Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 84322 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84322 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 422(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Tyler watched me with eyes full of pain, his eyebrows hitched together, throat tight. But he didn’t say a word.
He didn’t have to.
I could see it — how he was sorry, how he didn’t mean to hurt me.
And now, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it all along.
“She wants us to be friends,” I added after a minute, smiling a little as I nudged his shoulder with mine. “What do you think of that?”
Tyler let out a breath, slow and easy, like he’d been holding it. The corner of his mouth hitched up. “I think I want that, too.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded, and something sharp ripped through my chest, but I subdued the urge to reach for it and digest it and figure it out.
“Me, too,” I said softly.
Tyler’s smile widened, and I smiled in return — just as a bolt of lightning struck overhead, immediately followed by a deep rumble of thunder that shook the entire dock.
Tyler and I exchanged worried glances, and then we were both up on our feet.
“Damn New Hampshire summer storms,” I cursed, tossing everything into my bag and throwing it over my shoulder as Tyler grabbed our towels. “How can it be perfectly sunshiney one minute, and then hailing the next?”
“You sound like such a Cali girl right now,” he teased, but I didn’t have time to smack him or flick him off before another crack of lightning and thunder hit overhead, and then, in the distance, the soft sound of rain in the trees.
“Fuck,” I whispered, and Tyler and I looked at each other once more before we took off sprinting toward the old house.
We hadn’t even made it off the dock before the rain reached us, and I threw my bag over my head — as if that would do anything — as Tyler did the same with the towels over his. I was trying to protect the clipboard with the playlist we’d just worked on while also saving myself from the downpour, but it was no use.
We squinted through the sheet of rain, hopping over rocks and exposed tree roots in our bare feet on our way to the house. Careful where we stepped on the rotting stairs, we ran as fast as we could up to the back porch — the porch that wrapped all the way around the old house — and once we were under cover, we dropped the soaked towels and bag onto the porch and flicked the rain off us.
When our eyes met, we both burst into laughter.
Mine came in an explosion, one so fierce my stomach hurt, and I bent over, unable to stop laughing to find relief. Tyler’s bubbled out of him — slow at first, and then at the same rate as mine, and he bent forward, too, watching me as we both succumbed.
“Real bright idea to go to the lake today,” he teased. “Did you even check the weather?”
“No,” I confessed, still laughing as the storm raged on around us. The rain fell in a heavy, slanted sheet over the lake, the yard, pelting what was left of the awning that shielded the porch. “But now I’m kind of glad I didn’t.”
Tyler shook his head, righting himself and leaning against the old wood of the house with his eyes on the lake. Slowly, steadily, the laughter left us — and my eyes found Tyler while his focused on the rain, feeling like each new bolt of lightning was striking right through my chest.
Water fell from his hair and over his temples, his jaw, streaming in a small river that led down the valley of his throat. I followed the water down, down, over the muscular swells of his pecs, between the lean, cut edges of his abdomen, all the way to the band of his trunks.
When my eyes crawled back up again, his were watching me.
I was already moving toward him before I realized it, stepping into his space, into his warmth — so much so that he put his hands on my arms to stop me from coming any closer.
“If she wouldn’t have come to you,” I screamed over the rain, blinking over and over as water dripped from my lashes onto my cheeks. “If Morgan hadn’t told you to stay away from me… would you have… what would have…”
I couldn’t find the words to ask the question. It was as if all the boldness that had moved me toward him, that had propelled me to this moment was suddenly gone — washed away, wiped out with the rain.
But Tyler’s hands slicked up my arms — slow, purposeful — his fingertips trailing over my skin and leaving goosebumps in their wake. Those warm hands pressed flat against my shoulders, my collarbone, curling around my neck as my eyelids fluttered shut.
He stepped into me, and I swallowed, tilting my chin up as my heart pounded so hard that I knew he could feel it through the veins in my neck. I knew he could feel how I trembled under his touch, how I shivered from the rain and the wind and the tornado that he had always been in my life.