Chapter 21
“Are you breaking and entering?”
Today is a good reminder that I no longer have a best friend on the police force, a guy who I can name drop if I’m ever in a pickle with one of his buddies in uniform. But thankfully, it’s only my sister who finds me about to hop over the gate leading to the community pool in her condominium complex.
“I’m a guest using my sister’s pool,” I tell Caroline, backing away from the fence when she approaches the gate.
Caroline scoffs. “You can ask me, you know. Or Finn.”
“I already bothered you enough,” I say. It’s true. I’d love to think I’m set to do something big entirely on my own—like sue the police department—but I do need the guidance of my sister who is far smarter than me even though I’ll take that bit of information to the grave before I let her know it.
She pushes the gate open. “Speaking of which, try to avoid the police for the foreseeable future. I’m sure you’re not going to be high on their list of favorite civilians to help once you file everything.”
“What about the fire department?”
“Them too.”
“And if I need an ambulance? ”
Caroline shrugs. “Try Uber first.”
“Damn. Over a dog. To think this all could’ve been avoided if people weren’t such insensitive assholes.”
I look over my sister’s head when I see Harper walk up the path. She folds her arms over her black one-piece suit.
“What are you doing here?” Caroline asks.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Harper says and they both look at me.
“I’ll explain later,” I tell Caroline as I motion for Harper to go through the gate I hold open. “Come on. We’ve got work to do before snoopy neighbors catch us.”
Caroline shakes her head. “Make sure they don’t call the cops, Riley.”
Harper tosses a striped towel on an empty lawn chair and looks around. “What are we doing here exactly?”
“I told you, you should show Lucas how cool you are. Do you know what tandem surfing is?”
Harper shakes her head.
“Surfing.”
“Well, obviously.”
“And.” I hold up a finger. “Acrobatics.”
“So you want to enter a competition and show off even though we don’t know what we’re doing?”
“Why not? We just need one good trick.”
Harper raises her face to the sky. “Riley, we—
I step forward, stealing back her attention. “I don’t want to tell you how to feel about how you grew up. I don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed about. I think it’s actually cool. Really cool. And I think the only one who would think it’s cooler than me is Lucas.”
“Riley—”
“Surfing,” I interrupt. “It’s magical for me. It always has been. But Lucas is scared and I think we need to make it extra magical. And look. Getting Tides back? It’s kind of on me. It’s my thing to deal with. Teaching him to surf is going to be your thing and I respect that. It might just be nice if we do something together, you know?”
Harper gazes at the pool hesitantly.
“Alright, look. The first time I met Nate, he saved my life.”
Harper whips her focus back to me.
“I was… the point is, after that day? Nate was the most important person in my life. He got me in the water. He kept me in the water.”
Harper’s face softens instantly.
I step closer to her. “ You . You’re the most important person in Lucas's life now. I know you have a hard time believing it, but you’re his superhero, Harper.”
I watch the way Harper’s pillow lips recoil into a line, and I have the urge to stroke her cheek, to coax them back to where they belong. Stepping forward, I almost do just that but instead keep my hand down.
“But,” I continue. “You have to show him how awesome your superpowers are.”
Stepping back, I pull off my shirt, tossing it onto the chair where Harper’s towel sits, and then I quickly turn, cannon-balling ungracefully into the pool.
When I break through the surface, Harper is soaked and perhaps not very amused, but I splash at her anyway.
“Get in, Tink. We’ve got work to do.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I grit out through my teeth as I hold her wet, slippery ankles. “You’re a lot heavier than you look.”
“I’d bend down and hit you but I’d lose my balance,” Harper snarks. “This was your idea. Maybe you should hit the gym.”
She has a valid point .
“Okay.” Her body dips as she fills it with a full breath. “Ready?”
I see the depth marker at the side. “Hold on.” My toes scrape against the concrete floor as I slowly move back inch by inch. If Harper is going to flip backwards off my shoulders, she needs to land in the right spot.
“This is fine.”
“You need to land deep enough,” I rebut. The water reaches the bottom of my chest, and I keep going. “Can’t risk you getting hurt doing this voluntarily. Someone might see us as unfit to raise Lucas."
The moment the dark joke leaves my lips I recognize the Freudian slip.
From us …as if I have any claim over Lucas.
The idea is crazy. But then again, we are about to sue a police department for possession of a dog .
Harper wobbles again. “Okay, okay, stop. You’re not standing straight.”
“No shit,” I mumble unenthused, as if I’m not the one balancing a woman on my shoulders while gaging the depth of the pool by my toes. I back up so I’m off the slope. “Alright. Ready?”
Once again I feel Harper take a deep breath.
“Listen, you’re right I’m out of shape and about to scrap this whole idea. You have about three more seconds. We do it now or we don’t do it at—"
My body is pushed down by her force and all I hear is a splash. I quickly turn around and by the time I do, Harper breaks through the pool’s surface with a huge smile.
“Did you do it?”
I didn’t really factor in how I wouldn’t exactly be able to see Harper pull off this stunt until now. But she takes two quick strokes closer to me and flings her arms around my neck and that tells me all I have to know.
I also, maybe hadn’t given enough thought to the fact that tandem surfing might put us in this situation—close, too close for my brain’s comfort, but somehow not close enough to please my body.
I’m tense, teetering between the fine line of shock and…what is this feeling? It’s like I’ve got it behind one side of a wall and I’m trying to peek over and see what it is.
I’m fucking happy again.
Because of Harper.
I’ve drifted off the edge of the slope and I wrap one arm around her as I begin to tread water. “Was that cool?”
“So cool,” she whispers, her breath warms the skin of my neck. “The coolest.”
We both smile. And like her performance, I can’t see Harper’s grin. But I feel it against my neck and it might be the best thing I’ve felt in months.
It feels like peace, like healing, like a spark of light in a deep, dark well of endless loss. This closeness is totally unexpected, and totally…not all that right.
Judging from the way Harper makes no move to let go, to swim away, I have to wonder if her mind is telling her the same thing, that something can look wrong and feel so damn right.
It’s wrong because she’ll always be Nate’s wife, even when he’s gone.
It’s wrong because I’ll always be Nate’s best friend—his brother—even when he’s no longer here.
But then I hear Harper’s own words from that day in the backyard.
“You can be more than one thing, Riley.”
And god help me, I know now you can want more than one thing too. Because I want to honor and respect my best friend especially now. But between the softness of Harper’s thighs wrapped around my middle, and her smooth, slick cheek against my beard, I know that I also can be filled with a wild desire to find out how she feels everywhere inside and out.
As I tread, her body moves softly up and down against me and I feel it, goosebumps on her skin, the puckering of two buds on her chest through her one-piece swimsuit.
I don’t even realize my free hand finds the small of the back until it begins circling. “Are you cold?”
When Harper shakes her head, the sweep of my scruff along her jaw sends my mind spiraling, and I arch my back she moves up my body instead of down where she’d quickly find my cock now straining against my swimsuit.
I should let go.
She should let go.
We should both let go and swim away from each other.
But one of Harper’s hands finds the back of my neck and I barely can keep the hiss from escaping my mouth when her short nails scratch lightly at my skin. I lean back into the touch, which makes room between us, but not the kind of safety we need, the one that puts us behind our respective boundaries. Because now we’re face-to-face. We’re on the border about to meet in the middle, which happens to be the point of no return.
Maybe the pounding of my heart inside my chest is the alarm sounding. Or maybe it’s a song of anticipation, an eager encouragement to find out what it’s like to kiss a woman I once couldn’t stand being around.
And now? Her breath tickles and taunts me. It’s fucking luring me deeper to sea into no man’s land. And I have a feeling once I swim out, there’s no way I’ll be able to make it to shore.
Our eyes lock and this is it, the part where we decide how much of ourselves we are damning to an ocean of guilt.
Beneath the water, my fingers slide up into the valley of her spine. Harper’s eyes flutter shut and I’m left hypnotized by a cluster of freckles to the side of her mouth, all pieces of a puzzle I’ve yet to put together—just like us. We are pieces of a puzzle, but two of many and without a photo of how things are supposed to look, we’re left to our senses trying to figure it all out .
I don’t know how things are supposed to look with Harper. But I’m damn sure certain about how they feel.
Harper opens her eyes, and the way her honey-colored irises focus on me is like a reward I’m not sure I deserve. They swirl with golden flecks of desire you wouldn’t know were there unless you were this close and looking.
And I know, without a doubt, I’d never be looking at Harper this way if Nate were still alive.
She’d never curl her fingers into my skin—clutching me—if he were still here to hold.
But he’s not here.
My head feels heavy. It’s being pulled by the tension escalating between us with each quick breath, by the rip-roaring emotion of the last few months. Like an invisible under-tow you don’t know has trapped you until it’s too late, I know the only option isn’t to fight it. The solution is to swim with it. And fuck, if I don’t I’ll drown in this desire.
“Excuse me?’
Harper is off me and at the edge of the pool before I even have the chance to turn around. When I do, I find one of Caroline and Finn’s neighbors leaning over the fence lining the pool.
“And who are you?”
I run a wet hand over my face, which feels like I’ve spent a full day under the sun instead of just an hour beneath an overcast sky with Harper. “Caroline Monroe’s brother. Just visiting.”
The older woman narrows her eyes at me before mumbling under her breath and continuing along the path. I lean back, letting the knot of hair at the back of my head sit in the water while I try to collect my thoughts and talk my dick down.
Harper jumps out of the pool and snatches her towel, wrapping it around her waist. She’s fumbling with her bag and stumbling into her sandals, her long, wet blonde hair cascading as she leans down to pull a strap over her foot.
I sort of want to take a deep breath and sink under the water until she leaves .
“I’ve got to run. I’ve got a class.”
Words I read well if I really listen. I think she’s telling me this was too much.
But when Harper straightens, I find out I’m wrong. “You think we can do that again? On a surfboard ? In a competition?”
“Crazier things have happened”—I pause, thinking to myself, I mean, look at us— "it’s open to amateurs.”
Folding her lips together, she looks down at the ground and nods. “Tomorrow again? After I drop Lucas at school?”
I swallow. “Tomorrow, yeah. But you also have to get some time in at the beach. I need you to be able to handle that too.”
Harper nods, sliding the strap of her tote bag that has slipped off her shoulder, a delicate slope that if we hadn’t been interrupted I might have tasted with my tongue, peppered a trail of kisses up it to her ear.
She lifts a hand, giving me a small wave and heads toward the gate before stopping. “Riley,” Harper says. “I’ll see you at home, yeah?”
If it’s reassurance Harper needs, it’s reassurance I’ll give her.
I’ll bury these feelings, even if I have to drown in them.
“See you at home.”