“You’re big.” She stretched her arms out as wide as she could. “Like, unreal big.”
He smiled that crooked, sexy smile. “I know.”
I yanked up my jeans, fastening the button and hiking up the zipper before I made myself known. “Hey,” I said, slowly walking out of the hallway into the living room. “Ready?”
Allison turned to me, her eyes as big as saucers. “Holy fuck,” she mouthed, waggling her eyebrows.
I winked at her, knowing she would want all the details now. I forgot we’d decided he’d pick me up at our place, doing the whole chivalry thing. He refused to let me meet him at the restaurant because that wouldn’t be proper. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”
“She’ll be late. Don’t wait up,” Austin added.
“Go have fun.” Allison practically pushed me out the door when I got near her. “I want all the details,” she whispered in my ear.
Austin smirked with his eyes trained on mine. “She’ll have plenty to share.”
* * *
I burrowed my fingers into the sand, gazing across the water as the sun began to kiss the horizon. The warmth of earlier had started to fade, but the small grains beneath me were more than enough to keep me from being cold. “This is so beautiful.”
“There’s nothing like a Florida sunset,” Austin said, inching his body closer to mine. “I never really appreciated a sunset until I moved here.”
“The sunrises in Virginia are something else.”
His fingertip grazed mine, and I didn’t move away. “Before the service, I don’t think I was ever awake early enough to see the sun come up, and if I was, I didn’t stop to look.”
“I’m sure I’ll see a lot of beautiful sunrises and sunsets when I deploy next month.”
“Already headed out?”
I turned my head, staring at his face bathed in the orange glow of the setting sun. “Already. It’s going to be a long seven months.”
“Deployment can suck, especially your first, but you’ll hit some awesome places.”
“I guess, but I’ve been damn near everywhere. My parents weren’t ones to staycation.”
Austin stretched his legs out, dropping back onto his elbows. “I hadn’t been anywhere until I joined the navy. I went from bumfuck Tennessee to middle-of-nowhere Florida. I hadn’t been outside the United States until I enlisted.”
I spun my ass in the sand, turning to face him as I pulled my legs to my chest. “What’s your rate?”
There was so much I still didn’t know about Austin. While he was chatty, he was also standoffish. Maybe that was from his past. The tragedies he’d lived through made him keep things close to the vest. He only let me graze the surface of the real man underneath.
“Let’s not talk about work anymore,” he said, watching the waves rolling over the sand a few feet away. “It’s nice to get away from it all and act like someone else than a sailor.”
I pulled my legs tighter against me, resting my chin on my knees. “Sure,” I told him and then fell silent.
I didn’t know what else to talk about. We barely knew each other. Besides the navy, we didn’t seem to have much in common.
“How old are you?” I blurted out, trying to fill the silence.
“Twenty-five. You?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And it’s your first deployment?”
“I went to college and finished my degree before I enlisted.”
He raised his eyebrows, looking impressed. “Smart. OCS, then?”
