Page 34 of The Trouble with Love and Ink
I ripped off my goggles and swim cap, rubbing my forehead with a string of curse words.
“Fine.” I pressed a palm to the ache in my skull and winced.
I opened my eyes and found him looking worried. “Let me see.”
In other circumstances, I would have pushed his hand away, but the tenderness in his voice surprised me.
I’d never gotten a good look at the color of his eyes before. I knew they were brown, but that word seemed too dull to describe what I was looking at now. I had brown eyes. Beck’s eyes were fresh earth or a cup of coffee on a fall morning—caramel swirled in hazelnut—lively and surprisingly warm.
“Ouch,” he said, eyebrows drawn. “Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s bad enough to justify missing work.”
I started to laugh, but it died down as his feather-light thumb grazed my forehead and lingered at my hairline. His eyes drifted back to mine, then trailed down the bridge of my nose.
“What?” I asked, rubbing the area in search of a blemish.
He smiled. “You have so many freckles.” And at that, his eyes seemed to follow the trail out to my cheeks and then down to my lips. I stopped breathing as I realized how close we were, how entranced we both seemed by the proximity. Beck snapped out of it before I did, removing his hand and retreating a couple of feet. He cleared his throat. “Let’s give the flip turns a break for today. Okay?”
He was back in the water before I could utter a response. The next several laps, I saw how fast he could go in the water. Beck torpedoed past me continuously, and he didn’t stop again until he finished his workout.
When I approached the bench with my things, Beck was already there with a towel wrapped loosely around his hips while he checked his phone. I’d seen his stomach before, and I knew he still had swim trunks under that towel. But as beads of water rolled down that middle line separating his abs, my jaw slackened, and heat bloomed in my lower belly.
I snapped my eyes back to his face, chiding myself for drooling over Beckett Atteridge, Senior-level Asshole.
He scowled at his phone.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, tossing his phone into his gym bag. But as his zipper got caught, trying to close it, he exhaled loudly and relented. “Victoria and my ex are best friends. So I expected her at the wedding. I didn’t, however, think she’d come all the way from California for a wedding shower. But Victoria said she RSVP’d.”
It shocked me to see Beck lose his composure over an ex. It turned out Poseidon was a mere human like the rest of us.
“You still have feelings for her,” I guessed.
A sticky sensation spread across my chest, and I surprised myself when I put a name to it: jealousy—something I had no right to feel about Beck.
“No. It’s not like that.” He huffed out a frustrated breath. “It’s just awkward.”
“Because Victoria and your ex are close?”
“Best friends since college. Victoria introduced us a couple of years ago when Reagan moved to Houston for a job. She hadn’t counted on us hitting it off.” Beck looked at the swim cap in his grip. “She begged me not to pursue anything with Reagan, afraid our relationship would complicate their friendship.” He smiled faintly. “But I think her making Reagan forbidden only made me want her more,” he said, running a hand through his curls.
“So, you dated anyway and broke up?” I finished as I toweled off my calves.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but essentially, yes.”
“Complicated how?”
It felt weird, peering into Beck’s past. We weren’t close enough for a conversation about exes, but I could hear the tinge of pain in his voice. I had to know more.
“Last year, Reagan and I decided to spend Thanksgiving apart.” Beck sat on the bench next to me, gazing at the still water as he spoke, “My mom wanted me at their place. Reagan wanted to go back to her parents' house in California. It wasn’t a big deal. We’d decided we could spend Christmas together without family.
“But while she was there, she sent me a text saying, ‘Last night was amazing. Can’t believe we did that with my grandma in the next room.’” I winced, but Beck kept going. “I called her right away. Obviously, she hadn’t meant to send the text to me, but I thought it was innocent—like maybe her friend had come over, and they got high in her grandmother’s sewing room.
“To Reagan’s credit, she told me the truth—that things were getting serious between her and another guy. She told me Tom already had a job in Santa Monica. That she didn’t feel at home in Texas, and she didn’t feel like herself when she was with me.”
My head snapped in his direction. “What a shitty thing for her to say.”
He shrugged. “We’d been talking about buying a house in California together, but I’d just started a new job in Houston and told her I didn’t feel right quitting so soon. I had no idea how homesick she was . . . That’s always weighed on me. And what she said about not feeling herself when with me—what kind of person does that make me?”
