Bliss Brothers (Complete Series), page 50
8
Katie
The thing about having sex with your friend—your best friend, really—is that all the friendship in the world won’t save you from having to get up off the sofa afterward and put your clothes back on. Because you’re at work. You’re both at work, which means swiping your own panties off the floor and scampering off to the bathroom, because…
No condom.
A thousand yikes. Two thousand. Infinite yikes.
I run paper towels under cold water and make a makeshift wipe, but the water does nothing to calm the heat that’s still gathered between my legs. It radiates out from my hips, covering all of my skin, and every breath has a little hitch, hitch, hitch that I can’t control. Like drunk hiccups. It’s exactly like drunk hiccups.
Once I’m clean enough to put my panties back on and my shorts, I survey myself in the mirrors. Aside from my burning cheeks I look normal. That’s shocking. I always thought that if Huck and I slept together it would shatter me on a seismic level and put me back together in an entirely new configuration.
Just kidding. I never thought about sleeping with Huck. I avoided it at all costs, except maybe in the middle of the night, in my dreams. I never actively allowed myself to think about it until Libby’s wedding night.
Until that damn toast.
I yank the elastic out of my hair and go through the motions of smoothing it out, gathering it up, and putting it back in a professional ponytail. I am the picture of a woman who has not just slept with her coworker and best friend in a boathouse. I am—
The door to the bathroom swings open a few inches and I whirl toward the noise, my pulse throbbing at my temples. “Who’s there?” I cry, because obviously I’m in a horror movie.
“Uh, it’s me,” Huck says, coming all the way into the bathroom. “There’s nobody else in here and I locked the door, so…”
He lets the door swing shut then leans against it, watching me with those eyes.
“Are you okay?”
Am I okay?
In one sense, yes, I am okay. In one sense, I have gotten what I wanted, and it’s that simple. There’s nothing else to say about it. I saw Huck, I wanted him, I got him. His hands were on my body. He was in my body. And it felt good. It felt so fucking good that I’m still reeling.
In another sense…
“I feel like a boat that’s about to float off of a buoy.”
The corner of his mouth curves up. “Yeah. That got away from us a little bit.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it getting away. More like…catching up.”
Huck covers his face with his hands, and when he takes them away again he’s wearing a huge goofy grin, eyes sparkling. “Jesus, Kate, I had no idea.”
“No idea?”
“No idea you even wanted—that you’d ever considered—”
I raise both hands in the air. You got me. “I didn’t ever consider it. That wasn’t on the table for me, back when we were in high school. There was always somebody else, and we—” I make a frantic criss-crossing motion in front of my chest, which I realize in the moment must accentuate the fact that you can see my nipples pressing at the fabric of my bra. Great. “Ships passing in the night.”
Huck’s expression turns thoughtful. “We met in the night once or twice, I’d say. Just not…for this.”
“No, obviously not.”
“Obviously.”
It makes me laugh. “We’re getting stuck in a loop.”
“No loops. Can’t do that. So…what do we do now?”
Once in high school my mom and I went on a vacation for two weeks during the summer where all we did was drive from theme park to theme park and ride roller coasters. I don’t remember why we did it—god knows I was terrible at riding roller coasters—but we did. My favorite part was all the stretches along the highway, riding with my feet up on the dashboard and talking to my mom about whatever came to mind. But right now, I don’t feel like I’m ensconced in a comfortable passenger seat. I feel like I’m waiting for the brakes to release on the coaster and let me plummet down to either total exhilaration or sudden death. Is the air thin up here, or what? I fan my face like Huck has heard this thought out loud, but he gives me a look.
“Seriously, are you okay? Do you want to sit down?”
“I’m not sure where to go from here,” I burst out. “I hadn’t thought that far.”
“Okay,” Huck says slowly. “Maybe we think small for a minute. What do you want to do right now?”
“We should probably leave the women’s bathroom.”
“Oh, I’m definitely leaving the women’s bathroom.” He considers me, lips pursed. “I have to go to a meeting. Do you…want to come?”
“Come to a meeting with you?”
“Yeah. You could wait outside in the bullpen. I don’t know if Roman means for it to be confidential or what, but…” Huck lifts one shoulder and drops it back down. “That’s where I’m going. If you want to come…” His mouth twists. That’s the Huck I know—restraining himself from making a dirty joke. “Just come.”
*****
The brothers gather in Roman’s office while I sit outside in the bullpen. I came here once before, for my job interview, and that was…pretty much it. It’s weird. I know it’s weird. I’m about to stand up and leave when the blonde woman I saw outside the other day sits down next to me and peers over at Roman’s closed door.
“Hi,” she says, after a beat. “I feel like an asshole because we haven’t met.”
“I—what? You’re not an asshole. Hi. I’m Katie, from the boathouse.” I stick out my hand for her to shake and wonder if that’s a stupid move. But she shakes it back.
“I’m Holiday,” she says with a broad smile that lights up every friendship center in my brain. “I’m with Driver.”
“Oh—oh.” The insane jealousy that had threatened to explode from somewhere behind my liver shrivels up and dies. “Holiday. Holly. Duh. Of course. Huck has mentioned you.”
She leans back against the sofa. “All good things, I hope.”
“Just that you’re with Driver.”
“Good man. He didn’t spill the beans.” She folds her hands in her lap and watches the door of the office. “I’m pregnant, by the way. Due in the spring. So I’ve pretty much been at home, writing or throwing up.”
“Oh, wow. Wow.” For one thing, my mind is blown at the thought of being pregnant. I am religious about taking my birth control and always have been, since the very first pack at age fourteen. But more than that, I have a strange floating feeling, like my chest has been detached from the rest of my torso and is floating somewhere up in the atmosphere where there’s less oxygen. It’s not a bad feeling, but it is making me giddy. “That’s a lot going on. What are you writing?”
“Oh, I write these novels,” she says, waving a hand in the air. “I’m way more interested in you. When did you and Huck get together?”
My heart lurches in one direction, then flops back in the other, and I’ve definitely plummeted off a high ledge because I am falling, falling, falling. Did she see us at the boathouse? Did she see—
“We—” I say in a strangled voice. “We got together just now, if that’s—if that’s what you’re talking about. It was a spur of the moment thing, but altogether it turned out for the best,” I babble. What the hell is happening? Is this how intimate people just are at this resort?
Her eyes go wide and a startled smile plays over her face. Gray, but nothing like Huck’s. “Girl. I meant, when did you two start dating?”
“We’re not dating,” I say, the breath coming out of me in a whoosh. “We’re totally not dating. We’ve been friends since middle school, that’s all.”
Holiday nods, looking completely unable to keep the smile off her face. “I figured, from the way he looked at you the other day, that you’re dating.”
“We just hooked up,” I blurt out, because clearly my capacity for rational thought has been sexed out of me. “We actually just hooked up. I shouldn’t be telling you this. I really wanted to. But I don’t want to ruin our friendship. What do you do after that?”
Just then, the brothers file out of Roman’s office. Holly puts a hand on my shoulder. “Take a breath. We’ll talk later. Another day. Whenever. If you want. Okay?”
“Okay.” My tenuous grip on reality firms up. “We should do that.”
Huck saunters over, hands in his pockets, taking in the two of us on the sofa.
“How’s everything?” he asks, another question in his eyes.
“It’s wonderful,” Holiday tells him, standing up. “Katie, it was great to meet you. And Huck, it’s time to take this girl on a date.”
9
Huck
“I was going to take you on a date. Clearly.”
Katie sits in the passenger seat of my car, wearing a sundress over a pair of skinny jeans and looking like she just walked off a runway somewhere. Or out of a hair and makeup appointment for a wedding. I don’t know. She looks fucking amazing, and then she grimaces.
“You don’t have to take me on a date date just because we…you know.”
“Because we totally boned in the boathouse.”
She lets out a belly laugh. “You can’t keep saying that. Somebody’s going to hear.”
“Hey, if they don’t like it, they can walk away.”
“We’re in the car.”
“Then why are you worried someone might hear?”
She wrinkles her nose. “God, I don’t know. Because I’m still trying to figure out exactly what happened in the boathouse.”
“You tackled me, and we slept together.”
“I tackled you.” A mysterious smile flashes across Katie’s face. “I touched you, is all.”
“In the end, it doesn’t even matter.” She laughs, the sound filling me with a joy like a helium balloon. Thank god it won’t make me sound like a chipmunk.”
“But…where are we going, exactly?”
“To a hotel,” I answer her somberly. We’re officially off Bliss property and rolling into the outskirts of Ruby Bay. “It’s time to consummate…whatever this is…in a bed.”
“Huck, be serious.”
I glare at her out of the corner of my eye. “All I wanted you to know is that I was going to take you out on a date, even if Holly hadn’t said anything. Okay?”
She turns her body to look at me full on. “We’re not dating, though. This is…this can be our hang sesh.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds like a dentist appointment.”
“But we’re not dating,” Katie insists. “That’s not what’s happening. We’re just…we’re hanging out. Because I missed you.”
“Not dating,” I confirm, though it stops the breath in my lungs and a slow trickle of disappointment cracks like an egg on the crown of my head and runs all the way down my spine. “We are definitely not dating.”
*****
When I pull the car into the spot and turn it off, Katie blinks—once, then twice, and then she laughs.
“This is where we’re going?”
I bend my head to look out the window. “This is where we’re going.”
“You brought me to the public library, Huck.”
“First…” I release the clasp on my seatbelt and let it roll up into its holder. “You said you didn’t want to do a boring dinner date, as if I’ve ever taken you somewhere boring for dinner. Second, you seem to be totally committed to using the phrase hang sesh, and this is the best place for one of those.”
“You’re the one who started the hang sesh thing.”
I hold up one finger. “I think we both need to stop saying that.”
“I agree.”
We both sit in adult seriousness for a heartbeat, and then the laughter takes over. Katie laughs so hard a tear escapes the corner of her eye and slips down her cheek. “Oh, Jesus, Huck. How many afternoons did we spend here?”
“A lot.” They flash by like an old-fashioned film reel, little black spaces in between. Katie eating chips one by one, pressing them between her tongue and the roof of her mouth so they wouldn’t crunch and give her away. Katie chewing on the tip of a pen, studying for our chemistry final with a dogged seriousness that earned her a B+, which pissed her off. Katie with one tear after another gliding down her soft cheeks when we read A Separate Peace. She sat there with a box of tissues, shoving them one by one into the garbage bin behind the table. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she said.
But I knew.
And looking back, through the reality-colored glasses…
God, I wanted to be close to her then, too.
“You really showed up,” she says softly, and a tempered-glass determination slams down over one of our possible futures. I cannot fuck this up. I don’t want her to look back and think I was only doing it to get us to this point, but I don’t know how to say that to her.
“I might be a jackass, but I’ve always tried to be a good friend,” I say solemnly, and I catch a flicker of disappointment on her face. “Want to go in?”
“Hell yes,” Katie says, straightening up. “It’s time for our hang sesh.” She drags out sesh for way longer than necessary, then pulls on the handle and gets out of the car.
*****
“Here.”
We’re nestled at the back table on the balcony, where we used to sit back in the day. Katie sits across from me, just like she used to, and I get a weird double vision where I can see her like she was and like she is now. It gives me a sort of pleasant vertigo, and vertigo is not something I ever would have described as pleasant until this moment.
She watches me stick my hand into my pocket, her eyebrows rising. “What the hell do you have in your pocket?” Katie asks in her library voice, which is just above a whisper. “You perv.”
“I said here.” I get the Twizzlers out, finally, and slide them across the table like we’re completing an illicit transaction. “You’ll never get caught with those.”
Katie takes the package almost reverently in her hands and turns it so she can see the front. “How do you remember all this stuff?”
“How do you not remember it? Not—you specifically. I mean, in general, how do people forget all the stuff they know about a friend?”
She arches one eyebrow at me. “I’d say that we’re close friends at minimum.”
“About a best friend. And stop fishing for compliments.”
“Being your best friend isn’t a compliment,” she says primly. “Anyway, I’m not even sure we are best friends, after the wasteland of college.”
“Wasteland seems like a strong word.”
She shrugs one shoulder and it melts me all over again. “It was kind of a wasteland.” Her green eyes meet mine. “Why didn’t we talk?”
Because this would happen, and I wanted you to be free of Ruby Bay.
“I don’t know. The days got away from me, I guess. And I didn’t think you were having that hard a time.”
“I didn’t only want to hang out with you when I was having a hard time, you know.”
“That’s clear to me now. But in college, I was younger and dumber. And I still hadn’t made up my mind about coming back to Bliss at all.”
“You keep saying that.” Katie rips open the package of Twizzlers, pulls one out, and takes a bite of the end of one of the twists. “But I don’t get it. And why haven’t you brought this up before? Like, for real brought it up?”
“While we’re out taking guests on sailboats or doing all the other various bullshit for our jobs?”
She gives me a long look. “Yes. Exactly then. We’ve spent almost three full weeks together, and you didn’t say anything about it until the day of the wedding. You just kayaked until your arms got ripped.”
I flex them underneath my t-shirt. “Are you complaining?”
Her eyes rake over me. “No. But it did make me wonder if we were still friends. Still…close.”
I lean in, conspiratorial as fuck. “Is this the part where I talk about my feelings?”
Katie leans in, eyes darting from side to side. “Yes, you jackass. This is the part where you talk about your feelings.”
“But what’s going to come of it?”
She cups her hands around her mouth. “Hopefully a decent fucking conversation, Huck. Hopefully, we can catch up with each other in a way that’s not all about calling each other jackasses. Because I. Missed. You. What are you not getting about that?”
It should be hilarious, her mouth moving inside the circle of her hands, but I. Missed. You. is a sucker punch straight to my emotions. Warmth clamps down around my ribs like the world’s nicest vibes and shoots up to the crown of my head and down to my feet, and god, I missed her too.
“I missed you too.” I gather up all the balls I have for the next thing hovering on the tip of my tongue. “And I think I’ll miss you again, and pretty soon, because this—” I motion vaguely around us, hopefully indicating all of Ruby Bay, including the Bliss Resort. “This isn’t the endgame for you.”
Katie pops the rest of the Twizzler into her mouth. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
“And you’re always giving me shit for being cryptic.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“Stop it.”
“Shall we?”
She holds her hand up.
For a high-five.
And damn it, I give her a high-five right there in the library, the sound echoing through the silent stacks.
10
Katie
Not dating. Not dating. Not dating.
I am not dating Huck, he is not dating me, we are two friends who fucked one time in the boathouse and now we have unlocked that rare and powerful achievement: being friends again. Actual friends, who do more than just hassle each other and die laughing when one of us falls out of a kayak. When Huck falls out of a kayak, actually, since I haven’t fallen out once this summer.
The only problem with having slept with him is that I know how good it felt now. And it’s given him some magical golden glow that makes it, frankly, really hard to stop staring.
