"I'm aware of that. I'm damn pleased about it, if you don't mind me being honest."

  His hold on my ass was brutal. It was like he wanted to tear that piece of me off, keep it for himself. Or maybe he just wanted me to remember him tomorrow when— No. I wasn't thinking about that. Wasn't going there. We had eighteen hours left before the real world came calling. Eighteen hours before we slipped back into our old world, our old cycle, the old patterns. The way it was before we found ourselves on the same island. I wasn't thinking about that. I couldn't.

  "I'll get you there again," he promised, going for my nipples. He drew one between his lips as I found a fast, bouncing rhythm over him. "If we had that little clit sucker toy, you'd already be there."

  I edged my thighs wider, trying to get him deeper. I needed all of him, every last inch. I needed it now because I didn't know what came next. "Why do you like my toys so much?"

  He switched to the other nipple, gripped my ass harder still. "Because you like them."

  I felt the first twinge of fabric burn on my knees. I didn't care. "That's not why."

  "All right, yeah, that's not why," he said, sliding an arm across my back and anchoring me with a hand on my shoulder. He jammed me down hard, almost as hard as the cock shuttling over my swollen skin, and we cried out together. "I love it when you're strong. When you're just fucking strong, Sara. And I love it when you fall the fuck apart for me, but all I have is a dick and some fingers and a tongue, so I'll take all the help I can get because you don't fall apart the first time. You need me to make your blood pump so fucking hard that you can't hear any of the noise in your head. You need me to break you down, piece by piece, until all you can do is blink up at me with those big eyes and ask for more. You need me to do that for you, and Sara, sweetheart, I need it just as much."

  My knees burned. Heat bloomed across my face, my chest. Sweat slicked my back. My hair was everywhere, a thick cloud scented with saltwater and sunscreen. Everything between us was wet and slippery. It was desperate too, like we were out to prove something.

  Maybe that was just me. Maybe I was the only one who needed to prove this was perfect in a way I'd never believed perfect could exist. This was it, wasn't it? This was the perfect I'd chased, the rightness, the worthiness. All the validation I could ever want was between my legs, hard and swearing into my skin and bruising me with the promise that this was right and this was real.

  "Sara," he groaned, his lips on my sternum. "Come on, honey. Come for me. Put me out of this misery."

  The pressure building inside me resembled that groan. It was a roar, a snarl waiting to break free. It was the kind of scream that rippled with primal possession. The kind of scream I'd never dared to voice because I wasn't loud, I wasn't demanding, I wasn't the center of attention—I wasn't anything.

  But now I screamed. I screamed into Sebastian's skin, into his mouth. Screamed as the orgasm unfurled from behind my clit and wrapped my center in a brutal throb. As he speared up into me again, again. As he shook with me. As he held me.

  Chapter 28

  Sara

  "We've been here a couple of days," Sebastian said with a gesture toward the ocean, "and you haven't tried to drown me once. If you're going to do it, you better get a move on. This is your last chance."

  I spared him a glance before returning my gaze to the water. Waves lapped at our ankles as the sun climbed out of the horizon. I had less than three hours before I had to leave for the airport. I didn't remember why I'd been so adamant about flying home immediately after the conference. I regretted it now. This felt like the last seconds of a video game where the music sped up and the lights started flashing and everything was about to end whether I was ready or not.

  "We've been here a couple of days and you haven't tried to be a condescending asshole. It's your last chance."

  Sebastian shifted a bit, dipped his hands into the pockets of his shorts. I really enjoyed these shorts, but it was the breezy linen shirts rolled halfway up his forearms that did it for me. That I hadn't ripped every single one clear off his chest was worth recognition. I wanted the medal for that. Restraint, beachy linen with bared forearms category.

  "You are such a brat," he said, softly enough that it seemed largely for his benefit rather than mine.

  There was no suitable response for this comment. I wiggled my toes in the sand and pretended these weren't the final minutes of our perfect little island bubble. Life was a lot better without the real world. Even if the real world did insist on meeting me for dinner and being as self-absorbed as always.

  "It's not because you're spoiled," he added out of nowhere. "Although you are. You're a brat because you push the limits."

  Savage bitch heart, your order is ready.

  "For, well, forever, basically," he continued, "I assumed that was because you liked getting your way. You do, there's no doubt about that, but now I think you push because you haven't gotten your way enough."

  I stared down at the water, at my toes half hidden in the sand. I didn't say anything. Somewhere in the past few hours, I lost the glowy haze of this cease-fire. I felt none of that glow and tons of scrappy, agitated tension that seemed to tighten in my chest. I wanted to run away, push him away, do anything at all to get away from the pressure growing inside me.

  After a moment, he went on. "I like when you push. I like pushing you back."

  "Yeah, and that's a lot of fun, but sometimes you push the wrong way and much more than necessary."

  He ran a hand down my back. "Is that what you think, you snarky little goblin?"

  "It's what I know," I shot back. "You should give it a try when we get home. Just cut the pompous commentary in half."

  "That's what you want? That's the only change you'd like to see?"

  I rubbed a toe over a smooth pebble. "That would be enough."

  A growl sounded in his throat though I decided to commit myself fully to the examination of this pebble. It wouldn't do to get carried away with his growls when I still had to pack.

  Then, "Does that mean you have no desire to take this"—he wrapped an arm around my waist and shoved his fingers through my hair, forcing me to acknowledge him—"home with us?"

  "What of 'this' are you referring to?"

  He bent a single eyebrow and that was just about enough for me to lead him back into the bungalow and forget this conversation. To forget my desire to run. But then he said, "I'd rather not have to play pointless team-building games before feeling you up, and waking up next to you is worth all your brattiness."

  "You're not going to have to play pointless team-building games with me much longer."

  He laughed into my hair. "You're good at this."

  "At what?"

  "Evading. Dodging. Hiding. I don't know why you think you need to hide from me at this point, but you are very good at it."

  "I am not—"

  "We don't have time for you to be impossible about this. You have to leave and I have to know. Tell me how you want it to be when we're back home."

  I stared at his shirt, fixating on the fine weave of the linen. "I don't know yet. I need some time to think about that."

  Those words seemed to hit him like a solid blow. We were silent for a moment, but Sebastian shook his head slowly, as if he was carrying on a debate to which I hadn't been invited. "What is there to think about?"

  "Oh, I don't know, how about the fact that barely more than a week ago we agreed this was toxic and we needed a break from each other?"

  "I didn't agree to that."

  I pressed my hands to his chest. "That doesn't make it any less true."

  "I know you think your version is the correct one and I know you think you're doing the right thing by hiding, but you have to consider for a single fucking second that you might be wrong this time."

  "And what if you're wrong?"

  "Is it that bad?" he asked. "Am I that bad?"

  I dropped my forehead to his sternum. I needed to shake off the oppressive weight of this moment. It was swelling inside me, choking me. "I am enough of a mess on my own. I can't add another ounce to it."

  "Don't do that," he rumbled. "Tell me I'm a condescending asshole, tell me I'm nothing more than the guy you hate-fuck on Thursdays. Hell, just tell me I'm an ugly son of a bitch. But don't you dare tell me I'm going to screw up your life, Sara."

  I lifted my shoulders as I glanced around. "I have one question for you."

  He sifted his hands through my hair. "You know you can ask me anything. No need to dick around about it."

  "When everything happened in the ER, and the two of us were hustled out of there and upstairs to the Chief's office while we were covered in glass and blood, he called you in first. What did you say? How did you explain what'd happened?"

  He stared at me, the corners of his eyes crinkled and his scowl soft enough to touch. "I said it was an accident. I said we'd had a strongly worded discussion about a case and the rest of it was a million-in-one shot."

  I bobbed my head because I'd figured that much. He wouldn't have complied with the group therapy if he'd blamed me for the entirety of the incident. "What was the outcome of that conversation?"

  "Same as you," he said with a heaving eye roll. "Eight weeks of counseling and an emphatic request to not create more problems."

  "Except it wasn't the same," I said. "There's a formal reprimand in my personnel file and I got a lecture from the Chief that included the word 'tantrum' and a detailed reference to my father and all of his professionalism. Apparently there was some expectation of apples and their short fall from the tree."

  "That's bullshit," he said. "But you know it's institutional bullshit, not bullshit I've caused. You know the difference and I'm not going to let you pretend otherwise."

  "These two months have been difficult for me. This has been stressful, Sebastian. I told you before, you have all the power. I have a formal reprimand and a reminder to play nice. So, when you ask me if it's been that bad? Yes. This has been bad for me. Have I discovered that, under all your growls and scowls, under your arrogance and contempt for the entire world, you are not the miserable asshole you want everyone to believe you are? Also yes. Yeah," I added when he looked out at the ocean, "you're not the only one who knows how to hide."

  A moment passed when it seemed the only next step would be wrestling each other into the water, but then Sebastian let out an aggrieved sigh, saying, "I don't want to go home to screaming at each other outside your door and—"

  "Be real. You love screaming at me outside my door. That has a pretty high rate of positive return for you."

  The stare he gave me said he didn't appreciate my attempt at humor. "I don't want to go back to fucking and fighting only to go home alone afterward. Fuck, I really don't want to go back to watching a visiting professor hit on you and—"

  "If you think I am going to another one of those dinner parties, you're insane," I muttered.

  "—and not have the right to make it clear to everyone that you're my screech owl."

  I shook my head. "Is that supposed to be a term of endearment?"

  "I don't want to walk down the hall and have to pretend I don't know you in a way no one else does. Do you hear me right now? Because I'm not promising I'll never fight with you again—god, that's out of the question—but I'm saying it doesn't have to be the way it was. We can start over—or start where we are right now. We can start wherever you want, but I need you to want it too."

  I was so certain that I knew myself. That I knew my mess, my perfectionism, my savagery. I knew what I wanted, what I needed, and what I believed.

  I was so certain.

  Until this man with his dark eyes and dark moods showed up and sent my perfect little stack of index cards flying. Every last one of them, flying. It didn't matter to him whether they were color-coded and alphabetized, whether some were creased and dog-eared while others were taped together. He'd scooped them back up and he'd taken good care of those cards, but his handling meant they'd never be quite the same.

  And I was so very certain that there was something dangerous and destabilizing about his card-throwing entrance into my life that I'd never considered the possibility that I'd choose to keep him around.

  All those times we'd hurled insults at each other and fought over little scraps of nothing, I'd coded that as toxic. Filed it into my deck of cards as very bad for me, must avoid.

  The sex—which I'd participated in willingly, which had crushed my preexisting notions about pleasure and how I experienced it—had been very good, but also very bad. It existed in the risky borderland where hate wasn't hate and enemies could fight on the same side so long as they both got what they wanted. Very bad. Must avoid.

  And all those moments when it wasn't sex or anger or any of the other things we did to each other, those were just the in-betweens. The timeouts. The cease-fires. If we could've been gentle and generous with each other, we would've done that from the start.

  Those moments when we'd stopped being awful, they were the exceptions. This was the exception. Nothing we'd found here this week was the rule.

  That was how I'd organized these index cards, all without considering whether I had any of it right. Whether I was so busy being a mess, a perfectionist, a savage-hearted bitch that I didn't pick up on Sebastian playing an entirely different game. Whether I was allowed to forfeit my game and choose his instead, I still had to figure out.

  "I need to think about that," I said. "I—I just need some time."

  He gathered my hair up in his hands, let it fall. Then he did it again. "Time," he repeated.

  "I'm sorry, I—" I stopped myself. I didn't have to breathe life into those ancient aches today.

  He gathered up my hair again, twisted it around his hand. "What have these days been if not time?"

  "This has been a break. An escape from our regularly scheduled mutual hate and loathing."

  "I've never hated you," he said.

  "Sure, you just do a fantastic job of pretending otherwise."

  "I've never hated you, you crochety little witch. Even when I wanted to wring your neck. Especially when I wanted to wring your neck. And you know that." He dropped my hair and stepped back, a deep sigh rattling out of him. "What the hell are we doing, Sara? What do you want us to do? Answer me this time."

  Eventually, I admitted, "I don't know."

  He watched as I shifted, stared out at the ocean. "Would you tell me why it's so difficult to envision a world where the time we spend together isn't employer-mandated? I want to understand why that looks so terrible to you, because it can't be all about institutional bullshit and me picking on plastic surgeons. You're tougher than that."

  "Has it ever occurred to you that requiring me to be tough is half the problem here?"

  He stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the water. "It's not half the problem. You're the toughest little cookie I've ever met and I know a lot of tough cookies. You just haven't realized that you don't have to be tough with me."

  "You pick fights with me all the time," I yelled.

  "Because it's fun," he yelled back.

  "All this time, I've been battling you and you've—you've been having fun?"

  "And you weren't?"

  "No!" I cried.

  "The time you pummeled me with stuffed animals? That wasn't a tiny bit fun for you?"

  "It was—you know what that was," I said impatiently.

  "And the time you paid a hostess to ask me if I was the most arrogant surgeon in the city? You weren't having any fun then?"

  "I didn't have to pay her," I replied with a sniff. "She did it for free."

  "And what about the time you tried to drown me in the Charles River? There wasn't a single drop of fun in that for you?"

  "You have to stop saying I tried to drown you. Your sleeve was damp. There's a significant difference between a few splashes and holding your overinflated head under the water for a prolonged period of time."

  "And this?" he asked. "This isn't fun for you? Not even a little?" When I didn't respond, he went on, "Because I think it is, Sara. You just don't want to recognize it. You're so much fun to fight with. You get all worked up and you're so damn gorgeous when you're furious for no reason, and because you like it too. Admit it, for once, that you love battling me. That you can push and push and push, and the only thing I'm ever going to do is pull your hair and fuck you harder."

  "Even if a fraction of that is correct—and I'm not saying it is—don't you think I get tired of that?" I asked, still louder than anyone should be speaking on a beach in Jamaica at sunrise. "Don't you think I want some nice, simple interactions that don't involve screaming or beating the shit out of each other at jousting?"

  He brought his hands to my shoulders, up my neck. "No. I think you want to be loud. I think you want to be as wild and prickly and sweet as you know you truly are, and I think you want someone who sees that mess and wants more of it. Who wants all of it."

  I needed a minute to think. That was it, just a minute to think. And breathe. And also get the hell out of this conversation and into a place where this man wasn't crawling inside my head, scooping up my thoughts, and forcing me to look them in the eye. "I haven't packed," I said. "I should do that. Now. Soon. I mean, I have to go soon and I should pack now."

  "Sara." My name was a sigh.

  "If you want to continue talking to me, you can do it while I pack," I said, storming up the beach.

  It took me all of a minute to reach the bungalow and another minute to drag my bags from the closet and start shoving my things inside. If I knew anything about folding clothes or organizing garments, it didn't show. No, this was fully slapdash and that was the goal. I was doing exactly what I intended and no one was going to tell me otherwise. I knew myself and I was certain, so fucking certain, of all the things. I had it all right here in my contradictory little pocket. I wasn't trying to reorient my entire world while also gathering my things for international travel.

  It took several more minutes for Sebastian to appear in the doorway, his hair tousled like he'd run his fingers through it a million times. He tipped his head to the side, silent a moment as he watched me fill the suitcase.

 

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