Page 222 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
When he pulls back, he doesn’t go far.
The water rocks us together while his thumbs move once over my hips beneath the surface, a touch so slight it should not feel as intimate as it does. But everything with Silas feels more intimate than it should. Maybe because he has never touched mecarelessly. Maybe because even now, after all this time, there is still something reverent in the way his hands hold me.
“What are you thinking about, beautiful?” he asks.
His voice is lower up close, softened by the fact that he is already smiling a little, as if he knows there is a good chance the answer will make him either jealous or sentimental.
My fingers drift to the wet nape of his neck without permission, playing there because touching him has become as natural as breathing. Behind him, I can still hear Cheyenne yelling about something, Maria cackling, Adrian muttering a dry insult from the dock. The sun glints off the water. Somewhere a dragonfly skims low across the surface and disappears.
“All of it,” I murmur.
The words make his expression change at once, not dramatically, just enough that I know he’s listening differently now.
“This,” I say, glancing past his shoulder toward the dock, toward Adrian, toward our friends, toward the whole strange little life we somehow clawed our way into. “The lake. Them. Adrian looking almost happy and pretending not to. The fact that my parents took him in without blinking.” My mouth curves faintly. “The fact that you somehow convinced me to leave the house before noon during summer.”
That gets a real smile out of him, devastating in the way his smiles always are when they’re not meant for anyone else.
His hands tighten very slightly at my hips, pulling me closer still until my chest brushes his and my legs drift against his beneath the water. Heat licks low through me at the contact, subtle but immediate. Even now, after months of waking up beside him, of coming home to him, of learning the exact shape of his want and the deeper shape of his tenderness, my body still answers him too fast.
“And?” he prompts, because he knows me too well not to hear there’s more.
My gaze lifts to his fully then.
“And I was thinking,” I say quietly, “that this is the first time peace hasn’t felt borrowed.”
For a second, everything in him stills.
The summer noise goes distant. The lake keeps moving around us. His eyes hold mine with a depth that still makes it hard to breathe when I let myself fall all the way into it.
One hand leaves my hip just long enough to brush wet hair back from my face, his knuckles trailing over my cheek in a touch so gentle it nearly undoes me.
“You deserve that,” he says.
Maybe I do now.
Maybe that is what six months has changed most. Not just the apartment, or the way my body no longer goes rigid every time a phone buzzes, or the fact that my dad says Adrian’s name like he has always belonged to us. Maybe the biggest change is that when Silas holds me in the middle of a bright summer afternoon and tells me I deserve peace, some part of me finally believes him.
I lean in and kiss him this time, slower than before, letting the feeling sit between us.
The water sways around our bodies. His hands return to my hips. Mine slide up into his hair. It would be easy to let the kiss turn into something hungrier. With him, it always would be. There is enough heat coiled lazily under my skin to know exactly how quickly a quiet moment can become a ruined one in the best possible sense. The way his fingers flex against me tells me he knows it too.
Still, neither of us rushes it.
Not today.
Today, the sweetness matters just as much.
The kiss I give him doesn’t stay sweet for long.
Maybe it never really had a chance to.
Not with the water rocking us together so slowly that every shift of the lake presses me more firmly into him. Not with his hands already planted on my hips beneath the surface. Not with the sunlight on his skin, the wet hair pushed back from his face, the look in his eyes every time I say something that sounds too much like hope.
His mouth changes under mine first.
The softness is still there, but heat begins to thread through it, turning the kiss deeper, slower, more tense in the way only Silas ever manages. He kisses me like he has all the time in the world, though the hand at my hip says otherwise. His fingers tighten, then ease, then tighten again, as if he is trying to decide whether to keep this gentle or ruin us both in the middle of the reservoir while our friends complain from the dock.
My body answers before my mind can pretend otherwise.
