“You sure?”
“Stop asking.”
“I’m going to ask. Get used to it.”
She laughed again. It was easier this time. Like she was relaxing around me.
I kissed her again. Slower. I let one hand move up into her hair and held the back of her head, and I let the other hand stay at her waist. She tilted toward me. She didn’t know what she was doing, exactly—I could feel it in the way her mouth was finding the rhythm of mine—but she wasn’t hesitating either. She was learning fast.
I eased her down onto the blanket, moving slowly to give her every second she’d want to stop. She didn’t stop. She lay back on the blanket and looked up at me with her hair fanned out around her head, and I looked down at her and registered that I was going to be with this woman for the rest of my life.
The river kept moving past.
I leaned down and kissed her neck. Just under her jaw, where I’d been watching her pulse go wild. She made another small sound and her hand came up to the back of my head. Her fingers were in my hair.
“Tell me if anything’s not okay.”
“I will.”
“I’m going to take my time.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m going to.”
She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sigh. I caught it against her throat. I moved my hand to the hem of her tank top and stopped there. Waited.
She reached down and pulled the tank top up herself. Over her head. Off.
She lay back on the blanket in a plain cotton bra, hair spread out, sunburned shoulders bare, and looked up at me and waited for me to say something.
“You are very beautiful,” I said.
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I know I don’t.”
She closed her eyes.
I bent over her and kissed her again, and this time I let myself feel all of it. I felt her arch up to meet me, and somewhere down the bank a bird called once and went silent, and there was no one else for a mile in any direction.
4
SUNNIE
His mouth was warm against my throat, and I forgot every reason I’d ever had to be afraid of this.
I’d been afraid for a long time. Years. I’d built my dating life around the idea that I wasn’t the kind of woman who got to have this—that intimacy was a thing other women earned by being bolder, prettier, more obvious about wanting things. I’d convinced myself I was content. I’d been a woman who read books on couches and watched her friends fall in love and told herself she preferred it that way.
I had not preferred it that way.
Ross moved his mouth lower, down the line of my collarbone, and my hands tightened in his hair. His beard scratched against my skin in a way I felt all the way down to my hips. He kissed the hollow at the base of my throat, and I made a sound I had never in my life heard myself make.
He lifted his head and looked at me. “That a good sound?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
