Chapter 5 — The Count #2
Hot water hit my shoulders, my chest, running down my body in warm rivulets that carried the scent of sex and sleep and Kiki’s vanilla sunscreen into the drain.
She was already wet, golden hair plastered to her neck and shoulders, water beading on her skin, and when she reached for the soap, her breasts lifted with the motion, full and heavy and tipped with pink nipples that tightened in the cool air rushing through the cracked window.
“Soap,” she said, pressing the bar into my palm. “You have places. I have places. We should clean them.”
I lathered my hands and reached for her, and the moment my soap-slick palms touched her waist, the shower stopped being about cleaning up and started being about something else entirely.
My hands slid up her ribs to her breasts, cupping their weight, thumbs circling her nipples until she sighed and leaned into the touch.
Her skin was warm and smooth under my fingers, the soap making everything slick, and when she turned in my arms, her back pressed against my chest, her ass grinding against my half-hard cock in a way that was absolutely deliberate.
“Kiki,” I said, and my voice was rough with want I had no business feeling this soon after coming twice. “We have to—”
“We have to get to my family's dock by ten,” she finished, reaching behind her to wrap her hand around my cock, soap and water making her grip slippery and perfect. “I know. My mother texted while you were still asleep. Breakfast on the dock, everyone’s coming, the usual Memorial Day weekend wrap-up.” She stroked me slowly, her thumb circling the head where I was already getting hard again, and I bit back a groan.
“Fruit, pastries, Cooper’s famous breakfast casserole that's absolutely not famous and absolutely not his recipe. You know the drill.”
I did know the drill. I’d been to a hundred Bishop dock breakfasts over the years.
Mark firing up the grill for bacon. Caroline arranging platters on the picnic table.
The siblings wandering through in various states of wakefulness, the younger crowd clustered at the far end of the dock with coffee and sunglasses, the parents laughing about something that had happened the night before.
Normal summer-circle stuff. A morning where everyone was a little tired, a little sunburned, and completely comfortable in each other’s space.
A morning where the man who’d fucked Mark Bishop’s daughter twice in the last twelve hours and was currently getting a hand job in the shower should probably not show up with a hard-on and a guilty conscience.
“Kiki.” I caught her wrist gently, pulling her hand away from my cock before she could finish what she’d started. My body protested violently. “We need to talk about last night. About you staying over. About what we tell your family.”
She turned in my arms, water sluicing down her body, soap bubbles clinging to her golden skin, and looked up at me with those blue eyes that could have sold ice to penguins. “I already told them.”
The words landed like a brick. “You what?”
“I told my mom yesterday, before the party. I said I was spending the night at your house.” She reached for the shampoo, squeezed a dollop into her palm, and worked it through her wet hair with casual efficiency. “So that’s what I did. I spent the night at your house. I didn’t lie.”
The loophole was so perfect, so Kiki, that for a second I could only stare at her.
She’d told the truth. The exact, literal truth.
She’d spent the night at my house. She’d spent it naked in my bed, with my cock inside her, coming on my sheets.
None of that had been in the statement. She’d given her parents the cover story and the real story in the same breath, and they’d heard exactly what she wanted them to hear.
“You're terrifying,” I said, and I meant it as the highest compliment.
She laughed, rinsing shampoo from her hair, water streaming down her face and neck and between her breasts.
“I’m honest. There’s a difference.” She reached for the conditioner, her movements easy and domestic, like she’d been using my shower for years.
“My mom said fine, be safe, don’t drink too much, see you at breakfast. Standard Bishop mom stuff.
She trusts you, Luke. They all trust you. That’s the whole point.”
The whole point. The trust I was standing under right now, hot water running down my back, my hands still tingling from the feel of her soap-slick skin, was so thick I could have built a house with it.
Mark Bishop trusted me with his coolers, his dock, his boat keys, and by extension, his daughter.
And I had taken that trust and turned it into something that involved Kiki’s pussy gripping my cock at seven in the morning while she counted orgasms like they were collectible tokens.
Something must have shown on my face, because Kiki’s expression softened. She stepped closer, her wet body pressing against mine, soap-slick skin on skin, and cupped my face in her hands.
“Hey.” Her voice was gentle, warm, completely certain.
“I chose this. I chose you. Every part of it. The families don’t get a vote on what happens in your bedroom, or mine, or anywhere else I decide I want to be with you.
” She kissed me, soft and lingering, her wet lips against mine.
“They love you. I love you. Those things can exist at the same time without canceling each other out.”
She said “I love you” like it was a fact, not a confession, and the casual certainty of it hit me somewhere behind my sternum and stayed there.
I kissed her back, one hand sliding into her wet hair, and for a long moment we stood under the spray with steam rising around us and water running between our bodies and nothing else in the world mattered except the warm weight of her against my chest.
Then she pulled back, smiled that sunshine smile, and reached for the tap. “We’re going to be late. And I need to borrow a shirt. That blue one, I think. The soft one.”
She stepped out of the shower, water cascading off her golden skin, and reached for a towel without asking where they were kept.
She knew. She’d found them last night, or she’d guessed, or she’d simply decided that my bathroom was now partly hers and the towels lived where she expected them to live.
She dried herself with efficient motions, wrapped the towel around her hair, and padded naked across my bedroom to the dresser where she pulled open the second drawer, the right drawer, and selected the blue t-shirt I’d been planning to wear.
She pulled it over her head, and it settled around her thighs, loose and soft, and the sight of her, wet hair, my shirt, bare legs, that confident Bishop glow, standing in my bedroom like she owned it made something possessive and warm settle in my chest.
“Your turn,” she said, tossing me a towel. “I’ll find us coffee.”
She left the bathroom without looking back, and I stood under the cooling spray with water running down my face and the certain knowledge that Kiki Bishop had walked into my life, my house, my bed, and my shower, and she had no intention of leaving any of them.
The fifty suddenly seemed very, very real.
***
The Bishop dock was chaos in the best possible way, the kind of summer-morning mess that felt like coming home even when it wasn’t your home.
Paper plates everywhere. Coffee cups sweating condensation onto the weathered boards.
The grill smoking at the far end where Mark was flipping something that smelled like bacon and maple, and the lake beyond the railings was flat and calm, morning light turning the water to hammered gold.
I’d pulled on clean shorts and a polo, tried to look like a man who hadn’t spent the night fucking his best friend’s daughter, and failed spectacularly if the way Kiki kept smiling at me was any indication.
She wore my blue t-shirt over a pair of cutoff denim shorts, her golden hair loose and still damp at the ends from our shower, and every time she moved, reaching for a coffee, passing a plate, laughing at something Cooper said, the families around us saw a happy, bright young woman enjoying the first proper morning of summer.
What they didn’t see was the way her fingers lingered on my arm when she handed me a cup.
The way her blue eyes found mine across the dock with a heat the Carolina sun couldn't explain. The glow on her skin that came from being well-fucked and well-loved, and the casual confidence with which she occupied the space beside me, like she’d claimed it and everyone else was just going to have to adjust.
I saw it. God help me, I saw every second of it.
So did the other five.
Tatum noticed first, because Tatum noticed everything. She bounced over with a plate of fruit, copper-red hair escaping its ponytail, freckles dark against her fair skin, and her blue eyes went wide the moment they landed on Kiki.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, leaning close enough that her citrus-scented hair tickled my ear.
“You did it. You actually did it. She’s glowing.
Like, actually glowing. I can see it from space.
” She squeezed my arm, her grin splitting her face.
“Was it good? Was it amazing? Did she come like a freight train? She looks like she came like a freight train.”
“Tatum,” I said, and my voice came out strangled.
“Sorry, sorry, Responsible Luke voice, I know.” She popped a strawberry into her mouth, still grinning.
“But seriously. Good for you. Good for her. Good for all of us, because if Kiki can break you, the rest of us have a shot.” She winked and bounced away, calling something over her shoulder about floatie rights that made no sense to anyone but her.