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smiled before leaving me. I watched him walk toward the lake. He hooked his hands under his shirt and pulled it clean over his head. My mouth instantly dried. The last time I’d seen Blake, he was sixteen. But as I watched the boy I’d once known slide his cargo shorts off his legs, causing tanned, taut muscles to flex across his shoulders, and start sprinting toward the dock in nothing but his boxer briefs, it was obvious he had been replaced with a man.
    And I didn’t know how to feel about that.

    “So tell me again. Exactly what did he say?”
    Marissa and I stood with the rest of the counselors waiting for the new group to arrive. We could hear the approaching buses, but they hadn’t yet broken through the trees.
    “He said he wants to get to know me again. What does that even mean?”
    Marissa smirked. “I think you know what it means, Penny.”
    Heat burned through me, and I knew my cheeks had a crimson stain to them. If I had learned anything about Marissa over the last two weeks, it was that she was comfortable with her body, and that included talking about sex.
    “Marissa, can you stop? Please. It isn’t like that.” I leaned back against the wooden fencing that sectioned off the parking lot.
    “I’m just saying. I’ve seen how he looks at you across the fire. Like he’s remembering.”
    I groaned. Although she hadn’t pushed for details about the history Blake and I shared, Marissa had started to draw her own conclusions.
    The buses came into view, and I stood upright, wiping my hands down my shorts, butterflies fluttering in my stomach. The first group had, for the most part, been easy. I knew I had gotten off lightly.
    “Ready?” Marissa asked.
    “As I’ll ever be.”
    The buses rolled to a stop and dust sprayed around them as the driver hit the brakes.
    “Fingers crossed we get it easy again,” Sara, one of the other counselors, said with a smile.
    It went from calm to crazy as the doors opened and twenty-four over-excited teenage girls rushed off the bus.
    “Okay, okay, girls this way,” Tina yelled over the chatter. “Counselors, you’re up.”
    I rounded the crush to join Tina, Sara, and Sheridan. Tina started giving out instructions, and my eyes wandered over to the other side of the parking lot where the male counselors were meeting the boys.
    Blake looked at eased as he goofed around with a small group of boys and something stirred in me.
    “… Brianna, Lacey, Tonya, Jenny, Lucy, Erica, and Crystal, you’re going to be with Counselor Penny for the next two weeks.”
    I raised my hand and waved, trying not to shrink into myself as I remembered one of the first things Tina had told us during our first training session. ‘These kids will smell your fear and use it against you. Even if you feel like you don’t have it under control, your body language says you do. Got it?’ Hearing her words replay in my head, I straightened and rolled back my shoulders looking right at the eight girls gathered in front of me. I smiled. “Hi, I’m Penny. I’ll be your camp counselor during your stay.”
    A taller girl with cut-off shorts and a baggy t-shirt arched her eyebrow and huffed. “Awesome.”
    “Erica, come on, give her a chance.” A smaller girl glared at Erica and then glanced back at me, smiling weakly.
    “Okay, grab your bags and I’ll show you to our cabin.”
    Once the girls had their bags, we started the short trek to the camper cabins, or cabin row as we called it, set further into the woods than the staff quarters. I alternated between walking forward and backward so I could talk to the girls. Erica and another girl—Brianna, I think—obviously didn’t want to be here. Their bags hung off their shoulders as if they were carrying the weight of the world on them. I only hoped their worries were the regular girl variety and not the kind I experienced growing up.
    We hadn’t even reached the cabin when Erica dropped her bag to the ground and folded her arms over her