9. Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Gina
The sky is a smudged post-sunset yellowish pink in the west when Benji and I lock up the lodge.
Briar went home a while ago, but he insisted on staying well past orientation.
Campfire smoke drifts through the air, but it’s mostly quiet as we walk above the sandy beach.
When the trail takes us into the trees, I pull the mini mag light out of my pocket and click it on.
“Thank you for letting me stay,” Benji says with that dimpled grin. “I had fun today.”
Technically, Diana is the one letting him stay. If I asked him to leave, I think he would, but how can I? He’s been so happy all day and I love that he’s enjoying Happy Lake so far.
“I’m glad.” I should take this moment to bring up the divorce again, but I can’t seem to make myself. Being with him, out here alone in the coming night, feels like a sip of something forbidden. I must have been drunk off it in Vegas before I got literally drunk.
My grandmother drilled in me how important it was for me to be responsible.
I was fourteen when she passed away, and I became the adult in the family.
My mom has always been more like an unreliable older sister than a parent, and suddenly it was just the two of us.
There was never a time when I could do something impulsive.
While my teenage peers were out experimenting with alcohol or drugs or each other, I was working because she was between jobs.
I was too busy convincing everyone that we were fine to do something frivolous like go to the homecoming bonfire or any of the summer parties.
Maybe that’s a good thing, considering the one time I did let go, I got drunk and married a stranger. But I can’t regret it when Benji’s walking next to me. My only regret is that I can’t remember.
“I want to know what it felt like.” The words slip out into the quiet before I can catch them. But maybe I don’t need to. He’s not from here, and I don’t think he’ll judge me. “I don’t go out and get crazy on a Saturday night. Or any night.”
“Why not?”
A laugh bubbles up, and maybe I can’t talk about this. “I don’t know.” What if he doesn’t understand? He’ll tell me nothing is stopping me from doing whatever I want, and I’ll have to acknowledge that he’s right. That I’m the problem. “No time.” Not my best excuse. “Too much to do.”
“Are you busy right now?” Benji asks.
“No, but—”
“Let’s go,” he says, taking my hand and pulling me down the trail.
My heart thumps wildly, adrenaline taking over and making me laugh, the beam from my flashlight bouncing around as we jog.
Instead of going into the meadow where my cabin is, he tugs me down the short path to the lake and out onto the dock, where he drops my hand to pull his shirt off.
“Come on,” he says, hopping on one foot to remove a shoe.
“Let’s have some fun.” His shoes hit the dock, followed by his socks. “Have you ever been skinny dipping?”
His hands are on the waistband of his joggers, and he pushes them over his hips.
“No, but—” I suck in a breath and click the flashlight off, turning my eyes to the sky so I’m not tempted to stare. “You are really comfortable in your own skin, aren’t you?”
There’s a beat of hesitation. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”
“No.” I only feel like I should be. That’s all. He’s naked, and I’m feeling hot and fluttery, and the desire to look at him is burning inside me alongside a desperate longing to know what comes next. Will he take my hand? Tell me to look at him again? Call me his wife ?
“You don’t have to get naked,” he says. “Just swim with me.” His feet hit the dock—once, twice—making it rock. Then there’s a splash.
I bring my gaze down, and I’m alone.
He breaks the surface, shaking water from his hair. I can just make out the smile on his face in the fading light.
Something tethered between us tugs at me. This incomprehensible longing to follow him.
I work my feet free of my hiking boots and socks, but then I freeze.
“Come on, Gina!”
A warm breeze carries his voice up from the dark water.
It lifts the hair on my arms and slides over my shoulders, a touch so light it tickles.
What am I waiting for? We’re the only two people under this star-studded sky on a beautiful summer’s night.
So I shuck off my T-shirt and bra. The sound of both hitting the dock feels thunderous.
It echoes in my ears alongside my pulse and my quickened breath as I slide my shorts down my legs and wiggle out of my underwear.
I don’t know if he’s watching me from where he’s bobbing in the water—I don’t think so. I curl my toes over the end of the dock. Maybe I want him to see me.
I want to see me. I got a glimpse of who I could be in Vegas, and out here, in the dark with Benji, I can let go of everything.
So I jump, tucking my knees to my chest. Water closes over my head, warm like the night. My feet touch the sandy bottom, and I stand, breaking the surface.
“Now what?” I ask, flicking water out of my eyes.
“Float. Count the stars with me.”
I can see the shape of him in the water as he floats on his back.
His body rises like a chain of islands above the surface.
His head, the broad slope of his chest, the long shape of his thighs, his feet sticking up.
The water conceals his hips, but knowing that he’s five feet away from me and naked has me flustered.
But it feels good to float.
We drift closer until his head is near my shoulder, my head near his, and our feet point in opposite directions like a needle on a compass.
We don’t count stars, but I point out a few constellations. Benji spots a satellite, and we watch it blink faintly on its slow trek across the sky.
I stop floating, my feet finding the sandy lakebed. “Why did you ask me out?”
He drops out of his float to stand chest-deep in the water. “Digging for compliments, beautiful?”
I’m not, but I like him calling me beautiful. “Why me?”
Benji is silent for a handful of seconds. “It was selfish.” Another beat of silence. “You looked like you needed something I haven’t been asked to give in a long time.”
“What?”
“Company.”
I sink to my chin in the water. “You thought I looked lonely.” My eyes sting with shame—how pathetic. He pitied me.
“Lots of people look lonely. But I told you, it was selfish. I needed someone to need me for—well, me.” He looks away.
“People come to Vegas to party, and hooking up with me gives them a story to brag to their friends about or to check off some fantasy list. They want to fuck and leave, and they don’t care where I’m from or what my favorite margarita flavor is, or what I do for fun because they don’t care about me.
I’m not real to them. But you looked at me, and I was real to you. I needed that.”
I take a moment to let that sink in. “You were lonely, too?”
He nods. “I’ve been lonely for a long time.”
After a while, Benji returns to floating on his back, but I stay with my feet on the lakebed, the water gently lapping over my shoulders. The frogs are really singing now, and a loon gives a haunting call somewhere across the lake.
“Will you tell me about that night?”
“I’ll tell you everything,” Benji says, moving his arms to bring himself back from where he’s drifted. “If you tell me you want me to stay for the summer.”
“Diana already—”
“I want you to want me to stay.”
“I want you to stay.” I don’t think I could send him away. “But you have to pretend to be my second cousin, and you have to divorce me.”
Benji lowers his feet and stands in the chest-deep water. “What’s the latest date we’d need to start the paperwork?”
He’s going to give me a divorce? It can’t be this easy. “The end of the month.” That leaves about seven weeks to get it finalized. More than enough time.
He dips down into the water, submerging his shoulders. “Let me tell you about that night, but my way. Bit by bit, nice and slow.”
The way he says nice and slow causes my body to heat.
“Let me do it like a striptease,” he says, his voice low. “Let me give you just enough to make you want more.”
Want surges through me, the awareness of my hands on the tops of my thighs no longer feeling so innocent. I lift them and sink deeper so I can tread water. It’s the safest thing to do with my hands.
“Spend time with me,” Benji says, pleading. “Get to know me. I’ll pretend to be your second cousin. I’ll tell you about that night. And if you still want a divorce by the end of the month, I’ll give it to you.”
Too many feelings lodge in my throat, but my voice squeaks past them. “Okay.”
Benji grins. “Why did you come out with me?” he asks abruptly, drifting away a few inches before I can warm him that I’ll need that divorce regardless.
It was reckless, going out in Vegas with a stranger I’d never met and getting drunk off my ass. Briar—who I’d bonded with as she made me Shirley Temple after Shirley Temple—told me he was one of the good ones, but I got lucky. The night could’ve turned out very differently.
“I needed to do something—choose something—for me. Selfish, too, really.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Before we got married, you said something about choosing for yourself. What did you mean?”
“Can’t remember.” Milo had asked me to marry him for Happy Lake. I didn’t have a choice—maybe I desperately wanted one. “A friend once told me I’m a compulsive people-pleaser.”
“I can see that,” he says meditatively. “Today was your day off, and you worked all day.”
“Well, someone had to train a couple of new employees.”
Benji opens his mouth, and I know what’s coming. Lou—the friend who called me a people-pleaser—has been riding my butt about it for years. But instead, he lets out a high-pitched yelp and rockets into the air.
“Something bit me,” he says, stepping toward the dock before turning back to me, holding a hand out to save me from a hungry fish. It’s adorable.