She nodded and ran her fingers over it.
“Do you still put a sunflower on her grave every year?” I asked. When we were together, I’d gone with her to her sister’s grave to do it. “It’s the seventeenth of August, right?” I asked, and she nodded. But I already knew the answer to that question. Because the seventeenth of August was the one day a year that I willingly let my mind drift to her. I always thought about what she was doing, and hoped she was okay.
“If I can,” she said. “I’m not always around, so thought I would get this.” She held her arm out for me and I admired the intricate work.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, remembering that photo of her sister dressed in a yellow and white sunflower dress.
She shook her head suddenly, as if shaking off a memory and then quickly changed her demeanor. “Top us up.” She thrust her glass at me. I could see she no longer wanted to talk about this, and I obliged her.
“Bottoms up,” she said, and we both threw the liquid back. Again, our eyes met.
“Thirteen years,” I mused out loud. “It’s crazy how fast time goes.”
“As you get older, it seems to go faster.”
“In the blink of an eye,” I said.
“It’s been so long that it’s hard to imagine a time when we ever actually existed.”
“We did exist,” I insisted. “And for most of that, we were really good.” I topped up our glasses again. The alcohol was definitely making me buzz now.
She paused and took a long, slow sip. “Yes. We were good.” She licked the corner of her mouth with her tongue and the action was so fucking sexy that I had to cross my legs, because I could feel something stirring in my pants.
“Wewerereally good together, weren’t we,” she continued, her words slightly lubricated with alcohol now.
“We were.” I refilled our glasses. “We were good on email too, before we knew who we were speaking to.”
She nodded at me thoughtfully. “Do you think if you weren’t Logan, and I was just Leigh Smith, not Ash, and we met at a film shoot, we would hook up?”
“Do I think that our emailing would have led to a date and then probably led to us having hot sex in a tent like this?” I asked, locking eyes with her with as much intensity as I could.
She nodded and bit her lip at the same time. The gesture did not escape me.
“Yes. I do,” I said.
“So then why do you think we weren’t able to have hot sex all those years ago?”
“We were so young and totally inexperienced.”
“And we’re not young and inexperienced now?” she said. Her tongue came out to lick the corner of her lips again and now it was more than just a stirring. I was hard. And if she continued licking her lips like that while she talked about how “experienced” we both possibly were now, I was not going to be able to get rid of it.
“No, we’re not,” I repeated slowly.
“Do you think if we’d tried again, it would have gotten better, or do you think we’re just fundamentally not sexually compatible?”
This was the ultimate question, wasn’t it? And it had been the main reason that I’d made a very conscious decision to become good at sex. No, not just good,the best.And right now, looking at her like this, licking her lips, cute unruly hair that seemed untamable, just begging to be pulled at, tight tank top that showed the outline of her nipples and loose-fitting sleeping shorts that you could slip a hand into so easily, I had an overwhelming desire to show her just how fucking good I’d gotten—again and again and again—and just how sexually compatible Iknewwe would be!
“I can’t answer that,” I said instead.
“It’s weird, because before we tried to have actual sex, things were hot between us. It’s not like we hadn’t done things, and the things we had done were . . .” She took another sip of her drink. As she talked, her face was getting more and more flushed. I didn’t know if it was from the alcohol or from this conversation. “They werereallygood. And I think you’re so sexy.”
“Think? Present tense?” I shuffled a little closer to her.
“I meantthought! I thought you were sexy. Past tense. You know, when we were dating. Thought!”
“So you don’t think I’m sexy now?” My dick felt as if it was going to burst through my pants.
“I’m not drunk enough to answer that,” she said with a smile that was definitely flirtatious. In fact, it felt as if we were right back to being two people flirting with each other over email.
