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Paradise Cove

Page 15

by Jenny Holiday


  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “How come?”

  “How come we didn’t sleep together the last six months, or how come I haven’t slept with anyone since?”

  “Either. Both.” She stopped walking, so he did, too. “Sorry. None of my business.”

  “No, I’ll tell you the whole sordid story if you want to hear it.”

  That seemed to cheer her. She smiled and started walking again. “Can we grill fish and talk about our sexual insecurities?”

  “We can.” The answer was immediate and instinctive, which was weird because if you had asked him to make a list of things he wanted to talk about with Nora or anyone else, sexual insecurities would have been dead last.

  “I mean, is that allowed? Even if we’re going to be friends with benefits, we’re still friends, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And friends talk about this stuff.”

  He shrugged. He didn’t talk about this stuff with Sawyer and Law, at least since the ill-fated get-a-phone-so-you-can-get-on-hookup-apps intervention of two years ago.

  “You’re thinking you don’t talk about this stuff with Sawyer and Law.” She was reading his mind. He chuckled. She kept talking. “Yeah. Don’t listen to me. I don’t even know what the bases are.”

  “I already told you, first base is rolling around nearly naked in a pink room. Second base is talking about your sexual insecurities while grilling fish.”

  “I thought second base was sex on the beach with condoms.”

  He made a face. “Who told you that? That’s not right. Second base is talking about your sexual insecurities while grilling fish. Everybody knows that.” Mick, who had run ahead of them, circled back and started barking. “See, even Mick knows that.”

  If someone had asked Nora, yesterday morning during the Anti-Festival, what she would be doing the following evening, the last thing she would have said was that she would be grilling fish with Jake Ramsey and talking about how they lost their virginity.

  “I had some girlfriends when I was younger,” Jake said as he laid the fish on the grill. “Like, high school stuff. But really, it all started with Mrs. Robinson.”

  “She wasn’t really named Mrs. Robinson, was she?”

  He smiled. “No. Her name was Sarah. And she wasn’t that old. I was seventeen, and she was thirty-four.”

  “That’s twice your age! You were a child! Isn’t that technically statutory rape?” She sounded like a scandalized old lady, but she couldn’t help it.

  He shrugged. “All I know is I had the summer of my life. And then I took what I’d learned and became a slut.”

  Nora cracked up—so much for scandalized. “What does that mean?”

  “She was here the summer before my junior year of high school. I met Kerrie the spring of my senior year when her family moved here. But before that, let’s just say I put my Mrs. Robinson–instilled skills to good use.” He came over and sat next to her. “To frequent use.”

  “You are terrible!”

  “Well, maybe, but I never heard any complaints, if you know what I mean.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Mrs. Robinson taught me well. I got kind of a reputation.”

  “So you were a playboy. A player.” He smirked but didn’t deny it. “A slut, like you said.” She cocked her head. “Why do men get to be playboys, but women have to be sluts?”

  “That question is above my pay grade, Doc.”

  She smiled. “So then what? Kerrie arrives and suddenly you’re cured of your slutty ways?”

  “Pretty much. I fell hard for her.”

  He got up to flip the fish. His back was to her, which was probably the only reason she had the guts to ask, “What was she like?” She was so curious about the woman who had captured Jake’s heart.

  “Out of my league.”

  That was the last thing she’d expected him to say. “What does that mean?”

  “Smart. Driven. She wanted to be a lawyer—which she did end up doing.”

  “You’re smart.”

  He snorted. “You need a 2.0 GPA to graduate from the high school here, or you did in my era at least. Guess what mine was?”

  She chuckled. “I’m going to go with 2.0.”

  “Nope, it was 1.99, but there was a tornado that year, and it destroyed the outdoor stage they always used for graduation. I rebuilt it, and the principal rounded me up.”

  “Jake!” She hated hearing him run himself down, though he didn’t seem that concerned about it. “There are lots of different kinds of intelligence.”

  “Don’t worry, Doc. My self-esteem is fine. In those years I was just way more interested in being on the lake or snowmobiling or whatever than I was in being inside doing homework. And I have lots of other redeeming qualities.” He did the over-the-top eyebrow-wagging thing again. “Thanks in part to Mrs. Robinson.”

  “So here we are supposedly talking about sexual insecurities, but it doesn’t seem like you actually have any. It seems more like you had a dry spell by choice.” A grief-induced dry spell, but she wasn’t going to say that.

  “I guess. Sawyer and Law bought me a phone a couple years ago because they thought I should get on one of those hookup apps, but I wasn’t feeling it.”

  “I seriously cannot imagine you with a phone.”

  “I know. They were like, ‘Well, you can use it only for this.’ But no thanks, man. To the hookup apps but also to the phone more generally. I don’t need my brain turned to mush.”

  “See? You are smart.”

  “So what about you, Doc? Hit me with those insecurities.” She paused, and he got up and went to the grill. “If you want to. This is done. You want to eat out here or are you too cold?”

  “Out here, please.” She was cold, but she didn’t want to go inside yet. “I’m still not over the fact that your front yard is literally Lake Huron.”

  “Okay, sit tight for a sec. I’ll be right back.”

  She appreciated what he was doing, which was breaking up their heavy conversation. She suspected that when he came back, he wouldn’t prod her. He would leave it to her to decide if she wanted to tell him anything. Which she did. Even though it was slightly embarrassing, given that he apparently had no sexual hang-ups to speak of. But his absence afforded her the opportunity to gather her thoughts as she stared at the lake.

  She was starting to see that the lake had moods, for lack of a better word. The stillness of her first visit here, back when it was still warm, was nowhere in evidence. Tonight, there was a decent wind, and the water was choppy and gray, crashing against the shore in big, foamy waves. But it was still soothing, somehow. What had he said before? The lake goes on. It was oddly comforting. The lake didn’t care about her tale of woe.

  But you know who did?

  He came back out with a tray laden with dishes. He winked at her as he set it on the table. “One more trip. Be right back.”

  Jake did. Jake cared.

  A startling thought hit her: Jake was pretty much her best friend these days. Yeah, she had friends in Toronto. She had a couple group texts going, and people had checked in on her since the move. She’d issued vague invitations for them to come visit “once she was settled.” But most of them were friends from the hospital who knew Rufus, too, and she felt awkward about that. Anyway, she’d always been closer to her sister—and her grandma, for that matter—than to her friends.

  But what made a best friend? Someone you liked hanging out with? Someone who was always there for you? Someone you had inside jokes with? By all those metrics, Jake fit the bill, though maybe if there was a long-standing-history requirement, he didn’t pass that.

  Also, what about “Someone you have sex with”? Ha. She should probably be freaking out a little more over the prospect of sex messing up their friendship. People in books and movies were always worried about that. But for some reason, it didn’t bother her. She wasn’t having any problems compartmentalizing, and she was pretty sure Jake wasn’t, either.r />
  He came back with a bottle of water, a bottle of wine, a lantern-style flashlight—it had been late when she arrived, and it was getting dark now—and a big, heavy quilt that he draped over her shoulders before settling himself next to her on the bench.

  “This is the softest quilt I’ve ever felt.” It was like a cozy, cottony hug. She eyed as much of it as she could see, tucked as it was around her. “It’s gorgeous, too.” The design was subtle but complex, made of tiny triangles that varied only slightly in color or pattern. You had to look closely to see the variation.

  “My mom made it. She always said you shouldn’t treat quilts like pristine works of art. That you should wash them a lot so they get nice and soft. Use them, and not just inside. She was always dragging them around to use as picnic blankets or camping bedding.” He served her a piece of fish as he spoke and nudged the salad bowl toward her.

  “Oh my God, this is good,” she said after her first bite of fish. “It’s different from before, I think?”

  “Yeah. This is pickerel. It’s also good lightly breaded and panfried. I’ll do it that way next time, but I’m trying to make the most of the last days of grilling season.”

  Next time. She loved the way he kept saying that. And the amazing thing was, she was pretty sure there would be a next time regardless of whether they ever got around to sleeping together this evening. It ratified her feelings that things weren’t going to get weird. Jake was a person who could roll with the punches.

  And, slightly surprisingly, she seemed to be, too.

  Look at her. The life reset had yielded a new, flexible personality and a man-god best friend with benefits.

  “I had a string of failed relationships before Rufus,” she said, steering them back toward the topic at hand, even though he’d given her an out. “Going all the way back to high school. They almost always ended with the guy complaining that I didn’t have enough time for him. Which I can’t really argue with. School always came first, in high school and in undergrad, and then med school and my residency? I mean, forget it. You work a million hours a week. My last boyfriend before Rufus told me I was not cut out to be someone’s girlfriend. He issued this ultimatum, saying I had to meet him halfway or he was going to leave me.”

  “What did that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I interpreted it to mean I should cook more, do more around the house. And to be fair, I really wasn’t doing my share.”

  “What did this guy do? For a living, I mean.”

  “He was a junior high school science teacher.”

  “Well, that’s just stupid. You’re working more than he is—and he’s not working at all in the summer—he should do the cooking.”

  “Well, isn’t that enlightened of you?” she teased.

  “I’m serious. You figure out what optimizes the collective well-being, maybe taking into account what everyone does and doesn’t like to do, and you do that. That’s why I was staying home with Jude.”

  Man. Jake Ramsey, if he could ever get over his perma-grief, would make someone a great husband someday.

  “So what happened?” he asked.

  “Despite my best intentions and my pledge to improve, I really wasn’t doing half the housework. And then one time we had sex, and I fell asleep in the middle of it. And he left me.”

  He cracked up.

  “In my defense, I had just come off a twenty-four-hour shift. The last thing I wanted to do was have sex.”

  He furrowed his brow and paused with a bite of fish halfway to his mouth. “So why did you?”

  “I don’t know. I was trying to meet him halfway?” She could sense that he was gearing up to object to this concept, and he wasn’t wrong. Maybe post-reset Nora wouldn’t have been so eager to please at any cost, but she didn’t really want to get into it. “Anyway, my point is, then I met Rufus, and all of a sudden the scheduling stuff wasn’t such a big deal, because he was as busy—and tired—as I was. He got it. None of my boyfriends before had been doctors. So I thought, Hey, maybe my previous problems were just occupational hazards. But then…” She shrugged. He could fill in the rest. He knew about Perky Chloe. “I guess it shook my confidence.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fair enough, but I think the moral of this story is that Rufus is an idiot.”

  She liked that he said idiot. Everyone else had said something on the spectrum from jerk (Erin) to asshole (Grandma). Idiot, though, framed Rufus’s behavior not as something mean so much as something stupid. Like his nuking their relationship showed a lack of intelligence. She smiled.

  “What else you got?” he said, making a bring-it motion with his fingers.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you said grill fish and talk about sexual insecurities, plural, I was imagining a longer list. Not just a story about a couple dim-witted ex-boyfriends.”

  Hmm. “I guess that’s it.”

  “All right, then.”

  She laughed a little. Because she felt good. He’d earnestly listened to her fears, but ultimately dispatched them. Dinner, which they were almost done with, had been great. The darkening lake was enthralling. The stars were starting to come out. She was nestled in the world’s softest quilt, bolstered against the cold autumn air.

  Also, she was going to have sex. She glanced at him. Probably.

  His hair was down. Windblown and slightly tangled and God, that hair.

  She was going to have to make the move, she was pretty sure. He wasn’t going to just swoop on in after she’d expressed misgivings. He wasn’t that kind of guy.

  He was wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt. Man-gods like him were probably immune to the cold. But maybe that was her in. “You must be cold.” She could see him starting to disagree, but she did her own version of his exaggerated eyebrow wagging and held up a corner of the quilt.

  He grinned, flicked off the lantern, and scooched in. They reshuffled themselves until they were both cocooned in the quilt, Nora tucked under his arm. She sighed. She was both empty and full. Full of another delicious dinner but also feeling like she’d shed a bunch of emotional junk in their conversation.

  She tilted her head back. “You know, I thought the stars were impressive in town, but this is really something.”

  “Yeah, there’s zero light pollution out here.”

  “I know I sound like a broken record, but it’s still amazing to me that you get to live with all this”—she was too tucked into his body and their quilt to extract an arm, so she rotated her head, meaning to indicate the lake and the beach and the sky—“every day like it’s not a big deal.”

  “I’m lucky.”

  She felt lucky, too. For the first time in a long time. She smiled into the cold dark. “Well, you’re also about to get lucky.”

  “I’m lucky,” Jake had said earlier. He’d said it unthinkingly. But he’d meant it, which was actually kind of astonishing. He wasn’t the type of person who walked around marinating in self-pity, but no one could deny that he’d been through some shit in recent years.

  But here he was in his cove under the stars, making out with Nora Walsh, who was straddling his lap.

  So yeah, right now? Lucky.

  God. He’d forgotten how good kissing could be. Or maybe kissing had never been this good. Either way, kissing Nora was pretty damn fantastic. She was all in, sighing into his mouth as their tongues tangled lazily. It was a slow, heavy, drugging kiss that sent desire pulsing through his body. He brought his hands up to cradle her face, letting his fingers wrap around and press into her scalp. He’d meant it, all the times he’d told her he liked her hair, but he really liked her hair. He liked being able to see the shape of her head, to span it with his hands. It was strangely hot. He slid his middle fingers farther around until they met at the base of her skull.

  She moaned.

  So he did it some more, dragging the pads of his fingers slowly but firmly against her scalp.

  “Uhhhh.”

  She liked that. He made a note.

&n
bsp; Her head got heavier in his hands, like she was having trouble holding it up.

  Her jaw slackened some more, too, causing her mouth to open wider. He swept his tongue more deeply inside, licking into her slow and dirty.

  He could feel it, too, the loosening of his body, the surrender of his limbs growing heavy.

  She was still wrapped in the quilt. When she’d shimmied onto his lap, she’d kept hold of it, holding it around her shoulders like a cape. But as he pressed again into the tender spot at the base of her skull, she moaned again. Loudly—it echoed across the cove and pulled an answering groan from him. She let go of the quilt, slid forward on his lap, and wrapped her arms around him. Even boosted up on his lap like this, she was a head shorter than him, and it was impossible for them to be chest to chest like this and also kiss. She mashed herself against him, tucking her head under his chin and settling her core right on his erection. In keeping with the slow, languid nature of their previous making out, she didn’t move. There was none of the grinding from last time. She just pressed against him—hard. Like she couldn’t get close enough.

  He felt like he was going to implode as he let his hands come off her skull so he could wrap his arms around her. Tight. So tight. She was small but solid in his arms. No one moved. And in the absence of any thrusting or writhing or friction of any sort, it should have been impossible, but his dick grew harder. They were fully clothed and fully still. How could he be this turned on? “Jesus, Nora,” he whispered. “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.” Her lips were against his chest, so her voice was muffled. “That.”

  “Huh?” he managed.

  “Let’s fuck.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. Without moving any part of his body besides his legs, he stood up, taking her with him. She clung to him, wrapping her legs around him as he straightened. She was light enough that he could spare a hand for the sliding door. He aimed for the couch, but she snapped her fingers and pointed at the kitchen island, on which lay her bags. He detoured there, and she grabbed the box of condoms.

 

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