This.
God, I’d have to recreate it. Every night if I could.
Her personality morphed into a less structured version of itself and her figurative hair came down.
She was—
Relaxed.
It went that way for the next three weeks straight. Workouts swung from high to low as he criticized or praised, and my favorite time to be in the gym stayed very much the same.
But the company was oh so different than it had been for the majority of my life.
Sometimes we meshed and sometimes we didn’t, but we found a rhythm and routine. And I finally admitted to myself that I was happy to have him there—no matter how mixed up and jumbled he had my emotions.
He pushed, and I pushed back.
Somehow though, we managed to do it without knocking one another down.
Every night when we walked out of the building together, sweaty with laughter and endorphins buzzing deliriously from the exercise, he asked me to go somewhere with him.
Every night I said no.
But as he turned to me with hope in his handsome blue eyes, his stupid hair tucked away beneath his backward hat, I felt my tongue change direction. I fought it tooth and nail, scrapping and scraping and scratching at the image of my fleeting sanity.
I had my obsession with him managed at this point, but it carved a very tenuous edge. One I knew could be sharpened to the point of irreparable damage with just one night of recklessness.
“Callie.”
“Nik—” I started to say, very much knowing where he was going and needing to fight myself for conviction.
His eyes widened just slightly, the sad look of a puppy at the pound begging for a savior, weakening me at the knees and threatening to display all of my carefully hidden goo.
“Come with me. Please.”
The “please” sealed my coffin, each succulent letter driving in like an individual nail intending to secure my capture.
As the first syllable of my answer left my lips his face reacted minutely, hard jaws flanking a set of pinched pillow-like lips, but it wasn’t to the word I said.
It was to the one he expected.
“Alright.”
He nodded, forcing a gulp through his frustrated throat.
“One day you’re going to say…wait…did you just say alright?” he replied, stumbling over the words in a messy mix of confusion and excitement and screeching his upset nod to a halt.
“I did,” I confirmed with a smirk.
His entire body came alive, kind of how it did before a tumbling pass, energy passing through his fingers and toes and shooting plainly out of his anything-but-plain eyes.
It was boy-like in nature but mature in appearance, and with each second I soaked it in, I knew that the anticipation of my constant ‘nos’ had made a one time ‘yes’ that much better.
For him and for me.
“Good. Good, that’s good,” he stuttered some more, making my smile deepen.
In fact, it was so enthralling, it kind of made me want to drag out every decision and discussion I ever had, making the other party suffer if only for the good of the outcome.
“Don’t even think about it,” he warned, reading the illicit intent in my eyes and the mischief in the line of my mouth.
Normally I kept a vise-like grip on my emotions, but I seemed to defy all normality and logic around him. Emotion bled through not only the bone and the flesh within me, but seeped out the pores in my skin and covered him with their sweat.
Any appeal he might find in it I supposed rested in the circumstances of the situation, much how actual sweat garnered magnetism, during a passionate romp, and repugnance, after a vigorous workout, in equal measure.
The differences in my mood were stark, volleying between comfortable enjoyment and unfamiliar distrust.
I couldn’t figure out what he had switched on in me, where he found the secret key hidden after it spent so many years collecting undisturbed dust. But proximity left me with no choice but to face it, embracing it a little more each day as all of the previously solitary hours of my days filled with him.
I just wondered if I was at all prepared to handle it. I had no real ruler against which to measure my feelings and reactions or the way he felt about me. I didn’t know how to navigate what was appropriate and what wasn’t or if any of it even mattered.
I just knew I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.
Time seemed to speed up as he handed me the extra helmet out of his saddle bag and climbed astride as he strapped on his own. I wasn’t sure if my anxiety was playing with my perception of the passing of time or if it actually was fast, a desperate method by a man intent on keeping me from changing my mind.
All I knew is that one moment I was saying yes, and the next, I was climbing astride a motorcycle for the first time in my life with little instruction or insight into what I was getting myself into.
Three weeks of familiarity and long surreptitious forays into his eyes had me fairly confident that I wasn’t riding straight to my own murder, but other than that I knew nothing. I still had no personal information about his background or family or what had brought him here. His likes could be extrapolated from genuine smiles and warm excitement, but outside of gymnastics and tumbling, I hadn’t had all that much to apply it to.
And as someone who’d had her future mapped from the first few, not entirely clumsy, toddler steps, the notion of going in blind both boiled and iced over in the pit of my very unsure stomach.
“Nik,” I called as he started the bike and pulled my arms around his taut stomach.
His hand covered mine, and the feel of his fingers sliding through mine started to calm the riotous waters within before he even started to speak.
“Don’t worry, Cal,” he assured me, calling me by a nickname only ever used by my father. The sound of it from his endearing lips made fast work of changing it into something sought after rather than protected against. “I promise you’re going to love it.”
I rolled my eyes, and he laughed at the same time, clarifying, “Or, at the very least, live through it and feel no regret from having been there.”
He squeezed my hand again, and then lifted his hands to the grips, revving the throttle in a teasing exhibition of potential danger and releasing the clutch until we lurched forward in a slow roll.
A squeal escaped my lips uninhibited, and the muscles of his abdomen shook under my hand.
He turned right out of the parking lot and headed straight into the darkness of one of the most rural areas of our town, moving at a leisurely enough pace to set me at ease without adding an extra hour to our arrival time.
As first, I held on tight, focusing my eyes on the road like a professional grade laser in order to be prepared for catastrophe or mayhem. But as the minutes ticked by and the vibration between my legs dulled and smoothed out from adjustment, I finally started to settle.
Deep breaths once again passed through my lungs with ease, and the smell of saltwater tickled the tip of my nose with awareness.
“We’re heading for the water?” I tried to question over the roar.
I swore I could feel his smile all the way into the line of his body, but he didn’t answer.
The exhaust popped a couple of times as he cracked the throttle from open to closed, slowed us to a crawl, and turned off onto a sandy dirt path through a waist-high, grassy field.
I could hear the dull roar of waves, just barely whooshing over the more gravelly hum of his motorcycle.
I couldn’t see it, though, as he pulled to a stop at the back of a tall dune and killed the engine.