Chapter 17 The Ones We Keep
The Ones We Keep
The photograph that stopped me wasn't meant for Friday.
I came around the corner of the main lodge carrying a length of dock line I'd been splicing and found Kit and Bristol shoulder to shoulder at the long table on the lake porch.
Public display shots covered most of the surface.
New railings glowing in morning light. Families around the breakfast tables.
College kids playing cornhole beside the pool.
Every picture made Brewster Bay look polished, busy, and ready for the party at the end of the week.
Bristol's laptop showed me crouched over a dock cleat with my shirt off, hair still wet from the lake and both hands fighting a mooring knot that had seized in the rain.
I remembered the knot. I didn't remember anyone watching me work it loose.
Bristol's thumb hovered over the touchpad.
Kit covered her hand before she could close the folder.
"Wait," Kit said.
Bristol looked at her. There wasn't any shame in her face. Just the measured stillness she got when something private had been found before she'd decided to show it.
"There are more?" Kit asked.
Bristol held her gaze for a beat, then scrolled.
There were more.
Me kneeling beside a guest's stalled outboard with grease to my elbow.
Me carrying a sleeping kid from the end of the dock while his mother gathered life jackets behind us.
Me laughing with an older couple after I'd backed their trailer into the lake because neither of them could see over the boat.
Me sitting alone on the boathouse steps after closing, forearms on my knees, too tired to know what expression I'd been wearing.
None of the shots made me look larger than life. They made me look busy, dirty, amused, worn out, and unaware.
Bristol had kept every one.
I set the rope on the corner of the table.
Both women looked up.
Bristol's chin lifted. "I wasn't posting them."
"I know."
"They weren't for the display either."
"I figured that part out."
Kit's smile held more tenderness than teasing. She pulled out her phone, dug through an album buried years deep, and turned the screen toward Bristol.
Her first picture showed me at seventeen in a thunderstorm, soaked to the skin while I hauled a guest's boat against a broken cleat.
The next was me asleep on the Suttons' couch during winter break with one sock missing and a textbook open on my chest. Then me under the hood of Kit's car in a campus parking lot, frowning at an alternator while she photographed me through the windshield.
The years kept going.
I hadn't known about those either.
Bristol touched the edge of Kit's screen with two fingertips. Kit still held the phone, and their fingers met over a picture of me sitting on the lodge steps after a night shift, head tipped back, eyes closed.
"You've had these since before you were together," Bristol said.
"Long before." Kit looked at me. "He wasn't anybody's Smoke Show then. He was just Nash, doing too much for everybody and assuming nobody noticed."
"You noticed," Bristol said.
"Always."
Bristol turned back to the laptop. Her hand settled beside a photograph of me helping a little girl retie the string on a toy sailboat. "The public version is real. I chose him too. But this man doesn't know there's a camera."
Kit's fingers brushed hers again. "That's why you kept him."
Bristol nodded once.
I pulled out the chair across from them and sat. The sunset laid a gold path across the lake behind their shoulders. Between us waited two private histories of a man who'd spent years believing the only parts worth seeing were the ones that stayed useful.
"I don't know what to say," I admitted.
Kit reached across the table and took my hand. "You don't have to turn it into a speech, baby."
Bristol put her hand over ours. Her palm was warm, her fingers decisive. "You could let us keep looking."
That was easier.
I turned my hand and linked our fingers beneath hers.
The public photographs stayed spread around us. Neither woman reached for them.
Bristol closed the laptop and carried it inside. Kit tucked her phone away. I stacked the public prints and set the dock line on top so the breeze couldn't take them, then followed both women down the porch steps.
We stopped where the south dock gave way to a narrow strip of grass and smooth shoreline. The dinner crowd was gathering near the lodge behind us, but the last cabins blocked their view. Water touched the stones with a soft, steady rhythm.
Bristol stood between Kit and me, looking across the lake.
"I'm glad people know," she said. "About us. I wanted to be seen choosing you, and I'd make the same choice tomorrow."
I took her hand. "I know."
"But I don't want every piece of us fed into the same public story.
" Her thumb moved once over my knuckle. "I don't want what I have with you flattened until it's interchangeable with everybody else's relationship.
The photographs aren't embarrassing. They're mine because I saw those moments. I was there."
She spoke without apology, but her grip had tightened.
Kit stepped around her and took Bristol's other hand.
"Good," Kit said.
Bristol turned toward her. "Good?"
"I don't want you sanding off the private parts so you'll fit into a group picture.
" Kit tugged her closer until their shoulders touched.
"I want the woman who watches him fix a stranger's boat and keeps the picture because she loves the way he concentrates.
I want the girlfriend who'll kiss him in front of the whole lake, then save something softer for herself. That's the whole point of you, Bris."
The careful line of Bristol's mouth broke.
Not into one of her public smiles. Into something smaller and warmer that belonged with the pictures she'd never posted.
Kit saw it and cupped Bristol’s cheek.
Then Kit turned to me, caught the back of my neck, and kissed me.
Her mouth opened against mine with no trace of reassurance in it.
She kissed me because she wanted me, full stop.
Her tongue slid over mine, her body pressed into my chest, and the hand at my neck tightened when I pulled her closer by the waist. She tasted like iced tea and summer heat.
The low sound she made when my hand found the curve of her ass carried straight through my shorts.
When she eased back, her lips were wet and her eyes bright.
"You," she said, looking straight at me. "Still mine."
"Always."
"Good."
Kit kept one hand against my chest and reached for Bristol with the other.
Bristol came willingly.
Kit kissed her with the same hunger she'd given me.
Bristol's breath caught, then her mouth opened and her hand closed around Kit's waist. Their tongues met.
Kit's fingers slid into the hair at Bristol's nape, and Bristol pulled her closer until the soft front of her sundress pressed against Kit's shirt.
I stood close enough to feel the heat coming off both of them. My cock hardened against my shorts, and Kit noticed without breaking the kiss. Her free hand found mine and drew it to Bristol's hip.
Bristol leaned into my palm.
That small movement made it ours.
I kissed the line beneath her ear while Kit still had her mouth. Bristol shivered between us. One hand stayed on Kit's waist. The other reached back, caught my thigh, and held me there.
When Kit lifted her head, Bristol turned in my arms and kissed me next.
She kissed the way she did everything private. With complete attention. Her palms framed my face. Her tongue moved slowly against mine, testing pressure, changing angle when my breathing changed. Kit pressed against my side and ran her hand over Bristol's back while I kissed her deeper.
Bristol's composure didn't disappear. It became concentration, all of it aimed at my mouth.
She pulled back only far enough to breathe.
Kit rested her cheek against my shoulder and watched us with a smile that was proud, hungry, and nowhere near finished.
"Both of you," she said. "I want both of you tonight. Somewhere no one can turn it into a show."
Bristol's fingers curled into my shirt. "Somewhere we don't have to think about a lens."
I looked past them to the darkening water. The inlet beyond the northeast point had no houses, no docks, and trees thick to the shoreline. I'd anchored there alone plenty of times. Tonight it could hold something better than solitude.
"Give me ten minutes to fuel the pontoon."
Kit kissed my jaw. "Seven."
Bristol's mouth curved against mine. "We'll give you eight, baby. Don't waste them."
***
I got the pontoon off the dock in nine minutes because Kit spent the first two kissing me beside the fuel pump.
Beyond Brewster Bay, sunset had gone violet over the trees.
Kit sat on the bench beside the helm in her light shirt, pale-yellow bikini hidden beneath it, denim shorts and sandals still on.
One hand rested high on my thigh. Bristol had slipped her phone from the pocket of her sundress into the mesh bag beside the console before settling against my other side.
Neither woman tried to distract me from the controls.
They didn't have to.
Kit's thumb made slow circles through my shorts.
Bristol's fingers traced the inside of my forearm whenever my hand wasn't working the throttle.
Every few minutes one of them leaned in and kissed my shoulder, my jaw, or the edge of my ear, never enough to steal my attention from the dark water ahead.
It was worse than being teased.
It was being promised.
The main lake widened around us, black-blue beneath the first stars. Rosewater's lights shone around the southern bend. I steered north, past the rocky point and into the break in the trees where the inlet narrowed until the open lake disappeared behind us.
I pulled the throttle back. The engine softened to a murmur. Branches reached over the water from both sides, screening the pontoon from anyone who might pass the mouth of the inlet.
"This one?" Bristol asked.
"No houses. No docks. Nobody has a reason to come back here after dark."