Happy Place

HIS TONGUE BRUSHES my bottom lip first, like he’s just tasting. Like he doesn’t plan to kiss me at all. But my lips part for him anyway, and he sighs as his mouth sweeps upward, catching mine in full.

He captures my face in his hands and angles me up to deepen the kiss, the heat of his mouth scorching compared to the mild warmth of the water.

There’s no thought, no logic, no feeling other than him. My hands slip up the back of his shirt, nails sinking into his shoulder blades, and his hands sweep down my body, barely touching, leaving trails of goose bumps. My breath catches, spine curving into him, and his grip tightens against my thighs, scraping up beneath my hem to press me flush to him. His erection rocks against me, sending sparks showering across the backs of my eyes, and my nipples pinch as I arch into him.

My back meets the corner of the pool. Our hips angle together as his mouth glides down my neck, kissing me, biting wherever shivers erupt.

My skin burns everywhere it wants him.

The saving grace of this situation is that we’re not alone. That I can’t take this as far as I want to.

Behind us, Cleo and Kimmy finally manage to shove Sabrina into the pool. The splash carries a torrent of swear words up to the night sky. Wyn pulls back from me, his forehead resting against my temple, his heart slamming into me.

All I want now is to go to bed. I’m vaguely aware that there are reasons this is a terrible idea, but I’m having trouble pulling any of them to the forefront of my mind.

“You’re full of surprises tonight, Clee,” Parth shouts.

Cleo backstrokes past us, grinning up at the visible sliver of moon overhead. “Then I guess I’ve met my goal for the week.”

Still sputtering over the water and pushing fistfuls of honey-blond out of her face, Sabrina says, “Your goal for the week was to throw your bra off a Ferris wheel and bodycheck me into a pool?”

Cleo sits up, treading water. “More or less.”

Kimmy spikes a beach ball right at us, and I dive away from Wyn, my face tingling, my smile aching, my whole body buzzing.

Try as I might to bring myself back to reality, to the world outside the bubble of Knott’s Harbor, I am fully, terrifyingly here, where nothing else seems to matter.

•   •   •

AFTER WE’VE TOWELED off, climbed the stairs, and said our good nights, my bravery flags a little. Wyn holds tight to my hand as we make our way down the hall and into our dark bedroom.

He presses me back into the door the moment it’s closed. We’ve barely taken our hands off each other since that first kiss in the pool, but now that we’re alone, we’re both so much less certain. He’s trembling, or else I am—it’s always been hard to tell where one of us ends and the other begins—and our hands twist together, our breaths shallow.

It’s not that I think what happened downstairs was an act. But it was part of an agreement.

This isn’t. And neither of us seems to have decided what happens next.

My body has one idea. My brain isn’t a fan of the plan.

You’ve spent months trying to forget what you’re missing, I tell myself. How will you survive being reminded? Living the loss of it all over again?

His pulse is drumming into my chest. My weight shifts into him, my breasts brushing against his soaked T-shirt, and he lets out an unsteady breath.

I’m starved of him. I’ve been stranded in a Wyn-less desert, my throat bone-dry, and that first sip downstairs has made the thirst worse. My nervous system doesn’t care that this is a mirage. The violent kinetic thrumming is back, the air particles between us sparking.

“Is this okay,” he asks thickly.

I lift toward him like a charmed snake, my knees buckling a little when his palms touch my stomach through the damp satin, start to glide heavily up me. His lips skirt along my collarbone, his breath diffusing over my skin.

His dark eyes lift as his palms settle against my chest. I rock into his touch. His hands move to cup me more fully. When his thumbs graze my nipples, he groans, catches them between his fingers, watching the way my breath staggers and my body bows upward.

He slips one of my straps down my shoulder, kisses the bare skin where it used to be. His fingers find the other strap and tug it away too. My head tips back as I try to get a good breath, and he slips a hand into the now loose top of my bodice, his fingers curling against me.

He steps in close, his knee batting my thighs apart. I wrap my hand around his neck to keep from collapsing when his mouth drops to my chest, his lips closing over me. My existence narrows to that point, to the gentle pressure and fierce heat of his lips. He yanks my dress down until I’m bare to the waist, kisses his way across me, his palm moving to roll heavily against me.

“Tell me to kiss you, Harriet,” he rasps.

I don’t know if it’s wounded pride or fear of this all-consuming want or something else, but I can’t stand to ask for more of him.

“Tell me to kiss you,” he says again, nudging my thighs wider to ease in between my hips.

I rake my hands down his back, take hold of his waist, keeping us pinned together. I feel his pulse in his groin, or maybe it’s mine. The lines between him and me have become fuzzy, insubstantial.

“What are we doing?” he asks.

“I thought that was obvious,” I say.

His hips rock into me, and god help me, my hands go straight to his ass. He lifts me against the door, my thighs around his hips, my arms hooked behind his head, his erection hard against me.

I want him on top of me, beneath me, behind me. I want him in my mouth, his clothes in a pile on the floor, his sweat on my stomach, his voice rough against my ear. I want anything other than to stop.

“What does this mean,” he asks raggedly, still cupping me, kissing me.

“I don’t know,” I say.

A low, frustrated sound dies in the back of his throat, and he stills, holding me firmly against the door.

“This is a bad idea, Harriet,” he says hoarsely after a few seconds, lowering me but not stepping back. “We can’t be together.”

The words knock the wind out of me.

“I know that,” I say.

And I do. He broke my heart, destroyed it. And even if I could forgive him, he’s happy in his new life. I know there’s no going back.

So why does hearing it make my chest feel like a split log?

I push against Wyn’s shoulders, pull my straps back up.

He steps back, murmuring, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“I’m not sure you started it,” I get out.

He runs a hand up the back of his head, his brow deeply grooved. “I’m not sure that I didn’t either.”

“Then I guess I should say I’m sorry too,” I say.

His mouth twitches, a smile that’s anything but happy. He sighs. “This place.”

This place, indeed. It’s too easy to forget about the real world here, our circumstances, the things that broke us.

All the reasons there’s no finding our way back.

I flatten my palms against the door’s smooth wood. “We got swept up in it. That’s all.”

After a beat, he says, “I don’t want to do anything else that hurts you.”

“You didn’t,” I say.

I hurt myself, I think.

He looks over my shoulder at the door, almost guiltily.

“I think I should take a walk. Cool down.”

The thought of being any farther away from him than this is torment. I nod.

His eyes scrape down me and back up once more, heat washing from my head to my toes, a heavy pulse of need between my thighs.

“The bed’s all yours,” he says, and stalks past me. I slide out of the way so he can open the door. “Don’t feel like you need to wait up.”

It’s not that I wait up for him. It’s that as soon as I climb under the sheets, it’s like he hasn’t left at all, only multiplied. Every breeze from the cracked window is his mouth. Every brush of the sheets is his hand, moving across my thigh, over the curve of my stomach. Every creak of the settling house is his voice: Tell me to kiss you.

I try to think about anything else. My mind is caught on him.

Earlier tonight, as Cleo and I rested our chins atop our folded arms at the pool’s edge, legs sweeping in slow, luxurious kicks through the water, she asked, Any progress on your goal for the week?

And my eyes went straight for Wyn.

Not yet, I told her.

I don’t even know what I need from this week. To make it to the end without coming apart? Or without ruining Sabrina and Parth’s wedding?

My life has been on one set of rails since I decided to go into medicine. It’s been easy to make decisions with that as the governing force. Outside of that, I’ve rarely had to.

But I don’t want to regret anything at the end of this week. I want to feel like I used this time, even in a small way, how I wanted to.

And that’s what I fall asleep thinking over and over again: What do you want, Harriet?

I dream he climbs into bed with me. Arms up, baby, he says, and peels away my Virgin Who CAN Drive T-shirt.

There’s no one else, he whispers into the curve of my belly, the underside of my arm. Perfect, he says.

When I wake before sunrise, I’m still alone.