A quiet sound catches in my throat when his mouth moves more aggressively against mine, when one hand slides a little farther around my waist under the water, the other drifts up my side in a touch so light it feels almost teasing. The lake cools my skin. His hands do not. The contrast is enough to make every nerve in me wake up all at once.
“Well,” he murmurs against my mouth, his voice already roughening at the edges, “that escalated.”
A laugh escapes me, softer than I mean it to be, the sound pleasing him more than it should. His mouth curves. Mine does too.
“You started it,” I whisper.
His brows lift. “Did I?”
The innocence in his face is so fake it almost ruins me.
Before I can answer, he kisses me again, deeper this time, dragging the air right out of me. My arms slide more securelyaround his neck, fingertips catching in the damp hair at the nape, holding him close because there is no point pretending I want distance. Not with him. Not here. Not when the whole lake seems to have narrowed down to the heat of his body and the lazy, devastating way he keeps touching me under the water as if he has memorized exactly how to make me melt without anyone else noticing.
His hand glides over my side, then lower, then back up again, a slow pass that leaves my breath catching in little pieces. My thigh brushes his under the water. Everything in his face darkens for one suspended second, enough to make me wonder whether summer peace is about to end in the kind of trouble that leaves us stumbling back to shore and inventing excuses.
Then his hand stills.
Not because he’s pulling away. Because his thumb has found my scar.
The one along my side.
The one I rarely think about until someone else’s fingers tell me exactly where it lives.
His expression changes immediately.
Heat doesn’t disappear, but something gentler rises through it. His thumb brushes once over the old scar as if he is tracing something sacred instead of damaged. The touch is so careful it hurts.
Without really thinking, my hand moves from the back of his neck to his chest, then lower, fingers slipping beneath the wet fabric enough to find the place where his own skin changed in that motel room. The mirror scar. The one I left him with in the chaos of survival. The one that still makes my chest tighten whenever I remember how close I came to losing him there.
My fingertips rest over it.
He goes very still.
For a second neither of us kisses. Neither of us speaks. The water moves around our bodies in quiet little swells while our hands stay where they are, each of us touching the place the same horror left behind in the other.
His mouth brushes my temple once. Not lust now. Something deeper.
“You always find that one,” he murmurs.
“It always finds me first,” I say.
That earns a low laugh from him, though it is softened by feeling.
His thumb drifts over my scar again. “You make scars look unfairly beautiful.”
“Only because you’re biased.”
“I’m very biased.”
The confession is so immediate that it makes me smile against his cheek.
“I’ve noticed.”
His hand leaves my side only long enough to cup the back of my neck, keeping me close while he looks at me in that unbearable way he has, like every version of me has somehow become precious to him, even the ones I still struggle to look at too long.
“I like this one,” he says quietly.
My brows draw together. “Which one?”
