Page 8 of My Fearless Fake Fling

“Yes. Thank you—oh my god!” I shrieked, leaping onto Lennon, where he had no choice but to wrap his arms around me to hold me up. “I think a fish just tried to get to know me biblically.”

“Thank you, fish,” he mumbled. And to my horror, I realized I’d plastered my naked chest against his nakedness, and let me just say how good all that satiny skin and muscle felt pressed against me, one of his hands holding onto my naked bottom.

I tried to push out of his hold. He predictably held tighter but allowed me to slide down his body, which was almost worse because even wading in chilly water, I could feel a specific and highly impressive area of his anatomy. Highly, highly impressive. Enough for me to close my eyes and swallow hard while the jerk chuckled in my ear.

“You can let me go,” I told him, with a bit of edge to my voice. A year I’d neglected my girl parts by avoiding those boy parts.

“I’m good,” he replied, chuckling harder at the edge in my voice.

“Why do you want to torture me?”

“I’m not trying to torture you. Well, no, that’s a lie. I might be enjoying this a little. Why is your heart beating so fast now, Kam? The hard part’s over.”

“No, no…” My response squeaked out. “The hard part you’ve got pressed against my belly.”

I thought I’d get another laugh. What I got was Lennon’s crystal blue eyes staring deeply into mine. “I’m going to kiss you now.” He warned me as his head descended, tilted to the right.

“Okay,” I whispered back, having fallen under his spell until it hit me, and I hit him with a palm literally to his chest. “You can’t kiss me.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’renaked.” And yes, I whispered the wordnakedas if someone else could hear me and not see our two unclothed bodies.

That got me the laugh I’d expected before. “Naked is the best time to kiss, fearless.”

He called me fearless. And then he kissed me. Universes expanded in that kiss. Stars went supernova in that kiss. Civilizations rose and fell.

The closer he held me, the harder he pressed his lips to mine, exploring my mouth with his tongue, coaxing me to explore back. Nothing in my life had felt like it. No kiss I’d given or received made my heart feel on the brink of exploding. Soft and hard, powerful the way a good kiss should be.

Lennon moved one of his hands to grip my hair, positioning my head exactly where he wanted me, to deepen the kiss further.

I might have figured out the meaning to existence because of his lips.

“Well, all right!” yelled a distinctly male voice coming from behind us. So not Lennon’s, obviously. “Got here just in time for the good stuff.”

The good stuff? Jesus. I froze in his arms. To his credit, though, Len stopped his beautiful assault on my lips, whipped his head up to look at our intruder, and shoved me behind him, all without exposing any of my lady bits, in one smooth move.

“No, dude,” the guy on the beach called out. “Don’t stop on my account. Your lady ishot. Dudes like you always get the hottest chicks.”

He sounded like a stoner. He sounded stoned. And even worse for me, he wasn’t alone. Three other young men watched us from the beach in their rumpled jeans and T-shirts. Smoke billowed out of the open door to a nineteen seventies conversion van. Copper, with a Native American woman and a feather airbrushed where I would’ve wanted a window on the backend of the vehicle. And I thought I counted three more sets of feet sitting inside the van.

Oh, but that wouldn’t be the worst part. Far from it. The worst part was noticing the stoner dude held a cellphone in hand aimed at Lennon and me.

“Stay with me, fearless,” Len ordered, moving through the water up toward the beach’s sandy soil.

I didn’t even give “stay with him” a second thought, plastering myself to his backside. One of my hands on his shoulder, the other he held tight and close, resting against his chest. Over his heart, if I was the kind of girl to notice, which I totally wasn’t. Not at all.Shoot.

And the stoner kept right on filming us.

“Make him stop,” I pleaded to Len. Big and badarsed, he could do it.

“No,” he told me. No? “I have a better idea.” The water level dropped to around our knees, then calves, ankles until, with me still plastered to his back, Lennon stood on the beach in all his naked glory. “Toss me the lady’s clothing, will you?”

“Dude, get the hot chick’s clothes,” Stoner-boy called to his friend standing closest to my jeans and tee. He walked them over to Len, who grabbed them and turned, to my mortification, to my utterly naked self.

“Arms up,” Len ordered me. I put my arms up, not caring in the least the girls went unwrangled as he slid the shirt down, making it his mission to caress all of my curves as he did. Then I held on to his shoulders as he slipped first one leg and then the other over my feet. Yanking them up my wet body became a test of pure will. Man versus denim. In this case, thankfully, man won. Lastly, he helped me back into my cute little white canvas sneakers. Though, neither of us took the time to tie them.

Then he pecked the tip of my nose. Pecked my lips, and turned tail to collect his clothing scattered from the water’s edge back to where we’d parked.

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