“What?”
He doesn’t answer, so I finally turn to look at him. I realize my knee is almost touching his thigh, that my fingernails are digging into my palm, that Silas’s eyelashes are the same deep reddish brown as his hair.
“Are you breaking up with me?”
There’s a space where there’s nothing but sun and river and trees, the terrified thump of my heartbeat. The rough rock gouging my ankle.
Up close in the sunlight, Silas’s eyes are every shade of blue: azure and lapis and cerulean. The midnight blue of the night sky and the dusty blue of twilight; the bright blue of a clear sky and the iciness of a glacier and sitting there, staring at him, thinking of the ways I’ve fucked up I suddenly feel like I’m the only one who knows. It feels dizzy and heavy as a secret that I never want to tell.
And then I know something else, too: whatever I’ve fucked up and ruined in the past year, I couldn’t handle ruining this. Whatever this even is.
“No,” I answer. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
And then the space between us is gone, lost to desperate open-mouthed kisses. I grab his hair in my hand and hold his mouth to mine, suddenly starved for sensation. I need this, need the scrape of his teeth along my lip, need the slide of his tongue along mine, need the way he wraps a hand around my thigh and pulls me until I’m half in his lap, bare leg scraping along the rock below us.
It hurts. It might even draw blood. I gasp into his mouth but I don’t mind at all, the pain nothing but a quick sizzle along my nerves. He’s got his other hand in my hair and I let him tilt my head back, making a low, feral noise as he bites my neck. His thigh’s between my legs, and I rock against the hard muscle.
And God, it feels good. There’s no one here but us, nothing but river and trees and birds, probably. There’s the possibility of people—the road not fifty feet off, the river trail, kayakers, anything—but that’s all theoretical and Silas’s tongue in my mouth and hands on my hips are so, so real.
Soon enough I tear myself away with a parting lick to his lips, just like I wanted to do the day at the fair. It gets a smile and a noise out of him, looking up at me from where I’m straddling him on the ground, one knee pressed into the rock. It hurts. I almost like it.
“You gonna ask me about last night or not?” he says, and he looks wild as he says it: lips red and swollen, pupils pinpricks in the bright day, hair mussed where I’ve been grabbing him.
Because I can, I slide the pad of one thumb over his mouth, then press it in. Silas wraps his lips around it, bites down, swirls his tongue over the pad. The corners of his eyes crinkle with a smile and my mind goes completely blank.
I kiss him before I remember to take my thumb out and accidentally bite myself. His mouth tastes a little like stone and dirt and leaves, and then I can’t tell what’s Silas and what’s not. I wonder if my thumb was dirty from being on the ground, but I can’t be bothered to care.
“Not one tiny question?” he teases, then nips at my lower lip. I make a noise, and not a cute one. “You’re not gonna ask hey, Silas, did you eat me out for fun or for revenge?”
I pull back and stare at him: grinning, eyes crawling over my face. He hooks two fingers into the waistband of my shorts and tugs hard enough to rock me forward and the jolt on my clit makes me close my eyes.
“Sure,” I manage to murmur, words coalescing and dissolving like smoke, faster than I can grab them.
He tugs again and the friction is delicious.
“Come home with me and I’ll tell you,” he says.
I skim my fingers along his cheekbone, like I can brush away the faint freckles, along his jaw, down the tendons in his neck to the dip in his throat. I’m above him, right now, and I’m never above him. He’s beautiful from this angle, too.
“You’re not as charming as you think you are,” I say.
“You thought I was charming enough last night.”
I don’t have an argument for that besides hauling him up for another ferocious kiss, my hair spilling around his face. When it ends, I’m breathless.
“My place, then?” he says.
I nod, and he helps me off the ground.