Something Wilder

She shook her head. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” she said again. “Stop it.”

His heart sank. “Lily—”

“Do you know how hard it was to move on?” Her nostrils flared, and he caught a tiny glimpse of her chin quaking before she got it under control.

Nodding, he assured her, “Of course, I kn—”

“I realize you called—I get that now—but I didn’t know that then. The hope I had that you might come back didn’t just go away one day, Leo. It was a constant ache.” She pressed a white-knuckled fist to her chest. “For years.” She clamped her jaw shut, staring at him with unmasked pain, immediately mirrored in his own chest. “Those promises we made meant something to me. I get that what happened was just as heartbreaking for you. I get that. But when you do this kind of thing—talk about feelings, touch me? For you, maybe it’s just a vacation romance, but it takes me right back to the hardest time of my life. If you’d been there for me—even from New York—I could have weathered anything. But you weren’t. And I can’t go through that again.”

Leo took a step toward her but recoiled when a fat raindrop hit him on the forehead. “I want to have this conversation,” he said gently. “But—can we talk in my tent? It’s about to start pouring.”

“And I get that your life went to shit for a while, too,” she continued, ignoring this. “But mine has been terrible ever since you left.” Her eyes grew red-rimmed and watery when she said the next painful truth out loud: “I hate my life. I fucking hate it. With the exception of my horses and Nic, I’ve got nothing.” She took a few deep breaths through her nose and shook her head. “And so, what gives you the right to come back into my life and touch me, and look at me like that—like it isn’t completely presumptuous—”

The sky opened up with a deafening crack, swallowing the rest of her sentence.

“Lily,” he yelled above the cacophony of the rainstorm on rock. “Let’s go back!” Big cold sheets of rain fell in their narrow crevasse, and he stepped forward, lifting the sides of his windbreaker to cover her, but she shoved him away.

“I don’t need you to protect me from the rain, Leo.” Water streaked down her face and soaked her blue-checked shirt, leaving her bra visible, every curve defined. He dragged his eyes back up to hers. His head was a blur, emotions rolling around in him like boulders.

“I don’t need you,” she insisted again, but this time with less heat.

“Okay,” he said gently. “I’m not doing any of this because I think you need me. I’m doing it because I want to.” He looked around, searching for the right words and finding only the simplest ones. “I want you.”

“I don’t want you to want me.”

He closed his eyes, reaching up to wipe the rain off his face. When he opened them again, rain thoroughly drenched her, from the soaked ends of her hair to her lashes, her cheeks, her lips.

Under the pressure of his attention, she licked away the water, but the movement and the way she looked at him only made his longing worse. Unbidden, he remembered the first time he ever made her come. Long after her cries dissolved, Lily had looked down where he’d been lying between her legs, breathless. Her eyes were hazel, with a darker coffee-brown ring around the irises, but right then, her pupils swallowed them up, made them black with lust. Her dark hair had been a chaotic halo around her head. Shirt and bra pushed up over her chest, shorts hanging loose around one ankle. She’d looked like a star that crashed through the ceiling: blown open and depleted but still illuminated from the inside.

“Stop it,” she said now, reading the hunger in his expression.

“Sorry.” He squeezed his eyes closed, tilting his chin toward camp. “Let’s—let’s head back.”

But she didn’t move. “Why do you always look at me like that?”

Leo didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how he was looking at her, but obviously he couldn’t keep the infatuation from his eyes. He was falling in love again. Had never fallen out of it. Leo broke his gaze from hers. “I’m sorry.”

He froze when she reached up and dragged the pad of her thumb across his lower lip, staring at his mouth like she wanted to eat it. Longing corkscrewed through him, but then she blinked, clearing the heat from her gaze.

“No,” she said quietly, and then, with more force: “I am not doing this.”

He was frozen, his heart scaling the length of his windpipe. “Lil,” he said. “What am I supposed to do right now?”

She tilted her face to the sky, exhaling a devastatingly broken “Fuck. I don’t know.”