Chapter 46 #2
“Well,” he murmurs against my mouth, his voice already roughening at the edges, “that escalated.”
A laugh escapes me, softer than I mean it to be, the sound pleasing him more than it should. His mouth curves. Mine does too.
“You started it,” I whisper.
His brows lift. “Did I?”
The innocence in his face is so fake it almost ruins me.
Before I can answer, he kisses me again, deeper this time, dragging the air right out of me.
My arms slide more securely around his neck, fingertips catching in the damp hair at the nape, holding him close because there is no point pretending I want distance.
Not with him. Not here. Not when the whole lake seems to have narrowed down to the heat of his body and the lazy, devastating way he keeps touching me under the water as if he has memorized exactly how to make me melt without anyone else noticing.
His hand glides over my side, then lower, then back up again, a slow pass that leaves my breath catching in little pieces.
My thigh brushes his under the water. Everything in his face darkens for one suspended second, enough to make me wonder whether summer peace is about to end in the kind of trouble that leaves us stumbling back to shore and inventing excuses.
Then his hand stills.
Not because he’s pulling away. Because his thumb has found my scar.
The one along my side.
The one I rarely think about until someone else’s fingers tell me exactly where it lives.
His expression changes immediately.
Heat doesn’t disappear, but something gentler rises through it. His thumb brushes once over the old scar as if he is tracing something sacred instead of damaged. The touch is so careful it hurts.
Without really thinking, my hand moves from the back of his neck to his chest, then lower, fingers slipping beneath the wet fabric enough to find the place where his own skin changed in that motel room.
The mirror scar. The one I left him with in the chaos of survival.
The one that still makes my chest tighten whenever I remember how close I came to losing him there.
My fingertips rest over it.
He goes very still.
For a second neither of us kisses. Neither of us speaks. The water moves around our bodies in quiet little swells while our hands stay where they are, each of us touching the place the same horror left behind in the other.
His mouth brushes my temple once. Not lust now. Something deeper.
“You always find that one,” he murmurs.
“It always finds me first,” I say.
That earns a low laugh from him, though it is softened by feeling.
His thumb drifts over my scar again. “You make scars look unfairly beautiful.”
“Only because you’re biased.”
“I’m very biased.”
The confession is so immediate that it makes me smile against his cheek.
“I’ve noticed.”
His hand leaves my side only long enough to cup the back of my neck, keeping me close while he looks at me in that unbearable way he has, like every version of me has somehow become precious to him, even the ones I still struggle to look at too long.
“I like this one,” he says quietly.
My brows draw together. “Which one?”
“This version of you.” His mouth curves faintly. “Floating in a lake, being mouthy, pretending you weren’t about to climb me in front of your friends.”
Heat rushes through me so fast I swat lightly at his shoulder. He catches my wrist under the water, smiling like he’s already won.
“Silas.”
“What?” he asks, entirely too pleased with himself. “You were.”
“That is a wild accusation.”
“It’s a very accurate accusation.”
The banter should make the moment smaller. Somehow it doesn’t. It only makes it sweeter, the ease of us now, the fact that we can go from almost unbearable tenderness to this without either one cheapening the other.
My fingers return to the scar on his side, tracing its shape through the thin wet fabric. His eyes follow the movement. His hand stays warm over my own scar, not hiding it, not pitying it, simply knowing it is there and refusing to treat it like something that needs to be flinched from.
For a long breath, neither of us says anything.
The dock feels farther away. The voices of our friends blur into harmless noise again. The lake gleams around us. Above his shoulder the sky is impossibly blue, but I can only really see him.
“This,” I say softly.
His gaze lifts back to mine at once.
“This is where your scars meet mine.”
The words settle between us with a weight that feels almost holy.
Something in his face opens.
Not dramatically. Worse than that. Quietly. The kind of emotion that does not need tears to devastate. His forehead comes to rest against mine, his eyes closing for one suspended second as if the sentence hit somewhere too deep to answer immediately.
When he looks at me again, the heat is still there. So is the tenderness. So is that terrible, beautiful love that has only grown stronger each time life has tried to break it loose from us.
“Yeah,” he says, voice roughened by more than want now. “It is.”
Then he kisses me.
Slowly. Deeply. Like he is kissing every awful thing we survived and every gentle thing we built after. One hand stays at my scar. Mine stays over his. The lake rocks us together while his mouth moves over mine with a reverence that feels even more intimate than desire.
On the dock, somebody groans loudly enough to suggest we’ve become disgusting again.
Neither of us cares.
Not when the world has already given us so many places to break.
Not when this, here in the water with his hand over my scar and mine over his, feels so much like the place we were always meant to find.
His forehead rests against mine, his lashes still damp from the lake.
His mouth is a little swollen now, softer from kissing, redder where my lipstick and his need blurred together in the summer light.
Every time I think I have learned how to survive the sight of him, he goes and looks at me like this and ruins me all over again.
No hurry lives in the space between us now.
Only fullness.
The kind that comes after surviving enough to understand exactly what it means to be held by the right person. The kind that turns ordinary afternoons into something sacred because both of you know what it cost to get there.
His thumb brushes once more over the scar at my side.
My fingers answer at the one on his.
The smile that touches his mouth is so small it almost hurts.
“I love you,” he says.
Nothing dramatic in it. No need to dress the truth up anymore. Just those three words, laid between us like the most natural thing in the world.
Tears prick at my eyes before I can stop them, not from sadness, not even from relief, but from the unbearable beauty of hearing something so simple sound so earned.
My hand slips from his scar to his jaw, holding his face with all the tenderness he has ever taught me I am allowed to have.
“I love you,” I whisper back.
The words leave me and seem to settle everywhere at once. Into the water. Into the sunlight. Into the old wounds beneath our hands. Into the life waiting for us beyond the shore.
Then his eyes close briefly, his mouth curves, and for one shining, impossible moment, everything we survived feels transformed into this.
Two scarred hearts held by the water.
Still alive enough to love.
Still choosing one another after everything.
Still turning survival into something beautiful.