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The slide is called the Viper.
The sign at the base features a cartoon snake and a near-vertical drop, and the line coils through three switchbacks before disappearing around a concrete wall painted to look like a jungle.
Sarah has read the statistics off the sign twice, out loud, and is currently chewing the skin of her thumbnail in a way you know as her pre-courage ritual.
"It's literally almost straight down," she says, not really to you, rather more to the universe, as though negotiating terms.
"Yep."
"Thirty miles per hour. The sign says thirty miles per hour."
Two men in neon yellow go screaming over the lip of the drop on an inflatable, vanish, then reappear as a distant splash and a whoop. Sarah watches this with the expression of someone reconsidering a life decision.
"I think," you say carefully, "that this one has your dad's name on it."
The relief that moves across her face is immediate and total and you don’t even feel offended because fuck that.
“Yeah, he'd love this. He's always saying he likes stuff like this."
Joel has expressed no such thing in your presence, ever. You know his water-park priorities down to the geometry of where he sits to catch the most shade and where the nearest water fountain is.
But you say none of this.
"I'll go get him. Hold our spot."
She nods as you slip away from her, heat coiling low in your belly that has nothing to do with the fierce Texas sun and everything to do with pure, unadulterated want.
You've been watching him all day.
That's the honest version of how you got here - not Sarah needs her dad, though she does, but also the accumulated weight of six hours in the sun watching Joel Miller exist in board shorts and not nearly enough shirt.
The way his back looks when he reaches up to adjust the curtains around the rented cabana. The specific flex of his forearms when he carries three bottles of water and a tray of food from the concession stand without asking for help. The smattering of dark hair tracing down from his naval and catching the light. The scar along his ribs that you know the feel of in the dark. The way his hand spread across the small of your back this morning when you were paying for parking, automatic, not for anyone's benefit, just there - proprietary and easy all at once.
You've been wanting his hands on you since approximately nine this morning when you pulled up outside his house and it's now past four.
The cabana curtain is half-drawn. Through the gap you see him in pieces - bare feet, one heel dropped off the lounger, the long stretch of his legs, the faded board shorts, the knot of the drawstring - then all of him, arms folded back behind his head, pulling the muscles of his chest and shoulders into long, clean lines, chest slick with a mix of sunscreen and sweat, jaw loose with sleep, sunglasses half-slid down his nose.
You stand there for a moment that you don't justify to yourself.
He is genuinely, stupidly beautiful and he has no idea, or pretends not to, and the combination of those things has been a problem for you since the first time you saw him at the auto shop eighteen months ago.
You step inside and pull the curtain closed, muffling the noise of the park.
"Joel."
“Mm.”
"Joel." You crouch beside the lounger and lay your hand on his forearm, skin sun-hot to the touch. "Wake up."
He makes a low sound in his chest, and one hand drops and finds yours without a single second of conscious effort.
His palm is rough, warm and large and it swallows the back of your hand entirely. The ache that's been sitting at the base of your spine all day sharpens itself into something with an edge.
"Sarah wants you for a slide," you say, keeping your voice completely reasonable.
"Mm,” he murmurs again.
"Big one. Scary. She wants her dad."
One eye opens and finds you, blurry with sleep, and his expression does that soft private thing it does when you're the first face he processes.
His thumb moves slowly across your knuckles, back and forth.
"Tell her I died," he says.
"Joel."
"I'm serious. Tell her it was peaceful."
You push his sunglasses back up with your free hand, and he catches your wrist - not tight, just certain, the way he holds things he means to keep. Both eyes open all the way, and he looks at you the way he's been looking at you all day in a lower register, the same look made louder now that you're close and it's just the two of you behind a canvas curtain.
His gaze drops.
You're in a multi coloured bikini that ties at both hips, the one you bought knowing what it would do to him. He looks at you the way he always does - a single thorough pass that starts at your face and doesn't rush anywhere, takes in the curve of your shoulders, the neckline, the flare of your hips, the ties at either side - and then comes back to your mouth, his jaw tightening faintly.
"Come here," he says in a tone that indicates it’s not a request.
You lean in and he meets you halfway, his hand at your wrist guiding you in. Then his mouth is on yours and he tastes like the Coke he finished an hour ago and sleep and him.
His other hand comes off the back of his head and finds your face, his thumb against your cheekbone tilting you where he wants you. He kisses you like he's been waiting, slow and deliberate, taking his time with your bottom lip in a way that makes your toes curl into the warm concrete.
"We have maybe ten minutes," you say into his mouth.
"We have twenty. You know what these lines are like.”
He's already sitting up, and suddenly you're inside the bracket of him, his knees on either side of yours, his hands dropping from your face to your hips. He squeezes once, both hands, his fingers digging into the soft flesh there with a low, satisfied sound that goes directly to the base of your spine.
“God, I've been thinkin’ about this all damn day."
"You've been thinking…”
"You've been walkin’ around in this thing since this mornin’. Tits swayin’, ass jigglin’…fuck I love your ass.”
His hands move to curve around the swell of your ass, fingers kneading gently, then they slide back up your sides, thumbing over your ribs, tracing the line of the bikini’s edge up to where it sits snugly under your breasts.
“Drove me out of my mind."
"You’ve been too busy organising stuff, and sleeping, to notice,” you reply with a faux pout.
"I saw you, baby."
His mouth finds the side of your neck and you tilt your head back and just let it happen, your fingers curling into the hair at the back of his head.
He drags his lips along the column of your throat, open-mouthed, and you feel the scrape of his stubble on sensitive skin and shiver. His hands are moving - palming up over your hips, his thumbs tracing the hollows at the fronts of them, appreciating you with his hands the way he always does, like he's cataloguing.
“You're so goddamn…” he starts, low, against your throat.
"Don't," you say, because when he does this, talks low in your ear about what you do to him, you completely lose the ability to be a functional person.
He makes a low, amused sound and works the tie at your left hip loose. The knot at your right follows, unhurried, the material tossed to one side, and then his hands are on bare skin. He makes a sound that is not amusement anymore - rough, involuntary - as his palms curve over you. He pulls back to look at you in the stripped-down way he has when it's just the two of you, no pretense in it, just want laid plain on his face.
"Lie back," he says.
“Joel…” you say warningly, even though you’re already doing exactly as he’s asked.
He comes with you, one forearm bracing beside your head, the other hand spanning across your stomach. He's looking down at you like he always does - taking his time, reading you - and his hand is warm and large against your belly, and you feel the muscle there jump under his touch.
"Joel," you say again, this time not meaning it as anything except his name.
"I got you." He drops his head and drags his mouth from your throat, over your collarbone, nosing the straps of your bikini top aside one after the other before finally taking the fabrics between his teeth and pulling it down hard, making you gasp. The wet heat of his mouth closing over one hardened nipple causes you to arch up into him with a groan you swallow fast.
His hand slides slow down your stomach, over the jut of your hip, fingers curving inward. You’re already wound tight from the day and the accumulated want and the specific knowledge of his hands, and when he finally touches you where you need it most you make a sound that isn’t quiet enough and have to bury it in the meat of his shoulder.
Outside, a speaker plays something loud and bass-heavy. Children shriek as they run past, the water park absolutely continuing to exist whilst your boyfriend prepares to fuck you.
And you couldn’t give a damn.
Joel doesn't rush. He never rushes this part, which is its own particular torture - those thick fingers reading you with complete attention, learning what makes your breath hitch, pressing precisely where it makes your hips roll up. You feel heat building in long, deep waves and you press your face into his shoulder as your fingers dig into his back.
"You're so wet," he says near your ear, rough and quiet, and you want to die a little. "That water from the slides baby, or…?”
“What do you think?” You breathe, not waiting for the rest. "All day, Joel…” His fingers curl and you have to clamp a hand over your own mouth.
“All day what?”
“All day I’ve been thinking about this,” you confess.
“Really? Fuckin’ in a cabana with little old me?” He teases pushing one digit then another through your slick folds and into your heat.
“Fuck!” You gasp. “Oh my God…”
“Joel’ll do.”
You snicker a laugh that quickly becomes a moan.
“Asshole.”
“Mm…let’s keep your asshole for an occasion when we got more time,” he murmurs into the skin of your throat and your whole body shakes.
He works you apart with his hand until your thighs are trembling, your free hand fisted in the lounger cushion, his name a broken thing you keep pressing into his shoulder every time the sound tries to get away from you.
He watches your face through it with that focused, dark-eyed attention fixed on you like there's nothing else worth looking at in the world. Like you’re the most interesting thing that has ever happened in his life.
When you finally breathe out his name as a please he gets his shorts dealt with, and you reach down to feel the full, hard length of him, tip already oozing.
“Eager, Mr Miller?”
“Fuck,” he hisses in response. “Don’t tease me like that baby.”
“Like what?” You purr, stroking him firmly, thumb sweeping over his precum.
“Goddamn devil,” he growls, mouth covering yours, tongue sweeping inside and meeting your own.
Without further preamble, you hook your ankle behind his thigh and pull him in.
The moment he pushes into you, you both stop.
The stretch of him, the heat, the fullness…your whole body sighs around him. His jaw tightens, his eyes closing for a moment, and then he opens them and looks at you.
"Christ," he says, very quietly, like it's not meant for you.
"Move," you tell him.
He rolls his hips in a long, slow pull that makes your back bow, and the sound you make is absolutely not quiet, no possible way to make it quiet, and you have to turn your face hard into his shoulder and bite down.
“You feel so good, baby, so perfect. Like this pussy was just made for me.”
“Maybe it was,” you whisper. “No man’s cock makes me feel like yours does.”
He groans against your temple, low and controlled, and his pace builds from the slow deliberate warmup into something that is using his whole body - his hips snapping, the lounger rocking faintly, one of his hands gripping your waist and the other braced by your head.
You can feel every inch of him. You've wanted every inch of him since his hand was on the small of your back in the parking lot this morning and here you are with his body driving the breath out of you in a water park cabana while his daughter is nervously waiting in a slide queue.
“You like that, baby?” He mutters. “You like feeling my cock inside you?”
“Yes,” you whimper, ‘yes, Joel, yes…”
He palms over your breast, his thumb dragging across the nipple, and you dig your nails into his shoulder.
"Right there," you breathe, because your hips have taken on a direction of their own, angling up to take more of him, desperate and shameless. "Don't…don't stop…”
"Wasn't gonna."
His hand slides down your side, over the flare of your hip, then he squeezes again and you feel his pace stutter, like he physically can't help himself, like the curve of you in his palm short-circuits something.
"You have no idea," he starts, rough and half-finished, and his hand finds where your bodies join, his thumb pressing your clit in exactly the right place, and that's the end of your ability to track any conversation.
You come in a wave that starts low and breaks hard, and what comes out of you is almost nothing - a sharp, swallowed exhale, his name losing all its syllables, your whole body clenching around him and your fingers leaving marks in his shoulder.
He fucks you through it without mercy, reading you with his hands and his eyes and his body, and when the pleasure finally crests and rolls you feel entirely wrung out and still wanting more.
He chases it a minute later, his rhythm going deep and uneven, his face buried in the curve of your neck, a harsh breath of your name against your skin.
“You want me inside, baby?” He groans. “Want me to fill you up? Want me so deep?”
“Yes,” you beg, “please Joel,” because you haven’t failed to notice all the cute little kids in their bathing suits and hats, splashing in the shallow waters of the park, nor failed to consider what it might be like to have one of your own with his eyes and mop of dark hair.
“Fuck…” he grunts, then he shudders once, full-body, and the weight of him settles on you like something solid and right as he floods you.
Neither of you moves for a moment as his cock twitches, pushing the last remnants of him deeper.
Outside, the speaker switches songs and a child screams in total delight.
Joel lifts his head and looks at you. His eyes are still dark, still warm, and he brushes your hair back from your face with his thumb like it's the obvious next thing to do with his hand.
He looks at you for a long, quiet moment as you both begin to breathe steadily again, and you see the settled thing in him - the specific stillness that comes over him sometimes when he has your face in front of him, like this is where things make sense.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you agree.
He pulls out, the loss of him making you whimper, and sits up. Ever the gentleman, he reaches for your bag and pulls out a pack of baby wipes, carefully running one over your swollen centre and the inside of your thighs before sweeping it over his wilting cock.
Then he retrieves your bikini briefs and reties both hip knots with careful, practiced hands, smoothing the fabric back into place, and helping you fix your top. He presses his lips once to the tip of your nose - that small, private Joel Miller period mark, there, good, done - and stands.
You check your phone camera. Your hair is a disaster, but you've been in the sun for five hours so that's entirely explicable. Your lips are swollen and there’s a flush in your cheeks. But it’s hot out so…
Joel pulls up his shorts, runs a hand back through his own hair, finds his sunglasses, and somehow looks composed except for the colour across his throat and the way his eyes are still dark when they find yours.
"Ready?" you say.
"Mm." He rolls his shoulders, clears his throat and becomes a man who was simply napping in a cabana. "She better still be in that line."
"She's fine, Joel."
"I'm just sayin'. Don’t think I ain’t seen the way she’s been lookin’ at some of the boys round here in their shorts showin’ off their six packs.”
”She’s fourteen.”
”I’m aware.”
He holds the curtain open for you, and his hand drops to the small of your back as you step out into the full light - automatic, easy, there and then not there - and the afternoon hits you both like a wall.
Sarah is five people from the front, and the moment she spots Joel she lights up, that quick unguarded happiness she never quite succeeds in playing cool.
"Finally," she calls.
"Yeah, yeah." He steps into line beside her and she immediately begins presenting the slide's statistics to him with the energy of someone who has had too long alone with their anxiety and is ready to share the burden.
Joel looks up at the near-vertical drop, at the cartoon snake, at the sign that says thirty miles an hour, and his expression goes carefully neutral.
"You wanna do that?”
"Together. It'll be less scary with you."
He looks at the drop then looks at his daughter.
"Fine," he says.
Sarah's face splits open. "Yes…”
"I'm makin' no promises about what noises come out of me."
"You're definitely going to scream.”
"I am not gonna scream babygirl…”
They bicker warmly up the line, Sarah gesturing at the drop with both hands, Joel studying it with the face of a man calculating his dignity against thirty miles per hour. He glances back at you once - quick, a single beat - and there it is. Everything underneath, all of it, warm and dark and not for anyone else.
You lean on the railing with your water bottle and watch them. His hand on her shoulder, loose and automatic, her talking with her whole body at him, him listening like there's nothing worth hearing in the world except this.
Your chest is full of something you've stopped trying to name.
Up above, the Viper drops its near-vertical line against the bright sky. Another pair of strangers take the plunge and emerge from the splash at the bottom howling in triumph.
Joel is absolutely going to scream.
You genuinely cannot wait.