“What about staying with me?”
She was looking out on the water. A slow smile touched her lips, and after a moment she answered softly, “I can’t stay with you.”
“Why not?”
“I’d wind up sleeping with you.”
“How crazy,” he said.
“Oh! Well, I—” Her words faltered; she seemed to think she had received a rejection.
“It’s crazy,” he interrupted quickly, “because I believe we’re going to sleep together anyway, and I believe we would have slept together years ago had you stayed, and not staying with me is not going to prevent what surely seems to me to be just a little bit desperately inevitable.”
The breeze from the ocean whispered by, lifting a strand of her hair, an ebony that seemed to burn with a blue depth in the moonlight. Her lips curled slowly back into a smile. They still weren’t touching; they were just inches apart, seated on the sand, legs stretched out before them while the surf came near enough to brush their toes.
She stared at the night.
“I’ll never understand,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Time, places, life, the world, people,” she said, and she turned to him at last. “And it is crazy. I’ve been gone so long, I haven’t seen you in forever, and many a day went by when I didn’t even think about you or Key West, or even the water and the way it feels to sit outside and see the endless dark undulation of the water at night….”
“And?”
“And when I came back, the moment I saw you…You’d changed so much, and you hadn’t changed at all, and I felt like I did that last night, that I could still crawl into your arms, and you would be there to comfort me.”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking about comforting you,” he admitted.
She looked at him, and he knew how hard he was trying to play it all cool and rational, and yet…he was melting. Everything in him was melting, burning, and he felt the tension of desire rip through his limbs and his core, and he prayed that the longing to pull her into his arms, rip off her clothes and hold her wasn’t glaringly apparent. There was a glow in her eyes and a breathlessness about her; he thought that he could feel the pounding of her heart.
“I think I’ve been in love with you forever,” she said, and it was barely a whisper, hardly sounding above the breeze. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry, don’t take that as… I mean, I suppose I’ve always been drawn to you. If I hadn’t been quite such a good kid… I think a few of our schoolmates and friends might have been involved, but… I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
“Babble—it’s quite all right,” he managed huskily.
She burst out laughing, and so did he, and he would never be sure if he did reach out and grab her with force or if she actually turned to him, pouncing upon him. He went back flat in the sand, and she was on top of him. She stared at him a moment longer, and then her lips fell down upon his and her body stretched out atop his. For a moment they were locked in a wickedly hot, wet, passionate kiss with their tongues violent in the quest for the most intimate kiss in the world, and then they rolled so that they were side by side in the sand, still in one another’s arms, still melded together in the kiss, and yet freeing themselves to touch and pull closer and closer.
At last, somehow, she was beneath him, and his hands wandered freely over her length. She reached up to touch his face, then pulled him back, her fingertips pressing down the length of his spine. His lips touched hers again, and he felt the tremor of her heart, the rapid rise and fall of her breath, the vibrant movement she made beneath him, arching closer, touching….
He gasped, breaking away from her.
He leaped to his feet and reached down to her. She caught his hand, allowing him to draw her up from the sand. He pulled her against him again, laughing as he whispered, “It’s private, it’s remote. It’s not that private or remote.”
She grinned, turned and kicked up sand as she ran for the house. He bolted after her, following her into the family room. She had already sped through it, on her way to the stairs.
Panting, he forced himself to pause to lock and secure the door.
She had raced up the stairs to her room, and he followed. She had jumped upon the bed in the shadows; the room was lit only by the light escaping from the bathroom. Everything in him seemed to be pulsing to a painful degree as he started toward her.
To his astonishment, she stopped him.
“The door!”
“I locked the door.”
“The bedroom door!”