Page 48 of Reluctant Bride

He spins me so my back rests against his chest, no hesitation in the movement at all. I let him pull me in instead of drifting alone. His lips brush the shell of my ear, and I feel how much he wants me, hard and unmistakable against the small of my back even through the cold.

“I used to think about this place when I was in Chicago,” he says, his mouth still at my ear. “Cold as it gets there in January, and I’d think about how nothing in that city was ever this cold. Ever this clean.” His hips shift, slow and entirely on purpose, and I bite back a sound that has nothing to do with the water temperature.

“You could’ve called.”

“I could have.” He doesn’t pretend it’s an apology. “I told myself calling would’ve meant admitting I still wanted to hear your voice, and I wasn’t ready to lose that argument with myself yet.”

“You could’ve come back sooner.”

“I could’ve done a lot of things sooner.” His hands slide from my hip up along my stomach, slow, and climb higher until he’s cupping my breasts, thumbs finding my nipples already hard, peaked tight where they float at cold water’s surface. My head falls back against his shoulder, and I let myself have it, his hands relearning every inch of me like a man double-checking work he’s proud of. My pulse is hammering loud enough I can feel it in my own ears over the waterfall, the good kind of drowning. “I told myself I was building something worth coming home to. Some days that was even true. Most days it was just an excuse to not have to face you.”

I twist in his arms and kiss him because it’s easier than answering, and he lets me, tender and searching, his mouth soft against mine, unlike last night’s urgency, all of it belonging to two young adults who used to do exactly this in exactly this water a lifetime ago. I wrap my legs around his waist and squeeze, pulling him flush against me until there’s no water left between us at all, and the heat building low in my stomach is undeniable. His hand finds the curve of my hip under the surface, and mine finds the back of his neck, and for a long, suspended minute we’re just two people relearning a kiss they thought they’d never get to have again.

“I missed you here,” I say, when we finally break apart. “Not just you. This. The version of us that existed before either of us learned how to ruin it.”

“We didn’t ruin it.” His thumb traces my jaw, gentle, a rawness surfacing behind his eyes that he doesn’t let all the way through. “I did.”

“That’s not up for debate right now.” I kiss the words off him before he can build a whole confession out of one sentence. “Save it. I want today first.”

He laughs, short and surprised, and pulls me back in, slower this time, both of us shivering a little from the cold and neither of us in any hurry to climb out of it.

I scan the tree line anyway, underneath the good of it. The angle of the granite. Who could see us from where. I hate that some part of me never stops thinking about it, even here, even now. I do it anyway.

We climb out when the cold finally wins, skin goose fleshed, and instead of reaching for my clothes I stretch out on the flat sun-warmed rock at the pool’s edge, arms over my head, and let the heat soak back into me. Dawson lowers himself beside me, propped on one elbow, water still tracking down his chest.

The sun catches the little jade stone straight on, and I watch him go still, looking at it like he’s still not used to it being there.

“You never made me earn that story,” he says. “Nashville. Twenty-three. You said some stories you have to earn.”

“I remember what I said.”

“Have I earned it yet?”

I look at him a long moment. This place, more than anywhere else on either family’s land, is the one spot that was only ever ours, no strategy attached to it, no clause. If there’s anywhere I get to just tell him something because I want to and not because withholding it is the safer play, it’s here.

“My roommate at Cornell noticed before I ever said a word about it,” I say. “The year after graduation, when we were still splitting an apartment in Ithaca. She’s the one who finally made me talk about it.” I shrug, easy, no shame left in it after this many years of it just being true. “We went to Nashville that spring for a Lukas Nelson show and found a clinic with an actual medical license instead of a strip mall tattoo place, and I got it done.”

“And it worked?”

“It worked.” I hold his eyes, steady. “I could orgasm with you. Twenty years old and too stupid to know how rare that was. Then it ended, and I couldn’t. Not with anyone after you, not reliably on my own either. I told myself it was just you, some fluke of chemistry I’d never get back. My roommate’s the one who convinced me it wasn’t chemistry, it was anatomy, and there was something I could actually do about it instead of just missing you for the rest of my life.”

His face runs through too many things at once for him to land on just one. Guilt first, plain and unguarded, gone almost as fast as it surfaces. Then something sadder underneath it, the quiet grief of him reckoning with all those years he wasn’t there to matter this much to me. Then frustration, sharp, like he wants to go back and undo something he can’t reach anymore.

He doesn’t let any of it sit long enough for me to ask about it. When he speaks again his voice has gone quiet.

“I think about that summer more than I let on,” he says. “How good it was. How I let myself think it was simple back then, just because I was young enough not to know better.” He tucks a wet strand of hair behind my ear, careful, like the gesture matters more than he wants it to. “I don’t get to go back and be the version of me who didn’t wreck it. I know that. I’m not asking you to pretend otherwise.”

I turn my face into his palm, just slightly, and let him feel that I heard it, all of it, before either of us has to put a name to what saying it took.

He lets out a breath, slow, and some of the weight in his shoulders goes with it. I watch him understand what I just did, handing him something gentler than forgiveness and just as hard to earn. He settles around it before he lets himself move past it.

He lifts an eyebrow, the mood shifting easy under him like it always does. “I’ve got nowhere else to be today. Can I try giving you another one? Purely in the interest of testing how that jade does its work.”

“That’s very generous of you. Purely scientific.”

“Experiments need multiple data sets. We can perform it in every setting we can dream up.”

“We’ve already muddied the data set with too many variables,” I say. “But more experimenting is definitely required.”