Song of the Fireflies. J. Redmerski A.

      Mitchell jumped off a rock several feet high into the water not far from us. It scared the crap out of me, but Elias was so close to getting off that he wasn’t about to let something like that stop him. It was always harder to get off when under water, so the thirty minutes we spent with my legs wrapped around his waist and him slowly thrusting in and out of me wasn’t going to be for nothing.

      Elias grabbed me closer, one arm around my back, the other positioned partway in between my butt cheeks, and held me still when I startled.

      “Ignore him,” he said, staring deeply into my eyes, his face just mere inches from mine, as he tried to stay focused.

      He never took his eyes off mine. It made me insanely crazy for him. I pushed my bikini-covered breasts firmly against his rock-hard chest and kissed him. He devoured my mouth, pushing in and out of me beneath the water the whole time. Water dripped from his lips and his cheeks and I licked it off of him. The gesture made him thrust deeper, his fingers digging painfully into my back.

      “Oh look,” I heard Mitchell say, “It’s my best friend. Who kicked me out for a girl.”

      Elias’s concentration was unshaken. I, on the other hand, was getting pissed. And a little worried someone—mainly Mitchell—would notice what we were doing. He certainly didn’t need any more fuel for the fire he started.

      Jana jumped into the water next, thankfully slightly farther away from us than Mitchell had.

      “Come on, Mitchell,” I heard her say. I never looked away from Elias’s eyes. “Don’t do that shit here. You’ll ruin everyone’s night, not just theirs.”

      The two of them swam away in the opposite direction and left us alone.

      But apparently Mitchell’s presence and misplaced grudge against Elias, instead of the apology Elias had been hoping he’d get if he saw Mitchell tonight, was too much of a distraction. He pulled out of me without getting off and then hugged me.

      “I’m sorry,” he said, kissing the top of my head.

      “What are you apologizing to me for?” I kissed his lips. “He’s a fucking asshole. Enough to kill anyone’s buzz or orgasm.” I brought my hand out of the water and flicked droplets at his face. “You can finish with me later. However you want it.”

      For a second, it seemed Elias was just going to smile and join in with my impish gestures, but I saw something shift in his eyes when I said that last part. He looked at me with a deep curiosity.

      “However I want it?” he asked, searching for further explanation.

      I rested three of my fingers on his nose and then dragged them down his face and onto his lips, where he kissed each one individually.

      “Yeah,” I responded coyly. “You know you can do anything you want to me, right?”

      He still looked incredibly curious, that sidelong look in his darkening gaze, but I could sense that he was as afraid to come out and say what he was thinking as much as I was. We were still feeling each other out. Testing those boundaries. Hoping that there were no boundaries. But we were each afraid of scaring the other one off. We should’ve known that nothing could ever do that. It would’ve saved us a lot of pent-up sexual frustration a lot earlier on.

      A giant gush of water covered us like an angry ocean wave. Elias and I broke apart from each other’s grasp. I couldn’t see; the water burned my eyes as well as my nostrils and the back of my throat.

      “What the fuck, man?!” I heard Elias shout.

      I pushed the heavy, wet hair back away from my face and finally got my eyes open. I saw Elias first, and he had a murderous look on his face. I swam back over to him and draped my arms over the back of his shoulders, wrapping my legs around him from behind.

      Mitchell was grinning enormously, proud that he’d splashed us.

      “Let’s just go to our tent,” I said.

      He ignored me. “You’re twenty-seven years old, man,” he snapped at Mitchell. “A little old to be acting like that, don’t you think?”

      “Seriously, baby, let’s just go.”

      Mitchell laughed and laid on his back, floating on top of the surface. He spit water into the air. Jana, floating upright next to him, dodged it and made a face. Mitchell didn’t say anything else, but there was no shortage of spiteful looks exchanged as Elias and I left the water and got as far away from him as we could.

      “We can go home if you want,” Elias said to me. He pushed back a low-hanging tree branch to clear the path for me, and his other hand rested on my lower back.

      “No,” I said. “I want to stay. Screw him. I can’t believe he’s even acting like that. I feel like we’re back in junior high school.”

      “Well, it’s like you said, it’s the drugs. He’s definitely not himself.”

      We made our way up the rocky path leading back to our tent, hand in hand. But before we got there, my left flip-flop broke.

      “Shit.” I bent over to fool with the strip between my toes, trying to make it hold long enough so I could walk the rest of the way through the woods.

      Elias lifted me up, swung me around on his back, carried me the rest of the way. My arms were hooked around his neck and his were hooked around my thighs. We hung out at the tent for a long time, but neither of us could sleep. We had uncomfortable sex inside the tent, and then we talked for a while until we decided to explore the bluffs. I “borrowed” a passed-out girl’s flip-flops from another tent nearby, and Elias and I headed deeper into the woods.

       Chapter Eight

      Bray

      “What if we get lost?” I asked, gripping Elias’s hand. “We didn’t exactly bring any survival gear.”

      “We’re not going far,” he said. “I saw a ridge when we were swimming. People were hanging out on top of it.” He pointed. “It’s just up ahead. Jared and a few of the other guys went this way to get to it.”

      I had seen it, too, and wondered how everybody got over there.

      After several more minutes of pushing our way between trees and bushes and stepping over dead branches and stray rocks, we emerged from the woods into a clearing at the top of the ridge that overlooked the river many feet below. A campfire had burned here recently; I could smell the leftover heat and smoke still rising from the charcoaled sticks on the small pile. A few empty beer bottles were strewn about the ground.

      We walked to the edge of the ridge and looked out at the river; the moonlight was reflected off the water like hundreds of little diamonds. Some of our friends were still in the river below, floating on small plastic rafts, but it was fairly quiet everywhere, as the party had begun to die down for the night.

      I sat down near the edge of the ridge and drew my knees toward my chest, wrapping my arms around my legs. The breeze blew through my hair, and I closed my eyes and raised my chin to the sky, taking in the tranquility of the night.

      Elias sat down next to me, propping his wrists on his bent knees. “I almost went to South Carolina after you,” he said.

      I glanced over. He was looking out at the water. “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

      “Mitchell told me you were engaged.”

      I started to turn to him, shocked by what I’d heard, but I realized it didn’t surprise me much. “Well, he lied,” I said in a calm voice instead. After a pause, I added, “I wish you would’ve come after me anyway.”

      Elias looked right at me, the emotion in his eyes pulling me in. The breeze brushed through the messy dark hair that framed his beautiful, stubbly face. “I know,”