I lean in to kiss him. My mouth is a few inches away from his lips, the same lips I’ve fantasized about since I was fifteen and got my first taste of when I was eighteen.
The forbidden lips that I shouldn’t have wanted to kiss in the first place but couldn’t help myself.
But before I can touch them, he pulls away and opens the door, and I jerk back, my action delayed because of all the alcohol in my bloodstream.
I don’t hear it, but I feel when my heart splinters to pieces.
What was I thinking anyway? Men don’t kiss their sluts. Even if they make them their wives.
I ease off of him, as awkwardly as I planted myself on his lap, and he gets out first.
He waits for me in front of the car, probably to carry me, but I run ahead of him to the house. I’m hot.
Too hot.
And my steps are wobbly and incoherent. But I’m burning, and that needs to go away. That and the fucking breaking that’s currently happening in my chest.
My feet come to a halt at the edge of the luminous pool. Water.
I unhook my zipper and push the dress down my body, then yank away my panties so that I’m completely naked.
“Gwyneth, don’t,” Nate calls out in the distance, but I’m not listening. Because he’s the cause of this burn. He’s the reason I have to do this.
Taking a deep breath, I jump in.
Shock ripples through me, but the burn doesn’t go away. Is there water for internal fire? Because I’m about to explode from it.
My lungs burn and I realize it’s because I haven’t been breathing. That’s when I realize something else, too.
I can’t move.
26
Nathaniel
“Fuck!” I kick my shoes away and run to the pool.
Where Gwyneth just jumped in because she wasn’t thinking and she’s drunk as fuck. If she had access to her brain, she would’ve remembered that she doesn’t know how to swim.
She’s the type who always has some sort of a crutch, even when she’s in the shallow end of the pool. No matter how much King tried to teach her, she never learned to swim.
The seconds tick by like a damn lifetime the more she doesn’t resurface. She’s not even flailing around like she usually does when the crutches are taken away.
I curse under my breath as I plunge in after her, diving deep into the cold water.
The more time I spend getting to her, the harder my fucking heart beats. It doesn’t slow down even after I grab her by the arm and haul her to the surface. She splutters for breath, coughing and choking on water.
Her legs circle my waist and she uses me as a lifeline. Her entire body is wrapped around mine as I swim to where I can stand.
I grab her by the shoulders, shaking her. “What the fuck were you thinking just now?”
“I…wasn’t thinking…”
“Why the fuck weren’t you thinking? Do you want to die? Is that it, Gwyneth?”
“No, it’s just…”
“It’s just what?”
“It burned. I only wanted it to stop burning,” she slurs, blinking away the water from those fucking eyes. They’re bluer now, reflecting the surface of the water.
“What burned?”
“Everything.” Her shoulders slump in my hold. “I thought the water would fix it.”
“The water you don’t know how to swim in.”
“Oh.”
“Right. Fucking oh. What would’ve happened if I hadn’t been here?”
She flinches but says nothing.
“Answer me. What the fuck would’ve happened if you’d been on your own, Gwyneth?”
“I…would’ve drowned.”
Her softly-spoken words stab me in the fucking chest and I have to close my eyes for a second to chase away their impact. The thought of her drowning, gurgling and choking on water with no one to save her is like the monster I feared as a kid.
Turns out that monsters can show up at any time in your life. I just never thought that this damn woman would be the cause of it.
And then as I open my eyes and look at her bloodshot ones and the strands of her hair sticking to her face and neck, I realize it’s not only about the possibility of her drowning.
It’s about her being hurt in any way and my not being there.
It’d kill me.
Even if I’m mad at her, even if I’m still seeing red from when I caught her drunk and grinding against two guys. Fucking two.
All my self-control was used up at that moment, because if it were up to me, I would’ve claimed her in front of them and showed the world who she belongs to.