by L. A. Witt
“Yeah?” I took out my wallet and put a ten on the counter beside the softballs. “Prove it.”
Clint chuckled. “Seriously?”
“Yep.” I waved for the girl running the game to collect the money. “Seriously.”
She picked up the ten, handed me a dollar in change, and stepped out of the way. “Each throw is three bucks. You have to knock all three bottles down in one throw to win.”
“Fair enough.” Clint took off his leather jacket and handed it to me. Then he tossed the ball in the air and caught it again. He did that a couple of times while he eyed the bottles. “All right. Here we go.”
He didn’t just throw the ball. He wound up like a major league pitcher and slammed that fucker into the stack of milk bottles. For a second, I didn’t even notice if the bottles had fallen. I was much too busy replaying the image of him throwing it. Holy . . .
I turned my head. He’d knocked the top bottle over, but the other two were still standing. As the kid behind the counter reset them, Clint picked up another ball.
“So.” I cleared my throat. “You figure out how they’re weighted yet?”
“Not yet. Might take a couple of tries.”
Fine by me.
The second throw fucked with my pulse as much as the first one had. Maybe even more this time because I’d known it was coming, and I was already drooling just thinking about it. I swore the whole thing happened in slow motion—Clint drawing back, T-shirt pulling snug over his shoulders, lips tightening across his teeth—before he launched that softball across the counter.
This shouldn’t be that hot. He’s throwing a ball, for God’s sake.
“Damn.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Let’s hope the third time’s the charm.”
My mouth had gone dry, so I just nodded. While he sized up the pyramid of bottles, I glanced around, wondering if there was an ATM nearby. At three dollars per throw, I might need some more cash to keep this particular bit of entertainment going for a while. I didn’t even care if he won—I was perfectly content to watch him throw.
I shook myself. It had been a long time since a man had made my pulse race quite like he did. The fact that I already knew what he was like in bed was almost surreal.
“Finally!” He pumped his fist and grinned, and when I turned, all the milk bottles had been toppled over. One of them even rolled, teetered on the edge, and dropped onto the concrete with a satisfying clank.
“Nice!” I laughed. “So I guess I can’t bust your chops at work, can I?”
“Nope.” Under his breath, he muttered, “Asshole.”
The kid running the game handed over his prize, which turned out to be a steering wheel-sized plush . . . doughnut. It even had pink frosting and multicolored sprinkles.
We both stared at it.
To the kid, Clint asked, “When did you guys start doing stuffed pastries instead of stuffed animals?”
She shrugged. “That’s what the company sends.”
“Oh. Okay.” He eyed it, and then his face lit up with a wicked grin. “I think I know what we can do with this! We should give it to one of the sentries on base.”
I snorted. “Oh, I’m sure they’d love that. I mean, cops and doughnuts . . .”
“Exactly.”
The kid rolled her eyes and laughed. Clint tucked the doughnut under his arm, and we stepped away from the booth.
“So, um.” I looked around. “You want to keep going?” I pointed toward the far end of the pier. “Check out what’s down that way?”
“How’s your back doing?”
“Not bad.”
“You’re okay to keep walking around?”
“Yeah, yeah.” I waved a hand. “I’ve got some Motrin with me if it acts up.”
“Sure, we can keep going, then.”
So, we did. Strolling along, talking about nothing, we kept going toward the middle of the long pier where several people were fishing over the edge next to the No Fishing signs. A couple were hoisting up a crab pot, and a dozen seagulls patrolled the area in search of handouts or unattended catches.
Clint stopped. “Do I hear seals?”
I craned my neck. It was hard to hear much over the squawking seagulls and the country music blasting from someone’s radio, but then I heard the distinctive barking. “Yeah, I think you do. Or sea lions. I think that’s all they have here.”
We moved toward the sound and looked over the railing into the water.
Sure enough, four sea lions were bobbing below us, heads poking through the surface as if waiting for the fishermen above to toss them something.
“Looks like there’s a couple more.” Clint pointed at the water a few feet away from them. Either it was a trick of the light, or there were others swimming underneath. A second later, another whiskered head popped up.
While Clint leaned over the railing and watched the sea lions, I surreptitiously adjusted the intensity on my TENS. The pain was mild today, but there was a hint of tension in the middle of my back that could turn into a vicious spasm if I didn’t stay on top of it. Walking around on the slightly uneven pier probably wasn’t helping, but I wasn’t ready for this day to be over, so I prayed for the TENS to work its magic along with the ibuprofen I’d dry-swallowed earlier while Clint wasn’t looking. Not that he’d have judged—I just hated people seeing how much I relied on pain control.
The sea lions kept on playing below us, and we watched for a while. After they lost interest and swam away, we kept walking out to the far end of the pier, which was completely deserted.
There, Clint folded his arms on the weathered railing, and took in a deep breath through his nose. “Man, I didn’t even realize it until I came to Anchor Point, but I fucking missed being close to the ocean.”
“Yeah, every time I’ve had to be away from it for any length of time, I started going crazy.”
Clint nodded. “Seriously. Told you before—I did not join the Navy so I could go live in the desert.”
I laughed. “Well, I didn’t join it so I could work behind a desk, but . . .”
“God, isn’t that the truth.” He turned toward me. “Could be worse, right? I mean, the whole Monday-through-Friday, nine-to-five stuff has its perks.”
“Oh, no kidding. I do not miss duty weekends or night ops.”
He grunted softly and nodded. “Double-digit shifts are the worst. And months-long deployments.”
“Hear, hear.” I paused. “But, hell, they can stick me on a ship if they have to. As long as they don’t move me away from the water.”
“Yep. I don’t even know what it is.” He shook his head, gaze fixed on the water. “I spent my first eighteen years in Colorado. Didn’t even see the ocean until I was fifteen. Now I can’t stand to be away from it.”
I just nodded. The ocean was a funny thing. It had nearly killed me, and to this day, the thought of swimming in saltwater made my heart race, but after twenty-three years on ships and coasts, I didn’t like being far from it. Being landlocked for any length of time was disconcerting for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. It was . . . suffocating somehow. Lakes and rivers didn’t cut it, either. I needed to be close to water that reached a horizon.
“You would think we’d be tired of the ocean,” I said quietly. “After six months on a goddamned boat, I couldn’t imagine wanting to see water again as long as I lived. But two weeks after we came home . . .”
“Yeah,” Clint breathed. “After my first deployment, I went home to Denver for a while. Hadn’t been on the ground three days, and I was already itching to get back.”
“Amen to that. My ex-wife and I went to see her family in Oklahoma after I came home.” Shaking my head, I muttered, “I couldn’t tell if it was the dry land or my in-laws, but I was ready to go AWOL and haul ass back to Norfolk.”
He laughed. “In-laws were that bad?”
“Eh, they were a mixed bag. Brother-in-law was a hard-core pacifist who liked to regale me with statistics about civilian casualties—”
Clint shuddered hard, humor vanishing.
“But for the most part they were all right,” I said quickly. “Just . . . you spend six months on a boat with your squadron, and suddenly you’re surrounded by a completely different crowd. Like the whole world’s got a completely different rhythm, and nobody gets why you’re not used to it. It’s weird.”
“It is, yeah.” He shifted his weight and nodded, and slowly, he started to relax again. Tilting his head to one side, then the other, he said, “I guess I was lucky. My ex-wife was a Navy brat, so her family knew what it was like. They knew—and she knew—that it was an adjustment coming back to shore. They followed my lead with everything.”
“Wow. I would’ve sold my soul for an adjustment period when I came back.” I paused. “I mean, like I said, they were great people. My ex-wife too. But they had no idea. It took two deployments before she realized that when I came back, the last thing I wanted to do was go out and do everything I hadn’t been able to do at sea. Mostly I wanted to sleep, be around people I’d missed, and have some downtime.” I laughed softly. “Ironically, about the time we’d figured it out, and we knew how to handle me coming back from a deployment, we split up.”
Clint grimaced. “Damn.”
“Yeah. I kind of knew it was coming, though. We were going through a bad patch, and I had to go to sea again.”
“Ah, yeah. Nothing like a deployment to make an actual separation seem like a better idea.”
Nodding, I said, “Uh-huh. So I’d basically call home once a week, talk to my daughter, and fight with my wife. Halfway through the deployment, we decided we’d had enough. So . . .” I paused, then shook my head. “Anyway. That’s a downer of a conversation, so forget I brought it up.”
Clint shrugged, facing the water again. “I don’t think it’s possible to talk about the Navy life without divorces coming into it.”
“No, but . . .” I glanced around, making sure we were absolutely alone. Then I turned toward him and slid a hand over the small of his back. “We came out here to enjoy an afternoon together. Not talk about all of that shit. Why wallow in our pasts when the present is pretty damn good?”
He straightened a little, muscles moving subtly under my hand and his jacket, and the corners of his mouth rose. He faced me, and as he moved, my hand wound up on his waist. He snaked his own hand under my jacket, and I inched closer to him.
“You’re right.” A grin played at his lips. “This is a much better topic.”
And then, right there, out in the open in a public place, Clint kissed me.
Everything else disappeared. The pier, the past, the people who might or might not see us and notice there were two men getting close like this—they were just gone.
Wrapping my arms around him, I took in a deep breath through my nose. God. Clint’s kiss and the smell of the ocean. What more could a man want?
Through my shirt, his fingers grazed the TENS wires and one of the pads, but if he noticed, he didn’t let on. And I couldn’t bring myself to care. The pain was bearable at the moment, and anyway, I was much more interested in how his lips felt against mine.
I loved this. I loved it so much. Maybe I’d just been on my own too long, but I was completely overwhelmed by the feeling of someone being so brazenly affectionate. He knew I could barely walk sometimes. He knew our sex life would always be limited.
He knew, and here we were—kissing in the sun with his fingers on my back and my arm around his waist.
One part of my mind wanted to slam shut and push him away. I’d never let myself get close to a man before because the inevitable end scared the hell out of me. Either he’d get tired of the reality of my situation—a reality where TENS units, ice packs, and pain pills were part of every-single-day life—or the universe would throw us some horrendous curve ball.
I was fucking terrified, but I also wanted to see where this thing went. Maybe the inevitable disastrous end wasn’t as inevitable as I’d convinced myself it was. These things worked out for people all the time. Why not me? Why not us?
I drew back and looked in his eyes, and when he smiled, I thought my knees and the pier were going to collapse right out from under me.
Yeah. Why not us?
He gulped. So did I. How long had we been standing here looking at each other like this?
Oh hell, I didn’t care. I touched his face and kissed him softly. When our eyes met again, his smile seemed shy. He glanced back toward the shore, and some color bloomed in his cheeks. Or maybe that was from the nippy sea breeze, and I just hadn’t noticed till he turned his head.
“We should, um . . .” He cleared his throat and looked at me through his lashes. “Should we head back?”
“Sure. Guess we can’t stay out here all day, can we?”
He laughed. “Probably not. Unfortunately.”
“Might start getting weird looks.”
“Might?” He leaned in and kissed me again. “We stay out here like this, we’ll end up doing something that’ll get us nailed for public indecency.”
Dear sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . . “That . . . that’s not really going to convince me we should leave.”
“Right?” He nodded toward the land end. “Come on. Let’s go grab something to eat, and then maybe we can indulge in some private indecency later.”
“Have I mentioned how much I love the way you think?”
“A time or two, yes.”
“Seemed like a good time to remind you, I guess.”
We both laughed, and as we started back, he said, “So since you know your way around Anchor Point better than I do, I assume you know a few decent places to eat?”
“Absolutely. Kimber and I have grazed our way through every inch of this town.”
He chuckled. “Perfect. By the way, dinner’s on me tonight.” With a sheepish smile, he added, “Since you paid for, uh . . .” He held up the doughnut.
“My pleasure.” An image of him pitching that ball flashed through my mind. No, really. My pleasure. “You know, you could probably throw a few more and see if you can upgrade that thing.”
“To what? A giant Bundt cake?”
“Or a dozen doughnuts?”
“Just what I need.” He eyed it. “Though I have been meaning to get some throw pillows . . .”
“I’d pay to see that.”
“Of course you would.”
Wandering back toward the game booths, Clint glanced around, and that sad, nostalgic smile came back. “I’ll have to bring my kids here one of these days.”
“They might have more fun during the summer. There’s a lot more going on.”
Clint nodded. When he turned to me, his smile was a touch more guarded. “Hopefully they’ll be able to come out then. I think they’d have a good time.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, but fortunately, he picked that moment to ask, “So . . . dinner?” He nodded toward the shore end of the pier again. “Looks like there’s a couple of places down that way.”
“Sure. Yeah. Let’s see what’s there.”
We fell back into amiable conversation, avoiding the subject of his kids and why they weren’t with him, and he seemed to relax a bit. My curiosity ate at me, but I figured that, as with everything, the information would come out in due time. When he was ready to open up, he would, so I let it go.
The first restaurant didn’t seem all that appealing—too crowded and with a weird smell wafting out the door—but the next one was quieter and didn’t smell like bilge water. The menu was posted outside the door, so we stopped and gave it a look.
“Anything sound good?” I asked.
“Hmm.” His lips quirked. “The soup of the day sounds interesting.”
I skimmed the menu until I found it. “‘A classic recipe with a local touch.’”
“What does that even mean?”
I glanced out at the ocean, then scowled at the menu. “I’ll bet it means they put some kind of seafood in it.”
Clint laughed. �
��What’s wrong? You don’t like seafood?”
“I don’t mind seafood. What I don’t like is surprise seafood.”
His eyebrow arched. “Surprise seafood?”
“Yeah. Like when I ordered pasta in Guam, and after a few bites, I realized the little dots of parmesan cheese were actually suction cups that had fallen off the tentacle that was buried in the noodles.”
He made a gagging noise. “Oh. God. Gross.”
“Exactly. So I’m fine with seafood—I just want to know in advance if it’s in there, you know?”
Shuddering, he nodded. “I think that would put me off pasta forever.”
“Eh.” I shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad. No worse than the things they serve on ships.”
“Ugh. Seriously. I could tell you some stories about things I’ve eaten underway, but you’ve probably eaten variations.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “And I’ve probably heard or told variations of most sea stories anyway, food-related or otherwise.”
“Probably, yeah.”
I schooled my expression. “You know the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale, right?”
He raised an eyebrow. “No . . .”
“A fairy tale starts with ‘Once upon a time,’” I deadpanned. “And a sea story starts with ‘Y’all ain’t gonna believe this shit!’”
He threw his head back and laughed, and my stomach fluttered. God, I loved the way he smiled. “That one I hadn’t heard.”
I just chuckled, pretending he hadn’t made me weak in the knees by laughing. Then I gestured at the restaurant. “So, uh. Think we should give it a try?”
Clint smiled and motioned for me to go inside. “After you.”
This was my new normal, and I loved it—lying in bed with Travis, naked and satisfied. Sometimes we’d watch TV. Sometimes we’d just talk about whatever. The nights when we couldn’t be together like this were weird. I’d spent my whole life not lying in bed with him, and now when I wasn’t doing that, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.
There was one part I hated about nights like this, though—the inevitable end.
