Wear a mouthguard. Because when you see this outfit? You’re gonna bite something.
Chapter Ten
Delilah
It’s 10:57 a.m.
I’ve been sitting in my car for an hour.
One full hour. Parked in pervert row in the back corner of the lot, surveilling the community pool like it’s a CIA sting and not a side quest on my legally recommended journey to emotional literacy.
My private swim lesson with Benji is at eleven.
Eleven.
That’s in three minutes. Which is basically now, if we’re using Delilah Time, which always runs five minutes behind reality and ten minutes ahead of consequence.
I skipped breakfast because I read online that food in your stomach makes you more likely to drown. And while that might be a myth, or the deranged ramblings of a Reddit thread called “WATER IS A LIQUID LIE,” I wasn’t about to risk dying bloated in front of a man who looks like he was grown in a lab for lifeguard porn.
Benji is already here. Of course he is.
This is his job and he’s responsible. He’s also built like a firefighter calendar and radiating golden retriever energy that makes me want to sob into his neck and hump his shin.
His 10:00 a.m. lesson just wrapped. She came out early, drippy and casual, all sad one-piece swimsuit and a bargain bin towel knotted at the hip like she’s never once considered seducing a man through the power of visual storytelling. I watched her float by at ease just being adequate.
I am not fine being adequate.
I have an adorable pale pink pullover on, hooded, cropped, coordinated like my life depends on the color story. Underneath, my swimsuit says pin-up trauma survivor. I skipped my usual war paint. No mascara. No lashes. Just a whisper of lip gloss, because she has never betrayed me. She’s subtle. She’s waterproof. She knows how to shut up and shimmer.
Makeup-free feels like standing naked in a fluorescent interrogation room while God and every ex I’ve ever had critiques my pores. But I wanted Benji to see me as… normal? Vulnerable? Human?
I think I hate that I want that.
I don’t do bare-faced crushes. I do high-drama seductions with winged eyeliner sharp enough to perform surgery. But Benji’s too sweet for war tactics. He opens doors for old people and would offer to carry my gym bag with both hands like it might explode. He blushes when I flirt. No one blushes anymore. I don’t know how to survive this level of wholesomeness without catching a complex.
And right now he’s shirtless.
Shirtless.
No cap. No shirt. Just curls and muscle and that vulnerable prince who works part-time at the castle stables energy. His hair’s wet and floppy and real, not the crunchy gelled stuff. The curls are damp and loose and clinging to his forehead, begging for my fingers.
His chest is hold-me-while-I-sob-during-a-storm broad.
And the abs.
I could grate cheese on them. I could ruin my life on them. I could accidentally drown just so he has to haul me out of the water, cradle me to his dripping chest, and scream, “Stay with me, ma’am!”
His swim trunks are black and hanging criminally low on his hips. “I want to move into that V-line” low. “I would pay rent in the form of oral devotion” low.
This is the hottest man I’ve ever met. And I’ve met Jett. I’ve met Rhys. But this feels dangerous because it’s not just lust.
It’s hope.
And hope is way scarier than horniness.
I finally pry myself out of the car like a raccoon forced out of a trash bin, twitchy, unwilling, and one wrong look from biting someone. My lip gloss is still perfect, my swim cover-up is still matching like I’m starring in a workout Barbie promo, but internally I am rotisserie-level roasting on a spit of dread.
I make it three steps past the pool gate before the splash happens.
