I found the opener and the glasses, worked open the bottle, poured us each a glass, and carried them to the living room, setting them on the low glass coffee table along with the box of pizza. She joined me with two large ceramic plates and a bottle of ranch dressing.
I laughed. “Ranch? And real plates? Paper would have been fine.”
She frowned. “You don’t dip your pizza in ranch?” She shook her head. “You haven’t lived, then, my friend. And we don’t do paper plates. They’re bad for the environment.”
We helped ourselves to the food and dug in; I wolfed down three pieces before I remembered that I was supposed to act like I’ve been around other humans before, instead of the wolves I was clearly raised by. I glanced at Kitty sheepishly, watching her daintily munching on her first slice.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Used to eating with the guys.”
She just laughed, a musical, lilting sound that punched me somewhere in my chest. “You eat like the Beast from Beauty and the Beast.”
I realized I had tomato sauce on the side of my mouth, a piece of cheese on my thumb, and grease on my hands. And I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, well, I’ve never seen that movie, but I have seen actual wolves eat pizza, and I’m guessing that’s kind of what I looked like.”
She glanced at me curiously. “You’ve fed pizza to wolves?”
“We were fighting a big ol’ bitch of a fire in Montana, and after we got it under control, Ram, Rem, Kev, Jameson, and I all headed out to this ranch Kev had heard about. They did horseback hunting rides, and the guy also raised wolves. Why, I dunno, but folks that live out in places like that do some weird shit, you know? So we naturally wanted to see the wolves, right? I mean, they’re fuckin’ wolves. While we were watching them fight over a bone, the rancher’s wife brings over a bunch of pizzas, figuring it’d be nice and hospitable. Only, the rancher takes an entire pizza and tosses it over the fence. Those things went nuts. Snarling, snapping, biting each other…made me glad we had a ten-foot-high electrified fence between us, because those things are scary.”
“That does sound scary.” She eyed me. “What is it you and your brothers do, exactly?”
“Well, up until recently we were smokejumpers.”
She nodded, finishing her first piece. “I heard you say that. But what is that?”
“You know what a hotshot is?”
“A firefighter, right? But for wildfires.”
“Basically. So, in places like California, Idaho, Montana, they get a lot of wildfires, right? Well, the US Forest Service is responsible for fighting those fires. There are the regular wild firefighters with the US Forest Service as well as with the Bureau of Land Management, and then there are specialty crews—hotshots and smokejumpers. Hotshots hike up to the fire and fight it on the front lines. Smokejumpers parachute down into the fire and fight it from the inside, basically.”
“So, is one harder than the other?”
I shook my head. “No, not really. My brothers and I have done both. We started as hotshots, but our personalities and style didn’t really mesh with the other hotshots, so we transferred to a smokejumper crew out of Redding.”
“Didn’t mesh how?”
I shrugged. “Well, the hotshots are more tightly organized, more regimented. The smokejumpers are a looser bunch. I guess because you’ve gotta be a little crazy to be willing to jump out of an airplane into a wildfire. As you can probably imagine, my brothers and I are a little cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” I took a bite, and spoke after chewing a few times. “I have a lot of respect for the hotshots. That shit is fucking hard. It just wasn’t for us.”
“And now you’re in Ketchikan, opening a bar?”
Abort, abort, abort. “Yup, that’s the plan.” I needed to change the subject. “What about you? Have you always been a waitress?”
“No.” She sipped wine, shrugging. “I waited tables in high school and all throughout college, but I entered the workforce, or whatever you want to call it, after I graduated.”
“What’s your degree in?”
“Graphic design with an emphasis on marketing.”
“No shit, really?” I eyed her with renewed respect. “And you had a job in that field?”
She nodded. “Sure did. A good one, too. I interned the last few semesters of my senior year, and ended up getting hired at that firm. I was an account supervisor by the time I left.” She hesitated. “I—well, I actually really loved that job.”
I want to ask, but if I did, it’d open me up to questions, which could be dangerous. But shit, I’m curious about the girl. “Mind if I ask why you left?”
She laughed, a rueful chuckle. “A breakup.”
“You left a job you loved over a breakup?”
She nodded. “Yep.”
“Ugly, huh?”
She shook her head. “No, not particularly. I mean, I’ve seen friends go through ugly breakups, and this wasn’t like that. But when it was over, it was just hard to be there at all. Everything I did, everywhere I went, all I saw was just…Tom. I knew I needed a change if I was going to move on, and my roommate from college had moved here so I figured, why not. Fresh start and all that, right? Only, I couldn’t find a job in graphic design here, so I ended up waiting tables to pay the bills, and just haven’t…I guess I’ve been putting off looking for a real job or whatever you want to call it.”
“You like waiting tables, then?”
She tilted her head side to side. “Eh, yes…ish. It’s good money, for the most part, but it’s stressful, and the hours suck. And it’s kind of a dead end, you know? Unless I want to be a server my whole life, which I don’t. But keeping up with bills and work and all that makes it hard to put job hunting on the front burner, you know?”
I shrugged. “Uh, well, not really. If something is a priority to me, I get it done. That’s the only way to get anywhere is to put yourself first. Do what you gotta do. If I was in a job going nowhere and I wanted a change, I’d do what I had to do make it happen.” I glanced at her, worried I’d offended her. “But that’s just me. I’m a Type-A, hard-charging sort of guy, if you haven’t noticed.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.” She was quiet a moment. “You know, if I’m being honest with myself, I guess leaving the firm back in Anchorage was about more than the breakup, now that I really think about it. I was born and raised in Anchorage, went to college there, and had a good job that promised steady promotions, but I think I was afraid I’d be there forever, you know? Like, suddenly I’d be fifty and living in the same city my whole life. And it’s not like I chose Anchorage, my parents did. I think part of it was wanting to—I don’t know how to put it without sounding stupid.”
“Strike out on your own?” I suggested.
She laughed, shrugging and nodding. “That was what I was trying to avoid saying. Because I was twenty-eight when I left, and striking out on your own at twenty-eight just sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it?”
I shook my head. “Not at all. I get it. Rem and Ram and I couldn’t wait to get out of Oklahoma, and the podunk town our dad had settled in. I think he picked it just because it was remote, and small, and quiet, and away from everything he’d known. He could hide there, I guess. The second we could, we left. Moved to California, joined the US Forest Service, and started fighting wildfires. It sounded challenging and exciting, and California was as far from Oklahoma as we could imagine.”
The conversation wandered after that, to stuff like favorite movies and bands. We shared an affinity for nineties country, a dislike of eighties pop, and a love for classic eighties films like E.T., Karate Kid, Goonies, and stuff like that. At some point, the pizza box was closed, the second bottle of wine was opened, and we were sitting on her couch, sideways, facing each other, knees touching.
Her knees brushed mine, and as the conversation drifted from topic to topic, it seemed like the couch was dipping inward, as if we were sliding toward each other. I’m not sure I’d ever spent this much time just talkin
g to a girl, and I was feeling comfortable with it in a way I wasn’t sure I was ready to examine too closely.
She hadn’t rolled her eyes at me or called me in a jerk in like…an hour, which was weird, but also encouraging. Maybe I was doing something right.
She talked with her hands, I noticed, flinging them this way and that, gesturing, waving, stabbing, chopping. Once in a while, a gesture would end, and she rested her hand on her knee. Suddenly, there was a shift in the air, in the energy between us, and it began with her hand coming to rest on my knee instead of hers.
Maybe she was warming up to me. Could it be?
I felt absurdly excited about that little gesture, the way she let her hand flutter down to settle on my knee. My instinct was to push for more, but I held back. Gradually, I let my hand gradually sort of end up on her knee, a loosely closed fist, at first, just sort of resting there as I listened to her tell a story about getting in trouble in high school. And then, after a few minutes, I let my hand open, spreading my fingers out, sliding them softly along her skin. Her knees were pressed together, tucked under her as she sat sideways on the couch, her skirt tucked modestly around her legs. And then, as I let my hand open and my palm rest on her knee and my fingers on the muscle and skin just above, she shifted a little. She let her knees relax, let the skirt loosen, baring another few inches of the backs of her thighs. She leaned toward me as I related a story of my own, about the time my brothers and I pranked our entire senior class by putting half a dozen cows in the gym, along with a circular freestanding fence to contain them, a bale of hay to feed them and a tank of water.
She was relaxing now, for sure. Her tight body language was softening; her eyes were dancing, shifting, and roaming from mine to my shoulders, my arms, my chest. I used both hands—one empty, one clutching my wineglass—to indicate something in relation to my story, and when I set my empty hand down again, my palm came to rest just a little higher on her thigh. She glanced down at my hand, and then at my eyes, and then subtly shifted her weight so she was angled more closely against me, which had the effect of sliding my palm even further up her thigh. The hem of her dress was a few centimeters from my fingertips, now, with a slight twitch of my hand, I could expose even more of her thighs, and possibly even the lower curve of her ass.
My gaze flicked from her eyes to my hand, and then to the sweep of her dress against the tanned skin of her thigh, and then to the hint of cleavage, and back to her eyes. Was that a smile on her lips? Was she shifting even closer to me?
I couldn’t help it anymore—I needed to feel more of her. The curve of her thigh was too inviting, too appealing.
I listened to her talk about her childhood pet, a yellow lab named Polly, and let my hand slide up her thigh, fingers delving under the hem of her dress. Back, then, to her knee. She glanced at me, at my hand, but didn’t stop her story, and didn’t move away, so I did it again. This time, my hand drifted around to the outside of her leg all the way to her hipbone and back down. I was all but holding my breath as I explored her leg. She met my eyes as I began another trip up her thigh, this time letting my fingers graze gently along the back of her thigh from behind her knee to where her thigh met the couch. And this time, her own hand drifted up my leg, mirroring my gradual exploration.
I was talking, telling her about spending more time serving in-house suspension for fighting than I did in class, but my eyes—and most of my attention—was on her mouth, her lips. On the way she caught her lower lip between her teeth as I cupped the back of her thigh on my downward slide.
I finished my glass of wine, twisting and reaching to set it on the coffee table; when I returned to my prior position, we had to realign on the couch, and this time, instead of being tucked underneath her, she rested her legs on my thigh. In so doing, the skirt of her dress slid backward, toward her body, exposing a mouthwatering expanse of her legs.
This was an agonizingly slow process, but it was thrilling, exhilarating. Nerve-racking, even. I wondered in the back of my head if, even as a kid, I’d ever been this cautious and nervous about touching a girl—I didn’t think I had.
Kitty’s next story was about her first crush, and getting caught making out behind the bleachers at a football game her freshman year, and I felt a ridiculous bolt of jealousy at the thought of anyone kissing her.
I squashed that with alacrity, and dialed my focus in on Kitty, on the tanned silk of her thighs, turned toward me, resting on my leg, on the way she was closer than ever now, so close I could almost feel her body heat, on how large and brown and expressive her eyes were. I watched her gaze as I skated my palm over her knee and down her thigh, over the top, traveling as far as the edge of her dress before pulling back to her knee, trailing my fingers down the seam where her thighs were pressed together.
Ohhhh shit—the next time I passed my palm over her thigh toward her body, her thighs parted, just a hint. A gap of maybe an inch, just enough to let my fingertips traipse along the delicate flesh of her inner thigh.
As this happened, our conversation became a game of question-and-answer.
“Favorite pet?” This was her question to me, accompanied by her fingertips tracing a vein in my bicep.
“When we were thirteen, we found a squirrel that had been attacked by a cat. She was dead, laying on the ground outside our trailer. And right there with her was a little baby squirrel. How he did it, I’ll never know, but Rem managed to catch the little thing in his bare hands, and we raised it in the trailer. Dad hated it, because he kept making nests in weird spots. We loved that little critter, though. We named him Gopher, because his favorite game was to play fetch with acorns. We’d sit outside the trailer and throw an acorn as far we could, and Gopher would run after it in those weird bouncing runs that squirrels do, and he’d bring it back, crawl up your leg, and stand there chittering until we threw it again. Funny as hell.”
“What happened to Gopher?” she asked.
“He met a lady squirrel and ran off one day.”
“Awww. Were you sad when he left?”
I nodded. “Yeah, he was a fun little fella. Every once in a while we’d find a little pile of acorns on our trailer’s porch, which we figured was Gopher letting us know he hadn’t forgotten us.”
Her eyes followed my hand as I traced the inside of her left thigh down to the hem of her dress, a few scant inches from the promised land of the apex of her thighs. Kitty glanced up at me, brows lowering, teeth clamping on the corner of her lower lip; my fingers rested, pausing on the delicate skin of her inner thigh as I watched and waited for her reaction at the daring of my touch.
It seemed her breath was caught, her lungs filled, chest expanded, breasts high, her eyes searching me. Looking for duplicity, perhaps? This wasn’t me, this patient game I was playing. I saw what I wanted, and as soon as I was sure I had a positive reaction, I pounced. Took what I wanted, and gave better than I got in the process. This, though…this was strange, and different.
And I was out of patience.
I was ravenous for this girl. I needed her.
And she wasn’t demurring from my exploration.
Impatience flared, and I think my explosion of desire showed in a flaring blaze in my eyes—Kitty’s eyes widened, and her teeth clamped down hard, turning her plump pink lip white.
I leaned forward, caught her lip between thumb and forefinger, and gently tugged it free of her teeth. “Story time is over, Kitten,” I murmured.
“It is?” she breathed, her eyes on mine.
“Watching you bite your lip like that is driving me crazy.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “If anyone is gonna be nibbling on your lips, it’s gonna be me, sweetheart.”
“Can we still play question-and-answer?” she asked, valiantly trying to sound unaffected.
“Sure.” I grinned, leaning close. “You can ask me anything you want, and I’ll answer—so long as you ask it while I’m sucking on that luscious lip of yours.”
“Sucking on my—ohhhh my gosh.”
The abrupt shift was due to the fact that I’d matched deed to word, wrapping a hand around the warm, firm nape of her neck and leaning in, capturing that lower lip of hers and sucking it into my mouth. I don’t think she was expecting it—she probably thought I’d been teasing, or exaggerating. Expecting a typical first-time kiss.
She clearly had no idea who she was dealing with.
I drew her lip into my mouth between my teeth and then suckled on it, licking it, and she whimpered in surprise. The whimper turned to a moan as I explored her mouth with my tongue, still not kissing, but rather tasting and taking. She responded in the only way she could—giving me her tongue. Her lips. Her whole mouth. She leaned against me, hands twisting into the front of my shirt and then one palm skating over the hard range of my shoulder to dance along my nape. I accepted the offering of her tongue, tangling mine against hers before sliding my lips into place on her mouth, locking us together, claiming a kiss that stole her breath in a gasp—and mine in a snarl.
I backed away, not letting go of the back of her neck. “You bite your lip again, that’s what you’ll be getting. You bite your lip, I bite your lip.”
“Name of your first girlfriend.” She hissed this, a hurried mumble, as if afraid she’d forget to ask.
“Never had a girlfriend. Lost my virginity when I was fourteen to a high school senior named Vanessa Cloud.”
“Fourteen?” she whispered, sounding shocked.
“Yep.” I slid my fingers down her thighs, dancing through the gap between her legs, daring and daring and daring. “Same question for you. First boyfriend?”
“Dylan Porter. Sophomore year.” She glanced at me, and our eyes met in a crackle of sparks. “We dated for three months, and then I dumped him because I chickened out about having sex with him.”
“Why’d you chicken out?” I asked, dancing my fingers to the very edge of her dress and hesitating there.
“I wasn’t ready. My best friend at the time had lost hers before me, and said it had been awful, so I was scared, because I knew he was expecting us to do it soon.” She shifted her thighs apart, a silent invitation. “You said you’ve never had a girlfriend—but have you ever fallen in love?”
Badd Kitty Page 7
