I love this about her. I love that it’s always been the two of us, through everything, and now it’s the two of us here as close as two people can get. I love that she’s never backed down from me and I’ve never backed down from her.
I lean over her, elbow over her head, the thumb of my other hand on her clit because I can’t last much longer and her channel contracts around me when I do. I have to take a deep breath, clench my teeth, keep control.
I have to keep control.
“Come,” I tell her, my voice low, guttural, pure growl.
Her breath hitches and her eyes meet mine, unsteady, unfocused.
“Don’t stop,” she murmurs.
“I can’t last much longer like this,” I tell her, my voice bottoming out. “And I can’t come inside you, so if you want to come with my cock in you like I know you like to—"
Her fingers curl against my back and I clench both fists, forcing myself to hold back just a little longer. I rub her clit harder and hit the spot she likes with every stroke and she flutters, squeezes, her back arching.
“Oh fuck, Daniel,” she whispers, and I put my forehead to hers, every muscle in my body taut. “Oh fuck, I’m gonna come, Daniel, don’t stop—”
She comes. She comes so hard it nearly knocks the wind from my lungs and my vision edges black as I bury my face in her hair, her fingernails cutting ribbons down my back. There’s one second where I’m afraid I’ve lost control, too, that this was too reckless and too stupid, that of course there was no way I could resist her like this.
I come half a second after I pull out, spilling myself all over her thigh and hip in spurt after spurt. I’m still coming as she sits up and kisses me and puts her hand over mine, stroking me until it’s done and I’m gasping for breath, holding her close, kissing her, tangled.
“That was close,” I say, still standing between her thighs, my feet still in the cold water. I’m getting my own semen on me, but it’s not like I care.
“That was good,” Charlie says.
“It was,” I say, her face in my hands. I kiss her, and I don’t think about the next thing I say in this moment, I just say it.
“I love you,” I tell Charlie.
“I love you back,” she says instantly, and I kiss her, and the water’s cold on my feet and the night air is cool against my now-overheated skin and Charlie kisses me slowly and I feel like I’ll never want anything else, ever again.
We break the kiss. She looks up at me, hazel eyes wide, face pale and freckles dark in the moonlight, and her lips part like she’s about to speak.
Whoop!
We both freeze, and it’s been so long that it takes me a moment to realize what the sound is.
But then I see the blue lights blinking through the trees, and I remember.Chapter Thirty-OneCharlieA blue light strobes through the trees across the creek, behind Daniel’s head, and for a second I just freeze. I shut my eyes, then open them, thinking that maybe if I do nothing they’ll just pass by or go away and I won’t have fucked up royally yet again.
Instead, there’s the slow crunching sound of tires on a crappy dirt road.
“Shit,” I hiss, jumping off the rock, pushing Daniel backward. “Shit, shit, I’m sorry.”
“At least it’s not an old man with a shotgun,” he says, but his voice is tight, clipped.
“They never actually shoot,” I say, still pushing him backward, into the water. “They just shout some and then let you go.”
He grimaces as he goes deeper, behind a stand of rocks, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Sometimes they shoot,” he says, watching the shore behind me as he goes still.
I turn my head. We’re both waist-deep in the water now, the lights getting closer, my stomach in ten thousand knots. Daniel’s tense, his jaw clenched, and I know exactly what’s going through his mind.
He’s wondering how an arrest would look at a custody hearing. He’s wondering if skinny dipping with me would land him on the sex offender registry. He’s wondering whether everyone in Sprucevale will know about this by tomorrow morning, whether Crystal will know about it, how she’ll use it against him.
I hate her. I really do.
The crunching stops. I’m holding my breath, the lights still playing on the trees above us. There are a couple big rocks between us and the police cruiser, but I’ve got a pretty good suspicion that they’ve stopped behind my car and, at the very, very least, they’re issuing me a ticket.
Please just give me a ticket, I think. Just give me a really expensive, obnoxious ticket and then drive away, I can’t let Daniel get caught trespassing naked—