Off Limits

Danny Kessler's lake house had exactly three rules. Danny wrote them on a whiteboard by the fridge back when all of them were in their twenties and running on cheap tequila and the feeling that nothing could touch them:

1. Whoever burns the burgers does the dishes.
2. Nobody takes the canoe out after dark.
3. Nobody touches Lena.

Lena was twenty-nine now. She was an architect with a mortgage, a dead fern, and no patience left for her big brother's rules. The whiteboard was long gone. Apparently the third rule wasn't.

"You're in the boathouse," Danny told her Friday afternoon. Wedding chaos swirled around him: florists, a caterer yelling about ice, his fiancée's aunts claiming every bedroom in the main house. "With Jake. There are two beds. Don't kill each other."

"Two beds," Lena repeated.

"Two cots," Danny corrected, and he was gone.

Jake Hollis was leaning against the boathouse door when she carried her bag down the dock. Behind him, the late sun turned the water to hammered copper. He was thirty-five and the best man. He'd been Danny's best friend since freshman year of college, which made him part of the furniture of her life for more than a decade. He was big, quiet, and dark-eyed, he built houses with his hands, and he said maybe eleven words per holiday, most of them to her brother.

For years that had been fine with her. Then came Danny's thirtieth. She was twenty-four, and Jake walked her to her car in the rain and held his jacket over her head. He didn't say a single word. She drove home with her heart beating in her throat, and nothing had been fine since.

"Kessler," he said.

"Hollis."

He took her bag without asking, and his forearm brushed hers. It was nothing. It was a forearm. She felt it in her knees.

The boathouse was a single room above the boat slips. It had pine walls, a tiny kitchenette, and two narrow cots pushed against opposite walls like chaperones. A big window looked out over the lake. The air smelled like cedar and water and, faintly, like him.

"I'll take the one by the door," he said.

"Why?"

He looked at her then, really looked, and his jaw tightened. "So I can leave if I need to."

She didn't ask what he meant. She didn't need to.

The rehearsal dinner was the slow kind of torture. He sat across from her. Every time she looked up, he was already looking at her, and every time, he looked away first. When she laughed at something the groomsman beside her said, Jake's hand tightened on his glass. When she leaned over to fix the bride's veil for a photo, she felt his gaze travel down her spine like a fingertip.

At eleven, the storm hit.

It came off the lake all at once in wind and slanting rain. The boathouse power died with a sigh just as she was pulling off her heels. In the dark she heard the door, heard him come in soaked, heard him swear under his breath.

"Lena. You okay?"

"Fine."

Lightning turned the room white for a second. He stood in the middle of the floor with his shirt plastered to his chest and his hair dripping, as still as if he'd walked into a wall. Then it was dark again.

"I'm going to sleep in the truck," he said.

"Jake, it's a monsoon out there."

"I know."

"Then why—"

"Because you're in that dress," he said, low and rough. "I've spent six hours trying not to look at you in that dress, and I'm running out of reasons."

Rain drummed on the roof. Her heart drummed harder.

"Danny's rule," she said.

"Danny's rule."

"Danny wrote that rule when I was twenty-two and dating a guy who played the didgeridoo."

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "I remember that guy."

"I'm twenty-nine, Jake." She stood. The floorboards were cool under her bare feet. She crossed the room toward his shape in the dark until she could feel the cold coming off his wet shirt and the heat underneath it. "I get to make my own rules now."

"Lena." He said her name like it hurt. "If I touch you, I won't be able to pretend it didn't happen. Not tomorrow, not at the wedding, not ever."

"Good," she whispered. "I'm tired of pretending."

Lightning flashed again, and she saw the naked want in his face. Then his hands were on her jaw and his mouth was on hers.

At first it wasn't gentle. Five years of holding back went into one kiss, hungry and deep and a little desperate. His fingers slid into her hair and tilted her head so he could take more. She fisted his wet shirt and pulled him closer, and the sound he made against her lips went all the way through her.

Then he slowed down. He pulled back an inch, breathing hard, his forehead against hers.

"Tell me to stop," he said. "Anytime. I mean it."

"Don't you dare stop."

His laugh came out shaky. He kissed her again, slower now, like he'd decided to memorize her. His hands moved down her back and found the zipper of her dress. He drew it down an inch at a time, his knuckles grazing each notch of her spine, until the silk slid off her shoulders and pooled at her feet.

She pushed his shirt up and over his head. The next flash of lightning showed her what she'd been imagining for years: broad shoulders, a carpenter's arms, and a scar along his ribs she'd ask about later. She laid her palms flat on his chest. His heart was slamming.

"You too," she said, surprised.

"Since Danny's thirtieth," he said into her neck. "The rain. The jacket. I almost kissed you against your car."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because I'm an idiot." His mouth traveled down her throat and along her collarbone. "I'm done being an idiot."

He walked her backward to the cot by the window. They both laughed when it creaked under them like a dying animal. Then he knelt on the floor and pulled her to the edge, and she stopped laughing.

He kissed the inside of her knee, then her thigh. He hooked his fingers into the lace at her hips and looked up at her, waiting. When she nodded, he slid it down her legs and put his mouth on her like he had all night and meant to use every minute of it.

Lena gripped the edge of the cot. Rain hammered the window and the lake churned below them. Jake Hollis, the man who said eleven words per holiday, turned out to have a lot to say without words. He was patient and devastating. He read every catch of her breath and every arch of her back until she was gasping his name into the dark, her thighs trembling against his shoulders. Then she came apart completely, and the storm swallowed her cry.

He kissed his way back up her body while she was still shaking. "Okay?" he murmured.

"Get up here," she said, and she dragged him up by his belt.

His jeans hit the floor. She pushed him onto his back on the cot and climbed over him. He dug a condom out of his wallet with clumsy hands.

"Don't say anything," he warned.

"You've been carrying that since the rehearsal dinner, haven't you?"

"Since Tuesday."

She kissed him, laughing.

Then she sank down onto him, slowly, and neither of them was laughing anymore.

He filled her and stretched her, and for a long moment she stayed still to adjust. Her palms rested on his chest and his hands spanned her hips. They were both breathing like they'd just come up from deep water. Lightning lit his face. His eyes were open and fixed on hers, as if she were the only thing in the world worth seeing.

"Lena," he said. Just that.

She began to move.

It built slowly, and then not slowly at all. He sat up to meet her and wrapped her in his arms, his mouth on her breasts, her neck, her mouth. She rolled her hips and he groaned into her shoulder. The cot complained and they ignored it. When it finally let out a terrible crack, he simply lifted her, all of her, and carried her, still joined, to the wide windowsill. The cold glass at her back and the heat of him in front of her made her gasp.

"Look at me," he said.

She did. He drove into her deep and steady while the storm raged over the lake, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and held on. She felt the second climax gather inside her like weather. When it broke, it took him with her. His rhythm faltered, his face pressed into her neck, and her name tore out of him like a vow.

Afterward they lay tangled on the floor in a nest of blankets from the one surviving cot, listening to the rain soften.

"Danny's going to kill me," Jake said into her hair.

"Danny's getting married in fourteen hours," Lena said. "He'll be too happy."

"And after?"

She lifted her head. In the gray first light she could finally see him clearly. There was worry in his face and there was hope, and under both of them was something steady and certain.

"After," she said, "you're going to dance with me at the reception, in front of everyone. Then we're going to come back here and break the other cot."

He grinned, slow and wicked, and pulled her back down to him.

Rule number three, it turned out, was made to be broken.