Page 59 of Every Heartbeat After

“Just one last thing.” Her fingers fly over the screen. When she’s satisfied, she saves the note and locks the phone, handing it back to me with a satisfied grin. “There. Now, the sunrise was absolutely beautiful, but I’m still exhausted from yesterday, so I’m going back to bed. Care to join me?”

As much as my muscles are begging for a run, if only to release all this built-up tension, I hesitate. How many more chances will I get to fall asleep next to Tess? I’d be an idiot to give this one up.

“Definitely.”

“Perfect.” She stands and retreats through the small gap between our chairs, into the opening that leads to her bedroom, then dives headfirst into the covers.

I’m about to follow her when curiosity gets the better of me. I open the note and scroll to the bottom, getting hard all over again when I see what she’s added.

5. See if sex with an uncircumcised penis is any different.

I practically leap from my chair and into the room. As soon as the sliding door is shut behind me, she rolls over and smirks. “You promised to help me with all my goals, remember?”

“Am I allowed to pick which one we do first?”

Her smile is wicked when she replies, “I’ve already got one in mind. Don’t worry, I think you’ll love it.”

A shiver runs down my spine.I bet I will.

ChapterTwenty-Three

Tess

My breath comes in quick,excited bursts as I cut through the lobby, making a beeline for the small cluster of chairs by the door that leads to the pool deck. Kit’s waiting for me there. One ankle is balanced on the opposite knee. His chin is tilted up, gaze focused on the photo of my parents. The realization has my steps faltering just a few feet before I reach him. Normally I avoid that picture like the plague. But seeing him there, peering up at it with a half smile on his face, fills me with a happiness that tastes bittersweet on the back of my tongue. It feels like I’m interrupting a conversation between Kit and my parents. Something I’ll never get to experience in real life but suddenly want to so badly it makes my chest ache.

Kit turns to take me in over his shoulder, his dark features suddenly intensified by the contrast of a huge, white smile. “You look so much like your mom, you know that?” Then his gaze drops to my right hand, and he laughs. “That’s what you just drove forty minutes round trip to get?”

I glance down at the purple sandcastle bucket I’m holding, still a bit off-kilter from his comment. I know I look like my mom. I take pride in that fact. Something about him noticing, though—about the intimacy of it—is so precious it makes me feel weepy. I clear my throat and force myself back into the moment, willing the excitement to creep forward once more and push that aching nostalgia to the back burner.

I take the seat opposite him, keeping the photo at my back. “Unfortunate but necessary. You can’t get anywhere quickly around here in the summertime.”

Kit nods like he, too, has realized this, then holds up the oversize flashlight he was charged with snagging from Mauricio. “So we hunt them in the dark?”

I point through the window to the sun dipping low on the horizon. “Yes. They’re more active at night. Soon as that sun goes down, it’s crab-hunting time.”

His gaze flickers from the glass to my face. “And do we eat them?”

“Not that kind of crab.”

“What do we do with them then?”

I shake the bucket. “We put them in here. And then, when we’re done, we set them free.”

He narrows his eyes at the bucket for a second, a frown disturbing the hard lines of his jaw. He didn’t shave at all during our trip, leaving his stubble somewhere on the border of beard territory. I imagine how it would feel scraping the insides of my thighs, and heat floods my cheeks.

Finally, with a shrug of acceptance, his gaze returns to mine. “All right. But I’m ordering crab legs at dinner, because now that’s all I can think about.”

My stomach growls as though it heard him and vehemently agrees. I nod on both our behalves. “Sounds like a plan.”

He rises to his feet, all those long limbs unfurling, and uses a firm grip on the bucket to pull me from my seat. He plants a kiss on me that steals my breath. For a second I consider cutting the kiss short. Pulling back and ducking my head in case someone sees us. But then I think of his words in the aquarium. I think of standing still. And the very thought of it settles something inside me. That’s how I find myself melting into his embrace fully, right there in front of my family photo.

If only that little girl in the photograph could really see me now. Maybe knowing something this good was waiting for her would’ve made the awful years it took to get here a bit less painful.

Maybe the sweetness of having experienced it will make losing it hurt a little less.

* * *

“Crab hunting is as much an art as it is a sport.”

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