The Lake House Had One Bed Left for Our Parents' Wedding Week, So I Shared It With My Soon-to-Be Stepbrother novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Before the Photographer

The photographer was due at one, which gave us exactly one shower and ten minutes.

The upstairs bathroom had a narrow stall with a rattling curtain, and a mirror that fogged in seconds.

I stood under the water with my hair up in a towel and Jack's soapy hands working along my spine.

I let my head fall forward on the tile.

It was noon on my father's wedding day.

Every cousin in Michigan was in the yard, arguing about chairs.

"Tell me what you see," I said.

"Right now?"

"Right now."

He slid his hands down over my hips.

"Water running down the back of your neck," he said. "The dip in your spine. Your ass, soap on it, and I'd like to bite it, and I won't, because you'll have a mark in the photographs."

"That is a very thoughtful thing."

"I'm a gentleman."

He turned me around.

He lathered my breasts with slow, wet hands, and I leaned back against the wall and watched his face while he did it.

He looked at me as though I were a painting he'd waited all his life to be allowed in front of.

"Here's what I want," he said, soft. "Every morning, for the rest of my life, I'm going to tell you one true thing about how you look. Something new each day. It's a promise."

"You'll run out."

"Trust me," said Jack. "I have fifty years of material, and I'm just getting to the elbows."

I laughed so hard that I slid down the tile.

He caught me and kissed me under the spray, long and slow.

Then he rinsed the soap off my shoulders and turned off the water.

"Dressing," he said.

He dried me with a towel, patting each place the way he did everything, with care.

I dried him.

I put on the lemon-yellow dress Judy had chosen.

He did the zipper, slowly, from the small of my back to my neck, with his mouth following it.

I tied his tie.

I'd learned a Windsor knot at twelve, for my father, who never could.

I tied it standing in front of him with my wrists on his collar and my fingers trembling.

"Your hands are shaking," he said.

"It's my father's wedding."

"That's not why."

"No."

I smoothed his lapels.

He looked unfairly good in a charcoal suit, tall and calm and a little grave, with his hair finally cut and his eyes very green.

He took my wrist, the one with the scarf, and kissed the inside of it.

"We have eight minutes," he said.

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