Page 87 of Rhodes

I laugh because I can't help it. Cam loses interest immediately, which I appreciate, because I have no interest in talking small talk with him about our domesticity.

Rhodes gathers the empty glasses. I stack plates. Neither of us touches the other. That suddenly requires an unreasonable amount of concentration.

I carry a tray into the little outdoor kitchen and set it beside the sink. Rhodes comes in behind me with the bottles.

"There's a whole beach down there," he says, reading it off my face. "Nobody on it."

He pulls a blanket off a lounger, the big striped one somebody left out, and I follow him down the stone steps cut into the cliff without another word. I kick off my sandals at the top of the stairs, and hook them on two fingers.

The path smells like salt and lemon trees and thousand-year-old stone. Below us the water's black and loud, the surf rolling in long and dragging back over the rocks.

The sand's still warm on top from the day, cool underneath where my feet sink. He shakes the blanket out in the lee of the rocks where the path can't see us, and the wind grabs a corner. He pins it with one of his shoes and mutters at it, which makes me laugh for a reason I'm not quite sure why. He looks up at me from a crouch in the dark, and the laugh goes out of me.

He comes up out of the crouch, and I don't wait for him to get all the way there. I get a fistful of his shirt and put him against the rock wall instead, warm from a whole day of sun, and I kiss him the way the hallway never got to finish.

"Careful," he says into my mouth.

"I am so tired of careful."

He gets the dress up and over. Then his thumbs are in the waistband of the last thing I've got on, and that goes too.

The wind off the water hits every inch of me. I shiver, and he takes that, open-mouthed at the top of my shoulder. He kisses down to the inside of my elbow, continuing down until he ends up on his knees in the sand.

I get a hand in his hair. The waves eat the sound I make, and I'm glad for the shield, but I don't care at the same time.

When I can't stand it, I pull him up by the shirt. We go down onto the blanket, sand shifting under us. I get the shirt off him. I know his defined abs now by touch, the hitch in his breath when I rake my nails down his sculpted arms. I get his shorts open and take him in my hand, and he drops his forehead to mine and just breathes.

"Tallulah."

Out here with the water going and his mouth right at my ear, my full name in his voice does something to me that is dirtier than I care to admit.

He finds his shorts somewhere in the sand and comes back with a condom. He does it himself this time, fast, like he's worried I'll change my mind if he gives me the four seconds.

He pushes in slowly, and I lift off the sand to meet him. Neither one of us moves once he's all the way there. His mouth stays open against my temple and the ocean keeps roaring an arm's length away.

I start to gyrate my hips back and forth, hungry for his friction. It isn't careful nor quiet, because out here it doesn't have to be. No one can hear us but the water.

I hook a leg over the back of his and take everything and give it back. The world shrinks to his hands and his mouth and the tide climbing the sand toward us.

The tide finds us before I do, cold all the way up my back. It washes over his forearms where he's braced over me. I come on the shock of it, the dual sensation almost too much to bear.

The sand goes out from under my hip, and he swears into my hair, but keeps going straight through it. When he finally lets go, he does it silently, his whole body tensed. He cradles my head in his hand as he empties into me.

We lie there in the wet with the blanket ruined and the water pulling at my ankles. His heart is going so hard under my hand that I could count it.

We lie there afterward, half on the blanket and half off it, the sweat cooling. His hand runs up and down my arm. I could sleep right here and let the tide sort it out.

He's still catching his breath as his hand moves up and down my arm. It’s the thing he does after sex without knowing he does it. I let myself have about nine seconds of thinking this is a normal way for two people to end an evening.

"We can't do the whole-night thing," I say to the sky.

"I can hold you right here all night."

"If Libba finds my bed empty in the night, she'll do the math in about four seconds."

"I know," he concedes.

We lie there for another twenty or thirty minutes, until I start to get a chill. He picks a fleck of shell out of my hair after we get dressed, and he shakes out the blanket. We climb the cliff steps in the dark, hold hands as we walk down the dark path, and then split at the top without a word.