Chapter 15 #2
He’s already pulling his boots off, in no hurry, watching me with those slate grey eyes, careful and complete.
“The last two summers, since I came back from Chicago. Came for the annual lake day with your brothers, same as everyone else. Kept my face doing whatever it’s supposed to do around a group of people.
Then I’d slip up here alone after, when nobody was watching, and let it stop. ”
“Let what stop?”
“Whatever face I was wearing for the rest of them.”
“You knew why I wasn’t coming.” I fold my arms, mostly to keep from reaching for him too soon. “And you kept visiting this place anyway?”
“I did.” He doesn’t soften it either. “Didn’t stop hoping you’d change your mind. Didn’t stop me marrying you either, if we’re counting things that didn’t work out how I planned.”
“I married you because our fathers ordered a truce and neither of us gets to say no to Gideon Blackwater and Declan Sullivan. Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You married me because Nell’s pool had bad odds and you hate losing an argument more than you hate losing to me.”
“I have never once lost an argument in my life.”
“You’re standing at the edge of freezing water with your ex-enemy, about to get in anyway. Tell me again who’s losing.” His eyebrows rise up.
I don’t have an answer for that. Somewhere under the banter a dull ache settles in, quiet and unwelcome, for those two summers I forced myself to stay away instead of just being brave enough to show up and let him see me not fine.
I reach for the hem of my shirt, and his eyes are already on me before I’ve even pulled it over my head, unashamed of watching.
He doesn’t pretend to look anywhere else.
He stands there in the sun with his jeans undone at the waist, forgotten, and lets his gaze drag over my collarbone, my ribs, the line of my stomach, like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be and nothing better to look at if he did.
Heat crawls up my chest and throat under all that attention, the same shameless want that never once burned out, no matter how hard I tried to starve it.
I untie my bikini top slower than I need to, and his jaw tightens, just barely, a man holding himself very still on purpose.
“You’re staring,” I tell him.
“I’ve earned it.” His voice has gone rough at the edges. “Years of not looking. I’m behind.”
I step out of the last of it and don’t cover myself, don’t want to, not with him looking at me like I’m something he still can’t quite believe he gets to have.
The water’s colder here than the main lake, sharper, and I gasp the second it closes over my shoulders, my whole body lighting up electric like the first time, like always.
Dawson doesn’t follow me in the ordinary way.
He goes under at the edge of the pool without a sound, barely a ripple to mark him, and for three long seconds there’s nothing but cold water and waterfall hush and the absence of him.
Then his hands find my ankles beneath the surface.
They drag up slow, deliberate, over my calves, the backs of my knees, my thighs, before he surfaces right in front of me, water sluicing off his shoulders, and his hands don’t stop climbing until they’ve settled at my hips and pulled me flush against him.
I don’t hesitate. I wrap my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist in the same motion, like my body already knew the shape of this before my brain caught up, and he holds me there like I weigh nothing at all, like the cold isn’t touching either of us anymore.
His eyelashes are wet, clumped together in dark points, and this close I can see the water still clinging to them catching the light coming down through the granite walls, scattered and bright, so that for one absurd second, it looks like he’s got stars caught in his lashes instead of lake water.
His eyes are steady on mine, pupils blown wide in the shade of the rock, and neither of us says anything for a moment, both of us breathing a little too hard, a little too fast, from the cold and from the slick, naked press of each other with nothing left between us.
“Hi,” he says finally, rough, like it’s the only word he trusts himself with.
“Hi.” My voice comes out thinner than I mean it to.
He spins me so my back rests against his chest, no hesitation in the movement at all. I let him pull me in instead of drifting alone. His lips brush the shell of my ear, and I feel how much he wants me, hard and unmistakable against the small of my back even through the cold.
“I used to think about this place when I was in Chicago,” he says, his mouth still at my ear.
“Cold as it gets there in January, and I’d think about how nothing in that city was ever this cold.
Ever this clean.” His hips shift, slow and entirely on purpose, and I bite back a sound that has nothing to do with the water temperature.
“You could’ve called.”
“I could have.” He doesn’t pretend it’s an apology. “I told myself calling would’ve meant admitting I still wanted to hear your voice, and I wasn’t ready to lose that argument with myself yet.”
“You could’ve come back sooner.”
“I could’ve done a lot of things sooner.
” His hands slide from my hip up along my stomach, slow, and climb higher until he’s cupping my breasts, thumbs finding my nipples already hard, peaked tight where they float at cold water’s surface.
My head falls back against his shoulder, and I let myself have it, his hands relearning every inch of me like a man double-checking work he’s proud of.
My pulse is hammering loud enough I can feel it in my own ears over the waterfall, the good kind of drowning.
“I told myself I was building something worth coming home to. Some days that was even true. Most days it was just an excuse to not have to face you.”
I twist in his arms and kiss him because it’s easier than answering, and he lets me, tender and searching, his mouth soft against mine, unlike last night’s urgency, all of it belonging to two young adults who used to do exactly this in exactly this water a lifetime ago.
I wrap my legs around his waist and squeeze, pulling him flush against me until there’s no water left between us at all, and the heat building low in my stomach is undeniable.
His hand finds the curve of my hip under the surface, and mine finds the back of his neck, and for a long, suspended minute we’re just two people relearning a kiss they thought they’d never get to have again.
“I missed you here,” I say, when we finally break apart. “Not just you. This. The version of us that existed before either of us learned how to ruin it.”
“We didn’t ruin it.” His thumb traces my jaw, gentle, a rawness surfacing behind his eyes that he doesn’t let all the way through. “I did.”
“That’s not up for debate right now.” I kiss the words off him before he can build a whole confession out of one sentence. “Save it. I want today first.”
He laughs, short and surprised, and pulls me back in, slower this time, both of us shivering a little from the cold and neither of us in any hurry to climb out of it.
I scan the tree line anyway, underneath the good of it. The angle of the granite. Who could see us from where. I hate that some part of me never stops thinking about it, even here, even now. I do it anyway.
We climb out when the cold finally wins, skin goose fleshed, and instead of reaching for my clothes I stretch out on the flat sun-warmed rock at the pool’s edge, arms over my head, and let the heat soak back into me.
Dawson lowers himself beside me, propped on one elbow, water still tracking down his chest.
The sun catches the little jade stone straight on, and I watch him go still, looking at it like he’s still not used to it being there.
“You never made me earn that story,” he says. “Nashville. Twenty-three. You said some stories you have to earn.”
“I remember what I said.”
“Have I earned it yet?”
I look at him a long moment. This place, more than anywhere else on either family’s land, is the one spot that was only ever ours, no strategy attached to it, no clause.
If there’s anywhere I get to just tell him something because I want to and not because withholding it is the safer play, it’s here.
“My roommate at Cornell noticed before I ever said a word about it,” I say.
“The year after graduation, when we were still splitting an apartment in Ithaca. She’s the one who finally made me talk about it.
” I shrug, easy, no shame left in it after this many years of it just being true.
“We went to Nashville that spring for a Lukas Nelson show and found a clinic with an actual medical license instead of a strip mall tattoo place, and I got it done.”
“And it worked?”
“It worked.” I hold his eyes, steady. “I could orgasm with you. Twenty years old and too stupid to know how rare that was. Then it ended, and I couldn’t.
Not with anyone after you, not reliably on my own either.
I told myself it was just you, some fluke of chemistry I’d never get back.
My roommate’s the one who convinced me it wasn’t chemistry, it was anatomy, and there was something I could actually do about it instead of just missing you for the rest of my life. ”
His face runs through too many things at once for him to land on just one.
Guilt first, plain and unguarded, gone almost as fast as it surfaces.
Then something sadder underneath it, the quiet grief of him reckoning with all those years he wasn’t there to matter this much to me.
Then frustration, sharp, like he wants to go back and undo something he can’t reach anymore.
He doesn’t let any of it sit long enough for me to ask about it. When he speaks again his voice has gone quiet.