Page 81 of The Summer I First Saw You
I shake my head. “It’s not about sex.” She raises a brow, and I laugh quietly. “It’s notnotabout sex, either. I’m going to spread you open as soon as we get home. What I’m saying is…it’s more than that. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a lot more than that.”
It’s the kind of admissionI should have kept to myself when it can’t go anywhere, but I don’t regret it until she glances away, blinking back tears.
“What’s wrong?”
She forces a smile. “Nothing. It was just a sweet thing to say.”
I hold her gaze for a long moment. I know when she’s not telling me the truth.
And right now, she definitely is not telling the truth.
An hour later,she’s in my bed, naked and radiant, having convinced me we should go home and order pizza rather than wasting “precious time” in a restaurant.
I press a kiss to her shoulder. There’s a bruise left from where I bit her. I have to fight the temptation to bite her again, to make the mark permanent in some way. “I need a whole weekend of just this. Somewhere far away.”
“Where would we go?” She sets her paper plate on the nightstand and rolls to face me. “Cabo?”
“Dominical.” I reach for my phone and pull up the photos—deep blue water, white sand, palm trees. “Really consistent surf, and the water never gets colder than eighty degrees.”
Her eyes fall closed. “God, wouldn’t that be amazing?”
I push her hair back behind her ear. “We’d get a little cottage with some privacy, right on the beach. We’d be naked the entire time.”
She laughs. “We can’t be nakedallthe time. At least not while we’re surfing.”
“It’s my fantasy. We can be as naked as much as we want.”
“Is board rash not a thing in this fantasy world of yours?” she asks, trailing a finger down my sternum.
“As a matter of fact, it’s not. And after Dominical, we’ll go toCabo, or the North Shore, or Bali, and we’ll surf naked there too.”
As mythical as it sounds, what I’ve described is entirely real, and possible—aside from the naked surfing—and I crave it in a way I’ve never craved anything in my life. And what the fuck is stopping me? I’ve got the money. I’ve got the leave, too, even if Baker doesn’t want me to take it. We could spend a week in Costa Rica if nothing else. I’m not sure what she’d tell Bridget, but we’d come up with something.
“When do you have to go back to school?” I ask.
She stiffens. The hand that was sliding over my chest stops moving entirely. “I have to be back right after Caleb’s wedding.”
That’s mid-August—only three weeks from now. There’s no way the semester is startingthatearly, and I can tell she’s keeping something from me simply by her stillness, her reserve. A thousand questions come to mind, questions I have no right to ask: Is it actually over with the ex-boyfriend? Is there someone else?
Her palm is moving over my rib cage. She’s trying to distract me with sex, and I don’t want to be fucking distracted.
My hand bands around her wrist to stop her. “Why are you going back early?”
She shrugs. “I just have some stuff.”
Fuck. I shouldn’t ask, I shouldn’t push, but it bothers me, these tiny pieces of her she won’t let me have. It’s bothered me all fucking summer, the way she suddenly turns dark and gloomy, the way she looks away or lies when I ask her what’s wrong.
“Daisy,” I hiss, hating myself. “I need to know.”
“Know what?”
I roll to face her. “Whatever it is you’re not telling me. Whatever it is you’re hiding. I can tell every fucking time you don’t want to say something. You could try to distract me with sex,and there’s a possibility you’d succeed, but I really…I just need the truth, okay? This time I need the truth.”
She bites her lip. For a moment I’m certain she’s going to make a joke, attempt to laugh it off.
“I’m going back early because I have to,” she finally whispers. “I lied to you about some things. I’ve been lying to everyone.”
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