“Us?” I repeat.
He nods once. “Yes. One last hurrah or something like that. He and Nicola. Linden and Steph. And…you and me.” He pauses. “I haven’t told him yes or no. I wanted to ask you first. I know that we don’t know each other well and that going away on a trip can be a minefield for relationships. As if relationships aren’t minefields by themselves.” He looks away and smiles bitterly at some memory, his face shadowed in the streetlights. “I also know that this…” He gestures with his finger between us, “…is different.”
“Not a relationship,” I fill in, even though something shifts in my chest when I say that.
He squints at me for a moment. “No. So what do you say?”
“Well, of course I want to go,” I tell him, putting my hand over his, partly to make a point, and partly to stop his nervous fidgeting. It’s almost adorable.
“You don’t think it’s odd? To go off with me?”
Hell, I’d follow you anywhere. But of course I don’t say that.
“It’ll be fun,” I tell him. “So long as we get more than enough time to ourselves.”
“My cousins will have to drag us from our room,” he says, and his expression is still so sincere that I know he means it. He lifts my hand up, flips my palm over, and kisses it, his lips so full, soft. and wet, his gaze never leaving my face. I love that he does that. Not the back of my hand, always the palm, the love lines, where my skin is delicate and my nerves ignite.
After we sit by the water for a bit, watching the cars on the bridge and the reflection of the lights on the silver water of the bay, we head back to the apartment. It’s still relatively early and we fall back into his bed, our bodies finding each other again. His hunger for me just doesn’t seem to abide, and I don’t think I’ll ever get my fill. We fuck and fuck again, every way we can, until it’s after midnight and I know, I know I have to go home.
Somehow I force myself to leave him. I kiss him goodbye as he stands naked in his doorway, not caring at all who might walk past. His eyes are soft, that beautiful peace he gets from sex, as he watches me go down the hall to the elevator. Not smiling, just watching.
Maybe wishing, just as I wish, that we didn’t hear that clock ticking in the back of our minds.
Counting down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kayla
I am completely obsessed with Lachlan McGregor.
And not in the good way, in the coy, polite, restrained, never giving into my urges kind of way like most proper girls are. Oh no, not me. I’m obsessed in the can’t stop furiously masturbating every moment I get because I can’t get him out of my head way. I can’t stop seeing his hips as they drive and drive and drive into me, I can’t stop feeling his lips on my skin, the way he refers to my cunt in that overly Scottish way, the way he looks at me sometimes like he can’t believe I’m there. I can’t stop picturing his beautiful face, his tattoos, and the parts of him they represent, the parts he locks away and rarely shows. I can’t stop obsessing over every detail of his existence.
Because it makes me happy. It makes me so fucking happy that I think I might be going insane. My heart is permanently swollen, like a red balloon, and the more it pushes at my chest, as if my body, my soul, isn’t big enough to contain it all, the more alive I feel. My head is just this fuzzy, warm, sparkling place, and I’m walking through the moments of the day in a dream. A beautiful dream that doesn’t end.