Rugged

by Ava Bloom

  Still, I couldn’t help wondering how this was ever going to work out. She was going to have to leave Twin Valleys eventually; she couldn’t just move there to be with a guy that she had just met. And there was no way I was moving to San Francisco to be with her.

  But for now, we could at least have some fun.

  “What do you plan on doing this summer?” Mallory asked a couple weeks later, as we finished up breakfast out on the porch. It was unseasonably warm for spring – we were both in light jackets, but the sun was pleasantly warm on my bare face and fingers. I hadn’t had to stoke the fire nearly as high lately as I had during the middle of winter, when Mallory had first stumbled upon my home. There was always a chance that the weather would turn again, that the cold and the snow would return. But I didn’t really think it was going to happen this year.

  So, it was the perfect time to start talking about summer. The only problem was, I knew that talking about summer meant talking about us – and we still hadn’t put any sort of label on this. Now was the moment of truth. Of course, we had acted like we were in a relationship for the past weeks. But this could still be a seasonal fling.

  I hated to think that I might never see her again after the end of the season.

  I shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t know,” I told her, carefully keeping my tone level.

  It wasn’t really fair to do that, I knew, but I just didn’t know what she was thinking either.

  Mallory stared at me for a long moment, like she was trying to figure me out. Like if she looked carefully enough, she would be able to figure out what I was thinking. Finally, she shook her head. “I got a job offer. From the same company that I already work for, but…different.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. I knew that things were going well, now that she’d sort of stepped aside at work. She was finding out that people were a lot more capable than she’d realized, and she was also learning to relax when things weren’t done exactly the way that she would have done them herself. But it sounded like she was seriously considering whatever this new job offer was.

  “We’re opening a few new offices abroad,” she continued.

  I sighed. I knew she wasn’t there in Twin Valleys forever, but somehow, I still felt blindsided by the way this conversation was going. I supposed it had something to do with the fact that I had expected her to go back to San Francisco, if she was going anywhere else. It would be a bit of a haul, but I could at least try to make it out to San Francisco enough that we could continue some semblance of a relationship. If she moved out of the country…

  But it was her decision. I couldn’t exactly ask her to stay, just on my behalf. We weren’t technically in a relationship, and even if we were, we didn’t know one another well enough to be planning our whole lives around the other person.

  “I’m excited for you,” I told her. “What’s the new position?” I only hoped she couldn’t hear how flat my tone was.

  Mallory stared at me for another moment, though. Then, she sighed and looked away. “Your whole life is here,” she said softly. “All your friends – didn’t you say that they were all like family? I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, confused. What did my situation in Twin Valleys have to do with any of it?

  Mallory shrugged unhappily, still looking away from me. “When I requested that I be transferred to the new office in New Zealand for the next six months, I thought that maybe you might come with me,” she said. “The office is in Queenstown, and I figured that you could probably get work at a bar down there. I looked into all the visa requirements and everything, and as long as you’ve never had a working holiday visa down there before, it should be pretty easy. But I don’t know, I know you probably have things you do during the summer as well. Camping, fishing, whatever. You probably bartend year-round; I know the resort is open in the summer. I just… I don’t know what I was thinking. Forget about it.”

  “You want me to…” I couldn’t stop staring at her. Was she really saying what I thought she was saying? On the one hand, it was crazy to think that she was asking me to follow her to New Zealand for six months so that I could ski and she could do her work at an actual office. But on the other hand, hadn’t she already moved here to Twin Valleys for the time being, just so that we could continue to explore whatever we might be to one another?

  I swallowed hard, suddenly feeling like the floor had been pulled out from beneath me.

  “You realize that Queenstown isn’t really that big of a city, right?” I asked. “It’s nothing like San Francisco. I mean, there are bars, for sure. But it’s not… I don’t know.”

  Mallory looked disappointed. “You don’t have to give me all your reasons,” she said, still not looking at me – but I thought I might see tears in her eyes. “If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. But the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe it’s just what I need. It’s what I needed coming here as well: a change of pace. And I always meant to travel more, once I was out of college. I just never felt like I had the chance, with my job. But if I was able to take my work on the road with me…”

  “When do we leave?” I asked abruptly.

  Mallory turned startled eyes on me. “When do we leave?” she echoed.

  “Well, the ski season is almost over,” I pointed out. “I assume we probably need to buy our tickets soon. I need to check my passport and make sure that it’s still valid. And I guess we need to get visa’s, like you said – or at least, I do. I don’t know how it works for you, if the main company is based here in the States? But you probably already looked into all of that.” I trailed off, aware that I was babbling.

  Was I really considering this? Just up and moving to New Zealand with a woman whom I’d known for just over a month?

  But Mallory wasn’t just any woman. I hadn’t felt so right about a relationship since Sam. And to be honest, even with Sam, things hadn’t felt like this. Maybe it was because I was still so raw. Maybe it was because Mallory was so uncertain and inexperienced with relationships in general (although she was plenty experienced in bed, I was learning more and more).

  “Are you really sure?” Mallory asked, looking at me again. She was biting her lower lip, looking up at me through her lashes, and I suddenly felt a strange possessiveness run through me. I wanted this woman, more than I could ever believe.

  “I’m really sure,” I told her, hoping the fierceness in my eyes and my tone of voice conveyed everything I felt for her.

  A slow grin broke out over Mallory’s face. “Okay,” she said.

  “So, we’ll need to find a place to live,” I said. I shook my head. “To be honest, I have no idea how to do that. I bought this place here a while ago, because someone happened to be selling at the time when sleeping on Bobby’s couch was starting to get…just to be too much.”

  Mallory looked like she wanted to ask about that, but she held back. A story for another time. Instead, she shrugged. “How about I handle all of that,” she suggested. “You figure out your passport and your visa. And flights? I need to be there by the middle of May.”

  “I can do that,” I promised. “And you? Your passport and your visa?”

  “My passport is valid, and my visa will be handled by the company,” Mallory said. “I might need to go into San Francisco to make sure that everything is really taken care of, but I’m not too worried. They said the visa shouldn’t take long.”

  “Good,” I said. I paused. “It’s…been a long time since I was out of the country.”

  Mallory reached over and squeezed my hand lightly. “I bet it’ll be strange, being on a flight with me, instead of with all your…crew, or whatever you would call them.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Mallory just shrugged. “I’ve never lived abroad before,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll both have things that we’re…working through. Getting comfortable with.”

  “But the things that I’ll be coming to term with…” I paus
ed and cleared my throat, looking away from her. I remembered everything that Sam had had to deal with, when I’d first returned to the States. To be honest, back then I hadn’t thought that I would ever get over any of it. It wasn’t just that final mission, although that had undoubtedly been the crux of it. The straw that broke the camel’s back, if you will.

  But everything leading up to it had been difficult, too.

  I’d joined the Army fresh out of high school because I hadn’t known what else I was going to do with my life. And I loved my country, and I wanted to make a difference in the world, and this seemed like the way to do it.

  Sam had been so supportive of all of it, too. She’d really wanted me to find what I wanted to do with my life, the thing that made me happy. And I’d thought that the Army did that. It gave me a sense of purpose that I’d never felt before. The months of letters that I’d sent her, at first, had been so optimistic.

  And then everything had gone wrong. We’d started to get missions that seemed designed to put us in danger. I’d started to pick up more responsibilities – responsibilities that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, responsibilities that I didn’t feel capable of pulling off.

  And then things had gone really wrong…

  I shook my head to clear it of those memories – and of my earlier memories there in town. I had been just a shell of a man when I’d been discharged. It had taken a long time – and the help of all my friends, Bobby and Sylvia included, to bring me back to the shadow of the person that I had been.

  Mallory didn’t know all of that, though. With her, I could forget all about those terrible years and just be the person that I wanted to be. It was a heady feeling.

  But as soon as I left my main support system… Well, I no longer knew how I might react. What if things were just as bad as before? What if I had no one to lean on other than her? I didn’t know her well enough that I could foist upon her the sorts of things that Sam or Bobby had been able to deal with.

  Yet Mallory didn’t seem worried. I had to wonder if maybe she just didn’t understand what could happen. But it wasn’t that, I knew. Sam had briefed her, I supposed. Mallory just seemed to think that…whatever it was, we would get through it. I didn’t know where her faith came from, but I had to admire it.

  “What about your friends?” I said, suddenly remembering all the women that she had come to Twin Valleys with. Jane would be getting married in a couple weeks, and I knew that Mallory already felt that she was growing so distant from the rest of them, not being in San Francisco for their weekly brunches and other get-togethers.

  Mallory shrugged, though. “The world will keep turning,” she said.

  I paused uncertainly. “But if you start to miss them…” I didn’t want her to resent me because she felt like she didn’t spend time with her friends anymore.

  “They’re wonderful friends,” Mallory said, shaking her head. “We’ve all been friends for so long now that I can’t imagine that changing. If it does, it’s because I’m in a different place in my life than they are.” She shrugged. “I’ve always been different than the rest of them. If I’m haring off to the other side of the globe or I’m just focusing a lot more on my career and a lot less on guys than the rest of them – that doesn’t change anything. If we were going to drift apart, we would have already.”

  I thought about it for a moment longer. It wasn’t like I was trying to poke holes in everything, I just didn’t want her to agree to things so soon. Of course, I didn’t know how long she had been thinking about all of this. For all I knew, she had known about this job for months now. She could have made up her mind about it before she had ever even come to Twin Valleys.

  But I didn’t want to think that she was making this decision just for me. “What if I can’t be there for you?” I asked her. “What if you and I…break up?” I wasn’t sure that ‘break up’ was the right term for it, since I wasn’t sure that we were really in a relationship.

  Mallory just shrugged, though. “Then it happens,” she said. She shook her head. “Look, Derrick, if you don’t want to – “

  “It’s not that I don’t want to,” I interrupted before she could put words in my mouth. “It’s definitely not that I don’t want to.”

  “What do you normally do during the summers?” Mallory asked curiously.

  “Work at the bar some,” I admitted. “Sometimes I also do work around the resort – reshaping runs, cleaning things up, and so on. Or I work construction – there’s always construction to do in a ski town. And Bobby’s as good a boss as any.”

  Mallory sighed. “So, you probably don’t really want to come down to Queenstown, do you?” she asked. “Like I said before – like you said before – your whole life is here. Your ‘family’ is here.”

  “They are,” I agreed, nodding at her. “But maybe it’s time for a change.”

  “I can’t ask you to…” She paused, and I could practically see the gears turning in her head. She decided not to argue, in the end. “I’m not saying that this is going to be easy. But it’s kind of exciting, isn’t it?”

  I looked at the beautiful woman in front of me and couldn’t help but nod. “It’s very exciting,” I agreed, smiling back at her. And wasn’t that the truth.

  15

  Mallory

  I tucked one final tee-shirt into my suitcase – then changed my mind and pulled it back out.

  “Come on,” Derrick said, rolling his eyes a little at me. “I’ve watched you pack and unpack that shirt five times already. And I know you wear it. Is it about the space? Because I have plenty of room in my bag, if you’re worried about yours going overweight or something.” He paused. “But I really don’t think the shirt is going to be the thing that makes your bag overweight.”

  I gave him a look. “I really am bringing that many sweaters with me,” I said, in reference to an earlier disagreement that we’d had. I’d maintained that bringing five sweaters in various colors was really what I wanted to do (considering we were flying to New Zealand for their winter) and he reminded me that they had shops “down under.” I tried to explain to him that I was pretty sure that saying only applied to Australia, but he maintained that it applied to anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “I just think we really should be leaving or else we might miss our flight.”

  “We might,” I said. “Except that our flight isn’t for six more hours, and it’s only a 45-minute drive from here to the airport.”

  “Still, with these international flights – “ he began.

  “We’re not going to have a problem,” I interrupted. I looked around the apartment, wondering if there was anything else that I had forgotten to pack. Of course, I knew everything that I really needed to pack: it was the same stuff that I’d had with me in Twin Valleys, which hadn’t fully been unpacked since we’d returned to my place in San Francisco early the previous week.

  I smiled a little, thinking again about the adventure we were about to have.

  “What’s that smile for?” Derrick asked, slipping his hands around my waist. He already knew what the smile was for, though: it was the same grin that I’d worn almost constantly for the past couple weeks. I didn’t know how I had gotten so lucky to find someone as kind, charming, adventurous, funny, and sexy as Derrick, but I was so excited to start this chapter in my life with him that I could hardly keep from giddy giggling every other second.

  I leaned up on my tiptoes and kissed him. It was soft and tender, somehow still exploratory despite all the time that we’d already spent together.

  And there had been some good times, curled up on his sofa or pressed together in bed.

  Derrick groaned and pulled away, though, after only a moment of contact. “That is definitely going to make us late,” he said.

  I scoffed. “We’ll be fine.” When he still didn’t look convinced, I rolled my eyes. “Come on, don’t you want to have sex on two different continents in the span of
twenty-four hours?”

  Derrick chuckled a little. “Well, when you put it like that…” he said.

  In a moment, he had pushed my suitcase off onto the floor – and I didn’t protest, even though it wasn’t zipped yet, its contents spilling out all over the carpet. As he guided me down onto the bed, slowly and carefully, the only thing that I could think about was how there was no one I had ever met that I would rather share this adventure with.

  Derrick slowly unbuttoned my shirt, kissing at the smooth, pale skin that he uncovered. When he reached my breasts, he tugged at my bra with his teeth, until he could kiss and suck at my nipples, as I arched and moaned against him.

  He nudged into the space between my legs, tugging my jeans and panties only partway down before plunging his fingers into me. I gasped in shock, my walls clenching around his digits. He stroked gently at the tender skin there, giving me hardly a moment to adjust before he pushed his member inside of me in their place. His thrusts were hard and fast, until I could barely keep up with him, my breathing coming raggedly.

  I was so close to coming, already, that it almost made me sob with frustration as he slowed down considerably.

  “Please,” I begged, urging him onwards with my fingers at his back, with my heels against his lower back.

  “Relax,” he murmured, stroking his palm down my side, causing me to shiver.

  “You were the one who wasn’t sure that we had time for this,” I reminded him. He grinned – but he didn’t have a response for that, it seemed.

  Or maybe… I whimpered in need as he pulled out almost entirely, teasing me with only his tip. I pulled at him with my fingers, with my crossed ankles – but he continued to be in control, letting me have only a tiny bit of what I so desperately needed. I sobbed out his name, helpless as pleasure welled up inside of me.