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“My turn for what?” she asks, swimming a little closer to me.
“I’ve just told you a lot of private information about myself. The fair thing to do would be to reciprocate with similarly private information.”
“Is the fabric of your couch really that private?”
“For me it is.”
“In that case, I have a microfiber sofa. It’s gray. And as much as I like gingerbread, I’d choose chocolate chip every time,” she tells me. “But then, I’ve never tried one of Greta’s fresh-from-the-oven gingerbread cookies.”
“Well, that’s why you’d choose a lesser cookie then.”
“Chocolate chip is in no way lesser. Especially mine.”
“You bake?”
“Only when I’m feeling happy.”
“And is that very often?”
Her smile falters a little, but just a touch. “Often enough, I suppose.”
Something about her answer bothers me. It’s like I instinctively want to find a way to make her happy all the time. But that’s crazy. I don’t even know her. “How do you decide what’s often enough when it comes to happiness?”
“I don’t know. Nobody gets to be happy all the time. Most days are just sort of … normal, right?”
“Agreed,” I tell her, moving toward her again. “And what would you call today?”
Glancing up, she says, “Strange.”
“Agreed.”
“Ooh! There’s another one!”
I look up to see the tail end of a meteor.
“This is definitely in my top three night sky experiences.”
“Top three?”
She nods. “Puerto Rico as a college student and a family vacation in the Canadian Arctic—northern lights. You?”
I stare up at the millions of stars. “I’m going to say this tops the list.”
“Really?” she asks.
I watch her as she moves toward me again, wanting very much for her to close the distance between us completely. Wanting to feel her wet body pressed against mine and to taste her lips. “Definitely.”
I propel myself to her with my arms, too caught up in the moment to care about the consequences. She looks up at me, her lips parting, her eyes wide. She glances at my mouth, then licks her lips, and I know she’s feeling this too. The same pull that I am. It’s magnetic. Irresistible. And completely wrong. I cannot be the one to make the first move. Not with her. Not with who I am to her. Not with what I’m about to do to her and all her teammates.
The tension between us builds to a breaking point. My heart pounds in my chest. I move ever so slightly toward her again, leaving a couple of inches between our mouths, waiting for her to make the decision.
She swallows hard, then flops onto her back and swims away from me, leaving me standing here hard as a rock and totally gutted. “We should get some sleep.”
“Good idea. I think we have to be up early.”
Swimming to the steps, she saunters up them, giving me the view of a lifetime—the curves of her almost-naked body, dripping wet. If I were one to pray, I’d be praying for her to turn around and invite me back to her room. But she can’t, and even if she did, I couldn’t go. All too quickly for my liking, she’s pulling on her robe and sliding into her slippers. She turns around and smiles at me. “Are you going back to your room too?”
“In a bit.” As soon as my obvious attraction to her is no longer so obvious.
