Chapter Thirty-Seven
I waited up for Luke a long time, our brief embrace from this afternoon living on in my body. At last, my tent shook in a one-two rhythm, and he crawled in quietly.
“Everyone wanted to socialize tonight,” he said. “Right in front of your tent.”
Before I could reply, his lips were on mine, taking my breath and my heart along with it. We made quick and quiet work of zipping our sleeping bags together and crawling inside. Our jackets came off right away, and then our shirts. All of our layers of shirts. I wasn’t wearing a bra, so it was nothing but hot bare skin on hot bare skin. My breasts pushed into his chest as his mouth found mine again in the dark. He tasted like the lemony menthol of his cough drops.
All the new sensations swirling through my body made me dizzy. The headiness of his kisses demanded my full attention, yet I was also aware of the exact location of his slightly chilly fingers as they traveled across my belly and along the line of ribs where my bra band would have been. As those fingertips grazed the bottoms of my breasts, my nipples hardened, then electrified. I wanted his hands—maybe even his mouth—to continue on to my breasts.
Instead, he moved his hands around to my back as we twisted onto our sides. I leaned in to find his mouth, but he pulled back so I couldn’t reach. “Hold on a minute,” he said.
His hands were still on my back. He slid them slowly down my shoulder blades to the taper of my waist and across the small of my back. Then he did it again, his hands following the exact path as before.
“I’ve always wondered how this would feel,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Your body. You’re a powerhouse. A mountain-climbing machine.”
“Luke!” Now I was self-conscious. And it wasn’t true. After this long at high altitude, I’d lost a lot of muscle, and almost all of my bust.
His hands drifted up to my triceps, squeezing them before rounding across my shoulders and cupping them.
“Not all bodies can do what you do. And this is what it feels like.”
His hands studied the muscles of my back again, as if they were a map written in Braille. I had to admit, it was sexy.
“Now can I kiss you?” I asked.
He let me, and as we kissed, he slipped his hand over my breast like it was the cup of the kind of lacy underwire bra I’d never owned. He circled my nipple with his thumb, bringing heat and pressure to the junction of my legs. I sighed, which was as much in reaction to the sensation as it was with the surprise of his touch so strongly affecting a place that he wasn’t even touching.
I wrapped my arms around him. His kisses paused as my hands explored the soft skin above the tight and defined muscles of his back. Then his mouth was back on mine, more insistent than before. My panties grew slick, and my mind drifted to the condoms in my jacket pocket.
But if we kept going, Luke would realize I had no clue what I was doing. That I’d never been even remotely close to where we were headed. Should I say something?
He pulled back with alarm. “Emily. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
I didn’t realize I had stiffened. “No, it’s not that. It’s just…I’ve never done this before.”
He rolled back against me. I couldn’t see his face in the perfect blackness of my tent, but a smile was pressing his cheek into mine. His lips slid down to the pulse point at the base of my jaw, and he kissed me there before feeling for my hand and lacing our fingers together.
“I guess we could start with this,” he said, moving our joined hands down his stomach to his jeans button.
Oh my god. This was really going to happen.
I followed his lead, popping the button free. The zipper teeth clicked in the quiet of the tent as I slowly lowered his fly. He pulled his jeans the rest of the way off, leaving nothing but long underwear bottoms. Then he untied the drawstring on my thick fleece pajama pants and helped me slide them off. As we moved, the sleeping bag kicked frigid mountain air across our bodies, and in the stark contrast between hot and cold, goose bumps pricked along my arms.
We found each other again, our newly freed legs intertwining eagerly. My body relaxed as I followed his lead. A lead that I wasn’t sure I even needed, as it seemed like my body instinctually knew what to do. We kissed exactly as we had before, his hand cupping my breast and his thumb playing with my nipple, except this time there was no denying his hardness pressing against me. The yearning ache in my body wound tighter.
My hungry hands were all over his back, chest, and shoulders, trying to feel what I’d never seen with my eyes. He exhaled loudly in response as he pulled my leg up his hip and squeezed my bottom. His hardness pressed directly across the damp part of my panties, releasing a rush of need so strong that I did something I could never fathom under normal circumstances: I nudged his head lower, toward my breasts.
He cupped them with both hands and then, one at a time, took a nipple into his mouth, drawing a spiral around it with his tongue. It was so mesmerizing that I hardly noticed the footsteps on the rock just outside the tent. Until the footsteps stopped. We froze. Thankfully, the steps continued into the distance.
I wrapped my leg tighter around him, and we continued kissing. His hand explored the length of my bare leg, making my skin prickle deliciously. Our kisses deepened, perhaps as deep and overtly sexually as we had ever kissed, our tongues wet and hot.
“Okay, hang on, Emily,” he said, pulling away slightly. He was breathing as heavily as me. “We should think about this.”
“You don’t want to?”
“It’s not that, believe me. It’s just, for your first time… For our first time… With people walking by… And it’s so dark in here, and it’ll be messy, and then I’m going to have to sneak back off to my tent.” He framed my face with his warm hand. “It doesn’t match how I feel about you.”
My body reverberated with protest. If not now, there might not ever be another chance, first or otherwise.
As if emphasizing Luke’s point, more footsteps passed by the tent.
“But this could be all we have,” I whispered.
He ran his hand slowly through my hair. His careful, caring touch was a gentle salve for the parts of me that still burned for him.
“That’s just the thing,” he said. Something about his voice reached deep inside me, connecting with a place that made me feel more alive than any of the ways he’d touched me tonight. He twisted a piece of my hair and laid it along my bare shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be.”
I knew exactly what he was implying. He was quiet for a long time, letting his words sink in.
“I can’t leave Washington for another two years,” he said. “For all the people who have contributed to my scholarships and worked to get me where I am today—Greg included—I will finish my degree. You said you still don’t have anything lined up next, so why not figure it out in Washington? April was telling me her roommate is going to Antarctica for six months, and I bet you could sublet that room.”
Washington.
Luke was trembling a little, and I realized it was because he was nervous.
“I know you have bad associations in Washington and your mom lives there,” he said. “I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to go. But your mom is one person. I’m another. For all that she’s not, we are a lot.” He slipped a hand back to my face. “Aren’t we?”
I put my hand on top of his. I couldn’t imagine this being it for Luke and me. “We are,” I said.
As more cold air snuck in the wide opening at the top of our sleeping bags, we shivered. After putting some of our layers back on, we re-wrapped ourselves in each other.
He swallowed. “What if you came back…for me?”
Time went into slow motion, into a zone where elation and fear could exist at the same time. Luke tilted his forehead onto mine. “I know you’re going to need to think this over, and I don’t need an answer right now, but I’m really asking you. Officially. Will you come with me to Washington?”