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I’m trying not to dump this ridiculous orange kayak while reaching for Emily. She’s stubbornly keeping herself just out of arm’s reach, wading in the clear, shallow waters of St. Petersburg’s Weedon Island.
Her long brown hair is even darker than usual, waterlogged, and slicked back against her head. It floats out around her shoulders when she submerges herself. When she pops back up from under the water, it drips off her eyelashes, and the sun catches the drops, glistening all over her sun-kissed skin.
I want to lick every drop of it off her as soon as she gets back in the k
ayak. The monstrosity looks like an oversized hunting vest, complete with yellow oars so that displaced tourists and drunk kids can be spotted by helicopters when they don’t return home from their kayak adventures.
Or when they get eaten by alligators.
“I have a snake in the boat for you,” I mumble to myself.
Dangling precariously over the side of the kayak, I manage to reach her fingers and start to pull her back to safety where there are no alligators, piranha, or swamp creatures, and the only snake posing a danger to her is in my board shorts.
The kayak starts teetering from side to side.
“Em,” I warn her. She’s brought her feet up to the underside of the boat, clutches my hand, and bites her lip mischievously. “Don’t you do it.”
When I surface for air, the kayak is flipped over, the yellow oars float aimlessly nearby, and our once-dry clothes are sinking. Our little cooler is floating nearby but has sprung open and liberated empty soda cans.
But Emily is laughing, her smile lighting up the shadows of the mangrove trails, and the darkest corners of my world.
Like the last several weekends, Emily has dreamt up a new adventure to embark us upon, and while I’ve lived in Tampa most of my life, I’ve never kayaked the mangroves before. Or any of the other undertakings, experiments, games, or projects she’s so keen on.
She thinks she’s dragging me to all these adventures, and, if I’m honest, I let her think that because I want the brownie points. But besides getting to spend time with her all day, she’s also making me live a little beyond the only other obsession I’ve ever known—the track.
It’s only been a month or so since she finally relented and started speaking more than one-word answers to me, stopped running away all the while begging me to chase her.
Once she did, we were late for every class. I was entranced with her every word and couldn’t end a simple conversation with her when the bell rang. And as soon as she saw me, her face would light up. The girl spoke in novels like she’d been waiting her whole life for someone to listen to her.
Like that someone was me.
Eleven minute drives home from school became four-hour, two-hundred-mile road trips around Florida. And now that we’ve shifted from friend-zone to more, and I’ll be goddamned if some starving, sneaky anaconda or blood thirty crocodile is going to steal her from me.
I’d chase this girl across the earth and through the ends of time.
“Oh no, it seems as though I’ve capsized our vessel,” she giggles and lets out a snort. An actual snort.
There is something about making her laugh, making her smile. The quiet girl at school who ignores everyone, who stares out the window all day like she’s dreaming of being anyplace else.
She makes me feel like I take her there.
The girl who pays no attention to the teacher but still aces every test. There’s something so powerful about me being able to make her eyes go from dull and disinterested to full, dancing, and dazzling.
I get to do this for her.
I’m not just worth something when I’m with her, I feel like a fucking god. She’s so incredibly smart and kind, and unique. She talks about things that matter. I don’t know what the hell she sees in me, because Emily Walker is a good girl, not the usual kind who see bragging rights when they look at me. No, Emily sees something else. She looks at me like I hung the moon—and I need more of it.
Testing the depth, my feet hit the soft earth below me, and my toes sink into the silt, giving me enough traction to drag Emily through the water and up against me. Her palms flatten against my chest, and she looks up at me through her wet lashes, a tremor running through both of us and arcing between our bodies like electricity.
”Looks that way, gorgeous girl. Kayaking is not your forte.” I rest my hands on her midriff, my thumbs caressing her hip bones. She’s treading water trying to stay afloat, her feet not reaching the ground. Grabbing her behind her knees, I wrap her legs around my waist to anchor her.
She inhales sharply, then whispers, “Good.”
“Why is that good?” I sink down to my neck in the water and hold onto her, doing my best to keep my dick where it belongs and not make her uncomfortable. She’s not like other girls.
Her fingers expand over my chest. I can feel her energy seep through my pores and send a bolt of heat through my spinal cord.
“This is the only time I get to fail. It feels good.”
