In an instant, the two of them were on his bed. They moved like they were fighting the end of a dream—that frantic, weightless moment when you feel yourself waking up but your mind is desperate to stay in the surreal haze.
It occurred to her, between the rip of a wrapper and a kiss to her shoulder, that she would never be closer to Elliot than shewas right then. That she needed to sketch the feeling of him into her chest and memorize the colors swirling behind her lids as the pleasure built in her body with each touch. The inevitable loss of him ached even as she cataloged their every point of connection.
But when she collapsed into his chest, his mouth stayed pressed to her ear, muttering things like how beautiful she was. How good she felt. How he always knew she’d feel this good. How much he’d needed to be with her like this, at least once. How he wanted her to let go and feel everything with him.
So she did. She let herself feel all of it until they were nothing but tangled limbs and ragged breaths. They’d have only a few seconds in that liminal space between dreaming and awake until they’d be forced to face reality. The moment their feet touched the floor, it would be over.
She was building the courage to leave—she really was—but then, Elliot did something extraordinary: he kissed her forehead.
Her heart hummed beneath her ribs. She couldn’t make herself wake up. Not after that gentle press of his lips. It was so intimate and vulnerable. Unselfish. It wanted nothing from her. It only sought to give.
She kept her body still and her eyes pinched shut, imagining how heavy her arms would feel when she eventually let him go.
Chapter 15
Viking-Style Funeral Send-Off
70 Days until the Longest Day of the Year
Lainey woke upalone in Elliot’s bed beside a cold pillow and below a wet dog nose that was sniffing her forehead with the strength of a Dyson vacuum. Waffle extended his chin for a scratch. She dutifully complied as she sat up and finally let her feet meet the stone tile. The dream was officially over, and she was due for a shower.
She wasn’t sure if Elliot wanted to see her when he returned from his run or if she was supposed to go about her day pretending like nothing’d happened between them. She’d never done the let’s-bang-it-out-of-our-system thing before. Was mutual denial an essential element of this one-time experience? At some point in her deliberations, she decided that if she was going to pace in circles anyway, feeling like the sexual equivalent of a single-use plastic water bottle, she wanted to be holding a chainsaw.
Now that she’d seen the stag, she couldn’t unsee it. All morning, Lainey sat on her stool, carving with slow, deliberate movements. With her headphones on and the gentle breeze off the lake lifting strands of her hair and cooling her skin, time melted around her as she worked. Until a shadow approached at the corner of her eyeline, crowding into her view of the lake.
Brown fur galloped in her direction—Waffle—with a man in jeans and a worn slate-gray T-shirt trailing behind—Elliot.
She killed the chainsaw and set it on the ground in front of her sculpture.
“Definitely a stag,” he commented, pointing at the wooden creature in front of her. His voice reverberated inside her like a plucked string.
He stood so close to her, seemingly unaffected by last night. Was it possible it was nothing but a horny and achingly detailed lucid dream that’d been so realistic she could still feel his breath on her collarbone as he murmured,I knew it would feel like this. I knew it from the second we met.
“Did you eat today?” he asked, casual. Cool. Her jealousy over his apparent nonchalance bore a physical weight.
She shook out her shoulders, taking stock of her body as she considered his question. “I forgot.” She had a tendency to do that when she got lost in a project, and today she’d woken up with an immediate instinct. Gran had always called that look in her eyes her “spark of inspiration,” but to her, creativity had never felt like a power source. It was something buried in the cavern of her chest. A hidden secret waiting to be unearthed. For her, creating didn’t fuel. It took. The making was a choice. A belief that the thing rooted deep inside her had the potential to exist as something tangible if she had the courage to make it so.
The drive was invigorating but also bad for her executive functioning and chronic condition. When she failed to take care of her body, her body had a tendency to retaliate.
He handed her the water bottle in his hand. “Drink.”
It was as if the prompt had reminded her body it was dying of thirst. She drank so quickly, water dribbled down her chin.
“I have a surprise for you.” He tilted his head toward the woods between his property and hers. Or she supposed it was all “theirs” for the time being.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You pulled cabin three out of the lake?” she asked.
“Uh, no.” He stared off in its direction, as if he could move the cabin fifty feet from the shoreline with his eyes. “I’m halfway considering giving that bad boy a nice shove and sending it off with a Viking-style funeral.”
“Ooh, I’m very in favor of that plan. This might surprise you to hear, but I’m pretty decent with a bow.”
“That doesn’t surprise me at all, actually.” He moved his body right up to the edge of her stool. Near enough to send a tiny zip of electricity running up her back.
“The surprise involves me making you dinner,” he told her, inching closer until his thigh notched between her knees. “In a cabin that houses zero turtles, but has a floor and walls and a fully operable plumbing system for the first time in probably a decade.”
She lifted her chin. “Walls. Wow. Five-star accommodations.”
“Only the best,” he responded, then he lowered his face to meet hers. “Have dinner with me.”
