Chapter 10 #2
Maybe I was being dumb and irrational, but in five days I’d never need to see him again, why run now? Panic alarms were going off in my head as my brain was trying to override the actions my heart was doing.
This was a DEFCON 1 moment that I was incredibly ill-prepared for, yet craved with each neuron in my body.
Anxiety, desire, joy, and a million other feelings thrummed away in my stomach.
Our faces grew closer to one another’s, until there were millimeters between us.
A divide that had spanned miles, worlds practically, had been reduced to nearly nothing.
Some of my head’s fears bubbled to the surface. “Ev-Evan—what are we doing?” I whisper, barely loud enough for him to hear me.
“What I’ve wanted to do from the minute I saw you in that kayak,” he placed a hand on my neck and gazed. The way this man gazed earned him an Emmy nomination and he was now gazing at me. He was talking to me like a romantic lead, he stared at me like he wanted to kiss me.
Oh my god, he wanted to kiss me.
What he said next confirmed my suspicions. “And if I kissed you, would you mind that?” He chewed at his lower lip, anxiously awaiting my answer. He didn’t assume I wanted to kiss him. He asked—in the most tender of voices—if it was something I’d even consider.
“I wouldn’t mind that,” I peeped out.
Evan didn’t hesitate. He pulled my neck towards him and dipped down. Our lips met. They crashed headfirst into one another. It happened in the same way that I’d watched in dozens of romcoms. I felt Evan’s tongue push on the side of my cheek, I gently bit his lip, starving for more of him.
There were fireworks, sparks, and all the things a younger Dani would’ve used to describe it with a gel pen in her journal. If we were in a John Hughes movie “Head Over Heels” by Tears For Fears would’ve started playing. I swore I could hear the introductory chords to the song echoing around us.
Evan gripped his hands harder around me, his fingers digging into my side.
I begged that he would dig deeper, that his body would merge with mine.
I wrapped myself tighter around him as he lifted me a few inches out of the water.
I could swoon. We both forgot how cold we were as the other’s heat radiated off of us.
The softness of my body pressed up against the rugged muscle of Evan’s somehow fit perfectly together. Two puzzle pieces.
We parted. Evan looked down at me, his face blurred around the edges out of focus. Through the soft lines I could see the heavy lids over his eyes. The blue deeper than before.
I’d refuse to believe that we were fated magnets meant to find the other.
It was nothing more than a fast burn. Faster than the least believable of romance novels and fanfics.
So fast that I was convinced it would burn out before we got out of the lake.
That’s what this was. I dropped my forehead to his chest. His skin was still cool from the lake water.
Tiny goosebumps bloomed across his chest. The coil twisted tighter.
I hadn’t had a kiss like this in a long time, and from how Evan was acting it was clear he hadn’t either.
A passing pang of sadness coursed over me knowing I had wasted years with Nick not feeling something as immaculate as this.
I had to remind myself that Evan was a trained professional in the act, of course he’d execute on it flawlessly.
And I cursed that I may never feel this way again.
“What the fuck just happened,” I uttered. My mouth outpaced my brain.
Evan backed away slightly, eyes fearful that he had made a horrific mistake. I probably looked utterly stunned, maybe even terrified. I couldn’t think about how I looked to him right now.
He pressed his forehead with the heel of his palm, “I don’t know what came over me, I’m sorry did you not—”
“No, no, I, uh, really wanted that. I just…wasn’t expecting it.
Like at all.” I was looking past him now.
I think I may have left my body for a moment.
Surely it wasn’t real, I didn’t kiss Evan McLeod.
Or was it Evan McLeod who kissed me? I was pretty sure he was the one who lit the match between us.
He pulled me in closer again, and a ball of molten steel formed in the pit of my stomach. If this was the conjuring of my imagination I sure did a good job of it.
Any minute now I expected to resurface from the water and see Evan still sitting in his chair on the beach.
“You were right, by the way.” Evan gently cupped my chin. He was definitely standing there in front of me. “About what?” I asked, words felt stupid coming from my mouth.
“I did get used to it.”
I laughed, a girlish giggle that was nearly unrecognizable.
When I looked up I realized I was still holding onto him.
His broad shoulder muscles rippled underneath my fingertips, still damp from the water.
His skin was soft, and up close I could see it was dotted with scattered tan freckles.
I had written off the hand holding attempt as a misstep he made out of loneliness, but this, this clearly had some weight behind it.
I wanted to question his judgment. I wanted to cry out “why me?” There still had to have been some sort of mistake. There’d be some catch, a reveal that this was all a farce. Reality showed that Evan was looking at me, he actually couldn’t stop looking at me.
I didn’t have the time to question, because Sue bounded out of her house calling for Evan.
We both backed away from each other at the first sound of her voice, as if we were unruly kids who had been caught.
“Evan!” she shouted from shore. “I hate to do this but any chance you could help Randy out with one of the water tanks? He needs a second set of eyes and I don’t have the height for it.”
“You bet!” he called, cheery as ever. He grabbed my hand, placed a kiss on it like a goddamned regency-era duke, and ran out of the water. As his body emerged from the lake I noticed he hadn’t even changed out of the shorts he had gone on his run in that morning.
He operated purely on a gut feeling and jumped into the water, was kissing me part of the plan? Even he seemed surprised by it. Evan quickly changed in his cabin and jogged behind Randy and Sue’s house to the water tanks. In the meantime, Sue walked down toward the water, arms crossed.
“Still convinced Hollyweird isn’t interested?” she stood with her hands propped on her hips.
“Shit, Sue you saw us?” I studied her face to decipher how much she’d watched. The lake was more or less a fishbowl, anyone from shore would have been subjected to what had just happened.
She waved me off. “Kiddo, I don’t care. You’re an adult, and he’s a cutie.
” Goosebumps pinpricked across my arms, cutie was an understatement.
“I don’t blame you. I like keeping you on your toes.
” She gave an exaggerated wink as I stepped onto the shore.
The trickling lake water ran down my skin, my mind flashed to the feeling of Evan’s fingertips drumming along my back.
I stayed quiet as I was drying myself off with a towel. Sue fiddled with the turquoise brooch hanging from her neck. “I do recall telling your mother you weren’t going to do anything drastic.”
Suddenly, I was the despondent teenager sitting in her kitchen again. My mother didn’t know me, and Sue didn’t know these circumstances beyond the superficial. “Please, you know she doesn’t actually give a shit.”
“She does, in her own way.”
I wanted to beg her for further explanation.
My mother and I’s relationship was always tenuous at best. As long as I remembered, my mother had hardly paid attention to whether or not I was conscious, let alone happy.
It was so easy for me to disappear for hours running, far later into the evening than a teenager jogging alone should have.
She was not known for warmth and interpersonal communication.
When my father died when I was in high school, I didn’t find out until I got home and my mother was waiting at the kitchen table, glass of wine in her hand.
The house was dark, a singular lamp in the living room illuminated the bottom floor with a soft amber glow.
My father’s car wasn’t in the driveway, and my mother’s seemed to be parked haphazardly at an angle.
I could smell the alcohol, it covered the kitchen with thick sticky bubbles.
“Your father’s gone,” she said calmly as I stood dumbfounded by the scene before me.
“Gone where, mom?”
“Danielle. You’re fifteen, you know what I mean by that. He’s dead. He had a heart attack and died this morning.” Her voice slurred as she spoke, but the words were cutting.
She was the only one who called me Danielle, and this particular utterance of my name had a harsher bite to it than normal.
Rather than embrace me in comfort as most mothers would, mine ultimately decided to pour herself another glass of Chardonnay and tell me that if I needed to “get anything out of your system” that I needed to do so in my room.
Sue was often the glue that held us together, acting as an intermediary between two countries perpetually at war.
“I don’t know how you put up with her,” I remarked to Sue flatly.
“I knew her before she became what she is now,” she softened a bit, hints of a sisterly instinct shining through. “And I can still get that version of her out sometimes.”
“Must be nice.” I’d dismiss any further conversation relating to her, I’d gone on for a decade hardly thinking about her, I didn’t need to dredge up any feelings that lingered from childhood.
Sue had told me time and time again as a child that my mother wasn’t always this way and deep down there was a warm loving person who needed to be brought out, but I never believed her.