She let out a slow breath and lifted her hands to her hair to pull a little metal pin out, but her hair stayed twisted at the back of her head. Then she pulled out a second, her fingers still searching. She stilled when I stepped closer, taking her shoulders and turning her to face away from me. As gently as possible, I brushed my fingers over the soft strands of her hair until I found another and removed it from the twist.
Her hands drifted to her sides.
I paused with a pin halfway free.
“It’ll be easier when we’re back home, when we’re not so...” Her voice drifted off. A wavy dark strand fell and brushed her shoulder blades.
I didn’t finish her sentence, we both knew exactly what was unsaid. One last pin came loose between my fingers. I shoved them into my pocket. Restraining from the demand surging inside of my body, I plunged my hand into her hair. The strands filled the space betweenmy fingers. I gripped a fistful to ease her to look back at me. She rested her weight against my chest, and something tied tight inside me unspooled.
“Just promise me”—the fingertips of my free hand brushed down the column of her neck, and she shivered—”while you’re with me, you’re not thinking about someone else.”
Her eyebrows twitched, and she blinked twice.
“Only me,” I said somewhere between a demand and a plea.
“Only you.”
Those three syllables washed over me soft as a feather down my spine, sharp as her nails down my back.
I pressed a kiss to the arch of her dark eyebrow telling myself that this weekend would be enough. Nuzzling my nose into her hair, I breathed in as deeply as I could, filling my lungs with her scent. Under her sweet smell was the sharp bite of my sweat.
I groaned. Straightening, I untangled my fingers from her hair. “I need a shower. Give me ten minutes.”
“Don’t go,” she said. Turning to face me, she looked at me with heavy-lidded dreamy eyes.
“No”—I gestured down at my sweaty shirt—”I can’t touch you when I’m like this. Help yourself to anything. Grab a drink from the mini bar and watch the ocean for a while. Ten minutes.”
She pursed her lips. “Less than.”
“Fine, less than,” I promised pulling my shirt over my head as I took long strides to the bathroom with its moody dark wallpaper and glass walls surrounding the subway tiled shower. The water was still getting hot when I stepped under it, but I didn’t want to waste a single minute that could be spent with Sadie.
My hair was barely wet when the door opened and she stepped inside the room. She stood with her hands behind her back,leaning against the wall, taking me in through the fogging glass. “Is there a reason you didn’t invite me to join?”
Because I’m a broken person who doesn’t recognize opportunities.
“Because I’m an idiot.”
Her smile filled her face right before she looked down at her bare feet. “You are...oblivious for someone so smart.”
“I’m not smart at all,” I argued. Nothing had felt more true as my brain went completely blank watching her take slow steps to the shower entrance. Her dress was a blur of color against the dark walls. She stood out like a dandelion on a lawn of grass, and I wondered how anyone would choose a blank green yard instead of a field of the bright flower and all the life it attracted. It was as if all of my memories of her had planted and spread, filling up every corner of my mind.
No matter how many times I saw her, touched her, tasted her, I always wanted more.
Stepping over the lip, she placed her foot on the white tile. The hem of her dress dragged on the shower floor, water climbed up darkening the fabric and weighing down her neckline. It clung to her breasts, dipping between them. Her nipples outlined by the wet cotton. Drops splashed off the skin of my chest and misted on her cheeks, clinging to her eyelashes. Her lips glistened. The waves of her hair fell in dripping tendrils.
A four-letter word clung to my tongue, desperate to be whispered into existence. But I kept it to myself, knowing that wasn’t what this was. Knowing it was better that way.
My feelings might be unrequited, but I felt like I’d been resurrected. Fresh air breathed into my lungs.
Chapter 14
Sadie
This was, hands down, the best worst idea I’ve ever made.
I had had a moment of clarity when my thoughts were coming from above my pelvic floor. A reminder that he and I had done this before, and it had left me burnt. It would be in my best interest to retreat back to my room in order to avoid any confusion between sex and feelings. But then I heard the shower, and the image of Jamison naked and sweaty and wet conjured with such ferocity that I decided to ignore clarity. The reward of him actually being naked and sweaty and wet under my fingertips trailing up his sides to the firm round curves of his pecs. The coarse dusting of dark hair across his chest under my palms only made me hungry to touch more of him. My eyes fluttered closed when he bent to place kisses down my neck. The water pouring from the shower head sprayed down on his back. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, savoring the way his muscles bunched and flexed.
His erection was heavy, caught between his stomach and mine.
