16. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
The woods opened onto a small beach I hadn’t known existed.
It was tucked away at the edge of the property, hidden by a curve of rocks and a stand of pine trees that swallowed the sound of the party behind us until all I could hear was water.
The tide was low and calm and dark, holding the moon in pieces on its surface.
The sand was pale and smooth, still warm from the day.
“This is beautiful,” I breathed.
Kevin set me down gently, both hands lingering at my waist a second longer than they needed to before he let go.
“I found it yesterday. I was going to show you, but then, you know.” He gestured vaguely toward the general direction of the house. “Arson.”
“I didn’t commit arson. The torch committed arson.”
“That’s what all the arsonists say.”
I walked toward the water’s edge, kicking off my shoes. The sand was cool where the day’s heat hadn’t reached, silk-fine between my toes. Behind me, I heard Kevin follow, his footsteps soft and unhurried.
“I dare you,” he said.
I turned. “Dare me what?”
“Skinny dipping.” He nodded toward the water. “It’s private. No one comes here.”
“You want me to get naked and swim in the ocean.”
“I want you to live a little.”
“I’m living plenty,” I said, crossing my arms against the wind.
“You’re standing on a beach in your clothes. That’s not living. That’s existing.”
I lifted my chin. “And what about you? You going to stand there and watch?”
“I’ll join you. If you’re brave enough to go first.”
It was a challenge, and he knew I couldn’t resist a challenge. He’d always known exactly how to push my buttons, exactly where the line was between goading me and losing me, and he was walking it now with that half-smile I remembered from a hundred arguments I’d let him win.
Some cold, sober voice at the back of my skull reminded me that I had a ferry to catch and a whole life waiting on the other side of the water, a life I’d built specifically to not include him.
I told the voice to shut up. It was a beach and a dare and a summer night, and I was so tired of being careful.
“Fine.”
I reached for the hem of my dress.
His eyes went wide. “Wait, really?”
“You dared me.” I pulled the dress over my head in one smooth motion and let it fall to the sand. “I don’t back down from dares.”
I was wearing nothing underneath except a lace bra and matching panties.
The night air hit my skin and I shivered, but I didn’t stop.
I unhooked the bra and let it fall. Stepped out of the panties.
Stood there, completely naked, staring him down with my chin up and my heart slamming against my ribs.
His gaze traveled over me. Slowly. Deliberately.
From my face to my breasts to my hips to my thighs and back up again, and I watched the effect of it move through him, the way his jaw tightened and his hands curled at his sides.
His breathing changed, going shallow and rough.
He wasn’t hiding any of it, and the not-hiding was doing its work low in my belly.
I lifted an eyebrow. I’d completely forgotten about needing to pee. “Your turn.”
He didn’t hesitate. His shirt came off first, revealing that chest I’d been trying not to think about all weekend, the shift of muscle under skin, the dark ink over his heart I made myself not look at too long. Then his pants. Then his briefs.
He was hard. Very hard. Standing at attention in a way that made my mouth water and my thighs press together on instinct.
I let my eyes take the same slow tour of him that he’d taken of me, unhurried, deliberate.
The line of his shoulders. The dark hair down the center of his chest. The cut of muscle at his hips that I’d once traced with my mouth on lazy Sunday mornings.
He let me look. He stood there in the moonlight and let me want him, and the set of his jaw told me he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
“See something you like?” he asked, his voice rough.
“Very much, yes,” I managed.
We stared at each other across the sand. Two naked people on a moonlit beach with three years of pain and longing crackling in the space between us, thick enough to touch.
Then I ran.
I sprinted toward the water and threw myself into the waves, gasping at the cold shock of it against my overheated skin. Behind me, I heard Kevin curse and follow, the heavy splash of his body hitting the water, his laughter tangling up with mine until I couldn’t tell them apart.
I swam out until I couldn’t touch the bottom, then turned to face him. He was right behind me, treading water, droplets sliding down his throat and catching the moonlight where they clung to his jaw.
“You cheated,” he said.
“I strategized.”
“Same thing.”
“Not even close.”
He lunged for me. I shrieked and dove away, swimming as fast as I could through the black water. It was cold but my blood was running hot, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this alive, this weightless, this free of everything that usually sat on my chest.
He chased. I fled. We circled each other, splashing, laughing, the water breaking silver around us.
It felt like being twenty again, before the fights and the silences and the night that had ended everything, back when the worst thing between us was who’d forgotten to bring towels.
I hadn’t laughed like this in so long that my face hurt with it.
At one point he caught my ankle and I kicked free, sending a wave directly into his face.
He sputtered and I cackled, treading backward out of reach.
“Oh, you’re going to pay for that.”
“You’ve got to catch me first.”
“I always catch you, Steph. Eventually.”
He dove. Disappeared beneath the dark water without a ripple to mark where. I spun around, trying to track him, but the surface stayed still and glassy and empty, and my heart climbed into my throat with the sweet dread of waiting.
Then hands grabbed my waist from behind.
I shrieked. He pulled me back against his chest, both of us treading water, both of us breathing hard, his laugh warm against the wet shell of my ear.
“Caught you,” he murmured.
The laughter slipped from both our faces at once.
I could feel him against my back. His chest, his stomach, the hard length of him pressing against the curve of my ass.
His hands were splayed across my belly, holding me close but not too tight, his thumbs resting just under my ribs where he had to feel how fast I was breathing.
He was giving me room to pull away if I wanted.
I didn’t want.
“Kevin,” I whispered.
He turned me in his arms, slow, careful, the water making us weightless. We were face to face now, our legs tangling underwater, our bodies pressed together from chest to hip with nothing between us but salt and moonlight.
“Stephanie.” He said my name with so much love it physically pained me, a word he’d been holding in his mouth for years.
I cursed him silently for that. For making me feel things I’d spent three years trying to bury under new cities and worse dates and a job I liked well enough to pretend it was enough.
“Steph, I never stopped.” His voice cracked on it. “Loving you. Wanting you. Regretting every single moment I wasn’t there when you needed me.”
I couldn’t hear it. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready to hear the whole shape of the apology I’d wanted so badly I’d stopped letting myself imagine it.
We shouldn’t be doing this, the sober voice tried again, fainter now, drowning.
He’s your ex-husband. You know how this ends. You were there for the ending.
So I leaned in and kissed him.
He groaned into my mouth and kissed me back, and there was nothing careful left in it.
His hands came up to cup my face, then slid down my neck, my shoulders, the wet line of my spine, mapping me back into memory.
I felt the exact moment his restraint broke, the way his grip changed from asking to needing, his fingers spreading wide across my back to pull me flush.
He kissed to make up for three years in one night, deep and greedy at once.
My legs wrapped around his waist and we moved against each other, the hard length of him sliding against exactly the right spot between my thighs until I gasped into the kiss and felt him shudder in answer.
“Beach,” I murmured against his lips.
He didn’t ask questions. He just started walking us back toward shore, his mouth never leaving mine, one arm banded under me.
When the water got shallow enough that it dragged at us, he lifted me fully against him and carried me the rest of the way, his heart slamming where my chest was pressed to his.
He laid me down on the sand. The grains were cool against my heated back, faintly damp near the tideline.
He hovered over me, braced on his forearms, and I let myself look at them, the veins standing up under wet skin, the way they trembled just slightly with holding his weight off me.
He was looking down at me with an expression that made my chest ache and my eyes sting.
“Please,” he breathed. “Please. Let me put my mouth on you.”
The pleading in his voice made me feel powerful in a way I hadn’t in years. This man, this brilliant and successful and beautiful man, was braced over me on a dark beach begging for permission to put his mouth on me. He’d have waited all night if I’d said the word. I knew he would.
“Do it,” I said.
He didn’t waste a second.
He kissed his way down my body, and he took his time about it, worshipful and thorough.
My throat, where he lingered until my pulse jumped against his lips.
My collarbone. The space between my breasts, where he turned his head to catch one nipple in his mouth until I arched off the sand with a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
My stomach, which fluttered under him. The curve of my hip, where his stubble scraped soft against my skin.
The inside of my thigh, where he paused with his breath warm against me and his hands pressing my legs wider, until I nearly begged him to stop making me wait.
Then his mouth was on me and I stopped thinking entirely.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Exactly what I liked, all of it, three years old and not forgotten.
His tongue worked me in slow, devastating strokes while his fingers teased my entrance, unhurried, drawing it out, until I was lifting my hips toward him without any shame left.
When he finally pushed two of them inside, curling them just right against the spot that made my whole body seize, I cried out so loud the sound echoed off the rocks and came back to me.
“There you are,” he said against me, the words vibrating through where I needed him. “Don’t hold back.”
I couldn’t have been quiet if I’d tried.
He was relentless, his tongue and fingers working together in a rhythm that built me higher and higher, and he watched me the whole time, his eyes lifting to my face like my coming apart was the thing he’d been starving for.
There was no rush in him, no sense that he was working toward anything except this, except me, and it had been so long since anyone had touched me like I was the whole point that my throat closed around a feeling that wasn’t only pleasure.
My hands fisted in the cool sand. My heels dug in.
My back arched off the ground. I was writhing and moaning and completely lost to it, and he kept me there right at the edge, reading every hitch of my breath, until I was pleading without any words left.
“Kevin, oh god, don’t stop.”
“That’s it. Give it to me. Right on my tongue, gorgeous, don’t you dare hold back.”
I came apart against his mouth.
The pleasure tore loose in me, wave after wave that seemed to go on and on. He worked me through it, his mouth gentle now, drawing out every last tremor until I lay boneless on the sand with my thighs still shaking around his shoulders.
But I wasn’t satiated. Not close.
I pushed myself up on shaky arms. He was kneeling between my legs, his face wet, his eyes dark and blown wide with want. He was straining toward me, flushed and desperate, and he hadn’t touched himself once, hadn’t asked for anything, was just kneeling there ruined and waiting.
“My turn,” I said.
I pushed him onto his back. He went willingly, dropping into the sand, his breath catching hard as I positioned myself over him and put my hands on the hipbones I’d been watching all night.
I took him in my mouth.
“Fuck.” His hips jerked and he caught them, holding still with visible effort. “Steph. God.”
I worked him slowly at first, learning him again.
The weight of him on my tongue. The taste of salt and want.
I flattened my palms on his stomach and felt the muscles there jump and pull tight under my hands, felt his whole body straining not to move, to let me set the pace.
The sounds he made when I took him deeper undid me almost as much as anything he’d done to me, the broken groans and whispered pleas that came apart into nonsense.
“Please. Please, baby. Just like that. Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.”
I didn’t stop. I worked him with my mouth and my hand together, finding the rhythm that made him fall apart, and I felt every bit of the power of it, watching this composed man come undone under me on a beach because I’d decided to let him.
His fingers tangled in my wet hair, not pushing, just holding on like I was the only solid thing left. His whole body was trembling.
“I’m going to-” His voice was wrecked past recognition. “Steph, I’m close.”
I answered by taking him deeper.
He came with a shout, his back arching off the sand, my name breaking apart in his mouth. I stayed with him, working him through it until he collapsed under me, gasping, one arm thrown over his eyes.
I crawled up his body and sprawled out beside him on the beach, the sand gritty against my shoulder blades, the sky enormous overhead.
We lay there, side by side, staring up at the stars scattered thick over the water.
Both of us breathing hard, wet and sandy and satisfied, his hand finding mine in the space between us and lacing our fingers together like it belonged there.
He didn’t say anything, and I was grateful for that, grateful he wasn’t already trying to turn one night into a promise.
The tide crept a little closer. Somewhere behind the pines the party was still going, oblivious, and out here it was just the two of us and the wreckage of my very carefully constructed resolve.
Because I’d spent three years building a wall out of distance and geography and hard-won indifference, and it had taken him one dare and one dance and one whispered apology to walk straight through it. And I’d let him. I’d handed him the door.
And I thought: what the fuck did I just do?