Chapter Twenty-Six

I’m not sure whether I ever fully fall asleep, but I’m not suffering. For a few hours I’m in that syrupy, hazy place, with waves crashing nearby, cool, humid air pressing on my overheated skin, and Anna warm and asleep in my arms. Dreams flirt with the edges of my mind: mouths coming together, her soft cries, the wet sounds of our sex, the feel of her beneath me.

Even when I slowly rise to full consciousness, I stay motionless, listening to her quiet sleep noises, squeezing her when she murmurs, wondering whether I could carry her the entire way back to the bungalow. Lying for hours on a rattan mat on a wood-plank patio isn’t awful, but this very same position would be so much better in a bed.

Anna sleeps facing me, both her arms tucked against her chest and by default against my chest, too. She barely moves once her face is firmly pressed to my neck, almost like a button has been pressed in her brain that lets her fully power down. Has she slept like this with someone else? She must have, of course. The thought lands with a slice, a quick, sharp paper cut, and I have to shove it away. To me, everything with her is so raw, so candid; that transparency in both conversation and sex is new to me, almost embarrassingly so. I want to lie to myself and think it’s the same for her.

“I can hear you thinking,” she mumbles sleepily into my throat. “But if you’re going to freak out, can you do it later? You’re so comfortable.”

I laugh, kissing the top of her head. “I’m not freaking out. Just listening to the wilderness wake up.”

Insects and birds are coming to life, whirring, chirping, calling to each other from every measure of distance, and at the suggestion of creatures out in the darkness, Anna goes rigid in my arms. And then she presses forward, curling inward, like she’s trying to climb into my clothes. “Oh God, please don’t mention wilderness.”

I lift my head, scouting the immediate vicinity. “Doesn’t seem like anything out there is very close to us.”

“Not helping!”

“I do think we should head back, though. We might want to slip into the bungalow before anyone happens upon us.” Specifically, my father. Nothing would more effectively kill the vibe than hearing his voice right now.

Anna wiggles some more, but this time it seems to be less about escaping from bugs and more about finding ways to create friction between our bodies. “I don’t want to get up.” Her wiggling turns into grinding, and she sneaks a hand between us, palming my erection. Warmth bleeds into my limbs, and I press forward, dizzy with a rush of desire.

She kisses up my neck. “I like your morning boners.”

I groan, but not out of pleasure. “Green, I think I need to tell you: the word boners is…”

She pulls back to look at me. “You don’t like ‘boners’?”

“I enjoy my boners. I like the word less.”

“What’s better? ‘Hard-on’? ‘Woody’? ‘Stiffy’?”

“These are all terrible.”

A frown line forms on her forehead. “Devastating.”

“Then I may as well get it out there that ‘horny’ can also go in the bin.”

“You’ve just ensured that these words will now be staples in our marital relationship.”

“I think I can handle hearing them for another four days.” As soon as I’ve said it, we both go silent. Me, because an image has suddenly invaded my thoughts—dropping Anna off at her apartment in Los Angeles, seeing her figure shrink in the rearview mirror—and I don’t like the brief shadow it sends through me.

I’m not sure what brand of quiet she’s experiencing, but Anna tucks her face back into my neck, mumbling a “good” after what feels like an eternity. Her hand slides up to rest on my waistband, and I hate that I’ve just cooled the moment when all I want is her touching me.

The horizon has a telling glow to it, the lazy prequel to a sunrise, and I suspect it’s probably sometime just after five. Dad will be up and out soon, and what I want to do to Anna will take much, much longer than we have.

“Three hours is barely enough sleep,” I tell her, reaching to tilt her face to mine. I kiss her, resting my lips against hers. “Let’s head back and be lazy today.”

“Do we have to be lazy?” she asks.

“No…” I pull back so I can get a better look at her expression. The heat in her eyes sends fire licking across my skin. “But if you’re going to look at me like that, we do have to be alone.”

Anna stretches, kissing my chin, my jaw, my neck. Her hand slides down again, gripping me through my pants, teasing me with a tight squeeze. “We are alone.”

“For now.” I tilt my chin up so she has better access to my neck, mindlessly hoping that she’ll leave another mark. Her lips feather over my jaw, and then she bites. “My father gets up at sunrise and every morning has run along the trail that passes about fifteen feet from where we are right now.”

This has the effect I’d hoped, and Anna peeks past my shoulder at the band of light just at the horizon. With a reluctant groan, she shifts her hand from me and slowly pushes up onto her side, bracing back on a palm as she sleepily blinks out at the cornflower-blue darkness all around us. “Are we going to be able to find our way back?”

“Let’s take the shorter path. We haven’t walked it together, but it’s through the garden cabin area and I’m pretty sure there are lights.”

She nods, sitting up fully and rubbing her eyes. I take another long, appreciative look at her back in this dress; even though the cream satin is rumpled from dancing and walking and fucking and sleeping, it still gleams in the moonlight against her smooth skin.

But there’s also something vulnerable about her that has my chest constricting. She’s hunched over, hugging her knees, and her spine presses against her skin, sharp little points all the way down her back. Her personality is so big, her confidence so solid, that until I had my hands all over her last night, I didn’t fully realize how slight she is in more tangible ways. The view of her from behind in the blue-black darkness sends something inside me emerging protectively. It’s easy to forget, while she’s here and dressed in designer clothes, overfed at every meal, and basking in sunshine, that her life back home is hard, that she’s barely scraping by. That this trip is a break from her reality, and when she returns to Los Angeles, she’ll become that other version of Anna Green, the underemployed one, the one with food insecurity and unpaid bills, the one with responsibilities she’s hinted at but never fully detailed.

She has money now, I remind myself. You’re paying her more than many people make in years. You can give her more. You can ensure she never has to worry about money again.

Leaning forward, I press my lips to her shoulder blade, and kiss halfway down her spine, feeling my desire for her rise like the tide, mixing with this unexpected vigilance wrapping steel around my veins. I send an arm around her middle, hand sliding up over her breast, pressing my palm flat over her heart.

The words slip free in my thoughts—Please be okay after this—and I squeeze my eyes closed, pressing a final kiss to her back, not sure whether I’m making the wish for her or myself.

“Should we go?” she asks, setting her hand over mine on her chest. “This feels like the start of something we don’t want Ray to see.”

Laughing, I push myself to standing, extending a hand to her. Anna stretches, wrapping her arms around my neck. “I’m sad to leave the spot of the best night ever.”

“You still feel that way after sleeping on the ground?”

“I had a comfy pillow.” She steps back, taking my hand, and we start the trek back to our bungalow.

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