Kai’s kiss surprises me, but not much. All afternoon, I’ve wanted this. I’ve hoped for it. Ever since I saw him out on the water.

He moved so gracefully out there, like he was part of the surfboard. Sure in his footing, hips swiveling perfectly in sync with the turns of the ocean. The way he dove in before he could get knocked down, like he controlled the waves and knew exactly when they’d end.

Strange as it sounds, he seems to have the same mystical kind of knowledge when it comes to me. His mouth trails to my neck right as I lift my shoulders from the grass. When a piece of hair falls into my eyes, he brushes it away before it can even bother me. The second I start to feel something more, wondering how to tell him we should take this further, his hand presses against my sex, drifting between pressures as easily as the switch from crouching to standing on that surfboard—that moment when he stopped being carried by the wave, and chose to harness the motion for himself.

My fingers find the lacing of his swim trunks and pull. It knocks him off-balance; he catches himself just above me.

“Whoa, easy,” he laughs.

“Sorry. I thought it would just untie it.” I laugh too, mostly to hide my embarrassment.

“I’m suddenly very aware,” he says, and turns his head from one side of the clearing to the other, “that we’re in public.”

I look around. The hill is secluded, and there’s no reason for anyone to come back here. Other than the fact we’re outdoors, it doesn’t seem much more public than the cabana.

“I don’t think we should do anything, here.” He rolls to one side of me. I wait for his alternatives of where we should do something, but he doesn’t give any.

“Oh. Okay.” Contesting it or offering my own suggestions will make me sound desperate. And no matter how badly I want those hands on my body and the beachy taste of his mouth against mine, I’m never going back to Damian-level desperation. As Tanya often tells me, “It just isn’t a good look.”

All the same, going with the flow and following the guy’s lead (or lack thereof) is exactly how I got to desperation in the first place. If I’d just told Damian how I felt from the start, I could’ve saved myself years of trouble—and a whole lot of humiliation.

“Can I ask you something?”

He turns. Blood rushes to my ears, but I press on.

“Do you want this to…go anywhere? You and me, I mean.”

Kai scratches the back of his head; I see the tattoo again, sliding out from beneath his sleeve. “Can it go anywhere?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Because you’re leaving.”

I sit up. “I know. So I’m fine if you just want to hang out. And I’m also fine if you want to do…more than hanging out. I just want to know which.”

Dimly, he smiles.

“But yes,” I go on, “I’m leaving in five days. There’s no point pretending I’m not. So that means—the way I see it, anyway—the ending will stay exactly the same, no matter what happens before that.”

“I guess that’s true.” He rests his arms on his knees and looks up at the sky. It’s a perfect flower of blue through the trees, edges changing with the wind. “So, what—we just keep doing this? Hanging out and hooking up?”

“Doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me.” I elbow him until his smile strengthens. “No strings attached. No promises. Nothing has to get complicated or messy.”

“A vacation fling.” His eyebrow lifts, skeptical. “You’d really be okay with that?”

“I have to be, don’t I?”

Kai studies his palm and picks off dirt that isn’t there. “Five days.”

“Five days.”

We stare at each other. I think of the way he drew my bottom lip into his mouth, only a few minutes ago, and feel a chill run across me that I don’t dare show.

“It would be nice,” he says softly, after a minute, “to end this two-year dry spell.”

My laugh snorts out, which embarrasses the hell out of me again, but makes him take my hand and laugh.

“Since we’re doing the no-strings thing, apparently…I guess I can share this, now. I had a dream about you last night.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. We were in the cabana.” He leans close and kisses me again, tongue slipping into my mouth at the same pace his hand slips under my dress. My thighs tense under his fingertips, his hovering touch that isn’t really a touch. It’s more like he’s casting a spell, drawing goose bumps across my skin. So close to where I want them to be but so, so far. “Only this time, I didn’t let you leave.”

“Tell me,” I manage. I hold my breath as he lowers his head to my chest, doing the same thing as his hand on my thigh, but with his lips, passing them across the tops of my breasts. No contact: just electricity. “Tell me what…what you did to me. In the dream.”

Kai looks at me, pieces of hair falling across his forehead. I notice, in that way you catch things more on second glances, that it’s not jet black. There’s a softness to it, this muted depth from so much sun and salt. A lifetime of it.

He pulls his hand out of my dress and gets up. Once again, even though I don’t need to, I take the hand he offers me. “I’d rather show you.”

* * *

The cabana is scorching.

Stepping inside is like climbing into a car that’s been parked in a new asphalt lot for hours. In direct summer sunlight. In the middle of Mexico.

“Wow,” I choke, as the heat and humidity flood my chest with all the force of that water, the night of my drunken swim.

“Yeah, sorry.” He opens and closes the door, a makeshift fan. “I did not think this through.”

I laugh and help him out by opening the window. The cross-breeze is mildly impressive: the resort and cabana are set on a bit of a hill compared to the rest of the beach, so while the wind coming through is warm, it’s consistent enough to cool down the cabana to bearable levels.

I shut the window. Kai echoes my smile and slams the door with a flourish.

“About my dream.” He slides his arms around my waist and pulls me against him. Through his trunks, I feel him harden against my stomach and wonder how he managed to tolerate the bike ride from the clearing. It was hard enough for me.

“First,” he whispers, drawing my earlobe between his teeth and biting carefully, before skating his lips down my neck and resting them on my shoulder, “I kissed you all over.”

“So far, so good.”

He pulls back a bit. “All over.”

I actually giggle. It leaves me horrified, because there’s no clearer signal you’ve never had a guy talk dirty to you before than giggling.

“Should I demonstrate?” Without an answer, he edges his hand under the hem of my dress again. I shiver when he finds the ties of my swim skirt and undoes them. Two fluid tugs, like untying ribbon from a present. The fabric is dried by now, and whispers down my thighs like silk.

He kisses me, swiftly working a meandering path down the other side of my neck. At the nape, I feel his fingers fluttering to undo the knot of my halter top. When it gives and the fabric loosens, he wastes no time getting one of my nipples into his mouth.

Before I can melt into it, he releases and pulls my dress up to my navel, exposing my most vulnerable place to the stifling heat. He kisses his way from one hipbone to the other. I’m electrified by how close his lips are to my sex, but suddenly ashamed. In the daylight, even shaded in this small hut, I know he can see my stretch marks, some cellulite. The spot just over my panty line, where the smallest bit of skin crepes and folds. All the evidence of who I used to be.

But, just like last night, he either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care.

“After I kissed you,” he whispers, the intensity of his breath even hotter than the air, “I knelt down like this…” His hands find their place on my hips, anchoring me. “…and put my mouth right here.”

Everything inside me pulses at once. “Kai, please…show me.”

He smirks and, at last, closes that gap, those two millimeters between his dream and my reality.

My gasp dizzies me, the new rush of heat into my lungs sparking a fever from head to toe. His tongue draws lazy circles around my clitoris, still teasing, until I cup the back of his head in my hands and pull him closer.

The two fingers he pushes into me thrust in time to the movement of his tongue, and I turn into absolute putty. How I’ll keep standing, I have no idea.

“Kai….” I have to close my eyes. “Keep doing that. Don’t stop, please.” He’s found a perfect combination. Every time his fingers flex inside me, the jolt is intensified by the now forceful circle of his tongue.

My thighs shake on either side of his head. He lets me brace myself against him as the explosion looms.

It doesn’t happen. Instead, he manages to hold me there, suspending me in this high, buzzing state while he eases his movements to gentle sweeps of the tongue, an easy pulse of his fingers.

“Kai, I’m so close....”

He keeps me in this pleasurable purgatory. My orgasm hovers like a low fog, but no matter how much I will it to touch down, it doesn’t.

It’s torture. I squirm under the brush of his free hand, which skitters up the back of my thigh before cupping my ass the way I’m grabbing his head. He pulls me against his mouth with an ownership I’ve never felt from anyone else.

He wants you. And for more than one night. Even if it can only be a few more, at least it’s because of fate—not because he’ll have accomplished whatever he wanted to use me for.

Suddenly, he lets go.

I’m relieved the incredible torture has ceased, but hungry for it to continue. Especially when he stands and kisses me. I taste myself, mixed with that island combination of his skin.

I didn’t notice him undoing his swim trunks and kicking them to the floor, but now, as he pulls back and bares himself to me in the diffused light, I can’t look away. I was sure my memory of his size had already been colored by nostalgia. Evidently, it was not.

My orgasm lingers around me like an aura. I’m ready for that fog to sink into me, the pleasure to crash.

“What, uh….” My voice feels flimsy in my own ears. I clear my throat, but it doesn’t help. “What happened next, in your dream?”

“You took off my shirt, admired my muscles for a while...” He pauses, smiling at my laugh. “…then I sat in that chair and you climbed in my lap, just like last night. But things went a hell of a lot further.”

As he speaks, I work on making the first part come to life: my hands gather the bottom of his shirt and glide it over his head. He pulls it off the rest of the way and balls it up, every muscle in his chest and arms rippling as he does. When I blush, unable to look away, he says, “Yeah. Just like that.”

No strings. No mess, no complications. Five days of this, and then we say goodbye.

Yeah. I can do that.

I hold my erection at her entrance as she rises above me on the chair, arms draped around my neck. When I curse because I forgot to get condoms, she tells me she’s on the shot.

“So…green light?”

“Yes,” she laughs, lowering herself. “Very green.”

We both sigh as I fill her, her limit reached and every inch of me inside her. Like we were made for each other, I think.

Then I scold myself. Those are long-term thoughts. Definitely not part of the arrangement.

“God, you feel amazing,” she whispers, still adjusting.

“You too.” I don’t know if it’s the stagnant boil of the cabana making me rasp, or her.

In the soft light of somewhere private and familiar, I notice things about her I didn’t in the clearing, or last night in the darkness: the slope of her hips, meeting up at a perfect little hourglass dip in her waist. Her navel is set in, but just barely. There’s a small scar above it.

“You have your bellybutton pierced?” I ask, touching it.

She slows down and watches my finger trail from her stomach to her sex, brushing against her clit. “Used to,” she says. “Last year.” She closes her eyes, concentrating more on my touch than my question.

“What happened to it?”

“It fell out when I went camping, a couple months after I got it done. Closed up before I could put in a new one.”

“Oh.”

Mollie starts moving again. I’m glad she didn’t notice: asking about a scar, some tiny mark that doesn’t even matter, isn’t the kind of thing you do in a fling.

Note to self, I think, grabbing her hips to steady her when she loses momentum, too lost in the feeling to control it anymore, quit asking shit like that.

Kai is the moon and my body’s the tide.

His fingers skim the nodes of my spine, cup the shells of my hips. Pull me to the summit, where the tallest waves finally break.

Where water meets sky, just before the crash.

His hands are rough. I swear I can feel every callous on his fingers. Funny: I didn’t notice that last night. Or even today, when he held out his hand for me to take it on the beach, or in the clearing.

I didn’t notice a lot, actually. Maybe now, with the “what happens next” element wiped out, I can relax enough to study him the way I should have from the start. He’s muscular, which I already knew—you’d have to be on another planet to miss that—but in a lean, swimmer’s way. When I concentrate, I can see the variations in his tan: which parts are probably genetic, guarded under uniforms and surf shirts, and which are from his hours on the water.

Or his hair. All I noticed before was that sun-softened black. Now, I realize there’s sand trapped in it. A piece of a clover, from the clearing. Above his ear is a cowlick, cut close.

Stop it. Details like these aren’t important. Not when you’re just in it for a few days. Nothing good will come from memorizing these pieces of him, the cute little imperfections. I know better, now.

My thoughts do serve one important purpose, at least: staving off my orgasm the slightest bit longer, which teeters so close I can’t even find the words to warn him. He must know: my legs won’t move anymore, and any thrusts that happen—slow and deep, a complete fill with the shortest withdrawal—are from him lifting me, not my own motion.

“Kai,” I pant, as he brings his mouth to my nipples again. He works on one, then the other, and matches his pace to the timing of his thrusts, the brush of his fingers over my clitoris. I can’t decide where to put my focus: it isn’t any one thing he’s doing, but the combination, that’s tripping me to the edge.

I grab the hand he planted on my hip and pull it away to stop his thrusts, so I can sink into his lap completely, stretched and full and overwhelmed as the pleasure envelopes me. My sex quakes around his, the heat pushes down on us both, and it’s not until the peak passes and my brain reconnects that I realize I’m still holding his hand—and he’s laced his fingers into mine, just holding it, watching my orgasm unfold before him like the it’s the greatest thing he’s ever witnessed.

“Mollie,” he whispers, jaw tensing, “where can I finish?”

The fog still swirls in my brain, but I take a breath and make myself process his question. When I kiss him, I feel his erection flinch inside me.

“Wherever you finished in your dream.”

It’s little things.

The way she bites her lip every time I drive into her, each thrust like it’s the first. This small sigh at the back of her throat when I withdraw. Goose bumps pepper her skin, courtesy of the humidity.

Or, maybe, courtesy of me.

Her whisper pushes me past the tipping point instantly, more than the final rock of her hips as she regains strength, more than the way she kisses me and pulls my arm up over my head, still holding my hand while I release. I moan her name against her mouth and close my eyes.

She falls against me when it all ends. I’m still inside. Our hands are still entwined.

“Good way to end your dry spell?” she asks.

“Hell, yeah.” The hot air makes catching my breath a challenge. “Nice way to end your crush on asshole-friend?”

“That was definitely already over. But yes.”

We laugh. I ease out and scoot over so she can sit beside me, halfway on my lap as she burrows into the crook of my arm and sighs.

Okay, so maybe post-sex cuddling shouldn’t be part of the “vacation fling” deal, but between the temperature and my exhaustion—it has been a really long time for me—it’s pretty much the only option.

Besides, I don’t want to be a jerk. Wham, bam, get the hell out? Not my style.

She shivers, an aftershock, and rests a hand on my chest. Her breath is so shallow, I wonder if she’ll fall asleep. The idea of napping together makes me happier than it probably should.

Soon I’m in that weird in-between state, where you know you’re about to drop out of consciousness but don’t care, where reality melts with dreams. I feel the ocean underneath me, rocking my board and gliding me across low waves. The sun is white overhead.

I hear voices. By the time I register that the sound of footsteps outside the cabana and click of the door aren’t a dream, it’s too late.

“Oh, shit, man, I’m sorry!” P.J. backs up so fast, he bumps into whoever’s behind him. Both are covering their eyes. Thank God, because Mollie and I are anything but graceful as we fall out of the chair and gather our clothes.

“Jesus, P.J.,” I shout, now that he’s closed the door. Once we’re both covered, I grab the handle and jerk it open. “What the hell?”

“I’m sorry,” he laughs, holding up his palms. “Brad and me were just looking to smoke between shifts.”

I glance behind him at Brad, a new server we hired for the busy season. “You should know P.J.’s been written up twice for smoking weed on the property, and that was before corporate came in. I wouldn’t exactly follow his lead, if I were you.”

Brad looks petrified. “Yes, sir.”

“Kai,” I correct him, which I’ve had to do ever since his training week. We’re all basically the same rank—at least, we used to be, before this morning—but as the boss’s son, I guess people do see me as some kind of authority. Which is seriously flawed, for more reasons than one.

“If you can fuck a girl in the cabana,” P.J. says breezily, “I can pack a bowl.” He looks over my shoulder at Mollie, who’s painfully embarrassed. “I am sorry for barging in, though.”

A siren up the hill catches our attention. The four of us turn and squint at the resort, just in time to see an ambulance fly in from the road.

“Whoa.” P.J. steps into the cabana past Mollie, jerking his head at Brad to follow. “Hope nobody else drowned.”

Mollie winces. I glare at P.J., who doesn’t make the connection.

“Come on.” Her hand is slick in mine. We start for the building. “Sorry. P.J.’s a nice guy, honestly—clueless, but nice. And I don’t think he knows you’re the one who almost drowned, so it wasn’t a personal dig.”

“It’s okay.” She keeps one arm crossed over her body, hugging her ribcage like she’s self-conscious. If I still worked here, I’d give P.J. more than an earful at our next shift.

The ambulance is pulled up to a back entrance. Paradise Port policy, enforced whenever possible: if there’s time to get a hurt or sick guest to a more discreet loading area, do it.

I shoulder my way through the employees gathered there. Voices quiet when anyone notices me, which is the first sign something’s wrong. Usually, staff share info like cold germs.

The second sign is spotting Luka, pulling himself up into the ambulance before the doors shut.

“Who is it?” Mollie asks, after the ambulance starts down the road. I curse in a long exhale. The crowd has all turned to stare at me.

I feel her hand slip from mine, but can’t tell which one of us lets go first. “My dad.”