Chapter 27 #2
I opened my mouth to say something stupid, but nothing made it past my teeth.
The whole world felt too quiet, too malleable.
Sand, air, ocean, and sky—I wanted to merge with all of it at once, but instead I just sat there, letting Tobias’s thumb work slow, small circles over my ankle.
It was the kind of touch that could lull you to sleep or make you confess murder, depending on the direction.
He finished his soup and set the thermos aside, shifting onto his hip so he could face me better.
The blanket wasn’t really sized for two, so our knees brushed, and our shoulders hovered a centimeter apart.
His glasses were slightly fogged at the corners, and his hair ruffled by the salt wind.
He looked unlike anyone else and at the same time like he was always exactly where he belonged.
I wanted to ask him if he thought he would ever get bored of this, of me, of the way I couldn’t help being a little bit raw and a little bit new each time he looked at me like that.
Some other time I might have, but right now I just let my shoulder drift and press into his, and he let it happen, leaning back on one hand and letting the other rest on my knee.
It was such a gentle kind of contact that it didn’t feel like possession or even a hint of it.
It felt like gravity, or like the way deep water pressed its presence around you without ever touching you directly.
I let it hold me there, propping my weight against him.
In the dark, we must have looked like a pair of washed-up objects on the sand—a figurehead and the wreck.
Tobias gazed out over the water, but I could tell his attention was on me, his thumb rising and falling in the gap between my ankle. I didn’t know what he wanted, exactly, except maybe to obliterate the space between us atom by atom, until there was nothing left but touch and the suggestion of it.
“Can I… kiss you?” I managed, which was the last thing I expected to say. My voice was so thin I almost didn’t recognize it.
Tobias’s throat worked, and for a second, he just stared at me. Then he nodded, or maybe his head just dipped with the force of whatever was in him, and I leaned in and kissed him, putting my hands on his jaw. He kissed back with the kind of care you give to something you’re terrified of breaking.
I don’t exactly remember how we got from sitting on the blanket to lying on it, except that one minute my palms were pressed to his face, and the next I was half-straddling his lap, the two of us bracketed by sand and the roar of surf in the dark.
Tobias’s hands were everywhere, his pace hurried and desperate like never before.
I lost track of whose hand slid under whose shirt first. My brain had begun to cloud, vision pulsing red at the corners from how much I needed his hands on me, his mouth, his—everything.
I kissed him like I was starving for it, because I was, and he kissed me back with the kind of fervor that made me feel as if I were the only thing in the world.
He wasn’t rough, not exactly, but he was urgent, all containment gone.
I could feel him trembling, and it made me want to break apart and melt into the sand.
I wanted to push him down and be pushed down; I wanted the friction, the press of his body, the way he was always a little too much and never enough.
We fumbled. I couldn’t stop laughing every time one of us tried to unbutton something in the dark and failed. The blanket was the only thing between us and the cold, wet sand, and I was grateful for it, grateful for every inch of warmth and friction that kept me from coming apart.
Tobias’s mouth was on my neck, then my collarbone, then lower, lower, as he eased me onto my back. The blanket below was only marginally softer than the sand, but the way he touched me made it feel like a bed, like a place you could want to stay forever.
He dragged my shirt up, then off, and I kicked out of my jeans with graceless urgency, skin prickling with cold until his body blanketed mine.
The taste of him was in my mouth, and I wanted more.
I wanted all of him. I pulled at his shirt, and he let me, but when I tried to undo his belt, my hands trembled so badly I got nowhere.
He stilled my fingers, his own hands shaking a little, and together we got his belt open, our combined effort so hilariously bumbling that I started to laugh again, and then—to my own genuine shock—I broke apart and started to cry, the kind of silent, shuddering tears that come with a sudden, bottomless sense of loss.
Tobias’s hands were everywhere at once, frantic, and then they weren’t. He froze, panic radiating off him, his whole body going so still I half-expected him to stop breathing.
I tried to muffle the sound in my elbow, but failed miserably, and then he was gathering me up, wrapping himself around me with both arms and cradling my head against his chest. I buried my face into his pecs, feeling his naked body for the first time, which for some reason only made me cry harder.
“It’s fine,” I gasped, waving my hand blindly as if he could see it. “I’m fine. I just—fuck, I don’t know what’s wrong with me—”
Tobias shushed me, the hush more animal than comforting—a noise pressed into hair and skin.
His breath was fast and hot above my ear.
I could hear his heart, less like a drum and more like something live and trapped.
He touched my face, my jaw, the points where my neck and shoulder met, all with the flattening urgency of someone checking for the most critical wound.
I tried to say his name, but it came out wet and useless, and he only held me tighter.
My lungs burned. I was so full of wanting him, so full of terror I could drown in it, and the only thing I could think to do was clutch at him, nails digging into his back, just to prove I was still real and not a hallucination of what I wished my life could have been.
“It’s all right.” Tobias’s voice was a bare scrape, thread-thin and trembling.
“It’s all right. You can—I want you to—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
He made a sound, lips pressed against my hair, and stilled as if he was holding back something so enormous, it could have torn both of us apart if he let it out.
I felt raw, pink, and new and exposed to weather, but also lighter—as if the act of crying in his arms had somehow emptied the ballast from my chest. It felt safe, as much as anything ever did, to let myself shake like this in his hands, to let him see how annihilated I was by everything that had happened, how cracked open by the way he looked at me, touched me, made me want things I hadn’t ever wanted before.
It was embarrassing, but not unbearable, and for once I didn’t want to pull away or make a joke to fill the space.
When I could finally breathe again, I fumbled for his face, my palm awkward against the rasp of his beard. I stroked his cheek, feeling the sharpness of him and the way his whole body quivered beneath my touch.
I could have said anything—could have filled the air with apologies or reassurances or just let the wind and waves do their work. But what came out was almost a whisper, as if I was afraid the world would break open if I said it too loud.
“I think I love you.” It landed like a stone dropped in water. The truth of it just sat there, shivering and alive.
Tobias’s breath hitched, and for a second I thought he hadn’t heard me, but then he was laughing, the strangest, most beautiful sound—close to a sob, but more like the noise of someone who had just survived something impossible. He pressed his forehead to mine, eyes squeezed shut.
“I didn’t want to hope for that,” he said, voice ragged. His voice in the dark was the sound I’d been waiting for—something more important than anything I’d ever heard in my life, and it left me so exposed I could hardly stand it.
I wanted to say something clever, or at least salvage some dignity, but the only thing that happened was that I kissed him, desperate and salt-tasting, still crying a little because I didn’t know how to stop.
He kissed me back, so hard it felt like penance. His hands fanned over my ribs, then lower, and lower still, and I let him, letting my own hands wander up his chest and into his hair. I was so lightheaded I thought I might actually pass out if I didn’t get more of him.
He pulled away just enough to look at me, and even in the near-dark I could see the disbelief and ecstasy warring in his face. “Are you sure?”
I nodded, throat so tight it hurt, and for a moment neither of us moved, just lay there in the briny dark, a tangle of bone and hope and the kind of hunger that was nothing like what I’d ever had before.
“I’m sure. I’m scared about it, but I’m sure,” I murmured shakily.
Then I pressed myself against him, feeling the shape of him everywhere, the heat of his skin, his breath warm at my jaw.
He kissed me so hard my teeth stung, and I gasped, not in pain but in the sudden realization that I wanted everything, every piece of him, more than I wanted air.
I didn’t know how to say that, and I didn’t need to, because Tobias already had me—he slid his hands over my flanks, into the small of my back, palms cupping me as if to memorize the angle and weight of me.
He kissed the corner of my eye, the edge of my mouth, my jaw, his hands roaming lower until I arched into him, desperate. I could barely stand it, and he seemed to know, because the hand that had been stroking my hip slid lower, curling around my thigh, angling me, opening me up to him.
The blanket was rough under my back, and the wind’s chill stung the undersides of my legs, but Tobias was a furnace above me, muttering my name and nonsense sounds into the skin behind my ear.