Chapter 2 #4
She gripped the edge of her shirt and lifted it up over her head, and for a brief moment, he felt something like panic. It passed through him, but it left a sort of hollow feeling in his stomach as she unsnapped her shorts and pulled them down.
She had on a black sports bra and a pair of boy shorts.
He couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen this much of Lila’s body.
If ever. She was muscular, athletic, and for a whole second his mind was completely blank, like he didn’t quite know how to process the information that his eyes were seeing.
Her lean, muscular torso, gently rounded hips, shapely legs, and he refused—outright—to examine her breasts.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
He felt like clutching pearls he didn’t have.
He felt like he was back in that hotel room. Drunk as hell and with her arms around his neck —
She leapt into the water, sending a wave crashing over his head.
Then he felt like he’d come back to himself.
This was just normal stuff. The kind of normal stuff he did with Lila. That he’d always done.
He was stone cold sober, and he knew exactly who she was.
Practically a sister to him.
She emerged from the water and splashed him immediately. Then she started to swim away, smacking her hands and feet flat on the surface of the water, sending as much of a wave his way as she possibly could.
Apparently, she wasn’t too tired.
“Brat,” he said, going after her, grabbing hold of her leg and dragging her all the way back toward him.
He looked down at her, and she looked up at him, her face partly submerged in the water.
Then he pushed down on her head, taking her down fully into the water, releasing his hold on her the minute that she began to push back against him.
She popped back up, cheeks puffed out, and then she spit water into his face.
She wiggled away from him, and he refused to let go, swimming while holding on to her ankle.
And as he did, he slid his thumb over her ankle bone and couldn’t help but be aware of the interesting shape of it. How soft her skin was.
He released his hold on her immediately, the minute that thought crossed his mind.
Lila began to move toward him again, but he rolled onto his back, paddling away from her.
“You’re such a dick,” she said.
“I’m a dick? You started it.”
“I did not start it. I’m a lady. Or did you not realize that?”
Those words got trapped in the middle of his brain, rattled around there, and parked somewhere next to the realization that she had an interestingly shaped ankle and very soft skin.
Which were right next to the hollow feeling he’d gotten in his stomach when she had taken off her shirt, then wiggled out of her shorts.
And he didn’t know what to do with any of it, so he simply shut the door on it. There were other things behind that door. And he kept it locked for a very good reason.
“Yeah, a hell of a lady,” he said.
Then he submerged again underneath the water, letting all that cold close in on him. He held his breath until his lungs were burning, then propelled himself toward the surface, gasping as he hit the air.
Lila was already scrambling up onto the bank.
And he looked, for just a moment, at her ass.
She must do squats. Or work that was equivalent to it.
And that was the end of that thought. He hauled himself up out of the water and realized it was going to be a chafing nightmare for the whole rest of the day.
“We’re going to have to go commando,” he said.
“What?”
“We just are. You don’t want to have wet undies on underneath your shorts. You’re going to end up with cherry red thighs.”
What the hell was going on? He didn’t need to be talking about her thighs.
Or any of the other things that had just come out of his mouth.
He was trying to be practical. It was a conversation he would have had with anybody.
Though, not usually with a woman, to be fair.
But Lila occupied such a specific space in his life.
Where she was a lady, definitely, but more like a...
Sister. Something about that felt a little bit off right then.
“I’m being dead serious,” he said. “If we’d gone skinny dipping, it would have been a different story.”
He wasn’t making it better. “Just turn around and I’ll turn around, and we can discard the wet stuff in our backpacks.”
Nolan turned away from her without waiting for her to acknowledge what he was saying, and he stripped his shorts off.
A sharp squeak came from behind him, and he looked over his shoulder but just saw the back of Lila’s ponytail. And then he turned away as quickly as possible.
He shoved the shorts into his backpack, and then grabbed his jeans and pulled them on. Followed by his shirt.
Then he waited a few more seconds for Lila to call out that she was ready.
Then he turned. “Alright. Ready to blaze back up?”
“Yes,” she said.
There was something odd in her voice, and it took him right back to that drunken interaction – that one-sided drunken interaction.
And he shut that thought right down. Because it had no place here at all.