He gasped. I mean, I wasn’t sure, because it was in the middle of the kiss. But he seemed startled. He inhaled sharply through his nose. en he was kissing me, deeper this time.
I pulled away, laughing. “It was supposed to be my turn.”
He half-smiled. His lips stayed close to my lips.
I didn’t suggest this, and he didn’t agree to this, but somehow we telepathically agreed to give up on the witty conversation and make out. His tongue played with my lips. My tongue swept across his teeth. I drowned in it, and completely lost the people playing quarters behind us on the dock until someone said, “Is anybody filming Adam and Lori? You might be able to sell it.” Sean laughed and said something I couldn’t catch that made the people around him burst into laughter too.
Adam pulled back. He was embarrassed and saw our plan wasn’t working. He would escape to his room, humiliated. He would leave me naked, or nearly so, in my bikini and his sweatshirt in the midst of these fully clothed people.
Wrong. He kissed me again and whispered, “There’s something else you can do if you get bored with this.” Get bored with this???
“You kind of do the same thing, but move around. Here.” He kissed my jaw. His tongue touched my skin just as he pulled his lips away. “Or up here.” Good Lord, his teeth were on my earlobe. Very gently he slid them off. His tongue played outside my ear. His breath was loud and hot.
It felt so good, and at the same time, I could hardly stand it. I needed something to hang onto. My fingers patted the edge of the dock, finding a firm hold—but this seemed potentially splintery. My other hand felt for Adam’s hand.
Strangely, he must have needed something to hang onto, too. He took my hand and squeezed.
The guys playing quarters may have made another comment about us, but it was hard to hear with a boy’s tongue in my ear. Also it was hard to care.
I pulled away, shoulders shaking. Adam seemed to have a hard time focusing his eyes on me, like he was in a dream. I moved in and gave him the jaw treatment. en the ear treatment.
“Ah,” he said. He giggled and then cleared his throat before the boys heard him. “Lori.”
“Mm?” I hummed in his ear.
He shuddered. And then—oh, no! He stood up. I’d done something wrong! The tongue was indeed ell grosso as I’d originally thought!
“I’ll be right back,” he told me. He picked his way across the quarters game and pushed through the wall of people watching. He had sense enough not to push through Sean and Rachel again, or they’d know the ear was for them. At least, they’d think the ear was for them. I was beginning to wonder who the ear was for. It felt like it was for me.
He came back dragging a beanbag float and nearly knocked the legs out from under a few folks. He dragged it right over the quarters game, scattering the boys, and would have spilled the beer if someone hadn’t been faster. en he dropped the float into the lake and kicked off the part of it that sagged over the dock. He gestured toward it and grinned at me. “Your limo awaits.”
I had my doubts about this. e lake was black, and the sky was black with faraway stars. But anyone who drove their boat to the party this late would know to dock at the marina where there was more room. We were safe. I shrugged off Adam’s sweatshirt and— without looking to see if Sean was watching me, very important—slipped into the hot water. I hadn’t realized my butt was frozen solid from the cold dock. The lake was such a relief. Ahhhhh.
Until Adam did a cannonball, socking me in the eyes with water and splashing everyone on the dock, including Sean and Rachel.
“Aaaadaaaaaaaam!” they all cried. He chuckled softly to himself as we held onto the raft and kicked it out into the lake, beyond the glow of light from the house.
He stopped kicking and crawled higher on the raft, straddling it. “Come up here with me.”
e beanbag raft was filled with floaty bits rather than air and always seemed in danger of sinking. is could be annoying when you wanted to stay on top of the water, getting a tan. On a night like tonight, it was perfect. It would keep us from drowning while giving us more hot water than cool air.
“Now. Where were we?” He put both his strong arms around me, pulled me close, and kissed me hard.
I hadn’t thought this was possible, but it was even better than before, because no one was watching. Which was actually my new problem with it. I put my hand on his chest to stop him.
He groaned in frustration. I made a mental note to make him groan in frustration more often. It seemed like something a treacherous girl would do. Also he was really cute when he groaned.
“I just wanted to know,” I breathed, “why we’re doing this where no one can see us.”
“We think no one can. We thought no one was watching us at the bridge. We need to act the part all the time, and never step out of character.” He put his hand on my arm. “If that’s okay.”
I nodded. I was still nodding as he pushed me gently backward until I was lying down on the raft, and he was lying on top of me. His whole weight was on me, but he didn’t squash me because I was hovering on the raft, just under the surface of the warm water. I felt him along me. Almost every inch of his skin touched almost every inch of mine.
I watched the skull and crossbones glinting in the starlight, and tried to impress it on my retinas so I’d still see it when I closed my eyes to kiss him again. This was Adam, not Sean. I was after Sean, not Adam. Adam was after Rachel, not me. And if kissing Adam was better than anything I’d ever dreamed of doing with Sean… well, I could see how that was going to mess up my plans.
I kissed him anyway. The skull and crossbones lay on my throat.
“And when you kiss me,” I said against his lips, “you’re thinking about Rachel. Right?”
Almost before I got the last word out, he was kissing me again, harder than before, so intense I got lost in it and thought I might drown in the blackness even though my head was still above water.
I pinched his ass.
He yelped, and the yelp echoed across the lake and back. Silhouettes moved far away on the dock, peering in our direction without seeing.
“Did you hear me?” I asked.
He propped himself far enough above me to be able to see me. With one finger he smoothed a strand of wet hair away from my face. He traced the line of my cheek down to my chin. “Do you want to stop? Tell me and I’ll stop.”
“I don’t want to stop,” I said. e absolute truth, for the first time in a week. “But how far are we going with this?” Adam was used to jumping off the roof. I wasn’t.
These were dangerous waters.
He moved to my ear again, and my body braced for the shockwaves. Just before his lips touched my skin, he whispered, “I guess we’ll know when we get there.”
“S-bend or what?” Adam asked me, grinning.
I’d just climbed out of the water after landing the S-bend! And even though he’d dried in the hot sun and hugging me must have been a cold, wet shock, he wrapped his strong arms around my life vest and hugged me hard. Best of all, Adam acting this way wasn’t an unexpected hostess gift wrapped in Valentine’s paper anymore. It was part of being his girlfriend. I was getting used to it, and I loved expecting it.
Saturday we’d gone mud riding. en we’d parked in the movie theater lot, watched the trucks go by, and just talked. We’d shared a milkshake. I was totally immune to his germs by now. Monday after dinner, when I thought I’d have to spend the evening with Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote a good space story but was not the greatest kisser, Adam asked me to go for a walk around the neighborhood with him. We held hands, which no longer seemed the least bit weird. Here it was Wednesday, and I hadn’t had more than a fleeting thought of Sean since Friday night with Adam in the lake.
I could have sworn Adam hadn’t thought of Rachel, either. When he kissed me (often! really kissed me!), it felt like he was thinking of me, not her. Yeah, he could have been faking. But as he’d said that first night at the tennis court, he wasn’t exactly drama club material.