“God, Callum, you look…” She trailed off and pulled away to study me. A tilt of the head and her hair was tumbling over her bare shoulder. Suddenly, I was fantasizing about watching her get ready, helping her zip the back of a dress. “You look like a man, Callum Pike.”
Cass cut in with a big laugh. “That’s because he is a man!” She slapped a hand on my chest. Lake’s cat-like eyes flicked to it. “And what a man, right? Like, this six-pack? Oh my God.”
Lake blinked at her. “Yeah, girl.” She lifted her gaze from Cass to me, flashing me a little laugh that I refused to return. I wasn’t going to join her in ridiculing Cass. Even if Cass couldn’t distinguish pecs from abs. I’d seen Cass about a hundred times in the past few years and Lake a good zero. Cass found her way into every party I threw to raise money for the Scotch distillery. I spent years renovating a family business abandoned decades ago. I revived the Pike name to world recognition and built my own business from the ground up. Cass had some crazy in her but she’d spent the past several years throwing all her support into the biggest project of my life that Lake didn’t even know existed. If anything, Cass knew me more at this point.
And by the middle of dinner, in the bathroom, she was getting to know me even better.
She white-knuckled the sink and held on for dear life as I fisted her waist. I gnashed my teeth, trying my best to fuck Lake out of my head. One brush of her bare leg against mine and I was turning into a fucking menace at the table, remembering every inch of how good I once felt inside her. “I need to talk to you in private at some point.” She murmured the question to me and every soft word seeped into my skin like venom. It didn’t help that she was touching my knee. She looked at me like I’d spit on her when I said “sure” and removed her hand. It was cold of me and I knew it but I didn’t want to feel her touch. It was all I needed for it to start all over.
And I couldn’t let her take over my entire life again.
So I peeled off Cass’s dress in the bathroom. It was a ring of elastic squeezing her thighs tight for me as I pounded her from behind, taking in her reactions through the reflection in the mirror. I got off on the untamed faces pretty girls made when I fucked them. That eyes-squeezed-shut but mouth-wide-open thing. Bonus points if she gave me those real, throaty noises instead of the exaggerated moan you get in porn. Cass was giving me all of that and more. She breathed jaggedly, made sounds I’d never heard before in my life. Her lip was still swollen from how hard I’d sucked on it and it quivered in a way you couldn’t fake. She was everything I loved to look at during sex.
But it was doing nothing for me.
Grabbing two handfuls of her, I pumped my hips so fast I could feel a deep burn in all my muscles. I’d gotten her to come but I still needed to. Badly. But no matter how hard I went, how deep I sunk, I felt nothing building and I knew she was getting self-conscious when she started giving me the porn moan. Fuck. I stared down at her insane body. Her ass was rounder than any girl I’d slept with, her waist smaller, her legs longer and easier to prop up on the sink so I could plunge every last inch of myself inside her. But it wasn’t doing shit for me and though it never happened before in my life, I knew I wasn’t going to come. Worse, I knew exactly why.
“Wait. Please, Callum. I need to know… please just tell me, please…”
It wasn’t long before I was squeezing the condom off my fading hard-on and dealing with a naked girl crying in front of me in a hotel bathroom, refusing to get dressed till I told her what was wrong with her. If only she’d asked what the hell was wrong with me. I could’ve given her a ten-page thesis with citations. Fuckin’ ass, I cursed myself, wishing I could muster up some sort of emotion in my voice or think of words besides “it’s not you” while getting dressed again. But I couldn’t and at this point, Cass was streaking her mascara and bawling beyond the point of consolation. Another few seconds of my silence and it was a full-on wail.
And here we go. The mess was sudden and ridiculous but that honestly seemed about right because Lake DePalma was back and whenever she came around, so did the beautiful chaos that followed her everywhere she went like a stupid, lovestruck puppy.
But who could even blame it.
Chapter Two
Lake
I could feel the tears coming and for what would sound like the most idiotic reason when I finally told Isabel. She was hustling me out of the dining room and into the hallway for one of her signature pep talks, picking up right where our friendship left off, as if I hadn’t ditched her six years ago, right before our trip to Paris. She had, in distinct Isabel fashion, written out a sixteen-paged itinerary for the eight-day trip and bought an entirely new wardrobe. I disappeared the day before the flight and yet she was still pulling me aside tonight and saving me because she could still tell when I was two seconds from crying – and in front of a dozen people I hadn’t seen in ages, whom I really didn’t know that well. I’d lost most of my friends from high school before even disappearing, and it looked to me like Caroline had just invited people who she deemed the “nice” boys and girls.
“It’s stupid,” I warned Isabel when she asked what was wrong.
“I know what it is. The way he pushed your hand away.” She smirked when I looked at her with surprise for nailing it like that. “Lake, you act like I didn’t date Callum in high school. He can be rude without even realizing it. I remember. And you should remember, too. We used to sit in the kitchen with Caroline and bitch about it, just us girls.”
“And she’d pour us a little bit of wine and pretend we were all drowning our sorrows.”
“I don’t think she was pretending, girl.” Isabel cupped my cheeks when I frowned. “Oh, that was such a bad joke, Lake. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“It’s okay, it’s not you,” I murmured, still thinking about how much Caroline had been hurting even before I left her. “It’s just everything coming back to me at once.”
“I know, girl. Just keep the waterworks to a minimal or I’m going to cry and I got my mascara so friggin perfect today.”
I laughed. “Oh God, not the mascara.”
Isabel wiped my tears and gave me something that was partly pout but mostly smile. “Seriously, Lake. You knew this was going to take time. You haven’t been back more than two hours and you’re already expecting Callum to get over the fact that you ever went away? I told you, girl. I don’t know if you read any of the emails I sent after you left but he was in bad shape for awhile. Really bad. Both him and Caroline. They missed you worse than any of us did and I missed you bad.” She stuck out her lip. “You’re my Buxom Buddy.”
We both snorted. I had first bonded with Isabel in high school when she took it upon herself to fix my bra strap and tell me that I didn’t have to wear those “chunky-ass bras” just because I had “big tatas.” Our boob comparison had been a completely genuine conversation full of good advice about well-fitted bras, but it had fascinated the boys at the lunch table so much that Isabel instantly recognized our power that day as a titillating twosome. We were juniors in high school and not yet immune to the lure of constant attention so from that moment forward, to Callum’s chagrin, we became inseparable.
Sighing, Isabel pushed my hair back. “Pretty girl. It got even wavier.”
“It did?”
“Like beach hair. I pay like, thirty dollars for Bumble’s surf spray and you have this naturally? Fuck you.” I tried to crack a smile, knowing that Isabel was trying to get me to laugh. She shook my shoulders. “Lake. It’s day one. Give it time with him, okay? It’s gonna take awhile.”
“I know. It’ll just hurt in the meantime.”
“I say this with all the love in the world, babe, but you deserve to know some of that hurt.”