Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
When he woke up the next morning, he was in a bad mood, and his muscles were stiff.
Sleeping outside like this was not his favorite, and they had one more night of it.
But, they were making very good progress, it was just that...
Well, who was he kidding? It was less being in the tent, and more sharing it with Lila that was bothering him.
Last night’s conversation had taken a regretful turn, and he wished that he hadn’t said that.
Any of it.
Because there was subtext to it that he wished weren’t there, subtext to it that he wanted to squash once and for all.
But she’d asked if he liked her, and he hadn’t been able to tell her no.
He also wanted to drive home the point that Cody would kick his ass if he ever did anything untoward to her.
For himself, not her. But he was a little bit afraid that she might have picked up on the underlying meaning there, and that felt dangerous.
Like handing her a lit match while they were out there surrounded by kerosene.
But thankfully, in the morning, she didn’t bring it up. She drank coffee with him in relative silence, much like yesterday, and then they gathered their supplies to hike back in to the undeveloped part of the trail.
Lila seemed more aggressive in her work today, but she didn’t direct any of it at him.
And the silence allowed his mind to wander.
To the issues with his family. To whether or not he was going to contact his half-siblings on his mom’s side soon or not.
He knew that he was actually putting arbitrary goalposts in place so that he didn’t have to.
But the rejection on that side felt... the possibility of it felt the highest.
And because his mother was actually the parent he had known, it felt the riskiest.
The shape of that rejection felt the most imaginable.
He rolled his shoulders back, picked up the chainsaw and pulled the cord hard, revving up the engine. He let that take up all his focus for a while. Let work be his therapy, let his aching muscles be his compass, his grounding tool.
And when they finished for the day, they were hot and sweaty in a way that felt like being locked in a hot car, at least on his end.
His own sweat was forming a steam cloud around his face.
“I’ve got to hit the river before we do dinner tonight,” he said.
At least he had brought swim trunks with him.
“Okay,” she said.
She didn’t say that she was going to do the same, and he didn’t push her, not considering last time he had gone and blown his world wide open. By acknowledging that Lila Grayson had an ass. And this time, he might not be able to steer clear of acknowledging that she had tits.
Just thinking of it that way was pushing him further and further away from sense and sensibility, and a whole lot closer to madness.
He ducked inside the tent quickly, grabbed his swim trunks, changed, and came back out with a towel slung over his shoulder.
Lila was nowhere to be found. Scarce, and he was cool with that.
It was probably for the best.
He walked down the trail that they had carved out into the landscape, and returned to the scene of that particular crime.
But he wasn’t going to think about that. He was just going to jump in and let the water cool his head. And hope that it cooled his libido too, because having to get back into the tent with Lila tonight made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.
Made his skin feel too tight, made his stomach feel too tight, made absolutely everything feel too tight.
The last thing he wanted to do was get an actual erection over his best friend’s little sister.
He jumped into the water, let the cool close over his head, hoped that it would calm his racing thoughts.
And he knew, even then, that he couldn’t dismiss Lila by calling her that. Because she was more than that.
She was Lila Grayson, she stood on her own, and every time he tried to diminish her in that way, it came back and bit him in the ass.
She was amazing. Competent and confident, and a whole host of other things that he had never really given her credit for, because he hadn’t stopped to look at her as an individual. But he’d done it now. And now he was awake to it, and it was causing him a hell of a lot of problems.
He lay on his back, swam across the space, let his mind go clear. Until there was a splash beside him, big enough that it had to be another body going into the water.
He righted himself, treading water as he looked at the bubbly space on the surface of the river. And then, Lila appeared.
“You didn’t think that I was going to skip cooling off,” she said.
Tension created a knot at the center of his shoulder blades, between his eyebrows.
“Guess not.”
“Absolutely not.” Then she popped below the surface of the water again, and he took a breath. He looked up at the sky, begging any deity that might be listening to do something to free him of this torment.
Lila swam across the river then, climbing up onto the bank, and scrambling up the side of a rock that stretched out over the water.
He couldn’t help but admire her, standing there, shapely, muscular legs on full display thanks to the high cut on her black bikini bottoms.
The waist was low, well below her belly button, showing off every indent of muscle in her midsection, and then there... Well, damn it.
Now he was thinking about her breasts. He had thought about them once before.
This was the second time he had thought about Lila Grayson’s breasts, and he would like to get a lobotomy.
They were beautiful.
Just like the rest of her. There wasn’t a single inch on her body that he could see that wasn’t perfectly formed. That wasn’t glorious.
And that made him wonder about all the things he couldn’t see. An escalation. She grinned down at him, and there was something wicked in her smile, something sheepish in the glint in her eye, and it made it feel like she could see his thoughts. Could see into him in a way that he didn’t want.
But then she leapt off of the rock, and for the space of a breath, then two, he just watched her, watched her float through the air, watched her disappear beneath the surface of the water and emerge laughing.
Full of a life that nothing they’d been through had been able to squash or squander. And, yeah, she had pain. He knew that.
But not so much that she couldn’t do this. Not so much that she couldn’t revel in the feel of the water on her skin, the joy of leaping off the rock.
He wondered what else she might revel in.
And in that moment, the desire to be the one to show her everything that her body could experience was so intense, so feral, that it gripped him by the throat and threatened to never let go.
He wanted to cut himself off of that, wanted to cut appendages of his body off.
Wanted to do something to escape this feeling and the intensity of it, but he didn’t know how to do that.
So all he could do was stare. Stare and find himself baptized in the most uncomfortable attraction he’d ever felt before. It was like pain. Like a knife was digging straight into his side, curving around his ribs and on down. The pain that radiated there making it impossible for him to breathe.
A pain that could only be satisfied if he touched her, but a pain that would only get worse if he did, and he knew it. Because it would destroy everything. All of his real relationships, his entire life.
He was on the verge of trying to connect with his biological family, but the Graysons were his family. They were and had been the realest family that he had ever known. For him, there hadn’t been many high-stakes relationships. Not that he could control.
His mother had rejected him, he hadn’t had any control over that. He had been kept separate from his half-siblings.
He kept his physical relationships casual, and that meant when they ended, it didn’t matter.
But the Graysons, that was the one high-stakes relationship he had, where he was the one who could fuck something up.
Where he was the one that could create a situation he couldn’t come back from. Where he would be the one responsible for his own rejection, for being cast out of the family, and nothing was worth that. Absolutely nothing.
Lila was grinning, completely unaware of the deluge of dramatic thoughts coursing through his body like a torrential downpour.
“Jump off the rock,” she said.
“Are we twelve?”
“No. But we’re here, and we’re allowed to have fun. Just a couple of idiots who got abandoned by their moms.”
“Technically, you weren’t abandoned by your mom. She was there, she was just checked out.”
“Either way, I think we deserve to have fun. We deserve to have a break. And hell, we’ve spent about forty-eight hours in each other’s company, and we haven’t had a single fight, don’t you think we ought to celebrate that?”
She wasn’t wrong, they had done that, and they deserved something for it, surely.
Plus this felt like a dare that she might have issued to him when they were kids, and that at least felt safe. Because when they were kids, there hadn’t been all this sharpness between them.
So he climbed out of the water, and up onto the same rock she had just been on, swung his arms and gave himself as much air as he could as he jumped down into the water below.
When he resurfaced, she was clapping, as though he had done something worthy of praise, and he couldn’t deny that he enjoyed the feeling.
So they did that for a while. Taking turns jumping off the rock, and he even almost forgot to look at her after she’d done it four or five times, forgot that her body had enthralled him only a few moments ago, because he was listening to her laugh, and maybe he was even getting used to looking at her in a swimsuit.
And when they were done, they crawled out of the water, and he laid down on the bank, breathing heavily, tired but happy.
“I was wrong,” she said, crawling up onto the bank beside him, collapsing just as he had done.
“Hold on a second,” he said. “I’m going to have to preserve this moment for posterity. Write it upon the records of my personal history. Lila Grayson thinks she was wrong.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re very funny.”
“And what is it you think you were wrong about?”
“That we might have had anything to do with our mothers abandoning us. Because we are a goddamn delight.”
He laughed, hands pressed to his stomach as he genuinely laughed from the deepest part of himself. “You know what, we are.”
He turned his head, and realized she was only about five inches away.
Far enough, but also way too close. And then it was like everything slowed down.
The air around them, the birds that were flying overhead, his breathing, his thoughts.
It was like everything shaped itself around them, around that moment.
The breath in his lungs seemed like molasses, thick and slow-moving, and he couldn’t quite grasp anything. Not what he should do next, not what he had been thinking a moment ago, not what he had been worried about twenty minutes ago.
Because it was just Lila. Lila on her own, looking at him with some softness on her face that he so rarely saw.
Her dark hair was stringy and wet, hanging in her face, there were little water droplets sliding down over her lips, and he wanted to lick them away.
Had she ever been kissed?
It was that thought that jerked him out of the moment. That made him realize what he was doing. Or what he was actually pondering doing.
He sat up quickly. “I’m starving,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah, I think we need to go get dinner on.”
“Well, if you... If you think so.”
“Yeah. I do. Can’t be hanging out here soaking wet.”
The words landed between them, and they felt sexual.
They shouldn’t feel sexual. Nothing about it should be sexual, and yet it was, and it did.
Her face turned red, and he could see that she was about to say something, or wanted to, or didn’t want to, but was cursed with the desire to, to push buttons, to push further, harder, and all he could do was pray that she didn’t.
Because she would just be antagonizing him, the way that she always did, but she wouldn’t be safe this time.
Because normally, she pushed his buttons, and he just let it happen. But that was before. It was before the veil had been ripped away from his eyes, and he suddenly saw all these things for exactly what they were.
Before he had let himself think, fully formed thoughts about how he was attracted to Lila, even though he shouldn’t be.
Yeah. It was that. All of it.
He stood up, grabbed his towel and started to dry off.
Lila did the same, and he kept his gaze straight ahead, didn’t let himself look at her at all.
And he could only give thanks that she had decided not to push it.
For his part, his mind was like a cascade of images that wouldn’t stop. Kept building on each other. A slideshow of moments, feelings. And he couldn’t put them away, no matter how hard he tried. But he was very good at dealing with the uncomfortable.
A lifetime of neglect prepared you for that.
He had a lot of needs that went unmet.
And this was one that was going to have to go unmet forever. Until it went away. Until he squashed the need for it. He had done that pretty successfully with a lot of things, and this would be no different.
On that, he was determined.
There was no other choice.