Page 46 of Summer Romance

I’m feeling a little out of control myself, and I clutch my wineglass for something to do with my hands. “If that woman with the St. Bernard could see you here, she’d go nuts.”

“I’d never let that dog in bed with Brenda,” he says.

I take a sip of my wine and look down at Ethan’s socks on my feet. “It’s weird to think about actual dating,” I say.

“What’s weird about it?”

“Just being in a whole relationship. Sex. It’s been a really long time.” I just said “sex.” I heard myself say it. It is the word that is bouncing off the walls of my mind, and it just slipped out of my mouth as its own sentence.

“You’re the one with the rules, Ali.” He’s looking right at me, his arm resting on the back of the couch. His body language is casual, but what he’s saying is not.

“Yes,” I say.

He smiles a half smile and studies his glass for a second. He twirls it around a few times before he speaks. “I’ve wanted this for a long time. Since I was fourteen, actually. Since the first time I ever cleared your plate at the diner. You were at the back booth with your mom drinking a vanilla milkshake through a straw, and I thought, God, that lucky straw. That’s how long I’ve wanted you.”

He breaks eye contact and looks out the window. When he turns back to me, I don’t know what to say. I put mywineglass on the coffee table and take his glass from his hands and place it there too. I take one of his hands in mine.

Ethan squeezes my hand. “But I need you to decide what you want.”

His eyes are intense with feeling, and I have the sense that I am looking right inside him, like he’s shown me his heart. He has made himself more than naked, and he’s not shying away from it. He waits, and I look back at our hands. I take a second to enjoy the feel of his hand in mine and the sound of light rain outside the window. The quiet of this room and the space he’s giving me to decide how I feel. It’s been a long time since a man has worried about what I wanted. And it’s been a long time since I’ve wanted something this much.

I stretch my legs over his and scoot close enough to rest my head on his shoulder. I breathe in his delicious smell, now mixed with summer rain. He holds me there and runs his hand over my hair. I think I should say something, or he should say something, but I just want to feel the motion of his hand along my hair, hear the sound of the breath he takes when my lips brush against his neck.

“Ali,” he says. I raise my head from his shoulder and his face is inches from mine. He puts his hand on my cheek and runs his thumb over my cheekbone. “You haven’t answered my question,” he says.

“Yes,” I whisper into his mouth. “I really want this.”

He pulls me onto his lap, and his hands tighten on my hips to keep me there. He kisses me, and it’s different. It’s a runaway-train kind of kiss, and all my self-talk aboutslowing it down has silenced. I can no longer hear the rain outside or feel the couch below me. The outside world has dissolved into particles so small that they are meaningless.

When his mouth is moving down my neck and I am clutching the top of his sweatpants, he says, “Are you sure?”

“Sure,” I say, and move to kiss him again.

“Sure’s not yes,” he says, pulling back.

“What are you talking about?”

He takes both of my hands in his. “I just— I don’t want you waking up with regret, like we got ahead of ourselves and then things are weird. I really want this, but I’m not moving backward from here.” He gives my hands a squeeze. Like our entwined hands are the “here” to which he refers. A new place.

My body is on overdrive, but he’s being serious. I look down at our hands together and then back into his eyes. I have seen him today, and he is so much more than I thought.

“I won’t regret it,” I say. There’s no part of my body that agrees with stopping.

“You don’t know that.” He leans back and runs his hands through his hair in a way that’s really not helping me want this less. I put a hand on his chest, and he catches it. “We’re in sort of a fantasy here. This isn’t your life, we’re two hundred and fifty miles away from your reality. You’ve had two glasses of wine.” He brings my hand to his lips. “If you still want this tomorrow, when we’re back in Beechwood in the light of day, then I’m all in.”

“I’m a hundred percent sure I will.” Negotiating for sex was not on my bingo card for this trip to Devon.

He shakes his head, like he has more to say but thinks better of it. He stands and offers me his hand. “My fourteen-year-old self is literally screaming at me, but I’m going to tuck you in and then take the dogs out one last time.”

“In the rain?” I get up, reluctantly. I can’t believe this.

“Yes, this is my final act of chivalry of the day,” he says, leading me by the hand to his room.

He pulls back the covers of his bed and I climb in. He covers me up and leans down to kiss me again. His lips are soft, like they’re promising me something. I want whatever that promise holds, and as I feel him pull away, I raise myself up to keep it going.

He rests his forehead on mine. “I must really, really like you,” he says.I hope so, I think.

“You could stay in here, with me,” I say, one last plea. How delicious it would be to spend the night in his arms and wake up to the warm smell of him, already close.

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