Chapter Twenty-Three Ren
By her own admission, Ren was the most romantically inexperienced twenty-two-year-old in the world, but even so, she was pretty sure a concrete wall would be able to read the flirtation in Fitz’s eyes today. He said she could keep driving if she was up for it, but after their near-death experience, Ren eagerly handed him the keys. Back behind the wheel, Fitz teased her about the freeway adventure, but he did it sweetly, with laughter and glances from those happy, crinkly eyes. And he touched her. He touched her so much that she wondered whether she’d imagined the way he’d bolted away from her touch last night, feigning a coughing fit. She’d lain awake in bed, curled away from him, torturing herself by sifting through every embarrassing thing she’d done that day, when he’d clearly been trying to tell her that they were only friends.
So…was this how Fitz was with his friends? To him, was this kind of contact casual? And if this was casual contact, how on earth would she someday survive a real kiss, a real embrace?
Whatever was happening, Fitz seemed to melt somehow. He would reach out and squeeze her thigh to take the edge off a joke. He’d tweak her ear, poke her dimple, tuck her hair behind her ear. When she recounted the sequence of terrifying vehicular events that occurred while he’d been sleeping, he reached over and put his hand on hers. It felt like he was finding every possible excuse to touch her as much as possible. As soon as they were settled in tonight’s hotel, Ren promised herself, she would point-blank ask him what it all meant, and why he was running hot and cold constantly. She didn’t know how to play this game.
So, of course, the first time she really, really hoped they’d be forced to share a room again, the hotel in St. Louis had two available. It was clean, it was ready, and it was cheap. They still had plenty of money left from the Screaming Eagle, so unless she was ready to fess up about wanting to room together, there was no way for her to turn it down.
“Great,” she said with false brightness. “I’ll take it.”
The man with a handlebar mustache and bow tie tucked her key into one envelope, tucked Fitz’s into another, and wrote down their room numbers on each. Ren peeked over to see if they were even on the same floor.
They were not.
Using a pen to point to a small map printed inside the key envelope, the gentleman showed them where their rooms were. “Breakfast buffet opens at six thirty. Elevators are here, general store is over here, and our heated pool and hot tub are on the first floor, which is one floor down from where we are now.” He looked up at them and smiled. “Our pool is great. You’ll need your key to access it, but definitely give it a try if you can.”
Her brain screamed at her that hunger and sleep could take a backseat to time spent in the hot tub with Fitz.
The man closed their envelopes and handed them over. “Welcome to St. Louis,” he said as they bent to pick up their bags.
“Finally,” Fitz said in the elevator, “I can stretch out in bed, take up the entire thing.”
This made her laugh. “You’ll still sleep on your side anyway, completely immobile all night.”
He glanced at her sidelong. “You been watching me sleep, Sunshine?”
Heat rushed up her neck. “Definitely not.”
He was still looking at her when he said, “Maybe I’m really just looking forward to walking around the room naked.”
The words landed just as they arrived at the fifth floor. Ren stared at her reflection in the metal of the doors as they slid open, her body immobile, brain caught in a nuclear meltdown. Fitz held his arm out, pinning the elevator open. “This is you. I’m one more up.”
When the doors began to loudly beep, she startled into motion, stepping out into the hall. But then she turned, summoning a rush of courage and stopping the elevator doors from closing again. “Wanna meet at the hot tub in ten?”
Fitz’s expression went blank, and then he took a step forward. She released the doors to close just as his answer burst free: “Absolutely.”
Ren stood in front of the mirror, tugging on the thin fabric at her hip. What on earth was she thinking? A hot tub? With Fitz? She’d worn a bathing suit exactly one other time in her life, and now she was just going to—what? Walk around in front of him like she was some kind of supermodel? He’d probably dated the prettiest girls in school, in every school he ever attended. No—he’d probably turned down the prettiest girls in school because there were prettier girls somewhere else. Staring at herself now, Ren registered that she’d made an enormous mistake.
Once every few months, Miss Draper over at the Finders Keepers thrift shop in Troy would let Ren go through the bins of new donations and keep a few things in exchange for helping her get them washed and mended and ready for sale. Never having had a sibling to give her hand-me-downs, it was the easiest way for Ren to get new clothes when she’d outgrown her old ones. Sometimes the boxes would overflow with so many nice choices, and she’d want to try on all the silly impractical things—tube tops, tiny shorts, soft fluffy sweaters—but in the end Ren would take only what she needed. A bathing suit wasn’t ever in that category; Ren always swam alone at Finley’s Pond or at their secluded creek, anyway, and would just strip down to the buff and jump right in.
But when the bikini came through in the donations, she’d pulled it free from the pile and couldn’t let it go.
It had been two skimpy red-and-white-striped triangles for the top and a tiny scrap of blue polka-dot fabric for the bottom, and every part of her wanted it desperately. She knew Gloria would never approve of something so flimsy, so she’d kept it hidden high in a tree she knew Gloria would never climb, waiting for the days that stretched long and sultry, when the air shimmered with the heat of summer.
Ren was fifteen when she was riding her bike home from the market and followed the sound of voices down by the town watering hole. A group of kids about her age were swinging off a rope tied to a giant oak tree. Their laughter drew her closer, and their delighted screams as they soared through the air and splashed into the still-cold lake made her desperate to join in. She couldn’t get to her hiding spot quick enough. Ren shucked off her clothes, put on the bathing suit, and raced back. She swam in the sun-warmed water and splashed with the other kids. The suit was a little big—the top seemed to slip down and the bottoms crept up—but she tightened the straps and waited with bated breath until it was her turn at the rope. She’d never experienced anything as exhilarating as swinging through the air and letting go. She felt alive. She felt free. She felt very, very naked: Ren made it back to the shore long before her top did.
The one she was wearing now was newer—to her, at least—and fit better. She’d picked it up at Finders Keepers in January, just before she’d left for Spokane, after she’d seen that the school had a pool on campus. It was simple and yellow—Miss Draper called it a halter neckline—and had about three times as much fabric as that old bikini did. Unfortunately it was still a bikini, but it was the only bathing suit in Ren’s size at the thrift store that day. While she was tying it more firmly around her neck, her pulse seemed to sprint away inside her chest, tiny feet hammering down a path of incessant worries. What if history repeated itself, but this time she ended up naked in front of Fitz?
“You won’t be swinging from a rope,” she reminded herself with a laugh. But then her thoughts turned down a new path. What if Fitz didn’t like how she looked in it?
Ren drew her eyes up over the reflection in the mirror. “Knock that off,” she said to the woman standing there. “You look perfectly fine. No one can make you feel bad about yourself if you feel good.”
Ugh. She was taking too long, agonizing over nothing. It wasn’t like Fitz was going to notice her anyway. He was probably down at the pool, effortlessly shirtless in his swim trunks, scrolling on that phone of his and not thinking about her at all. She’d walk in and he’d say Hey and she would feel stupid for putting even this much thought into it.
She tugged on her T-shirt and shorts and padded out of the room.
Ren could smell the pool as soon as the elevator opened on the bottom floor but was grateful for it; turned out she didn’t like riding the elevator alone, felt weirdly claustrophobic without Fitz. She swiped her key at the door and pushed in, seeing no one else in the long, dim space. The air was heavy and humid, filled with the chemical smell of chlorine and wet cement. And just like she expected, at the very back of the pool room, she found him slumped in a chair, scrolling on his phone. She was relieved to see he wasn’t shirtless yet.
His eyes dragged upward when she approached wearing her too-big T-shirt and sleep shorts. “You swimming in that?”
Ren worked to not fidget with the hem of her shirt. “No.”
He cocked an eyebrow, a silent Well? But Ren needed another second to find her courage.
In front of them was a large, lit rectangular swimming pool with a spillover feature, like a tiny waterfall, that filled the space with the sound of splashing water. On the other side of the deck was a steaming hot tub. Refracted light bounced off the pool’s surface and shimmered along the walls, the ceiling, and rows of empty lounge chairs. Lapping water echoed in the quiet.
Fitz stood, walked to grab a couple of towels from a rack, and came back over, dropping them onto the chair. Without ceremony, he reached for the collar of his T-shirt, tugging it off, and for a second, Ren lost her breath.
His torso was so much better than she’d remembered. And that all made it so much worse.
With her pulse rioting in her throat, she threw her gaze to the other side of the room. “I thought there’d be more people in here.”
“We can leave if you want,” he said immediately, a frown in his voice. “We don’t—”
Before he could finish, she shoved off her shorts, peeled off her shirt, and turned to him. “I’m good.”
Ren didn’t miss the way his mouth went slack and his eyes dropped to her feet before slowly climbing up her bare legs. When his attention moved to drag up over her stomach and across her chest, her skin felt like it was covered in sweet, licking flames. Turning to keep him from looking any further, Ren cannonballed into the pool.
She was still underwater, arms and legs flexing out and back as she kicked to the surface, when there was a smooth missile under the water, and Fitz’s hand came around her foot, playfully tugging.
Ren emerged at the surface, screaming out a laugh, and he broke through right after her, hair slicked back and lashes heavy with glimmering water droplets. With his eyes full of mischief, Fitz dove back under, wrapping his arms around her waist and hoisting her up, hurling her screaming in delight across the water. Ren ducked under, minnowing past him, dodging his grasp, and coming up behind him. With a laugh, she dunked his head underwater as he let out a laughing shout.
She’d spent countless hours swimming, but none in an actual pool, and rarely with anyone to play with like this. For what felt like hours they chased each other, wrestling, grabbing, tugging limbs and hands and toes. He practiced launching her with one foot in his joined hands until she’d made a perfect dive into the deep end. They raced—his strokes clean and practiced, hers unpolished and instinctive, but Ren won half the time anyway. They did handstands and underwater somersaults and competed to see who could stay under the water longer until they gave up nearly at the same time and pushed together, breathless, to the side, arms bent and chests heaving.
“You’re strong,” Fitz managed between labored breaths.
“You bet I am.”
He leaned his cheek on his arm, gazing at her with a glimmer that she didn’t want to believe was interest. Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. She wanted to believe, a little too much. Ren blinked away, feeling a shiver pass through her.
“Cold?” he asked and surprised her by sending a gentle hand down her bare arm.
Ren was anything but cold after he did that, but nodded anyway, and Fitz pushed his upper body out of the water, hopping a leg up like he weighed nothing. He bent, dripping, and extended a hand to help her climb out. “Here.”
Ren hesitated, but not for any reason that made sense in her head. She simply didn’t know what to do with herself—with her hands and face and legs and thoughts that still seemed to be tripping over the feeling of his slippery skin against hers underwater, the size of his hands and how they slid up her legs to take hold or tickle her, the hard planes of his back and chest and arms.
“Don’t you trust me?” he asked, and it unlocked something in her brain, releasing her arm from its weird, infatuated paralysis and reaching so he could pull her up. Ren scrabbled the rest of the way out of the pool on her own.
When she straightened, it was the first time they really saw each other in their suits, stealing glances as they trailed wet footprints across the concrete.
Fitz tiptoed over to the control panel on the wall to turn on the Jacuzzi jets, and when his back was to her, Ren measured the width of his shoulders with her eyes, mapping the shape of his back, and mentally painted the way water sluiced down the center of his spine. His suit was wet, plastered to his backside, and the deepest ocean blue. It made his tanned torso look golden. When he turned around, her eyes landed directly on his toned stomach, smooth and defined. Her own stomach took a screaming nosedive.
If Fitz’s smirk told her anything, it was that he knew exactly what she’d been doing.
With the hot tub now gurgling between them, Ren walked to the edge and stuck her toes in the water, testing. It was so hot, it took her breath away.
“Go slow,” he said quietly. “This isn’t a jump-in kind of pool.”
Ren nodded, looking up to find his gaze trained on her outstretched leg, eyes glazed. A rush hit her, something new and untamed, and it took her a few seconds to register what it was. For the first time since they’d been together, she experienced a tiny surge of power over him. She stepped one foot in, and then another, and couldn’t help the groan that escaped. At the sound, her cheeks went instantly hot in mortification, but she didn’t look at his face, couldn’t log his expression. Instead, she slowly lowered herself to one of the tiled steps, watching Fitz as he followed her in.
His calves were strong, his thighs thick. Those swim trunks hung so low on his hips—inches below his navel—Ren wasn’t sure what was even keeping them up. His chest was geometric and tight; she was fascinated by the angles of muscle and bone, the line that ran from his abdomen up the center of his pectorals. His nipples…
God. She’d never really looked at a man’s nipples before.
“You okay there, Sunshine?”
Ren sank further into the water, turning her attention to the plaster ceiling above. “I’m great.”
Steam twisted between them, and she didn’t let herself look again until he was safely underwater. Fitz dropped to the bench across from her and the water was displaced, jostling her in her seat and rocking Ren back against the hot tub wall. Her face positively flamed at the images that flooded her head. Legs bracketing hips, wet skin against wet skin. He groaned in relief, and her stomach tightened in response. Ren had an overwhelming need to clench her legs together. He wasn’t touching her, but it didn’t matter; it felt like his hands were everywhere, all over.
“That feels good,” he murmured.
Not helping.
She’d thought about him—of course she had—but she’d never mapped out the mechanics of touching him. Or of him touching her. Right now, it was all she could think about.
She desperately needed to think about something else.
“What’s your favorite thing about Nashville?”
Fitz dragged his eyes up from the water bubbling at the surface, visibly thrown. “What?”
“Nashville. What do you love about it?”
He closed his eyes, leaning his head back so that his Adam’s apple pushed forward.
Not helping.
“The food. The music. The feel of being outside on a warm spring night.” He lifted one shoulder in a lazy shrug. “It feels more like home than home does.”
“Is it your mom’s side or dad’s side?”
“What’s that?”
“Your family there,” she said. “In Nashville.”
“Oh.” Fitz lifted a hand and dragged his fingertips through the bubbles. “Um…mom.” He smiled, but it didn’t look happy. “Nashville isn’t really Robert Fitzsimmons’s style.”
“What’s he like?”
He exhaled a dry laugh through his nose. “Rich.”
“Really?” She laughed incredulously. “That’s the only way you’d describe your father?”
“Well, no,” he said, dragging a hand through his wet hair. “He’s also disciplined. I’m sure I’ll grow up to be a very productive member of society, thanks to him.”
“That doesn’t sound very warm and cuddly.”
“That’s not really his way,” he said.
Ren hadn’t known him long, but she liked to think she was figuring him out and knew when it was time to stop pushing. “Okay, next question. What’s—”
“No,” he interrupted. “It’s my turn now.”
She swallowed. “Okay.”
“What do you find attractive in a person?”
She didn’t even have to think. “Kindness. In the eyes, especially.”
“Kindness, huh?”
Ren grinned at him. “Broad shoulders and big hands don’t hurt, though.”
Fitz laughed. “There it is.”
She gnawed her lip, dropping her gaze to his neck, because she couldn’t look him in the eye when she asked, “What about you?”
He gave a little shrug and stretched an arm across the back of the hot tub. “I like people who are good.” She looked away from how the movement elongated his muscle, his pectoral twitching just below the surface of the water, and squeezed her legs together again. “Opposites attract, you know.”
She stared at him, knowing he expected her to call him out for this self-flagellation disguised as cockiness. “That wasn’t the answer I was expecting,” she said instead. Glimpses of his genuine depth still took her by surprise.
“You thought I was going to say boobs or asses or something like that.”
It took all her strength to not cross her arms over her chest. “Obviously.”
“Right,” he said darkly, “because I get in everyone’s pants.”
“If you say so.”
“I never said so. You did.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about this,” she reminded him. “Rule number eleven.”
“We’re practically naked together in a hot tub. Road trip rules are out the window right now.”
“Okay, then,” she said bravely. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
His answer was clear as a bell: “No.”
“Oh.” It was like every bone in her body liquefied.
He leaned forward again, his smile wide and wicked. “My turn,” he said.
“No,” she protested. “It’s my turn now. You asked about what I found attractive.”
“And you just asked whether I have a girlfriend.”
She frowned. Dang it.
“In the car,” Fitz began, “you said you couldn’t die before you were kissed. Is that true?”
“Is what true? That I don’t want to die? Yes, it’s true.”
He laughed. “No, wiseass, is it true that you’ve never been kissed?”
She took a beat to steady her voice. “Yes.”
He looked away, squinting in the distance at the wall on the far end of the room. After a deep breath, he turned his eyes back to her. “We could fix that, you know.”
A thunderbolt cracked through her torso. “What?”
“I could be your first. You know, to get it out of the way.”
“You?”
“Yeah,” he said, and smiled. “Why not?”
“Why not?” she repeated. There was a storm of words in her thoughts. “You’re confusing, that’s why.”
Ren noticed that he didn’t ask her what she meant. He only said, “I’m sorry.” He lifted a hand, dragging his fingertips through the bubbles again. “If it helps, I want to be less confusing.”
She swallowed, shaking all over, wanting to dissect that but not having the faintest idea where to start. “It’s a very nice offer, but I don’t know how to do it, and I wouldn’t want you to have to suffer through my fumbling.”
“I would show you. Nobody’s suffering here.”
She blinked and looked away. Was this a normal thing to offer? He said it like it was, just threw it out so casually. Inside her, hunger violently thrummed just beneath the surface of her skin. She wanted this. She wanted him. Even if that was all it was—a lesson in kissing—she wanted to feel it, just one time. “Okay,” she said finally.
For a split second he looked shocked. And then his shoulders relaxed, and he reached for her. “Then come here.”
She jerked her head back to stare at him. “Wh—Now?”
“Why not?”
Across the expanse of the hot tub, he found her hand and tugged her through the bubbling water to rest between his parted knees. Her own knees hit the bench and he shifted, gripping the backs of her thighs and floating her easily onto his lap, so that she was straddling him, with one knee on either side of his hips.
The air rushed from her lungs in a gasp, and she reached for his shoulders to keep from sinking down fully onto him.
“This okay?” he whispered.
She’d never been so close to anyone before for more than the duration of a brief hug, and her mind had gone completely blank. She nodded.
“Words, Sunshine. Lesson one: When you’re with a guy, you need to tell him that what he’s doing is okay. If it’s not, he should stop.”
“It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“Good.” He swallowed, finding the fingers of one of her hands on his shoulder and guiding them higher. “Maybe you want to cup his face, like this.” He brought her trembling hand to his jaw. Her eyes followed the movement, riveted, as he set her fingers on his skin, molding them with his own hand. Without thinking, she brushed a thumb over his cheek. His skin glowed under the dim lights, his eyes darting to hers.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“No. It’s good. Do what feels natural.”
With that permission, she moved an inch lower, drawing the pad of her thumb across the swell of his bottom lip. It was so much softer than she’d imagined, so smooth and full. He pressed a kiss there and she looked up, meeting his eyes.
“Good,” he said, eyes dark. Her other hand slipped absently down to his chest. She could feel the pounding of his heart under her fingertips. “Still okay?” he asked.
He had one hand on her lower back, the other wrapped around the top of her thigh. His body was strong and steady beneath hers. Ren swallowed, starting to answer only with a nod, and then remembered: “Yes.”
“How does it feel so far?”
“Really nice.”
He smiled at this. “Good.” He began to close the distance between them, so close that he was out of focus, and she had to shut her eyes. She could feel his breath on her parted lips, the way his fingers had slid higher and curled around the back strap of her bathing suit.
“You’re doing so good,” he whispered, just an inch away. “And remember,” he said, so close, so quiet. His nose brushed against hers, and his other thumb moved in soft circles near the crease of her thigh.
“Remember?” she repeated mindlessly, breaths short and stuttering.
“When you do this,” he said, and his lips just barely brushed over hers, “you can stop whenever you want.”
“I don’t want to stop.”
She sucked in a breath at the first full press of his mouth; the sensation inside her felt like falling. She’d never ridden a roller coaster before, but she imagined it was something like this, right at the very top, a free fall into joyful abandon. Her stomach had to be somewhere near her throat; she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. Fitz pulled away like he wanted to check in, but Ren slid her hand to the back of his neck, pulling him close again. The heat pressing up from beneath her skin felt almost unbearable, and when he carefully swiped his tongue over hers, she felt a different kind of hunger, a new kind of need. She’d never experienced this sweet tension spiraling through her body, heavy and warm.
He moved a hand to cup her face and tilted her head to fit him better, the hand on her back moving to her hip to pull her closer. She was so conscious of every tiny movement and point of pressure—his thighs beneath her, the power of his arms, the gentle scratch of his stubble against her lips and cheeks. She understood now on a deeper, savage level why people did this, why people fought for it, lost themselves in search of it.
Languid minutes passed as he showed her so many different kisses—deep ones and tiny, soft ones; teeth-dragging ones and lip-sucking ones. Steam swirled around them, decadent fingertips brushing their skin, leaving them dewy with sweat. She felt his kisses in every nerve ending in her body, felt the growing points of contact between them, how she moved closer and closer until they were touching from chest to hips, moving, rocking.
She understood how they’d fit together.
Slowly, with his breaths gusting against her lips, Fitz pulled away, stilling her with a thumb set gently on her chin. This close, she could see that his cheeks were flushed, his lips wet, so pretty and pink. His chest rose and fell like he’d just done laps around the pool.
“We should stop,” he said, voice tight.
“Did I do okay?”
He blinked, and met her eyes, giving a quiet laugh. “Yeah. You did great.”
Seconds ticked by before he cleared his throat, and the glassiness in his eyes slowly sobered. She grew conscious of their position, the feel of that part of him, the reality of what they’d done, and shifted her hips back, half floating, half perched on his knees.
“See?” He reached up, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. “Now you can’t say you’ve never been kissed.”
“You’re right.” Her lips still tingled, and she bit the lower one, dragging it through her teeth. He watched. “Thank you, Fitz.”
He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the side of the hot tub, his smile slowly fading. Worry tightened his brow, but he curved a hand around her side and murmured quietly, “Trust me. It was my pleasure.”