The whole time, her hand stays on my leg. Sometimes her fingers move, and I can’t tell whether it’s with the water in the hot tub or whether she’s teasing me as she talks. I just know that by the time Amy and Kate head off to margaritas — they finally decided — every hair on my body is standing on end, the whole of my mind dedicated to the path her fingers are taking.
“Have a great night!” Amy calls from the doorway, and then the two of them are gone and we’re alone up here.
Delilah tilts her head back against my arm, her cheek against my shoulder. She presses her hand into my leg and all I can think about is four fingers and a thumb, the length of her thigh against mine. The way she looks at me and her neck curves away from her collarbone, the plunge of her neckline, the swell of her breasts.
“I have bad news,” she says, raising one eyebrow.
“I’m the worst skiier you’ve ever met.”
Delilah scoffs.
“Shut up, you did great,” she says. “You’re sliding down a mountain on slippery sticks. It’s hard.”
“Every toddler I saw begs to differ,” I point out.
“You’re much further off the ground than they are,” she says. “A kid falls down face-first, they barely notice. An adult falls down face-first, it’s an ER visit. I once watched Bree tumble down half a flight of stairs and then bounce up still asking for ice cream.”
“What’s the bad news, then?” I ask.
Her hand moves, or maybe it’s the water. Half a centimeter up. I feel like my skin is glowing with heat.
“I can’t leave this hot tub,” she says. “It’s too cold. It was cold before I got in, and getting out is gonna be even colder, so I live here now. Promise you’ll write.”
“You’ll just get my letters all wet,” I tease.
“Seth, I would be so careful with your letters,” she says, laughing. “I would hold them super far away from the water while I read them.”
“But then your arms would be cold.”
“That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make to read your letters,” she says, her head still on my arm. “A very small part of me can be cold.”
Her hand on my leg moves, I think, or maybe it’s the water. Another half-centimeter, the distance geometric, my desire logarithmic. I’ve been fighting myself since she walked out here in a bathing suit, but I’m losing.
“You do know there’s an indoor hot tub, don’t you?” I point out, just to tease her. “By the pool. First floor.”
“But that one gets crowded, and this one’s on the roof,” she says. “A little privacy is probably worth never being able to leave.”
My own fingers alight on her thigh, just below the garter. Her face flickers. Her chest rises, falls, breasts swelling above the water and then sinking beneath the surface again.
She’s soft, slippery, flesh and muscle. Watching me with her lips parted as my hand pushes between her thighs, gripping her just hard enough for her soft skin to bulge between my fingers.
Nothing about her yields. She’s soft the way the earth is soft: welcoming, giving, unconquerable. I’m falling toward her, parachute forgotten.
“And why would you want privacy?” I ask. I move my thumb along her skin, still gripping, and I feel her move her hips in response: microscopic, the angle of her leg changing by half a degree, but Delilah is a song I know by heart.
“Because my self-control is fraying at the seams,” she says. Her fingers play with a fold on my swim trunks, and my whole leg shivers. My cock swells. There’s nothing I can do. “Because you kissed me hello like you hadn’t seen me for weeks.”
I lean in, slowly. She straightens, her head lifting from my arm, her dark eyes locked on mine, and I brush my lips against hers.
Just a taste. Just a tease, just a test, just to see if I can do it and still pull away. I can, but not far. I can, but not for long.
It’s slow as a first kiss, but nowhere near as tentative. I explore her mouth with mine. Gently, patiently, even as below the water my fingers sink further into her thigh and my thumb finds the edge of her swimsuit, the spot where fabric meets flesh, crosses the boundary.
She straightens, locks her other hand through my hair, traces her fingers over my neck. She parts her thighs and drapes one over my leg, her hand still between us, the side of my finger finding the edge of her bathing suit between her legs.
Delilah sighs, and it crashes over me like a wave. I pull her onto my lap and she bobs onto me, arms going around my neck, laughing as she leans in.
“See?” she says. “This would be so awkward with other people around. Can you imagine us making out in a hot tub while Bob and Jim discuss golf five feet away?”
“I’d rather not,” I tell her, pulling her in. Her mouth is soft, open. “I hate golf.”
She laughs, shifts on my lap, takes my shoulders in her hands. Squeezes until her fingernails dig in, then lets go. I’m hard as a rock underneath her, every tiny movement she makes echoing through my body.
“Nobody likes golf,” she says. “They all just think everyone else does, so they pretend.”
“I’m sure someone does,” I say, and I wonder who nobody and everyone are. I wonder if they’re in the box.
“Sure. One person, somewhere,” she teases. “Everyone else just likes driving that cart around.”
“You gonna make me do that next?” I ask. My hands are on her hips, pulling her in sideways.
“Are you saying I made you go skiing?” she says. An arm around my neck, a hand on my chest.
“Just that if it weren’t for you, I’d probably be driving four-wheelers through the mud and shouting yeehaw! this weekend,” I say. “You know, some lowborn redneck shit.”
“That does sound fun,” she says. Her mouth finds mine, pushes it open. Her body presses against me, and she pulls away, leans her forehead against mine.
Squirms on my lap until suddenly she’s straddling me in the water, the heart tattoo right in front of my face, both sides bowed in by the swell of her breasts, shining even in the low light.
Her nipples are hard as pebbles in the cold air, and I close my hands around her ribcage. My thumbs on her sternum, breasts in the valley between finger and thumb as she rocks against me softly once, twice, a loose curl bouncing against my temple.
The tiniest movement, and I’ll be across the line we’ve set. The line that’s become the bond between us. The line that keeps us from falling off a cliff.
“So, you’d rather be out muddin’ than here?” she teases, softly. “I’m not sure I believe you’ve ever even been.”
“I went once,” I say. I hook my thumbs beneath the fabric over her sternum, pull it down until I can see the very top of the raven’s head, the fabric over her breasts denting into them. “It was enough. You get real dirty, turns out.”
I pull harder on her swimsuit and this time she comes down, kisses me open-mouthed. Locks her hand around my neck, the other still on my chest, her hips grinding slowly against me.
I’m crumbling, fast. I don’t want to think about the wedding album and the box, but I do. It’s there, below the surface of my mind like a whale about to breach. The vast unknown of what he was to her, what she was to him. Why.