But I died a little too. I was afraid of what this meant. Now that she was gone, especially with another guy, there was no reason for Will and me to continue this charade. Our heady night together was over.
“Tia,” he said.
I nodded, bowing my head and bringing it closer to his. At least I could feel his breath in my ear one last time before we went our separate ways.
“When we arranged our deal to make Angelica jealous, I didn’t say what I really meant, which was, please go out with me. I want to be with you. I don’t want it to be fake, and I don’t want it to end tonight.”
Heart racing, I sat back in my chair. “So, you never really wanted to get Angelica back? That was just a ruse to get me to go out with you?”
He watched me carefully, like he was afraid I would bolt. “No, not exactly. I didn’t think it all the way through. But you said you wanted to help me. This was a way you could help me. And in the back of my mind I was probably thinking, Grab.” He slid his hand around my waist. “Opportunity.” He circled my fingers with his. “Grab.” Holding my hand, he met my gaze and waited for my answer.
I found the courage, but slowly. “Okay.”
His fingers massaged mine as he leaned forward and whispered, “You left out a stop when you took me on a tour of town.”
“What’s that?” I asked, beaming in anticipation of what he would say.
“A place people go to be alone. Do you have one of those?”
“We do.” It was Harper’s grandfather’s strip of beach. He could have sold it for a billion dollars and retired in a mansion, but he chose to continue living in his little bungalow on the same street as Sawyer’s house and keep his fishing boat down at the city marina. Harper had given Kaye and me the code to open the gate at this private beach in case we ever needed it.
Now I did. Harper’s boyfriend, Kennedy, seemed more interested in talking smack with his artsy guy friends after hours than going parking with her. Aidan and Kaye would stay here at her house until the end of her party. The beach belonged to Will and me tonight.
***
“Do you have a condom?” I asked.
We were driving in Will’s throaty car toward the beach. The question hung so starkly in the air that I almost imagined I could see it centered over the armrest between us, blinking as streetlights and the shadows of palm trees alternated overhead. Asking the question meant clarifying what we were about to do.
After a pause, he said, “Yes. I bought them on my way home from your house that first night.”
I hooted laughter. “A little sure of yourself, weren’t you?”
He grinned. “No. Just motivated.”
“I’m on the pill, too,” I said. “Due to my family history, I make sure I’m super safe.”
He nodded, then swallowed with difficulty like his mouth was dry. “I want you to know something,” he said. “When I got so mad on the first day of practice and threw my phone, and you said my girlfriend had taken advantage of me before I left . . .”
“I was so out of line,” I said. “You were right when you said I hold stuff in and pretend I’m not mad, and it comes out later as a backhanded insult. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean, she didn’t. Take advantage of me. We didn’t do it. The whole time we were dating, she said she wasn’t ready. And the night I left, she did it with my best friend. So she was ready, just not for me. I guess it doesn’t matter. But I didn’t want you to think that I was that . . .”
“Experienced?”
“Naïve,” he said, “that I wouldn’t know what was going on if she tried to trick me into, like, putting out or whatever.” He glanced at me. “Or experienced.”
I touched his hand on the gearshift, lifted my hand when he had to shift, and settled my hand on his again. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes,” he said instantly. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his whole face looked happy, starry eyed and breathless with the idea. Then he started laughing uncontrollably. “Yes!” he chuckled. “Good Lord. But you’re not.”
“Me!” I exclaimed. Then a rush of warmth flowed through me. It was relief that we wouldn’t do this. Not tonight. And something more: a deep appreciation that he knew somehow what I’d been feeling without me having to tell him.
“If it didn’t mean anything, you’d be willing,” he said. “Now that it means something, you want to go slow.”
I gazed at him across the car, his head and shoulders mostly in shadow. The moonlight burnished his short hair, turning it bronze, and kissed his long lashes and long nose, his expressive mouth. This time I knew better than to think he looked handsome only because of the moon. I had been a fool to push this guy away.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about slow.”
He was laughing again as he pulled up to the gate. After we were through and I’d locked it behind us, he drove underneath the palms. The trees were thick at first, then more sparse, until the grove opened onto the beach. The moonlight streaming toward us across the ocean was as brilliant as the sun.
“Wow,” he breathed.
“I told you it was beautiful here.”
He cut the engine. Instantly the sound of waves crashing on the beach rushed to fill that space. He turned to me. Now he would hand me one of his delightfully cheesy pickup lines. It was beautiful here, he would say, but he didn’t mean the beach. He meant me.
He caught me completely off guard when he said instead, “I fell for you that first night we were together. And you can say it’s because of what we were doing, or I was rebounding from Beverly, or I was stressed from the move, but I know how I feel. I love you.”
We weren’t touching anymore. I sat on my side of the car. He sat on his, watching me with a serious expression in his shadowed eyes, the worry line between his brows deeper than ever.
“I love you too,” I breathed.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he complained. “Now I’ll never get laid.”
I giggled as he tumbled his big frame over into my side of the car and eased the seat back flat. Kissing me deeply, he unbuttoned the front of my dress, then reached around to unhook my bra. Then he bared my br**sts and put his mouth on me.
“I like it when you do that.”
His lips brushed my skin as he spoke, and his low voice sent chills through me. “Yeah, I remembered you like it when I do that.”