“Cheater!” he laughed, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and tossing her further into the water.
She popped up out of the surf, water flowing off the tip of her nose and over her torso in winding rivulets, and splashed him. “Winner, you mean.”
Her body was slick under his hands, her curves sliding against him under the water as they came together, splashing like children, and broke apart laughing. Water dripped from their hair into their eyes. Her leg brushed his as she flitted past him and he reached beneath the water, his hand closing around her thigh and pulling her close. He lifted her leg to wrap around his hip until she was floating in his arms, her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck.
The laughter died on her lips, her eyes holding his, so full of questions he didn’t have answers for. He slid his hands over her back beneath the water, savoring the feel of her under his hands, the weightlessness of floating with her in his arms giving everything a dreamlike haze.
It didn’t feel real, and if it wasn’t real then he didn’t need to question what he was doing touching her like she was his to touch. If it wasn’t real, then what did it matter if he let his hands drift over the curves of her hips and thighs, if her breathing grew shallow and her nipples, hard points pressing against her swimsuit, were so close to his lips he could practically taste them? If it wasn’t real, then no one could get hurt and he could want her without needing to protect her from that want.
Her legs tightened around him and he was certain that she could feel him growing harder by the second.I should stop this.The thought came unbidden and unwelcome. He should put her down and make a joke and forget he ever knew what it was to have her legs wrapped around his waist. Instead he slid his hand higher on her leg, his thumb tracing the edge of her swimsuit where it cut across her thigh.
“Admit it,” he said, his voice low and rough. Her eyes widened, her pupils blown, dark circles rimmed by a thin border of chocolate brown. “Admit you cheated.”
Her lips turned up in a smile so delicious he wanted to know what it tasted like. “There were no rules established. You can’t cheat if there aren’t any rules.” Was her voice huskier?
“I should teach you not to cheat,” he said, quietly enough that no one else could hear the low rasp of his voice over the crashing of the waves.
“Maybe you should.” Her hand moved into the hair at the back of his neck, nails scraping lightly over his scalp and sending bolts of electricity down his spine.
His thumb slid beneath the seal of her bathing suit, tracing the crease where her thigh met her hip, but his eyes never left hers. How had he never noticed the copper tint in her irises before, the way the sun caught the deep brown and made it gleam?
Water crashed over his head. Callie shrieked and hid her face in his neck as the water broke over them, the splash accompanied by the sound of Liv and Liam laughing. Noah wiped the water from his eyes and looked over to see his sister and best friend high fiving just before a second splash smacked him in the face.
“What the fuck?” he demanded, turning his body to shield Callie from the worst of their assault.
“Get a room!” Liv called.
He set Callie down and took off after their assailants, vowing retribution. It was easier to focus on his return attack than to think about what he’d just done, the way he’d touched her. Easier to leap on Liam’s back, to flick water at Liv and Min, than to admit how much he wanted to touch her again.
∞∞∞
That night, exhausted from a full day at the beach, they spread blankets on the lawn around a bonfire. Callie felt like a teenager, roasting marshmallows and sharing stories from when they were kids, watching the firelight dance over Noah’s face as she’d done during so many bonfires in his mother’s backyard over the years.
There had been a moment in the water when she thought he might kiss her, when she could have sworn he wanted to. Since then, it seemed he was never very far from her, his fingers casually brushing against her as they stood together at the fire’s edge. They sat beside each other on an old flannel blanket the front desk had provided, their hands so close to each other, they were almost touching.
“Were you always a performer?” Jamie asked Liv when Mrs. Van Aller had finished telling another story about one of Liv’s early roles.
“Pretty much. Callie and I were always on stage when we were kids,” Liv said, pulling a burned marshmallow off her stick and licking the gooey white stuff from her fingertips.
“You’re a performer, too?” Pattie asked.
Callie shook her head. “Not like Liv and Daemon are. My ambitions for the limelight never went past middle school drama club.”
“That’s not entirely true,” her mother said. “If I remember correctly, you won your high school talent show with that song you wrote.”
Callie blinked. Was that pride in her mother’s voice? No, it couldn’t be. She’d never been all that supportive of Callie’s music.
“That’s right!” Mrs. Van Aller chimed in. “You were quite the musician.”
“It was high school,” Callie demurred.
“They’re right,” Noah said. Then, to the newcomers amongst them, “Callie wrote amazing songs. Every time I’d come home from grad school for the weekend, she’d have piles of new sheet music to show me.”
“No kidding,” Liv said with a laugh. “Any time you came home, my best friend disappeared into the music cave—”
“Our living room is hardly a cave,” Mrs. Van Aller objected.
“—and I wouldn’t have her to myself again until you went back to Boston.”
