Chapter 18 The Lake #3
Ethan’s hand secured itself around my thigh, bringing my focus back to him.
Snapping my head forward, my heart began back on that steady race to beat so fast and so violently that it was just a continuous murmur of panic as I realized just how close Ethan and I were. His face was right in front of mine.
His lips were even closer.
“I felt something,” I said through quick breaths. “It touched my leg.”
Clear shock held Ethan’s eyes wide open and his mouth parted just so.
He was so near, I could see myself in the water droplets holding themselves up on his cheek and feel the strength in his body between my legs.
Oh God. This was bad. This was really, really bad.
I’d pretty much just obliterated that line we spoke about just moments ago, and I wasn’t even thinking when I did it.
I guess that’s how most bad decisions happen though. Little thought and a whole lot of consequence.
“You sure it wasn’t just some weeds or something?” Ethan’s voice was slow, like he was trying to catch up to the moment.
“It was slimy,” I offered.
“That could be anything in here.” He cocked a disbelieving eyebrow that shattered through the surprise in his eyes. Thank the Lord.
“All I know is that something touched my leg and that’s enough for me.”
“What, are you getting out now?”
“I’m certainly not staying in here with whatever tried to go to second base with me.”
“But what about the pictures?”
“You mean the pictures you’d have to be outside of the water to take?” I asked with a stunning bite of sarcasm.
“ You’re the one who asked me to get in in the first place.”
“Yes, and now I’d like to get out please.”
Challenge wrote itself in around Ethan’s eyes that I had no problem seeing given how close we still were. “All right. So get out.”
“Well, I—” I stuttered. “I was kinda hoping you’d walk me back over to the dock.”
He shrugged so nonchalantly; I knew he was messing with me.
“I’m not ready to get out.”
“But—”
“If you want a ride over to the dock, you’ll have to stick it out with me in here for a bit longer.”
“Ethan,” I whined.
“Five more minutes.”
The compromise was written into the endearing lines of his smile, and before I even gave him a response, I felt my heart give into him hook, line, and sink right to the bottom of the lake.
“Fine.”
With my decision final and our time in the lake now given a limit, I waited for Ethan to move me off of him. I waited for the push of his hands against my legs, brushing me from around his waist and back to an acceptable distance. I waited and I kept waiting.
I waited on and on for a rejection that never came.
Ethan never even made an attempt to remove me from around him, and while the thought crossed my mind that maybe I should make that move, the feeling of being wrapped around him was too divine to let go of.
The warmth his body provided was way too comforting against the icy waves of water splashing against my skin.
And I wasn’t ignorant enough to try and deny the euphoria infusing my blood even hotter being skin to skin with Heaven.
For the next five minutes, we stayed exactly as we were, bodies intertwined and our hearts beating against our pressed chests as if they were attempting to break down our walls and climb out and touch each other.
“So why didn’t you ever try to become a photographer? You’re really good.”
Ethan perked a charismatic brow up at me. “Who says I didn’t try?”
“Well… did you?”
The life in his eyes melted away into the water around us. “No.”
“Why not?”
Ethan didn’t come across as the type of person to give up on something he loved or was passionate about. He came across like the kind of person who would fight and strive and bleed for something he loved until it loved him back just as equally.
“It just wasn’t meant to be.” He shrugged beneath my arms around him. “That’s all.”
“But why not?” I pushed. I wasn’t buying his half-hearted answers, and if there’s anything that Ethan taught me so far, it was that persistence was the key to unlocking information that may or may not be any of your business. “There has to be more to it than that.”
Against his chest, I could feel the steady rise in his heartbeat, and I could see his pulse quickening in his neck. Whatever it was, was a page unseen in the story of Ethan and more than ever, I wanted to devour his words.
In a voice so low it was almost a whisper, he answered, “My mom. She’s the one who wants me to be a lawyer.”
Confused but thrilled that he was opening up, I kept on pushing. “Is there any reason why? Like, is it a career that runs in your family?”
“Nope.” Ethan rolled his lips together as staggering disdain rolled through his stare. “I’ll be the first.”
“Then why?”
Ethan sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“I like to listen.”
“Longer than five minutes.”
My lips grew into a gentle smile. “I guess I can make an exception this once.”
The clarity of his decision to tell his story came from the pit of his eyes and how they screamed through the black before he’d ever said a word. They screamed with pain, with vulnerability, and with the sound directed right at my aching heart.
“My senior year of High School, I was on track to study Photography in college. I had applications sent out to my top three schools and planned on going forward with the whole starving artist lifestyle. I was pretty stoked to eat ramen noodles for three straight meals a day.”
Of course he’d find a way to joke right now. Even in our most serious moments, Ethan still found ways to make me laugh.
“My dad was driving me home from school one day because I had stayed late to develop some photos and…” Ethan’s stare shifted down to the water between us, and I chased his gaze with mine.
I needed to see him right now. I needed it like it was my very next breath and his eyes held the oxygen essential to my survival.
“This truck… came out of nowhere and slammed into us. Our car rolled four times before hitting these concrete blockades on the side of the road.”
My mind spliced together horrific images of the scene he was describing, and I saw the car rolling, the terror in a young Ethan’s eyes, and I heard that sickening crush of metal hitting metal.
My stomach twisted with the images my mind provided and without thinking, I tightened my grip around Ethan’s shoulders, half for support and half to keep myself from pulling him closer.
“I wasn’t thinking anything when we were rolling,” he continued, his voice as far off as the look in his eyes. “I was just… watching it happen to me like it wasn’t real. Like I was watching a scene from a movie instead of my life.”
Ethan drew further and further back into himself and his memories. The look in his eyes was so far off and away—back in time, back in that car. The pain reflecting in them was enough to turn the water around us to bone chilling ice.
“Once we finally stopped, I turned to my dad to make sure he was okay.” There was a break in Ethan’s voice—one that cracked my heart in two. My stomach dropped. Ethan swallowed hard. The anguish in his eyes exploded and leveled my heart to dust.
“The second I saw him… I just knew. I still don’t know how I knew he was gone. He didn’t have any visible blood on him. He just looked like he was sleeping. I tried to wake him up like he was.”
The image of Ethan bloodied and desperate, shaking his father’s lifeless body and begging him to please wake up was too much.
I tried to speak, to say that’s unimaginable, to say that’s awful, but found forming any words at that moment difficult.
What can you say to someone who just told you they watched one of their parents die right next to them?
I couldn’t hope to say anything that would make him feel better but I wanted to.
Right then and there, I wished for the perfect set of words to make the pain creasing every flawless inch of his face disappear.
Though, all I could come up with were three, poor excuse words that meant nothing of the despair I truly felt for Ethan.
“I’m so sorry.”
He spared me a brief glance only to acknowledge that I’d spoken. He and I both knew that my condolences meant nothing compared to his tragedy.
“It turned out to be a drunk driver that hit us. Some guy blazed out of his mind at 4 o’clock in the afternoon who just so happened to run the wrong red light at the fucking wrong time.”
In my life, I’d gathered a very short list of people that I truly, deeply, wholeheartedly hated. Today, that list grew by one name.
“After my dad died, I took a year off from school to take care of my mom and sister. When it was time to start applying to schools again, I knew I needed to do something that brought in lots of money to help my mom out with bills, which meant that photography would have to take a backseat.”
As my brain registered his words, my crush on Ethan tried to expand and deepen into something more.
Any man putting his passions on the back burner to help his family out would make my heart buckle, but learning that quality about Ethan?
A man I already swooned for with just a playful smile or meaningful glance?
That was a potentially disastrous nugget of information for me to keep.
“My mom started suggesting I look into law school. Then suggesting became asking and then asking became begging. She wanted me to go into criminal prosecution to make sure the ‘bad guys got what they deserved’ in her words.”
Carefully, I asked. “What happened to the guy who hit you and your dad?”
The hurt overwhelming Ethan’s stare suddenly turned cold and hardened into crystallized rage. “He got 12 months and two years of supervised release.”
“ That’s it?”
He nodded. “Yup. My dad doesn’t get to see me or my sister grow up or grow old with my mom, but this guy who killed someone gets to live out the rest of his life doing whatever the fuck he wants.”