It had been awhile since he had built a sandcastle, and he had to admit, he had more fun than he expected. He heard a yell and looked up to see someone pop out of the water and laugh. Mark ran out of the water with his boogie board and dropped it next to them on hilly structure he and Katie built from nothing.
“Ohh! Mom is gonna flip when she sees this.” Mark laughed.
“I hope that’s a good thing.”
“Yep. Mom has the worst sandcastle building sense ever.”
“I didn’t know that there was a science to it,” Den joked.
Mark rolled his eyes. “Well, if there is, Mom needs to go back to school.”
“I heard that!” Sidonie huffed and Den turned around.
“Hey,” Den said as he looked over her.
Damn, if she didn’t look good, then nothing did. Her bikini was modest, but revealed a crazy amount of skin in the oddest places. There was a top that wrapped over her breasts and straps that crossed oddly around her shoulders and torso. The bottoms were like a tiny pair of shorts that covered most of her bare belly with the same oddly crossed straps.
There were tiny diamonds of skin exposed all over that made him wish that he could touch her. He was going to have to think about baseball if he didn’t want to come out looking like a letch.
“Hey,” she said as he thought about the last game he’d watched. “Like your castle.”
“Thanks,” he responded even as he wondered what she had been doing that had her skin so dewy and glistening. “Where have you been?” he asked out of jealousy tinged curiosity.
“Playing a game of volleyball with some college kids. Katie was over there a while ago, but she quit when the ball smacked her in the face.” Sidonie grinned, but Den felt a bit miffed.
She was way too sexy to be bobbing in front of boys that would only ogle her body. It was his to ogle, not some college kids with half-assed attitudes and full hard-ons.
“Did not,” Katie muttered. “Just was ready to build a sandcastle, that’s all.”
Soon after, his mother wandered over from where ever she had been laid out. The tan color in her skin was a bit deeper after the handful of hours they’d been out.
“Hey, Ma. Pa still on the pier?”
“Yep.” She grinned and shrugged.
“Okay. I’m going to get hot dogs and whatnot. Want anything?” he asked everyone at once.
By the time everyone had the chance to call out a number of things, Sidonie chuckled.
“I’ll help you carry that if it’s okay with you guys.”
“Of course. I’ll supervise the castle building.” Mrs. McTavish grinned and flopped onto her knees alongside Mark and Katie.
They walked onto the pier and Den grabbed a hose. “Water’s gonna be cold, but let’s clean you off.”
“I’m not the only sandy person around here, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Well, then I’ll do you and you can do me.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She grinned, but her face froze when the water hit her square in the chest. “That was wrong of you McTavish.” Her teeth chattered and she narrowed her gaze on him evilly.
“Well, they looked a little hot, so I thought I’d do you a favor and help you cool down.” He dropped the hose lower and hit her in the front of the bikini.
This time she gasped and he knew that she enjoyed it. Her nipples were hard, and while he would have attributed it to the water, the way she thrust the large mounds out said otherwise.
The water was washed over her legs and, finally, her sandy feet.
She turned the hose on him, but she hit him on the feet first. Then moved it up to his shorts and the water turned his half-stiffy into a sniveling worm, caused him to jump back.
“Oh, take it like a man.” She winked and turned the hose off.
“Imma show you how a man does it. Since you froze my balls, you get to warm them back up.”
He grabbed her hand and he walked them quickly to the other side of the boardwalk where a group of family bathrooms were off to one side.
They were, thankfully, clean as the season wasn’t underway just yet and when he didn’t hear any sounds coming from the stalls, he flicked the lock and shut them away.
“You’re crazy, do you know that?”
“No more than anyone else. Plus, I have meds so I’d probably get a pass.” He winked. “Warm me up, woman.”
She used one damp hand to unearth his cock before she squatted and took him in her mouth. Her tongue was a wicked weapon that wreaked havoc on his desire to hold out. He only wanted to tease her, thought she wouldn’t just own his cock.
But she was far from timid and she wouldn’t even let him catch his breath.
His hand wrapped into her hair and helped her bob up and down on him. Den got the pleasure of watching her mouth stretch into an impossibly wide facsimile of itself.
“Damn! Sidonie, stop.”
She only hummed and kept right on sucking.
“Fuck! Sidonie, I’m going to spank you black and blue if you don’t stop it.” Even that threat seemed to hold no sway on her. He grabbed her hair tighter and pulled her away from him, but the suction of her mouth was stronger than his single hand or his will.
Finally, when he was a split second from eruption, she stopped, left him needy and greedy and short of more than one breath. She stood up and stepped back until she was propped at the edge of the sink. Sidonie turned around and faced the mirror, looking at him in a way that he followed without thought, until he was pressed against the plump thickness of her hips.
When she pulled the steamy wet fabric from her ass to reveal her sex, Den did what the silent command asked for and thrust his saliva slickened cock home.
“Oh, yeah!” she cried out. “Please!”
Den grinned and grabbed her hair again, using the length as a tether to draw her back and forth.
It only took them a handful of minutes to fall into a perfect sync as her cunt fluttered with every thrust and his cock throbbed for release. He caught her gaze in the worn mirror and licked his lips. She was passion drunk, eyes glazed and mouth gaped open.
“Love it, Sidonie.” He gasped as the last of his reserves fell apart and she nodded gingerly due to his lockjaw grasp on her hair.
“Yeah, me, too…” She sighed and tilted her body into his rippling hips.
When she was limp and leaned heavily on the sink, he rubbed his hand over the exposed portions of her skin and breathed deeply.
He turned on the water, warm this time, and wiped the sex juices away before he patted her dry. She lovingly bathed his cock off and slid it back into his shorts.
“Public sex, check.” She chuckled as he struggled to walk.
Den laughed. “I don’t know if this counts.”
Sidonie looked over at him and winked. “Close enough.”
She didn’t look much better, but the limp in her gait only made the sway of her hips more apparent. On him, it likely looked like he struggled to get used to a peg leg.
Twenty minutes later, he carried a bag filled with hot dogs. They decided to take no chances and just bought a bunch of things, enough that everyone would have a hot dog and a hamburger each, along with a churro and French fries. They had drinks in the cooler, thankfully, so they didn’t have to worry about that part.
Katie and Mark ran over before they could get close to the buried cooler, and he watched Sidonie grab two large towels and spread them over the sand.
“Let me go get your dad.” His mom hopped up and walked up the steps to the pier.
They ate the food on the sand and Den watched the water ebb and flow. For some reason, this moment was perfect. When he looked over at Sidonie, he realized that it was her.
She was perfect.
Somehow, she fit into his life in a way that he never imagined a woman could. He had imagined meeting someone his equal, not someone that was better than he was. She made him want to be better than he was, be more than he was.
The f
unny part?
She didn’t even have to ask for it. He wanted to give her the very best he had to offer. Too bad he was terrified it wouldn’t be enough.
Den looked at the woman he found himself falling for and wondered what it would take to get her to acknowledge her feelings. Was it as simple as telling her what her felt? Would he even be able to do that?
Even for her?
That was a stiff proposition, the idea of laying himself bare.
That wasn’t something real men did, talk about their feelings. Real men did something about their feelings, even if it was only to run far and fast. Men liked action, not the weakness of emotions.
He looked at his father and doubted he’d even exist if his father was unwilling to be in touch with those same emotions. Likely not, as his mother was a much different woman than his father was a man. His mother was champagne and caviar, and his father was back breaking work and silent acceptance.
They were two different people that had found a happy medium between them, a place where their differences were only a gasoline to their flames, instead of a reason for dissension. He appreciated the fact that they worked together in ways that he hadn’t understood before.
Until he met Sidonie.
Chapter Seventeen:
SOS: Save Our Skins
Sidonie rolled up the damp and sandy towels as her children threw away the leftover scraps and trash from the meal they’d eaten on the surf. When Mrs. McTavish opened a cooler with cupcakes everyone licked their lips and devoured them summarily.
Although, Katie didn’t get to eat hers. A gang of seagulls flew overhead while she savored it slowly, circled closer and closer until she leapt up and ran.
The mob of birds chased her in circles and everyone fell over onto the sand laughing.
“It’s not funny!” she cried and ran faster with the avian stalkers on her heels.
When all was said and done, Sidonie made the motions of packing her cooler, but really watched Den with the kids.
They liked him and respected him. Den only had to say something once and they hopped to. Both of them. It wasn’t that she had disrespectful children, or that they were rude. But they both liked to know the reasoning for everything. She had grown used to being asked a billion questions back to back about the most mundane of things.
Katie happily cleaned up the buckets and wiped off the chairs they had set out earlier, while Mark folded up the towels and cleaned the odd bits of trash up. It was odd to see them interact with a man that was not their father. Odd to see someone who barely knew them enjoy their company in the same way she did.
They tossed a rolled up towel back and forth as his parents looked on with a gleam in their eyes she knew would end badly for them all.
Den was the type of man who would take his parents into account and she liked that best of all. But that meant he would be susceptible to something he didn’t even want. She’d assumed for so long that any man she met wouldn’t love her children, merely tolerate them. As that idea was not acceptable, she’d kept to herself.
The one man she trusted with her body was the one man to get past her guard. The one man to make it past her barriers was the man she was terrified had laid claim to her heart.
Once everything was tossed away and the sand was free of their imprint, Sidonie looked at the slowly setting sun and wondered: What would she do when the sun set on their relationship?
That was a worry for another day, even as she knew that each encounter between them was one day closer to their last together.
She had never felt like this before, not even for her ex. She had never felt as if she lacked some substantial part of herself when he walked away. Sidonie had grown used to his presence, or lack thereof, during deployments, but there was never a part of her that was flat out, head over heels for him.
They had a comfortable relationship, so much so that their marital connection was akin to an old shoe. It was a familiar place to be in and she had no intentions of walking away, in spite of her lack of satisfaction.
Being the wife of a military man was hard. It felt almost the same as being a single mother, but there were two incomes instead of one. She had made it work, made her life balance out in a way that allowed her to schedule what she needed to have done when it had to be done.
That was probably why she hadn’t blinked an eyelash at his departure as life didn’t change as much as she would have imagined. Her address had changed, her name had changed back, and her marital status went back to the single it had been before. But at the end of the day, she wasn’t crazy about Charles. There was nothing between them but their two children and his self-deception.
Not to mention that she had her fair share of lies she had told herself.
That her husband wasn’t a sexual being.
That she wasn’t a sexual being.
That they were just fine.
That he would be the one to sit on a porch with her and drink tea when they were eighty and grandchildren ran about.
That sex was unimportant in a mature relationship. As Hunter S. Thompson put it, sex without love was as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex. She wasn’t certain if she subscribed to that theory or not, but it made more sense now that she had been on the end of both extremes.
She had love without sex with Charles before and their love was just as tepid as lukewarm water. Now, she tried to have sex without love and found herself falling head over heels for Den. But unlike before, she was so much more invested.
Either way, it didn’t matter. She had bitten the lure Den offered only to find that the meat was poison to her self-control. None of her dates ever progressed far enough for her to feel that her heart was at risk. No other man had made her feel as if she would miss him when he was gone. And she liked it that way.
At first, she had been so certain she would be able to keep this separate, whatever this was. She hoped she could give her body to Den in a dozen ways that no other man would ever take her and she would still walk away, relatively unscathed and back to her regular life with a well-used cunt and a new attitude.
That evening, as she looked out into the surf, she knew that she was wrong.
When Den left, he would be taking the best parts of her with him. Parts she hadn’t realized even existed, sexual parts of her she had no idea could burn so bright.
Emotional parts of her she never imagined a man could tap into, a depth that she hadn’t even tapped into.
It was a quandary for certain, to know that everything had a shelf life.
An expiration date.
And this was no exception.
Their only rule was mutual pleasure, but somewhere, somehow, those lines had become so blurred she didn’t think she could get past the emotional web he’d woven around her while she wasn’t looking.
Welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly.
By the time she realized that the web he’d woven from odd bits of her sexual unconscious was an emotional trap, it was too late to escape and she was too far gone to care that he dined on her that night. Only to taste another trapped creature after her sated husk was sapped dry from his lusts. Because there was no way this could work, not for the long term.
And the saddest part was that all she craved was the long term. Every night she spent with him made it harder to walk away. She had gotten bad enough off to think about vacations and shaving cream on his side of the bathroom sink.
But where could they go from here? It wasn’t like she could move him into her place. It wasn’t like she wanted to bring a man under her roof that she wasn’t married to.
Married?
Sidonie’s belly rolled with a mix of emotions, sick that the idea even popped into her head in the first place, even as her heart soared at the idea of being Mrs. McTavish. Liking him was one thing and loving was another, but marriage was… in an entirely different dimension.
She had been treading in dangerous waters for a while now. But for her to think about the big M
meant the sink or swim variety of trouble.
“Mom?” Katie asked.
Based on her daughter’s perplexed expression, the girl had been calling her for a while.
“Sorry. I was off there—”
“For a sec? Yeah, we noticed,” Den stated simply.
Since when had he known her long enough to finish her statements?
Apparently, it was long enough.
“I said I was sorry. What more do you want? A pound of flesh?” she quipped in a pathetic attempt to lighten her own mood, damn everyone else’s.
Den only looked at her and tilted his head.
“Hey, kid-a-roos! Want to get a doughnut from Britt’s after we pack up the cars?” Den’s mother asked and Sidonie smiled at the woman gratefully. “We’ll meet you back at the house.” She winked and turned around.
“Yeah!” The twins echoed in unison as they grabbed more than their spindly arms could carry and raced off toward the street with the elders in tow.
“Look both ways!” she called out behind them.
She shrugged on her wrap and pushed her sunglasses onto her hairline. When they were relatively alone, Den grabbed her arm. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
“I’m not lying. I just don’t know what it is.” She did.
Sidonie felt as if she waited for the other shoe to drop.
She felt as if she watched a train barrel toward her and she couldn’t move to save her own life. It was a terrifying emotion. The fear of falling even as she plummeted was too late to stop the splat she knew was coming.
“Is this too much?” he asked and Sidonie suddenly felt shame wash over her and a soundtrack played in her skull. The melody was an odd one, consisted of every melody she’d heard, despite the fact that only two sounds were audible. That of the sea and her heartbeat.
“Yes.” she said. For what reason, she had no idea.
Den’s eyes closed and she could read the disappointment on his face as if the expression spoke a million words his mouth had not.
Strangers with Benefits (Siren Publishing Classic) Page 23
