It was an excruciating amount of time later—which was really only about two minutes but felt like two hundred to a man whose cock was on the verge of bursting if he shifted a centimeter to the left—that Piper started to snore, and Kol was finally able to slip out of the bed.
The house had gone silent, everyone else tucked away and asleep, and Kol sneaked across the hall into Piper’s bathroom. Lights left off, he locked himself inside and took himself in hand. It would be unimpressive and quick, Piper’s presence enough to push him to the edge, and then her needy voice and her soft breasts and the way he knew now that she could be flooding his senses.
Bracing against the door with one hand, Kol pumped at his cock with the other, eyes squeezed shut, Piper’s panting face behind his eyelids. She wanted to be fucked, and he wanted to fuck her, but why did she have to go about it like that?
He twisted down the length of himself, hand already slick with anticipation. He wished he had her in the bathroom with him, not to touch, just to watch, to see what she did to him, to know he didn’t want to refuse her.
Kol found her name in his throat as he came. Release jerking through him, he stiffened, hand shaking as he brought himself past the point where it was pleasurable into that torturous moment after.
It’s just easier for me like this.
His forehead found the door as he went limp. He would find another way to make it easier for her, to get her to tell him what she really wanted, he had to, or he would absolutely lose everything trying.
17
Dropped Messages And Other Unfortunate Miscommunications
Kol slept surprisingly well after squeezing all the icing out of his piping bag, but it probably had more to do with the limbs wrapped around him. Piper was cuddled into his side, a leg thrown over his hips and both arms entwined around one of his. He was still dreaming, he had to be, nothing this wonderful could ever happen.
But then he caught a whiff of her breath as she snored up against his face, and he was thrust into full wakefulness.
Piper’s head lolled to the side, a little puddle of drool on the pillow and messy hair stuck to her forehead. Gods, she really was beautiful. But the line between silent admiration and creepy staring was as thin as tinsel, and he had other things to look at.
It was probably an hour or so later when he heard shuffling from the bed and the telltale groan of a hangover. “Waterya doin’?”
Kol turned over his shoulder and held up the hefty textbook from his lap. “You were going to be a doctor, like your mom.”
“Hmm?” Piper blinked, sitting up into the sunlight that streamed in on her disheveled form, dust motes dancing around her droopy, adorable face. “No, I wasn’t.” She fell back into the bed with a thump.
“But these are your perfectly straight highlighter marks and your itty bitty, neat handwriting in the margins.” He flipped through another page ofClinical Pharmacokinetics & Pharmacodynamics. “And look, after this study where no medicines worked, someone wrote,Maybe they should try laughter?If that’s not a note thatyouwrote, I’ll eat my hat.”
Piper groaned long and low as she twisted under the duvet. “Not a doctor, and definitely not like my mom.”
“People don’t have these kinds of books for fun—I might not spend much time in the human world, but I know textbooks cost an ear and a nut.”
She chuckled groggily. “I was going after my undergrad in pharmaceutical science, but I didn’t finish. Mom got sick.”
Kol swallowed back his next exclamation, about to encourage her to go back to school. He’d been flipping through all the books on her shelves, annotated and tabbed with such neatness and care. Besides the medical books, she had a shelf filled with old, illustrated field guides from all over the world and another dedicated to fairytales, old, leather-bound copies and newer retellings with pretty, pastel covers. No wonder she’d been so good at handling the whole magic-is-real thing. Her bookshelves didn’t tell him everything he wanted to know, but it had been a start. “I’m sorry, Piper,” he said as he carefully placed the book back where it belonged.
“I know, everybody is, but don’t be—the only good thing that came from her getting sick was the excuse to quit school before I failed out.”
Kol scoffed. “I bet you’ve never failed at anything in your—”
“I’mawfulat math,” she admitted with the freedom of a woman who had been keeping it in for far too long. “It doesn’t happen with words, but I see numbers backwards, and I can barely add without a calculator. I would have killed someone by giving them too many milligrams of floxuridine or something, if I ever even made it to an actual patient, which I definitely wasn’t going to.” She dug the heels of her palms into her eyes as she flopped fully onto her back, words continuing to tumble out. “Every other subject was so easy, but I spent all of my free time between twelve and twenty-two just doing equation after equation, struggling to get it right. I don’t belong in a school, or in a hospital, or a pharmacy. I wanted to be good at it, Kol, Ireallydid, and Mom wassoproud when I got accepted to her alma mater, but I never loved it as much as she did, and I just…I couldn’t do it. I didn’twantto do it.”
He shifted onto his knees and went over to the bed. Guiding her hand away from her face, he offered her a gentle smile. “That’s okay, you know.”
“But she was great, and I’m nothing like her.”
He felt the scowl before he could stop it from overtaking his face and grabbed a framed photo from the nightstand. A much younger Piper and her mother were squished up against one another in the hollow of a huge tree, both faces dirt-smudged and beaming in the picture. “Don’t say you’re nothing alike—she clearly loved being outside as much as you do.”
Piper flopped her arm over the edge of the bed to take the photo. She had circles under her eyes and her cheeks were red, but at least she wasn’t crying. A smile made its way back onto her face. “Well, I guess that is true. Mom was as good at identifying mushrooms as she was at identifying tumors. Even her own.”
Piper’s heavy words blanketed Kol’s shoulders, but she hadn’t frowned.
“She actually did, ya know. She was forgetting stuff, so she gave herself a brain scan. She said once,This is what I get for specializing in dermatological oncology.” When he hesitated, she clarified for him, “Melanoma has a pretty high survival rate: brain cancer, not so much.” Piper studied the photo then actually started to laugh. “Well, you can’t really give yourself an MRI, but she swore the radiologist to secrecy, which was very like her. If she had the time to teach herself how to do the surgery, she probably would have tried to remove her own tumor—she always took care of everything on her own all the time.”
Kol watched her stare sentimentally at the photo for far too long. “That sounds an awful lot like somebody else I know.”
