28. Then #3
I believed I loved him, I really did. And I guess I do love him, but not in the right way. I love him like a brother or a best friend. I just didn’t know, until Luke, that I was supposed to feel more.
Is it better or worse to pretend it didn’t happen and keep it all to myself?
Am I even capable of pretending now? Luke is in my blood.
I can still taste the saltwater on his lips, hear his exhale in my ear, his body slick with sweat and gritty with sand.
I can still feel the way something inside me unfurled when I was beneath him, some hungry prisoner who’d kept quiet a little too long.
I don’t know how I can live without it anymore.
* * *
I wake too early in the morning. It’s just past dawn and the guys are already making a racket, getting ready to surf.
Luke’s in the kitchen, the ubiquitous wet suit hanging off his hips.
I take in his lean body, the hollows in his broad shoulders, his firm stomach, and all I can think of is my hands in those hollows, my body arching into that stomach, and the way he looked at me, as if nothing in the world mattered more.
My hair’s a rat’s nest, my mouth kiss-swollen, my eyes half-asleep, but when he turns, he looks at me like he’s never seen anything better. And like he’d very much like to repeat what happened last night.
Danny’s hand lands on my shoulder like a bucket of ice. I have to stifle my desire to shudder in response, but Luke stifles nothing. His eyes drop to that hand and his mouth flattens. Don’t do this, Luke. Please don’t.
“You not surfing today, Dan?” asks Ryan, wandering through the swirl of tension in the room without a clue.
“I’ll come out later. I’m going to hang here with Juliet for a while.”
Luke’s eyes flicker over me again, possession in his gaze. “She should be surfing too.”
“I can’t surf.”
“I think you could do anything you set your mind to,” he replies.
I’m pretty sure he’s not talking about surfing. My heart gallops in my chest as I look away.
When Danny finally leaves, after breakfast, I gather my stuff to shower.
The bathroom is disgusting, with three days of hair and filth that no one has touched, so I walk to the neighbors’ house, the one whose pool they used last night.
I unlatch the child lock at the top of the tall wooden gate as Caleb’s girlfriend instructed me and discover a clear rectangular pool gleaming in the sun.
Above me, the house has multiple decks overlooking the ocean, but I ignore them in favor of the enclosed shower around the corner from the pool.
I linger under the heated spray, soaping myself, shampooing twice, shaving carefully.
Everything feels sensual today, reminding me of Luke’s hands on my skin, his weight above me.
To Danny, I’ve long represented something bad, something he needs to keep at a distance, covered from view.
Luke made me feel priceless, seductive, and desirable in the best possible way.
After I dry off, I climb into the rich family’s hammock on the second floor, swaying in the breeze.
Caleb’s girlfriend showed me the family’s Instagram—the beautiful wife, her adoring husband, and their two little girls grinning in front of Parisian landmarks.
How do you get a life like that? How do you get to be with the person you love and have children with him, and take off for Paris instead of your vacation home in Malibu?
I fall asleep in the hammock with my hair still wrapped in a towel, dreaming that it’s my house and that Luke’s the husband who wants to whisk us away. I don’t even care where he takes me.
* * *
I avoid Luke that evening. He goes to the neighbors’ house to swim and I remain behind with Danny, not drinking.
When Danny and I go to bed, I lay on the air mattress facing the ceiling, wide awake.
I can’t get comfortable because even the smallest motion on my part makes the entire mattress roll like a boat in a storm.
I’m not sure I’d be able to get comfortable anyway—with every memory of Luke, of him touching me and kissing me, comes a sick pulse of shame.
I also can’t escape the desire to do it again.
Eventually I rise, taking my blanket with me.
I’d sleep better in the neighbor’s hammock than I would here.
I enter the living room and find Luke on the couch.
His gaze is on me, and though I mean to keep walking out the door, he holds out his hand and I’m drawn to it, unwillingly.
He pulls me down beside him, his muscles tightening as he wraps himself around me.
We fit together perfectly, two objects that were made only for the other.
I inhale the salt of his skin, let myself bask in its heat.
He’s already hard and we’ve been here for seconds. I’m instantly wet at the very idea of repeating last night. His hand slides between my thighs and inside my sleep shorts and he exhales against my neck—quick and sharp—when he discovers it for himself.
I rise, grabbing my blanket and heading for the door, and he follows.
Last night was unplanned. We were drunk and it could all have been written off as a regrettable mistake. But this is as intentional as it could possibly be. His fingers tighten around mine as if he’s worried my conscience might make a sudden reappearance, but there’s no need.
I don’t simply want this. I need this. I need everything from him I can get, and I know there might never be another chance.
I’ll end things with Danny eventually—I have to, after what I did and what I’m about to do again—but me and Luke?
That will never happen. It would destroy Danny, and Donna too. This has got to be the last time.
We step off the wooden boardwalk and into the sand. He leads me to a dark corner, where the bayberry hedges cast shadows, blocking us from the moonlight’s glare, and then he tugs me against him and kisses me as if it’s all he’s thought of since last night.
His hand slips between my legs again. “You’ve been wet like this the whole goddamn day, haven’t you?” he asks, his mouth moving over my neck.
I nod and he pulls me down to the sand and kneels between my legs as he pushes them apart. His finger runs down the center of my chest.
“One day,” he says, “we are going to do this where I don’t have to worry anyone will walk in on us. And then I’m going to get you naked in my bed and keep you there for days.”
I open my mouth to reply, but that finger he just ran along my chest is pushing inside me and whatever I was going to say becomes a quiet moan.
He tugs my shorts over to the side and then slides down, pressing a gentle kiss between my legs before his tongue starts to move.
It’s different than intercourse. It’s different than anything else.
It’s slick and hot and soft all at once, and when I groan, he reaches beneath me, grabbing my ass to pull me closer to his face, his tongue flickering mercilessly.
My toes tense, my feet arch. My whole body is coiled tight as a spring, and when it releases, I cry out, stunned into carelessness, shocked into utter disregard for anything but this.
“I—” My words trail off. “I don’t even know what to say.”
I sound drugged.
He climbs over me. “Jules,” he says, and it’s the plea in his voice, the desperation in it, that wakes me up. He’s pressed rigid against his shorts, the fullness of him resting on my abdomen. “Can I—”
I reach for him, pushing the shorts down, and in one surging thrust he slams inside me.
“God,” he whispers. “ Yes .”
It’s different than what he just did with his tongue, and as satisfied as I thought I was, I can already feel my belly tightening, my muscles clenching around him. Those nerve endings wake to life again and my hands slide down to grip his ass. “Go slow,” I beg.
“You’re gonna come again?” The words are a grunt, disbelief, hope, and desperation all at once.
I gasp at his next sharp thrust. “Yes.”
“Fuck,” he hisses, and somehow I know he’s not expressing disappointment. He’s simply struggling not to finish too soon.
His mouth moves to my neck, and his hand slides beneath my t-shirt to palm my breast and then pinch my nipple. And all the while he’s moving inside me, and I’m so slick and so full that I can feel a second orgasm coming faster than I ever imagined.
When it hits, I sink my teeth into his shoulder to stifle my scream, and with a series of jabbing thrusts he joins me, groaning against my neck as he lets go.
I’d give anything, anything in the fucking world to stay just like we are. To fall asleep like this, and wake like this, and have it all turn out okay. For a moment he lets his weight sink into me. Relax. Yes, stay . But then he rolls beside me and pulls me to his chest.
“A room,” he says. “We’ll run off and have a room of our own. No, fuck it. We’ll have a whole house.”
I laugh quietly. “I thought of that today. I went to the neighbor’s place to take a shower and then I laid in their hammock and imagined it was ours.”
“We’d have a house just like that, but with way better waves than these. An oceanfront home facing the Pipeline, maybe, and every morning I’ll go surf and you’ll sleep in, and then I’ll come back and make you breakfast.”
I laugh. When he dreams, he dreams big. Neither of us could even afford an oceanfront shed .
“That sounds like a pretty easy life for me. Am I at least responsible for buying the groceries?”
“No. You can’t because I’ll have burned all your clothes.”
I giggle again. “If you’ve burned all my clothes, can I even go outside?”
“You make a good point. Okay, I’ll put up some hedges for privacy so you can go into the yard, but no farther.” He pinches me. “You can finally open that copy of Wuthering Heights you kept claiming to read for school. Now ask me what we’ll do after breakfast.”
“Okay, what are we doing after breakfast?”
He rolls above me. “You’ve been sitting there eating pancakes naked for thirty minutes. What the fuck do you think we’re doing?”
I’m still laughing when he pushes inside me again, surging harder and harder like a storm coming in. And when I’m close, when my body stiffens and I’m sinking my nails into his back because I need him to tip me over the edge, he gasps against my ear.
“God, I’d do anything to have that,” he says, and for a single blissful moment, when I’m blind and senseless and stunned by the force of my orgasm, distantly aware of his hoarse cry as he joins me, it feels as if it all came true.
As if there is another life in which we moved to Hawaii and never let the world come between us. Where we’d sway in a hammock, wondering if we should take our twin girls to Paris. And ultimately decide we were too happy where we were to ever leave.