His leg bumped mine underwater as he shifted. His hand tightened its grip on mine, and we pulled each other in, and our lips met in the middle softly, and Brougham drew in a sharp breath.

He tasted just as I remembered. He unthreaded his fingers from mine and rested them on my temple, before walking them backward to both push my hair back and pull me in to deepen the kiss.

I didn’t want the kiss to be gentle anymore. I tugged him into me to press his chest against mine with one hand, and the other I weaved up and around his neck. Then I shifted and pushed myself up and around so I was straddling him, my knees against the concrete. He kept kissing me, and grabbed my hips to move me into a comfortable position. We were getting water everywhere, but it barely mattered.

All I could do was kiss him for all the times I’d wanted to but couldn’t. Letting my hands roam wherever they ended up. Letting him run his hands under my shirt to touch my shoulder blades, and rake his fingertips down my skin when I sank low into his lap, drawing a moan from somewhere guttural. He broke his kiss away and moved it to my neck, holding me in place so I could arch my back without crashing into the pool. The warmth of his mouth and the sweep of his tongue against my collarbone almost made me lose my grip on everything completely, and I fought to draw myself back into the present before I gave in to abandon and pulled us both underwater.

Because we—

His hair was so soft and thick, and the bit by the nape of his neck was like touching a mink blanket—

—couldn’t do anything but kissing—

—and I felt myself slipping, or maybe Brougham was sliding forward, but my feet were in the water now, and I wanted to let him—

—because his dad was in the house and could be watching us right this second.

I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I steadied us by bracing my knee against the pool’s edge, and broke away, panting. “Brougham.”

He froze. A flash of panic swept over his face, like someone sobered by ice water. Straight into sharp focus.

He thought I was going to run off again.

I cupped his jaw with my hands and tried to give him a reassuringly warm look. “Your dad is right inside.”

Everything relaxed, so intensely I could physically feel the shift of his body beneath mine. “Right. Yup. Duh.”

I stayed in my position while we caught our breath and tried to bring things back to more of a three out of ten on the intensity scale.

“I wanted to tell you I had feelings for you,” I said. “But you’d already picked things back up with Winona. It happened so fast.”