Authors: Jocelyn Kates
Chapter 17
Danny was pretty well “knackered” when he got back to his cabin that night. He’d eventually had to physically prevent J.T. from ordering yet another round, because he showed no signs of slowing. Those Australians must be bottle-fed beer to develop such a remarkable alcohol tolerance.
Falling down heavily onto his couch, he let his head settle back against the cushion and closed his eyes. The ocean breeze rolled in from the open door, the soft humidity of the evening air embraced him, the sound of crashing waves and island birds lulled him into a half-sleep.
After who knows how long, a sharp sound—a light, staccato tapping—broke the steady lullaby of island noises. Reluctantly rolling his head forward, Danny opened one eye and scanned the room. A figure stood beside the end table near the open door, and he jumped up from the couch, emitting a cry of alarm.
As soon as he stood and his eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room, he could see clearly who it was. Adele.
“Hi,” she said. He could hear that her voice was thick with tears.
“Jesus, you scared me to death.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I knocked.”
“I heard.”
“Listen, can you talk for a minute?”
Danny knew that he was probably a bit too sauced to have any sort of in-depth conversation at the moment, but couldn’t resist. Plus, he didn’t really want Adele to know that he’d been drinking—not that she would judge, but it just seemed like a fairly unattractive thing to do. He wished that he’d brushed his teeth before passing out on the couch.
“Sure,” he said, and sat carefully back down.
Adele walked toward him with hesitant steps. Given the fact that they’d had sex several times, it amused Danny to see her demure behavior around him.
“Can I sit?” she asked, gesturing to the open cushion next to him.
“By all means.”
Adele sat and immediately began talking. Her words were jumbled and rambling, and it took her quite some time to reach the message she seemed to want to convey—or at least for Danny to understand that message—but ultimately she reached a place of clarity and determination.
“The point is,” she said, and Danny felt grateful for the summary that was about to follow. “We’ve all done things we’re not proud of. Hey, I worked at a soul-sucking corporate law firm for years. So it’s not fair for me to judge what you’ve done with your work just because it happened to personally impact me. It’s hypocritical. Plus, you know, life is short and I really, really like being around you.”
At that last sentence, she placed one hand shyly on Danny’s knee. She’d been staring at the coffee table while she spoke, and now looked up and caught his eye. She looked so deadly serious that Danny had to smile a little; thankfully, she took his cue and did the same.
“I really like being around you, too,” Danny said, and as the words left his lips he realized it was the simplest, most obvious truth. The agonizing and analyzing he’d been doing over his feelings for Adele seemed pointless, self-indulgent. It all came down to this one truth: he loved to be around her. That was all. And that was okay. In fact, it was perfect.
His smile widened as he settled on this smooth stone of truth in his mind, and her smile widened in return. They stared at each other for a few moments like grinning idiots, and Danny felt every nerve in his body come alive.
Adele glanced down to straighten her sundress, then looked back at Danny. He smiled back at her as silence settled comfortably over the room, and then, as though his voice was speaking without his agency, he heard himself say:
“I gotta tell you, Adele, I’m really smashed right now.”
She stared at him for a beat, her eyes inquisitive, her lips pursed together, and Danny felt his stomach tighten.
Idiot.
But then, Adele exploded into another bout of laughter, this time doubling over toward him so that her torso fell onto his thighs, and he could feel the energy of her laughter transferring to his body—she was like a little girl being tickled, her entire body consumed by the act.
Adorable
. He wrapped his arms over her and let deep belly laughs reverberate through his body.
When they quieted down, they landed in a state of exhausted peace. Adele left her head lying in Danny’s lap, and he gently stroked her hair, gazing dazedly down at this glorious little woman in his home.
“I’m glad you came,” he said.
“Me too.”
“What made you change your mind about me?”
“A bunch of things, I guess,” she said. “Partly it was realizing my own hypocrisy. The fact that I had no right to get up on some moral high ground. Partly it was the things I’ve been learning here, about how it’s not about judging other people, how that’s a recipe for complete misery when you put energy into approving or disapproving of other people’s actions. And partly it was realizing that life is too short, and that the best thing, the most meaningful and powerful and happiness-creating thing we can do with our time is to give love.”
At that last word, Danny’s quadriceps involuntarily tightened, and his hand stopped mid-stroke in Adele’s hair. He felt her stiffen as well. He tried to cover, quickly resuming his stroking as though nothing had happened, but Adele turned her head so that she could look up at him and spoke quickly, her voice now higher and hollower.
“Not that, you know, I’m saying I love you, I barely know you, that would be crazy, but, you know, just, love, like the love we feel for, for humanity, you know?”
Danny was amazed at the sudden transformation of this eloquent, poised woman into a babbling, awkward teenager—but he understood. He’d felt something at that word—
love
—too.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Totally, I know what you mean.”
“Do you?” she said, her voice returning to its normal register and a sly smile creeping onto her face. “Do you really, drunky?”
He laughed at the jab, and playfully pushed her hair into her face. She brushed it away, moved his hand to the back of her head, and turned to look down. Before Danny even had time to process what was happening, her mouth was on his crotch, her breath hot. The pressure of her lips transferred through the fabric of his shorts, and he could feel himself get hard in an instant. Without moving her mouth, she nimbly undid his shorts and tugged them down, revealing his rock hard erection.
Tossing her hair out of her face, she looked up at him, both hands coming to hold him firmly, beginning to move slowly up and down. “Not so drunk, I see,” she murmured, and her voice was like liquid heat being poured down over him.
He could only moan in response, but thankfully she wasn’t expecting a reply. The next moment, she’d turned back down, and her hot, wet lips were on his cock. She took him inside her mouth, at first just the tip, swirling her tongue over the head, and then another inch, then another, until she’d taken all of him, all the way up to the base.
He moaned again, more loudly this time, as she slid her mouth up and down, her tongue dancing over his shaft as she did so. The pressure was almost unbearably blissful, and with each throb he felt as though he could go over the edge at any moment. She ran her fingernails lightly over his inner thigh with one hand, and caressed his stomach and chest with the other. She slid her mouth up to the tip, taking him all the way out of her mouth, and then teased him with her tongue. A whimper escaped his lips before he could stop himself, but the next moment, her lips were surrounding him once again.
She began to slide up and down faster, and he gripped the couch cushion as if that would help ground him. As the pace quickened, he began to thrust back against her, staring up at the ceiling in blurry-eyed pleasure.
He glanced down at her just at the moment that she flicked her eyes up to him, her mouth still moving up and down on his cock. Locking eyes with her, he knew there was no point in fighting anymore. He surrendered himself to his orgasm, thrusting up against her mouth, a wave of ecstasy sweeping through his entire body, keeping his eyes on hers the whole time.
As the last shudders of his orgasm faded away, he fell back against the couch yet again, breathing heavily. A moment later, Adele had climbed up from the floor and was curling up beside him. She rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his chest. He closed his eyes.
The air was cooler outside than usual, and the ocean breeze stronger. It felt good, especially with the heat of his orgasm still on his skin, and the blanket of Adele’s hair on his shoulder. He could feel his breath slowing, his thoughts blurring, the heaviness of sleep overtaking him.
Then Adele shifted slightly, and he felt her breast against his side. His eyes snapped open, and he lifted her head gently from his shoulder.
“Hey!” he said.
“Hey,” she drawled sleepily.
“No going to sleep yet,” he said.
She furrowed her brows. “Why not?”
Danny grinned mischievously. “My turn,” he said, and carefully pushed her onto her back on the couch, arranging a pillow beneath her head before burying his face between her legs.
Chapter 18
Dawn came quietly, its warming glow creeping its way over the sparkling ocean and tide-dampened sand, across the dewy lawn, and into Danny’s cabin. When the first tickle of its rays hit Adele’s face, she opened her eyes. Instead of the anxiety and disorientation that normally hit her upon waking up in a place to which she wasn’t accustomed, she smiled serenely.
She let her eyes wander around Danny’s room, taking in all the details she hadn’t had the light—or interest—to observe night before. The books, the journals, the surfing paraphernalia, the collection of empty coconuts. When her gaze alit on him, lying fast asleep across from her, she wriggled over next to him, sliding one arm around his waist and fitting her body against his. She smiled at the mental image of her as big spoon and him as little.
She lay like that for a few minutes, savoring the smell of his skin and the sound of the waves; but soon, the room had brightened to the point where she knew it must be time for her to go back to her cabin and get ready for asana practice.
As she gently separated herself from Danny, he awoke. He looked at her in surprise for a moment, and then a candid grin blossomed on his face.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she whispered back, smiling down at him. “I’ve gotta run. I need to get to practice.”
He looked disappointed for a moment, but quickly recovered. “Okay babe,” he said, and she felt her stomach flutter at the term of endearment. “Have a great morning.”
“I will,” she said, and leaned down to peck him on the lips. “You too. Go get your surf on.”
“I will.”
She climbed out of bed and pulled on her clothes, which had somehow wound up in all corners of the room the night before. Giving Danny one last kiss—she just couldn’t help it—she stepped gingerly out of the bedroom and across the large main room. Reaching the front door, which had stood open to the porch all night, she broke into a light jog as she crossed the path toward her cabin.
As soon as she reached the edge of the main lawn and passed onto the field of tall grass that led to her cabin, a figure stepped out from behind the shadows of the palm tree that stood nearest Danny’s cabin. With smiling eyes and somber lips, Val strode toward his porch and the door beyond it, which still swung open in the gentle morning breeze.
In retrospect, Adele would remember that the walk to practice the next morning was peculiarly quiet—as if all the normally noisy birds and bugs and other critters of the isle had suddenly disappeared. At the time, however, she couldn’t be bothered to notice anything around her. She was walking on air, supported and surrounded by a bubble of happiness that the external world couldn’t penetrate.
Now that the beautiful simplicity of her and Danny was revealed, she laughed aloud at how complicated she’d managed to make it. She felt a tinge of regret at having wasted so many days being angry and angsty that they could have spent enjoying Bali together—especially now that she and her yogi peers were about to leave the beach resort for the inland town of Ubud, where they’d complete their training—but felt confident that they had many more happy days before them. Sure, she wasn’t quite sure how they would make it work, since he was based here on the island and she had her life to return to back in the States, but she knew they would figure it out.
The yoga room hummed with a restless energy. Rather than sitting quietly on their mats, centering themselves before practice as they normally did, her peers were shifting from foot to foot, fiddling with their clothing, adjusting their mats on the floor. Drawing her attention to the outside world for the first time since leaving Danny’s bedroom, Adele felt the strange energy shift to her. It reminded her of the way the air felt before a big thunderstorm back in humid St. Louis where she’d grown up.
“Come to your mats,” Ajuni said, his voice low and resonant as always. It was the first time he’d initiated class with a verbal command rather than by sitting silently on his mat.
The class obeyed, and a quiet finally came over the room. Adele followed Ajuni’s instructions to connect to her breath, to bring her awareness only to this room, to her mat, to her body, to her breathing. Reluctantly, she forced herself to let go of the thought of Danny for now.