His pet name for me jarred me from my drooling state. “Baby?” I took his hand.
When I was upright, he buried his hands in my hair. “Not a fan of the word?”
“Whatever trips your trigger,” I teased. He could call me anything he wanted to as long as my body was flush with his.
He laughed.
“Hey, man,” Austin piped up. “Are you making breakfast?”
Train flicked his head at Reagan, who was just moving under the covers. “Go back to your girl. We’re taking a walk. Then we’ll talk about food.” Train ushered me outside.
Breakfast did sound good.
More bodies were cocooned in sleeping bags around the fireless pit. The sun sat slightly above the horizon, while the water was calm—a sharp contrast to the rough surf last night.
Train and I ventured down the desolate beach and walked along the shore, sinking our feet into the wet sand. The only sound for miles was the push and pull of the barely there waves that slid along the sand and, at times, over our feet. We meandered for about five minutes before I broke our silence.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“You. Me. Us.”
“Again, you confuse me. You said you would tell me this morning why you changed your mind about me.”
He picked up a seashell. “If I’m being honest, you scare the fuck out of me. I’ve never met a girl like you.”
“I’m not sure how to take all that.”
His tone was genuine. He did like me. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have slept next to me. Even if he just wanted sex, he still had to at least like me. I couldn’t have sex with someone I didn’t like.
A seagull cawed overhead.
His eyes sparkled in the morning sun. “Nina was my world. I seriously thought I would marry her someday. We were inseparable. We’ve known each other since grade school, and it wasn’t until the ninth grade when we started dating. Then at the end of our junior year, I was in Charleston, visiting my dad. I was walking to my truck, when she came out of a nearby restaurant with a guy. I watched as she kissed him. When I confronted her, she said the guy was a friend of the family. You don’t tongue a guy who is a friend of the family. The kicker was I knew the guy. He’s the starting quarterback for Clemson, who wasn’t a friend of her family.”
“Elvira said you put him in the hospital?”
“After Nina and I broke up, she decided to show up to a party with the dude on her arm. I was drunk and lost my shit.” He stared out at the water.
I grasped his hand. “I can’t tell if you’re not over her or still hurt by her or both.”
He switched his gaze from the water to me. “Neither. But I was shocked when she showed up on the beach on the first day of school. Over the summer, her father took a job in Florida, but I guess that didn’t work out. I thought I didn’t have to see her at all during my senior year or ever.”
“Hence why you’ve been cranky,” I said.
“I’d sworn off girls this year. But that lasted all of two weeks.” He chuckled. “Some blonde who thinks she owns the universe blew into computer class and blindsided me.”
His admission explained why he’d been pushing me away.
He snaked an arm around my back. “I do like you. You have this personality that attracts me to you, and you have a way of getting me to do things I would never do.”
A butterfly winged in my stomach, but I tamped it down. “You mean like stripping.”
“Fuck. I would’ve never done that with another girl. Not to mention that weight room scene. That’s not me, although your mom’s book spurred me on.”
I slipped my fingers just inside the band of his swimsuit. “Why did you get spooked in the weight room?”
He sucked in a breath. “I was making moves your mom wrote. It was weird.”
“So I guess we’re dating now,” I said.
