Chapter 18 The Lake #2
“No. You’re-I…” I kept clicking through picture after picture he’d taken of me, mesmerized more by each one. “I’ve never looked like this.”
Beside me, Ethan let out a short, audible breath that pulled my attention. His eyes were on the pictures, but moved to meet mine. There in his stare, I spotted that unspoken something I’d seen in him at the bar last night. It consumed his gaze but refused to be acknowledged.
“What?” I asked.
I wanted— no —needed to know what he was thinking, what was causing him to bite the insides of his cheeks like he was doing now. I could assume at this point that it was his nervous tick, but what in the world did he have to be nervous about right now?
Covering the secret in his eyes, he averted them towards the dirt.
“Nothing.”
Liar, but okay.
“So what now?” I asked, trying to dispel the sudden tension in the air.
“Uh…” Ethan let out an exasperated, quick laugh and turned to face the lake. “You could always get in the water.”
“But I don’t have a bathing suit?”
“I’ve swam in this lake countless times without one.”
“But then I’ll be wet on the ride home.”
“I’ve got some towels in the car,” he suggested.
Okay, so that takes care of after I get out of the lake, but what about while I’m in the lake? Even thinking about getting in that water with these jeggings on had my insides curling up in repulsion. I hated the feeling of fabric sticking to my skin like a sopping suit.
“But what about what’s in the lake?” Ethan finally turned over his shoulder to look at me with a crooked grin.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. What about gators or snakes or poisonous frogs?”
A skeptical expression pinched Ethan’s features together. “Have you never swam in a lake before?”
“Uh… no?”
“Ah.” Ethan nodded, that crooked smile never waning. “Well, I can promise you that in all the times I’ve swam in this lake, I’ve never come across any alligators or poisonous frogs.”
“What about snakes? You specifically left out snakes.”
“I did.”
“So there are snakes in there.”
“I’ve only ever seen small ones.”
“But the small ones come from somewhere!”
Ethan chuckled and it drifted up into the air, the breeze carrying it away. “All right, would you feel safer if I got in first?”
“Significantly.”
“Fine,” Ethan said as if he was bothered, but nothing about that man appeared even a teeny bit bothered. In fact, the dents in his cheeks only seemed to deepen as he set down his camera on top of his car and kicked off his sneakers.
“Do you have basketball shorts or something to swim in in your car?”
Ethan shook his head just once. “Nope.”
Then he grabbed onto the hem of his shirt and pulled it up over his head, tossing it on top of his car as well.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Immediately, I veered my eyes to the grassy ground.
I picked apart blades of grass with my eyes, forcibly keeping them as far away from the vision of Ethan unbuckling his jeans and discarding them away too.
Here he was, undressing so nonchalantly, and here I was, trying to make sure my heart didn’t beat out of my chest while he did it.
The man I had a massively inappropriate crush on was now half naked next to me, and from even the quick glimpse I got of his upper body before looking away, he was even more tempting than I had thought.
A flash of defined pecs, curves of muscles, and wisps of dark hair sprinkled across the top of his chest swarmed my mind no matter how hard I tried to blink them away.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ethan move towards the lake and a few seconds later—a big ol’ splash.
Peeling my eyes up, I found Ethan emerging through the surface of the nearly black lake, shaking his head back and forth, water splattering like paint from his hair.
He ran his hand over his face, clearing the water from his eyes.
He was unarguably mesmerizing as he blinked his eyes over to me and smiled the widest, most breathtaking smile I’d seen to date.
“See? I’m fine. No snakes!”
“Yet,” I muttered under my breath.
“Come on,” he encouraged.
“Is it cold?”
“Nope. Warm as bath water.”
“That’s not terribly appealing either.” Ethan groaned from the water.
“Just get in the water, Slim.”
My eyebrows cranked together. “Did you just call me Slim?”
“Yup,” he answered without hesitation, moving his hands through the water like blades cutting through. “I finally figured out your nickname.”
Slowly, I began to take off my shoes. “But why Slim? Just based on my… body type?”
“Nope.”
“Then why?”
“No more questions. Just get in.”
A gasp wrought with shock sucked between my teeth as Ethan whipped his arm over the surface of the lake and sent a wave of water in my direction. I yelped and jumped out of the way, a laugh tumbling free despite my scream.
“Okay, okay!” Ethan cheered in victory, and I loathed how much my heart loved seeing him like this. “Turn around!” I yelled to him.
Even between the distance the lake provided us, I could see that smirk of his creasing his lips like it was a neon sign flashing in the darkness. Even still, he abided by my request and turned his back to me.
As quickly as I could, I shimmied out of my pants and tank-top, all the while keeping my stare glued to Ethan’s masculine back to make sure he stayed facing away.
This was stupid and obnoxiously teasing that line that I’d mentioned earlier, but I was sticking to my plan of enjoying my time with Ethan today.
Tomorrow I’d start being good and keeping that distance between us.
Tomorrow was not today. Today, if Ethan wanted me to get in this lake with him half dressed, then bye-bye jeggings.
Wearing only a black bra and underwear that didn’t match—of course—I tiptoed my way down the soft grass until I reached the small, wooden dock. I walked until my toes hung over the edge of the dock, just above the water that up close looked way darker and scarier than it did from up on the land.
“Can I turn around yet?”
“No!”
“Fine,” Ethan sighed. “Just jump in. Don’t ease your way in.”
“Eh, I’m definitely more of an ease your way in kind of person than a jumper.”
“What a safe way to live life,” he quipped.
“Shut up.” Huffing, I sat my butt down on the deck, the wood hotter than I thought it would be from the sun beating down on it. The heat felt good on my skin, though. Part of me just wanted to lie back and sunbathe while Ethan swam. In a way, that sounded like the most perfect afternoon.
Unfortunately, I knew that wasn’t an option and that the longer I waited to get in the water, the more Ethan was going to make fun of me. Taking in a few calming breaths, I sent up a quick prayer that I wouldn’t encounter any unwanted creatures in this lake before pushing my weight off the dock.
“Oh my god!” A sharp breath sucked between my lips as my legs sunk below the surface of the lake and the chill from the water immediately raced up my spine. “You liar! This is freaking freezing!”
Only two seconds in the water, and already, my teeth were chattering as the cold crawled its way into my bones. My feet danced along the bottom of the lake, hitting rocks and dirt squishing between my toes along the way as I hopped over to a grinning Ethan.
“It’s not that cold.”
“Well it’s certainly not bath water,” I replied.
“Just swim around. You’ll get used to it.”
Ethan didn’t appear phased whatsoever by the temperature of the water.
He was swimming around, gliding along the water on his back, making big strokes with his arms to move himself through the lake.
It was hard not to watch him as he swam, and not only because he was shirtless and the sun was glinting his muscles a golden hue that made him look literally God-like.
He just looked so peaceful.
“You see that tree over there?”
I turned my head in the direction of Ethan’s pointed finger and indeed, there was a tall, moss covered, monster of a tree.
“My sister and I tied a rope up on that branch that’s sticking out and we used to swing off of it into the lake.
My mom hated the thing at first. Was sure that we were going to break our necks jumping in. ”
“That sounds like a very mom thing to worry about.”
“Yeah, she eventually came around to liking it and my dad even got her to jump off of it once. Then, one day we came out here and the rope was just gone. My dad went out the next weekend and got us another rope to tie around it. Every time we came back, we’d tie up another rope around that branch and each time, someone always took it down. ”
“Sounds like someone just hates fun.”
“Says the woman who refused to jump into the lake,” he shot back.
“Hey!” I whipped around to find him grinning ear to ear a few feet in front of me. “That had nothing to do with me not being fun and everything to do with me not wanting to be eaten whole by some snake!”
Ethan’s eyes rolled as far back in his head as they could go. “You will not be—”
“What the—”
I cut the rest of our sentences off with a scream as it pierced the air when something in the water brushed my leg.
In a panic and with a quick pump of fear based adrenaline, I threw myself towards Ethan, wrapping my arms around his neck.
I scrambled to get my feet off of the bottom of the lake floor, climbing Ethan’s body and pulling my legs up and around his waist and away from whatever the hell just grazed my lower thigh.
My heart pounding away in my chest, I scanned the water around me, searching for any movement beneath the shallow layer of the lake that I could see through before it got too deep and too dark.
Another scream lurched in my throat when the sensation of something else brushed across the edge of my thigh, but my heart grabbed onto and held the scream in as I realized exactly what that something was.