She touches my jaw, pulling me back. Her head tilts, and her wet, tangled hair splays out over the ground. I’m surprised she doesn’t care about getting dirty, but here we are.
I smile at her.
Her tongue darts over her lower lip. “Where do you go when you get that look on your face?”
My brow furrows. “Go?”
“Yeah, one second you’ll be looking at me like everything is right in the world, and the next…” She shakes her head. “It’s like a summer storm. It blows in, darkens your eyes, and then disappears as suddenly as it came.”
And here I thought I’d been good at hiding. I hate that she’s noticed. She hasn’t said much, but between her dad abandoning them, her mom dying, and the years of struggle, how could she not be looking over her shoulder, waiting for the next disaster to befall her?
I want to give her a break from that worry, to help her sink into this excited happiness she’s wearing like a second skin.
And I can’t even do that right.
I raise her hand and kiss the pads of her fingers, doing my best to put the question to rest. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real.”
She shrugs one bare shoulder. “That’s not really an answer.”
Our eyes lock, and in their silver depths I see it: resignation that she’ll get no answers from me, because that’s what she expects. We’ve barely begun, and I’m already teaching her I won’t be honest.
That she shouldn’t expect anything from me.
That disappointment is all she can hope for.
I don’t want that. There’s not a lot of things I can do right, but this is one of them. I can make a choice, right here, lying in the grass. I can give her a real answer instead of an evasion.
My heart thumps hard in my chest, but I don’t let it stop me.
I squeeze her fingers before resting our clasped hands on her sternum. I would love to distract her with sex, because if I brush my thumb over her nipple, she’ll suck in a breath and turn toward me. She’ll let me sweep her away, use her body’s response to distract her from the fact that I refuse to give her what she really desires. It will tell her this is what she should settle for, because it’s the only choice she has.
It would be easy.
She’d let me. And it would be enough for a while. Until it wasn’t.
So, I resist the impulse and plunge full steam ahead into uncharted waters, as dark and unknown as the lake lapping the rocks at the shore.
I grit my teeth and say the words. “I’m afraid I’m going to fuck this up. Because that’s what I do, what I always do.”
Surprise flickers like bits of platinum in her eyes. “I guess we’re alike that way.”
“How do you mean?”
She shivers a little and tucks herself closer. I release her fingers and wrap my arm around her. The night is hot and humid, but her skin is cool from our late-night swim. “We might have come to it differently, but at the end of the day, aren’t we both just looking behind us, waiting for disaster to strike?”
I hadn’t expected her words to echo so closely to what I’d been thinking, and until that moment our situations never struck me as the same. In my mind, my wounds are self-inflicted, unlike hers, which are born of circumstances.
She touches my cheek. “There’s that storm cloud again.”
I scowl. “I don’t want to mess this up with you.”
She smiles at me. “Then don’t.”
“I’ll try.”
She’s silent for a moment before she says, “When I was growing up, I wanted to breed horses.”
I’m not sure what to make of the change of subject, but I go with it. “Oh?”
She nods. “I was obsessed with them—not that I could afford one of my own. There used to be stables not too far from here, and I begged the owners to let me help in exchange for lessons. The Spencers became like my second family, and I went there constantly. They were an older couple and couldn’t have kids, so I was their surrogate daughter. The first time I saw a foal born, it was all I wanted to do with my life.”
“What happened?”
A shadow passes over her face. “They died in a car accident. The land was sold, the horses sold—except for my favorite, which they gave to me in their will.” A muscle jumps in her