Chapter 3
Asher
Her mouth is on mine, and my back hits the door before I've caught up to what's happening.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.
Her hands are in my hair. My hands are on her waist. The lock clicks somewhere behind me, and I don't remember her hands leaving my head to turn it.
Nate is going to kill me.
I know who she is. I've known since I walked up to her at the bar. Nora's sister. The widow. The one with the kids playing with Owen.
Nate's text in the group chat is sitting in my head like a flare:
FYI. Nora's sister and her kids will be coming too. Lost her husband a few months ago. She might not be very social.
I have a rule not to screw around with single moms. Too complicated. I've never known what to do with kids, Owen being the one exception. And that’s only because he’s Nate’s.
I read that text and walked up to her anyway, because I watched her sitting at that bar like she'd forgotten how to be a person, and something in me wanted to put a crack in whatever she was sitting under.
Wanted to make her laugh, or flinch, or flush, or do any single thing that wasn't the careful nothing she was doing.
I was being a gentleman. Sort of. For me.
I wasn't trying to hook up with her in Nate's downstairs bathroom.
Her teeth catch my bottom lip, and I lose the thought. I return it with a nip of my own, then suck the sting away, pulling the plump of her lower lip into my mouth and holding it there for a second longer than I should.
She makes a small sound against my mouth—not quite a moan, more like recognition—as if her body just noticed it was alive. The sound lands somewhere deep in me and rolls lower, settling heavy and warm at the base of my spine.
Her hands move flat against my chest. My shirt is still wet from Owen's water gun ambush at the pool, the damp fabric cold between her palms and my skin.
The towel around my neck slides off my shoulders and lands somewhere on the tile.
I don't care where. I don't care about anything except the way her fingers are curling into the fabric over my ribs, pulling me closer.
I pull back half an inch. Just to look at her.
Her pupils are blown. Cheeks pink in a way that the heat outside doesn't account for. Her chest is rising and falling fast, and her hand fists the front of my shirt like she's worried I'll change my mind.
"Hey." My voice is rougher than I want it to be. "You sure?"
"Don't." Her other hand grips my jaw. "Don't talk me out of it."
Okay then.
I kiss her again, harder this time. My mouth opens over hers, and I taste the remnants of the lemonade she’d been nursing by the pool all afternoon, tart and faintly sweet on her tongue.
Her hips press forward, and I push back.
I can feel her breath catch against my mouth, a small hitch that makes my pulse kick up.
I flip us around so her back's against the door.
My hand finds the hem of her dress. Slides up.
Her thigh is warm and soft under my palm, the skin smooth, and she shifts to let me in.
When my fingers brush the fabric between her legs, she's already soaked through it.
The swimsuit is slick, clinging to her, and I have to close my eyes for a second.
Jesus Christ.
She gasps into my mouth, and I swallow it, then drop my forehead against hers while I try to keep my hands steady. While I try to remember that this is a downstairs bathroom at Nate's house. That her kids are forty feet away. That her sister might come looking for her in the next ten minutes.
That she has not done this in a long time. Possibly a very long time.
I push the bikini down. The fabric slides over her hips and drops, and she steps out of it without letting go of me.
She makes a sound when my fingers find her—this stunned little noise like she didn't know she still had it in her. My forehead presses harder into hers.
"I've got you," I say, low, against her lips.
Her eyes close.
I work her slowly at first. Carefully. Watching her face for what she likes, watching her mouth fall open when I find the spot that makes her breath stutter, feeling her hand white-knuckle the back of my neck when I press in deeper.
Two fingers, then a slow circle, then back again.
Her hips start moving on their own. Chasing. Asking.
She's so wet it's embarrassing. For me, I mean. I'm embarrassing myself in my trunks with what she's doing to me, the front of them stretched tight, and every time her hip brushes me I have to bite back a groan.
Before I can stop her, she gets her hand between us and undoes the drawstring on my shorts.
Oh.
Oh, we're doing this.
Her fingers wrap around my cock, and my hips jerk forward without permission. I have to brace my free hand against the door beside her head and just breathe for a second. Her grip is firm, a little uncertain, and that uncertainty makes my chest ache in a way I don't expect.
"Audrey—"
"Yes."
That's all she says. Like she's answering a question I haven't asked yet, and she pulls me closer with the hand that's not making it hard to think.
I lift her.
She wraps her legs around me without being asked, dress rucked up to her hips, and her arms loop around my neck.
Her forehead drops to mine as I line myself up and push in slowly.
Excruciatingly. Every inch is a negotiation, her body resisting, and I have to stop halfway because the grip of her is so tight my vision flickers at the edges.
Fuck.
Her breath stutters against my mouth and her fingers dig into the back of my neck, her whole body shuddering once, hard, like a system coming back online after a long shutdown.
"Okay?" I get out.
She nods. Her eyes are wet. Not crying, just full, and I can see something moving behind them that I don't have a name for yet.
"Move," she whispers. "Please move."
I obey.
It isn't slow for long. She doesn't want slow.
Her hips meet mine on every thrust, her heels pressing into my lower back, the wet cotton of my shirt cold between us where her hands fist it between my shoulder blades.
The door makes a soft, repeating thud against the frame, and I can't do anything about that. What I can do is this:
I cover her mouth with mine before the next sound gets out.
She moans into me and I swallow it, low and broken, and god I love that sound—but the wall between this bathroom and the hallway is thin, and Nate's house is full of people I know and people she's related to and her kids are out there somewhere.
I keep my mouth on hers.
I get a hand between us. Find her with my thumb.
She gasps against my lips and I press the gasp back into her, kiss her through it, take it before it can become anything anyone else might hear.
I can feel her getting tighter around me, the flutter of her building, and I grind up as hard as I can and pound into her faster.
"That's it," I breathe into her hair when I let her come up for air. "That's it, doll, quiet now—"
She nods into my jaw. Bites down on the wet fabric at my shoulder instead, and the pressure of her teeth sends a jolt through me that makes my rhythm stutter.
She comes apart faster than I expect.
Her whole body locks, thighs clamping around me. She turns her face into my neck, and the cry she makes is muffled there, hot against my skin, vibrating through my collarbone.
The clench of her pulsing around me drags me right after her. I press her into the door and bury my face into her hair, trying not to make any sound at all and losing—a low groan tearing out of me that I muffle in the blonde silk of her hair.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
Her breathing is loud in my ear. Mine is louder. Her heart is fluttering against my chest and mine is hammering back. I can feel the exact second she starts to come back to herself, because her body goes from boneless to aware in one small inhale.
I lift my head.
She isn't looking at me. She's looking at the ceiling. Her eyes are bright, cheeks wet at the corners, and her mouth is doing something complicated, something that I can't read.
"Hey." I touch her jaw. Gently. "Look at me a sec."
She does.
There’s nothing shut down in her face. Whatever was buried at the bar is sitting right at the surface now, and I don't know what to do with it except hold still.
For one second, she looks almost surprised.
"I'm okay," she says before I can ask.
"Okay." I still search her face for confirmation. I don't know why, but I really fucking need it.
Her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. Not quite.
I ease her down to the floor and steady her until her feet are under her.
Then I turn my back while she puts herself together, because that feels like the right thing to do, even though I’m the one who just had his hand up her dress.
I retie the drawstring on my shorts with hands that aren’t as steady as I'd like.
Pick the towel up off the tile and sling it back around my neck like it's been there the whole time.
When I turn around, she’s at the mirror.
Smoothing her hair, pressing a knuckle under each eye, adjusting the strap of her dress so it sits right on her shoulder again.
There’s a faint pink patch high on her left cheek, almost to her jaw, where my stubble must have rubbed against her.
She notices it the same second I do. Her fingers press there briefly, and she doesn't try to cover it.
Her face in the mirror is calm. Composed. Settling back into something quieter than what was just on it.
She catches my eye in the glass.
"I'm going first," she says.
"Okay."
"Wait a few minutes."
"Yep."
She turns. Steps past me. Her shoulder brushes mine, and she doesn't react to it. I don't either, but I feel it down to the soles of my feet.
The lock clicks.
The door opens.
It closes again.
She's gone.
I stand there in Nate's downstairs bathroom and stare at the door she just walked through, trying to make my brain do anything other than replay the last ten minutes on a loop.
Fuck.
I drag a hand down the front of my face.
She's a single mom still grieving her husband. The sister of my best friend’s almost-girlfriend.
And I just fucked her against a bathroom door.
Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.
It takes me six minutes to look like a normal person again. I wash my hands and splash cold water on my face. Straighten my swim trunks. Check my reflection for anything obvious and find my eyes looking back at me as if they've never seen me before.
When I come out, the party is exactly where I left it.
Music. Kids shrieking from the pool. The smell of charcoal on the wind.
Nate’s at the grill with tongs in one hand and a beer in the other, talking with Nora and his mom.
Felicity’s still annoying Knox about something.
Owen and the other boy, Eli, squirt water past me with a Nerf gun, screaming, the little girl watching.
Audrey is back on the stool next to Declan.
Same stool as before. Same posture, mostly. There’s a plate in front of her now—pulled pork, fruit salad, and a roll she's already torn in half. Declan says something low, and she nods, saying something back. She picks up the fork and eats.
I make myself walk to the cooler and grab a beer. I say something to Nate that I won't remember later, and he claps me on the shoulder and laughs, pointing the tongs at someone, and I nod as if I’m following.
I’m not listening.
I’m tracking her.
To anyone else at this barbecue, she’s doing exactly what she was doing an hour ago. Sitting with Declan. Talking softly. Existing politely at the edge of things.
To me, she is in the fucking spotlight.
She isn't squinting into the light off the lake anymore. Her hand isn’t up, shielding her eyes.
Her shoulders, which spent the first part of the day up somewhere near her earlobes, have dropped.
The line between her eyebrows, the one I noticed before I even said hello to her, is gone.
In its place is a careful blank, a nothing she's putting on deliberately, because something is happening underneath it that she doesn't want anyone to see.
She is trying to blend in.
She is failing. Spectacularly. At least from where I'm standing.
Declan says something else, and she huffs a short almost-laugh, the kind that doesn't really commit to being one. She lifts a strawberry to her mouth and takes a small bite. Swallows it. Then lifts it again.
Something about that piece of fruit going into her mouth wrecks me for a second.
Get it together, man.
I try.
I really do.
I make conversation, help carry a folding table, throw a football with the kids in the side yard and let one of them tackle me so he can tell his friends. I take the long way to the bar so I don't have to walk past her. I take the short way back so I do.
She doesn't look up. Not once.
She is so good at it that I start to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. If the lock and the door and her mouth and her yes were something my brain manufactured to get me through a long summer afternoon.
Then she turns her face toward Declan to answer something, the late sun catching the side of her jaw, and I see the faint pink patch on the side of her cheek where my face rubbed against hers.
I didn't imagine it.
I take a long pull off my beer and look at literally anything else.
Eventually, the light turns golden, the cooler runs low, and everyone starts the slow chaos of leaving—beach towels gathered, sandals located, kids negotiating one more ten minutes that turns into twenty.
Audrey gathers hers.
I watch her without meaning to. Owen is bargaining, Eli is leaning heavily against her side, drooping from a long day at the pool, and Audrey is patient with both of them in a way that looks practiced and bone-deep at once.
She says goodbye to Nate. To Nate's mom. To Declan. She starts walking out with her sister, following the little boy and the older girl. She’s holding an overflowing bag, the little boy's sandles, a plate covered in foil, and somehow she isn't dropping any of it.
She almost makes it to the gate.
And then, for no reason I can name, she turns her head.
Across the yard, across the noise, across thirty feet of other people's lives—she looks at me.
Her face does nothing. Her eyes do everything.
Doe eyes.
It isn't long. Maybe half a beat. Then she turns away, stepping through the gate, and she’s gone.
I stand there with a beer I'm not drinking and watch the space where she was.
I'm the guy ladies know they can come to for a good time. No-strings-attached. Come for the ride, go home for real life.
No backstory. No commitments. No phone number to call the morning after.
It's not my first time hooking up like this.
So why does it feel like shit watching her walk away?