“I’m not sure,” I reply with a grin. “I may need you to wrap your arm around me…you know, for balance.”
“Oh, well that was happening anyway because I’m cold,” she replies, slipping herself right up next to my side and wrapping an arm around my waist.
I blink in my surprise as my arm goes automatically around her shoulders. I’m not actually sure what it is that we’re doing here. She called it a date. More than once. But she’s also distracted and sad and something definitely happened to her today.
Fuck, I just need her to let me in. She’s gotta give me something. Anything.
Sure, I want sex. I want another taste of her so badly. But this has already moved so far beyond sex for me. I want…her. I want her laughter and her curious questions. I want the way she explains about the nonprofit and building out a donor base. I want foreplay as we talk about the environmental scourge of geotubes and compare our favorite plot lines of SOA. I want the smell of her coconutty hair on my pillow.
The truth is that I’m falling hard for this woman, and from everything I see and feel, she’s just…falling. And I don’t know how to catch her. I don’t know how to make it stop. And she won’t give me a goddamn clue. It’s driving me insane.
“Let’s stop by the car,” she says. “I think I’ve got a beach towel in the trunk.”
“Are we sitting out on the sand?”
“No,” she says with a laugh. “I’m gonna use it as a blanket.”
We hurry over to the car—well, as fast as I can go in my current state. She pops the trunk and whips out a big striped beach towel.
“Aha,” she says with delight, shaking it loose of sand. “Get over here. There will be better body heat with both of us—and hold my phone.”
She tosses her clutch into the back, and I shut the lid of her trunk. Tucking her phone in my pocket, I let her drape the extra-large beach towel over my shoulders. Then she tucks herself against me, wrapping the other end around her shoulders. I hold one end, and she holds the other, and that’s the way we walk down the boardwalk to the beach. I’m not even cold but fuck if I’m gonna tell her that.
“Oh god, it’s so beautiful,” she says with a sigh, looking up at the dark, starry sky.
The moon is out tonight, large but not quite full. Only a few clouds dot the sky. There’s quite a bit of light pollution down this stretch of the beach, but you can still see a few stars. I gaze out at the quiet ocean. The surf is strong, the white caps breaking once, twice, as the water inches towards us.
I’ve always liked seeing how the ocean can change day to day. Some days you’ll come out here and the beach will stretch out for almost a hundred feet before you hit ocean. On a night like tonight, with the tides rising high, there’s really not much further we can go off the end of the boardwalk.
Another couple slips past us with a dog on a leash. Losing their shoes in the sand, they walk hand-in-hand along the dune. Next to me, Tess shifts her weight, her hand under the towel brushing my hip.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, borrowing her line from the restaurant.
She nods, even though I see that wary look in her eyes.
Braving my fear that she’ll shut me down again, I ask the question I’ve been pondering for weeks. “When did you know your marriage was over?”
31
I want to kiss him.
That’s the mantra I’ve been chanting in my head for the last ten minutes. Holding him close, sharing his warmth, basking in the feel of his absolute attention.
I want to kiss him. I want to kiss him. I want to kiss him.
And Ryan Langley is a damn good kisser. Beyond the obvious mutual attraction, he makes me feel safe. He makes me laugh. It’s almost like he tries to pull them out of me, like he wants to hear me laugh. It’s endearing…and, quite frankly, a little disorienting.
I’m standing here, with no other witnesses except the sand and the sea, and I’m actively not kissing Ryan Langley. I want to fix this. Immediately. Fuck what I said earlier about keeping my distance. We should always only ever be kissing.
I shift my weight, inching closer to him. This towel was both a genius idea and a terrible one. Because now I can smell the crisp, clean notes of his aftershave. That scent is coiling deep in my senses, setting a little light in my core. It flickers hopeful, growing stronger.
But then his hand stiffens on me. And then he’s turning, a question in his eyes. “Can I ask you something?” he says. And I know it will be about Troy. He must have questions. Any man would. He’s been honest with me tonight. Can I bear to do the same?