Chapter 4 — The First Line Crossed #7
"It's the fifty, and the fact that you want it, and the fact that you're lying here with your cock getting hard inside me again and trying to look responsible about it.
" She laughed, low and warm, and the sound traveled through my ribs and settled somewhere behind my sternum.
"You're the least responsible man I know, Luke Whitaker.
Responsible men do not let the sweetest woman in the summer circle corner them in a pantry and make them forget their own name.
Responsible men don't look at six women in bikinis and think, I want all of them.
Responsible men have boring lives and boring houses and they don't build ironclad models in rooms with locked doors. "
She was right. She was so fucking right it hurt.
I cupped her face in my hand, feeling the warm skin of her cheek against my palm, and she turned into the touch like a cat finding sunlight.
"The model room," I said. "That's what did it. You asked to see it, and you meant it. You weren't pretending."
"God, no." Her eyes softened. "Those little ships.
The way your hands get so careful. The lamplight, and the reference photos, and the fact that you built that whole world in there because nobody else was going to build it for you.
" She kissed my palm. "That's the Luke I fell for.
The one who makes tiny rigging with tweezers at two in the morning because the world outside isn't giving him what he needs.
I didn't fall for Lake Luke or Hot Luke or any of the Lukes the girls talk about.
I fell for the man in the locked room who thought nobody would ever want to come in. "
Something cracked in my chest. Not pain. Something older, something that had been sealed shut for years.
Kiki saw it. Of course she did. Her eyes got tender, and she laid her head back down on my chest, her ear pressed over my heart, and her arm curled around my ribs like she was holding something valuable.
"I'm staying tonight," she said. Not a question.
A statement of fact, delivered with the same golden certainty she brought to everything.
"I'm not sneaking out. I'm not going home and pretending this didn't happen.
I'm sleeping right here, in your bed, with your cum inside me, and in the morning I'm going to make coffee in your kitchen and wear your t-shirt and probably sit on your counter while you try to make eggs, and you're going to love every second of it even though it terrifies you. "
I laughed. Couldn't help it. The sound came out rough and real, and her body shook against mine with her own laughter, and for a second we were just two people in a bed, happy, the way people are supposed to be.
"Fifty times," I said.
"At least." She kissed my chest. "Maybe more if you're good."
"I'm never good."
"That's why I like you."
The peace settled deeper. The kind of peace that comes after a long fight, when you finally stop swinging and realize the other person was on your side the whole time.
I'd expected guilt. I'd prepared for it, built a whole architecture of self-recrimination ready to collapse on my head the second my orgasm faded.
Instead, I got this: Kiki Bishop's weight on my chest, her breath warm against my skin, her pussy still holding my cock like it belonged there, and the clear, terrifying knowledge that I had crossed the line and found something on the other side that felt like coming home.
She was right about the model room. She'd seen the locked door and asked to come in, and I'd let her, and now the door was open and the room didn't feel private anymore.
It felt shared. The same way my bed felt shared, and my kitchen would feel shared in the morning, and my life, which had been so carefully, lonely mine for thirty-eight years, was filling up with something I couldn't name yet but recognized on a cellular level as belonging.
As much as I might fight it, I wanted Kiki every single day she would let me have her.
Kiki's breathing slowed. Her body grew heavier against mine, her arm lax across my ribs, her golden hair tickling my chin. She was falling asleep, here, in my bed, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like she'd been planning to do it all along.
Maybe she had. The other five had their roles, Tatum with the chaos, Reese with the warmth, Shay with the dirty truth, Penny with the glamour, Eden with the quiet design, but Kiki had been the one to walk through the door first. To find the locked room.
To see the man inside it and choose him anyway.
I lay there in the dark, one hand in her hair, feeling the rise and fall of her breath against my chest, and understood that the most dangerous consequence wasn't the sex or the secrecy or the fact that the summer circle still trusted me to be the man who kept the night contained.
The most dangerous consequence was the peace.
The clarity. The certainty that I had made the right choice for all the wrong reasons, or maybe the right reasons all along, and that whatever came next, the other five, the families, the summer spinning out into something I couldn't control, would be worth it because Kiki Bishop was asleep in my arms and she had no intention of leaving.
Fifty times. Minimum.
I closed my eyes and let the lake sounds carry me toward sleep, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn't feel alone.