In This Moment(79)

“Aimee.” My name is a moan and a plea. He pushes his tongue inside my mouth and glides his fingers underneath the elastic waistband of my athletic shorts to where my upper thighs meet my torso.

“Ahh!” I close my eyes and tip my chin down toward my breast.

Considering that this is a public place, I should be more worried about what could happen if someone were to find us, but I’m too distracted by what Cole’s fingers are doing to me and how his hot tongue feels moving against my neck.

Panting, I shift so that my ankles are hooked in the middle of his back and we kiss like that until we’re both out of our minds with wanting. Cole breaks away, digs a condom out of his wallet and looks back at me with an intensity that has my body practically begging.

I draw in a breath and skim my hand under his shirt across the expanse of his muscled chest. I wonder if he feels it too—this huge sensation like the sky opening up and swallowing us both.

He grins sheepishly. “I wish I could give you more than the back of my truck.”

“I’m pretty happy with the back of your truck if that’s where you are.”

Cole’s smile deepens until I can see the shadow of his dimples. He kisses my shoulder and runs his fingers down to the small of my back and around my waist. As he removes my shorts, his blunt nails scrape across my bellybutton creating a delicious friction.

Holding his eyes with mine, I tighten my legs around him and pull him inside of me. Cole goes very still then he kisses me hard and presses his palms deep into my skin.

It’s hard to say how it happens. How all of the bits of me—even the broken ones—start to tumble. I think it’s my toes that go first. Next—my legs and the hollow spaces behind my ribs. And then my arms all the way down through my wrist bones to the tips of my fingers. My lips part and I realize that this is what it feels like to fall.

We move with the low rumble of the waves as our soundtrack and I live again and again. His fingers trace letters on my flesh. He’s handing me back my own words.

This is real.





Cole





I never used to think about things like death and life and all the hundreds of thousands of seconds that get stuck in between. Back then I didn’t know the way that a person can crawl so far inside of you that your organs voluntarily shift to the side to make room for the shape of them.

Her smell is all around me. I clutch her head, my knuckles brushing the smooth line of her jaw, and I tilt her chin back so that I can see her eyes better. Clear blue pools swimming beneath a flutter of dark lashes. She makes a faint sound as her body gets closer and then she cries out and buries her face in the skin of my neck.

Damn. I close my eyes and give in to the feeling swelling hard and fast under my flesh. It intensifies with each ragged beat of my heart until I think I might explode. She’s everywhere—grabbing at my skin, pulling my hair through her fingers, clenching her muscles tightly around me. I bite back the primal sound scratching at the back of my throat, and all at once I’m erupting, breaking free, coming apart from the inside out.

That was…

The damp heat of her breath exchanges with mine as she fits her mouth over my lips and collapses her weight against my chest. I wish I could describe this. This moment. If only I could… fuck. For the first time in my life I want to tell someone how I feel and I don’t even know how to find the words—solid and honest—to do it. Isn’t it considered a chump move to tell a girl all the ways that she rocks your world right after sex?

I stroke her long hair and pull her into my side.

“Don’t let me go,” she says so quietly that I have to replay her words in my head to make sure that I heard them right.

I run my thumbs over the bumps of her spine. “Don’t worry,” I reply. “I won’t.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN





Cole



“It’s way too hot for this shit. Where is autumn? It’s almost November and I’m still sweating my balls off over here.” I drop to the grass.

Daniel laughs, takes a rasping breath, and bends over to reach for the blue plastic water bottle that he tucked beside the base of a scraggly pine before we took off on our run. “It’s going to be like this until a storm breaks. A patch of warm air is pushing its way inland. Don’t you ever check the weather?”

“Do I look like someone who checks the weather?”

Daniel ignores the question. “I think that you’ve lived in Florida long enough to know that changing seasons are a myth anywhere south of Tallahassee.”

“Then no more afternoon runs.”

“Hey, you’re the one who couldn’t go later on—not me. If we had waited to run until seven then it wouldn’t have been so bad,” Daniel says as he lowers himself to the ground. We’ve just endured a brutal eleven miles and now it is time to sprawl on the lawn in front of the track and field offices and let our muscles cool down.