Today was unusually hot for Ireland. The kind of day that lingers like a sultry secret. Lana lay stretched across the sun-warmed rocks at the edge of the Irish Sea, her Gucci bikini soaking in the sun’s flattery, brown sunglasses shielding eyes far too discerning to miss beauty—when she chose to look.
She wasn’t here for attention. She preferred the quieter perch, well away from the laughing, shrieking students plunging themselves into the surf like human cannonballs. Their recklessness made her smirk behind the pages of her age gap romance. Oh, the irony.
Age gap. Power dynamics. The kind of story she told herself she only read for the writing. Her teeth grazed her bottom lip, almost unconsciously, when the forbidden kiss finally happened. Her legs shifted—a subtle uncrossing, recrossing—as if mimicking the tension on the page.
And then she imagined—just for a second—what it might feel like to be the older woman in the novel.
Unbeknownst to her, she already was.
A pair of eyes had been watching her for weeks now. Younger, bolder, and far more deliberate in her presence than Lana had ever acknowledged.
Until today.
There was a sudden splash—water lapping against Lana’s sun-kissed skin, droplets landing rudely on the open pages of her book.
She gasped. “Excuse you! You just—”
But then her gaze shifted, and so did her breath.
She lowered her glasses just slightly. The young woman in the water smiled—drenched, radiant, her suit clinging in all the wrong places Lana wished were right.
Lana blinked. “You… got my book wet,” she finished, but her voice lacked heat.
The girl tilts her head. “Wasn’t aiming for the book.”
Lana exhales a slow, nearly imperceptible laugh and looks back down at the pages—then immediately closes the novel.
This can’t be happening, her mind scolds. She’s half your age, Lana. Behave.
But there’s a flicker—a pulse just beneath her calm exterior. A familiar tension from the book’s earlier pages, now seeping off the page and into her very real, very warm afternoon.
It seems today… she’s no longer just reading the fantasy.
She might be living it.