by D. Brumbley
“No. She said as soon as you were awake, we could go. Though she made me promise to let her give me a once-over before I left.” He put the blanket around her along with his arm to run it along her back, heaving a sigh of relief that she was awake and talking. “Cory was apparently messing around with one of the horses and got his collarbone broken when they spooked at the boom earlier. He’s fine, don’t worry. Sierra was down that way already, so she stopped in and took care of him. I told your dad I would take care of you up here and get you back to my place to rest for the night before we go the rest of the way back to your place in a couple days. They were all asking about you.”
“I’m an idiot for getting myself all banged up. I just…I couldn’t do anything to get into the house from the back, it was all on fire. I thought I should at least check and see if anyone had survived the crash, even though I knew it was nearly impossible. I had to see. I had to make sure there wasn’t someone I could…” She sighed and wiped at her tears with her good hand. “Now all I can think about is all the wasted life, and I thought about how meaningless my… I don’t…I don’t want to be meaningless. I don’t want to live a life that isn’t fulfilling or happy.”
Without allowing himself the time for any hesitation, he leaned down and rested his forehead against hers, his grip on her back tightening as he moved in close to her. “You could never be meaningless, Anna.” He stayed like that with his eyes closed, then pulled away enough to kiss her cheek, resting his face there as if he was either hesitating or thinking. He slowly pulled away, sighing as he looked down at her. “I’m gonna go see if she’s out of surgery so we can get going, alright? Decent sleep in a decent bed is as good an antidote for anything as I’ve ever heard of.”
Anna was still crying quietly as she agreed, but she didn’t look at him after he pulled away. She couldn’t. Not even Jannah was worth it if Logan wasn’t with her. She needed Logan, but she didn’t know what would happen if she told him the truth. Anna could see clear as day that he wasn’t ready to be with anyone, and she knew it was possible he would never actually want to marry again, much less marry her. What she didn’t know was how much longer she could go without telling him the truth. After all that had happened, she knew she needed to. Sooner rather than later.
True to his word, Logan didn’t leave the large room with all the care beds in it, but the Reeves’ cousin never returned either. Doc Weber came back a few minutes after Anna woke up and broke the news to Kevin that his cousin hadn’t made it through surgery. The next half hour was spent with the doctor fussing over Logan and his many injuries, most of them burns, before he finally managed to argue her into releasing him to take Anna home.
Logan did look much improved by the time he got back to her, though he had bandages around part of his ribs and one low on his left cheek against his jawline where the burns had been most severe. He helped her up out of the bed and held onto her hands to make sure she could walk for a while, then still held onto her hand as they went down to the truck.
Afterward, as before, he didn’t seem satisfied just having her there with him. She needed to be under his arm at all times and tight against him so that he would know she was alright. “Word already got out somehow that we were the first ones on the scene.” He said quietly, and only once they were in motion. “Some guy came by Doc Weber’s wanting to talk to us a few hours ago. She told him we were both still unconscious from smoke inhalation. She didn’t recognize him.”
“I knew someone would come. It doesn’t matter.” She looked down at his leg instead of up at his face, since her insides were twisted into knots. “Obviously we don’t know anything.”
“We do know one thing.” He said just as quietly, rubbing at her shoulder as he sighed. “While you were asleep, I watched some of the headlines. That arm broke off of Station Nine. Orbital headquarters of the Jannah Initiative. There was no report on whether the people who died were part of the Initiative or not, but still, it’s…unnerving.”
“Do they think it was someone attacking the Initiative? All those people died because of that?” She knew there wasn’t an actual answer to her questions, but she had to ask it out loud. Especially if they were still going to consider being a part of it.
He shook his head. “Officially, they’re still claiming it was a catastrophic technical failure. But they’re naturally running a full investigation to determine the truth of the matter. Some outlets are theorizing about protesters attacking after the acceptance letters went out the other day, all kinds of things are floating around. And any combination of it could be true, honestly. I have no idea.”
“I don’t even know if I can think about Jannah right now. It seems so unimportant. Unreal, even.” She closed her eyes and memorized the feeling of being close to Logan, since if the truth actually did bubble up and spew out of her mouth, she wanted to remember what it was like when he still wanted her to be close to him. “Maybe that’s the pain medication. I don’t know.”
“Well, if it is, I’m glad it’s working.” His tone attempted to be light, but failed, and he rubbed her shoulder again as they drove into the evening. “You can go on and sleep if it’s still making you drowsy. I’ll carry you in once we get to the house.”
“I don’t want to miss any more.” She said softly as she slowly opened her eyes to finally look up at him. “What if you die tomorrow and this is the last thing I have to remember of us together, sitting next to you?”
“I’ve got no interest in dying. Certainly not tomorrow.” He said without looking back at her.
A few kilometers later, he found a spot that had once upon a time been a house and the driveway that led up to it. The ruins of the place had long since caved in and been reclaimed by nature, but the first part of the driveway was intact enough to let him park.
He brought the truck to a stop and paused with his hand on the gear shift, having some kind of conversation with himself before he turned slowly to face Anna. “And no, if I was going to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t want your last memory of me to be just sitting here driving home.”
The stillness of the world, the absolute emptiness of the planet on which they lived, seemed even deeper, surrounded by endless fields long since grown to seed, bounded on two sides by a two-lane road that might as well have stretched into eternity in both directions.
They were utterly alone, and their world began and ended with each other.
In the stillness, he reached up to caress the side of her face in a gesture that would never come from just a friend.
Nor would the look he was giving her as he held her close.
“The last thing I would want you to remember would be this.”
The silence of the world seemed to explode into motion as soon as the words were out of his lips, and his lips claimed hers in a deep kiss that rendered all her other senses absolutely irrelevant.
Anna was so shocked that she could feel Logan’s lips on hers that it took her too long to respond, but just as he started to pull his lips away, she put her good hand on the back of his head and pulled him back to her so that she could kiss him back. Her heart was racing in her chest, but she didn’t want him to think for one moment that he’d made a mistake or that she didn’t want what was happening. She wanted it more than anything.
He had been expecting her to be shocked, even angry about the kiss, before he had decided he cared more about honesty than he did about fear. She could feel his own shock when she started kissing him back, along with a renewed urgency about the touch that made him turn completely into her and put an arm across her body to hold her against him.
Whimpers escaped her chest under the kiss under the pressure that had been building in her heart for years. She wanted every kiss, every touch, so badly that she didn’t want them to end, even if it meant another one began.
Anna felt like she couldn’t breathe when he pulled away from her lips, even though he didn’t go far.
What did it mean?
Did he really care fo
r her as more than a friend, or did he pity her?
Was she that transparent about her feelings for him?
“I’ve wanted that for so long, Logan.” She finally admitted in a whisper. “Years and years, I’ve wanted it. You, I wanted you.”
That revelation was nothing he had ever expected to hear from Anna, and all he could do in response was kiss her again, one hand moving gently up her ribs to feel her close to him in the silence of the world around them. “I’ve wanted you like this since I was old enough to know how.” He admitted quietly, reaching up to caress the side of her face just because he could. “It always seemed like you were right around the corner from what you wanted with the men you were with. I didn’t want to interfere in that.” He shook his head, yelling at himself for a hundred wrong decisions that were beyond changing. “And here I thought you’d be pissed at me.”
“I chased after all of those men looking for something I knew I couldn’t find. I only applied to Jannah because it was too hard for me to watch you with…” She shook her head and kissed him again. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not mad.”
He rested his hand against her neck near her shoulder, and gave her another heated kiss before he turned back to the steering wheel and threw the truck back into gear. “We need to get home.” Were there possibilities waiting behind the fact that he had simply called it home instead of his home? She didn’t know. The kisses had left more questions than answers, but Anna was excited, for once, about what she might still not know.
The rest of the ride was quiet for all sorts of reasons, but Anna didn’t once move from Logan’s side. Despite his own leg injury, he helped her out of the truck when they got home, but she stood and looked at his house as if catching her breath would also collect her thoughts. “Liam and Larissa are going to have a million questions and just as many curses for you, I think.” She wasn’t ready for his siblings to shatter whatever had started between them, especially if it would lead him to regret kissing her in the first place. “I don’t have to stay. I can ask Ben to come get me.”
“I told them back at the hospital not to wait up for us. And you’re insane if you think I’m letting you go anywhere right now.” He didn’t go toward the front door of the house, oddly enough. Instead, he picked her up and headed along the side of the massive house, past windows removed from the ground and multiple cellar doors leading down to the lower level of the home.
He stopped eventually near the back corner of the house where she knew his suite was located, and set her down next to what appeared to be a blank piece of wall. He took his keys from his pocket and slid one into a crack in the exterior, to reveal a door set into the siding. It opened on a small room where Logan had to key in the same kind of code he had to use at the main entrance to the house, but the door inside opened onto the short hallway that separated his bedroom from his bathroom and faced his closet.
He shut everything tightly behind them once they were inside, and smiled over at her without apologizing for the secret. “I found it one day when I was twelve. Scott knew about it, the old groundskeeper we used to have. He helped me get the locks changed and everything updated. Larissa and Liam don’t even know I have it, but it comes in handy sometimes.”
She was shocked herself, really, since she didn’t think there was much that could surprise her about Logan anymore. He was proving her wrong in multiple ways. “I wish I had a secret entrance to my house. It would have meant not getting caught by my dad so often.” She kept her one good arm wrapped around him but the other hung at her side. “I think before I can pass out again, I need a shower.” She squeezed his shoulder gently. “You too.”
He had no argument with that, given the state he was in. He helped her walk into his bathroom and started the water going to let it heat up. His shower had no curtain to it, since it was just a walk-in portion of the bathroom, oversized to the point of absurdity. There were half a dozen different showerheads pointing down in different directions, but he only activated one before he turned back to face Anna where she had stopped against the outer wall to lean against the tile.
He put a hand on either side of her waist as he looked down at her in the dark. They both cast doubled shadows, one from the nightlight above the sink and one from the streetlamps that lit the long curve of the house’s driveway. “You need some help?”
Anna actually trembled as he offered, fantasy getting too close to reality.
Was it now reality?
Anna found herself nodding, since speech seemed to be lost on her. All her life she’d been called opinionated and loud, but there she was, speechless. It seemed to be a night fit for the impossible.
He nodded back, as if to acknowledge the insanity of what was happening between them, but his lips against hers afterward were warmer than the steam beginning to dampen the air around them. His massive hands found her waist and took their time moving to the clasp of her jeans. Undoing each was like stripping away a level of the world they had lived in up until that morning.
When the clasp and zipper were undone, he left them hanging on her hips and moved to pull her shirt off instead, taking his time about getting it up over her head. Once it was clear of her arms, he threw it aside on the bathroom floor without even glancing to see where it went, and smoothed her hair back away from her face with calloused fingers.
He’d seen her in her bra and underwear more times than he wanted to admit he had counted, but the last time he had seen her naked, they had been little more than children together. They weren’t anymore.
Anna watched him as carefully as she could in the darkness, watching to see what his expressions would reveal about what he was feeling. He had always been a difficult man to read, but she hoped all the desire she thought the shadows showed in his face was real.
He had already been shirtless when they went rushing out to the Reeves farm, but with her uninjured hand, she loosened his belt and the button to his own much-abused pants. She was still shaking, but she wasn’t hesitating or stopping.
“Is this real?” She whispered in the dark.
He actually chuckled, the sound ringing through the tiles from the deep thrum of his voice. “I was just asking myself the same question.” He put his arms around her waist to hold her against him in a deep kiss, but then reached up to unclasp her bra and nearly tore it off her shoulders, looking her in the eyes the entire time. When he held her close against him afterward, things felt much, much more real, her bare breasts against his chest and his hands grasping her waist. He kissed down along the inner slope of her breasts as he ensured that her jeans followed, peeling them down her legs to the floor for her to leave him down on one knee in front of her.
It looked like he was either worshipping her or about to propose, and Anna could barely breathe at either prospect. She stepped out of her underwear last, and she gripped his face with both of her hands. “Maybe this seems too fast, but I feel like I’ve waited an eternity for this. It’s been a long time since I allowed myself to hope that you would ever want anything like this.”
“Never underestimate what I’m capable of wanting.” The words were a low growl as he stood back up slowly, his body the most solid thing in the world against her own. He made sure her hair was back over her shoulders and then stepped back to look at her, taking in the sight of her one piece at a time, his hands lingering on her bare waist. “I’m of the mind right now not to ask too many questions. You…” he shook his head and definitely growled that time, raising his hands to explore her gently with his fingertips, calluses brushing lightly over the sides of her breasts. “I’ve always thought you were beautiful, Anna. I have a good imagination, and I’ve put it to work picturing this kind of dream for a long time. But you’re better. So much better.”
Anna actually blushed, but she hoped he wouldn’t notice in the near-darkness. She hadn’t thought there was anything about sex that could make her blush anymore, but Logan was different. Logan was her dream. “God, your hands.” She said with a moan as hi
s calloused fingers explored her sensitive skin. Amazingly, though, Anna stepped back out of his embrace so they could get closer to the water. “I want to clean you up.”
He didn’t push her to stay when she stepped away, just pushed down his pants and kicked them to one side of the bathroom along with her own, leaving him and the wounds of the day completely bare to her in the near-darkness. On his way to follow her deeper into the shower, he pressed a button to turn on all the other showerheads, each of them flowing into life one by one. It created a cocoon of water in the broad shower stall, hitting them both from all sides.
“I like my showers hot. Not sure if you knew that.” His deep voice cut through the chaos of the water as he joined her, smiling as his hands found her again. “There may not be many things we don’t know about each other, but I’m really, really looking forward to making those few things into exactly zero things.”
“I hope so. I know you know what kind of reputation I have, but with you…You’re the only one I want, Logan.” She grabbed a bar of soap and lathered up her hands before she ran them gingerly across his skin so that she didn’t hurt him or herself. Burns didn’t go well with hot water, but she knew that he had been treated, so he was probably numb in those places. “I love the way you feel.”
The soot and grit that they’d gotten into that day took some work for both of them to get off, but Logan took the soap from her when she was done with it, and got to work on her as she got to work on him.
He tended to her arm first, removing the provisional bandage that had only been there so the sprayed bandage would cure up correctly. With that gone, her arm looked perfectly new again, even though he knew it was false skin and it would take some time for her own to grow into it and regain sensation. The rest of her that he could reach was undamaged, but bloody, and he took care to lather all of her until the day had been washed away.
