by Shaye Marlow
Mission accomplished. I bounced on his shoulder as we took the steps down from the beach.
“They’re fucking college students,” Zack said. “I can tell you exactly what they have to offer. Ten seconds, maybe even thirty, of sweaty, awkward, painful fumbling.”
“I think you might be thinking of high school students. These guys’d probably last a minute to five, depending on how long I let them. But in any case, they’d be ready to go again in fifteen,” I pointed out. “The benefits of youth, you know.”
Zack grunted.
“Plus, I’ve got enough experience to smooth over just about any amount of fumbling, sweat is a fact of life, and sometimes pain can be fun.”
Zack missed a step, growled a little, then deposited me on my feet in the boat. He gave me a shove onto the bench. “Stay,” he ordered. He turned, and just managed to catch me by the waistband as I made a run for it. Hanging on to me with one hand, he retrieved the anchor.
I gasped as he picked me up by the back of my pants, giving me a massive wedgie—which brought to my attention that I was more than a little aroused by all of this. Zack kept a grip on me as he pushed the boat away from shore, and then pulled me to the stern.
“You’re leaving your other boat,” I pointed out, trying to retrieve the bit of butt-floss that’d burrowed so deep I could taste it.
“Rory and I’ll come back for it.” He tugged me down onto the bench with him, then steered us around toward the cabin. “You could read,” he yelled over the sound of the engine.
“What am I supposed to read? The playboys in your closet?” I yelled back.
He shot me a look.
“You don’t even have TV,” I pointed out. The watermelon’d seen to that.
“You could work out. We’ve got a complete home gym in the shop.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s high on my list.”
“You could bake,” Zack suggested.
“We could go flying for another hour,” I countered.
“Rory needs me. What about a bath?” he said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got some bath salts in a closet somewhere.”
Now, that… actually sounded kinda nice. We didn’t have running water up at my father’s, so hot baths were in short supply.
Zack must’ve noticed my hesitation. “I bet I could find some candles, too, and you could have a nice, long, relaxing soak.” He maneuvered us into a slot at his dock, then startled me by grasping my hand. His was firm but gentle, big and strong and callused, and I was mesmerized by the clasp of it as he pulled me to the cabin.
Zack was true to his word, the tub was clean and the water good and hot, and they worked to curb my more mischievous tendencies for the rest of the evening. Rory’s, though…
Chapter Eight
ZACK
Frances was all I could think about. I’d set her up with a bath, and after that, in my mind’s eye, all I could see was her in it. Those perfect legs of hers, wet, by candlelight. Round breasts emerging from the water, nipples tight from the cold. The bath salts I’d found had been gardenia-scented, so she’d smell like warm flowers…
In my current state of distraction, I was about as useful in the shop as tits on a snake. But every time I started edging toward the door, Rory asked for my opinion, or asked me to hold something, or full-on guilted me.
Night had fallen before Conway retired to the guest cabin and Rory and I ventured back inside. The cabin was quiet, the only sign of life the light under Frances’s door. I sighed, regretting not having been able to entertain her.
Then I caught sight of my brother, who was also looking at that light, his expression speculative. He was the reason I was camped out on the couch at midnight, watching her door. As expected, Rory came creeping quietly down the stairs.
I waited until he was even with the couch to speak. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Mid-creep, he froze. Laughed nervously. “Zack, you scared me.”
I stood up, and moved to cut him off. “What,” I repeated, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Uh…” Rory’s eyes flicked toward Frances’s closed door. He licked his lips, then squared his shoulders. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you. Because I knew, you horny bastard, that you wouldn’t be able to resist.”
“What do you care? And even if you do care,” he scrambled to say before I could argue, “we could share—”
“What’s this about sharing?” Frances asked, making us both jump. She stood in her doorway, looking us over. She wore a tank top and sleep shorts, but didn’t appear sleepy in the least.
“This joker,” I said, pointing at my brother, “was about to let himself into your room.”
“I would have knocked first,” Rory protested.
“You need something in here?”
Rory tried for a seductive smile. “Only the sweet, sweet pleasure of your company.”
My jaw dropped when she didn’t immediately deny him. And then, the unthinkable happened.
“Okay,” she said, stepping aside.
Rory rushed forward.
I grabbed him.
Frances’s brow shot up. “Problem?”
I ground my teeth together, having no real grounds for objection. Maybe I could ask to join, but… I didn’t want her that way. I wanted her to myself, dammit. And in any case, I refused to beg.
Rory slipped my grip. With a “Squee!”, thick thighs flashing in the moonlight, he darted into Frances’s room.
She blew me a little kiss, then shut the door in my face.
Five minutes later, I was still out there, and my brother was giggling. Whatever she was doing to him, he was fucking… giggling. “Oh my god, yes! That’s so good,” he moaned.
I didn’t know why I was still hanging around, why I was torturing myself this way. Or even why it was torture. I shouldn’t have cared. She wasn’t mine.
The low murmur of their voices was accompanied by a thump, and another laugh. “Yes!” Rory cried, making my fists clench. I wanted to rip the door open, grab him, and throw him out the window. I closed my eyes, everything in me rebelling at the thought of Frances in there with my brother, touching him. Him touching her.
A rhythmic thumping started up. Thump, thump, thump, getting faster, thumpthumpthump. When it came to making noise during sex, my brother was a rock star, and he wasn’t holding back now. “Harder!” he cried, followed by mad laughter and some, ‘fuck yes’es and a, “You’re so fucking hot. So tight.”
I was up off the couch and pacing, grinding my teeth. I needed to see Rory come back out, needed him to not spend the night with her. That way, it would be just sex. If it were just sex, it’d be tolerable, I told myself.
The sounds were reaching a crescendo. Something shattered. Frances moaned, “Oh, Rory, you’re so huge. Fuck me, you monster!” Then spanking sounds, and squeals of glee. “Oh! Oh! Mmm, you want to put it in my butt? Yes, please!”
That was the last straw. I broke down the door.
From the bed, Rory and Frances looked up at me, both flushed and a little sweaty, big grins on their faces, and… both still clothed.
“You fucking—” I tackled Rory off of her and took him to the floor.
“Zack, we were just messin’—”
“You’re hard!” I yelled, grabbing him by the hair to slam his head into the birch planks.
“Well of course I’m hard,” he yelled back. “She’s a total babe!”
I hit him in the mouth, and he whacked me in the nuts. I keeled over. “You sneaky… fucker,” I groaned, clutching myself. I glanced up to see Frances grinning widely at me over the edge of the bed, then dropped my head back to the floor. “Fucking hell.”
“What’s your problem, anyway?” Rory asked.
I thumped my fist against the floor. “I don’t like it.”
“Don’t like me and Frances?”
I shook my head.
“Dude… she doesn’t even like you,” Rory said.
“I k
now.” It still smarted that she thought I looked like a douche, and then there was the little fact that I’d made up this room for her, and she’d decided to ditch that first night, rather than sleep in it. Thank god I wasn’t the sort to get discouraged easily.
Rory was silent for a long moment, and then, “Okay.” He got to his feet, and walked out the door.
“Rory!” Frances called after him. “Hey, you said you’d eat me out. Rory!”
“Bros before hos!” With a laugh, he pounded up the stairs.
Frances scowled at me. “Are you happy now?”
I rolled onto my back, sprawled out and smiled up at her. “I kinda am.”
“You turd,” she huffed.
I laughed, and finally peeled myself up off the floor. “Sweet dreams, sweet cheeks.”
She threw Rory’s shoe at me.
“Zack.”
“Mmm.” I was having a dream. It was a good one, all soft pink cheerleader parts and pirouettes on the ice. I was awash in fans. Their ‘raaaaahhhhhh’ filled my ears.
“Zack.”
They were yelling my name. The goalie took off her mask, and swished her hair, and she was a cheerleader, too. The stands were full of them, all jumping up and down, cheering me on.
A shadow intruded into my dream world, at first faint and blurry, a smudge of darkness that quickly grew darker, sharper.
“Zack!”
My eyes shot open, heart racing. The darkness was a head, and that head was brunette, not blonde. The eyes watching me didn’t glint with adulation. They were gray and lurking in the grim face of the most beautiful woman in the world, who was currently sitting on the edge of my bed.
I stared at her in puzzlement.
“Time to get up. Flight lessons,” she said. She held out a blue plastic cup. “Water?”
I sat up and accepted the offering, my mind fumbling with the reality of Frances sitting on the edge of my bed at—I glanced at the clock—seven a.m. On auto-pilot, I lifted the cup and took a long sip. Mouth full of something decidedly not water, my eyes shot to Frances, widening.
She grinned.
I sprayed something thick and viscous with the repellant sweetness of glycerin out of my mouth.
“Welcome to my world,” she said.
“What?” I managed, though speaking before coffee had never been my forte.
“Imagine my surprise,” she said, “when upon waking, I noticed a handy personal faucet just above my nightstand. And, oh, just next to it: a cup.”
I grimaced, trying to wipe the stuff out of my mouth with the closest thing at hand—which happened to be a ratty old quilt I’d had since high school.
“What, nothing to say? I followed that pipe,” she continued, “all the way up to the attic, and I’m guessing you might have some idea of what I found.”
I grunted.
“A plastic barrel, suspended in the peak of the roof. It had a sticker on the side.” She didn’t wait for my grunt this time. “‘Animal birthing agent’, is what it said. And so… I’m at a loss.”
I glanced at her with the sudden fear that I’d managed to run her off, again.
“I’ve never seen this before,” she said. “Lube, piped into every bedroom in the house. And not just the bedrooms. I found one of your naughty little faucets in the fucking kitchen.”
“Rory’s idea,” I mumbled.
“It’s brilliant,” she said.
“Or mine, I can’t remember.”
“Perverted,” she continued. “But brilliant.” She snagged the cup from me and rose. “Now get the hell up. We have flight lessons.” And then, before I could argue, she turned and walked out of the room.
The beguiling flash of her bare legs was like the promise of brains to a zombie. I followed them downstairs just to have Frances slam the bathroom door in my face.
I lumbered into the kitchen for coffee, then slumped next to Rory at the bar. I drained half of my mug before glancing his way, and raising my brows.
“Not sure what’s up,” Rory replied. “I just got up myself, after hearing what I thought was a family of squirrels in the attic. She’s lucky I didn’t shoot first and ask questions later.”
I gave him a hard look.
He shrugged.
The bathroom door opened. Both of our stools creaked as we turned to watch her emerge.
Oh… god. In the dimness of my room, I hadn’t noticed details. Details like that her hair was sticking up in every direction, and one shoulder peeked out the neckhole of the oversized T-shirt she wore. Beneath that, her pale legs stretched down to fuzzy pink socks that gathered lazily at her ankles.
She ducked into her bedroom, and I looked at Rory. “She’s wearing my shirt.”
Rory’s eyes were big. “I can’t believe I chose you over a night of hot sex with that.”
Me, either.
We watched her emerge again and meander toward the kitchen, ignoring us completely. She pulled open the fridge, and then bent down to take a look inside. She was wearing pink panties under that shirt. She had a bow on her ass.
I gripped the counter. Next to me, Rory whimpered.
Frances reached up to snag a mug, flashing us those panties again as her shirt—my shirt—rode up. She sloshed coffee into it, and then the way she poured that cream… She stood with one knee bent, hip cocked, hair looking like some lucky guy’d recently had his fingers tangled in it. Those big gray eyes flashed as she licked a drop of cream from the tip of her finger.
Rory shoved back from the bar. “I’ll be upstairs.” He ran up them two at a time.
I was hard as iron, and troubled that Frances could so easily wring such a response from me. Was the woman even attracted to me?
Frances rounded the bar to take Rory’s seat, wafting the scent of warm gardenias to my nostrils. She smiled at me over the rim of her mug, making my heart give an extra thud.
I could attract her, I decided. I would inspire her to lust, make her lose control. And to achieve that, I’d tease her in the same way she was doing me. Starting tomorrow morning. It was on.
Chapter Nine
FRANCES
The brothers had no aesthetic. I told Zack this as we were stowing our headsets.
“Aes-thet-what?” asked Zack.
“Oh shut up, you know what aesthetic is.” Anybody with that many art textbooks in his closet would know what ‘aesthetic’ meant. But, just in case he wasn’t shittin’ me: “Your yard looks like shit.”
He climbed out of the plane, and paused to look around. “What do you mean?”
“Ugh.” I hopped out, and led the way into their ugly yard. “This, the way you’ve done this, is hideous.”
“Done what? We haven’t done anything.”
“If you hadn’t done anything, your yard would look like the woods, and would be charming, so obviously that’s not true. Look, see? This is rhubarb. Rhubarb doesn’t grow in the woods.”
“So? What’s wrong with it?”
“You planted it in the middle of goddamn everything. There’s no rhyme or reason, it’s just there.”
“Seemed as good a place to put it as any,” Zack said.
“Well, it’s not. It sticks out like a sore thumb.” I stared at it a moment, wondering if I had to tolerate walking around that ill-placed plant for the rest of the month. “May I move it?”
“You can do whatever you want to the yard,” Zack said. “I don’t care, and Rory cares even less. Anything actually growing here is either a gift or a weed, and frankly, if it was a gift, it was lucky to’ve made it into the ground. And speaking of which, if you’re looking for some more stuff to plant, our sister’s given us a couple things. They’re still in their pots over next to the shop. Ferns, and… stuff.”
“Really? Whatever I want, wherever I want? I can trim bushes, and pull weeds, and—?”
“You can clear-cut every inch of the yard if you want.”
I took a deep breath, mind racing. “Do you have a shovel?”
First thing,
I moved the rhubarb.
Then I went over and investigated the pots Zack’d mentioned. Fiddlehead ferns, yes. Also a couple wild roses, a baby mountain ash, and a crabapple.
Besides the willow and birch saplings growing like weeds here and there—which I cut or pulled next—there were only two trees in the yard. One was a massive cottonwood that stood next to the little guest cabin.
The other tree was a chokecherry clustered with white and intensely-perfumed flowers, growing unchecked just outside my bedroom window. It’d come up in four tall and spindly trunks, making them vulnerable to breaking off under a heavy snow load. After cutting away the masses of suckers growing up from the roots and base, I found a ladder and deadheaded the tops of the three trunks I could reach. The fourth, I went inside to cut from my window. It came off clean, and I tossed it toward the growing pile of burnable yard trash.
Through the pruned tree, I could see that Zack and Rory had opened one of the shop’s oversized garage doors, and were working on what might’ve been the base to a new catapult. As I watched, they wheeled the giant platform out into the sunshine. Bendy was with them, a clothes-hanger for REI-chic, looking a damn sight better than the bottom-of-the-closet brothers.
But then Zack peeled out of his T-shirt, and I changed my mind. Their guest probably looked pale and skinny and cerebral under his clothes. Zack looked like someone that ought to be followed with a camera, so no moment might be missed.
As I stood at the window, creeping on my student, the birds started to return to my tree. Chickadees and sparrows flitted back and forth in the slender branches. The greenery was that bright, vivid, sun-drenched color that only an Alaskan summer seemed able to achieve. I propped my elbow on the sill, chin in my hand, dreamily taking it in.
One of the birds darted closer. It perched on a bobbing branch, tilting its head to eye me with shining black eyes. Another bird trilled, and my bird responded with a series of chirps. Then, it started to sing.
Did it get any better than this? I was getting serenaded while ogling the hottie in the yard, whose muscles bulged as he helped Rory carry a large timber from behind the shop.
