Chapter Twenty-Five #2
He laughs, his cheeks pinkening—from the heat of the water, or from me.
“I loved it,” he admits. It’s unsteadying, to think of us that summer: all that animosity, and knowing now that somewhere in the middle of it, Campbell loved something about me.
He lifts one, wet hand to brush his thumb along my nose.
“I’m glad you still have this, for me to remember that version of you by. ”
How does Campbell make you feel? Ava asked, this morning on the beach.
The truth, right now: precious.
The way he’s holding me, the person it’s becoming clearer and clearer that I’ve been to him all these years. I feel so cherished it’s disorienting.
“I want to kiss you,” I say. Honest and inelegant, but worth every clumsy syllable when he smiles between the frame of my hands.
“Mattie,” Campbell says, “I want to kiss you so badly I could eat your entire face.”
I tuck closer to him. “You call yourself a writer?”
“We can’t all be as—”
But I drop my mouth to his, and he swallows the words.
The fabric of this swimsuit is thin and gauzy, especially useless soaked through.
I feel every aching inch as Campbell hardens beneath me.
His lips taste vaguely of chlorine, the water on his face—and then, as the wet heat of his mouth opens up for me, only of him.
It’s heady, and already distressingly familiar.
When I graze my fingernails into his hair, Campbell makes a low noise in his throat.
I feel it under my palm, braced along his neck, and against my mouth, and at the tender point between my legs where we’re only separated by thin layers of drenched fabric.
His hands rise from my thighs to my bare waist. Then my ribs, his thumbs sweeping the edge of the swimsuit top.
His mouth is insistent and claiming and already I can feel something humming under my skin—steady, pulsing want.
“I can’t—” Campbell bites out as my hand starts to trace down his chest, his stomach. “I can’t get enough of this.”
“This?” I press. My fingertips dip into his swim trunks, and his hips rise to meet me.
“You,” Campbell says. Opening his eyes to look right up at me, swallowing in a steadying sort of way as I lift onto my knees and slide my hand beneath the fabric. I wrap my fingers around him, hot and straining, and his eyes fall shut. “Mattie.”
“Have me, then,” I whisper, starting to move. Campbell’s gaze flickers over mine—as his hips pitch beneath the rhythm of my hand, as his lips part and I mirror the movement with my own.
“Mattie,” he says again. It’s a shred of a word.
“I mean it.” I pull my hand out of his shorts and press my body in along his, arching my back so his hands slide around to my shoulder blades. “Have me.” I kiss his open mouth, graze my teeth across his bottom lip. “Not here. Inside.”
Campbell’s palms find the curve of my ass, and he lifts me through the water, standing to set me on the edge of the tub.
We cross the patio, stumbling wildly to keep from coming apart as he kisses my lips, my jaw.
Campbell’s thumb brushes my nipple through the wet, clinging fabric of my swimsuit, gone hard and obvious in the cold.
“Shower,” he says, stretching one hand back to close the patio doors.
“Why?”
He threads our fingers together and leads me to the bathroom. “So you aren’t freezing.”
My entire body’s bloomed with goose bumps; he noticed before I did. He turns the gold tap in the soaring marble shower and looks at me. “So you feel good.”
I untie the bows of my swimsuit top. It hits the bathroom floor in a wet smack and Campbell’s eyes darken.
“I feel good,” I whisper. He reaches out with one hand on the small of my back and gathers me into him, the hot spray of the shower hitting both of our heads as his free hand rises to my breast.
He thumbs my nipple and says, “I want you to feel even better.”
“Then come here.” I drag his face to mine and Campbell kisses me—deep, hungry strokes of his tongue that I feel between my thighs. When he pulls at the tie of my swimsuit bottom, it comes apart and falls to the floor of the shower.
“No fair,” I say into his mouth. His fingers are already moving against me, soft and teasing. “Now you.”
Campbell straightens, his hand sliding up to hold my hip. He looks at me, water running rivulets over his face, then down at his swim trunks. When my hand lands along the waistband, where he’s taut against the fabric, he breathes out.
“Go ahead,” he says. I loosen the white crisscrossed drawstring.
As it gapes open, I see that Campbell doesn’t shave everywhere: there’s a dark line of curly hair disappearing below the waistband of his swimsuit.
It sends a hot flare of longing through me.
I lower the fabric until it loses purchase, skating down his thighs, and reveals the length of him.
“Can I—” My hands are already reaching into the space between us when I look up.
“Mattie.” Campbell’s voice is scraped with need. “You can do anything you want to me.”
“Anything?” I say, closing my fingers around him and pressing my wet body against his.
He lets out a strangled exhale. “Anything.”
But as I start to move, he can’t seem to hold himself still.
Campbell tips us back into the stream of the water and runs his hands down my waist, along my hips, until his fingers slip between us to where I’m sensitive and wanting.
I let out a sharp whimper, and he flexes responsively in the circle of my fingers.
“Is this okay?” Campbell grinds out. His fingers are intent and staggering.
“It’s okay,” I say, kissing him through the veil of the water. “Feels—so good.”
“Yeah.” He drops his forehead into my neck. “You do.”
Campbell picks up his rhythm, and my thighs tremble. “Mattie.” His voice is slashed. “Can you finish like this?”
I feel like I’m going to come out of my skin—the hot pelt of the water, the steam between our bodies, Campbell in my hands and his unrelenting fingertips. “I don’t know,” I say. “Can you?”
He chokes out a laugh. “Yes. But I don’t want—” His fingers disappear, his hand landing over mine where it’s wrapped around him. He stills me, finding my eyes through the haze. “I want you in bed.”
“So have me in bed.” I squeeze him, gently, and he lifts both hands to cup my jaw. He kisses me deep and dirty before tilting us into the stream of the shower. My skin is so sensitive that I feel like an exposed nerve every time his palms smooth over a new part of my body.
“Come here,” he says, stepping out of the shower. He wraps me in a thick towel and, for a minute, just takes me in: his hands on my arms, he’s naked and dripping in front of me.
“What?” I say.
Campbell shakes his head. He blinks through wet eyelashes. “You’re just—you’re really so beautiful.”
He’s unbelievable like this: his hair drenched and dark, water charting the planes of his chest, his lips parted and swollen. “You’re beautiful, too.”
Campbell grins, at once surprised and triumphant. It’s a smugness I’m so damn charmed by: the way he beams anytime I admit to feeling something for him that isn’t opposition.
I open my arms and pull him into the towel with me, pressing our damp bodies together. “Bed,” I whisper, and he shuffles us gracelessly from the bathroom. A laugh bubbles out of me and Campbell tastes it, his lips wet on mine as he pulls the towel from me and wipes himself off.
We’re standing at the foot of his bed and he guides me back onto the mattress. I’m thinking of that first day in Aspen, tipping backward like a snow angel onto my own bed, when Campbell sinks to his knees on the floor.
“Campbell,” I say, propping onto my elbows. “You don’t have to—”
“Lie down, Mattie.” He takes my knees in both hands and spreads them with so much authority I have to drop back onto the bed and shut my eyes. “Isn’t it clear, by now, how much I want this?”
“But you don’t have to do this.”
“I want to do this.” His hands pet up the insides of my thighs, making me shiver. “Are you still cold?”
“No,” I breathe, barely a word.
Campbell slides two fingers inside of me, slow and steady. His ring brushes the tender crease of my thigh. I whimper, and he says, “Is it okay if I do this?”
I nod, and his fingers curl.
“I need to hear you say it, baby.” His mouth lands on me, one laid-bare kiss that makes my knees fall open even wider. “Is this okay?”
“Yes,” I whine. Campbell licks a wide, hot stripe along me and my hips twitch, chasing friction. “Campbell.”
“Mm?” I feel the hum of his lips and gasp.
“More,” I whisper, and he sucks in a way that’s simultaneously so gentle and so obliterating I bite down on the back of my hand.
“Use me,” he says, lifting his free hand so I’ll take it. He guides it into his hair. When I clench my fingers into a fist, tugging, he groans against me.
By the time Campbell works me over the edge, I’m shaking, my legs trembling around his head and my heart wobbling up my throat. It’s reckless, to let myself be so overwhelmed by him. But I do it anyways: my eyes crashed shut, my fingers snatched through his hair, making small, ruined noises.
Campbell climbs onto the bed at my side and tilts my body into his, palming the back of my thigh and the arced curve of my spine. “How are you doing?” he asks, quietly.
I’m a goner, I think. Holding his eyes in the shadowy light, my entire body wavering against his. I’m so far gone.
“Mattie.” Campbell lifts one of my legs to wrap it around his hip, running his palm down to my knee and back again. “You’re shaking.”
I reach down between us instead of answering, finding him almost painfully hard. When I stroke him in one long motion, he closes his eyes.
“We don’t—” he says, brokenly. “That can be it. We don’t have to do anything else.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I say, and he smiles.
“Now I’m stupid?”
My hand moves, slow and firm. When I whisper, “You’ve always been a little stupid,” Campbell laughs.
“Mattie,” he says again, this time with a directness that stills me. Our gazes catch, and his fingertips press into my thigh. “Are you sure?”
“That you’re a little stupid?”