Chapter 7

The salt air was still clinging to my skin, a faint, briny ghost of the ocean that had wrapped around us the night before, even now as the sun began its slow, deliberate climb above the horizon. I woke not with a start, but with a slow, heavy realization of warmth. The world was quiet, stripped of the frantic, electric buzz of the carnival games and the thumping bass of the pier’s live band that had vibrated through the floorboards until our toes went numb. Instead, there was only the rhythmic, steady thrum of his chest against my back, a anchor in the soft, drifting sea of sleep. I was tangled in him. My legs were draped over his thigh, my head buried in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of sandalwood and sea salt and the musk of a man who had been utterly, completely consumed by me. We hadn’t made it to a hotel, hadn’t bothered with the pretense of separate rooms or polite goodnights. We had crashed right there in the private booth of the seafood shack at the end of the pier, the velvet seats still bearing the imprint of our combined weight,