Page 21 of Thin Ice

"This is where I stuck the throttle," he said, and I laughed.

"You came in hot. Right about there." I pointed at the water, which was now ice. I walked to the end of the dock and turned back to him, "and this is where you crashed."

He smiled and stepped forward to the other side of the dock. "And you screamed at me. Right about here." He remembered the spot. "You called me a maniac."

"You were a maniac."

"I was eighteen and bad at boats."

"You were eighteen and showing off." I raised my eyebrows and stepped toward him.

"Also true." He moved close enough to me that I could feel the heat from his body.

"Hey," he said with an adorable smile.

I kissed him right where it all started, and his mouth was cold, and then it wasn't. We leaned into each other.

Somewhere out on the lake the ice let go with a long rolling boom, and neither of us jumped.

We stayed like that. His hands found the front of my jacket and pulled, fists in the fabric. My hands went to his jaw, and his skin was freezing, and I held his face and kissed him again, slower, and felt his breath catch against my mouth.

Our noses touched. Stayed. That close, his eyes were too much, so I kept mine shut and just breathed him. Cold air and his cologne. His forehead came down against mine and we stood there in nineteen degrees not moving, just breathing the same air back and forth until it was warm.

"A week," he said.

"Ten days."

"You counted?"

"You didn't?"

His mouth found mine again, and this time it wasn't slow. His hands let go of my jacket and slid inside it, palms flat against my ribs through the flannel, and the heat of them went through me like a current. I pulled him closer by the belt loops and felt all of him against all of me, and we fit the way we always fit, his height against mine, his hip against my hip, and the cold stopped being a thing that existed.

He made a sound against my mouth. Small. The kind he tried to swallow and couldn't. That sound turned off my brain and all that was left was want.

I pressed him back half a step. His shoulders hit the dock piling. I kissed his neck below the ear where his pulse was going fast, and he tipped his head back and let me, and his fingers dug into my sides hard enough to bruise.

"Liam."

"Yeah."

"We're on a dock. In December."

"I'm aware."

"In public."

"There's nobody for four miles."

"My dad has binoculars."

That got a laugh out of me, and he laughed too, and the laughing broke it just enough to pull back. Not far. An inch. His mouth wet and his eyes half-shut and his hands still inside my jacket.

"Come on," I said. "I've got something better than a dock."

***

Getting Alex up a ladder and through a shrink-wrap flap in a peacoat was comedy. I let him struggle with it, because watching a rich kid problem-solve a boat access panel is a gift you don't rush.