When we got back to the island, Damian made real ceviche while I showered and changed.
“Show off,” I said. He really was a good cook. And a great kisser. I couldn’t stop staring at his lips. Those lips had blown orange seeds through a straw at Gideon Benedict St. John, but now there was an eroticism to them—every time he spoke, every time he took a bite. They were all I could see. And I wanted them on me.
“What happened to your face?” he asked.
“Your beard.” I snapped out of it long enough to answer his question. The hot shower had turned my chin and upper lip red from where his beard had chafed my skin.
Damian grinned. Leaving his mark on me seemed to appease some Paleolithic, cave-dwelling part of him.
His grin did things to me too. I wished he would lean over and kiss me again.
He did lean over. To pick up my plate. And then he proceeded to wash the dishes while I put things away. I wished he’d hurry up so I could throw my arms around him again, but he was taking so darn long, scratching an imaginary speck, then washing the damn spot again, then drying, all the while keeping his eyes on the task.
He was avoiding me, and when I finally clued in to why, I wanted to kiss him even more. Damian wasn’t doing the dishes. He was wrestling with something he’d never felt before. He was feeling shy and it was something completely foreign to him. He had never allowed himself to like a girl, never been on a date, never felt butterflies in his stomach.
I felt a stab of tenderness that was quickly overcome by the urge to jump him. I cleared my throat in an attempt to dislodge the treacherous minx that was quickly taking over.
“Why don’t you go change? I’ll finish here,” I offered. He was still wearing his strawberry splattered shirt.
He jumped on it, like I had just thrown him a life raft. Anything to get away from me. I finished up the rest of the dishes and turned off the lights.
We bumped into each other in the hallway. He was coming out of the bathroom and I was going in. The first thing that struck me was his clean-shaven face. Bye, bye beard. The stitches were gone too. No baseball cap. It was like he was showing me his face for the first time—the ridges where the boy I once knew had hardened to a man, the places he’d stayed the same. The second thing I noticed was his skin, still warm and wet, bare except for the sweatpants that didn’t look so ugly when they hugged his hip like that.
“I—”
“You—”
We stepped away from each other, aware of all the places our bodies had just touched.
I don’t know who moved first, maybe him, maybe me, but we were zigzagging through the hallway, our lips locked, my back against the wall, then his, banging and colliding in the narrow space until we got to the bedroom.
Damian picked me up and carried me inside. His bare arms felt like heaven. We fumbled to get under the netting, neither of us wanting to stop kissing, but it was tucked under the mattress, sealing off the bed. When Damian knelt on the mattress, with me still in his arms, the whole thing ripped from the top.
“Problem solved,” he said, tearing through the gauzy folds as he deposited me on the bed.