Like the light rain that follows a hurricane.
Maren eases her grip but works me slowly down.
When I’m done, I rinse my hands beneath the water. Stepping in and out of the spray in silence, we wash our hair and faces and bodies. My cock stings a little at the soap given what we just did.
I step out first and grab a towel off the rack to hand it to Maren. She starts squeezing the water out of her hair with it, so I grab a second towel and wrap it around her body. Not because I want her to hurry up and get dry, but because if I have to lookat her tits and that pussy, I’m gonna want to dip my cock in her, condom or no condom.
“Thank you,” she says, then a faint smile crosses her lips. “For all of it.”
“Seems like I’m the king of bad ideas, today.”
Then, the smile becomes a grin. “Long may you reign.”
I roll my eyes and grab a towel to run through my own hair. Once it’s secured around my hips, I leave the room, so she has a little more space.
The little camera thing she has is handy. I can see how choppy the water is getting, but it hasn’t broken the surface level of the wet dock the airboats are tied up in.
I grab my phone off the floor and hurry downstairs.
The signal is shit in the boathouse, but I find a spot near a porthole-style window that I can squeeze a bar or two out of. The noise of the storm rattling through the boathouse doesn’t help. It’s like someone is shaking massive, corrugated sheets of metal.
After three attempts, the call I’m trying to make goes through, and North answers on the second ring.
“Thank fuck, Prez. Where the hell are you?” His voice is steady and alert, so very much like him to stay sober when there could be an emergency. Someone needs to be able to think or ride or do whatever is necessary. It’s not the time to be pitting your alcohol tolerance against Mother Nature.
“I’m safe. Realized I left my laptop at home, so I went to pick it up,” I lie. “Saw a truck. Two guys like Ridge described in it. Decided to try and follow it.”
“What the fuck, Prez. Shouldn’t be doing that alone. You should have called one of us.”
He’s not wrong; that’s what I would have said they should do. “Truth is, I thought about it, but they were headed north of the club, and by the time someone caught up to me, they’d be long gone.”
I hear Havoc yelling something in the background, and unlike North, he sounds one beer shy of too many.
“That’s fair. Did you recognize them?” North asks.
“Only in so much as they matched Ridge’s description. Never seen ‘em before. Got a partial plate, though.”
I give him the details from memory. One thing I’ve always been good at is remembering details when it matters. He’s got a contact at the DMV who runs plates for us. Hopefully, the partial plus the description will yield a name. Someone we can follow.
“You follow them far?”
“‘Bout a mile,” I lie.
“They didn’t stop anywhere?”
A large crack of lightning hits a tree across the bay and splits that fucker in half. “No. Weather got too bad. They were in a truck; I was on the bike, having difficulties keeping it upright. Needed to find shelter because I knew I wouldn’t make it back.”
“Where are you now? I can try to come get you, and we can recover your bike later.”
“No, don’t risk it. I’m secure.” I look around the dim boathouse. Guess the generator only stretches to two lights that mark out the pathway to the exit door. It’s a clever design. Unshakeable concrete, airboats tied up inside but technically still in water, a water-tight staircase headed to the upper level.
The water is clearly higher than it was, occasionally splashing over the edge of the concrete.
Wait, what if the water gets higher than the room? Are we stuck in there with no way out, like an underground bunker? Then, I remember what Maren said about an exit onto the roof.
The silence stretches a second. North finally sighs. “Are you deliberately not telling me where you are?”
“Storm’s getting worse, must be near the eye of it,” I say. “Gotta go. Had to move somewhere less secure to get a signal to call you.”
