Page 60 of Learn Your Lesson

Nothing but pure, honest intent to do good.

Fuck, I hated that. I loved it. I detested it. I craved it.

I wanted to warn her to shut her mouth just as much as I wanted to shut it myself, to kiss her hard and leave her breathless.

“Sorry,” Chloe said, reading my stare as me being upset. Which was fair, since I wasn’t sure exactly what I was feeling. “We don’t have to. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“Stop fucking apologizing.”

“Then stop looking at me like I need to apologize.”

My eyebrows shot up at that. “Is that how you think I look at you?”

“Is it not true?”

I could see how she was breathing harder now, her chest rising and falling rapidly as she doubled down on sitting on her hands — no doubt to avoid fidgeting. There was something bold in the way she stared at me, like she was facing a fear I didn’t realize she had just by talking to me.

“Most of the time, you’re glaring at me or storming away from me. Even today, it was like it killed you to say even a few nice things to me. You left the classroom without so much as a goodbye. You’ve been ignoring me all night. One moment, you’re looking at me like I’m… I don’t know, a blessing or something. And the next, it’s like you wish I’d never been born.”

I ground my teeth together, Adam’s apple bobbing hard in my throat.

But I couldn’t speak.

A flash of earlier that day hit me hard in the chest, when she’d laughed off her job and acted like she was nothing special. I’d wanted to tell her how wrong she was, and I’d started to — before remembering why I never tried to articulate thoughts like that.

I was terrible with words.

It was easier for me to show what I thought and felt through actions, through touch.

But I sure as fuck couldn’t touch her.

So what was I supposed to do?

Couldn’t she see it? Couldn’t shefeelit, too? When I looked at her, she squirmed beneath my gaze like it was a heat lamp. When I so much as brushed a part of her skin, I swore I heard her suck in a breath and hold it just as I did.

She had to know I was holding back. She had to understand that I wanted her so fucking badly I was making myself sick trying to refrain from giving in. And if she didn’t know, if she was waiting for me to say it…

How could I tell her the truth, when I wasn’t even ready to admit it to myself?

“You know why I left without saying anything,” I finally ground out, the words raspy and harsh.

Chloe’s breaths picked up speed, her nostrils flaring. I watched that determination slide over her again, despite how she swallowed and paled a bit.

And then, she pressed her weight onto her hands, lifted herself, and slid into the water.

Fuck.

My heart tripped over itself before starting to race, and it beat faster and faster as I watched her body disappear beneath the water. The line of it rested just under her breasts when she was all the way in, lifting the weight of them, her nipples hardening into peaks.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” she breathed, but that breath betrayed her. Everything about her body screamed that she knewexactlywhat I wouldn’t say.

Goosebumps spread over her arms and chest.

Her eyelids fluttered.

Her hands shook until she submerged them beneath the water.

She took one small, slow step toward me, and then another, her brown eyes locked on mine.