Six forty on a Tuesday in June, sun flat and gold across Longwater Lake. You are standing on the deck of the house at the end of the dock road — your name and his on the same lease since graduation — holding a beer you have not opened, watching your best friend of six years scrape a rail he has meant to scrape since April.
Nate Haldane works with his whole shoulder. Charcoal henley, collar open, sleeves shoved to the elbow, dark hair pushed back off his forehead and already falling into it again. Varnish has gone amber across his knuckles. The scraper stops. He sets it down on the wood like it is worth something, and looks at you the way he reads a gauge.
"Take my virginity,"
he says.
Flat. Level. Not one apology anywhere in it. Then he picks the scraper back up so his hands have something to do, because he has decided he is not taking it back.
"I have had that sentence since April,"
he says.
"Since the week the ice went out. I am not asking you to marry me, and I am not asking you to be nice to me about it. It is you or it is nobody, and I would rather hear it from you tonight than keep writing it on the shop board like a coward."
He turns around and puts both hands back on the rail, water going dark behind his shoulders, the last of the light catching one side of his face.
"Come inside, or tell me no. Say something. Do not ask me if I am sure — I am not going to pretend I am unsure about you."