HARBOR: Beards & Bondage Read online

  As I pull up to Shaw’s house, he’s coming out of the barn. I cut off the engine and watch as he walks over and waits. He doesn’t try to open my door for me. He doesn’t ask me what I’m doing just sitting behind the wheel and looking at him. We watch each other for a moment and then something clicks. He comes close and I open the door. I don’t get out.

  “Hey,” I say, looking him up and down.

  “Hey.” He comes closer and I sit still, my voice caught in my throat as he reaches over my lap and gets a firm grip on my thigh. I help him as he turns me in my seat, spreading my legs. I help him hike up the light fabric of my dress. I hold still as his fingers start to explore. I do my best not to squirm as he discovers how wet he’s made me in less than a minute.

  “Shouldn’t we take this inside?” I ask as I inch my ass closer to the edge of the seat.

  “Do you want to?” he asks as he pinches my slippery clit between his fingers.

  “No,” I groan. “Where’s Vaughn?”

  “On a call.”

  “Oh. Well, then we shouldn’t disturb him.”

  He shakes his head. “Nah, we shouldn’t.”

  I grip the steering wheel with one hand and the back of the seat with the other as my hips pump forward. I’m grateful Shaw’s yard is surrounded by trees. I’m glad his prim and proper Polo-clad neighbors can’t see Shaw push three fingers inside of me. That they won’t catch my hips arch off the seat. The way I start fucking myself on his hand, my pussy starting to straight-up leak onto his driveway.

  My cunt starts to squirt when he finds that perfect spot and we both hit that perfect rhythm, shooting my juices all over his tattooed wrist. They can’t see the way he’s looking at me or notice how fucking turned on I am by the dark spots I make on his nice clean shirt. They might hear me when I come, when I cry out, whimpering Shaw’s name. They might hear me, but I can’t bring myself to care.

  Seventeen

  Vaughn

  Shaw is still standing at the sink where I found him washing his hands after he apparently fingerfucked Brooklyn in the driveway. I get it. I’ve been waiting almost three weeks to see her and touch her again, but damn. He couldn’t even let me say hi. I could smell her on him as he explained that she was upstairs getting changed. When she comes back down, she at least knows she’d been caught leaving me out in the cold again. I hadn’t said anything, just sat back down at the table.

  “Don’t be mad.” Brooklyn looks down at me as she lets out this throaty laugh right before she hugs my head. I fix my glasses, jostled by her arms, but I don’t pull away. Her arms feel good around me. She feels good in my lap.

  “Who said I was mad?”

  “Your face,” Shaw says from the kitchen.

  Brooklyn collapses in my lap and covers my face with kisses, trying to make me smile. I won’t budge. They will suffer my wrath for another twenty-something minutes.

  “How can I make it up to you?” she says, kissing me again.

  “You can’t. You ruined it. Both of you. Weekend’s over. I want a divorce. I want to go home.”

  “Are you two married? I never asked.” Brooklyn suddenly says.

  “No, it would fuck up Shaw’s vibe.” I’m just fucking with him and he knows it.

  “Shaw, marry him and then he’ll stop being pissed at me.”

  “I’m not pissed. Just disappointed.”

  “How about Shaw and I spend the rest of the weekend making it up to you? What do you want? What do you need?”

  Stop fucking each other without me, I almost say. I’m fine with the fucking itself. I’m not jealous or anything like that. They needed last weekend and I’m glad they had that time together to sort their shit out, but I want to fuck too. Damn.

  “I need Shaw to control himself.”

  “Can’t, sorry,” he says, staring me dead in the face. I hate when he does that ’cause he knows that his ego is part of his appeal.

  Brooklyn sucks her teeth at him. “Stop.”

  “I want Shaw to take us out on the boat,” I say.

  “Oh, I’d love that, but like not too far out?” Brooklyn asks.” I can swim, but I can’t swim.”

  “We’ll be right in the harbor. Plenty of people around. Lots of witnesses,” Shaw says, winking at her.

  “Well, in that case,” Brooklyn says sarcastically, looking back at me. I give her thigh a gentle squeeze and she lets out a soft breath. “I think we owe you more than a boat ride. What else can we do for you, Vaughny? How can we make this up to you?”

  “I’ll think on it. Let’s head out. We can get lunch on the way.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Shaw says. “Brook, why don’t you help Vaughn get ready? Wink, wink.”

  “I’m gonna fuck you up one day,” I say to Shaw as I ease Brooklyn off my lap. She stands beside me and takes my hand.

  “Come on. I need to change into my bathing suit. Help me.”

  I glare at Shaw as Brooklyn pulls me out of the kitchen and up to her guest room. I step into the room, taking in the unused space and Brooklyn’s things on the foot of the bed. I turn back to her just as she closes the door. I don’t miss the look on her face as she crosses the room. Maybe I shouldn’t be pissed at Shaw. I don’t know what kind of mood she was in when she arrived, but she’s turned on now and it would stupid of me to not to lean into that. She steps close to me, putting both of her hands on my chest. She has to crane her neck to look up at me, giving me a damn good view of her beautiful face.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “He caught me off guard.”

  I reach up and stroke her cheek. “You don’t have to apologize for getting off. I understand the difficulty in resisting Shaw.”

  “Come here.” She nudges me back toward the bed, going for my belt, but I stop her.

  “Hold on a sec.”

  “You sure? My head game is next level.”

  “I know. I remember the last time I nutted in your mouth.”

  “Good, ’cause I definitely didn’t forget.”

  “It’s not what I want.”

  “Well, tell me what you want,” she whispers. I gaze at her lips and think about the way I feel when she responds to my texts. How the silly selfies she sends me from her office are becoming the highlight of my day. Yeah, I’ve been waiting over two weeks to be inside Brooklyn again, but what I really want is to hold her and kiss her. My hands slide up the side of her neck and I lean down, pressing my lips to hers. I feel it in my chest when she sighs against my mouth.

  “You are such a good kisser,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she smiles. There’s something on the tip of her tongue, but she’s doing that thing again, holding back.

  “What is it?”

  “Tell me something bad. Give me one little thing to hate about you.”

  “Why?” She’s said this before. She was joking then, but now I think she’s actually searching bad shit out.

  “’Cause I don’t want to fall for you, Vaughn. Make it easy on me. Please.”

  “I hate doing dishes.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a great cook and that kinda makes up for that. Try harder. Dig deeper. Give me something truly awful. Tell me you bite your toenails.”

  “That’s nasty as fuck.”

  She laughs as she gently nudges my stomach.

  “What would be so bad about falling for me?”

  “Well, for one, I’d have to put up with that asshole downstairs,” she says with a sexy smile.

  “Yeah, he sucks wicked bad. But besides that shiftless bum?”

  “I’m not ready and you, Vaughn Coleman, deserve someone who’s ready. I mean, besides Shaw. If that’s what you want.”

  “Fucking Shaw.” I lean down and kiss her again, slow and deep. I soak in the way she sags against me, her arms wrapping around me. I need to let go of this desire to keep Brooklyn with us. It’s gonna fuck me up in the process, but I have to. I believe her when she says she’s not ready and she’s right. I want to move forward w
ith people who want to move forward with me. I break our connection and focus on the weekend we’ve agreed to spend together. That’s good enough for now. It has to be. “I’ll give you one thing.”

  “Oh! Please tell me.”

  “I hate Christmas.”

  “Vaughn, what the fuck!” she laughs.

  “My cousins used Gremlins and Home Alone to play fucked-up mind games with me when I was a kid and I was convinced that some horrible shit was always going to happen on Christmas.”

  “I forgot about Gremlins. That is technically a Christmas movie.”

  “With a whole story about a dad getting stuck in a chimney and dying ’cause he thought he could play Santa Claus. People tried so hard to convince me it was safe, but it just made me hate the whole concept of the season.”

  “Aww, poor Baby Jesus. So, do you just not celebrate?”

  “No, I celebrate. Shaw loves Christmas. It’s the only time of year he’s outwardly pleasant. I just look like this the whole time.” I give her my best gritted teeth grin, smiling at her for real when she fails to cover a loud snort.

  “You’re saying I need to stick around at least til Christmas so I can see that face again?”

  “It could help take some of the pressure off me. Especially if you like Christmas music. You and Shaw could sing your hearts out while I hide in a corner somewhere.”

  “Okay, fair. That’s a little, well, not odd. Plenty of people don’t like or celebrate Christmas for obvious reasons. I’ll just accept that you’re perfect and I’ll spend time alone wondering why we couldn’t have met under different circumstances.”

  “Sounds like a bad plan, but I’ll accept it for now.”

  “Thank you.” She steps away from me and goes over to her weekend bag. “Why don’t you head down while I get changed, ’cause I don’t think we’ll make it to the boat if I take off my clothes in front of you.”

  “You’re right. I’d be all over that.”

  She rolls her eyes before she shoos me away. I go down to my room, change into my swim trunks and grab the rest of my stuff, then head to the kitchen where Shaw is waiting with Roger.

  “All good?” he asks as he looks up from his phone.

  “All good. She’s getting changed. We managed not to touch each other’s genitals.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel like that,” he says instead of cracking another joke.

  I squat down and Roger comes right to me. I give his head and neck a rough scratch. “I know.”

  “I just—”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, look at her.”

  “I know,” I say, chuckling. “Makes me feel a little better when she has us both a little fucked up.”

  “Do you want to get married?” he says suddenly.

  “Do you?” I ask, shocked.

  “You may not believe it, but Brook is teaching me some things. I know we talked about the idea of it before, but that was before...before Corrine.”

  I look back at him, blinking. Shaw is who he is and I’ve always loved him for it. I know he’s being serious right now. I know that he’s trying. He just caught me way the fuck off guard. I stand and cross the kitchen to him. He watches me, carefully. He’s expended all of his emotional bandwidth for the day just by asking me that question, and he’s warning me with this hesitant expression, so I know not to push him for more. I take his cheeks in my hands and squeeze his face. He scowls at me, his lips puffed out but he doesn’t move.

  It’s not a question of if I want to marry Shaw, but if he wants to marry me. I know I’m a lot for him. Most people are. It’s why he likes to live alone in this giant house. I’m sure a therapist would have something to say about the way he keeps people at arm’s length. I know it has a lot to do with his parents and his fear of abandonment, and the way everything went down with Corrine didn’t help those issues one bit. Still, I know how he feels about me and I know what’s trying to say. He doesn’t want to lose me and if marriage is what I want, he’ll give it to me. That’s a bigger conversation for another day. And it still does change my desire to add more, permanent partners to our relationship in the future.

  “I love you.” I tell him.

  “I love you, too.” he mumbles back, his lips still squished together. I kiss him and step away, giving him the moment he needs to slide his hard shell back into place.

  A few moments later, Brooklyn steps into the kitchen and makes a dramatic show of putting on her large-frame sunglasses. “Come, gentleman. Let’s go yachting.”

  Shaw finds a place on the water for us to chill. I help Brooklyn apply sunscreen to her back, she helps me and then we both help Shaw before he goes back to his Captain duties while Roger makes himself comfortable on the other side of the deck. It’s a beautiful sunny day on Cape Cod Bay, but I can’t keep my eyes or my hands off Brook’s ass. She is lying on top of her towel on the deck of the Dirty Diana, her floral two-piece bathing suit leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. I’m on my towel beside her, gently caressing and lightly smacking her ass. Her giggles and sighs let me know she approves.

  Shaw was right. It’s a busy Saturday on the coast. Everyone’s keeping their boat at a safe distance, but there’s definitely too many people out for me to casually start eating Brooklyn’s ass without anyone seeing. Still tempting though, I think as I slip two fingers under the fabric of her bikini. She squirms a little, spreading her thighs an obvious degree, but I resist the urge to stroke her pussy from behind. For now.

  “I see why you put up with him now. This is like a porno.” I follow her eyes and see Shaw securing the main sail. The sun is glistening off his skin and he’s wearing the Ray-Bans I got him for his birthday. It’s not a bad view at all. He’s calmer out here, quieter. Happier. I love the ocean, but not like Shaw does. He comes over to join us, easing onto the towel beside Brooklyn. I move as she rolls over and puts her head on his thigh. I still have access to her perfect ass.

  “Hey, you guys wanna play a game?”

  “You wanna see a dead body?” Shaw drones. Brooklyn playfully smacks his foot.

  “I’m serious.”

  I sit up and slip my glasses back on my face. “Sure, what’s your game?”

  “It’s a classic I like to call ‘Never Have I Ever: The Brooklyn Edition.’”

  “Whatever the rules are, I’m gonna cheat,” Shaw says.

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less there, you punk,” Brooklyn laughs. “Okay, so I say something like ‘never have I ever shoplifted from a dollar store’ and if you have, then you have to pick someone to kiss, on any part of their body.”

  “So, if you say some shit like ‘never have I ever played basketball,’ I have to come over there and swallow Vaughn’s dick?” Shaw says.

  “I mean, if you want to give that elderly couple over there a show, go for it.” I look where Brooklyn is nodding and, sure enough, there are two old white couples hanging out on the deck of a nearby boat.

  “If Shaw and I kiss on the mouth, that might be enough to give one of them a heart attack,” I say.

  “I’m willing to risk it. I’ll go first. Never have I ever...done something stupid that landed me in the ER,” she says.

  “I’m interested to see how playing this with an A.D.A. goes. I’m pretty sure your answers are going to be pretty tame,” I say, giving her a hard time.

  “Phsssst, whatever. I might be a public servant, duty bound to protect the innocent, but I can get pretty wild. I’m on a boat with two dudes I’m definitely gonna bone later. Plus, my sister used to use me as a crash test dummy. I’ve been to the ER. Just answer the question.”

  “False. Okay, Vaughn. Truth or dare?” Shaw says.

  “No, wrong game,” Brooklyn laughs. “Try again.”

  “Okay. Uhh—” Suddenly I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. “Never have I ever had three girls try to share me at prom.”

  “They didn’t try to share me. We went as a group.”

  “Oh, so is th
at where this plural-love thing started,” Brooklyn teases.

  “Three girls asked me to prom my senior year on the same day. I felt bad, so we all went together.”

  “That’s amazing. What about you Shaw?”

  He shrugs and tugs at the edge of his shorts. “I didn’t go to my prom. But during my modeling days, I did have an orgy with that photographer Corbin Wills and three Victoria Secret models at an after party. I imagine that’s better than prom.”

  “Geez. I just went with this boy in my history class. Most action I got was a kiss on the side of my ear at the end of the night.”

  “Sounds romantic to me,” I say.

  “Vaughn, you lost,” Shaw announces.

  Brooklyn laughs again, “Vaughn didn’t lose and you both ignored my question.” She rolls to her side and kisses me on my forearm. “I let my sister push me down the street in a shopping cart once and broke two fingers and a toe.”

  “Glad you survived that brush with death,” Shaw says before he leans over and kisses her on the mouth. “I used to street race for a while. Crashed my buddy’s car and broke my arm.”

  “I feel like Shaw’s going to have James Bond level answers to every question.”

  “I lived a crazy life, what can I say.”

  I roll my eyes. “Okay, I’ll go. Never have I ever spent a fucking grip on Celtics playoff tickets only to get booted out of the Garden during the National Anthem.”

  “What?!” Brooklyn says with a screech of laughter as she looks between Shaw and I. Shaw sits forward suddenly, rolling Brook toward me with a casual “Excuse me,” before he stands. He throws me his phone, which he’s lucky I catch, and does a backflip into the ocean. Of course, Roger thinks it’s play time and goes leaping into the water after him.

  “Is he serious?” Brooklyn says before rushing to the edge to make sure neither of them have drowned. I shake my head as I stand and make my way over to the ladder. Shaw takes his sweet-ass time, but eventually he and Roger swim over to that side of the boat. Shaw hoists Roger up to me and I help the dog back to the deck. I turn my head to avoid the splash zone as Roger gives his body a shake, spraying sea water everywhere. Shaw follows and does the exact same thing, splashing water all over me. It would be annoying if it wasn’t for the sound of Brooklyn’s laughter.