Only in Your Dreams (The Mountains are Calling #2)

18. Grey

Forty-five minutes later, we’re sitting on my dock, a plate of brownies between us, vanilla bean ice cream melting in the summer heat. Our feet dangle in the water—because it’s the only way it’s cool enough to sit outside—and the sounds of cicadas and owls echo over the lake beyond.

“Don’t tell Mom,” Finley says, scooping another bite of brownie and ice cream onto her spoon, “but I think your brownies might be better than hers.”

I grin at her. “I’m absolutely telling.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she says, holding her spoon upside down in her mouth, eyes narrowing sternly.

“What’ll you give me to keep quiet?”

“You’re blackmailing me?” She sounds incredulous, even as her smile hitches higher.

I hold my fingers an inch apart. “Only a little.”

She bumps her shoulder with mine. “So what’s the secret?”

“I add more salt than she does. One time, I misread the recipe and used a fourth of a tablespoon instead of a fourth of a teaspoon. I thought they came out even better, so that’s what I do now.”

“And you never told Mom?” she asks, quirking her brows.

“Are you kidding? I’m not going to tell her I perfected her recipe.”

A smile breaks across her face, her eyes widening in triumph. “ I’m going to tell her you said that you perfected her recipe.”

I dip my chin in a nod, holding back a grin. “Well played, Blankenship. Truce?”

She takes my proffered hand, shaking it, and a tingle of awareness shoots up from it, making my whole body feel like a live wire. I don’t know how she has this much of an effect over me, that a simple touch feels better than anything else with anyone else.

“Truce,” she echoes, taking her hand back and glancing out at the darkened lake, the water glistening under the bright moon and stars. “I would never get over this view if I were you.”

“You should see it first thing in the morning.”

Her eyes skate back to me, a grin quirking her lips. “Does that line usually work for you?”

A laugh jumps out of me, erasing the last bit of tension leftover from dinner from my body. She watches me as if she’s reading it, her expression growing more and more carefree with the sound.

A second later, she stands, extending a hand to me. “I want to swim.”

I stare up at her for a long moment. “It’s dark.”

“You know, it’s crazy,” she says, her free hand planting on her hip. “But there is actually still a lake out there even in the dark.”

“Okay, smart-ass.” I grab her hand and pull myself up.

The cocky smile dissolves the second I reach over my head and tug my shirt off. Her eyes trace over the contours of my body, taking me in as I strip off my shorts and stand before her in just a pair of black boxer briefs.

My hand finds her chin, tipping it up until her eyes connect with mine. “Eyes up here, sweetheart.”

And then I jump into the lake, landing with a loud splash, breaking the quietness of the summer night. The water is refreshingly cold, and I savor the way it feels against my overheated skin, swimming around to face the dock. Treading water, I flash Finley my teeth in the darkness. “What’re you waiting for?”

Staring down from the dock, looking decidedly less confident than a moment before, she asks, “Is it cold?”

“Your feet were just in it.”

“That’s different.”

“How?” I ask, my arms making tiny waves where they fan out beside me.

“I’ll be naked.”

A smile stretches out across my face. “Well, don’t let me stop you. It’s like bath water out here.”

Her eyes narrow, her hands returning to her hips. “I’m not getting fully naked.”

“I’ll take any degree of nakedness, please and thank you.”

She looks as if she’s valiantly trying not to laugh. “Now I’m tempted to jump in wearing my dress.”

“That’s fine. Then you can change into my clothes when we get inside. That works for me too,” I say, grinning wider.

This time, she can’t hold back her smile or her laughter. She’s so perfect it makes my chest hurt, an ache forming beneath my sternum. God, I’m so in love with her.

The smile she pulled out of me slips away, though, when she reaches for the hem of her dress. In fact, I think I stop breathing altogether. She lifts it slowly over her head, ruffling her short blond hair, and my eyes don’t leave her even as it lands in a pile next to my clothes. She’s stunning in moonlight, the dips of her skin disappearing into shadows that I want to touch and taste.

Before I can look my fill, drink her in, she’s jumping, landing with a splash in the water next to me, coming up looking like something out of one of my dreams. Her skin looks soft as silk, and her smile is bright enough to illuminate the lake if the moon were to slip behind the clouds.

“You’re staring,” she says, silently moving closer to me in the water. Her legs slip against mine, and it takes everything inside me not to reach for her, to let my hands slide against her skin and see if it’s as smooth as it looks.

“Should I look away?”

I expect her to respond with sarcasm, but my throat dries up when she holds my gaze steady and says, “No, I like it when you look at me.”

I want to tell her I’m never not looking at her, that if she’s in the same room as me, my eyes are following her every movement, but I can’t make my mouth work. I can’t do anything but slide my hands the distance between our bodies and pull her closer. I’m tired of all the space I’ve kept between us over the years. I’m tired of being careful. I’m just tired of wanting .

She must misinterpret the look in my eye, because she asks, “Are you okay after…?”

“After?” I ask, even though I know what she’s referring to. I just don’t want to talk about the dinner, about them. She holds my gaze, not speaking, until I blow out a heavy breath and say, “Yeah, I’m okay. My parents are…” I trail off, not knowing how to finish the sentence, my eyes settling on the trees in the distance. Difficult? Tiring? Disappointing?

“Wrong,” Finley says, and it snaps my attention away from the trees at the other side of the lake. I find her eyes already settled on me, earnest.

“Wrong?”

She nods, scooting even closer to me. We’re almost lined up, our legs tangled as we tread water, skin sliding against skin. Softness against hardness. Roughness against smoothness.

“They’re wrong about you.” She says it with so much certainty that I think I believe her. Holding my gaze, her voice dropping lower, she says, “ Your dad is wrong about you, Grey.”

I swallow against the lump forming in my throat, unsure of how to respond.

“What made you want to become a firefighter?” she asks. I probably wouldn’t answer truthfully if her palms didn’t land on my shoulders, her fingers sliding up to thread into the hair at the base of my neck. On instinct, I settle my hands in the dip between her waist and hips. They fit perfectly there, like she was made for me. And that feeling loosens my tongue, making me speak the truth that I never have to anyone else.

“When I was a kid, I overheard my parents arguing,” I start.

She must feel the way my body tenses, because she moves even closer, until we’re lined up completely. My heart thumps in my ears, so loudly I’m sure she can hear it. But for the first time, I want to tell this story. I want to let it go so that it might lose some of its power.

“They didn’t argue much, really. I don’t think they ever cared enough to argue. But this one time, it was late at night, and I was small. I’m sure they thought I was asleep, but it was storming, and I woke up and went to their room.” I pause for a moment, avoiding her gaze. I don’t think I can look at her as I say this next part. “My dad was cheating. It wasn’t the first time, and I get the sense that he always has. My mom was fed up, I think, and she told him that the only reason she got pregnant in college was because she knew he was going to end it and she wanted him to be tied to her.”

I feel Finley’s gasp as much as I hear it. Her chest moves against mine with it, and I want to put my face there, let her smooth her hands through my hair and comfort me. Erase this memory I’ve held on to for so long.

Instead, I keep going, knowing that if I stop, the lump in my throat will grow too large to continue. “She thought that if she got pregnant, he would marry her and quit cheating. I don’t know if he stopped for a while, or if he just married her and continued with the affairs. But either way, they had me, and he never changed. She told him…” I swallow thickly, dragging my eyes up to the darkened sky. “She told him she regretted doing it. That she regretted tying herself to him for the rest of her life. That she would take it back if she could.”

“Grey,” she breathes, sounding as wrecked as I feel. Her hands find my face, tugging it down until we’re eye to eye, until our foreheads are pressed together and we’re breathing the same air. She doesn’t say anything else, because what could she say? But having her here, holding me like this, is more than I could have asked for.

I don’t know how long we stay like that, our knees bumping and thighs sliding together as we tread in the water, but eventually, my heart starts to slow. My breathing starts to even out. Some of the tension that has been weighing my shoulders down for decades dissipates.

So I continue, speaking into the sliver of space between our lips, my eyes still closed. “About a week before that, I’d seen a story on the news about a little girl that had been dropped off at the fire station. She was adopted by this couple who had been trying for years to have a baby. The three of them looked so happy. I thought my parents would be happier without me, and that maybe there was a family out there who would really, really want me. So the next morning, I rode my bike to the fire station and told them I wanted them to find me a new mom and dad so mine would be happy again.”

When I open my eyes, I see tears streaking down Finley’s face, little droplets that glisten in the moonlight.

“Hey,” I say, pulling back enough to move my hands between us, catching the tears as they fall.

She shakes her head in my hands, swallowing thickly. Her voice comes out as a croak. “Don’t comfort me right now. All I want is to go back and hold childhood Grey and tell him how loved he is.”

This makes my lips tug, and she looks startled by it. “Why are you smiling?”

“You love me.”

She coughs out a choked laugh. “You’re ridiculous.”

“I know,” I say, leaning forward until my mouth is pressed to hers. It’s a chaste kiss, nothing close to what I want, but it’s the only way I can think to thank her.

When I pull back, I say, “The story gets better from here. The chief was Charlie.” Recognition dawns in her eyes. She doesn’t know him personally, but she’s heard me talk about him enough over the years that his name is familiar. “He must have called my parents, I know that, but he let me stay for a few hours. He showed me around the station and told me all about his job, then he let me sit in the truck and pretend to drive and turn on the siren. He made me feel important, which is something I don’t think I’d felt before. He told me I would make a great firefighter, and when we went back inside, he set me on the counter while they all made lunch. And for the first time, I saw what family could be like, you know?”

She nods against my hands, her eyes softening like melting ice cream, because she does know. It was the way she was raised, the way I discovered in her house as a teenager.

“I decided that day that I was going to be a firefighter. I think my dad always assumed I’d grow out of it, but I didn’t. After that day, I just tried my best to be as unproblematic as possible so they wouldn’t have anything to argue about. I didn’t want to give them any reason to regret me.”

“Grey,” she says after a long pause, seeming to search for the words.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

Her eyes find mine, so earnest it makes my chest ache. “I have so, so much to say that I don’t know where to start.”

Her words feel like sunshine being poured inside me, lighting up all the dark, shadowed places that have been festering since that day when I was a broken five-year-old boy. I want to stay here in this water with her forever. Until our skin grows pruny and the sun starts to brighten the sky. I don’t want this to end, this feeling, this moment, this blip in time where I feel lighter than I ever have before.

But then I notice the goose bumps prickling her shoulders, the way her teeth are starting to chatter. Despite my comment earlier about how the lake felt like bathwater, it’s actually pretty cold. And we’ve hardly been moving, letting the water chill us to the bone.

My hands slip down the slopes of her shoulders, squeezing her arms periodically until I get to her hands. “Let’s go inside and get warm.”

She nods enthusiastically, and I feel a stab of guilt in my abdomen that I’d gotten so wrapped up in the tangled mess of my childhood that I hadn’t noticed her growing cold against me.

We swim back to the dock, and I let her climb up the ladder before me, trying very hard not to watch the way her matching floral bra and underwear cling to her body. I don’t think I do a good job, because when she’s back on the dock, she turns around and smirks at me as she picks up her dress.

“You’re staring again.”

“I’d have to be dead not to, Finley.”

This makes her rich laughter echo across the lake, seeping beneath my skin and warming me in a way heavy clothes and blankets never could. I want to capture that sound and keep it for the days when memories threaten to swallow me whole.

She’s already dressed, her sundress sticking to her wet undergarments, as I tug my shorts and T-shirt back over my wet skin. By the time I’m buttoning my pants, she’s running up the dock for the back door, yelling over her shoulder about how she’s got dibs on the shower first.

“I have two showers,” I yell back, following after her at a leisurely pace.

“Yes,” she calls as she stops at the back door, her hand on the knob. “But I distinctly remember you going on and on about the custom shower you and Holden installed last year and how when you die, you hope you go in there, underneath your rain showerhead.”

A laugh climbs up my throat, and I tip my head back, letting it disappear into the sky. Her mouth stretches into a grin, and she watches me for one long moment, as if memorizing the sound of my laughter the way I did with her just minutes before. Then she hurries inside to take over my shower. Through the windows, I can see her stripping off her now damp dress as she runs toward the bedroom, and my laugh turns into a groan, because, damn, I’m in trouble.