Page 27 of Thunder

It's slick as glass where the water's splashed, and my heel goes out from under me on three.

Instead of hauling him up I pitch forward, and there's a half-second of pure stupid physics where I know exactly what's about to happen and can't do one thing to stop it.

I go into the tub.

Not gracefully.

One knee cracks the tile edge and the rest of me goes over the side and into the water and into him.

Right into his lap, a full-grown woman in jeans and boots landing in a bathtub on top of a wounded man.

Water sheets up over the side and soaks the floor and my shirt's instantly plastered to me and my hair's in my face.

And I laugh.

I can't help it.

It punches out of me, half a shriek and half a laugh, the absurdity of it, the two of us jammed in a tub with my boots still on and water everywhere.

For one second everything I've been white-knuckling since the hospital lets go at once.

It cracks right open.

I'm laughing with my forehead dropped against his wet shoulder and his chest is moving under me and I realize he's laughing too, low and rough, the first real laugh I've heard out of him since before the bunkhouse.

"You're supposed to be pulling me out," he says into my wet hair.

"Shut up, I slipped⁠—"

"Boots in the tub, Presley."

"I know where my boots are—" I lift my head to argue and his face is right there.

And neither one of us is laughing anymore.

The water's around us and my hands are flat on his chest.

His eyes have gone dark and dropped to my mouth, and the laugh dies in my throat and turns into something with a lot more weight, and I know.

I know, clear as anything—that if I kiss him right now I don't get to take it back.

I've spent a month building a wall out of every good reason.

My family.

The lie.

One more secret in a house already drowning in them.

All of it real, all of it still true, every brick of it stacked up between what I want and what I let myself have.

And the wall doesn’t survive his hand coming up out of the water to cup the back of my neck.

He doesn't pull me down. That's what undoes me.

He doesn't force it, he just holds the back of my neck in his big wet hand, warm and heavy, and he waits.

His thumb moving slowly along my jaw, giving me the half-inch of choice, letting me be the one who closes it or doesn't.