“God, are those crickets?” Trevor asks, sweeping his hair back into a messy half bun.
“Cicadas,” I correct him.
He nods without looking at me, clearly distracted. I rest a hand on the small of his back to guide him to my intended location. A slightly overgrown trail cuts through the bushes, leading to my own personal oasis.
I don’t frequent as much as I did when I was a kid now that I’m an adult. But my younger cousins and distant relatives keep the path well-worn.
The trees get just a little thicker right before giving way to a startling turquoise spring. A gasp from Trevor tears through the sound of the cicadas. He pauses beside me, disbelieving eyes on the placid water in front of us.
“You’ve got your own spring?”
“You wanna swim?” I gesture awkwardly toward the water. “I keep a couple of changes of clothes in my truck in case I get messy at work.”
Trevor laughs derisively, aiming a blinding grin my way. “Of course I want to swim!”
Scrambling out of his clothes, Trevor stands in just a pair of tight black boxer briefs that leave nothing to the imagination. A quarter could bounce off his ass. Round and gorgeous, just like the rest of him. Smooth, golden skin, a little bit of light blond hair, and firm muscles that ripple each time he shifts even a little. Jesus, my fake boyfriend might as well be a supermodel.
“Well?” Trevor lifts one knowing eyebrow at me.
Heat slowly creeps up my neck. “Oops.”
Not wanting to make a fool of myself in front of him, I undress slowly. But by the time I’m done, he’s not even watching me anymore, his toes are already dipping into the spring. When I come up beside him, he looks coyly up at me through his eyelashes.
“It’s been a while since I swam in a spring. The key is to jump right in, right? No second-guessing?”
I nod at him and tangle our fingers. “Together?”
He takes a fortifying breath. “Together.”
And then we jump.
A gasp tears from me as I break through the surface of the water. The trick is to let my body acclimate to the perpetually seventy-two-degree water, but it always feels a little bit like dying. Silt at the bottom of the spring stirs under my feet, but the water remains a crystal light blue.
Trevor breaks through the surface with a laugh and a violent shiver that cracks his teeth. Sunlight slits through the trees, highlighting all the golden strands of his hair. Like honey, or the center of a daisy. Yellow’s always been a happy color to me. Trevor reminds me of the color yellow. Sweet as honey, happy as a sunflower inching towards the sun.
“God, I’d forgotten,” Trevor complains, his teeth chattering loudly.
I chuckle softly. “It’s a good jolt to the body.”
Trevor reaches up to expertly remove his hair from the tie, letting the soft strands cascade to his bare shoulders. I watch enraptured as he dips his head back, wetting the golden locks in the turquoise water. He comes back up with his hair slicked back, longer now than it was when it was dry. Dipping down, he treads water instead of reaching on his tiptoes to touch the bottom.
Sun slashes through the trees, catching on the mostly still water of the spring. Trevor uses his hand to block out the sun and look behind me at the river beyond.
“How many gators come in here?”
“They stay away from the spring mostly,” I reassure him with my best comforting smile. “They prefer the river. It can happen though. Don’t swim fast and they won’t eat you. Swamp puppies are just as scared of you as you are of them.”
“So comforting,” Trevor murmurs in obvious disagreement.
His baby blues shift back to me, sending a terrifying thought through my head.Kiss him. A moment of tension passes over us before Trevor breaks it by playfully splashing me. And then it’s on. We wrestle in the water like children, splashing, and laughing under the bright sun. Both of us let out soft pants when we finally pull away, grinning like loons. God, Trevor makes me feel like a kid again. Some kind of magic.
“How’d you become a fake boyfriend?” I ask because I am so curious about the mystery of Trevor.
Trevor hums thoughtfully as he lies back to float along the surface of the water. Every firm muscle along his body is on display from this angle. We might be in a spring, but my blood heats to boiling, especially when he reaches out to tightly circle his fingers around my wrist. To not float away, as if I’m his anchor.
“Matter of circumstance. Helps me pay the bills and I’m good at it. Plus, I like helping people.” Makes sense. Trevor kicks his feet, so he spins around on the surface of the water, a little smirk playing at his lips. “What about you, handsome? Why’d you need a fake boyfriend?”
I blow an exasperated raspberry. “I don’t have much time to date with the farm and my family.”
