by Gwen Masters
At the touch of his tongue, Rebecca pressed the vibrator to the tip of her clit. The orgasm rocketed through her, leaving weakness in its wake. She collapsed over him but he was ready for it, held her up by her hips and neatly flipped her under him. Before the pleasure had faded he was on top of her, her legs over his shoulder, driving into her with enough force to push her up the bed.
She’d had a few long-drawn-out plans for what to do with that vibrator and cock ring, but Richard was beyond caring what they might have been. He had never before seen a woman come like that, so close he could almost feel it himself, and now his dick was in control of his actions. Rebecca simply opened her legs and braced herself on the headboard while whispering into his ear: “Do it. Come. Come inside me, Richard. Come.”
The mantra matched his thrusts, and he came with a hearty shout. The orgasm actually hurt—whether it was from coming so often with Rebecca, or coming so hard, he didn’t know, and he really didn’t give a damn, either. All he knew was that pain was pleasure, pleasure was pain, and he hadn’t come so hard in his whole life.
When he came back down to earth, Rebecca was smiling up at him.
“I simply adore Iowa,” she said.
That afternoon, as the sun was dropping in the sky, they were back on the snowmobile, heading for the place where her car was still stuck in a ditch. They could hear the distant rumble of vehicles. Their hideaway would soon rejoin the rest of the world, thanks to the wonders of snowploughs and road salt. Richard knew he had to get back to work at some point, but these last few days with Rebecca had been more than newsworthy for him.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her as they approached the buried car.
“Wondering if my lenses are okay,” she admitted. “Pretty romantic, huh?”
“We’ve been romantic. Now’s the time to be practical.”
He slowed to a halt in front of the car and they both sat in silence, staring at it. The red paint shone through the snow, but so did the broken window—the emergency blanket he had used as a makeshift tarp had blown away—and looking in that window made Rebecca realise again how scared she had been, and what would have become of her by now, had Richard not come around when he did and pulled her out of the car that had so quickly become her prison.
Richard was seeing much the same thing, and marvelling at the fact she was so strong in the face of the memories that car had to bring back. He didn’t rush her, instinctively knowing Rebecca would have to make the first move towards the car.
When she did, he breathed a sigh of relief and hurried to join her.
Rebecca knelt down beside the broken window and peered into the car. Her cell phone was on the dash, covered with a light dusting of frost. There was one medium-sized bag in the backseat, and her suitcase was in the trunk. She reached in and yanked out the bag, then retrieved her cell phone and her case with the new lenses. The first two she sat haphazardly down on the snow. The last she carefully opened, holding her breath as she peered in at the pristine black lenses, resting comfortably in their velvet cases.
“They look just fine,” she said. “I’m not sure what the cold did to them, though.”
“They’re insured, right?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely.”
Richard walked back to the snowmobile and returned with a folding shovel. He started to clear snow from around the trunk, but it was a one-person job, and that left Rebecca with too much time to think. The reality of what had happened settled over her, and tears stung her eyes, spilling over before she could brush them away. She took deep breaths to calm herself down.
Richard knew she was crying. He had seen it out of the corner of his eye. He had wondered when and if a breakdown would come, but, now that it was here, he didn’t quite know how to help her. Would it be best to let her handle it on her own? Would she appreciate a hug or would she think he was being too much like her ex-boyfriend, trying to look down on her and make her cheer up?
Finally he turned and stared at her until her eyes met his. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, and she smiled.
“Let me shovel for a while,” she said. “I need something to do.”
Richard leaned into the driver’s window as she started scraping away at the snow. He wiggled in until he could reach the glove compartment and flipped it open. Right on top was what he hoped he would find—her insurance card. He was sure she would need it to get the window fixed. He stuffed it in the pocket of his parka and wiggled back, cutting his hand on the shattered window in the process.
The shock of the pain coursed through him. Blood stained the snow underneath him. Realising what he had just done, he cursed roundly.
“What happened?” Rebecca called.
“Cut myself. It’s nothing,” he called back, holding snow against the cut to stem the bleeding. It was a little more than nothing. He looked in the backseat for something to wrap his hand in and came up empty, so he trudged back to the snowmobile for the first aid kit, holding his hand close and hiding it from Rebecca. He already knew her well enough to know how his hurt hand would affect her—even though it was his own fault, it was her car, and that would be enough to send her into the land of guilt.
Rebecca watched him go, thinking again how different he was from Gene. Richard had a deep-seeded patience about him. She already knew he was the kind of man who would say nothing unkind, nor would he look down on her. Instead, he had made it clear how much he admired her, and didn’t hesitate to praise her strength.
How in the world was a man like Richard alone for so long? She pondered the question as she went back to shovelling snow. He said it had been three years, and she believed him—if there was anything else clear about Richard by now, it was his honesty. But what made him stay away from women for that long? Had someone hurt him, wounded him terribly and left him reeling? Had he not dealt with something from his past, or even worse, was he still pining after a woman who had broken his heart?
Rebecca’s shovel scraped against metal. She had reached the trunk. She dug carefully around it, glancing back every now and then at Richard, who had just wrapped his hand in a white bandage and was now securing it with tape. She contemplated what might have gone wrong in his life, what event had caused him to live in that big house all by himself. She found that it really mattered to her, perhaps much more than it should have, and the more she thought about it, the bigger the questions grew.
“Need some help?” he asked from behind her shoulder, cheery now he had staunched the bleeding of his hand. He took the shovel out of her hands, dropped a kiss on her cheek, and started to clear out around the lid of the trunk. “We’ll have your clothes out in no time.”
“You’re wonderful to me,” she said.
“I’m glad you’re here.
She kissed his cold cheek, and he turned his attention to the shovel.
When the trunk was finally visible, Richard found the can of denatured alcohol he had remembered to bring along. Pouring it on the seam of the trunk and the lock, he melted the ice that lingered there, and soon the trunk was open. Inside it was a spare tyre, a jack and a suitcase.
“All that work for that one little bag,” he joked, pulling it out. It was stuffed full but still not as heavy as it looked. He strapped it on to the back of the snowmobile, making sure to leave enough room for Rebecca to sit, and looked back at her when she got settled.
Together they listened to the sound of approaching snowploughs.
“I hate to do this,” he said slowly, “but we need to make a detour before we go back to the house.”
“Okay?”
“I cut my hand on your window over there, and I might need a stitch or two.”
Rebecca’s knees went weak, a reaction that caught her completely by surprise. She immediately reached for his hand. “You’re hurt?”
“It’s not bad, but it’s not the kind of thing that will heal on its own.”
“Then it’s bad.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is!”
Richard shook his head. “It isn’t bleeding anymore.”
Rebecca climbed off of the snowmobile and motioned for him to move. “I’ll drive.”
He looked up at her for a long moment. “Are you mad?”
“No. I’m worried.”
“I’m fine, Rebecca,” he soothed. “Really, I am.”
“You got hurt on my car,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“Don’t do the guilt thing. Don’t do the worry thing, either. I’m okay. If it was really bad, I would have told you as soon as it happened.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a little white lie,” she challenged, a grin playing around the corner of her mouth.
Richard blushed. “I’m fine.”
She took his bandaged hand in hers and gently turned it over. She lifted the tape a little bit and tried to see under the gauze, but she was afraid to pull it too much. If he said he needed stitches, she believed him. He wasn’t the kind to overreact.
“Let’s get you to the hospital,” she said, reaching for the key.
“Rebecca, honey.”
The endearment made her go perfectly still. Jesus Christ, she had known the man for a few days, and under the least ideal circumstances, but already he was getting to her in a way that nobody had in a very, very long time.
“It’s a few stitches,” he said softly. “That’s all. Why are you so upset?”
“Because…” She tried to find the words but was appalled to find only tears instead. She dashed them away with the back of her glove. What had got into her?
“I’m okay,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her, even though his bandaged hand hurt like hell. He held her until she looked up into his eyes.
“I’m upset because if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be hurt,” she said. “You had to break that window to get me out and now you’ve hurt yourself on the glass…”
“And if you hadn’t bought a car with electric windows, instead of the old-school crank ones, this would never have happened?”
His teasing made her smile. “You know what I mean.”
“If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t have just got cut. Okay. I wouldn’t have had some of the best sex of my life, either.”
That won a broader smile. “Best, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Want some more?”
“Once I know I’m not going to bleed to death.”
Rebecca smacked him on the shoulder. “I thought you were fine?”
He dropped a kiss on her nose. “You drive.”
With his careful directions, they made it to the hospital in less than five minutes, though it normally would have been a fifteen-minute drive. They cut through open fields and backyards, sometimes drawing the attention of the people inside those homes, who looked at them with furrowed brows through frost-edged windows. When they reached the hospital, it was a little jarring to see a perfectly cleared parking lot at the end of a cleared street. Rebecca had almost let herself forget there was asphalt underneath the blanket of white.
She parked the snowmobile beside the parking lot and they walked in together.
Richard took her hand as soon as they started walking, held it as he walked into the hospital, and only let go when he had to sit down and talk to the triage nurse. The nurse glanced at her with interest and might have asked about her, had she not been more interested in what Richard had done to his hand.
Rebecca stood beside him as the nurse carefully removed the bandage. Richard winced, Rebecca stared and the nurse whistled low under her breath when they saw the gash in the palm of his hand.
“I know one newspaper man who isn’t going to be typing for a while,” the nurse chided. She grabbed more gauze, held it against the wound and motioned to Rebecca to apply pressure. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and whooshed out of the room on quiet shoes.
“Jesus,” Rebecca said, stunned by how deep the cut was.
“A few stitches will take care of it,” he said.
“We’ll have to be careful not to get lube on it.”
He laughed out loud at her teasing.
When the nurse came back with the proper supplies, she led them into a little room and instructed Richard to sit down in a comfortable chair. She sat a metal tray on the desk beside him. On his lap she placed a pillow, then a waterproof mat on top of that, making a comfortable place for his arm to rest. She unpackaged what looked like an enormous needle, and Rebecca turned her head away.
“You can stay if you want to,” the nurse said, “but it’s not going to be pretty. You might want to wait in the lobby?”
Rebecca met Richard’s eyes. There was no expression in them. He was letting her make the decision, and the fact that he wasn’t about to ask her to stay made the decision for her. The nurse watched as Rebecca stepped to his side and put her hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll be all right,” she said.
The nurse gave her a broad smile. “Here we go.”
Rebecca stood behind the nurse as Richard got a few shots of numbing medication, then got his stitches. She watched through all fourteen of them, and marvelled at how rarely he flinched. He seemed to be more interested in a story for the paper about the nurses at the hospital. He asked one question after another, and eventually more nurses came into the room, adding their own answers. Richard joked that he needed his tape recorder at a time like this, and more than a few of the nurses offered to answer his questions—anytime. Would he like their phone numbers, so he could call them when he was ready to do the story?
Rebecca reminded herself that she was leaving in about a week, that these women would be here long after she was gone, and that she had no cause to get jealous about things. After all, when they had cast curious looks in her direction, she had told them she was just a friend from out of town. That’s what she was, wasn’t she? She was a friend who happened to have wild sex with the man they all seemed to lust after, but how well did she really know him?
She watched as Richard collected phone numbers, prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medication. The attending nurse finished wrapping his hand again and pointed a finger at him.
“Take that medicine. Finish the entire antibiotic. Don’t hesitate to take those pain pills if you’re hurting. And stay away from broken glass, for God’s sake.”
“Yes, Madam.”
The nurse gave Rebecca a final grin and walked out with his chart. Richard shrugged into his coat as Rebecca watched him from across the room. With his good hand he stuck the papers deep in his pocket, and a small twinge of jealousy nagged away in the corner of Rebecca’s mind.
“You okay?” he asked, and she nodded.
“Are you?”
“Yeah. But I need to get some of this pain medication in me, because I have a feeling I won’t be so okay in an hour or so. That was a big needle.”
“That was a big cut.”
They walked together down a long hallway and wound up at the pharmacy, where the receptionist knew him by name and didn’t ask for his insurance information. The bottles were filled amid banter about the snow and what the paper would have to say about it, and a minute later they were outside in the darkness. The sun had gone down while they were under the fluorescent lights of the hospital, and now the world seemed a bit disorienting.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked when they were out of earshot of the hospital.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
She didn’t answer him, and soon he realised that no answer would be forthcoming.
Rebecca sat on the snowmobile and Richard climbed on behind her, wrapped his arms around her middle, and decided it might be best just to keep his mouth shut until she was ready to talk. Not a word was said between them as she manoeuvred the machine down the hillside and along the same path she had taken a few hours before. Richard laid his chin on her shoulder and watched the world go by while he wondered at the thoughts running through
her head.
When they reached the house, Rebecca carefully slid the snowmobile into the garage. She turned off the engine and the silence rushed in, making it clear just how much time had gone by without a single word from her. Finally she sighed and turned in the seat to look at him. Why be anything but perfectly frank and honest?
“I’ve had so much fun these last few days,” she started. “I’ve enjoyed every moment of being with you. It’s almost magical, how it happened—you saved me from the blizzard, we wound up in bed, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world. But I guess when we were at the hospital I started to realise that this isn’t a fairy tale, and it’s going to end soon. When it does, you’ll have your life and I’ll have mine, and never the two shall meet,” she said, and smiled sadly. “You’ll have a lot of nurses waiting for your call.”
Richard didn’t know what to say. While in the hospital he had acted the same way he always had, and he’d had no designs on any of the women there. He had known most of them for years, and while some of them had made their interest known, he had never returned the favour.
“I don’t think I’ll be calling any of them for personal reasons,” he said carefully.
Rebecca nodded and put on a brave face. “What you do is your business. I just think…well, I think I’m going to miss you.”
What else could she say? No matter how magical things might seem, she was a realistic person, and the reality of so many miles between Miami and Crispin was very clear.
“You don’t have to miss me yet,” he said.
She climbed off of the snowmobile and took off her coat. Outside the garage the moon had drifted behind the clouds and it was almost pitch-black, but they could still hear the roar of snowploughs, so much closer now. The roads would be cleared by morning, and then they could pull her car out of the ditch, and then…
