Chapter Nine

 

 

Lauren

 

“People are looking at us,” I said without actually meaning to. I immediately cursed myself for revealing my insecurity.

If only I had pulled a fucking plastic apple out of a throat, I wouldn’t be sitting in a public place with a man ten years younger than me. If I hadn’t hit my pliers on the edge of a stupid Charlie Horse cut out, I wouldn’t be catching the attention of total strangers like I was. If I, an experienced surgeon, had just been able to play a child’s game of Operation, I wouldn’t be hearing their whispers about how much hotter and younger than me Ryan was.

But I knew all that wasn’t true. Ryan had given me an out. He’d told me he wouldn’t hold me to our bargain.

And I’d agreed to go out with him of my own free will.

Simply because I’d wanted to.

I was doing a lot of things simply because I wanted to lately. And while I wasn’t exactly unconflicted about it, part of me was excited by the prospect that I was finally reaching out and living outside the normal bounds of expectations people held for me.

Ryan sipped his beer and glanced around the crowded bar. “They’re looking at you,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head. “For being such a brilliant woman—I mean kind of scary brilliant and most definitely intimidatingly brilliant, Lauren—” He leaned over to whisper as if it were a secret he was telling me, “—you are really, really quite dumb.”

“I am not dumb.”

“Oh, but you are.”

He touched my hand conspiratorially and sneakily pointed to a girl sitting across the bar. “She was looking at you.”

“I know. Because I’m with you and—”

“No,” Ryan interrupted. “She was looking because you draw eyes to you, Lauren.”

I started to laugh his comment off, but he squeezed my wrist. “Seriously, Lauren. Don’t take your ex’s inability to keep his dick in his pants as anything being wrong with you. Don’t take the fact that I’m a little younger than you as any big deal. You’re the light here and we’re all the moths,” he said, rubbing his thumb along the underside of my wrist. “And I don’t just mean dudes with eager dicks. I mean, I don’t know how else to say this, darling, but you stick out.”

I had no idea what he was saying, but I was trapped in his spell.

Ryan seemed to be searching for words. “You’re different. The way you look, the way you act, the way you think. Even the way you move is different. We’re all walking through air and you’re gliding through water. You sit differently, you hold your martini glass differently, you look at people differently. You look at me differently.”

He smiled at me and I almost thought I saw the hint of a blush across his tanned cheeks.

“All I want to do is watch you, listen to you speak, follow you, talk with you, be near you.” He nodded at the girl he’d pointed to earlier. “So I get why that girl wants to look. She’s trying to figure out who you are. And it’s driving her crazy that she doesn’t know.”

The green of his eyes seemed to deepen as he looked across at me. His voice was just above a hush.

“It’s driving me crazy.”

Dear Lord. If I had successfully pulled a plastic pencil out of a toy game, I wouldn’t be feeling this way—like I was out of place in public with this young, sharp, stunning man. But neither would I have ever heard those words from Ryan’s beautiful mouth. I wouldn’t have been staring into the most gorgeous green eyes that looked at me the way no one had ever looked at me before. I wouldn’t have felt the way I did then: truly happy.

And horny.

That familiar heat pooled between my legs. It’d be so easy to give in to him. To accept more than a date from him. To feel him inside me again. Such a wicked temptation, I thought, even as I tightened the reins on my self control.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked suddenly.

I frowned, searching the bar. “Our appetizers aren’t even here.”

“I know, I know,” he admitted. “But I realize now I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

He must have seen the clear confusion on my face because he laughed and explained. “I’ve brought you to a typical restaurant for a typical drink along with a typical dinner while listening to typical music all to complete a very typical date. And as I just got finished explaining, you are not typical.”

“Okay…” Part of me wondered at his sudden about face. If he really was embarrassed to be seen with me. But no, I had to stop thinking that way. Honestly, before Samuel’s betrayal, I’m not sure I would have given so much thought to the fact that Ryan was younger than me. Now the fact that he was my resident was still another matter.

Ryan slipped his wallet from his back pocket and threw a hundred on the table before standing up and offering me his hand.

I slipped my hand into his and he led me out of the restaurant. With one final glance over my shoulder at the now empty table, I felt like I was leaving something behind there. I saw a woman sitting there that was satisfied with alright, okay with just okay.

The woman who held Ryan’s hand wanted more.

To be daring. Brave.

To take what she wanted, without guilt or remorse.

To take him.

 

* * *

 

With a contented sigh, I leaned back on the blanket spread out across the wild grasses next to the lake. Ryan wiggled up next to me and carefully eased my head onto his leg. I let my eyes fall closed as he started to run his fingers through my hair.

After we’d left the restaurant, Ryan had driven to a local deli. He’d returned to the car shortly after with two caprese sandwiches, a tub of fruit salad, and two bottles of strawberry wine. I’d asked him where exactly we were going to eat this, but he merely winked and insisted he knew a place.

The place was a beautiful state park just outside of Denver up the highway. We’d pulled into the gravel parking lot just as the sun started to set over the Rocky Mountains in the distance and we’d spent most of the time sitting quietly together on a blanket Ryan had in his car watching the vibrant reds and yellows and pinks and oranges dance across the gentle waves of the lake. The rest of the time was spent with fingers brushing against one another, feet playing flirtatiously back and forth, eyes glancing at the other when we didn’t think we’d get caught, though we did every time.

Time seemed like molasses, sweet like the strawberry wine we sipped from the bottle, sweet like the smell of the summer heat on the grasses, sweet like Ryan’s lips on my own.

“What are you doing?” I asked, opening my dreamy eyes to look up at him with a smile.

“Just testing a theory.”
“Well?”

He grinned. “I thought maybe your lips would taste like the strawberry wine,” he said. “They looked like they would.”

“And?” I asked.

“I was wrong.”

“Oh.”

He laughed and softly tickled my side. “They tasted better. See, I’m telling you, for being so smart, you miss a lot of stuff. That’s Romance 101.”

I pushed him over on the blanket and crawled on top of him. I kissed up and down his neck. “What else is Romance 101, huh?” I asked between kisses.

“Well,” he answered, “there’s running to the airport gate before the lover leaves.”

“Can’t do that anymore.”

“Okay, there’s standing outside your baby’s window with a boombox.”

I kissed Ryan’s jaw, saying, “Do they even sell boomboxes anymore?”

“Right,” he said as his fingers dug into my hair. “How about kissing your girl in a field when it’s pouring down rain?”

“Hmm,” I kissed each of his closed eyelids, then the tip of his nose, each side of his lips. “Lot of logistics. We’d have to find a field where the farmer won’t chase us off with a shotgun, first of all. Then we’d have to wait for rain, which in Denver is fairly rare.”

“A rain machine?”

“Expensive.”

“Well, that’s it then.”

I pulled up and looked down at him.“What’s that?”

“Romance is dead,” he said.

I nodded. “Dead,” I repeated, pushing his silky, brown hair from his face. “There’s no chance for us.”

He stared up at me. “None whatsoever.”

The air around us, warm and still, felt like a cocoon, and the sky was tinted faintly with lavender and rose. My skin against his and his against mine felt suddenly like the most solid of connections.

“I have an idea,” Ryan said.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Let’s skinny dip.”

The hazy, dreamlike cocoon I’d been feeling was broken and I rolled off of Ryan.

“What?” he said, sitting up with his hair a mess, which I had to admit, only made him look cuter.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?”

He swept his arm across the lake and looked at me with wide eyes, hungry eyes. “There’s no one here,” he insisted.

I checked around myself and found the lake area with its tall grasses empty. Stars above us just started to twinkle one by one.

“We can’t skinny dip in the lake,” I said, though with less confidence than just moments before.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I floundered. “Isn’t a park ranger going to come by or something?”

Ryan reached across the blanket for my sandal and unhooked the buckle as he grinned up at me. “A park ranger is going to hike up here looking for those infamous skinny dippers at 9 PM on a Saturday night?”

I thought it through as he slipped my sandal off and went to the next one, leaning over to kiss along my calf.

“We can’t skinny dip,” I repeated, mostly to myself this time as my brain hurried to find a reason, any reason why not.

“We can.”

With both of my shoes off, Ryan tugged his shirt up and off, tempting me with that perfection of a chest. He kicked off his own shoes and tugged down his shorts as I watched, dumbfounded. He winked down at me. “We can do anything we want.”

He set off through the grasses toward the sandy shore of the lake and a moment later something sailed through the air toward me. His boxers landed in my lap and I stared at them as if I’d never seen boxers before in my entire life.

I was a forty-year-old woman. I couldn’t get butt ass naked in a public space and go swimming. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t. And yet I found myself standing and tugging my sundress over my head and unlatching my lacy bralette and shimmying out of my thong. I stood there, alone, and tried to remember a time I’d been naked outside. Ever.

The utter freedom of it made me want to run around shouting and hollering. I wanted to act like a fool. Smiling, I made my way down to the lake and found Ryan bobbing up and down about twenty feet from the shore.

“Took you long enough,” he shouted and I immediately searched the area for someone who could have heard. Ryan laughed. “Get in here, you fine ass woman.”

The water pooled around my ankles and I hesitated. “What do I do?”

“You can swim, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then what do you mean, ‘what do I do’?”

I threw up my hands. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just mean what do I do?”

He splashed water toward me though it got nowhere close to me. “You just put one foot in front of the other till you’re in past your head and you’re forced to swim or sink.”

“Helpful,” I laughed, wading in.

I skimmed my fingertips over the surface of the lake as it sloshed against my thighs. The water was still warm from the battering of the summer air and yet a shiver traveled up my spine nevertheless. I felt daring and bold and brave. Ryan watched me as I swam toward him.

“I’ve finally figured it out,” he whispered as I drew near, slowly paddling and kicking.

“Figured what out?”

He reached out a hand and touched a strand of my hair. “I figured out what color your hair is just now.” He smiled. “It’s the color of water under starlight.”

I bobbed in the water while watching his eyes. We were close. Close enough that my fingertips grazed his as my hands skimmed across the cool, silk-like surface of the lake. Close enough that our toes occasionally bumped into one another's as we each treaded water, silent and uncertain and hesitant. Close enough that I could catch the growing starlight reflect off of the tiny beads of water that clung to his long back..

We were close.

But not close enough.

I bit my lip and almost stopped when nerves tumbled around my stomach, but I needed this, I knew I needed this. I moved in closer and pressed my lips to his and tasted the strawberry wine and tasted the fresh lake water and tasted excitement and energy and the potential for a new start. Our kiss was awkward and uncoordinated in the water and when I pulled away I knew from the heat in my cheeks that I was blushing.

But his eyes burned with lust and desire. He pulled me tight to him and kissed me. As we tried to stay afloat, the kiss got sloppier and needier. His kisses landed on the corner of my lips, my cheek, my nose. We wanted one another. We needed one another. Even if it wasn't perfect, it was perfect.

The ripples from our movement spread out around us and I felt like I was quite literally the center of the world, there in his arms with the water blanketed around us. Ryan supported my back and I closed my eyes and tilted my head as he kissed along my neck. The sensation of his tongue, hot and searing, compared to the chill of the water, made me shiver and moan.

My eyes only opened when my foot connected with wet sand beneath me. Surprised, I looked around to find Ryan had pushed us both closer to the sandy shore line speckled with wild grasses. The mountains were dark against the distant horizon. Soon we were in shallow water and Ryan laid me down so my head was in the sand, but water lapped up against my exposed tits.

Ryan’s gorgeous face was surrounded by stars, but the beauty of the night sky was nothing compared to the beauty of his eyes that flashed and twinkled for me. My back arched off the wet, dense sand when his finger circled over my clit. The sensation of the smooth water with the warmth of his calloused finger made my breath come in little gasps as he lazily circled round and round.

I grasped blindly in the lake water and found Ryan’s hard cock. He felt like velvet under the water.

We continued to watch each other as he touched me and I touched him. I studied his face to see what movement made him gasp, which made him bite his lip, which made his hips buck or his head fall back or his perfect, juicy mouth release an uncontrollable moan. I wanted to give him pleasure. I wanted to take him apart. I wanted him to scream my name.

He seemed just as determined to make me lose my mind, slipping his fingers into me and rubbing firm circles against my clit. Suddenly, he seemed to lose control, however, and gripped each of my thighs. Almost shaking in anticipation, I let go of his dick and stretched my arms above my head, reveling in the feeling of my skin in the sand. My nipples, hard and perky, pointed toward the open night sky as my tits heaved, ready for Ryan's cock inside of me.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “I don’t have a condom.”

I stared at him. Thought about it. Then asked, “Are you healthy?”

“Yes. But you probably shouldn’t just believe me.”

I knew I shouldn’t just believe him. And if it was anyone else, I probably wouldn’t. But this was Ryan, who was a good doctor for God’s sake. Ryan, who hadn’t used our dating app hook-up to his advantage, but had respected the professional boundaries I’d established. When I’d kept to them, that is. And despite the complications between us, I believed him.

“I’m safe, too. And I’m on the pill. But you probably shouldn’t just believe me.”

“I believe you,” he said. “So…”

I nodded. “It’s okay.”

My breath quickened when I felt him line up his cock head with my pussy and I moaned as he pushed in, slow and gentle and so, so slow. I'd never fucked in water, but it was better than fucking on the most expensive silk sheets the world could provide. My breasts bounced as Ryan rocked me back and forth and I felt at the same time the heat of the summer air and the cold of the lapping lake water. The heat between my legs was chilled by the cool sand beneath my back. The pulsing, red hot iron of Ryan's cock filled me before the chilly water flooded back in.

"I've never felt like this," I breathed as Ryan thrust inside me.

"I wish you could see how good you look," Ryan moaned.

He squeezed the skin of my inner thighs tighter and I groaned. I could feel myself getting close, the sensation of it all too much.

"Your arms coated with sand as you reach for something to hold onto," he practically growled.

He punctuated his sentence with a thrust that doubled the amount of stars in the sky.

"Making waves as your back arches off the ground when you squirm."

His pace quickened as the water splashed around us. To my ears, we were making so much noise the mountains were shaking and the windows in Denver shattering. I moaned Ryan's name as I pushed my hips up to get more of him. He knew what I wanted and fucked deeper inside of me. I was close, so close.

"Your tits look like they're covered in diamonds, sparkling all wet and hard from my cock."

"Ryan," I groaned, gripping handfuls of sand.

"I want to see you come, all laid out in the sand," he said, his voice strained.

"Yes," I moaned. "Yes, yes."

"Come for me. Lauren, I want to see you come."

At the sound of my name whispered on his lips like something sacred and precious, I came. Unimaginable pleasure swept through me as I clawed at the sand and my back arched up. My thighs clenched together as I tried to hold onto the feelings that shook my body and pulled moan after moan from my lips.

"Fuck," I heard Ryan gasp through a haze. "Fuck, fuck."

Ryan thrust deep inside of me and then I felt his fingers on my thighs shake and his hips stutter. I opened my eyes when he groaned my name and he grabbed my tits as he came, chest heaving and breath gasping. We both stared at each other as the waves washed over us.

With a smile, Ryan rubbed his thumb over my nipple before pulling out and collapsing in the sand next to me. I rolled over onto my side and he did the same. He reached over and brushed a strand of wet hair from my face. His fingers were coated with sand.

He pulled me in tight to his chest and we laid there together in the heat of the summer air with the lake as our silk sheets pooled around our legs, tangled amongst our intertwined ankles. The wind played in my hair and his breath fluttered my eyelashes. The sand was rough, but his skin was soft and I never wanted to move.

Fuck any park ranger that tried to separate us.