17. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
I can’t be in that house tonight.
Not with the balloons still deflating in the corner of the kitchen, pink and purple going soft and wrinkled. Not with the party debris that the staff haven’t finished clearing. Not with his sentence still echoing in my ears - I don’t want the year to end - like a bell that won’t stop ringing.
So I take a bottle from the cabinet where he keeps the good wine, and I walk down the lawn in the dark, and I find the boathouse at the edge of the water where no one goes.
It’s old, this building. Weathered wood and salt-stained windows, a dock that creaks under my feet, water slapping against the pylons like the ocean is trying to tell me something.
I sit at the end of the dock with my feet dangling above the black water and I pour wine into a glass I didn’t bring and realize I’m going to have to drink from the bottle like the disaster I apparently am.
I drink.
The stars are out. Thousands of them, scattered across the sky like someone threw a handful of light and didn’t bother to clean it up.
Back home - my old home, the apartment with the water stain on the ceiling - you couldn’t see stars.
Too much city glow, too much light pollution, too much world in the way.
Here, at the edge of Callum Lippitt’s property, looking out at his private stretch of ocean, I can see everything.
I hate that I find it beautiful.
I hate that I’m finding a lot of things beautiful lately.
Behind me, the boards creak.
I don’t turn around. I don’t need to. I know who it is by the weight of the footsteps, by the way the air changes when he enters a space. He’s been doing that since the first day - walking into rooms and changing them just by existing.
“Go back to the house, Callum.”
“You took my good bottle.”
“Then bill me.” I still don’t turn. “Add it to what I owe you.”
Silence. Then more creaking, coming closer, and then he’s sitting down beside me on the dock. Close. Close enough that I can feel the heat of him down my whole side, even through the night air.
I hate that I’m counting it.
I hate that I notice exactly how many inches are between his shoulder and mine - four, maybe five - and that I’m wondering what would happen if I closed them.
“You have to stop,” I say.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like that.” I take another drink from the bottle. It burns going down, which is good. I want something to burn. “Saying things like you don’t want the year to end. Following me into the dark.”
“You want me to stop following you?”
“I want you to pick one.” I turn to face him, and it’s a mistake, because his face is right there - lit by starlight and shadow, closer than I thought, close enough that I could count his eyelashes if I tried. “Be the cold man who bought a wife, or be this. You don’t get to do both to me.”
“Do both what?”
“Both.” My voice cracks on it, and I’m furious that it cracks. “You can’t stand in your study and lay out terms like I’m a business deal and then kiss me in a ballroom like I’m - like you-” I can’t finish. There’s no end to the sentence that doesn’t reveal too much.
“Like what?” His voice has dropped. Gone low and rough, nothing like bored. “Like you’re what, Nichole?”
“It isn’t fair.” I look away, back at the water, because I can’t have this conversation while I’m looking at his face. “To do both to me. It isn’t fair.”
“You think I want to feel this?”
The question hits me somewhere soft. I feel him shift beside me, feel the heat of him move closer by half an inch.
“I had six years of wanting nothing,” he says. “It was quiet. I could live inside it. I woke up and I went to work and I came home to my daughter and I didn’t want anything I couldn’t have. It was manageable. It was safe.”
“So what changed?”
“You know what changed.” His jaw works in the starlight. “A woman sat down on my staircase and came apart and would not let go of my daughter, and I have not had one quiet day since.”
I can feel something splintering, all the walls I’ve built.
“So don’t,” I say. “Don’t talk to me about fair. Don’t act like I’m the one making this complicated. You wrote the contract. You set the terms. You-”
“I know what I did.”
“Then why are you sitting here?” My voice is rising. I can’t stop it. “Why did you follow me? Why do you keep looking at me like-”
“Like what?”
“Like you want something you’re not allowed to have.”
The silence rings.
We’re both breathing too hard. I can hear it - his breath and mine, ragged in the salt air, the water slapping beneath us, the distant sound of the house settling into sleep.
“Then we’re the same kind of stupid,” I say, and my voice cracks on it again, and I’m furious that it cracks-
And then I don’t finish.
Because he kisses me.
Or I kiss him.
Later I won’t be able to say which. It doesn’t matter.
The argument simply stops existing, swallowed whole.
One second we’re sitting there with four inches between us and all our careful words, and the next his mouth is on mine and I have a fistful of his shirt and nothing else in the world is real.
It isn’t gentle.
It’s every word neither of us finished. Every look we tried not to give. Every night on opposite sides of that room, listening to each other breathe and pretending we weren’t counting the inches.
I kiss him like I’m angry, because I am. He kisses me like he’s starving, because he is. My hand fists tighter in his shirt and his hand fists in my hair and somewhere in the roaring of my own pulse I think: this is the thing I swore I would not do.
I’m doing it anyway.
I cannot make myself stop.
He gets me up off the dock - I don’t know how, I don’t remember moving - and my back hits the boathouse wall, weathered wood rough against my spine and all of him pressed against my front.
His mouth leaves mine just long enough to drag down the line of my throat, and I hear myself make a sound I did not authorize, something between a gasp and a moan that comes from somewhere deep.
“Nichole.” His voice is raw. “Tell me to stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Tell me to-”
“Don’t.” I grab his jaw, force his face back up to mine. “Don’t ask me to be sensible right now. I can’t be sensible. I’ve been sensible my whole life and it hasn’t gotten me anything.”
He makes a sound against my mouth that I feel all the way down. His hands find my waist, my ribs, the curve of my hip. Like he can’t decide where to be first. Like everywhere is urgent.
Salt air. Water knocking under the boards. My pulse going everywhere at once.
I pull his mouth back to mine because I can’t stand the half-second without it.
This is what I was afraid of.
This is exactly what I was afraid of - the wanting, the needing, the way he’s unraveling me with nothing but his hands and his mouth and the sounds he makes when I pull his hair.
I was afraid that if I let myself have this, I would never be able to give it up.
I was afraid that wanting Callum Lippitt would be like wanting air, and I was right, I was exactly right, and I don’t care anymore.
His hands slide under the hem of my shirt, palms warm and greedy as they skim up my bare stomach.
“Fuck, your skin’s so soft,” he murmurs, voice low and rough against my ear. He pushes the fabric higher, baring my ribs, then my breasts. His thumbs brush over my nipples, already tightened into hard peaks. “Look at these… already reacting for me.”
I arch into him with a soft gasp.
He leans down, mouth hot, and takes one nipple between his lips, sucking hard. “Mmm… perfect,” he groans around it, tongue swirling before he tugs gently with his teeth. He switches to the other breast, sucking just as greedily. “You like that? God, I could suck on these all night.”
“Yes-” I breathe, fingers sliding into his hair, holding him there.
He keeps lavishing both nipples - sucking, licking, nipping - until they’re flushed and aching. One hand stays busy at my breasts while the other drifts lower, slipping beneath the waistband of my pants. His fingers glide over my lower belly, then between my thighs.
The second he feels how slick I am he stills for half a second, then a dark, satisfied growl rumbles out of him.
“Gosh… you are so wet,” he says, voice thick with lust. “Fuck, baby, you’re soaked already. Is all this for me?”
I can’t answer, just a shaky moan as he parts my folds with two thick fingers. He strokes slowly along my clit first, circling it deliberately, then presses one finger inside, then a second.
Then he curls his fingers, pumping deep while his thumb keeps working my clit. At the same time his mouth returns to my nipple, sucking harder, tongue flicking.
“That’s it… ride my hand,” he encourages, voice husky between pulls of his mouth. “Fuck, you’re getting even wetter. You gonna come just from my fingers and my mouth on these pretty nipples?”
I rock against him, hips rolling, breathless. “Don’t stop-”
“Not a chance,” he promises, fingers driving faster, crooking perfectly against that spot. He switches breasts again, sucking the neglected nipple deep into his mouth with a wet sound. “Mmm… taste so good. Keep those legs open. I want to feel every single quiver when you clench around me.”
I’m moaning into his shoulder now, one hand still tangled in his hair, the other gripping his forearm as he fingers me deep and slick and relentless. The dual pleasure - his mouth greedily worshipping my nipples and his fingers fucking me open - has my thighs trembling.
“Oh my god, you are so fucking responsive,” he groans. “I can feel you getting close. Gonna make a mess all over my hand, aren’t you?”
I’m right there, clenching hard around his fingers, about to tip over-
And then there’s a sound.
We freeze.
Small. Wrong. Something that doesn’t belong to the water or the night.
We feel it at the same time - the shift, the intrusion, the sudden awareness that we’re not alone. We break apart, breathing like we’ve run a mile, his forehead dropping to mine.
“Did you hear-”
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t let go of my waist. Not yet. His hands are still there, under my shirt, against my skin, and neither of us wants to move.
Then a voice. Small and frightened, from the dark at the top of the boathouse path.
“Nichole?”
It goes through me like cold water.
I turn, his hands still on me, my mouth still swollen from his.
And there, at the edge of the lawn where the path meets the dock, stands Olivia.
She’s barefoot. Her white nightgown glows in the starlight. The one-eared rabbit hangs from her fist, dragging on the grass. She’s come down in the dark, looking for the one person who always comes when she calls.
She found her.
Pressed against the boathouse wall in her father’s arms.
“I had a bad dream,” Olivia says, in the smallest voice in the world. Her eyes move between us, trying to understand what she’s seeing. “Why are you biting each other?”
Callum makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be despair. His hands slide away from my skin. The night air rushes in where his warmth was, and I feel the loss of it like a physical thing.
“We weren’t biting, sweetheart.” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “Grown-ups sometimes-”
“Were you fighting?” Olivia takes a step closer, her face worried. “You looked like you were fighting.”
“No, baby.” I push off the wall, straightening my clothes, trying to look like someone who wasn’t just making a series of questionable decisions against a boathouse. “We weren’t fighting. We were just… talking.”
“Talking with your mouths touching?”
Behind me, Callum coughs.
“Yes,” I say. “That kind of talking. It’s a grown-up thing.”
Olivia considers this with the seriousness of a philosopher. Then she nods, apparently satisfied, and holds out her arms.
“I had a bad dream,” she says again. “Can you come back?”
I cross to her. I scoop her up, and she wraps herself around me like she’s been doing it her whole life - because she has, I realize. Her whole life with me. These weeks that have somehow become her whole life with me.
“Of course,” I say into her hair. “I’ll always come back.”
Over her shoulder, I look at Callum.
He’s still standing by the boathouse, one hand braced against the wall, looking at us with an expression I can’t quite read. There’s heat in it - the echo of everything that was just happening between us. But there’s something else too. Something tender. Something that looks almost like awe.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” I tell him.
He nods.
I carry Olivia up the lawn, toward the house, toward the room she has nightmares in and the bed I’ll sit beside until she falls asleep.
The boathouse stays behind us, dark and quiet, keeping its secrets.
I don’t look back.
If I look back, I’ll go to him.
And if I go to him-
But I can’t think about that now. There’s a child in my arms and a nightmare to soothe and a whole complicated life to figure out.
The wanting will have to wait.