Chapter 5: Touch of a Stranger
The stranger’s name was Luke. He’d told me twice, and I’d already forgotten the first time, the sound lost in the roar of my own panic. His hand, which had been resting casually on the bar, now lay on my bare thigh. The touch was warm, heavy. It felt like a claim staked.
My skin prickled, a revolt of goosebumps racing away from the point of contact. The sensation was intolerable. It wasn’t just the touch itself; it was the texture of his palm, slightly rough, against the unbelievable softness of Sabrina’s skin. My skin. I could feel every individual ridge of his fingerprints. I stared at it, this foreign object violating my space, and my mind short-circuited between a lifetime of male instinct—a territorial urge to knock it away—and the dawning, horrific understanding of what this body signified in this moment. An invitation.
“You’re quiet,” Luke said, his thumb moving in a tiny, almost imperceptible circle.
I flinched. The motion sent a jolt through me, a direct line to a place in my body I refused to mentally acknowledge. “Am I?” My voice was a thread.
“Compared to your friends over there.” He grinned, nodding toward the booth. “They seem like a lot.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see them watching. Andrea had her chin propped on her hand, a smile playing on her lips. She gave a little wave. Encouragement. It was a bolt of nausea mixed with a twisted, inexplicable thrill. She was seeing me, Sabrina, being approached. She was approving. The dissonance made my head swim.
His hand slid. It was a deliberate, slow migration, an inch up my thigh, away from my knee, toward the hem of the tiny bikini bottom. The warmth intensified. The weight of it was anchoring me to the stool, to this nightmare. I could feel the pressure of each finger individually.
“You’re really tense,” he murmured, leaning in closer. His breath smelled of beer and lime. “Still thinking about those spicy tacos?”
Before I could form a syllable, his other hand came up. It didn’t go for my waist or my arm. It went behind me, palm open, and settled directly on the curve of my ass, just below the waistband of the bikini bottom.
The world narrowed to that single point of contact.
The fabric was a flimsy barrier, less than nothing. His hand was big, warm, and it cradled the swell of flesh with a casual familiarity that stole the air from my lungs. It was a possessive, intimate grip, completely at odds with the five minutes of stilted conversation we’d shared. My entire body went rigid. A cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck. The sensory input was overwhelming, all wrong: the soft give of the flesh under his hand, the way my new center of gravity seemed to pull toward that touch, the sheer, audacious physicality of it.
From the booth, I saw Andrea’s smile widen. She said something to Jess, and they both laughed. My wife was laughing while a man she’d never met had his hand on my ass.
Luke’s fingers flexed, just slightly, a testing squeeze. My stomach lurched.
“Tell you what,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, confidential rumble that vibrated in my ear. He nodded toward a nearly-full bottle of tequila and two plastic cups a waiter had just sat in front of him. “It’s too loud in here. Would you like to go for a walk on the beach? We can bring the rest of this bottle. Watch the stars come out.”
His hand on my thigh gave another gentle, persuasive stroke. His other hand remained exactly where it was, a hot, undeniable brand.
The invitation hung in the thick air between us, alongside the smells of fried food and salt. A walk on the beach. In the dark. With a stranger. With tequila. In this body.
Every cell in me screamed to shove him away, to run back to the booth, to Andrea, to safety. But safety was an illusion. Safety was my wife pushing me toward this. Safety was a body that felt like a grotesque costume. If I ran back now, what would I be? Sabrina, the prude, the buzzkill, the one who couldn’t handle a little harmless fun. They’d tease me all night. Andrea’s smile would turn puzzled, then slightly disappointed.
I looked at Luke. His face was expectant, confident. He’d done this before. This was a script he knew by heart. I was just the latest line.
I looked past him, at the vast, dark maw of the ocean. The sound of the waves was a relentless sigh. Out there, it was just the wind and the water and the indifferent sand. A different kind of trap.
His thumb moved again on my thigh. The touch was no longer just physical; it was a question. It was a lever being pressed, and I was the mechanism waiting to spring.
I opened my mouth. The tequila, the fear, the bizarre, crushing weight of my wife’s expectation, it all coalesced into a single, breathless word that floated out of me, thin and high and utterly foreign.
“Okay.”