Page 19

19

KIT

I n the morning, we make a huge breakfast, then snorkel out to the sandbar, where we stretch out in the sand, side by side. “This is so perfect,” I whisper. Behind us, an endless blue ocean; ahead of us, the crystal water we swam through to get here, an unblemished white beach, and the small green palms that separate his home from the shore.

He lifts up a strand of my hair, already bleaching to the palest blonde in the light.

“I’ve always loved your hair,” he says. “I loved the way it got during the summer.”

“It’s just like Maren’s,” I say with a shrug.

“No,” he says. “It’s really not. Yours has this little wave to it and it gets lighter. It was almost white by the time I left the Hamptons.”

A fist squeezes in my chest at the memory of that week— wandering around lost in our beach house, sick with how much I wanted him, desperate for him to stay and also desperate for him to leave to make the feeling stop.

I used to look at the calendar every single night, counting the days until he left for law school. I couldn’t wait and I knew it would break me at the same time.

Right now, with my hair in tangles, my skin turning gold, it’s as if I am seventeen again. Seventeen and so infatuated with Miller I can’t quite think straight. So infatuated I’d have sabotaged my lovely older sister’s relationship in any way I could.

“So when you got back from Kili,” he asks, “how did you avoid managing to break up with Blake?”

I sit up with a grin, brushing sand from my arms. “Are you trying to give me shit for dumping him by text again?”

His smile is slight. “No, I’m just thinking it must have been awkward to act as if everything was normal. I’m assuming you didn’t live together?”

I shake my head. “His business is in Vegas. He claimed he was planning to sell it and relocate to New York, but I got the sense that it might never happen. He kept trying to get me to move out there instead. But anyway, I just hadn’t seen him.”

He looks relieved by this for reasons I can’t understand. “So, no amazing reunion sex after you got back from Kilimanjaro? I’m struggling to imagine dating you and not being in Manhattan waiting the second you got off that plane.”

I squeeze my thighs together to ward off the hard press of want there. It’s all too easy to imagine Miller waiting for me, eager for that reunion. I’d be eager for it too. So fucking eager.

“I don’t think I’ve seen him since New Year’s actually.”

His mouth falls open. “So you’re saying that the two of you went without sex for nearly two months?”

I frown. I suppose that means he has had sex in the past two months, which shouldn’t bother me but does. “It just kind of worked out that way. But yeah, I guess it’s a long time to go without it.”

His gaze lands on mine, saying I could fix that for you .

I can’t agree. But if he just…went for it…I already know I wouldn’t be willing to stop him.

I really wish he’d just go for it.

I shower when we get back to the house and don the second of the bikinis Elite sent: bright red and as skimpy as the first.

He’s in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher. I grab a popsicle from the freezer and hop on the counter to watch him.

“I’m being helpful by providing you with interesting conversation,” I claim.

He glances over his shoulder, his gaze lingering for half a beat on the bikini, on the popsicle as I place it between my lips.

I wonder if he remembers the way he used to tease me, threatening to eat the cherry ones whenever I left the beach house. I loved it. And I loved that he didn’t tease Maren. It made me feel as if he and I shared something he didn’t have with her.

“Go ahead,” he grunts, turning toward the dishwasher. “Provide the interesting conversation, then.”

I lick the sides of the popsicle first. “What would you like me to discuss? Global warming? Celebrities I think are overrated?”

He slams the dishwasher door and leans against the opposite counter. His gaze is on my face. On my mouth.

“I want to talk about the dream you had in the tent,” he says.

I pull the popsicle out of my mouth. “I had a lot of dreams in the tent.”

A muscle ticks in his jaw. “You know what dream I’m referring to. You said it was about someone from college. Who?”

My eyes fall closed for a minute. I could lie. I could make someone up. I just don’t want to. “You know it wasn’t about someone from college,” I whisper. “What was I supposed to say?”

“Jesus,” he whispers, his hands clenching the counter behind him. “You’re lucky I didn’t know that at the time.”

My body is so tightly strung that a single touch could make it shatter.

I lick a trickle of juice running down the popsicle’s side, stalling. His pupils dilate; his nostrils flare. And suddenly I know what that favorite fantasy of mine was based upon, the one I told Maren about: it was him, during that talk in the kitchen.

The faceless man who grabs me on the kitchen counter, the one who doesn’t take no for an answer, was Miller. I needed him to take it from me because I couldn’t offer it, and he was only faceless because I couldn’t stand to admit to myself whose face it was.

I didn’t run him off because I didn’t trust him. I ran him off because I couldn’t stand not having him for myself, and I kept right on wanting him for years and years.

My gaze slowly returns to his. It’s the point where I should make a joke but none come to mind. The only thing in my head is Do it, Miller. Close the distance.

“Fuck it,” he whispers, and in a single stride, he’s crossed the kitchen to where I sit. He pulls the popsicle from my hand and tosses it toward the sink before he grasps my face in his palms and kisses me.

His mouth is warm against my popsicle-cold lips. His tongue finds mine, and my thighs spread wide to bring him closer.

“Fuck,” he hisses, his erection pressing between my legs. I could come just from the feel of him there, from the gentle friction of him pressing closer when we’re still separated by multiple layers of clothing.

I could come at the idea of how much is there, hard as steel.

He cups one breast, groaning against my lips as the pad of his thumb slides over my nipple, pinched tight beneath the top.

He pulls back just enough to watch my face as his hand slides inside the cup of the bikini. His nostrils are flared, his mouth ajar.

As if he could come just by watching me fall apart.

“This fucking bikini is as bad as the other one,” he whispers. “You torture me, Kit.”

I want to argue that he’s the one who’s tortured me, that I’ve waited ten fucking years for this, but his mouth is moving now...down, down to that breast he revealed, to the nipple pinched so tight for him.

“I’ve thought about my mouth here for so long,” he groans as his lips fasten around it and tug hard enough to make me gasp.

His mouth continues—sucking, biting, alternating between soft, sweet kisses and tugs so pleasurable they’re almost painful while his hand trails between my legs, slipping under the elastic of my bikini bottom, air hissing between his teeth when he feels me—slippery and swollen for him. My head falls back against the cabinet as he slides one thick digit inside me.

There’s an awkwardness to your first time with someone, normally… Will he think my ass is too flat? Will he think my boobs are too small? Is that scar from my appendectomy ugly? What if he’s not good? What if I’m not?

None of that exists here.

He knows everything already. If my boobs are too small and my ass is too flat, that couldn’t matter to him less. And he won’t be bad, because he’s him, and I won’t be bad either, because he wants this so much.

“I want to fuck you,” he says. “Right here on this counter. Just like this. I’m not normally this selfish. Judge me for it later.”

I respond by sliding the bikini bottoms off and widening my legs.

I might need more foreplay, under normal circumstances, but I’ve been fantasizing about this for a decade, and wanting him so much that the thoughts infiltrated my sleep, and I’m already so worked up that I’m worried I’ll come before he even gets going.

His trunks fall to the floor and he grasps himself, running the tip of his cock over me once, twice, three times, until I’m gasping and digging my nails into his back, desperate to feel the press of him as he enters me.

“Do I need?—”

“No,” I say with a frantic shake of my head. “Please.”

With a groan, he lines up to my entrance and begins pushing inside me. As wet as I am, it’s a stretch.

“Oh God,” he whispers as his head falls to my shoulder. “It’s too good, Kit.”

“More,” I beg, digging my nails into his back again.

He gives it to me. First in slow thrusts and then harder ones, with one hand braced against the counter and the other wrapped around the back of my head so that it doesn’t slam against the cabinet.

His mouth is on my neck, his sounds muffled.

Jesus.

So long. Wanted. For years.

Just like this.

His words hit in hissed fragments, and each provides a new thrill…tingling up my back, making me clench harder around him. My hair is clinging to my skin; a drop of sweat is streaking down his chest.

“Not yet, not yet,” I cry, pleading more with myself than him.

My teeth dig into my lower lip. I no longer feel anything but the way he is filling me, no longer see anything but the orgasm hurtling toward me, whether I want it to come or not.

“Oh, God, yes, just like that,” I beg, my back starting to give way as if my body can no longer hold me up.

I come with a muffled cry and his mouth presses to mine, inhaling it, groaning as he lets go.

It’s exactly what I fantasized about, but better. He’s still hard inside me, twitching. His hands are on my ass. Mine are on his back.

His head falls to my shoulder, his breathing still fast, and the kitchen grows impossibly silent.

Any moment now, one of us will apologize and then the other will apologize and it will be awkward as fuck.

I should go. I should get out of here as fast as possible because this was such a mistake.

But God, what a mistake. What an amazing, fucking miraculous mistake.

One I now have to set right. My father’s plane is probably gone. I can still get a commercial flight out if I hurry.

I open my mouth to say all this, but his hand grips the back of my neck and pulls my face to his before a single word of it comes out. He is kissing me again, and it is no less desperate, no less raw than it was before.

Which is an odd way to preface the awkward apologizing we both are about to do.

He releases my neck, still kissing me, and tugs my bikini top off. Also a strange way to preface an apology, or the suggestion that we just got carried away. He steps back and looks me over, his eyes dark and hungry.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “I have fantasized about doing so many things to you that I don’t even know where to go next.”

This is a bad idea. My sister will never forgive me, and we really should stop while we’re ahead, but the way that he is looking at me right now keeps me silent. I place my palm against his bare chest, and that seems to be all the agreement he requires. With his hands beneath my thighs, he scoops me off the counter and turns, moving us toward his bedroom, where he places me on the bed.

He climbs on the bed between my spread legs, looking me over with dark eyes. And then he descends to kiss a trail down my neck, brushing over my lips and my eyes. I gasp and his mouth curves into a pleased smile against my skin in response, before it begins to lower. He pulls one tight nipple into his mouth, soft and then hard, making me gasp and arch.

“Fuck,” he groans. “I want to go slow, and you make it so difficult.”

He continues working his way down my torso, his hand still on my breast as he spreads my legs wide and runs his tongue over me, from my entrance and up, circling my clit, using his shoulders to spread me wider as he does it. He places one finger inside me and then another.

“I love the way you taste,” he hisses. “I want to do this for the rest of my natural life.”

Some distant voice inside me argues that this is unrealistic. We can’t stay here, we can’t be together, we wouldn’t even survive if I continued to just let him go down on me twenty-four hours a day, but I can’t seem to form the words. I tug at his hair as if I’m drowning and he is all that can keep me afloat.

“I’m going to—” I cry out. I come before I can complete the sentence, and his tongue moves faster, his fingers plunge harder, prolonging wave after wave, not relenting until my back has settled against the bed and my body’s gone entirely slack.

I stare at him, astonished. “I didn’t even realize I liked that. I apparently like that a lot.”

He laughs, but inside that laughter there’s a rasp of pain, and when he leans over to kiss me, he is like steel against my abdomen. I reach for him and he groans. Already, it’s as if I haven’t just come twice but have never come in my entire life and really, really want to see what all the fuss is about.

I should return the favor, however. I’m nothing if not fair-minded.

“Get on your back,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “I want that. I am going to want that a million times. But right now, I really need to fuck you again.”

This time my gasp is half surprise and half desire. No one has ever been quite so open with me before, quite so filthy, and it turns out I really, really like that too.

* * *

We’re both starting to doze off when I think of Maren, and my pulse triples as the guilt hits.

I throw off the sheets, suddenly in a profuse sweat and breathing too fast.

Oh God, I’ve really fucked up . I’ve really, really fucked up, and I can’t begin to imagine how I let this happen.

I pad to his bathroom and turn on the shower jets, simply to get some distance from him so I can calm the fuck down. My head hangs as the spray hits my face.

What the hell am I doing? How could I have let it go this far? It was such a betrayal. And whether Maren knows about it or not— I’ll make sure she never knows —it will remain such a betrayal.

I’ve got to get home. Immediately. I’ve got to undo this and I can’t, so the next best thing is to get out before I make things worse.

His arms wrap around my waist as he steps in behind me, resting his chin atop my head.

“Don’t do this,” he says. “Don’t disappear on me.”

I turn and press my face to his chest as my hands wrap around his back.

“I can’t help it,” I whisper. “I don’t think you realize how hurt Maren would be by this.”

“You slept with someone she dated briefly ten years ago,” he says, “and I am na?vely hoping that you also might like the guy she dated ten years ago. I just don’t see how this can be as big a deal as you think it is. She’s married. Her life has moved on, so why shouldn’t mine? Why shouldn’t yours?”

I glance up at him. “She and Harvey are having problems, and I think maybe somewhere in the back of her mind, she’s wondering if there is still a chance with you.”

“That can’t be true,” he says with a quiet, shocked laugh, pushing my hair back from my face. “Seriously. It can’t be. I’ve barely seen her over the past ten years, and I’ve never once given her the impression that I regret breaking up with her. To think otherwise would be…delusional.”

“Haven’t you ever idealized something or someone in the past? It happened so long ago that you can barely remember any of the details, yet you somehow convince yourself it was perfect? I think that with her marriage falling apart and feeling alone, she’s looking back at that summer and seeing it all with rose-colored glasses.”

He tips my chin up with a finger. “I am not willing to just give this up because your sister is struggling in her marriage. You shouldn’t be either. Haven’t you been through enough? Haven’t you sufficiently taken care of her and your mother, and suffered in the process? Take something for your-fucking-self. Please .”

I let my head press to his chest, hoping that it conveys everything I cannot say—that I would give up almost anything to make that possible, that I want him every bit as badly as he wants me, if not more, but that I also don’t see any way forward without hurting my sister, and that’s something I will never be able to do.

He turns off the shower and wraps me in a towel before leading me back to bed. I’m still committed to ending this but the damage is done, I guess.

Until we return, I’m going to take enough of him to make up for the past decade.

And to sustain me through the next one. Because when we leave, this is definitely over.