Page 78 of Everything You Hate
I shed my clothes. Boots, jeans, shirt. She watches. Her gaze travels down my chest, my stomach, the scar on my forearm from a day I don’t talk about. She touches it with her fingertips, tracing the jagged line of it. She doesn’t ask what it’s from. Doesn’t have to. Her eyes say I recognize this. The language of healed wounds is one we both speak.
I guide her down to the bunk. She shivers against the blanket, and I pull another from the shelf and lay it over her. My weight settles beside her, and for a minute, all I do is look at her—catalog the gold hairs at her temple, the freckle at the edge of her jaw, the scar that circles below her left breast like an underscore
“I always meant to do something,” she whispered. “A tattoo, or... something that made it pretty and mine, I guess. Something I chose.” Her fingers find my wrist, anchor themselves around it. “Never got around to it. Maybe I was waiting for something to make it worth the effort.”
“Maybe just being alive is enough,” I said.
She doesn’t answer. She pulls my hand to her chest instead, flattens it over the place where her heart is. Her skin is hot, and the beat beneath it is steady, stubborn. The kind that keeps going even when the rest of you wants to quit.
I kiss her there. I’ll never get used to the taste of her—skin and sea salt and some sharper note that belongs to her and her alone. She sighs, her hands tangling in my hair, and she pulls me down until our faces are close.
“You don’t have to—” she starts, but I cut her off.
“I’m not doing anything I don’t want to,” I said.
She rolls her eyes but doesn’t fight me. I move slow, slower than I’ve ever moved in my fucking life as I kiss her mouth. Her neck. Her collarbone. The scar. Her stomach. Her hips. She arches under me, her hands in my hair, and the sounds she makes are honest in a way that undoes me. No camera between us. No audience. Just her, here, giving me this version of herself that nobody else gets.
“Dean.” I’ll never tire of my name in her mouth, half question, half plea.
“I’ve got you.” I push her thighs apart. My mouth on her, tongue flat against her, and she jerks. Her hand fists in the blanket. I work her slow. Building, not rushing. She’s wet against my tongue, hot, and the taste of her is clean and sharp and entirely hers. Her hips move. She’s chasing it, and I let her chase, and when she comes it’s with a choked gasp that she buries in her own arm, like she’s still learning how to make noise without an audience.
I kiss my way back up her body. Her skin is flushed. Her eyes are heavy. She reaches for me, pulls me against her, and her hand finds my cock and wraps around it. Her grip is sure. She strokes me once, twice, her thumb over the head, and I groan into her neck.
“Condom,” I manage.
She finds the packet in my jeans on the floor. Hands it to me. I tear it open, roll it on, and she guides me to her entrance with a hand that doesn’t shake.
I push into her slow. So slow it burns. She’s tight, wet, her body opening around me inch by inch, and the look on her face is something I’ll carry for the rest of my life. Wide eyes. Parted lips.
“You good?” I ask. My voice is wrecked.
She nods. Bites her lip. “More.”
I give her more. Deep, steady strokes. Her legs wrap around my waist. Her heels dig into the small of my back. The bunk creaks. The boat rocks. We find a rhythm that works for both of us, and it’s not fancy, it’s not performative, it’s just us moving together in a space too small for anything but truth.
She comes again. Harder this time. Her body clenches around me, her back arches off the bunk, and she says my name like it’s the only word she knows. I follow her. My hips stutter. My release rolls through me in waves, and I bury my face in her neck and hold on while it takes me apart.
We lie there. Breathing. The cabin smells like sex and salt and the two of us. Her head on my chest. My arm around her shoulders. My hand traces the line of her scar, the place where the surgeon’s knife met skin and left its mark, and she doesn’t flinch. She watches my hand. Watches me touch her like she’s something worth touching carefully.
“I thought you’d look at me differently,” she says. Quiet. Into my collarbone.
“I am looking at you differently.”
She lifts her head. Searches my face.
“You’re here,” I say. “That’s the difference.”
She settles back against me. Her breath evens out. Doug snores from his nest. Captain mutters in his sleep. The harbor is quiet beyond the hull.
I trace her shoulder. The curve of it. The place where scar meets skin. My fingers find the ridge, follow it, learn its geography. She lets me. Her eyes dift close. Her body grows heavy against mine.
I haven’t done this in years. Held someone after. Stayed present in the aftermath instead of calculating the distance to the door. My Coast Guard training carved itself into my nervous system so deep I can’t turn it off—always braced, always ready, always one foot pointed toward exit. But here, in this narrow bunk, with this woman’s weight across my chest and her scars under my hand, the math fails.
I’m not calculating. I’m just here.
That terrifies me more than any storm I’ve ever ridden out.
Chapter Twenty-One
