Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(62)
“Yeah. That’s okay with me.” I pushed that voice aside, knowing it would be back. “More than okay.”
Our sea change it may be slow in coming
At least we’ve been dealt back in the game
—Casey Stratton, “Sea Change”
If Robin minded that I was rather dreamy and distracted at the gallery that afternoon, he didn’t say anything. I floated, drifting from task to task, lost in my own thoughts. Every once in a while, a memory would creep up on me and crash over my brain like a tidal wave, stopping me in my tracks, like I was experiencing that moment all over again. If there was a completely positive, sex-related equivalent to an acid trip, I was definitely tripping.
Robin just endured my moments of absentmindedness without asking too many questions, and sent me off for my swim and dinner break after we’d locked up.
Jace was waiting for me outside the gallery.
“Hey. Want a ride down to the beach?”
I grinned, my eyes passing down his body to take in his swim trunks and sandals.
“Sure. But just so you know, I will not have time to have sex with you in the water unless I plan on skipping dinner.”
His eyes danced as he opened the passenger-side door of his car for me. “I’ll keep it limited to foreplay.”
I laughed as he shut the door behind me, waiting for him to hop in the driver’s side and take off.
“I don’t wanna hear a damn word about blue balls if you do.”
He actually limited himself to a few gropes inside my Speedo. He didn’t swim out as far as I did, but he held his own for a while, then floated on the waves and groped me some more when I came back. I admit, I liked trying to keep us afloat through each wave while he wrapped his legs around my waist and ground against me, thrusting his tongue down my throat. If I hadn’t needed my arms to keep our heads above water, I totally would have snuck a hand down the back of his swim trunks and finger-f*cked him right there.
Then he took me out to dinner and smirked while I adjusted myself under the table because that hard-on did not want to go away.
I’d figured Jace would go do something to entertain himself while I worked at the tattoo parlor, cleaning surfaces and sterilizing Geoff’s equipment as he inked the last clients of the day. Instead, he just hung out on the sofa in the waiting area with his sketch pad, doodling designs and talking to Geoff and the customers about body art stuff that didn’t really apply to me. I tuned out and lost myself in my own thoughts until I heard my name.
“Huh?” My head came up as Geoff was finishing with his final client, putting a bandage over a tramp stamp for some tourist passing through town.
Geoff nodded to Jace. “I was just telling him you weren’t interested in having anything done.”
“Oh. It’s not that I’m not interested. It just never seems to be a good time.”
“Well, what are you thinking of?” Jace asked while Geoff ran the client’s credit card and escorted her to the door. “I bet between Geoff and me, we could design something really gorgeous for you.”
I sighed as Geoff locked the door and turned out the lights in the windows. “I’m sure you could, but the problem is my swimming. I can’t take the time to wait for something to heal.”
“That’s a good point,” Geoff acknowledged, grabbing the bottle of disinfectant spray from me. “I really wouldn’t recommend a tattoo unless you can give it a few weeks before going into a lake or pool. A piercing would be different, of course.”
Something in my stomach flipped. “How would that be different?”
“It would be small enough to cover with a Tegaderm patch.” He opened a drawer and tossed a flat packet at me. “It’s the thin, second-skin kind of tape they put over an IV catheter when you’re in the hospital. It’s waterproof, so you could put it over a piercing before you went swimming, take it off after.”
“Oh.” I stared at the Tegaderm wrapper, my pulse beating harder. Why the f*ck was I feeling so jittery?
A piercing—and yes, it would definitely have to be a piercing, not only for practical reasons, but because everything inside me had clenched into a big ball of want at the discovery that it might be possible—seemed so intimate. Maybe even a little kinky, because I didn’t want some pedestrian facial piercing, I wanted it on my body. And the thought was an extremely sexy one. Until this moment, I hadn’t imagined I could have any trouble being frank about my desires, especially with Jace. But I felt incredibly shy as I stood there, with his eyes on me.
Maybe it was just the attention. Suddenly the focus of everyone in the room was on me and my issues, making it all about me. I was the center of attention and that was never a safe place to be.
Maybe that was why I was hemming and hawing still, torn between wanting to do it and feeling I shouldn’t. Body art was meant to be seen, shown off, admired—even if only by select individuals who got to see you with your clothes off—and I could never do anything that would attract that sort of notice without expecting someone to put me in my place. I could just imagine the eye-rolling that would take place if I showed up at a family gathering with a tattoo or piercing. They’d assume I was doing it to put myself on display.
If it’s someplace private, the way you want it to be, then they don’t ever need to know, and they can’t accuse you of being an attention whore, the rational part of my brain whispered. But my emotional programming tended to ignore the rational part of my brain.