“We could be.”
I slide him a glance. He’s leaning back on his palms, and it makes every muscle in his arms stand out in stark relief. His smile is lopsided and sneaky, like he has a secret he won’t share.
“What?” I narrow my eyes on him.
“Just happy to be alive.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He laughs and bumps me with his shoulder. “You want to explore?”
“There?” I gesture toward the island. It’s half-wild, with a small lighthouse at the end and tangles of scrub trees and low bushes past a rock-strewn beach. The bay surrounding Crownhaven is full of islands like this.
“It’s special.”
“What does that mean?”
His hand goes to the neck of his t-shirt and he pulls it off, and I get one long mouthwatering look at the lean planes of his torso.
“It means that I’ve never brought a girl here and I want to show it to you.”
My pulse leaps.
“Tristan,” I say warningly.
“What?” He pushes to stand, and my breath catches while I watch him. When he slips into the water, he goes under for five seconds and surfaces, shaking his head like a dog and grinning. “Come with me, Katie.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Don’t you want to?”
Of course I do.
I want to curl up next to him and nap in the sun. I want my head in his lap. I want a hundred more summers with him. I want my fingers on his jaw and his tongue in my mouth and I want to do it every day until we die. And I think he wants it too, andoh god, no, of course he doesn’t, because he told me at the start of the summer that he’d prefer not to feel anything.
“Katie,” he says coaxingly.
I screw my eyes shut so I can untangle my thoughts.
I turn every word over from last night and today and I wish I could understand him. He’s being different.Sweet, almost.Hot. Silly and sexy and handsy.
But does that mean he wantsmore?
I don’t think so. I think—and it’s hard because he’s skimming his thumb over my knee—that this is just fun for him. He feels like a vise is closing around him. This is a distraction before his marriage. Something we’ve both wanted for a while and not something that runs deeper. There’s a massive gap betweenjust practiceand deeper feelings, and this isn’t that. Tristan doesn’t want to feel things.
He told me so himself.
But I do.
There’s an ache low in my stomach. It’s soothed by the skim of his fingers up my thigh, before it returns, harder and sharper, like a stone in my belly.
“What do you want from me, Tristan?”
I lift my lids to see him gazing up at me, arms folded over the edge of the boat, feet kicking lazily behind him.
“Give me the day.”
I shake my head. Panic flares inside me. “One day won’t be enough for you. You’ll want more, Tristan. Iknowyou. You’ll want my nights and every day after and you’llconsume me.”
