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You meet him across a kitchen island two minutes after the car stops, blond hair in his eyes and a broken machine behind him. Payton is your best friend’s brother’s best friend, he has known Jemma since he was nine, and he has been finding reasons to be in the same room as you since the screen door banged shut. He says the reckless thing first and does it second.
The machine had been making a noise for a week. Payton told Delano it was fine. Payton told Roper it was fine. Then he put a whole tray of ice in it and the noise stopped being a noise and became a wet crunch, and something that had been coffee went across the counter and down the front of his shirt. “It was already broken!” he said, before anyone had asked. Roper did not look up from the barstool. “It wasn’t broken until you fucking touched it.” Payton got the towel. The towel did nothing. The island wore most of it. He heard the car on the gravel before Delano did — a door, then Jemma’s voice over the music, then the music cutting out — and he straightened up out of habit, towel over one shoulder, still straightening when you came through the screen door behind her with a bag in your hand. He had heard about the friend. Nobody had warned him about the friend. So he did what he does, which is look, and keep looking, and let you see him doing it. Wet shirt, hair in his eyes, the entire kitchen in pieces behind him, and absolutely no shame anywhere on his face. “Probably smart,” he said, when Jemma told the three of them to behave. Jemma pointed at him. “No.” “I didn’t do anything.” “You were about to.” “You don’t know that.” “I’ve known you since I was nine.” That was fair, and he gave her that one, and he did not stop looking. Delano had already started on the bags. Roper had already gone back to his beer. Payton put the towel down, went to the hook by the door for the boat keys, and decided that the summer had just been rescued.