Page 81 of Holding Penalty

It’s not mandatory or anything, but the six of us—Cooper, Vaughn, Adriano, Hayden, Noah, and myself—all go every month as a good example to encourage the rest of the team to join us. There’s usually a good turnout, and tonight was no exception.

When I get inside, I don’t take notice of the fact that Piper isn’t on the couch. I don’t take notice of the fact that her bedroom door is wide open and she’s clearly not there, either. Nor does it register to me that the bathroom door is closed.

Without mentally noting any of those facts or thinking about their implication, I simply go right to the bathroom and pull the door open.

But the sight that’s in front of me? Yeah, I notice that. As a matter of fact, nothing in the world exists to me other than what my eyes are pointed at right now.

The breath is trapped in my throat, my heart has skipped a medically distressing number of beats, and there’s no way I could even add two one-digit numbers together right now.

Because I’m looking at Piper in her bathtub, her perfect tits and pointed pink nipples on full display as she sits reclined in it.

Her mouth is open, her lips an alluring, soft circle of surprise as she looks back at me.

My wife is naked in front of me, and my sanity hangs by the flimsiest, thinnest thread in existence.

Every detail of her is immediately burned into my brain. Her tits are literally the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen in my life, covered with a light dusting of soapy bubbles.

The surface of the bathwater is bubbly, but from where I’m standing, I can still see the blurry, opaque glow of the rest of her naked body beneath it.

“Well, now who’s waiting for an invite?”

The sound of her voice opens the floodgates in my brain, reality rushing back in. I just barged in on Piper in the tub, and I’ve been standing here gawking at her for who knows how long.

“Sorry,” I grunt out, the sound a strangled growl in my throat. I step out and close the door behind me, and it’s then that I’m able to breathe.

Guilt starts to kick in my brain. Did I really just not notice that Piper was nowhere to be seen in this small house? Did it really just not occur to me that the bathroom door was closed? Despite what happened when she walked in on me, and the fact that we’ve both been opening doors with extra caution ever since?

Or did a part of me, a dirty, greedy part … want what just happened to happen?

A reproachful feeling twists through my guts at how possible that feels.

I pace back and forth through the living room, feeling the gnawing of guilt in my chest, trying to control the hormones raging through me like a hurricane.

Then I hear the bathroom door open behind me, and my chest hitches.

“Nash, we should talk.”

I turn around and instantly wish I hadn’t. Piper wears nothing but a white towel wrapped under her arms, covering the bare minimum of her legs. Her hair is wet and plastered to the side of her neck, water still clinging to her exposed skin.

“Talk?” I blurt out. “About what? The news?”

No one in the history of the world has ever done a worse job at trying to avoid a topic than I just did.

Piper narrows her eyes at me, though there’s a hint of amusement sparking in them. “Nash, you just saw my soapy tits and now I’m standing in your living room wearing nothing but a towel. No, I don’t want to talk about the news.”

My jaw pops as I fight back a groan. When she literally mentions them, it’s impossible for the sight of those soapy tits not to blare in my imagination.

“Nash, we’re both adults. I think we can handle a conversation about the … tension we’ve been living with lately.”

“Tension?” I ask. Many, many points may have just been shaved off my IQ by what I just saw. But even with that being the case, I do a bad job of sounding stupid, like I didn’t understand her obvious implication.

So, she makes herself impossible to misunderstand. “The sexual tension.”

“I … we …” This conversation feels like a powder keg, and I don’t know which way to step.

“We’ve still got at least four months left of living together. Neither of us needs an extra source of stress in our lives by having to deal with it every time we’re at home, where we should be able to relax.”

Is she going to propose moving out? Panic spreads through me. The very thought of going back to spending night after night in this house without her in it … I know that’s in my future no matter what, but, damn it, I don’t want it to come this soon.