How to Honeymoon Alone

by Olivia Hayle

To everyone whose favorite vacation is a really good book.

“I get the sense that you’re not feeling like your best self,” I say. “If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener. But it’s perfectly all right if you don’t want to.”

A hand curves lightly around my waist, and then his voice is by my ear. His breath tickles my skin. “Sit back properly, Eden,” he says. “It’s safer.”

infinitesimally

He turns to face me fully. “You’ve been looking for me?” he asks and sounds inordinately pleased by that fact.

“That’s the most devastating thing you can give him. Your happiness.”

“Five minutes,” Phillip mutters. “Right. So, with the dipshit, you had participation trophy sex?” I blink at him. “Sex doesn’t have winners and losers.” “Oh, Eden, it definitely does,” he says. “I like winning… and I like making sure the woman I’m with wins, too. Several times.”

In a place where two people became something very unlike themselves for a glorious few minutes.

“Let me take care of you.” The words spiral through me, spreading heat that sears me along its path.

“Tell me what you like. What you need.”

“Trust me, I never want to stop.” He lowers his head back down.

“Fuck, you’re gorgeous,”

back. In the reflection, his eyes are heated. “Look,” he mutters, and wraps an arm around my bare waist.

skim the indent at my waist and the flare of my hips, or as he traces the outsides of my thighs. There’s nothing funny at all about the intensity in his eyes or his hand pushing my legs apart so he can reach between them, just like he did in the pool, touching me like he already knows all of my secrets.

“You’re the most wonderful thing I never saw coming. I need more of it in my life.”

“You’re so beautiful,” he mutters. “It tugs my heart, all the damn time.”

And I believe him.

Because I feel the same way...