That made her mouth dry. She wasn’t quite ready to contemplate that. But maybe that was the key. No thought. Just action. She’d had had her fill of thinking, after all. It had been good. It had brought her to a good space.
Now she was ready to dosomething. A little less conversation, a little more action.
Maybe living her life via lyrical content from Elvis wasn’t any better than Michael Jackson, all things considered, but she had to start somewhere.
It felt like it took an eternity for him to pay. Felt like the moment had extended into its own era.
Finally, they were back out on the street. It was still teeming with people. But that added to the excitement, to the rush of the moment. To the feeling that maybe she was someone else, or herself for the very first time. They were in a city, where no one knew them. Where they weren’t accountable to anyone. It was a rush. A thrill. Unmatched. It was him.
He had been the object of so many hard feelings. She could recognize them for what they were now. They weren’t hard feelings. They were forbidden feelings. Feelings that she hadn’t been allowed to have. Feelings that she hadn’t been brave enough to admit.
How could she admit them? It was so important to her to be good. To be perfect. To be beyond reproach. Then it had been so important to her to live in her self-righteousness when Will had made that proclamation. She didn’t want to have sex with a stranger. She didn’t want the touch of any random man that she might find in a bar. But she could relate to wanting the touch of someone else. She did. She had wanted Logan then for far longer than she was comfortable admitting. She wanted him now.
Beyond reason, with no endgame in sight, with no plan. She wanted him with everything she was. Whether it made sense or not. Whether it was reasonable or not.
So she did something that felt brave. She did something that felt like a risk. More so than getting up on that platform at the zip line. Because at least there she’d had a harness. Something to catch her if she fell. There was nothing here. Nothing but this. Nothing but them. And hundreds of people crowding the streets, but they didn’t matter. How long had it been since nothing but the moment mattered?
It was a rush, her heart pounding fast, and she took his hand. She felt him jolt, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he let her lead him to a side street, where there were no people. Where there was nothing but the lit gas lamps, casting an orange glow onto the bricks. She could only just hear the chatter of the people around them over her heart pounding in her temples.
That was when she did it. She reached out and grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him up against her. At the same time, she stretched up as far as she could on her toes, used her free hand to curve her arm around his neck, and kissed him.
It was like fire. Like the sensation of striking a match against a rough surface. Igniting an instant and deadly flame that couldn’t be controlled or contained.
She had meant only to test the waters. A simple press of her lips against his, but there was nothing innocent about the contact. Nothing at all. It was an uncontained, raging explosion. The heat that she felt at the press, the firmness of his mouth on hers, was unlike anything she could remember. It burned everything else away. She found herself releasing that clinging hold on his T-shirt and moving her hand to his shoulder, down the back of his shirt collar, shuddering as she felt his skin beneath her fingertips. He was still for a moment, and then the kiss was his. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her against one of the brick walls in the alley, the hardness of his body a welcome sensation.
She had been waiting for this for three years. Maybe she had been waiting for it her whole life. This kind of passion. Not a frightened, desperate, teenage kind of passion, but something exceedingly adult. She knew what she wanted. She could imagine it. She needed it.
He parted his lips, his tongue sliding against hers, and a rough groan escaped her. She couldn’t control it. She wasn’t even certain if she wanted to. She wanted to surrender. She wanted this, and everything that could come with it. She wanted to be new.Thiswas the way. This was it. Him.
She was wrapped in him, enveloped in his strength, his heat. And it wasn’t enough. She wanted more of him. She arched herself against him, desperate to take it there. To take it further. Faster.
They parted, for just a moment, their breath harsh and jagged. His blue eyes contained something wild in them. Something she had never seen before.
Logan. This was Logan. This man that she had known—in some capacity or another—since she was in high school. This man she had watched love another woman. Marry her. Bury her. Care for his beautiful daughter all on his own. This man who had vexed her from the moment looking at him made her feel a tension, excitement, heat that she could not explain away. She couldn’t put into a neat little box. Because she was a married woman. The feelings that she’d had for him, they didn’t have a place. Not in her world. Not in her scope of morality. Not in her life.
Now in this moment, she wondered if none of it mattered. If it had been inevitable. From that moment their eyes had met on the lanai in Hawaii, and it had become clear, exceptionally clear, that there was more between them than there should be. She had resisted this, but maybe it had been pointless. Fruitless. A delay of something that had been destined.
She moved back in, desperate to touch him again, but he stopped her, holding her apart from him, his grip on her shoulders hard.
“Are you still going back to him?”
“I…”
“Answer me. Yes or no. Are you done with Will?”
She faltered. She had just accepted that there was a need to open herself up to the possibility that they wouldn’t end up together, but how could she say that definitively about the man she’d been married to for twenty-two years, in this moment, in an alley? How could she even think of Will?
It was like trying to swim through some kind of sensual fog. She was trying to accurately think of him. Think of his face, think of their life.
Will was the only man that she had ever kissed, but she hadn’t compared him and Logan when Logan’s mouth had touched hers. It hadn’t even occurred to her to do so. Because kissing Logan had been its own experience. New and intense, and the only thing she wanted to live in. She didn’t want to think about the future. She just wanted to have him. She just wanted to have the experience.
“Logan, I… I don’t know. I… I feel like this was something that had to happen. This thing between us, it needs to happen, right? Because why else is it so… For so many years, why else has it been there? I think we need to see. I think it’s an experience we have to have.”
His face went hard. Cold. “I am not a zip line, Samantha. And I am not a tattoo. I am not an experience for you to have, or a rebellion against your mother, or a fuck-you to your husband. If you want me, you can’t want him. It’s that simple.”
She couldn’t speak. Part of it was out of fury, fury that he was holding this over her head right now, when she had been living in the moment, and he wasn’t letting her have that. And fear. Because how could she promise him something like that when she didn’t know if it was true? She had no idea what she wanted. She had no idea where this summer was going to take her, and it had been a step to let herself not know. He was asking for certainty. She didn’t want certainty right now. She wanted to revel in not knowing. She wanted to follow whatever path she saw. He wasn’t being fair.
“What? You can hook up with any random woman in a bar, but you can’t hook up with me? I have to be able to give you answers? Do you ask the twenty-eight-year-olds that you take back home with you at night what they want for their future? Or is that just something you’ve reserved for me, because you think that my life should just be hard?”
