I wake up in the middle of the night soaking wet. In a puddle.
“Shit,” I say. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I left the rain fly off, which makes me a fucking idiot. I can feel Clark’s fury from hundreds of miles away.
This part of Idaho has less than a 25 percent chance of rain on any given day in March, I tell imaginary Pissed-off Clark. And the percentage drops as the month goes on. There wasn’t any in the forecast.
Tell that to your hypothermia, Pissed-off Clark flings back.
I crawl out of the tent. Water runs down my face.
Most of my stuff is still in the trailer we’re hauling behind Bernadette. I could climb in there. But it’s not heated, my sleeping bag is soaked, and I didn’t bring as much wool and fleece as I should have, because this was never supposed to be a wilderness trip.
It’s not so cold out that I’m in any danger of actually dying, I tell Pissed-off Clark.
You don’t know you’re hypothermic when you’re hypothermic, Pissed-off Clark slings back.
God damn it. Pissed-off Clark is not going to let me stay here in the rain or sleep in a trailer when there’s warm, dry shelter just a hundred feet away.
And he’s right, and I know it.
I drag my sorry ass up to Bernadette’s door and knock. Quietly, in case Mari’s asleep. I guess I’m sort of hoping she is. If she doesn’t answer, I won’t have to go in there, and if I don’t go in there, I won’t give in to temptation.
To kiss her. To touch her, a slow, leisurely exploration of her body with my hands and mouth, until she’s begging me to fuck her.
And then…
Because I’m all out of self-control. I’m all out of the energy I’d need to remind myself of reasons I can’t touch her.
The door swings open, and she’s standing there, blinking at me sleepily. Alarm rushes over her face, and then amusement, and then—curiosity, I think. Her gaze runs over me. All of me—the water running down my face, my wet half-zip base layer, the wet sweats I pulled on over my bottom base layer, because it gave me a thin extra layer of armor. Which is basically useless, because despite the chilling cold, I’m sporting yet another semi, and I swear her eyes snag on it on their way back up to my face. Her cheeks go pink, which doesn’t help the situation.
“Get in here,” she orders, which also doesn’t help.
I obey, because…
I wish I could blame it on Pissed-off Clark, but I know the truth. The truth is that I want to go inside, and I want… her.
“I’m sorry,” I say, taking a step toward her. “Clark would have my head on a platter. I fucked up with the rain fly and woke up drenched.”
“Just come in,” she says. “Clark’s not here, and I don’t judge.”
As I step inside she grabs a towel and hands it to me, and I do my best to dry myself off. I try to keep my arm or the towel in front of my wet, clinging clothes. Because my semi isn’t becoming any more semi.
She eyes me. “Give me that,” she says, holding a hand out for the towel.
When I don’t give it over, she snatches it. “Lean down,” she says.
I do, and she towels off my hair. Her breasts are inches from my head. I’m looking down at her belly, full of our baby. Even through the towel, her touch feels blissful.
Then she hands me the towel and I arrange it discreetly in front of my groin.
She marches back toward the bedroom area and returns with a small stack of clothes. “I don’t know if anything will fit you.”
I hold up what are obviously her biggest clothes and laugh out loud. Her mouth turns up slowly.
“Yeah,” she says. “Not so much. What do we do?” She wrinkles her eyebrows. “Okay. Here’s the plan. I’ll make up the lounge for you with sheets and blankets. Then I’ll get in bed. And then you get undressed and towel off and get in bed. Make sure you wring out your clothes and spread them out so they have the best chance of being dry in the morning.”
She wants me to sleep naked. In her Airstream. Or maybe I should say she wants me to ‘sleep’ naked because there is no way I am going to be able to fall asleep naked six feet away from her.
And there’s also no way I’m going to be able to engage in the one activity that might help me sleep.
But unless I want to be soaked to the bone all night, this is my best bet. So I take the sheets and blankets from her arms and make up the convertible lounge myself.
She slips to the back of Bernadette, and I hear the sounds of her getting comfortable in bed again.
I wish the invitation had been to climb in there with her.
Instead, I use the already wet towels to wring out my clothes, then drape all the wet things over the dinette. Then I climb under the covers—naked—on the lounge bed. It’s not the most comfortable sleeping surface in the world. In fact, it might be one of the most uncomfortable. But it hardly matters since there’s no way I’ll sleep.
I stare at the metal ceiling, at a light fixture that looks like an original, trying not to think about Mari, six feet away.
“Kane.” Her voice comes from Bernadette’s bedroom end.
“Yeah?”
“You settled?”
“Yeah.” Except for the fact that I can’t stop noticing the cool caress of the sheet on my dick, no matter how I turn, no matter how I move. Every time it scrapes like a tease over the head, my cock throbs and jumps, which makes it worse.
And her voice, sleepy and confidential, isn’t helping.
“I looked at the photos you posted on your Insta. I love the one of the woman watching her kid climb on the rocks in the canyon. She looks terrified and proud at the same time.”
“Thanks.” I’d liked that one a lot, too.
“You see people. It’s a gift. I see you hanging back with your family, too, watching them, taking in everything.”
I rake a hand through my hair. “Yeah, well… maybe it’s a gift. I’m not always sure.”
“What do you mean?” Her voice is barely more than a murmur, but it carries through the echoey inside of our aluminum cave.
“I mean…” I think of the other day, when my mom fretted that I’d forgotten to take my own pizza order. “Sometimes they forget I’m there. Sometimes… I forget I’m there.”
“I can see that.” Not judgy. Just: hearing me. Just like she sees me. “They all have their roles. Gabe’s the boss. I’m guessing Brody’s the bad boy, or at least he dresses the part?”
I nod. “Close enough.”
“Clark’s—what?”
“Forest warrior. Easton’s the panty-melter.”
She laughs at that. “Right, I got that feeling, distinctly.”
“In your panties?” I tease, over a rising twinge of jealousy.
“Ha, no. He’s too slick for me.”
“That’s what they all say. Right before their panties go up in flames.”
She chuckles. “So, boss, bad boy, forest warrior, panty-melter. And Amanda’s the girl.”
“Right.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “And you?”
“I’ve always been… the boy next door. The peacemaker. The fixer.”
The covers rustle in the back. “Do you remember when you first knew that was your job? Brody’s probably the bad boy because he got stuck chasing Gabe’s shadow. And Amanda’s the girl because she is. Easton’s the youngest, so I’m guessing that plays a pretty big role in him figuring out how to be the charmer. But you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I remember.”
I close my eyes.
“It was pretty soon after my dad died. My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Which was—I mean, you can imagine. Your dad dies and then, blam, your mom has cancer.”
“Kane,” she whispers.
“Everyone was falling apart. My mom was in chemo, and she was just—I mean, you know. She was barely hanging in, and my brothers were all causing a ton of trouble. There was this one night when everyone was being a dick and giving my mom shit, and at some point I joined in, too. She gave me this super sad look and said, ‘Not you, too.’”
She makes a small oof noise.
“Afterwards I apologized to her, and she said, ‘There are too many wild men in this family, Kane. Just be our good boy.’”
She’s quiet in the back. Then she says, “That’s a lot to live up to. For a teenage boy. You took it all on, didn’t you?”
I’d never really thought about it that way before, but in this moment, I know she’s right.
“You’ve got an artist’s soul. And all those mountain men brothers. Big, physical, rowdy. Must have been hard sometimes.”
My chest aches and my throat’s tight again. I try to speak, but I can’t.
“You okay?” she asks.
Air finds its way out again with a little huff. “Yeah. I mean I love the shit out of them. You know I do.”
“I know.”
“But, yeah. Maybe. What you said.” I take a breath. “Can I tell you something?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“In Vegas. My brothers liquored me up and dared me to pick up a stranger, and when I said I couldn’t, they said, sure you can. Just pretend you’re Easton. So that’s what I was doing that night. That’s how I got up the nerve to talk to you. That’s who I was pretending to be when we…”
It’s all there—her scent, the feel of her body beneath mine, her cries of pleasure. I slide a hand down my abs to cup my balls.
“It wasn’t fair to you, me pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I guess I just wanted to say that.”
I listen, craning my ears—my whole body really—for her reaction.
I can hear the rain pounding on the aluminum roof of the RV. I can hear it landing with soft definite drops in a bucket or bowl somewhere within Bernadette’s curved shell—I remember her mentioning that Bernadette could use more waterproofing. I listen, and I wait.
“Kane,” she murmurs. Just the sound of it is enough to send sensation sliding through my chest, down into my dick. “That night. It was really you. And it was really me.” I hear her gather her breath. “You can’t fake… what we did.”
I close my eyes, seeing it. Feeling it. Her words unknot something in me. She’s right: Fundamentally, wholly—I was myself with her that night. Maybe more myself than I’d been in a long time.
I am so myself right now that I can’t contain it all inside my skin. It needs to go somewhere. I can hear a clock ticking, or maybe it’s Bernadette’s exoskeleton settling. I try to ignore the tease of the sheet against my dick, which is nothing compared to the heat building from inside me, heat she’s stoked with her words. Heat and pressure, and that’s what I blame for the words that jump out of me:
“It was good, wasn’t it?”
“It was so good.”
Her voice is a teasing rasp.
I can hear the shifting of her covers, of her body in the other room. My mind goes bananas with imagining things. She isn’t. She can’t be.
God, I hope she is.
“What did you like about it?”
The question drops from my lips.
I’ve definitely gone too far. I hold my breath, waiting for her to remind me of my own rules. Of our good reasons to keep sex out of this. My cock jumps against the sheet; I wrap my fist around it and squeeze. The pressure is a relief, but it also amps me up a level.
“Oh, God, everything,” she says roughly, and against my palm, I get harder. “Your hands on my wrists, your body pressing me against the wall, your mouth—God, your mouth, Kane. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—for weeks. Months. I tried to hook up with a couple of guys in those months, but I always quit after the first kiss, because it wasn’t you kissing me. That sounds nuts, right? I’m nuts for saying that. It was one night.”
“You’re not nuts,” I say, thinking of Veronica and the bland kissing, the bland sex. No wonder she dumped me. If I was more myself than I’d ever been with Mari, I was an empty shell with Veronica, not even letting myself think about what I was missing. “It was a hell of a night.”
“You know what I liked best?” Mari whispers.
I’m stroking myself now, and I want to know. I need to know. If she is, too. “Are you…?” I rasp out.
“Am I what?” Her voice is husky, teasing.
“Are you touching yourself?”
It’s barely above a whisper, but the words feel huge and loud in the six feet between us. I glide a hand up over the head of my cock, picking up the slickness, spreading it over myself. Wishing it were hers, her slickness on my fingers, her body under my hand.
“If I said I were? Would that be breaking the rules?” I can hear the smile in her voice.
I shake my head, but of course she can’t see me. “No. God no.” My hand is flat now, the meat of my palm applying perfect pressure to my cock. My balls are drawn up. God, that happened fast, and I want more time, I don’t want this to end too soon. But I can’t stop the slow rocking motion that’s winding pleasure up from the deepest part of me.
“No. It wouldn’t count. It would just be you getting yourself off before you fall asleep.”
“And you?”
My voice is huskier than hers. “And me getting myself off, before I sleep. We wouldn’t even tell each other we were doing it.”
“Kane.” It’s almost a moan this time. “You have no idea. How horny being pregnant makes me. It’s because there’s all this extra blood flow everywhere. I’m all swollen and… and needy,” she says.
“Jesus. Jesus, Mari.” My voice is cracked and raw in the dark. I clamp my hand tight around the base of my cock, staving off release. Not. Yet. I want more. More of this feeling, more of her confiding, teasing voice in the dark. “How horny?”
“I make myself come at least once a day. Twice some days.”
I groan. I can’t help it. “And what do you think about when you’re doing that?”
“You.” This time, unmistakably, it’s a moan.
“Mari.” Halfway between a grunt and a groan. My fist is working now, slick with precum.
“I think about how you—ah, Kane, God—I think about how you wouldn’t come until I did. And the tightness in your face, like you were just barely holding on. All that restraint, all that self-control, for a woman you didn’t even know and would probably never see again… and I just thought, what would it be like to be with a guy like that, who cared that much, who gave that hard—”
Then she’s calling out my name, and making small, wordless, whimpering cries, and, “I’m coming, Kane, and it’s all for you.”
I’m coming too, thick, gripping, mean spasms that feel like they’re rising up from the very bottom of me. It’s all for her. All of it.
“Me too,” I say. Because that’s all I can manage.