21

THE DYING AND THE LAUGHING

NORA

MY WRISTS ARE A tiny bit chafed from the handkerchiefs he fished out of his bags to tie my hands together, but I’m grinning all over my body. I wasn’t kidding when I said I wanted to tie him up, too. Thankfully, he was up for it. I’ve never heard a man moan so loud when he wasn’t already orgasming. It practically made me come just from hearing it. In fact, the feeling it created is still boomeranging around inside me.

I let my hand drift up and down his torso, circling his nipple as I lightly sink my teeth into his pec. He startles awake, and I giggle. “Oops.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, pulling at the hand we realize is still tied to the bedpost. I crawl over him and undo it. “This is just fine.”

I look down and I’m straddling him, my boobs presenting at eye level. “I wanna go swimming.”

“It’s after midnight. Pool’s closed.” His eyes are smiling more than his lips.

“Perfect. No one will see us swimming naked then.”

Before I can say “let’s go!” we’re both out of bed and scrambling to get in our bathrobes. Once we get to the gates of the pool—which are indeed locked—we look for a way over or around that won’t draw attention. Doc finds an open door through the deck side, and we slip in and shed our robes.

As soon as we get in the water, he launches into a memory about sneaking out to surf in the middle of the night with a childhood buddy.

“Does this story go south?” I ask.

He stops and dunks himself below the surface, reemerging to slick his hair back, and even in the moonlight, it’s sexy as fuck. I grin, and I can feel him smirking at me.

“Is that code for sex?”

I cackle, following up with a gasp and a hand slapped over my mouth. “Shit, sorry!” I whisper-yell, but he laughs. “And no, you pervert. I meant did one of you get hurt? Oh fuck, does he die?”

I feel a hand slip low around my hips, low enough to settle on my ass. “No, but I did.”

“Smartass.”

He chuckles in my ear, and my nipples harden. I press harder against him.

“I did,” he claims. “Just for thirty seconds or so.”

I push off his chest but don’t get far—his arms have surrounded me. “That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking! I wiped out and got caught in the barrel and drowned.”

He’s so casual about it, it kind of pisses me off. Mostly because it freaks me out a little. “Oh my God, Doc!” I say.

I barely know how to deal with how emotional this makes me. My heart pounds beneath the tightening muscles in my chest that constrict my breathing. I feel a pain in the center of my ribs and rub it with my fingertips.

“It was fine,” he insists, his palm flat on my lower back.

It grounds me, and I lean my forehead against his. My lungs open just enough to stem an unnecessarily triggered panic attack.

“Jordy got me out, pounded on my chest, and tried to make out with me—”

“I’m assuming that was the mouth-to-mouth,” I interrupt for clarification, because I’m having trouble finding the humor in it. His arms around me are the only reason I haven’t lost my shit.

“Of course it was,” he says, and I can hear the joke coming, which helps me relax—knowing I can be annoyed by it and feel normal again. “How do you make out with someone?”

“You’re such an asshole.” I wrap myself around him and hold on, just to feel the warmth of his body within my grasp. I’m simultaneously arguing with myself over why everything’s fine. He’s okay, obviously, or I’d never have met him.

I’d never have met him.

I suck in a quietly panicked breath and tuck my face in the crook of his neck.

“Hey. Hey,” he says. His voice softens to wrap around me like a blanket. “It was years ago. More than a decade, even.”

In my head, I ask myself when I got so shitfaced that I’m easily swayed by the thought of Doc in perilous circumstances. “I know.”

“Beauty,” he says, and I find his eyes, our noses brushing. “I’m sorry.”

The apology catches me off guard, and my eyes go wide. A tiny gasp escapes me before he kisses me so gently, I want to cry.

A confession rolls out that I don’t expect, but it feels surprisingly good to say. “It was awful to imagine you… not being here. I didn’t like it.”

“Thank you,” he says, so softly I barely hear it, even as close as we are. He presses another tender kiss to my lips. “I didn’t mean to make it a thing. Why don’t we forget I mentioned it? Maybe I could give you an orgasm to wipe the slate clean?”

The shift in topic jars me into an awkwardly preteen-sounding laugh. Part of me is still embarrassed, but the other part has snagged on the offer of an orgasm.

“Oh really, now? Right here, right now? How will you guarantee I won’t be super loud and alert the authorities to our presence?”

At this point, my back touches the side of the pool. Doc’s body presses into me, his hands on either side of me.

“I’m willing to chance it to make you feel good.”

Fucking hell, I nearly came right there.

“You know, the offer is enough to make up for it.”

His brows knit together. “Is that a no?”

I smile. His lips tip to one side as his hands find my sides and turn me around. I grip the side of the infinity pool and gaze unfocused over the moonlight-kissed landscape beyond us. There are dots of light sparkling in the distance and vague shadows and contrast that blur when I feel Doc’s fingers slowly meander down over my stomach and brush over the most sensitive place on my body.

And then stop.

“Wh-wha?”

“You didn’t say yes,” he whispers like the evil sonofabitch he is. “I want to make sure this is consensual.”

“Oh my God, you jackass,” I begin, about to spin in his arms and tell him again what a jackass he is to his face, but he stops me with his thumb on my clit and two fingers plunged inside me. “Ohhh, God, yes!”

I quickly lose the ability to enjoy the darkened view, but at the very least, I try to be quiet about it. Ish. Well, we don’t get caught anyway. When he won’t let me return the favor, I eyeball him like he’s been invaded by body snatchers. What’s stranger, he doesn’t argue.

“Maybe tomorrow we can head over to the set for a quick tour,” he says, completely redirecting. “It’s only a ten-minute drive from here. And there’s a great sushi place right up the road from there.”

I keep staring. “Doc.”

“Yeah?”

He grins, and I’m suddenly lost as to what I was planning to say. I mirror his expression. “I’d love to see the set. And have sushi,” I say, swimming up to him and holding on. “Thank you.”

The warmth of his embrace in the cool water is everything in this moment. I feel his lips press into my temple. “Anytime, Beauty.”

Surprisingly enough—to me, anyway—nothing else happens in the pool aside from kissing and caressing. On one hand, we’ve already had enough sex for the week in the course of one day, but on the other, it’s really nice to relax and goof off. Plus, I love listening to him talk. His stories of growing up in Australia are refreshingly odd, yet entirely normal. If you eliminated the locations and regional details, his family’s camping adventure in the outback would easily be into Yellowstone National Park or the Serengeti. Well, I imagine it could, as I’ve never been either place. Maybe it’s just the way he tells it.

“Mum is screaming,” he whisper-yells, arms above his head, flailing, “‘Do not go in that tent!’ And I’m like, ‘Whatever!’ because, and you might be shocked, I’m a smartass.” His hands splash into the water as his shoulders shake with laughter. “See, thing was, Lynn and I were crazy pissed off because Mum’s cousin Al up and left us all at the ranger’s office for three hours that morning. Add in the fact that I’m thirteen and thereby all-powerful in my own mind, so we just up and went on walkabout, so to speak, without a word. When we got to our campsite, she was rightly pissed off and freaking out, yeah?”

His accent is super strong right now and even in the low light, I can see how expressive his face is when he’s reliving his stories in his mind. The man is gorgeous inside and out, and I find myself grinning like a Cheshire cat.

“Anyway, she doesn’t even hug us or any of that before the screaming. We rush right into the tent just to be assholes, and there’s Al in his tighty-whities—not incredibly white, by the way—vomiting in a bucket, hands all bandaged and scrapes all over his body.”

“What the fuck?”

“Turns out he got bit by a fucking brown recluse spider and—”

I shudder violently, creating a splash of my own at the same time I emit a slew of noises of disgust. He laughs.

“No worries, love. He was fine. He lost a few fingers, but otherwise fine.”

“Fine?!”

He cracks up. “He was a total wanker, anyway. Mum didn’t speak to him for five years after we dropped him off.”

“Without fingers.”

“Wasn’t even his dominant hand,” Doc reasons, which I find hilarious, until I shiver. “Oh, baby, you’re cold, aren’t ya? Here I am waxing poetic on and on, and you’re freezing.”

I chuckle and kiss him as his arms surround me. “I’d hardly call referring to your cousin Jasper as a ‘a tub-thumping tight-arse fuckwit who shits you to tears’ poetic. What does that even mean?”

“I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

With that, I find he’s pushed us to the steps, where we promptly climb out and look for our robes. I get lost watching his face as he wraps me in the soft, thick terrycloth. He’s thoughtful, but a gentle smile hangs from his lips. Content. Peaceful. Happy.

I feel a kick in the gut. I don’t want to ruin this. What if I totally ruin this?

“Are you okay?” he asks, standing there buck naked with his hands on my shoulders as if to steady me.

I blink and look down. “Fine! Of course, I’m fine. You gonna stand there like Atlas, waiting for someone to drop a globe on your back?”

His smirk is quick, but his retort is quicker. “You’re right, they should erect a statue to me. Right here.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I say, shaking my head.

“I think you mean amazing,” he says and slips into his robe. “Allow me to escort you, Beauty.”