Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 117408 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117408 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
He also beat it into me. Holy fuck was last night all kinds of good. My ass was sore, my body was sporting random hickeys, and my legs felt like they’d been replaced with sticks of cotton candy.
And I wanted to do it all again. After the initial pain disappeared and I adjusted to all the new sensations, I let myself go and found that I’d never had such mind-blowing sex. It was all about the trust I had in Fox, which allowed me to be confident in the moment.
I kissed him then, his body coming onto mine, the pressure of his weight on me beginning to feel like home.
We spent every minute of that hour the best we could, sending both our bodies to the same heights we had achieved the night before.
And hopefully, depending on how this plan turned out, we’d do the same for countless days to come.
* * *
Fox had rented a twenty-two-foot sleek and fast Bayliner boat, perfect for cruising as well as racing through the water if things escalated. The boat was fast and top of the line, with a suite of digital settings and tools. It took me a few minutes to get fully accustomed to piloting a boat again, but after the initial setup, I realized it was like riding a bike. Once you got back on, even after a couple of years being off, your muscles tend to take over and get shit done.
Navigating was a little more difficult. We had the map, and we compared it to more current printouts, trying to figure out where exactly Gemini Grove was.
By our estimation, it was an hour’s boat ride out and up, away from Miami Beach and closer to the mangroves up north.
The ride was smooth as the boat cut through the calm waters like an Olympian ice-skater gliding over her rink. Fox and I stayed quiet for most of it, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
I couldn’t say what was going through Fox’s head, but mine was a mash-up of hype music and “holy shit, I have a boyfriend” over and over again.
Last night might have had a hiccup, but it still happened to be one of the best nights of my entire damn life. Besides, we talked through it and we put the fears to rest. I was set with Fox; I didn’t want anyone else. He wasn’t robbing me of anything because I didn’t want anything else. All I had was Fox, and he was all I wanted.
In fact, I was actually glad that last night had gone down the way it had. We needed to air out our fears and worries. It prevented them from taking hold and chewing us up from the inside out.
It made me even more sure of our relationship, and it proved to me that we could work through things without blowing up and losing our minds.
I sat back in the captain’s chair, the soft tan leather cushioning to my shape. Fox was next to me, looking out at the ocean, the wind messing up his hair as it whipped around the windshield. He looked so damn handsome—how the hell did he end up with me? How did I get so lucky?
He was wearing a pair of short light-blue trunks that ended midthigh and made his tanned skin pop against the light color. His shirt was white and tight, fitting snug around his chest and arms. He held a wide-brimmed straw boater hat in his lap. The big sunglasses he had on shielded his eyes when he turned to look at me, smiling.
“We have to come out here together when we aren’t working,” Fox said over the wind.
“I’m down.” From this point on, Fox could have said he wanted to camp out next to an active volcano and I would have said: “I’m down.”
He reached over and our hands found each other, closing as we went back to a beautiful silence, the both of us taking in the moment of calm, neither of us sure what we would face but confident in knowing we’d be facing it together.
Wasn’t much longer after that when shit hit the propeller.
“Look, groves.” Fox pointed at a thick stretch of mangrove trees that must have marked the beginning of Gemini Grove. The trees were dense, their thick network of tangled roots seeming to carry them above the waterline.
“We’re getting close.”
“Throw on your hat, and let’s start going slower.”
I slowed the boat down to a virtual crawl, steering us closer to the edge of the mangroves but not venturing in through them. We figured we would do a loop around the outer path before looping back around and boating through the mangroves.
We didn’t spot anyone at first. As we kept going, my hopes started diminishing. There weren’t any other boats for as far as the eye could see. There was still a chance they were inside the actual grove, but there were plenty of stretches of grove where the trees had thinned enough to let us see through to the natural passage they created, and we still couldn’t spot a—