Chapter 4 — The First Line Crossed #3
Kiki was in the shallow end, golden hair slicked back from her face, water beading on her shoulders.
She'd changed into a white bikini that glowed under the pool lights, the top cut high enough to showcase the full, round curves of her breasts, and the bottoms sitting low on her hips in a way that made every guy within eyeshot track her movement like she was broadcasting on a frequency only they could hear.
Owen Kerr had found a spot beside her, sandy hair dark with water, saying something that made her laugh.
Ryan Pike was on her other side, leaning against the pool wall with that cocky ease, his eyes on the place where her bikini top met the golden skin of her chest.
Good. This was good. Men her age. Attention she deserved. The world working the way it should.
Except every few minutes, Kiki's blue eyes found the house. Not the patio. Not the pool. The house. My bedroom windows, dark against the night, and the look she gave them was so specific, so deliberate, that I felt it in my chest like a physical touch.
Tatum was everywhere, the way she always was.
Red hair flying as she cannonballed off the diving board for the third time, landing with a splash that sent water arcing over half the patio.
She came up shrieking with laughter, pushed her hair out of her face, and immediately started organizing some kind of relay race that involved floating on pool noodles backward while singing.
Chaos, pure and cheerful and exactly what Tatum brought to every room she entered.
Reese had claimed a spot on the steps, honey-brown eyes warm as she listened to someone's story, her glossy chestnut hair catching the pool light in strands that looked like they'd been dipped in gold.
She laughed, that full-body Reese laugh that made everyone around her smile, and reached out to touch the arm of the guy telling the story, a warm, genuine connection that said she was exactly where she wanted to be.
Shay was holding court near the drink station, dark hair wild from an earlier dunk, vivid blue eyes dancing as she delivered what had to be a filthy punchline to a cluster of guys who were clutching their red cups and howling.
She caught me watching, raised her cup in a toast, and mouthed something that looked suspiciously like "still being good?
" before turning back to her audience with the satisfied grin of a woman who knew exactly how loud she could be.
Penny had claimed the lounger closest to the pool, platinum blonde hair sleek even wet, green eyes sharp behind the sunglasses she'd pushed into her hair.
She wasn't doing much, which somehow made people work harder to impress her.
Two guys had drifted into her orbit, then a third, and she let them compete for her attention with the lazy amusement of a woman who knew exactly how much damage a small smile could do.
Every time the conversation started to pull too many eyes toward Kiki, Penny shifted, laughed, touched someone's arm, and the whole little cluster turned with her.
By accident or design, she kept angling them toward the house, toward the dark windows, toward the part of my life I was still pretending belonged only to me.
Eden moved through it all with quiet efficiency, dark brunette hair pulled into a loose knot, hazel eyes tracking the patio like she was running calculations.
She adjusted a speaker. Passed a drink to someone who needed it.
Laughed at the right moment in Tatum's relay race.
And never, not once, stopped watching the angles.
Who was where. Who was looking at whom. Which conversations needed redirecting and which ones could run their course.
It was magnificent. Six women operating in what appeared to be perfect synchronization, having the time of their lives with people their own age, while underneath it all, the machinery of something else turned with quiet, relentless precision.
I stood at the grill with a pair of tongs I wasn't using and tried to believe my own eyes.
This was what should happen. Beautiful women in their early twenties should be pulling attention from men their age.
They should be laughing, flirting, swimming under string lights, living in the freedom that came with being young and wanted and exactly where they belonged.
For stretches of three, four minutes at a time, I almost convinced myself.
Then Kiki would glance toward the house, and the spell would break.
Or Shay would tell a joke so loud it drowned out whatever Owen was saying to Kiki, and the timing was too perfect to be accidental.
Or Eden would drift through a conversation near the shallow end and somehow leave Kiki alone with Ryan for exactly thirty seconds before Tatum splashed them both and changed the subject.
Or Penny would call someone over to look at a photo, drawing eyes away from whatever was happening by the steps, and the redirection was so smooth it looked like nothing at all.
The fun was real. The laughter was real. The splashing and the music and the way the pool light turned everyone's skin into something otherworldly, all of it was happening exactly as it appeared.
But so was the plan.
I felt it like a current under still water. The after-party was happening on my patio, in my pool, under my lights, but the real event was happening around it, through it, in the spaces between splashes and laughter and the way Kiki's eyes kept finding the dark windows of my house.
My house. My rules. My chance to be the adult in the room. The only problem was that these girls were all adults too. Technically. Legally. Physically, in ways my body would not let me ignore. So why did wanting them still feel like crossing a line I could not uncross?
The adult in the room was standing by a grill he wasn't using, watching a golden blonde in a white bikini laugh at something a sandy-haired guy had said while her eyes tracked the path to his bedroom, and the disconnect between what everyone thought was happening and what was actually happening was so vast I could have driven a boat through it.
I set the tongs down. Brushed my hands on my khakis. Said something about checking the indoor speakers to nobody in particular, and walked through the sliding door into the relative quiet of my kitchen.
The music followed me, muffled by glass and distance, and through the window above the sink, I could see the blue glow of the pool and the shapes of bodies moving through it like something from a dream I hadn't asked to have.
I needed a minute. One minute of quiet. One minute where I wasn't watching Kiki Bishop look at my house like she already knew which room was mine.
I left the kitchen lights off and kept walking.
The model-ship room was at the back of the house, down a hallway most guests never found, and the door clicked shut behind me with a sound that felt like exhaling after holding your breath too long.
Lamplight warmed the space instead of overhead fluorescents, and the worktable under the window held the half-finished hull of the USS Cairo like something I'd been in conversation with for months.
I hadn't turned on the main light. Didn't need to.
The desk lamp cast enough warmth to see by, and the blue glow from the pool filtered through the curtains in thin stripes that painted the floor and the lower shelves where finished models sat in quiet rows.
USS Monitor. CSS Virginia. The river ironclads I'd built on commission for a museum in Tennessee, each one scaled down to eighteen inches of precise detail, every plate hand-cut and fitted, every rivet placed with tweezers and more patience than I had any right to claim.
Tools lay on the worktable in the order I used them: fine brushes in a mason jar, Exacto knives with their caps on, a pot of black paint thinned to the consistency I liked, reference photos pinned to a corkboard beside the window.
The Cairo's hull was walnut, steam-bent to the gentle curve of the original, and the armor plating, individual iron rectangles no bigger than my thumbnail, waited in a small tray beside the hull, each one drilled with tiny holes for the rivets that would hold them in place.
I picked up a piece of plating between my thumb and forefinger, feeling the weight of it, the cool metal against my skin, and some tight thing in my chest began to loosen.
This was mine. This quiet, this focus, this kind of patience that lived in my hands and nowhere else.
The party noise reached me as a distant pulse, bass through floorboards, laughter muffled by walls and hallway, and on my phone, the exterior camera feed showed the blue glow of the pool and the shapes of bodies moving through it like fish in an aquarium.
Everyone where they were supposed to be. Everyone having the kind of night they'd come for.
I set the phone face-down on the worktable and reached for the hull, turning it under the lamplight to check the seam where the bow met the waterline.
The walnut had taken the stain evenly. No cracks.
No warping. Just clean lines and the satisfaction of wood that had been shaped by hands that knew what they were doing.
The door opened behind me without a knock.
I knew it was Kiki before I turned. Knew it from the sound of bare feet on hardwood, from the vanilla-sunscreen scent that reached me a half-second before she spoke, from the way the air in the room changed when she entered it, like someone had opened a window to a warmer climate.
"Hey," she said, her voice quiet, almost careful. "Sorry. The door was open a little."
I turned, and there she was, golden hair loose around her shoulders, still damp from the pool, wearing a thin white cover-up over what had to be that white bikini.
Her feet were bare, leaving wet prints on the hardwood that would dry before anyone noticed, and her blue eyes took in the room with a curiosity that looked nothing like performance.