Wednesday, p.2
Wednesday, page 2
Her phone rang from inside her purse, but we both ignored it while I continued licking and sucking her breasts.
I pulled open the front of my shorts and Chloe took me in her hands, gripping me firmly and rubbing her thumb over the drop of fluid at my tip. This time, I was the one groaning in the otherwise quiet room. She had magic fucking hands. Hands that held the power to make me forget my own damn name. She gave her palm a twist, massaging my shaft in maddening strokes.
Her phone rang again and she pulled away, her hands working quickly to tie her dress back in place. “It’s probably Jason. We’re slammed at the inn. I’m sorry . . . I have to go.”
The idea of her leaving was not a pleasant one, but I knew I couldn’t make her stay. I had nothing to offer her, nothing real to give her.
She grabbed her purse and was gone before I could even get my dick back in my pants.
The air-conditioner hummed softly from the other room, and I swore under my breath. What the hell am I doing? Regrets rushed through me, hot and fast.
I rose to my feet, wanting to take another swig from the bottle on my desk, but decided against it. Heading down the hall, I unlocked the door to my private apartment at the back of the single-story building and let myself inside.
I stripped off yesterday’s clothes as I made my way toward the small bathroom with a glass stand-up shower stall. Not bothering to let the water warm, I stepped under the spray and hissed through my teeth.
A cold shower, both to sober me and to tamp down my raging libido.
Chloe was the golden-haired little girl I’d taught to fish, and caught minnows with. She was the first girl I kissed, the one who taught me the lyrics to her favorite pop songs. She’d been my best friend since I was a little kid—and now she was my fuck toy. The memory of how it all started loomed large, impossible to escape.
Samantha had been killed on a Wednesday. Four days later at her funeral, I wasn’t any closer to understanding what had happened. I felt lost and empty and nothing made sense. Then Chloe had taken my hand and looked at me with worry in her ocean-blue eyes, and I’d snapped. I broke the one rule I vowed I’d never break. Chloe was practically a sister to me. A friend. My best friend. But never my lover. That hadn’t stopped me from using her to escape the grief that stormed through me day and night.
I scrubbed shampoo through my hair and pushed all the noise out of my brain.
Apparently I was taking two of Chloe’s guests out on a fishing expedition in my personal boat since every other craft in my fleet was booked to capacity, and my own manager had even told me no way.
We lived and died by the rule the customer is always right. Nowadays you made one misstep and an angry patron would blast you with a one-star review on social media sites—and things like that stay there forever. We were barely scraping by as it was. We couldn’t afford to say no and leave guests unsatisfied. Not if I could help it, anyway. Plus with Chloe being the one to ask, I couldn’t exactly say no, considering all the ways she’d been there for me.
After dressing in a new pair of board shorts and a clean T-shirt, I headed out onto the docks, knowing there was more to be done. There was always more work to be done, or maybe it was that I needed to feel the warmth of the sunshine on my skin since I knew my soul was as black as night.
“Hey, did you get that charter figured out?” one of my deck hands asked.
“Nah. Fuel me up. I’m taking them out myself later today.” Once I’ve sobered up.
He shook his head, smirking at me. “She’s got you pussy-whipped, man.”
“Not even a little bit,” I replied.
I didn’t know if he knew the extent of my relationship with Chloe. But I was never going there again with a woman. Deep, committed monogamy. No way. I’d changed who I was once before and nearly lost a lifelong friend, and look what happened. My entire world got knocked on its ass. My philosophy now was that pussy was easy to come by and best when regularly rotated.
Then why haven’t I seen anyone but Chloe? a little voice inside asked.
Ever since Samantha’s death, I’d been fucked up in the head. Messing around with something you don’t mess with. Something sacred. My one-time best friend. Only now I had no idea what she was anymore. I only knew she made me feel good. I knew she let me fuck her raw six ways from Sunday. Let me mark her skin, and moaned when she tasted herself on my tongue, then asked for more.
The scary part was that I had no idea where this was heading and how it could possibly end well, but I knew one thing for certain—I had no plans to end our arrangement.
“Just fuel me up and keep the questions to a minimum,” I barked back.
“Yes, boss.”
I checked my cooler for this morning’s haul. The grouper was still sitting pretty on ice. I grabbed the fish and made my way inside, knowing I had my work cut out for me before I could get Chloe’s guests out on the boat later.
• • •
“Abe? You here?” I called, opening the flimsy screen door to his rundown one-bedroom house.
Stony silence punctuated the still air for several seconds, and my gut twisted. The eerie realization that one of these days I was going to get here and find him dead washed through me.
“I’m out back,” he called in his gruff voice.
Taking a deep breath, I headed through the house, stopping in the kitchen to set the fish fillets I brought him every Sunday in the refrigerator. Its uneven hum told me the appliance, much like everything around here, was on its last leg. I’d replaced his air-conditioning unit last summer and had a feeling more repairs were on the horizon.
I found him out on the back porch with its no-frills concrete floor and screened walls, doing the Sunday crossword from the newspaper. I needed to remember to bring him another crossword book; the man probably didn’t have any other hobbies.
I sank down into the folding chair beside him, the rickety thing creaking under my weight.
“You catch anything good for me today?” he asked.
“Fresh grouper. There’re two fillets for you in the fridge.”
“You sure you don’t want to stay for one? I can fry them up in some butter.”
He was a modern marvel. A full-fat diet, yet skinny as a rail and healthy as a horse.
I shook my head. “Can’t today. I promised I’d take a couple of Chloe’s guests out on a charter.”
“It’s nice how you’re there for her.”
I grunted. “Trust me, she does much more for me than I do for her.”
Abe nodded. “She’s kept you together after Samantha, I know.”
“She has.” Licks of guilt tongued through me. If he only knew.
“I can’t imagine, son,” he continued. “Lost my Sarah after fifty years of marriage, and I still reach out for her in the night, still call her name like she’s in the other room. The brain knows she’s gone, but the heart won’t accept it.”
I didn’t say anything because I had nothing to say. His situation and mine were very different. I had celebrated only one anniversary with Samantha and had yet to adjust fully to life as someone’s husband. It was a role I didn’t think I was very good at, which only added to my guilt.
We were quiet for several minutes, the soft lap of waves in the distance our only company.
I had to stop thinking about this. I’d found myself slipping into a dark place that I was quickly realizing I didn’t like visiting lately. My gaze dropped to the pile of mail that I’d brought in from his front porch.
“More offers?” I asked, leafing through the pile I’d set on the dusty glass table between us.
He nodded. “Throw them out.”
“Maybe you should open these first?”
The return addresses were real estate companies, investors, and even a lawyer in South Carolina. Real estate developers wanted to bulldoze the place down and had offered him outrageous sums of money for his beachfront property, but Abe held fast.
“What am I going to do with a pile of money?” he asked.
The man had a point. He was eighty-seven. No sense in trying to pretend he’d be around long enough to cash their checks, let alone enjoy the money. He didn’t have any kids or much in the way of relatives, as far as I could tell. I was the closest thing he had to family, and I certainly wasn’t interested in the money, or in seeing a line of condos go up on the plot of beach that had once been his home.
“Built this place with my own two hands. It isn’t much but it’s where I loved my Sarah, and where I lost her too. I’d just as soon live out my days here, thank you very much.”
I nodded. I couldn’t blame him. This was his home, all he knew.
“You need anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Go on. Go help Chloe. I’ll be here.”
“Okay. I’ll see you next weekend, and sooner if I find any lobster.”
He grinned at me and gave me a wink.
Chapter Three
Chloe
I was still a little shaky after my encounter with Shaw, but did my best to focus and get back to work. Most days I felt like I was trying to find an answer to the question: how far would you go to be there for your best friend?
He and I grew up together swimming and surfing and spending entire lazy Saturdays lying in his parents’ hammock, talking about how when we grew up and finally got off this stupid island, everything would be better. I taught him how to climb trees and catch lizards, and he taught me how to kiss.
Then we got older, and four years of college at the University of Miami and city life sent us straight back to the place we’d vowed to escape. But with the perspective of twenty-somethings, we realized that people who lived in the city worked all year just to be able to spend one week in the place we called home. Sun-kissed shoulders and flip-flops and casual beach life weren’t easy things to get out of your system, it turns out. Of course, now I wouldn’t trade it for anything. You couldn’t drag me away.
Back then, things were so different. I never thought of Shaw that way. But now, looking back, there were signs that deep down I felt something more for the boy I called my best friend.
It seemed so obvious now. I always hated his girlfriends, never thought they were good enough for him. When we were younger it was because they didn’t know how to bait their own hooks or catch minnows in the bay, and when we were older it was because they always seemed too polished with painted nails and highlights in their platinum-blond hair, and this season’s designer jeans.
One thing was for sure—girls always flocked to Shaw. I was always by his side through all the breakups and rebound flings. But then he met Samantha and my whole world changed. I couldn’t blame her—Shaw was lovable times a thousand. And I couldn’t blame him, either.
It was a year after we got home from college and I’d been busy working seventy-hour weeks at the inn my parents owned but left me and my brother to run when they retired. They took off in an RV with maps and a plan to explore the lower forty-eight states. Instead, they were parked in the driveway of my older sister’s suburban Kansas City home so they could be close to their grandkids. I was guessing they wouldn’t be back to Florida until I popped out a few kids for them to spoil, or my brother knocked up some poor, unsuspecting tourist. Most locals knew Jason was a player and steered clear.
Part of me wished Shaw was like that—a player moving from girl to girl, never settling down or getting serious. But he wasn’t built that way. He was a serial monogamist through and through, moving from one serious relationship to another while I remained perpetually single.
The year after graduating with a hospitality degree, I threw myself into the family business while Shaw fell in love, and I knew I had really lost him this time. It only made me pull away more. Which was fine with Samantha—she never liked the revered place I’d once held in Shaw’s life.
The inn Jason and I ran was on the tiny Florida key of Marathon. And anyone here would tell you, island living made for close quarters. It was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, and usually by name. It was something I’d always loved, but now I had mixed feelings about. It was impossible not to see Shaw, not to feel his presence on an island with a couple of thousand full-time residents. It swelled to more than ten thousand during peak travel season, which the permanent residents always viewed with mixed feelings too.
On the one hand, the tourists were the reason many of us could live in paradise full-time. They rented our hotel rooms, cars, and boats, ate in the restaurants, shopped at the boutiques along Main Street. But they also crowded our roads with extra traffic, littered our beach with the remnants of their picnics, and sometimes . . . sometimes, they did very bad things. Reckless things that could never be taken back.
It was how Shaw’s wife was killed. A rowdy college kid from Georgia down here on spring break had too much to drink and wasn’t smart enough to call a cab, or hell, just walk home. Instead he’d gotten behind the wheel of his pickup truck and driven south on Highway 12. It was early evening and the sky was most likely painted pink and orange like it so often was that magical time of day.
I had no idea what Samantha was doing in the tourist area that night. Maybe it was just a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. But when his truck crossed the center line and slammed into her small sedan with enough force to send it end over end, none of that mattered. All that mattered was that she died instantly, and Shaw was left to spiral into a deep depression.
At least, that’s how it seemed from the outside looking in. Maybe it wasn’t even depression. It was more of a dark reverie, one that he couldn’t seem to escape. And despite how close we were physically, that’s still what I was—an outsider being held at a distance. Shaw never let me get close enough to see inside, to understand what he was thinking and feeling.
I’d thought about calling this whole thing off countless times—telling him no the next time he showed up at my door at two a.m. with a wild look in his eyes, his fists clenched at his sides, and whiskey on his breath. But I always saw what was beneath—his broken soul that needed soothing, and a heavy heart that I alone knew how to handle with care.
Who was I kidding? The only way I knew to make him feel better was to reach down and palm his erection, and whisper that I needed him.
I wanted him to heal. I wanted him to be okay. And for those few hours every week, if he could lose himself in me, I was only too happy to oblige.
• • •
“Nice job,” Jason muttered around a bite of roast beef sandwich.
“With what?” I asked, pouring myself a second cup of coffee. It was two in the afternoon, but being thrust into the role of co-business owners, Jason and I now knew what schedule worked best for us. After lunch we were just getting warmed up for the day, and we often worked late into the evening.
“For getting Shaw to take those tourists out on his personal craft.”
“No problem.” I poured a hefty amount of creamer in my mug, turning it a nice honey shade. Just the way I liked it.
“What’d you have to do? Blow him?” he asked.
My eyes jerked over to his and my heart started to pound. Did he suspect something?
Jason smirked at me, then took another bite of his sandwich. I let out the breath I’d been holding. Fuck, that was close. If he only knew.
“Maybe Shaw’s finally starting to get his shit together,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee.
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“It’s been eight months,” I added. Eight long months of falling deeper and deeper in love lust with my best friend. I couldn’t let myself think about love. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Shaw had been in love just once, as far as I knew, with his wife, Samantha, and look at how tragically that ended for him. I wasn’t about to stomp my foot and make demands for something he couldn’t give me.
“Geez, you’re jumpy today,” Jason said, pulling me out of my daydream.
I looked up at him. He’d set his sandwich down on his plate and was staring at me.
“What’s with you?” he asked.
It was Wednesday. “Nothing. I just have a lot to do. I’ll talk to you later.”
I grabbed my mug off the counter and headed back to the office. I knew I needed to focus as best I could to get through a big chunk of invoices before the inevitable happened, a Wednesday ritual I’d had for the last eight months.
I knew Shaw’s schedule by heart. He ended his workday around five. After dinnertime, he showered, changed, and then spent an hour with his laptop, catching up on the office work he neglected all day when he was out on the dock. Sometimes he had a beer or two, and he always had the game on in the background. Then, at about eight, I’d expect a knock at my door. It was our weekly ritual, and one I looked forward to all week long.
Our rendezvous were somewhat precarious because my cramped one-bedroom apartment was located directly above my family’s inn. Jason lived on the lower floor in the main house that contained the offices too—which were just a couple of converted bedrooms in the back.
But if Jason happened to be paying attention, he could have seen Shaw creeping through the overgrown trees and shrubs and up the stairs to my place. I still didn’t know if he walked or drove. I only knew that his truck was never in sight. And that so far, we hadn’t been caught.
After finishing up a couple of hours of work that afternoon, Jason brought me a bottle of water and a sandwich, which I ate while reconciling last month’s receipts. Then I made my way upstairs since it was already after six.
Inside my place, I entered the bathroom and cranked the shower all the way to hot. It had been a hell of a day, and I needed the release of a steamy encounter. Double entendre implied. I threw my hair up in a messy bun and stripped down as the little room filled with steam. I stepped under the spray of water, careful to keep my long hair from getting wet. It would take hours to dry, and if I didn’t manage it with all sorts of products and flat-ironing, it would be a horrible, frizzy mess. No thank you.
I lathered my skin with the lavender-mint bodywash I’d splurged on during my last trip to the mall in Miami, and let the sensory experience transport me. I felt light and free, almost reverent as I stood there under the spray of water. The anticipation of my evening with Shaw was almost as good as the event itself.
