurant.”

Nick kissed her on the lips, and at first she assumed he was showing off his new power over her to his friends, but then she realized this was a nice, romantic thing that boyfriends do; it wasn’t the way boys used to treat her. She blushed and felt happy. She watched her friends go.

Everything was going so well suddenly. It was too bad there was only half of the summer left ... but oh well, she was going to make it count.

After breakfast, Nick stood in the small workshop off the front office putting back together the Denon DN-2600F. The damage had been mostly superficial and he’d gotten it playing music again by putting a belt back on a pulley and re-aligning the laser. He listened with headphones and the playback was fine, but the case was scuffed and dented still.

Nick wouldn’t have cared that much about the cosmetic damage to the CD player’s metal case but it was so banged up that it wasn’t going back on the chassis properly, and that had to be fixed. He gave it a few whacks with a rubber mallet, adjusted the rails with pliers, then the case closed almost as good as new.

Looking over his handiwork, he felt pretty proud of himself. It was unfortunate that it got busted, but being able to fix things felt good. So no harm had been done the previous night after all. What was more, he had a girlfriend. He’d never expected to be dating Lacey Larue. She was beautiful and sexy, but at the start of the summer, he’d recoiled at her attitude and reputation. She had changed a little, maybe, but she was still basically the same person. She was still into New Kids on the Block, for example, and didn’t know much about anything Nick was into. Nick didn’t think he was just with her for her body, he had more self-respect than that, and she did too now. The thing was, she wasn’t his tired old idea of his soulmate who loved every book and band he did and completed him as a person, she was just a nice, fun girl who was into him. Why did he need anything more than that?

He walked out into the front office area. Most summer employees only came here when they were in trouble or there was a problem with their paycheck. Nick did not have a normal summer job though so he worked with the front office people more closely than most any other teenager on staff, and he had the keys so he could do work in the office whenever he needed.

His repair work done, he walked around aimlessly, still having an hour before he was to go meet the swim team bus. He thought this was the first time he’d been back here truly alone. Laura was not the sort to work on a Sunday, and Mitch was at his off-site mansion. Most everyone else who worked in the front office lived in town.

Since he was always doing difficult jobs for managers, custom work that required him go all over the resort, he’d acquired so many keys he jangled loudly when he walked. He liked that though, all those keys meant he could go anywhere at Summer Lake. This lodge was massive, well over half a million square feet between the hotel rooms, convention space, and the front office. Supposedly it was the largest building between Milwaukee and the Canadian border, or maybe it had been when it was built, but that was one of those claims from Summer Lake’s own brochures so you never knew if it was true.

He thought about going into Mitch Ballard’s office, putting his feet up on the big mahogany executive’s desk, but that was too cliché. He messed around with some of the office computers, mostly cheap PC clones, but Laura Ballard had a top-of-the-line Macintosh. Nick knew her password from when she’d had him fix it after she’d accidentally deleted a file, so he logged on and looked around. She seemed to just use it for solitaire and writing front office memos and all-caps notices for the employee lounge bulletin board in WordPerfect. This computer cost almost as much as a new car, it was ridiculous. Back home he just had a Commodore 64.

This was going nowhere fast, Nick thought to himself. Why couldn’t Laura Ballard store something nice and incriminating on her hard drive? He turned the computer off, careful to leave no evidence he’d been there, then walked around to the back part of the office area. It was dusty back here and some of the rooms were unused. With computers doing the reservations and bookkeeping these days they didn’t need as much staff as they used to.

He found a room he’d never noticed before with an old frosted glass window and the stenciled word “ARCHIVES”. The door looked old enough to be in the archives itself, like it was the door to a private detective’s office in an old film noir.

His interest piqued, Nick started trying keys. None worked so he got out the crude lockpicking kit he’d assembled after Lacey showed him how to pick locks one bored night recently. Far from a dumb blonde, that girl had the street skills to round on Nick’s book smarts. She must have scraped to get by down there in Florida with her redneck family. But as a man who liked having access to forbidden places, lockpicking was a useful skill for Nick Sanchez.

The door clicked open and he stepped inside and coughed from the breath of dust he inhaled. His curiosity was strong, though, and walked inside and turned on the light, which buzzed overhead as if the bulb was an antique like everything else in here.

The room was full of old-style wooden filing cabinets and there were a bunch of framed pictures everywhere as if they’d just been stacked here after being taken down from other rooms, probably decades ago judging by the layer of dust. Nick started going through them. Each one was more amazing than the last. Duke Ellington at the Summer Lake band-shell, then Cab Calloway and his band in the ballroom, Ella Fitzgerald in a canoe on the lake. Nick had known this place had its glory days back in the thirties and forties, but he had no idea the gods had been here, playing on the same stages he now set up for polka concerts.