Page 58 of Seven Summer Weekends

“I don’t know if I’d call it a gash.” She smiled. “It’s more like…a boo-boo.”

“Maybe you should kiss it, then, make it all better.”

She leaned over and kissed the tip of his nose instead, which had clearly been broken once or twice. He took her hands in his and pulled her onto the couch next to him.

“Not like that,” he whispered, running his finger across her lips as if silently asking for permission. She gave it and kissedhim straight on. Their positioning was awkward, so she brazenly climbed onto his lap and wrapped her long legs behind him.

And they kissed.

They kissed like two teenagers who had never kissed before but also, so perfectly, and so in sync, as if they had been kissing each other for their entire lives.

She kissed the salty skin behind his ears and down his neck while running her hands through his disheveled hair. And he responded with a hunger that the small collection of women he had slept with since Julia hadn’t touched. He hadn’t truly desired any of them. It was just a primal urge. This was also primal, but from his heart. She had indisputably awoken his dormant organ.

He wanted, actually needed, to feel her skin against his. Needed to scoop her up in his arms, carry her to her bed, and make love to her. But with every inch of him pushing for that to occur, he knew that there was still one enormous obstacle. He was, in fact, wearing a wet suit. There was no graceful way of getting out of a wet wet suit. It was one of those things that needed to be done in private—nothing even minorly sexy about a grown hairy man peeling himself out of a spandex suit. Logic and humility stepped in and curbed the hunger.

He broke away.

“Are we doing this?” he asked quietly.

“It seems so,” she answered, clearly not interested in a break in the action.

“I’m going to bring Sally home.”

Addison looked down at the dog. Seeing her little snout resting on the coffee table and her human eyes staring at them was more than mortifying.

“That’s a good idea. Come right back?”

“Give me a half hour—I want to feed her and rinse off the ocean.”

The need to take off his wet suit made him seem cool and collected when, in fact, he was anything but. Her eyes longed for him, but she nodded yes. He almost stopped to tell her the truth—but that longing in her eyes was too good to squash with intimacies that usually aren’t revealed until at least the first anniversary. An anniversary—he flinched at the thought. The thing he had sworn against felt inevitable with this woman. He worried about going home, breaking the spell.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The minute the screen door slammed and Ben was out of sight, Addison stuck her nose under her arm and took a whiff. Not awful—but certainly not the essence of lilac that Gicky’s bottle of shower gel assured. She stripped off her clothes in the outdoor shower, washed her body, and even ran a razor over her lightly stubbled legs. Inside, she followed the whole thing up with a coat of moisturizer and threw on a cotton sundress and a pair of sexy undies.

She was feeling vulnerable, which was new to her. Vulnerability may have been the number one thing that Addison had steered away from in her dating life. Granted, she had felt a host of emotions this summer that were unusual for her—beginning with failure—but this type of raw emotional exposure felt exceptionally risky. She brazenly slipped off her panties, knowing that when Ben reached under her dress and realized that she was naked, it would make him crazy. That’s not why she did it though; it would also make her feel as if she were in control. And with that thought, she felt more at ease.

Get out of your head, Addison.

She knew only one way to do that. She went to the studio to meditate, leaving the door ajar so that she would hear Ben return.

As she sat on the floor counting back from one hundred, everything released in her head. Her heart, her mind, even her pores were all open. When she finally opened her eyes as well, she found Ben sitting on the floor—staring at her. She did not know how long he’d been there.

“What are you doing?” she asked, amused.

“Counting your freckles.”

“There are forty-seven,” she laughed.

“You counted?”

“My sister counted when we were kids.”

“You have a sister?”

“Yes. Ivy. Three years younger than me.”

“I guess we put the cart before the horse. Should we fix that?”

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