8. Hudson #2
“Because you looked like you were braced to be told no,” I hear myself say instead.
“Like you'd practiced it on the walk over.
And I didn't want to be one more person who said it.” I'm looking at the water, not at her, because that's already more than I meant to say. “That's all. Don't make it a thing.”
The quiet that comes after has a little weight to it.
“Hudson.”
“Nope.” I reach for the rope back to solid ground. “We're not doing a moment. Eat your fancy bread.”
“Hudson.”
I look at her.
It's a mistake, looking at her. She's soaked and freckled and furious-soft, lake water on her lashes, a piece of weed still stuck above her ear that I want to reach over and deal with, and not stop there.
And she's looking at me like she's trying to read the back of a page she can already half see through, and the want comes up in me so fast and so total that the whole running commentary in my head just, stops.
I want to put my mouth on the weed-stuck spot above her ear and work down. I want to know what sound she makes. I want, with an immediacy that has nothing professional in it at all, to find out how soft the inside of her wrist is, and whether she'd shiver if I got my teeth near it.
You said surprise me, she'd told the room. Do what sells it. I trust you.
Nobody's watching. That's what gets me. There's no aunt, no porch, no mother, no town, no one on this entire shoreline to sell a single thing to.
But we're supposed to be practicing anyway, aren't we.
That's the whole arrangement. A man could kiss her right now and call it practice and nobody, not one soul, could say he was out of line.
I can call it practice. I can absolutely call it practice.
I cup her face in one hand. Lake-cold skin, warming under my palm.
“Tell me no,” I say, and I mean it, the rule is the rule, hers is the only call that counts. “Right now. And I'll make a joke and we'll never bring it up again.”
She doesn't tell me no.
“Practice,” I say, mostly to myself.
And then I kiss her.
It is supposed to be practice. I told myself, two seconds ago, that it was practice. It is not practice. Her scent's all around me now, brown sugar and warm oat gone soft at the edges, an omega scent doing something to the back of my brain that no amount of telling myself otherwise is going to fix.
It's her mouth soft and startled and then not startled at all. Her hand fisting in the wet front of my good shirt. The little sound she makes that I'll hear in my sleep for a week.
She opens for me on a gasp and I have to lock every muscle I own not to haul her into my lap right here in four feet of lake water and find out what other sounds she's got.
And every smug, deflecting wall I've ever built comes down, quietly, like a boat going over in the shallows. Lazy and total and always going to.
And underneath it, something older wakes up in me.
Because this close, kissing her, I finally get her scent with nothing in the way. Brown sugar and warm toasted oat, the smell of somewhere you'd want to come home to. It goes straight past every reasonable thought I've got and lights the part of me I keep on a short leash.
There's a sound trying to start low in my throat, a purr I have not given anyone permission to make. I clamp down on it. A purr is a alpha telling on himself, and I am nowhere near ready for her to know how far gone I already am.
But I feel it sitting there, wanting out, every instinct I've got lit because she's kissing me back like she means it, her hand twisted in my shirt, pulling me in.
And I understand for the first time, really understand, why everyone keeps warning each other about this.
It isn't the kissing that's dangerous. It's the part underneath that doesn't care what we agreed to.
When we break apart she stays close for a second, forehead nearly to mine, both of us breathing like we just surfaced from somewhere cold. Then she pulls back, and I watch the walls come up behind her eyes, fast and practiced, and she reaches for the safe thing before I can.
“Okay,” she says, a little unsteady. “Okay. That was, that was good. That'll really sell it.” She's nodding too much, not quite meeting my eye. “Good practice.”
And there's the part I don't say. That I walked into this thinking it was a favor and a good time, that I have made a whole personality out of not catching feelings, and that somewhere between a capsized kayak and a loaf of bread I appear to have caught one anyway, hard, with no idea when it happened.
But her walls are up, and she's looking at me like she needs me to hand her the easy version back, like the whole afternoon is balanced on me agreeing it was nothing.
So I agree it was nothing. “Real good practice,” I say, easy, grinning like my chest isn't doing something complicated. “Your aunt won't know what hit her.”
She laughs, relieved, and the moment closes over like water, and I let it, because she needs me to, and because a man's allowed to keep one card to himself.
She nods, fast, grateful, and stands and brushes grass off her legs and announces we should get the boat back, and I get up and help her drag it to the water, and we paddle in, and she does better this time, steadier, going with it instead of fighting, and she doesn't look back at me once.
I watch her the whole way in, the set of her shoulders, the loose wet hair, the way she won't turn around.
I told myself this was going to be a fun morning.
I am the world's biggest idiot, and I'm whistling, and Wes is going to take one look at my face when I get back and know everything.