Chapter 26 #2
“On the beach. It’s a one-bedroom with a big balcony. I added faux-wood floors and a shiny new IKEA kitchen and bathroom. Big project, but it needed it. It was my parents’ first place together. They bought it in the early eighties for, you know—”
“A thousand bucks and a spit handshake?”
“Basically. They kept it for various reasons over the years, but I think it was mostly sentimental. They lived there as newlyweds. But they told us they kept it for the rental income, and then later for us kids to crash if we ever needed a place for a few months. Summer break from college, that kind of thing.”
“Did you go away to college?”
He leans back at the faint surprise in my voice, scrutinizing my face as though I might be making fun of him.
“Not that you don’t seem like you went to college,” I add, “but I got the sense that you grew up here and never left.”
“Nah.” He relaxes and looks up at the stars instead. “I was up in Gainesville for four years. Four wild years.”
“Florida State?” I hazard a guess.
He lets out a low whistle. “Don’t let people hear you say that. University of Florida. Gators.”
“Gators. Not Seminoles. Got it.”
He shakes his head in amazement, like I’ve had a close brush with danger.
“What did you study?” I ask.
He adjusts his posture and gazes evenly at me, silently telling me to go ahead and assess him, give it my best guess.
“Hmm, okay.” I feign deep thought, but really I’m using the moment as an excuse to drink him in.
His dusky-red hair—I can’t tell if it would feel soft or prickly—and the faint freckles across his face that somehow seem more pronounced in the moonlight.
The dimple in his chin, the slight smirk creasing the corner of his mouth.
He has a freckle right in the center of his bottom lip.
I really should not be noticing these things, not if I want to keep myself together.
Nothing can happen with this person. This man sitting so close to me that I can feel the warmth of his body and smell his woodsy soap.
Keep your pants on , my brain hisses at me.
“Business,” I say decisively.
He drops his head back and howls with laughter. “You sure got my number.”
“I bet you were in a fraternity, too.”
“I am offended. And yes, I was.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh.
“You were not in a sorority, I take it. Up there at…”
“University of Washington.”
“Huskies.”
I nod, impressed.
“I know my college football,” he says. “I can see you up there, pretending to study in the library but really just reading your American Girl doll catalogs.”
“Hey!” I swat at him, but really I’m tickled that he remembers that detail from our first conversation. And here we are again, referencing that night.
“Look.” His tone is serious all of a sudden. Here it comes: He’s going to say something about that kiss and about how we can’t let it happen again. “I’ve been meaning to ask you.” I swallow and nod, bracing myself. “How do you react to getting pushed into a pool?”
“What?” I barely have time to say the word before his hand is on my waist and he nudges me—gently, really, but hard enough to do the job—and I feel my bottom slipping over the edge. A guttural shriek escapes me right before I crash, fully clothed, into the water.
“You—” I sputter once I’ve come back up for air. “You pushed me in! I can’t believe you just did that.” I push tangles of wet hair out of my face. It’s not cold, but it’s still shocking to be suddenly submerged. Daniel roars with laughter.
“You should’ve seen your face.”
“I hope it was worth it,” I say, and then I grab hold of both of his legs and drag him in with me.
He’s still laughing as he goes under and then pops back up, spitting out a fountain of water.
“You know, I could have had my phone in my pocket,” I say.
“I do have my phone in my pocket,” he says, and I gasp in horror. He pulls it out and places it on the pool deck. “It’s okay, it’s waterproof. And I knew you didn’t have yours on you.”
“How did you know that?”
“Trust me.” His eyes rove down to where my legs are treading water under the rippling surface of the pool. “I didn’t see any pockets in that dress. And I looked.”
The way he says it sends a sudden jolt through me.
“Speaking of my dress.” I hoist myself out of the pool, and he groans.
“Party’s over already, huh?”
I stand up, far above him, and shake my head.
“I didn’t get my hair wet just for ninety seconds in the pool.
But this dress deserves better.” With some difficulty that probably negates any possible sexiness, I tug the sopping black dress over my head and drop it on the nearest chair.
I’m wearing black cotton cheekies and a black bra—one of only two bras that I brought on this trip, but there’s no need for Daniel to know that.
He’s gazing up at me in stunned silence, the lower half of his face underwater.
“That’s better,” I say. Daniel makes a choking sound. I slip back into the water and swim sedately to the other side of the pool.
He follows me, doing a slow backstroke.
“I met a guy from Seattle once,” he says, “who didn’t know how to swim. That common up there?”
“I guess, kind of.” I hang on to the edge of the pool. “I know plenty of people who never learned.”
He shakes his head. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Maybe not if you never go on vacation. We have lakes, but they’re freezing cold.”
“You learned, though.”
“Well, yeah. My parents are both from here. We came to Florida every year when I was a kid.”
He puts an elbow on the pool edge beside me. His eyes are a strange reddish blue in the glowing light.
“Did you ever consider moving here?”
“Never. I always had a life up in Seattle. Until recently.”
He chooses this moment, for reasons unknown to me, to take off his soaking-wet polo shirt. He tosses it onto the deck, and I don’t even pretend not to look at his gently chiseled chest, covered in reddish-brown hair.
“Until recently, meaning you had a life until recently? Or you never considered moving here until recently?” As he speaks, he moves closer, and I can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not, but suddenly he’s so close I could touch his foot with mine if I flexed my big toe.
“Both,” I whisper. Gazing up at him, I realize that I probably have mascara pooling under my eyes. Still, something comes over me and I cover his foot with mine, down at the bottom of the pool. He doesn’t flinch.
“Can we talk about how this is a terrible idea?” I say.
“Terrible might be overstating it a bit.” One of his hands finds my bare waist. He doesn’t pull me closer, just leaves his hand there.
“Because I’m leaving soon. And if we start something, it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s just going to end.”
“I’ve heard they have this nifty thing called email now.”
“You don’t want another long-distance relationship.” I’m instantly mortified that I used the word “relationship.” Seems like a stretch.
“So if—just following your logic—if it can’t go anywhere, that means there’s no point in it at all?
” Slowly, he brings his other hand up to the other side of my waist. Somehow, despite the bathtub temperature of the water, his hand is warm against my skin.
“No point in one night, just because there might not be another?”
I feel like a stunned little goldfish. My heart is pounding, with Daniel’s nearly naked body so close to my own, surrounded by fairy lights and the ripple of the glowing pool all around us.
My logical mind is summoning up weak reminders of why I decided this would be a bad idea: saying goodbye soon, possible hurt on both sides, opening myself up to another heartbreak, another man who might prove impossible to get over.
“Because if that’s how you feel,” Daniel continues, “I will respectfully remove myself from the situation. Just wish I had some dry clothes.”
He removes his hands and takes a step backward. And then my logical mind is utterly silenced by the swift decision of my body. I lunge toward him and wrap my legs around his waist and my arms around his shoulders.
Due to some apparently ultra-strong self-control on his part, we’re not immediately kissing. He swivels me around so my back presses against the side of the pool, his hands digging into my thighs harder than is strictly necessary given that I’m weightless underwater.
“Is this a green light, Rosen?” he asks, and it’s not at all lost on me that his voice is suddenly raspy.
“A green light for tonight,” I confirm, and our mouths meet before I’ve finished saying the words, both slick and wet from pool water.
He pushes himself against me, our kiss feverish and desperate, just like the first time.
There’s no room between us other than our clinging, wet clothes, and he’s not shy about grinding into me, so I grind back and work myself into a frenzy, my back rubbing against the edge of the pool so hard I know I’ll have a scrape there.
After minutes that seem like an hour, Daniel pulls away, looking as shaken and breathless as I feel. I’m looking around for a pool chair or someplace comfortable enough to turn this party horizontal, but he’s thinking something different.
“Okay,” he gasps, holding up a hand. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Red light,” he says, swimming backward, away from me. “For tonight.”
“Red light? After all that?” I cock my head at him, my brain blurry from the cocktail of hormones racing through me.
“ All that”—he waves a finger through the air in my general direction—“was more than enough to—” He stops and runs a wet hand over his face. “It was more than enough. Trust me.”
I’m legitimately confused for a second.
“I don’t know about you, Mallory, but that… You know, I’m not a monk; I have had hookups before, but they don’t usually feel like that. Again, I don’t know about you.” He seems a little embarrassed to be admitting this. But I know what he means.
“No,” I agree. “They don’t usually feel like that.”
“So. You might have been right.”
“Right? That we shouldn’t have?” I deflate at this.
“Maybe.” He gives a nervous laugh. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now.”
“Me neither,” I say. “Except I wish we had a towel.”
With an unspoken agreement not to touch each other again, we sprawl out on pool chairs and spend the next hour and a half talking as the balmy night air dries us off.
When we finally say good night, I have to admit to myself that the talking might not have been such a great idea, either. If he hadn’t suggested going home, since it was past one in the morning, I could’ve kept talking to him all night long.