eyes, kinda laughing. When she surfaced, she sputtered, “Shit,” her head spinning around like she was looking for something.
“You okay?”
Then a piece of black fabric surfaced in-between us.
Her eyes met mine. I grabbed it before she could, holding it up. It was her bikini top.
“So, that’s what happens when you do a cannonball in a string bikini after I loosen the string, huh?”
She grabbed at it, grinning. “Gimme that.”
“Nope.” I flung the bikini top into the bushes and her jaw dropped. “Didn’t you get the memo that this is a naked pool party?”
“Your assistant must’ve failed to send that memo out.”
“Guess I’ll have to fire her.”
She grabbed my shoulders and hopped up, clamping her thighs around my waist. I caught her ass and held her there. “You can’t fire me,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck so her bare breasts pressed against my chest and her lips hovered close to mine. “You like me too much.”
“Guilty,” I mumbled against her lips as I drove her back against the wall of the pool. I held her there, brushing my lips over hers.
“I like you,” she said abruptly, and I paused before kissing her more deeply. “I want to keep you.” Her turquoise eyes, wide open, looked into mine. “And I don’t want your money.”
I just looked at her.
“I mean… I like your pool and everything. But I like you more. I like working for you. But I don’t need your riches. I can make my own money. I just want you to know that isn’t why I’m here. I’m here letting you smush me up against the wall of your pool with barely any clothes on because I like you. And if you lost your entire fortune tomorrow, I’d make sure we survived on chip sandwiches and Coke. My treat. Because I like you.”
Wow. That was a lot of likes in one paragraph. If she’d sent that to me in an email, it would’ve been peppered with heart-eyed smiley faces and thumbs-up emojis.
I smoothed the wet hair out of her face. “You don’t know me very well, Taylor.”
“I know I like how I feel when I’m with you. What more is there?”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I said nothing. I was hardly gonna give her a list of things she shouldn’t like about me.
“I think two people are what they are at the moment they meet,” she said. “You shouldn’t change for each other. You either like each other or you don’t. Or maybe you hate each other, but you’re still drawn to each other. That part is chemical. And spiritual. I think the idea of getting to know each other and then having feelings develop is bullshit. It’s either there or it’s not. Everything else is just time. And time means nothing. It’s just a construct invented by man, to try to control things we can’t control. You choose what you do in every moment, but moments are fleeting. Underneath that is who you are and at the core, that doesn’t change, even when you grow.”
Okay, that was a lot of vodka-induced introspection. But Taylor usually did speak her mind. I loved that about her.
I wasn’t lying when I said I preferred her uncensored.
Even if uncensored Taylor scared me sometimes.
“That’s probably what scares people,” I said, trying to digest everything she’d just said, and the implications of it. The more layers of I like you she’d piled on with that revelation. “It scares us away from commitment. Maybe we’re scared that we don’t have a choice, from the moment we meet that other person and we want all in.”
Out. In.
I wanted her in from the moment I met her. So I thought I’d just keep her out.
Simple.
But when she came back, wanting in, I pulled her in tight and close, and locked her down in every way I could in a matter of days, with no intention of letting her go. Getting her moved into my place, signing contracts, filling her bank account with money. I might as well have pissed all over her, written my name on her forehead and given her a ring.
“I actually think it’s kind of stupid to fear something you have no control over anyway,” she said.
“Are you calling me stupid?”
“I would never call you stupid. You’re very brilliant.”
“I think it’s dangerous to accept that you have no control. Because then you have no illusions, nothing to hold onto when the fear creeps in.”