What You Say

 (Click here to read the first episode and here for the previous one.)

We should eat something and go to the beach before it gets dark. I’m teaching Emma how to surf. But now it’s way past our siesta and she’s lying beside me. I’m looking at her, watching her, staring at her—she’s so angelically beautiful it’s embarrassing. I tell her I’m out of my mind over her.

“Out of your mind?” She giggles. “Guess we better wait till it comes back.”

“It not supposed to be funny, Emma.”

“So why don’t you say, ‘I love you’?”

I sigh and rest my head below her rib cage. Her eyes are closed and she’s stroking my hair. After a minute she bends over me, her breasts all I can see. “You faker, Scott, acting scared.”

We readjust so we’re on our sides facing each other, her legs criss-crossed between mine. My eyes roll toward the sky. “The whole thing’s stupid. You know how I feel.”

She cups her hands over my eyes for half a second—hide and seek. “Of course, I know how you feel and you know how I feel.”

The thing is, she hasn’t said she loves me. Now that would be a dangerous thing to say: that I want her to say it first. 

So we’re having a great time. The sex is wilder than wild, and she’s just now, after our second session today, proposed a limit of once every twenty-four hours. Because while she admits it’s fun to succumb to every stirring, “We don’t wanna be going at it because we can’t think of anything else to do.”

Yesterday Pedro asked why I haven’t followed through on that dinner invitation to him and Moira.

“We’re not there yet,” I told him.

“You’re not?”

“Pedro, she’s different.”

“Are you getting impatient?”

“Come on, you know it’s nothing like that. More like, faith, trust—along there.”

“You’re in trouble, Scottie.”

“No,” I told him. “No, I’m not.”

Now I’m propped above her, my hands on either side of her upturned face. My lips graze her ear. “I love you.”

And she hoots, pushing me away. “I knew it! You’ve probably said, ‘I love you,’ a million times to every woman on your list.”

“Probably, maybe, I don’t know. But you need to believe me, Emma. You need to know that when I say, ‘I love you’—to you—the words have unique meaning.”

“Unique?” She’s giggling and batting me with a pillow. “Is that so? And here I thought you’d put ’em in storage.”

“No.” I lift her up, so she’s straddling me.

“We’ve been together a month, Scott, two weeks in Chicago, two weeks here. But, you weren’t holding back.”

“I wasn’t until you started prodding me.” I roll away, watching her. “I love you.”

“Don’t you want to know if I love you, too?”

I’m nodding, yes. Yes, that’s what I want. I definitely want to know if Emma loves me, too.

“Well, of course,” she says. “You know that. I mean—of course.”

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