Chapter 19 #2
from view up the path. Long gone is the candyfloss sky. Instead, clouds bubble overhead, and I’ve felt a few droplets of rain.
So much for today’s nicer weather.
I trail behind Dylan, a shadow in her wake, until she asks, ‘Can you go ahead to see how deep it gets?’
‘Scared of the big, bad ocean?’
‘I’m scared of lots of things, Max,’ she replies through a sigh.
It takes a while for the water to reach my shoulders, and then we face each other, water splashing at our necks, her fingers
brushing mine under the water.
‘I wish I could bottle this feeling,’ she says, smile tugging at her cheeks.
We face each other, water splashing at our necks. ‘The early stages of hypothermia?’
She throws me a look. My favourite kind. Unguarded. Sharp. Openly irritated. The one she doesn’t give anyone else. ‘No. We’re probably about thirty seconds from being rained on and I can’t feel my toes, but I don’t know, I just feel . . .’
Alive? Real? Present?
‘Free,’ she says at last. ‘My mind feels different here. Clearer.’
‘I can understand that.’ I inhale the crisp air, and if I concentrate, I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. ‘Bet you don’t
have much quiet time to yourself in London.’
She laughs, and it sounds like the wind chimes by our door. ‘This is the first time I’ve been able to slow down in years,
and it’s honestly really nice. Do you ever get that feeling?’
‘Not really,’ I admit, pushing up and out of the way of a rogue wave. ‘I don’t go on these trips to slow down. I go on them
to keep moving, I guess. It’s easier that way.’
She watches me, hazel eyes careful, lips parted. ‘How is it that we’re both here, in this moment, doing the same thing, but
moving at different speeds?’
‘I think our timelines are different. You have all this extra time to try things at your own pace. It makes sense for you
to use this trip to slow down.’
‘And it doesn’t make sense for you, because you don’t think you have that time?’ she asks, seeing more than I’d like her to.
I don’t get to answer, because something drags across my leg underwater, and it makes me jump and let out a frantic, ‘Shit!’
I reach down and find the culprit–a single piece of seaweed.
When Dylan sees it, she lets out the loudest laugh I’ve ever heard from her, and it warms my frozen body all the way through.
‘Sorry, it could’ve been a jellyfish,’ I mutter, and her eyes are bright and alive and I feel a little like I’m looking at the sun. ‘Or, like, a really skinny
shark.’
She sticks her bottom lip out, and fuck me, if that isn’t a perfect mouth. ‘Did the big, bad ocean scare you?’
‘Shut up,’ I say through a laugh, and lift the seaweed above my head just for something to do with my hands that doesn’t involve
setting mine on her body.
She recoils. ‘I swear, if you throw that at me, I’m getting out.’
‘I’m not going to throw it at you,’ I say, before dropping it on her head.
She flings it off and back into the water with a shriek, and when that turns into another laugh, I realise she hasn’t been
laughing fully until now. It’s like her joy was stuck in a jar, visible but contained, and she’s only just let me take the lid off.
I take that metaphorical lid and launch that into the ocean, too.
‘I hope you got some good footage of me before you came in and started swimming on the job,’ I say, letting the water buffet
me in her direction. ‘You’re on the clock, Tiny.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those bosses.’ Her billowing T-shirt grazes my stomach.
‘What, someone who takes their employees’ output seriously? Sue me.’
She shakes her head, eyes playful. ‘You’re going to work me to the bone, Max Monroe.’
‘No, I won’t,’ I say quietly. A wave brings her closer, and the brush of her knee against mine lights a fuse. ‘You wouldn’t
have to work hard with me. I’d do it all, if that’s what you wanted.’
Rivulets of water trail down her face from the last time she dipped her head under, and when the next wave brings us together
again, her hands move to my shoulders for support, and they stay there even after she’s righted herself.
‘I have a confession,’ I say, playing with the material of her T-shirt, weaving it between my fingers and releasing it, over
and over again. I wet my lips, tasting salt. ‘I’m thinking things I shouldn’t.’
A droplet falls from her lashes when she looks up at me, and there’s something in her eyes that could heat up even this icy
water. She swallows and whispers, ‘Control yourself.’
My fingertips skim her bare thighs under the water, ‘Believe me. I’m trying.’
She doesn’t say anything for a while, just tightens her grip when the water knocks us some more.
‘I have a confession too,’ she says, her breath hot against my cheek. ‘But I don’t know how to say it without sounding mean.’
‘Try me.’
She exhales slowly, and her hands move to the base of my neck. She must be able to feel my wild pulse. ‘I’m still not even
sure if I like you.’
‘Dylan, honey.’ I let out a quiet laugh and tuck her hair behind her ear, and my thumb lingers by the hinge of her jaw. ‘Who
said anything about like?’
Neither of us speaks, only the deep, distant rumble of thunder breaking the quiet. Her chest heaves, my heart pounds in anticipation,
and I wait. And wait some more. And then, right when I think I can’t wait any more, her tongue darts out to wet her lips.
Slowly–so slowly–my hand finds the back of her head and I bring my mouth to hers. She lets out a quiet sigh of relief when
our lips brush, but I pull back and press my forehead to hers before it can happen again. It’s careful, restrained, gentle.
It’s a simple question. Do you want this?
What comes next is the answer. Our mouths meet once, twice, then again and again and again in an increasingly frantic dance;
lips pressing, tongues sliding, hot breath passing between us. She tastes of saltwater and want and every bad decision I’ve
ever made, and all I can do is keep coming back to try more.
Fuck, I don’t care that she wants a husband and probably a golden retriever and two point five kids when she leaves this place.
I care that she wants me right here, right now, and she’s finally acting on it.
Her arms wind tighter around my neck, and when my hands find the backs of her thighs, her legs tangle around my waist, and
finally, I get to feel the parts of her that I’ve been dreaming about for weeks.
She scrabbles at my shoulders and pulls me closer with tiny, hungry noises that make my blood race, until we’re pressed so tightly together that not even water can pass between us.
All I know is that my fingers are pressed into the fullness of her ass, and the skin there is soft and cold, and so are her lips, but she’s warm right where she presses into my stomach and it makes me feel like I’m burning all over.
Weightless, adrenaline-fuelled vitality sears through me, telling me I’m alive. It makes me crave more of her, makes me desperate
to learn what other sounds she might make, to find out how else she might tell me she doesn’t like me.
I can’t help the groan that spills out of me when her fingers wind into my hair and tug, and she angles my head to kiss me
deeper, longer, a puppeteer controlling every one of my strings while the waves surge around us. Her teeth clip my bottom
lip, my tongue swipes along hers, and I might be enjoying this too much, but so is she, because for the first time since we
met, she’s entirely unrestrained, and it’s even better than I expected.
Because shit, my imagination didn’t warn me how she’d unravel in my hands. It didn’t prepare me for the desperate whines she’d
let out whenever I draw back to nip at her jaw. It didn’t prepare me for the way she’d command every tilt of our heads. And
shit, it definitely didn’t prepare me for the quiet moan she’d release at the shift of my hips, or the way she’d pull her
legs even tighter around my waist in response.
My fingers slide up to the waistband of her underwear, and I don’t really know what I intend to do next, but I don’t get to
find out, because thunder roars, and the sky splits open.
Rain pelts the surface of the water with enough force to splash us, and Dylan comes back to earth, pulling back to look at
me with swollen lips and hungry eyes that send more blood rushing between my legs. She immediately lets go, her limbs sliding
off and away, and I exhale raggedly as she starts swimming back to shore.
I assume she wants to get out before the rest of the storm hits, but she stops when we reach the shallows and spins around,
her face showcasing a hundred emotions at once. She steps backwards when I approach, fingers to her lips, and her tone is
indignant. ‘You kissed me!’
It’s such an obvious thing to point out that it disorients me for a moment.
‘You kissed me back,’ I manage to reply, rubbing a palm down my face and trying to calm my breathing as the ocean churns at my ankles and the rain hammers my skin.
She strides over to our stuff on the sand, which she’d covered with a raincoat I didn’t even know she had, and pulls her towel
out of her bag with a grunt. I reach her in time to help wrap it around her, despite how pointless it is in this weather.
She pulls away, then tugs her raincoat on, and I’m so confused by this whole sequence of events that I don’t even have it
in me to point out how ridiculous she looks.
‘Are you going to tell me what the issue is?’ I ask over the drumming of rain pelting the sand.
‘You weren’t supposed to do that.’ She pulls her hood up, as if her hair isn’t already soaked, and pushes a few strands off
her face without meeting my eye. ‘We weren’t supposed to do that. We made a rule, Max. I don’t—that can’t happen again. I’m not—that’s not what I do. I’m not
like this.’
After a long time scrabbling around in the dark, drifting along and grabbing hold of anything that might pull me of out of
my own head, it’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve learnt how to be okay on my own.
But as Dylan makes her way up the coastal path, I realise those old cravings have taken a new form, and I know with some certainty
that I am completely, truly fucked. All over again.