The girl I love?
She wades to him and wraps her arms around his neck, dragging him down to her level, chin-deep in the water. His toes dig into the rocks and sand as she fits her body to his, soft in places he is embarrassingly hard.
Her eyes widen. “Is that . . . ?”
Fire engulfs his cheeks. “I’m sorry, I—”
“You don’t have to be sorry.” She shifts against him, and for a split second, he worries he’s going to come in his swimsuit.
“Your freckles are starting to show more,” he points out.
Nelle squints down at her nose, searching. “Do you like them?”
“Love them,” he says, testing the word. It flies out effortlessly.
She laughs, a sound like silver wind chimes.
“Thank you for bringing me here,” she says.
“Thank Jessie, not me.” His chest tightens with the need to say three specific words to her. It feels like a lie to keep them in. He needs to know whether she feels the same way. Whether she, too, needs to wrap her arms around him and never let him go, to know how his skin feels under her tongue, to study him like a poem so she can remember the lines of him forever.
“James,” Nelle says, her lips a shivering inch from his. She takes on a serious tone. “I need to do something, but I don’t know where to go.”
He bobs in the water. “Whatever it is, do it here.”
She shakes her head. “Ican’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because ...” She drops her voice. “Because I need to pee.”
“I feel dirty.” Nelle climbs out of the water and finds refuge on her towel. She folds herself on the red-and-blue striped rectangle and hugs her wet legs, craving a scalding shower.
“It’s completely normal.” James picks upRavel, bookmarked halfway. “Everyone does it.”
“Everyone doesnotpee on themselves.”
He glances up from his page. “It’s not really peeing on yourself if the water is cleaning you off while you do it.”
“Would you clean yourself off in the ocean any other time?”
“Well . . . no.”
“My point proven.” Nelle picks up her own book, a mystery. “You wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t clean you at all. There are probably urine particles on my legs right now. Still inside my bikini, too.”
At the mention of her bikini, James’s cheeks go apple red.
Nelle’s lips become the south pole to his north, aching to connect. Heat swells behind her pelvis.
“Think of it this way.” He nudges his book against her stretched legs. Not even skin-on-skin contact, but it sets her aflame. “Peeing in the ocean is yet another new experience.”
When he returns to his book, his hair hangs over his dense eyebrows. A droplet of seawater slides down his temple, his chin, and he wipes it away with the back of his hand.
Nelle runs her fingers through his wet, silken brown hair. Almost black. Touching him is the most exhilarating thing she has ever done, more than traversing New York, more than tasting salt in the sea, more than leaving Quill. Somewhere in her chest, a dam breaks, releasing a deluge of golden magma. She wants this feeling to bury both her and James, to hold them there forever, hardening under her lava.
Nelle has been alive for twenty-one years. Between the Technicolor men on the boxy TV she used to sit cross-legged in front of and the men in the pages of her books, she has grown familiar with her sexuality. But she has never felt this before. This pining, more powerful than lust. It is new, electrifying, and the moment she feels it, she knows what to call it.
She never felt love with Quill. Only fear. What she has with James is freedom. It’s an old country road, laughing late at night, drinking coffee, kissing in the sea.
