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Furious.
At her father.
At anyone who’d ever told her that about herself.
At her, for humiliating him and soaking him. Making him care. Making him feel.
When a wall of water hit him in the face, Roman lunged.
He caught her easily by one wrist. She tried to get him again with her free arm, but he found the crown of her head and pushed her under. She came up spitting and sputtering, then head-butted him in the stomach.
Roman folded and went under, finding her shoulders, her armpits, taking her down with him. When he pushed to standing, she was clinging to him, her bare, wet breasts pressing against his chest, one arm slung around his neck, her face close, water clumping her eyelashes together, muck on her neck, danger in her smile.
Reckless, yes. She was as reckless, as stupidly reckless, as anyone he’d ever met.
But she was alive, and he was drawn to her despite himself. His weakness to her strength. He didn’t know what to do about it. About her.
He didn’t want to feel compelled to make her feel better, or to get harder at the feel of her body against him, which was softer than he’d expected. Warm everywhere, alive everywhere, breathing and human and so real, it hurt to touch her.
“Now you’ve got me,” she said. “What are you going to do with me?”
In that moment, he felt everything, just like she’d said. Everything in precarious balance—a broomstick in the palm of his hand, and on top of it a ball, and on top of the ball Heberto, Carmen, Ashley, Sunnyvale, Coral Cay.
His foster family—Patrick and Samantha—his past.
Carmen. His future.
Carmen.
“Nothing,” he said, and the word helped a bit, but not enough. Nothing he did seemed to put enough distance between them. “I’m not going to do anything with you except get you inside where you can’t get picked up and charged with public indecency.”
He tried to mean it. He started moving toward the shore. His soaked jeans made it almost impossible to walk, and he couldn’t shake Ashley off. He had to heave her up higher so he could push his legs through the water, which meant his fingers sank into her ass, his palms memorizing the breadth of her hips, the strength of her thighs wrapped around his waist.
It meant not thinking about her spread open and bare against his stomach, pink and wet, that sweet cunt a mystery he wouldn’t look at, wouldn’t think about, wouldn’t feel.
She took his face firmly between her hands and kissed him.
Roman tripped and fell, knocking his nose into something hard, her teeth or her skull. He managed to take most of the fall on his right knee and elbow, but she still said “Ow!” and scrambled away from him in the shallow water near the bank.
Then she started to laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“Why not? You’re hilarious.”
He grabbed her ankle.
“Hey!”
He pulled her back toward him, crawled over her, pinned her down in three inches of water, covered in muck, his knees on either side of her waist. She was naked and filthy and infuriatingly beautiful, and his nose fucking hurt. “Don’t laugh at me. I’m not hilarious. I’m not a fucking joke, I’m normal. Normal people don’t do this kind of shit.”
“And yet here you are.”
Ashley reached out a hand, dipped it into the mud, and smeared it all over his chest. She beamed at him. There was mud on her lip.
“I hate what you do to me,” he said.
“I know.”
