Book Lovers

15

WE AMBLE DOWN the dark road in near silence, but the air hums with an electric charge between us.

“You don’t have to walk me all the way to the cottage,” I finally say.

“It’s on my way,” Charlie says.

I cast him a disbelieving look.

His head tilts, streetlight lancing his face. I’m not sure anyone on the planet has nicer eyebrows than this man. Of course, I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed a man’s eyebrows before, so it might just be that my general under-stimulation during publishing’s slow season has forced me to find new interests. “Fine,” he relents. “It’s not far out of my way.”

At the edge of town, the sidewalk gives way to a grassy shoulder, but tonight I’m wearing sensible shoes. On our right, a narrow footpath winds into the foliage. “What’s through there?”

“Woods,” he says.

“I got that much,” I say. “Where does it go?”

He runs a hand over his face. “To the cottage.”

“Wait, like a shortcut?”

“More or less.”

“Is there a reason we’re not taking it?”

He arches a brow. “I didn’t take you for the hiking-in-the-dead-of-night type?”

I push past him.

“Stephens,” he says. “You don’t have to prove anything.” His faintly spicy scent catches up to me before he does, so familiar and yet surprising, notes of cinnamon and orange that are much stronger on him than they are on me. “Let’s just go back and follow the road.” Overhead, an owl hoots, and he ducks his head and throws his arms over it protectively.

“Wait.” I cut him a glance, stop. “Are you . . . afraid of the dark?”

“Of course not,” he growls, starting down the path again. “I’m just surprised how far you’re taking this small-town-transformation thing. And just so you know, those bangs do not make you more approachable. You just look like a hot assassin in an expensive wig.”

“All I just heard,” I say, “is hot and expensive.”

“If I showed you a Rorschach blot, you’d find hot and expensive somewhere in there.”

My gaze catches over his shoulder. Just beyond the trail, a stream funnels over a small waterfall, massive rocks jutting up like teeth on either side of it to form a swimming hole. A break in the tree cover lets moonlight pool on its center, turning the frothy water into a landscape of shimmering silver spirals.

“Number six,” I exhale.

Charlie follows my gaze, his brow furrowing. “There is absolutely no way.”

The urge to surprise him surges like a tidal wave. But there’s something else too. In college, I was always the Party Mom, the one who made sure no one fell down stairs or drank anything they hadn’t seen poured. With Libby, I’m the doting-slash-worrying older sister. For my clients, the hard-ass who argues and presses and negotiates.

Here, I realize abruptly, I’m none of those things. I don’t have to be, not with obsessive, organized, responsible Charlie Lastra. So I step onto the nearest boulder and kick off my shoes.

“Nora,” he groans. “You’re not serious.”

I peel my dress over my shoulders. “Why not? Are there alligators?”

I look back at him in time to catch his eyes cutting up from my underwear, instinctively snagging on my bra for a split second before launching to my face with a clench of his jaw.

“Sharks?” I ask.

“Only you,” he says.

“Leeches? Nuclear waste?”

“Regular waste isn’t bad enough?” he says.

“I’m not making you get in,” I say.

“Not until you start drowning.”

I sit on the rock, dangling my legs into the cool water. A shiver breaks across my shoulder blades. “I’m a very proficient swimmer.” I slip into the stream, suppressing a yelp.

“Cold?” Charlie says, tone self-satisfied.

“Balmy,” I reply, wading deeper until the water reaches my chest. “I would have to try very hard to drown in this.”

He steps up to the ledge. “At least the bacterial infection will come easily.”

“I would’ve thought this was some kind of Sunshine Falls rite of passage,” I say.

“Do I seem like the kind of person who would honor local rites of passage?”

“Well, your boots are Sandro and I’ve seen you wear luxury cashmere at least thrice,” I say, “so maybe not.”

“Capsule wardrobe,” he says, like this explains everything. “I only buy things that can be worn with everything else I already own, and that I know I like enough to wear for years. It’s an investment.”

“Such a city person,” I sing.

He rolls his eyes. “You know this doesn’t count for number six, right? Maybe in Manhattan they consider this skinny-dipping, but in Sunshine Falls we’d call that getup ‘a glorified bathing suit.’ ”

Another challenge.

I’m a woman possessed. I sink beneath the water, unclasp my bra, and hurl it at him. It thwacks against his chest. “Closer,” he allows, lifting the dainty black lace strap to examine it in the moonlight. “All this,” he says seriously, “wasted on Blake Carlisle.”

“I exclusively own pretty underwear,” I say. “They’re bound to be wasted occasionally.”

“Spoken like a true lady of luxury.”

I drift backward, knees bent, toes gliding along the smooth stone creek bed. “I think we’ve proven that, of the two of us, you are the aristocrat here. I’m skinny-dipping. In a local watering hole. Whereas you can’t even swim.”

He rolls his eyes. “I can swim.”

“Charlie,” I say. “It’s okay. There’s no shame in the truth.”

“Remember when you used to pretend to be polite?”

“Do you miss it?”

“Not at all.” He tugs his shirt over his head and discards it on the rocks. “You’re way more fun this way.” When his pants are halfway off, I remember to look away, and a moment later, when the water breaks, I spin to find him wincing at the cold slosh against his stomach.

“Shit!” he gasps. “Shit-fuck!”

“Such a way with words.” I swim toward him. “It’s not that bad.”

“Is it possible you don’t have any pain receptors?” he hisses.

“Not only possible but probable,” I reply. “I’ve been told I feel nothing.”

Charlie frowns. “Whoever said that clearly only met Professional Nora.”

“Most people do.”

“Poor assholes,” he says, almost affectionately. The same voice in which he said Of course you did when I told him I met my agenting goals eight months early.

I stop close enough to see his skin prickling. The droplets on his throat and jaw catch the moonlight, and my chest and thighs tingle in response.

I drift backward as he wades toward me, maintaining the gap between us. “What other Sunshine Falls rites of passage did you ignore?”

The muscles along his jaw shadow as he thinks. “People are really into bouldering here.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “That’s when you stand at the top of a mountain and wait for one of your enemies to walk by, then push a rock over the ledge.”

“Close,” he says. “It’s when you climb boulders.”

“For . . . what reason?”

“To get to the top, presumably.”

“And then?”

His golden shoulder lifts in a shrug, water sluicing down his chest. “Probably there’s another boulder, and then you climb to the top of that one. Human beings are a mysterious species, Nora. I once watched a bike courier get hit by a car, get up, and scream I become God at the top of his lungs before riding off in the opposite direction.”

“What’s mysterious about that?” I say. “He tested the limits of his own mortality and found they didn’t exist.”

Charlie’s pouty mouth tugs to one side in a half smirk. “That’s what I love about New York.”

“So many bike couriers with god complexes.”

“You’re never the weirdest person in the room.”

“There’s always that person in silver body paint,” I agree, “who asks for donations to repair his UFO.”

“He’s my Q train favorite,” Charlie says.

My skin warms. I wonder how many times we’ve passed each other in our city of millions.

“I like that you’re anonymous there,” he continues. “You’re whoever you decide to be. In places like this, you never shake off what people first thought about you.”

I swim closer. He doesn’t retreat. “And what did they think of you?”

“Not huge fans,” he says.

“Mrs. Struthers is,” I point out, “and — your ex is too.” I shoot him a glance and sink lower in the water to hide the way my body lights up under his gaze.

I don’t feel like Nadine Winters when he’s this close. I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.

“Mrs. Struthers liked me because I fucking loved school,” he says. “I mean, once I figured out how to actually read. Didn’t exactly make me a hit with other kids, though. In high school, things weren’t as bad, and then eventually . . .”

“You got hot,” I say somberly.

His laugh grates over my skin. “I was going to say ‘I moved to New York.’ ”

We’ve stopped moving. Heat corkscrews through my rib cage, coiling tighter with each spiral.

I clear my throat enough to joke, “And then you got hot.”

“Actually,” he says, “that only happened four or five weeks ago. There was this big meteor shower, and I made a wish and . . .” Charlie holds his arms out as he drifts closer.

My heart feels light and jittery in my chest, my limbs incongruently heavy. “So you’re saying Amaya’s expression was less about longing than outright shock over your new face.”

“I didn’t notice Amaya’s expression,” he says.

My mouth goes dry, heaviness gathering between my thighs. He catches a bead of water as it trickles over my cupid’s bow. My lips part, the pad of his finger lingering on my bottom lip.

I’m acutely aware of how flimsy the space is between us now, slippery, finite, closable. Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world.

It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.

Usually I live like I’m trying to see four moves ahead in a chess game, but right now I can’t seem to think past the next five minutes. It takes a lot of effort to say, “You probably want to get home.”

He shakes his head. “But if you do . . .”

I shake my head.

For a moment, nothing happens. It feels like there’s a silent negotiation happening between us. His hand catches mine under the water. After a beat, he draws me toward him, slowly — plenty of time for either of us to pull away.

My fingers brush his hip instead, and the chessboard in my mind disintegrates.

His other hand finds my waist, closing the gap between us. The feeling of being pressed against him is somewhere between bliss and torture. A small sound sighs out of me. He doesn’t tease me for it. Instead his hands cut a slow path down my sides, tucking each inch of me against him: chest, stomach, hips flush, all my softest parts against all his hardest, my thighs settling loose around his hips. His thumbs catch on the curves of my hips, and a gravelly hum rumbles through him.

My nipples pinch against his skin, and his arms tighten across my back.

We’re both silent, like any word could break the spell of the silver moonlight.

Our lips catch lightly once, then draw apart, slip together a little deeper. His hands follow the curve of my back lower, curling around me, squeezing me to him, rolling his hips into mine.

My mouth feels like it’s melting under his, like I’m wax and he’s the burning wick down my center. One of his hands curls around my jaw, the other sweeping up to cup my breast as my thighs wrap tight around him. My breath catches against his mouth when his thumb rolls across my nipple. He hitches me higher, everything to my belly button above the water now, exposed to the moonlight, and he’s looking, touching, tasting his way across me.

My brain grapples for control of my short-circuiting body. “Should we think about this?”

“Think?” He says it like he’s never heard the word. Another hungry, stomach-flipping kiss erases it from my vocabulary too. My hands twist into his hair. His mouth moves down the side of my throat, teeth sinking into my collarbone.

I’m trying to think my way through this, but it feels like I’m a passenger in a very willing body.

Charlie teases against my ear, “You should never wear clothes, Nora.” My laugh dies in my throat as he pins me against one of the flat rocks at the edge of the water, my hips locking around his, sensation flaming through my thighs at the friction between us, at the push of his stomach and his erection shifting against me through our underwear.

Charlie kisses like no one I’ve ever been with. Like someone who takes the time to figure out how things work.

Every tilt of my hips, arch of my spine, shallow breath guides him, landmarks on a map he’s making of my body.

He hums my name into my skin. It sounds as much like a swear as when I slammed into him at Poppa Squat’s, his voice sizzling through me until I feel like a struck tuning fork.

His lips drag down my throat to my chest, his breath ragged as he draws me into his mouth. His fingers circle my wrists against the rock, our hips moving in a hungry rhythm.

“Shit,” he hisses, but at least this time, he’s not slingshotting away from me. His hands are still everywhere. His mouth hasn’t left my skin. “I don’t want to stop.”

My mind’s still half-heartedly warring for control. My body makes the unilateral decision to say, “Then don’t.”

“We have to talk about this first,” he says. “Things are complicated for me right now.” And yet we’re still clamoring for each other. Charlie’s hands raze over my thighs, squeezing so hard I might bruise. My nails are in his back, urging him close. His warm mouth skims over my shoulder, his tongue and teeth finding my pulse at the base of my throat.

I nod. “Then talk.”

Another sharp kiss, his teeth hard against my lip, his hands hard against my ass. “It’s hard to think in words right now, Nora.”

His hands wind into my hair, his mouth slipping against the corner of mine, his breath shallow and frantic. I lift myself against him and one of his hands curls tight against my spine, his groan crackling through me like a dozen bolts of lightning heading straight to my center.

Everything else is briefly obliterated as I roll myself against him, and he returns the favor, the friction between us electric.

“God, Nora,” he hisses.

Something like I know slips out of me, right into his mouth. His fingers dig under the lace at the sides of my hips, burrowing into my skin. I’ve never felt someone else’s frustration so palpably; I’ve never been so frustrated. I’m seeing spots, everything lost behind a wall of need.

And then my phone rings from the rocks.

All at once, reality crashes in from all sides, a rock slide of thoughts my lust has been holding back. I push back from Charlie, gasping out, “Dusty!”

He blinks at me through the dark, chest heaving. “What?”

“Shit! No! No!” I swim for the rocks, the ringer echoing through the dark.

“What’s wrong?” Charlie asks, close behind me.

“I was supposed to call Dusty. Hours ago.” I haul myself out of the water and rush for the phone. I miss the last ring by seconds, and when I dial back, it goes straight to voicemail. “Shit!”

How could I do that? How could I just forget about my oldest, most sensitive, highest-earning client? How could I let myself get this distracted?

I dial again and get her voicemail message. “Hey, Dusty!” I say brightly after the beep. “Sorry about that. I had a . . .”

What could I possibly be busy with this late at night? No respectable meeting, certainly.

“Something came up,” I say. “But I’m free now, so give me a call back!”

I hang up, then skim Libby’s string of messages, increasingly frantic requests for me to confirm that Blake hasn’t fed me to a wood chipper. My heart rockets into my throat, and hot, prickling shame rises to the surface of my skin. On my way home, I text Libby.

“Everything okay?”

I turn and find Charlie pulling on his pants, his shirt bundled in one hand. “What happened?” he asks.

I wasn’t there, I think. They needed me and I wasn’t there. Just like—I cut myself off before my mind can boomerang back there, say instead, “I don’t do this.”

Charlie’s brow arches. “Do what?”

“Everything that just happened,” I say. “All of it. This isn’t how I operate.”

He half laughs. “And what, you think this is a pattern for me?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, maybe. That’s the point! How would I even know?” His smile falls, and my chest stings in response. I shake my head. “It’s this book, Frigid, and this trip — I started thinking I could just go with this, but . . .” I lift my phone at my side, like this explains everything. Libby’s pre-baby crisis, Dusty’s intense insecurity, not to mention all my other clients, everyone who’s counting on me. “I can’t afford a distraction right now.”

“Distraction.” He repeats the word emptily, like he’s unfamiliar with the concept. Probably he is. For a solid decade, I was.

Prioritization. Compartmentalization. Qualification. These things have always worked for me in the past, but now just one sprinkle of recklessness has distracted me from both my sister and my prize client. After what happened with Jakob, I should’ve known I couldn’t trust myself.

I force down the hard knot in my throat. “I need to be focused,” I say. “I owe that to Dusty.”

When I’m distracted, I miss things. When I miss things, bad things happen.

Charlie studies me for a long moment. “If that’s what you want.”

“It is,” I say.

His brow slightly lifts, his eyes reading the obvious lie. It doesn’t matter. Want is not a good way to make decisions.

“And besides,” I add, “things are complicated for you anyway, right?”

After a beat, he sighs. “More every second.”

Still, neither of us moves. We’re in a silent standoff, waiting to see if the dam holds, the pressure building between us, my cells all still vibrating under his gaze.

Charlie looks away first. He rubs the side of his jaw. “You’re right. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to accept this can’t be anything.” He snatches my dress off the rock and holds it out.

My stomach sinks, but I accept the dress. “Thanks.”

Without looking at me, he says dryly, “What are colleagues for?”