Page 24 of Hiding Rose
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought you out here,” he said, his words reticent. “I thought it would be okay.”
I grabbed his hand and held it to my chest. “It’s not your fault. The dumb thing does what it wants, regardless of where I am or what I’m doing. The sand is helping. I never thought of using the heat it holds to relieve the spasm. It makes me wonder if I did this more often if it would help keep the muscles loose.”
He smiled down at me. “It’s really working? It was a hail Mary when I did it.”
I reached up and caressed his face. “It’s almost completely gone. The leg will be tender for a few hours, but it feels much better already.”
He lowered his head until his lips touched mine. Upside down it was difficult to do more than a quick peck, but it still jolted my system from the emotion of the connection.
“I’m glad,” he said. “It makes me feel less like a jerk for insisting we come down here.”
“You’re not a jerk, and I wanted to come here. I could have said no, but you promised to take care of me, and you did. Once I can stand again, I want to put my toes in the water.”
He stroked my cheek as we sat in the darkness of the night. The only sound was the waves of the ocean and an occasional hoot of a short-eared owl. “Only if you feel steady. I’ll help you, but it’s for purely selfish reasons,” he whispered.
“What do you mean?”
He kissed me again before he answered. “I want to be the man with you when you sink your toes in the surf for the first time. I want you to remember that I was the one holding you when you experienced the ocean so intimately. It’s selfish and wrong, but I’m admitting to it anyway.”
I twisted more to get a better angle to see him. “I don’t know why it would be selfish or wrong, Sawyer. As humans, what we experience in the world around us is what shapes us into who we are. You want to share the love of your home with me. There’s nothing selfish about it.”
He laughed and it carried across the water and then back to us. “It has nothing to do with showing you my state, and everything to do with me. Being the first person to help you experience the ocean means I’ll always be the person in your mind when you think about tonight. So, yeah, it’s selfish, but I’m doing it anyway.”
I lifted my hand for him to take again and held it to my side. I didn’t make eye contact, but I answered him with how I truly felt. “There’s no one I would rather be here with right now.”
