16. Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Benji
Show me.
Fuck yes.
Except I’m holding a half-eaten s’more, my fingers are sticky with marshmallows, and Gina is still engaged to Milo.
Not that those things will stop me. It’s just…
I’ve held back from kissing her so many times because I want her to choose when and how it happens.
Also she’ll hate it if I get marshmallow in her hair.
But I really want to kiss her again. What do I do?
“Can I—?” She shifts to kneel on the bench, and I look up into her eyes. I’m nodding when she cups my face in her warm hands. Her fingertips slide into my hair. Can she hear my heart racing over the crackle of the fire? “Like this?” she whispers.
Right. She doesn’t remember what happened next. “Like this,” I confirm. “You closed your eyes, and I looked at you. I wanted to memorize every eyelash, each freckle, the shade of pink rising on your cheeks. Your lips parted, and I needed to know how they felt, how you’d taste.”
She inhales sharply.
“So I bent down and took that kiss. The noise you made—so sweet.” I close my eyes. I can still remember that moment so clearly. How she kissed me back. “You tasted like summer, and you held me tight, and I thought—”
She tips my face up, and I open my eyes. She’s bathed in the warm, flickering light of the campfire and the cool blue light of the stars. I thought you were the most beautiful person I’d ever seen, and you were mine.
Kiss me, Gina, please. I can’t wait for another second.
She kisses me. The first brush of our lips is electric.
She makes that same tiny noise she did when we kissed in Vegas.
I feel it everywhere. It burrows under my skin and slips into my bones.
When her lips part for me, I drop my half-eaten s’more.
Screw sticky fingers. I fist the sides of her T-shirt, pulling her closer.
Her tongue tastes like burnt sugar, and that’s the only way I’ll be toasting my marshmallows from now on.
We kiss for minutes, hours. The crackle and pop of the campfire marks the time while we slowly discover all the ways our lips fit together. All the ways I can tell her I’m hers without words.
Her hands in my hair feel so damn good, and I’m so fucking hard for her. I’m straddling the log, and I want her to straddle me, but she needs to be the one setting the pace.
Climb onto my lap. Please. I might die if I don’t feel you against my cock.
Wishing worked with the kiss, but it doesn’t get her on my lap.
Maybe that first wish coincided with a shooting star or something.
The kiss winds down slowly, reluctantly.
Her hands settle on my shoulders, then fall away as she pulls back.
She smiles at me with kiss-swollen lips. “Was it like that in Vegas?”
“You mean world-shaking, life-changing, and perfect? Yes.” The smile that earns me is a little bashful, and she doesn’t deny it as she slips back to sit facing the fire. It's burned down with both of us too occupied to put another log on.
Gina sighs. “It’s getting late.”
In another world, that’s a cue for us to finish what we started in the bedroom.
But in this one, she puts the fire out while I pick up the s’mores stuff, and we go inside to get ready for bed—Gina in her room, me on her couch.
The smile she gives me when she says goodnight is dreamy, and I fall asleep happy.
Life is good.
Gina’s still smiling over last night’s kiss, and I’ve become Happy Lake’s unofficial paddleboard instructor. My T-shirt is off, and the sun feels good on my skin. Even better, if I look up at the lodge, I know Gina will be watching me.
Even when she’s working, I can summon her to a window by standing on the beach and taking off my shirt, which is why, when I borrowed Wade’s metal detector the other day to look for the rings, I covered the beach and lawn surrounding the lodge three times.
I found seventeen bottle caps, one rusted old whistle, and my wife with her nose pressed to the window.
Pamela gives a loud squawk as she nearly loses her balance. Her laughter, alongside Joelle’s, ripples across the water.
“Bend those knees a little, Pamela,” I call back over my shoulder. “Eyes up.”
“My eyes are up,” she protests, but she bends her knees and stabilizes despite Joelle’s snort.
Pamela hasn’t fallen in for at least ten minutes, and we’ve managed to paddle about twenty feet from shore, away from the swimmers.
Everyone at Happy Lake is on the beach or in the water today. It’s a hot one.
We’re close to the end of the swimming beach, so once they catch up to me, it’s time to turn around. Waiting gives me time to look up at the lodge, and sure enough, Gina is leaning against the sliding glass door, watching me. I wave. She waves back. We’re both smiling.
She should be out here with me. Maybe I can convince her to spend a few hours paddling somewhere more private on her next day off.
My students glide next to me, and I demonstrate how to turn, reminding Pamela to keep her knees slightly bent and her stance wide.
Joelle, who quickly picked up all the basic techniques, slowly turns. Pamela turns in the opposite direction, then changes her mind, and the two laugh.
Not too far behind them, a large bird dives toward the lake, close to the shore. It might be an eagle or an osprey. Gina would know.
Joelle cheers as Pamela finishes her turn. I forget the bird and cheer along with her. It echoes over the lake, picking up volume.
Wait, that’s not an echo.
That’s—quacks?
Joelle glances over her shoulder, and I turn to follow her gaze as the eagle/osprey flies back up over the trees.
“Duck!” she shouts.
It’s not a duck, I’m about to point out to her as the eagle/osprey lands on a scraggly branch near the top of a tree, but then there’s a scream followed by a splash. I turn back to find Pamela in the water, Joelle crouched low on her paddleboard.
And suddenly, there are ducks. They stream above me, a river of irritated quacking and wings as they try to take flight. The paddleboard rocks under my feet, but this is surreal—they’re so close I could touch them. It feels like I’m one of them.
“Duck!” Joelle yells again.
I turn instead. One last duck is trying like hell to get in the air. There’s a flurry of brown feathers as it smacks into my head. My arms windmill, but it’s too little, too late. The force knocks me and the duck into the water.
I pop back up as the duck runs across the lake's surface, wings flapping as it finally gets airborne again. The angry quacking fades into the distance as it joins its friends at the far end of the bay.
“Are you okay?” Joelle asks, and when I nod and haul myself back onto the paddleboard, she dissolves into laughter. “I told you to duck!”
That sets Pamela off as she bobs in the water beside her paddleboard.
I laugh, too, because did I seriously get brained by a duck? What are the odds of that?
I glance up to see if Gina saw that. Maybe a guest inside distracted her, but no. She’s out on the deck, gripping the rail. So she saw that.
Everyone saw that. People in the water, sitting on blankets or camp chairs on the beach, are all pointing, laughing, or staring.
My head doesn’t hurt as much as my pride, but I touch it lightly. My fingers come away with a little watery blood, and my stomach drops.
“It’s not too bad, but better get that taken care of,” Pamela says.
Joelle sticks close as we paddle back to shore, on our knees this time while Pamela swims, pushing her paddleboard ahead.
We’re greeted with a mix of concern and laughter. Ty and Caden—two recent high school graduates staying with Ty's family for a couple of weeks—push through the crowd, phones in hand.
They’d been recording each other attempting some picnic table parkour when the noise of the ducks drew their attention. The video jumps from a backflip to a close-up of me, surrounded by ducks in flight, Joelle yelling to duck—and me getting duck-ed.
The pissed-off way the duck flaps off before I resurface makes me laugh, and when they ask, I tell them to post it so long as they don’t tag me.
Gina pushes through the crowd, and I smile at her until a drop of blood rolls down my forehead. That makes me feel like throwing up. She places a fluffy washcloth against my forehead and wraps an equally fluffy towel around my shoulders.
I wince and take over holding the washcloth. “So you saw that, huh?”
“It could’ve happened to anyone,” she assures me, patting my arm. I follow her into the lodge and back to the office, perching on the desk while she digs in the first aid kit.
She partially closed the door. I’m trying not to read anything into that when she sets her supplies on the desk next to me and carefully peels back the washcloth.
I focus on her face while she gently dabs my forehead around the cut.
The dusting of freckles over the golden hues of her skin, her pretty pink lips made for smiling, the golden flecks in her mossy green eyes—“You’re so beautiful. ”
She shushes me and grabs an alcohol wipe, but pink spreads under those freckles.
I grab the belt loops on her shorts, tugging her to stand between my spread legs. She hasn’t told me off yet, so I walk my hands up from her belt loops under her T-shirt.
“How can a professional dancer be so clumsy?” she asks. She can pretend to ignore my hands, but her skin pebbles with goosebumps at my light touch. “This is the second time I’ve had to patch you up.”
“I’m not clumsy.” I am sometimes clumsy—I was in a moon boot the night we met, thanks to a fall at rehearsal. “That duck was clumsy.”
Her lips quirk as my fingers dance over her lower ribs, but she puts the alcohol wipe down and grabs a Steri-Strip, all her focus now on applying it to the cut.
“You should kiss me again,” I say.
“Not here,” she whispers, reaching for another Steri-Strip.
Not here doesn’t mean not at all . Does she want more? Are things shifting in my favor? “Milo didn’t come back last night.”
Gina’s brow furrows in concentration, her lips pressing together as she places the next Steri-Strip.
“Did you break off the wedding?”
“No.”
Damn it. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. That’s okay. There’s still time, and I’m confident she’s interested in more kissing. “You feel this spark between us, don’t you?”
She studies her handiwork, then takes a small step back, my hands slipping from her T-shirt. But her gaze meets mine, and she nods.
“You don’t feel it with him.” It’s not a question.
She sighs. “Can we not talk about this?”
There’s still time—two more weeks until I’ll have to sign the divorce papers.
But I have the whole summer to change her mind.
Up until she says ‘I do’ to him. “Okay,” I say, getting to my feet, careful to keep my voice low.
“But I want you to know I meant every vow I made that night, and now that I know you better—I’d marry you all over again. ”
The look on her face might be anguish or frustration or maybe yearning. Whatever it is, it’s full of emotions she’s barely containing.
“You need a day off,” I say, changing the subject. I don’t want to push her too hard or too fast. “A real one,” I add before she can protest that she has Mondays and Tuesdays off. She does, but we both know she’ll be working, if not at Happy Lake, for someone in Havenwood.
“I need to get back to work,” she says, sidestepping the argument.