by KD Robichaux
I wish he would take control, ignore my nerves he’s picking up on, and just rip off the Band-Aid, so to speak. I’m entirely too intimidated and inexperienced to voice or even passive-aggressively show that I’m ready to have sex for the first time, to give him my virginity. All he’d have to do is make the first move, give me any opening, and I would make it clear to him that I’m all for it. Just kiss me deeply, and I would pour myself into the kiss and not let go until he understood. It’s just the lead-up that’s terrifying.
“What movie do you want to watch?” he asks me, obviously trying to bring me out of my stupor, and I shake myself, realizing I had been staring straight through him.
“A comedy. Definitely a comedy,” I reply.
“What, you don’t want to watch a scary movie, where you’ll have to cling to me to keep you safe from the boogie man?” he teases, tickling up my leg, making me squeal.
“I don’t do scary movies. My brother traumatized me when I was little.” I pout. “He was supposed to take me to see a Disney movie, but we went into Gothica instead. At first, I thought it was cool I was going to see a grown-up movie with my big brother, but an hour in, he thought it would be funny to grab me right at the crescendo of a scary part, and it frightened me so bad I screamed and peed, right there in the chair. I avoid horror movies at all costs now.”
The confession is worth every ounce of embarrassment, as Corbin throws back his head and lets out one of his rare belly laughs. I feel it to the very depths of my soul. It doesn’t happen often, so when I can make him laugh like that, when he lets his guard down and shows every bit of his amusement, I feel so accomplished and happy that I can make him feel that way for a few moments. It’s not often my serious soldier gets to be carefree, so when I get to witness these fleeting seconds, I take a mental picture of the look on his face, and try to record the sound of his laugh to play back later, because God only knows when he could be sent somewhere.
These weeks he’s spent training in the field have been hard enough. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself if and when he ever gets deployed. So I try to capture the tiny dimple that forms on one side of his lips when he smiles this big. The gasp of breath he takes between bouts of laughter. The tiny line that forms between his eyebrows, and the even smaller ones at the corners of his sparkling brown eyes.
When he finally catches his breath, he looks over at me, and heat joins the sparkles in his gaze. “If you keep looking at me like that, baby girl, I’m going to have to pull this car over and have my way with you,” he growls, his sight zeroing in on my mouth, where I was unconsciously biting my bottom lip as I watched him.
“Please do,” I breathe, and then my eyes widen when I realize I said it out loud.
He lifts his eyes to mine and his brow furrows. Time seems to stand still as he stares at me with that intense stare. I feel as if he is looking into my very soul, reading into my two slipped words. Yes, I implore, I mean it.
“Are you ready, baby girl?” he asks, his eyes never wavering from mine.
The tension grows even more potent, and it forces me to glance toward the road. I’m fascinated the car stays perfectly centered between the lines of the open road, even as I feel his intense look boring into the side of my face. I take a deep breath in through my nose, let it out slowly through my mouth, inhale once more before I turn back to him, wet my lips with the tip of my tongue… and dyno.
“I am.”
I WATCHED CAREFULLY as Vi gained her courage, much like she does before a tricky move on the rocks, and when she turned to me and said those two words, I am, her voice was steady, strong, and determined.
I’d used self-control I didn’t know I possessed, when it came to her. Although I usually never had to try to pursue a woman for very long in order to take her to bed—if at all, seeing how I got hit on the majority of the time, not the other way around—I hadn’t tried to get her to move any faster than her own pace. I waited for clues, letting me know she wanted me to kiss her, when with anyone else I would’ve done it whenever I wanted.
The only things she seems courageous enough to do herself are placing her tiny hand in mine to hold while we walk, or sit in movie theaters, playful swats while we joke around, and the occasional hug that she initiates. But every kiss to date has been me giving it to her, not her taking. Part of me wonders if she is that naturally submissive, while the rest of me believes it’s just fear from being so inexperienced. Yet the way she just answered my question left no room for doubt that she wants me, and I’m not about to give her a chance to change her mind.
Pressing down on the gas, my speed goes from a steady cruise of fifty-five miles per hour up to ninety, and I hear her sweet giggle from beside me. She loves going fast in my Camaro. And I know she loves watching me shift gears by the way she always bites her lip while her eyes follow my right hand on the stick. I don’t often get to race around with her in our small town, but out here, on the deserted back road we took to get to and from the amusement park four hours away, I open it up and give her a thrill.
I hear her gasp, but I don’t take my eyes off the road. “Corbin! You’re going a hundred!” she squeaks.
“Hundred and eight, actually,” I correct, and feel her swat my arm.
“Slow down! You’re going to get a ticket.”
“Radar detector says otherwise, baby. Hasn’t beeped in the last three hours. Now, grab my stick.”
“Excuse me?” she scoffs, and I laugh.
“The stick shift, perv.”
“Why?” she asks suspiciously.
I grab her hand and put it on the black knob of the gear shifter, then cover it with my palm. “Ready?”
“For what? What are you doing?” she asks, her voice panicked.
“Down to fourth,” I say, and we downshift into the lower gear, slowing down a little. “Third.” Our hands move again, and the car slows even further. “Second.” The trees outside stop whizzing past as our speed lowers until I finish with, “First,” before bringing the Camaro to a stop in the middle of the abandoned street. “Neutral,” I tell her, centering the stick and wiggling it a little.
“Oh, my God, Corbin. What if someone comes up behind us? They’re going to nail us right in the ass!” she squawks, spinning to look out the back windshield.
“I’m going to nail you right in the ass if you don’t chill and listen for a sec,” I threaten, and her eyes come to me.
My right hand still on hers, I take it off the shifter and yank her across the center console, tangling my fingers in the back of her hair with my left. Her other hand comes to press into my chest for balance as I pull her face to mine and crush my lips to hers. I let my need for her show in this kiss. This isn’t one of the sweet, innocent pecks she’s used to. No. And it’s more heated than any of the times we’ve made out since that first time I taught her how to French kiss.
Feeling her hand move up my chest, I breathe her in as she sighs, enjoying the combination of her watermelon-flavored drink mixed with something uniquely Vivian, and savor the touch of her fingers against my skin as she wraps them around the back of my neck, holding me to her. Yes. God, yes. This is what I’ve been waiting for. For months, all I’ve wanted was for her to show me she wants me just as badly as I want her, and finally, with her grip locked on, I now know for certain my girl will be all mine.
Just not right this second.
I let go of her hair and pull away slowly, so she doesn’t feel rejected, and smile down into her beautiful face when I see her eyes are still closed, her breath coming out in short pants. “You ready, baby girl?” She nods, never lifting her lids, so I place her hand back on the stick shift, and tell her gently, “Then get us home.”
She scoots back into her seat, lets out a deep breath, and finally opens her eyes, blinking a couple times to get her bearings. “Okay,” she replies with another small nod.
“Over and up to first,” I instruct, helping her with the first gear as I work the pedals to get us going. “Down t
o second.” This time, she does it on her own, and when I coach, “Third,” and she pushes it straight up flawlessly, I remove my hand and stretch my arm out to rest behind her shoulders.
I can’t help the sense of pride I feel when I rev the engine, push in the clutch, and she moves the gear into fourth without my direction, and then finishes off with fifth the same way. She looks over at me with a beaming smile, obviously proud of herself too. “I’ll have you driving stick in no time.” A sound escapes her that’s a cross between a hiccup, a giggle, and a snort, and I look at her in surprise. “Was… was your mind just in the gutter, baby girl?” I ask. “The one time I wasn’t making a sexual innuendo….” I grin.
“You’re rubbing off on me, I guess.” She giggles sweetly.
“Not yet, but I will be.”
AFTER SHOWING THE guard at the gate our IDs, soon, we pulled into a parking lot between two huge, rectangular, four-story, plain beige buildings. The area was almost eerily silent. There were a ton of cars parked, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Where is everybody?” I whisper, the feel of the place making me want to be quiet and not disturb the silence.
“Half are deployed, and a lot are still out in the field for training. Only three of us come in at a time to guard the building, each taking a one-day shift and two days off, before we go back out in the woods,” he explains.
As we walk in through the heavy-looking door, we pass an old metal desk that has a half-eaten meal in the center, but no one there to eat it. “This is where you spent all day yesterday?” I ask, and he nods, grabs my hand, and starts up the stairs. “No wonder you were bored out of your mind.”
He doesn’t reply, just continues to guide me up the four flights of stairs until we come out another metal door into a long, creepy hallway, a numbered, beige door breaking up the painted off-white cinderblock walls every eight feet or so. The lights must be motion-activated, because another buzzes on in the ceiling as we walk farther down the hall, and as I look behind me, I see the one closest to the stairwell door we exited through flicker back off. I hold Corbin’s hand tighter in my right, and reach across my body to squeeze his bicep with my left, making him chuckle.
“Not gonna let anything get you, baby girl. These barracks are just old and decrepit, built in the 1950s,” he soothes.
“All I’m hearing is ‘This place is haunted as shit, and super old, so lots of years for ghosts to take up residence,’” I mumble, bring my side flush with his as he lets go of my hand and wraps his muscular arm around my back. I feel his fingers dig lightly into my ribs near my breast, and it sets off tingles throughout my body, doing an awesome job of distracting me from the scary setting we’re in. And finally, he stops at a door, one that looks like all the other beige doors we’ve passed, only this one has a set of black numbers in the center: 308.
He takes his key out of his pocket, unlocks the door, and shoves it open, holding it for me to step through. When he lets go, it shuts on its own with a loud, echoing bang, making me jump. I try to shake off my nerves as I take in his home for the past two years. To the left, there is a giant wooden piece of furniture with a set of double doors. I don’t know the proper name for it, but it’s like an external closet. A wardrobe, I guess. It’s kind of what I pictured when I read the Narnia books several years ago. Just past it, I can see about two feet of a bed covered in a fluffy blanket with an outdoor scene on it, and then another wardrobe at the foot of the bed. It makes me smile as I peek in.
“I used to do this with my bed,” I tell him. “My mom would get frustrated with me, because I’d sneak off with all her pushpins out of her craft room and use them to attach sheets to the ceiling, like a canopy around my bed. It didn’t work too well though, and they’d all end up falling after a couple hours. She finally got me one of those pretty sheer mosquito nets that hang down over the bed. I don’t know. I just liked being in an enclosed space, kinda like little boys like to build forts, I guess.”
The right side of his mouth tugs upward. “Totally get it, baby girl. It’s the only way I can sleep. I feel too exposed otherwise. Also, it’s for privacy. My roommate is deployed right now, but when he’s here, he’s a fucking chatty Kathy and wouldn’t leave me alone before I arranged it like this,” he explains, and I look farther into the room. Sure enough, past the second wardrobe is a twin-size bed along the back wall. Above it, I assume there is a window, but it is covered in a thick, black piece of fabric. In the center of it is an American flag attached with safety pins at the corners, and I can’t help but smile. I love how proud and patriotic my soldier is. Looking to the right, there is a large dresser, with a good-sized TV on top with a DVD player next to it, and then yet another beige door.
“Is that the bathroom?” I ask, and he snorts.
“I wish. No. That’s the next room over. We have latrines here,” he says, and at my confused look, he adds, “Big shared bathroom down the hall. Kind of like in a locker room.”
“Well crap,” I grumble.
“What’s up?”
“I definitely have to pee after all that watermelon Arizona drink and four hours in a car,” I confess, fidgeting on my feet.
“There’s nobody here. I’ll take you down there.” He opens the door, but I hesitate. “You coming?”
“I’m imagining a long wall of urinals and me trying to pee standing up.”
“Soldiers still gotta take shits, Vi. There are two stalls with doors,” he tells me, and I scrunch up my face, making him grin.
We only have to walk about ten feet down the creepy hallway before we reach the latrine, and I keep my eyes averted and head straight for the two stalls in the corner. Even though it’s completely deserted, I still feel like I shouldn’t be in here, since this is a place only men use during what would normally be private moments for civilians, using the bathroom and showering. I finish my business and quickly wash my hands at one of the faucets above the trough-style sink lining one of the walls. There’s a metal shelf the length of it above the faucets for the men to place their toiletries while they shave and brush their teeth, or whatever else men do in the mirror.
As I step out into the hallway, I’m suddenly grabbed roughly from behind, and as I go to scream, panic flaring inside me, a hand clamps over my mouth. It’s not until I smell Corbin’s familiar, intoxicating scent, and then feel the fingers of his other hand begin to tickle my sides that I start to laugh, swinging my elbow behind me to get him back.
My back flush with his front, the heat of him sinks into my chilled bones, and as I laugh hysterically, wiggling against him, I’m no longer afraid of the unnerving old building. I stop fighting and let my body become dead-weight, and he stops his tickle torture and wraps his tattoo-covered arm around my narrow body beneath my breasts, holding me to him. He removes his hand from my mouth and uses it to pull my hair back so he can see the side of my face.
“Sorry, baby girl. I couldn’t help it,” he chuckles. “I wanted so bad to do that when we first got here, but I didn’t want you to pee on me. Couldn’t resist, knowing you had a freshly emptied bladder.”
“You’re a dick,” I gasp, trying to catch my breath, but giggling still.
He laughs heartily then spins me around, making me squeak as he picks me up in his arms bridal-style and carries me back to his room and through the door, not stopping until he tosses me through the narrow opening onto his bed. “What do you want to watch?” he asks.
“What do you have?” I counter.
“As far as comedies,” he begins, opening the top drawer of the dresser in the corner, “I have Night at the Roxbury, A Knight’s Tale, My Big Fat—”
“—Greek Wedding? Yes! My favorite!” I exclaim, and he puts it into the DVD player, using the remote to turn on the TV as he walks back toward me. He tosses it onto the mattress next to me, and I watch, my eyes widening, as he grasps hold of the bottom of his T-shirt before pulling it off over his head in one quick motion. I gulp, taking in the perfection of his bare torso
and arms.
He has a body the likes I’ve never seen on a real-life person. Maybe in fitness magazines, music videos, and action movies, but never up close, within reach. Sinewy forearms, bulging biceps, up to obscenely wide shoulders, fist-sized traps on either side of his strong neck, down to his pecs, wide and hard, but not overly big and puffed up like I’ve seen on some body builders. They’re proportioned to the rest of him, the perfect canvas for his vibrant chest piece, the vivid green-and-red snake battling the black eagle, the beak of its white head about to take a chomp out of the long, slithering body.
My eyes trail downward, over the six perfectly symmetrical protruding abs, a deep trench between the two columns leading my gaze even farther south, to the V-shaped muscles above his hips. Jesus, is he even real?
He takes a pace forward, and I fight the urge to move back on the bed, instead holding my seated position on the edge as he uses his knee to separate both of mine and steps between my now spread legs. My heart thumps, and I stare straight ahead into that flawless tattoo, unable to look up to meet his eyes. My hands tremble where they clench the edge of the mattress, and I can’t seem to inhale.
His hand comes up beneath my chin, and as he lifts it, my lids close on their own. My stomach clenches as I feel him press closer, his body coming into contact with my most intimate place, and I finally suck in a breath just as his mouth presses to mine. His palm lowers to the base of my throat, and it’s a much lower part of my body that clenches this time, as his hand rests there, firm and hot, sending a thrill down my spine. Using pressure against my sternum, he lays me back on the bed, his lips never leaving mine as his tongue slips between them, and his other hand comes down at the side of my head to brace him. Just like the kiss in his car, I melt into him, following his lead and losing myself as his tongue dances with mine. Without a spoken word, he teaches me ways to draw out the most pleasure, and unconsciously my hips begin to move against him, my core suddenly needing… something. I don’t know what.
