A Fine Mess (Over the Top) (12 page)

I sink against him and press my lips to his ear. “I’m so hot for you.”

A deep growl rumbles from his chest, sexy and masculine. He pulls me between his legs and secures his arms around my waist, the hard length of him pressed into my back. “Keep that up, babe, and I’ll come in my swimsuit. I’d rather not find out if sharks are attracted to semen.”

He nips my neck, and I sigh, the vibration thrumming through my limbs. My throat tightens, too, sudden awareness tingling across my skin.
I’m in love with Sawyer.
It’s a truth I’ve ignored, pushed to the recesses of my mind, but acknowledging it feels
good
. Right. Unfortunately, happiness this intense is dangerous. My shopping spiked after his rejection, and we hadn’t even kissed. To fall from these heights could set off my issues, worse this time. But Sawyer won’t revert to being the man he was, not now that we’ve made promises. Not after we give ourselves to each other tonight.

Instead of worrying, I wriggle around until he groans. “Tonight can’t come soon enough,” I say.

He stills my hips with his legs. “It will come, and
you
will come repeatedly.”

The rest of the afternoon is a blur.

I thought I had this whole foreplay thing figured out, then Lily one-ups me. Turns out subtle touching gets me hot, but the real kicker, the thing that lights my fire, is knowledge. Surprised the fuck out of me.

Since she told me she wanted to have sex tonight, I’ve been…

Thinking about sex with Lily.

Imagining sex with Lily.

Obsessing over sex with Lily.

The simple knowledge of it has had me walking around like I’ve been revirginized. The second snorkeling trip this afternoon was awesome. It’s been a while since I’ve taken a beach vacation, too long since I’ve lost myself in the coral and fish and magic of the sea. But instead of focusing on the colors and marine life, I kept watching Lily. Her lean legs as they kicked. Her bikini bottoms that hid her strawberry birthmark. I had to wait before getting back in the boat.

We had little privacy afterward, but I’m digging it. Getting off on the anticipation. Tony and Jonathan are leaving tomorrow, so they invited us out for predinner drinks at a beach bar. Flip-flops off, Lily and I rubbed our sandy feet together the whole time. At our room, before dinner, we didn’t talk about this knowledge of ours. This gift. I sat on the bed and watched her shower and change, not touching her with anything but my eyes. Then she did the same.

I’ve never come without friction, but I’m starting to think it’s possible.

Even now, walking through town after a killer meal, I’m in no rush to get back. We have all night. Four more days. I don’t care if we leave the room.

The town is busy with tourists walking the narrow streets, golf carts driving by, music drifting from bars. We step out of the way as two boys speed by on bikes, the smell of grilled chicken suddenly thick. Hands clasped, we resume our leisurely stroll.

“If you were a comic book character,” I say, “you’d be Venus.”

She laughs. “I’ll need more information so I can decide if I should be flattered or offended.”

“She’s from an early Marvel comic. Hot as sin, obviously. She could control people’s emotions like a siren. Get into their heads with her song, curing their souls by allowing them to live out fantasies, or breaking them by reducing them to tears. She could also fly and shapeshift, but I mean the emotion thing. I feel like you do that to me, bend my mind with your voice. In the good way,” I add.

I want to have sex with you tonight.
That’s a siren’s song, all right.

She stops so suddenly, I nearly stumble. “Sawyer, that’s really…wow.”

“Wow good or wow bad?”

“Definitely wow good. You could almost take Kolton in a wooing match.”

I tug her forward. “Not a chance. He’s got Jackson. Kids always win with wooing. Although I could buy a puppy. Or rent one so it never grows up. You do have a thing for puppies.”

We round a corner and head toward the beach to walk the rest of the way on sand. The ceaseless wind greets us, blowing her yellow dress around her knees.

She swings our clasped hands. “I have to choose your superhero persona now.”

“How about Multiple-Orgasmo? Or Captain Disco? I do rule a dance floor.”

Grinning, she knocks her hip into mine. “Come on. Yours was romantic. I need to do better than that. What about Iron Man? Not just the sexy playboy thing—we both know you have that nailed—but he’s passionate, too. He’s always sweet with Pepper Potts. And funny. And he wants to use his intelligence for good.”

“Last I checked, I can’t operate my iPhone, let alone build high-tech gadgets.”

She chews her lip. “The only other one I can think of is Captain America, and you don’t do wholesome, all-American boy.”

“No, I do not. I’ll stick with Iron Man. I like that he turned his life around and found a good woman.” Like I found Lily.

Long-term relationships have always been a no-go for me, then this slip of a girl busts into my life, and I’m imagining things I’ve never considered. Not necessarily the 2.5 kids and white picket fence, and you’d have to pry my muscle car from my cold, dead hands. But this relationship won’t end with this trip. We’ll do the long-distance thing. Live our lives, together and apart. Figure it out as we go. Have an obscene amount of sex, of course.

Sex with Lily.

Damn.

I slow our pace through the alley, dragging out the torture.
Knowledge.
Who knew suffering could be so sweet? We don’t talk. We don’t have to. We
know
. Soon she’ll be under me, and I’ll be inside her, and the walls in our room will shake. For the hundredth time today, I adjust my shorts.

Two girls walk by us, giggling, and I smile at them as they pass.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to that.”

Lily’s tone has me frowning. “What?”

“You. The way you are with women, the way they always notice you. It’s hard to compete with.”

I stop before we reach the beach. “Are you serious?”

Her damp palm fidgets in my grasp, but I don’t let go. She looks at her feet. “I know you don’t mean anything by it. It’s like a tic for you. But it’s hard.” She glances over her shoulder.

The two girls we passed look our way and whisper to each other as I replay the encounter. The brunette took an eyeful when she smiled at me, and her friend bit her lip. I smiled back. Harmless enough. Or was it? Did I encourage the ogling?

A group of three guys, laughing and nudging each other, approach us. The tallest one winks at Lily while I’m holding her fucking hand.

Superpower wish: matter manipulation,
bury asshole under rubble
.

She looks up as he does it, and determination sets her jaw. She smiles at him with blatant eye contact. The group keeps walking, but I’m picking them off one by one in my mind, a veritable mess of blood and bone. So this is how she feels.

Burned. Jealous. Insecure.

I don’t do insecure.

Insecure is for pansies who don’t know how to pleasure a woman. It’s for dudes with dicks too small and wallets too big and mommy issues. I know she grinned at that fucker to prove a point. Still, it sucks. If she weren’t with me, assholes like him would be all over her. Smiling. Flirting. Hoping to see that birthmark.

Yep, totally insecure.

If I’m committed to being with Lily and not hurting her, I’ll have to find a way to curb my natural tendencies. “My ego took a hit watching you notice that guy, and I guess that’s what you meant when you said it’s hard seeing how I am with women, yes?”

She nods. “Yeah. And I’m sorry. I didn’t find him cute. I just wanted to do it back to you. It actually made me feel dirty.”

A natural reaction. So why didn’t I feel the same? The two girls who passed were attractive. I acknowledged their looks with my attention, because that’s what I do. I deal in beauty, designing clothes to make people feel cool or sexy. It’s not about being model skinny, either. If a voluptuous woman in killer heels and a wrap dress passes me on the street, I give her a nod. Own it. Flaunt that shit. Channel your inner Beyoncé. The sexiest weapon in a woman’s arsenal is confidence, and I’m happy to boost it.

Not at the expense of hurting Lily, though. “I get why you did that, and I promise to try and rein that stuff in. If you want, I’ll walk around with blinders on, like a horse.”

She huffs out a laugh. “As much as I’d love to see that, it’s not necessary. I know who you are, Sawyer, and I know it’s harmless. I’ll get used to it. Come,” she says, and drags me forward.

But the incident gnaws at me.

The lights from the hotels cast the beach in a warm glow, clumps of sea grass and trash marring the landscape. Plastic—mankind’s worst creation. I flick my head toward it. “This drives me nuts, people tossing crap into the water. Have you seen that garbage patch in the Pacific? The island made of trash? The thing is a floating mass of plastic bottles.”

She leads us toward the pile. “Yeah. They say it’s the size of Texas or something.” She releases my hand and bends down to pick up a lone flip-flop. “It’s not all trash, though.”

Lily and her love of secondhand everything. “That’s a nasty flip-flop someone tossed overboard. My vote is trash.”

She turns it over, her lips moving the way they do when she invents stories. Like her birthmark, I revel in knowing this secret about her. A quirk she doesn’t let people see.

“If you tell me that crusty sandal’s narrative”—I study the debris and spot a length of rope—“I’ll enthrall you with the adventures of that decomposing twine.”

“Okay.” She drops the sandal on the pile and takes my hand.

We continue on, lazily, the air around us vibrating with
knowledge
.

“A girl was close with her grandmother,” she begins, her voice carrying on the wind. “The girl loved her so much it hurt. She taught her how to sew, and they’d spend hours poring over designs and fabric. Her grandmother had all these neat antiques and stuff, and would chatter endlessly about her childhood, sharing stories: losing her first love in the war, finding another. Discovering rock ’n’ roll. Then the girl’s grandmother died.”

Lily’s attention drifts, a faraway look on her face, telling me this is more than fiction. This is her, and I am riveted.

“The grandmother’s daughter packed all her mother’s things in boxes to be given away, but the girl saw the lone flip-flop on top and remembered the story about the day her grandmother met her second love while hunting seashells. The granddaughter couldn’t give the boxes away, so she held on to them. Cherished them. She kept the stories so her grandmother would never truly be lost.” She blinks rapidly and averts her gaze to the sea.

This is Lily at her most vulnerable.
My
Lily. I squeeze her hand. “She sounds like a pretty awesome lady.”

She squeezes back.

I’m usually an open book. I retell every embarrassing story to earn a laugh. The time I drank apple juice only to realize it was Nico’s urine test? That one’s fun for parties. How I got ranch dressing on my pants during lunch period and proceeded to fake an orgasm? Comic gold. But Lily knows all of me. The good and the bad, the fun and the heavy. The best way to honor her truth is to offer more of mine.

“A man found a rope while mountain climbing. He’d used lots of ropes before. If one broke, he’d replace it. He climbed a lot, really loved it, just never cared for any particular rope. A man can’t have enough rope.”

She smirks, reading the innuendo in my words. I go on, “Then he found this new cord. Shiny. Really sweet. The Rolls-Royce of twine. It never chafed his skin or let him down. It became his anchor. After a while, he couldn’t imagine climbing without it. He was pretty sure he’d slip and fall if he used anything else. He was terrified to do something wrong and break it. If he did that, he didn’t think he’d ever climb again, and when you’re as into climbing as this dude was, that’s a scary prospect.” Smirking, she snorts. “He decided to trust his weight on it anyway,” I say, “and hope it didn’t snap. He probably wouldn’t recover if it did, but he knew it was worth it.”

She looks up at me then, eyes shining. “Thank you,” she whispers.

I’ve heard those two words a million different times from a million different people, but from her, like this, in Belize, their meaning changes.

It’s her siren song for
I love you
.

I’ve seen it on her face for a while, during my trips to Toronto. Her pale skin and gray eyes don’t hide much. I want to continue my story and tell her I love every fiber of the rope. It’s there, below the surface, growing alongside my seed of fear and the heartburn I know is anything but. My uncertainty is fed by moments like our talk in the alley. Still, I’m too selfish to let it stop me.

We arrive at our hotel and walk through the sand.

Knowledge.

We stop on our porch.

Knowledge.

I press her back into the wall beside our door.

Knowledge.

“You invoked our pact earlier,” I say.

She looks up at me and licks her pretty pink pout. “I did.”

“What did you say to me again? I can’t quite remember.” The waves, the wind, the insects, the leaves—they answer. They
know
. She breathes heavier. “If you want it, Lil, you have to ask for it. But if it makes things easier, I’ll go first.”

Voice stuck, she nods. I take the bottom of her ear between my teeth and apply pressure. She whimpers, and I soothe the spot with my tongue. One stroke. Two. “I want to be inside you so badly, my chest aches. You drive me insane. I can’t believe we waited this long. I’d wait longer for you, though. If you asked, I would. It would suck, but I’d do it. So you have to tell me if you still want what you asked for on the boat, or if it’s too much, too soon. Either way, I need you to tell me.”

She grabs my hips and pulls me against her, wrapping her leg around my calf. “Yes. I want this.
Sex
, I mean. With you. I’m still nervous, but I can’t wait.”

Enough knowledge crap. Enough subtle foreplay. Enough bullshit about fear.

This day has wound me up so tight I’m ready to explode. I hoist her up and latch her legs around my waist, pressing my dick against her, needing friction. I kiss her hard and squeeze her ass. “You’re perfect,” I say when I come up for air. “Nothing but perfect. With me, nerves and insecurities go out the window.” Then I open the door and carry her inside.