I hear what you're saying

You're lying there with your eyes closed, singing badly to "Johnny Appleseed" and trying to decide if you should get really properly wasted or what, when there's a hard nudge on your shoulder and it startles you so badly you suddenly find yourself falling over the edge of the jetty and then you're in the water, flailing awkwardly because you were lying there in your pool cover-up which is now snagged halfway up one of the pilings and you're sort of tangled in it now. At least your head is above water. You're trying to stay in the territory of: above water's still a good thing. "What the f-f-fuck," you half-sob.

"Jesus. Fuck. I'm sorry, Birdie," Dex's surprised face appears over the side of the pier. "Fuck—" he exclaims again, when he sees your predicament. "Here—hold on there—yeah. I'm going to reach down and tear it loose." Dex lies down flat on his belly and eases his lanky frame down until he can reach and seize in both hands where the cover-up is snagged. "Ready?" When you nod, he yanks, hard, and it tears loose. Since you're holding on to a knot in the piling, the cover-up wasn't really supporting your weight so much as it was restraining you. Its tattered remains just sort of waft down, landing on your head.

"I just got this thing," you complain, batting it away from you.

"I know. But it was already plenty ruined before I got to it," Dex says, which makes you scowl up at him.

"I'm going to swim to the ladder," you tell him, and he nods. You're kind of grateful now, that the water is so remarkably clear here near the shore. It's probably only ten or fifteen feet deep, and you can see straight to the rocky bottom. It's a bit cool, since summer hasn't properly gotten its hooks into the surrounding landscapes yet, but more brisk than chilly. It's nice, because when it's too cloudy to see, you find standing bodies of water a bit scary.

On the other hand, it gives you a perfect view of your phone lying there on the bottom of the lake. Ugh. Your mom is going to fucking **** you over this.

Dex helps you up the ladder, his duck boots caked in drying mud and his face a mask of apology. "My phone," you say, and he's already pulling off his boots and shucking off his clothes down to his boxers.

"I'll at least fish it out," he promises, then dives neatly into the water. Dex resurfaces in no time with your phone, which, no surprise, looks absolutely beyond fucked. "We'll take it back up to the house and dunk it in some rice or something," he says, when you can't help snuffling at the sight of the dripping wet dead brick he's holding.

"Mom's going to absolutely fucking kill me, Teddy," you lament.

"It'll be fine. I'll get you a new one if I have to. This is not going to ruin your time. She doesn't have to know." He sits down next to you on the jetty, then slips his arm around your shoulder. "I won't let it."

"What do I do if she calls or texts and I can't get it?" you can't help fretting. "Who knows what the fuck she'll do?"

"I'm going to take care of it. I promise." He gives you a hard squeeze. "Sorry again. Didn't expect you to startle so easy."

You shrug. "I think Mom taking away the door to my room made me jumpy, or something."

"Yeah." There's a short silence, since your long purgatory of ultimate grounding isn't exactly the funnest topic ever. "So..." Dex says after a moment. "Should we go back up? The reason I came down to start with was Scott's back at the house making a pitcher of mojitos for us to share."

"Really?" you ask, surprised. "I thought you guys were sulking."

He's the one to shrug this time. "We did some of that. And then we talked a little. Nothing's fixed—" he adds quickly, when this makes you draw in a sudden breath, "—but we can at least act civil and try to have the nicest time we can."

"Hence booze," you say.

"Hence booze." Dex sets his chin on top of your head and squeezes your shoulders again. This is why you're looking down to begin with, and why you can't help noticing the contours of his penis under the thin cloth of his boxer shorts. Which is simultaneously mortifying and fascinating.

"Ugh," you sigh aloud. "Oh, my god, I'm so frustrated, Teddy! I'm literally objectifying you right now. I'm so fucking pathetic it's embarrassing."

"You what now?" He's looking down at you, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"I mean it's humiliating that I can hardly think of anything except sex and I have literally nobody to do sex stuff with. And no prospects. I'm going to be an embarrassingly old virgin who dies alone." You sigh dramatically, and flop backward on the jetty, your hair dripping lake water onto the sun-warmed wood planks.

He's studying you with that cocked-head, wheels-turning expression. "What brought this up?"

You gesture impatiently toward his lower half, and Dex looks down at his lap, still momentarily puzzled, before blushing bright red. "Jesus. Sorry. Um. I wasn't thinking."

He leans over, reaching for his pants where he dropped them on the pier, but you stop him with a hand on his arm. "It's okay. You're not the one who should apologize. I'm the one whose libido is crazy out of control."

Dex frowns, contemplative. "Why, have you been feeling like this a while?"

"Not long," you say. "Only like the last year."

He winces. "That bad, huh. How come you never said anything?"

You shrug. "'Cause that's not the relationship we have, I guess? Like how fucking gross and selfish to pester my ace friend about my own bullshit lack of sex life."

Dex's expression shifts several times through that short statement, beginning with a sort of pained look at being informed your best-friendship doesn't accommodate an open, free-wheeling sexual dialogue, and ending with confused surprise. "Wait, you thought I was ace?"

You sit up on one elbow. "You're not?"

"Of course not. I'm... I guess bi, probably. What made you think I was ace?"

This question makes you shake your head. "I guess just... the fact that all through middle school you basically had a mental stable full of all the cute guys you wanted to go out with, but then we got old enough to do something about that stuff and you never did anything about it with anybody?"

He takes that in for a second. "I guess maybe that really isn't the relationship we have," he says quietly, sounding sort of sad about it.

"Wait, does that mean you were with people and I never knew?" you ask, stunned.

He doesn't answer. He's staring at his lap, red-faced, where it looks like maybe he's starting to pitch a bit of a tent.

Right, cool. Just what you both needed to make this less awkward.

"I didn't mean to, like, lie about anything. I didn't know how to discuss it," he says after a second.

"Jesus. Does this mean I'm truly the only virgin I know?" you sigh. "That's rhetorical. Don't answer."

"Do you ever talk about this stuff with him?" Dex asks quietly.

"With Scott?" you say, since he didn't specify. "No, not really. I just assumed he can't be a virgin. Because look at the guy. Cheekbones you could slice wedding cake with. Smile that makes the sun itself look like a fucking sad-sack. I mean, somebody like that has to try not to have sex. Right?"

He tilts his head in **** agreement.

"I really thought you were going to come out as ace at some point," you say. "So can I ask—the people you were with. Guys or girls or both?"

Dex takes a long inhalation and lets it out slowly. "Just one person. A guy," he says, looking at you like he's watching a reaction.

"Wow. Am I just oblivious or was it a secret thing?"

"Secret." He looks uncomfortable, but this is the most frankness you've gotten out of him or Scott in months so you're not in a hurry to end this conversation.

"So can I ask you something super intrusive?" you say, glancing at his lap but trying not to be obvious about it.

"Go ahead, Birdie," Dex says, then stretches out next to you on his side, settling in for the questioning.

"How do you know you like girls too?"

You're lying there looking right at him, and Dex's face is so solemn that when he reaches over toward you and traces his index finger down the contour of your side and along your hip until he reaches your swim bottoms, you stay frozen like that, unsure what's happening, while your whole body sparks with confused hormonal excess. "I know," he says, simply.

Wow. Oh, wow. Wow.

And it feels, good. "Don't stop," you say, a little breathlessly, knowing you should talk about this, or something, and not just give in to how much you want it, because this is Dex, he's important, too important to mess things up permanently just for a bit of fun—except the sudden ache between your legs says otherwise.

This time he slides his warm palm up your belly, until he reaches the contours of your breasts inside your borderline-skimpy bikini top, and you're almost panting with how new and wonderful this feels, until you feel his palm cupping you, and the exciting tension of your nipple tightening and standing up against his hand. You hadn't known until now, that someone cupping your tit was something you'd be able to feel in your actual cunt.

Dex scoots a little closer to you, and you have a moment of heart-pounding anticipation that lasts only a few seconds because then your favorite person is kissing you, his warm mouth on yours and his breath sweet and humid against you, while he keeps up with your tits and while the throb between your legs keeps up with a steady pulse of building longing. You kiss him back, a little clumsily, and what a fun way to learn something like this, while you breathe in his familiar smell, along with something brightly scented with hints of mint and citrus.

You can't help pressing back against him, trying to deepen the kiss, and it's that which seems to make Dex come back to his senses. He pulls away, looking slightly dazed at the line you've just crossed, and immediately begins apologizing. "Fuck! I'm sorry. Jesus. What the fuck is wrong with me?"

"No-no-no, it's—please don't stop," you beg, "that was perfect!"

"Fuck," Dex says, sitting up and rubbing both hands over his face in the universal gesture of bewildered embarrassment. "What was I even thinking to take advantage of you like that?"

You sit up too, but before you can reach for him he's already picking up his clothes, along with your bricked phone (oh, yeah... that) and jamming his feet into his duck boots. "I'm so fucking sorry, Birdie," he says, looking so miserable about this special moment you just shared that it's about to topple that enormous sense of well-being you'd reached for a second there.

"About my phone, fine, be sorry," you say as you get to your feet, "but the rest of that was probably the finest three-minute interval of my entire life!"

He casts you a guilty glance, then jerks his head up the trail back toward the house. "We should get back. He'll be wondering."

"Teddy—did I do something wrong?" you ask helplessly, and he shakes his head with the firm conviction of an expert in self-deprecation.

"No. Sorry. I'm the one who made a mistake," he says in a voice that basically makes you want to tumble off the pier again and just drown there this time.

"No you didn't!" you say hastily. "I liked it!"

"It was wrong. You're not even sober. I mean, what the fuck am I doing?" he says in apparent dismay. He's got all his shit gathered up now and in another second Dex is going to walk up the path away from you and leave this beautiful moment forever irretrievable and spoiled.