The steam from the shower was heating up the bathroom.
He stood up. “You better get in there. Although the way I understand it, showering’s not going to help. I’ve heard of something called a morning-after pill, though. It gives some kind of hormone boost that knocks your system out of whack and keeps you from getting pregnant. Any chance of your getting hold of one of those?”
He turned to look at her, still sitting there on the edge of the tub. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s a good idea. I’ll call my doctor in the morning.”
“Great.” He started for the other room.
“Sam.”
He turned back.
Alyssa had stood up. She was dazzlingly naked and he made himself keep his eyes on her face. There was no point torturing himself. He was not sleeping with her again. Not until she was ready to spend her life with him.
“I didn’t mean what I said about you, you know, as a husband and father,” she told him.
“Well, yeah,” Sam said. “I kind of think you did.”
“I didn’t, and I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just really freaked out and—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Really. I can’t imagine being a woman and having something like this happen. It must be . . . extremely stressful.”
She nodded. She was looking at him and she was making absolutely no effort to keep her eyes on his face.
Idiot that he was, he just stood there, staring back at her, as his body betrayed him. Apparently the message that he wasn’t sleeping with her again hadn’t made it through his central nervous system to his various appendages.
Alyssa cleared her throat. “So. Since I’m going to be taking one of those pills tomorrow, um . . .” She glanced at the shower, looked back at him. “You want to . . . ?”
This was where he had to say no and walk away. Stick to his principles, damn it.
“You mean, without a condom?” he heard himself ask.
Alyssa shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Considering the damage is already done and we’re already completely screwed . . .” She held out her hand to him and gave him a smile that was half pure sweetness and half pure sin. “Come on.”
Sam imagined how surprised she was going to be when he said no. But imagining it was as close as he was going to get.
“Fucking A,” he said, and picked her up and carried her with him into the shower.
“Is it really so awful to be here with me like this?” Gina whispered, breaking the silence they’d fallen into. She pulled back slightly to look up into Max’s eyes.
He couldn’t lie to her. “Yes, it is.” To his continuing despair, he felt his eyes fill with tears. “It makes me want . . .” You.
He knew she didn’t understand and he tried to explain. “I know you think that I have trouble with the fact that I’m older than you, and yeah, I confess that makes me uncomfortable. But if that was it, Gina, I’d learn to deal with it. But that’s not it.”
“Transference,” she said flatly.
“Yes,” he said. “Transference. We met in an extreme situation. I became your only link back to safety. You didn’t have a choice about trusting me. You had to do what I said, you had to listen to me—I became everything to you. Your father, your savior, your God.”
“My friend,” Gina countered. “My lover, if we both could only just relax and let it happen.” She laughed softly. “Although what’s the likelihood of that? Between the two of us, our tension level is off the charts. Can you imagine us in bed together? I’m not sure whose head would explode first. Still, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want to try.”
Max resisted the urge to scream. His voice came out sounding strangled. “How can I go from a situation where I’m everything to you, where of course you love me because you depend on me for your very life, into a sexual relationship, without wondering—constantly—if I’m taking advantage of your trust?”
“Stop wondering,” she told him. “Because you’re not. Max, seriously. How could this still be transference? It’s been years.”
“I don’t know,” he confessed.
“It’s not,” she said. “And you’re not taking advantage of me. I want this.” And then she kissed him.
He should have been expecting it. He was all but inviting it, sitting on the floor with Gina nearly in his lap.
Still, she managed to take him by surprise with her sweet mouth and her arms up around his neck and the softness of her breasts against his chest.
She caught him off balance, too. Because he never would intentionally have pulled her back onto the floor like that . . .
Would he?
Except his arms were around her, and his tongue was in her mouth, and he was angling his head to kiss her even more deeply.
This was insanity. It was double insanity because he recognized it as such and yet did nothing to stop it.
Max held her loosely, afraid to hold her too tight, afraid he’d scare her, afraid she’d get overwhelmed and pull away.
But then he realized that that was the solution. He needed to stop this, and since he couldn’t seem to do it himself . . .
He rolled them over, so that he was on top of her as he kissed her harder. He wasn’t overly rough, but he wasn’t particularly gentle either as he pushed his way between her legs, as he ran one hand down her body, his palm overflowing with the fullness of her breast.
Oh, Christ. Gina arched against him, her body pressing up against his as she clung to him even more tightly. He kissed her harder, and she moaned and reached between them to slip her hand inside his pants and . . .
And gave him about the farthest thing from a please stop message that he’d ever gotten in his entire life. Particularly when she used her other hand to unfasten his belt and unzip his fly.
He pulled back from her, out of the softness of her hands. “Whoa . . .”
She took the opportunity to pull her top over her head, and she was so abundantly twenty-three years old that he was stupefied—there was no other word for it—by the sight of her.
She had her shorts and panties off before he could form a coherent thought let alone a single word of protest. And then she started removing his clothes.
His jacket, his shirt, his shoes, his pants. Was it possible he was actually helping her?
No, he was too busy kissing her, her mouth, her neck, her delicate collarbone, her shoulders. Those incredible breasts.
Then, finally, when he was naked, too, she hesitated. “Max . . .”
He didn’t want to stop, but he knew that he had to.
I’m sorry, he was about to say. Oh, damn it, I’m sorry, but he never got the chance.
“We need a condom,” Gina told him, in her sexy as hell, husky voice, and he realized she was, by no means, stopping anything. In fact, the way she was touching and then kissing him was a definite full speed ahead.
“I don’t have one,” he gasped. And there it was. Finally. The reason to put their clothes back on.
But, “I do,” she told him. She untangled herself from him and vanished into the bathroom.
Max pushed himself onto his hands and knees. If there was ever a time to run away, it was now. But he’d only made it up to his feet, his shorts in his hands, before Gina returned.
She stopped in the bathroom doorway. “You’re gorgeous,” she breathed.
“I think that’s supposed to be my line,” he said, looking at her standing there. Her legs were incredibly long and her hair spilled down around her shoulders. Her skin gleamed, and those breasts . . . With the exception of her belly button ring that sparked as it caught the light, she looked like a movie star from the days when movie stars were allowed to have hips and breasts and smooth, slightly rounded, marvelously female stomachs.
Raquel Welch. Sophia Loren. Gina Vitagliano.
She came toward him, looking at him as if he were something special. Yeah, he kept in excellent shape, but it didn’t warrant that look. Of course, it didn’t mean he didn’t like it. A lot.
“That’s not really me,” he told her.
“Yes, it is,” she said. “It’s one of you. You’ve got this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing going—” She took him by the hand and pulled him toward the bed. “—that I happen to think is very sexy.”
He had no choice but to follow. “I have to work hard to sound that way. Laid-back. I’m really a maniac. Gina, this is—”
She didn’t let him finish. She pressed that body up against him and kissed him.
Max opened his eyes to discover that they were on the bed. How the hell did they get on the bed? “Gina . . .”
She handed him the condom and kissed him again. He was on top of her, and she wrapped her legs around him, pressing him down on her, sliding her slick heat against him.
Yeah, okay, if she was going to do that, they definitely needed to get this condom working.
But . . .
“This feels so right,” she whispered. “It finally feels right. . . .”
He barely had the condom on—God damn, had he put it on himself? He must have—before she pushed herself up and he slid inside of her.
And oh, Christ, reality slapped him hard in the face and he was instantly terrified. And not just because he was breaking every rule he’d ever made about his job, about sex, about his responsibility as a man who held a great deal more power than nearly all of the people he’d encountered in his life.
He didn’t want to hurt her, he didn’t want to scare her, he didn’t want to move. And, to make matters even more complicated—or maybe, quite possibly less complicated—he was losing his erection. Very rapidly.
She moved against him and . . . So much for keeping that a secret.
“Bang,” Gina whispered into his ear. “I think I just heard your head explode.”
“Yeah.” So this was what complete mortification felt like. “I think you did.”
She wouldn’t let him pull away. “I’m okay, you know,” she said, looking up at him, touching his face, tracing his nose, his eyebrows, his jaw, his lips with one finger. The light from the room’s one lamp was so dim, it was possible that she couldn’t tell he was actually blushing, but he doubted it. “And I think it’s really incredibly sweet. That you care so much that . . . you know.”
“Well, there’s a new spin on it,” he said.
She started to move again, but just a tiny bit so that he didn’t slip out of her. “I love knowing that you really are human,” she whispered. “And I also love knowing that I have this much power over you. I bet this has happened to you . . . what? Never before?”
“What would you say if I told you that this happens all the time?” Max asked. “You know, I am pretty old. As far as sex goes, I’m way past my peak.”
She knew he wasn’t serious. He could read it quite clearly in her eyes. But she answered as if he were. “I would say ‘So what?’ I would say I’m not in love with your ability to get it up. I’m in love with you.”
Oh, man, hearing her say that wasn’t going to help. But the way she kissed him after she said it . . .
Gina kissed him and just kept on kissing him. Slowly and sweetly, and then deeper, longer, harder. Harder . . .
When she broke off to whisper, “Let me be on top,” he pulled out of her and rolled over. And he was actually back in the game, with something there for her to climb on top of.
Still, she took her time, stroking him as she straddled his thighs, smiling down into his eyes.
You don’t really love me, Max wanted to tell her. And it wasn’t just because of transference. It was because he wasn’t that guy she thought she liked so much, on the other end of the radio. Mr. Smooth, Mr. Cool, laid-back and comfortable inside his own body, inside his own head.
In truth, he was flipping crazy. He had constant chaotic noise jangling inside of his brain, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been content. He spent too much time thinking, second-guessing and outmaneuvering everyone and everything. And he spent all of his time keeping his internal lunatic in check. You don’t know me at all, Max wanted to shout at her.
But her smile and her eyes had turned dreamy as she touched him, as she rubbed him against herself. Watching her, feeling her touching him was such a turn-on, he kept his mouth tightly shut.
She brought his hand up to her breast, and that, combined with what she was doing with her hands, nearly made him come. God damn it, one extreme to the other. He had to stop her, to physically move her hands and her body away from him. He touched her instead with his thumb.
The sound she made was unbelievably sexy, and she lifted herself up and slid down on top of him, pushing him deeply inside of her.
Max tried to hold himself still, tried to let her have total control over everything, but when she leaned forward and began to move on top of him, her breasts close to his face, he completely lost it. He licked one taut, perfect nipple into his mouth and suckled her harder than he should have, moving with her, driving himself more deeply than he should have inside of her.
“Max,” she was saying as he felt her release. “Oh, Max!”
He came in a hot, blinding rush of sheer pleasure that he couldn’t have postponed even if his life had depended on it. It consumed him with noise and light and total, exhilarating, mind-blowing chaos, and he didn’t want it ever to end. But when it did, he could hear Gina laughing. There were tears on her face, and when she kissed him, he could taste the salt.
“Thank you,” she told him. “I needed that. I really, really needed that.”
He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. The reality of what they’d just done—he’d just done—was crashing around him. He touched her face, praying that in her happiness she wouldn’t notice that he was so completely shaken he couldn’t even speak. But this was Gina, and as she looked down at him, her gaze softened.
“Bang,” she whispered. “Right?”
He nodded, closing his eyes. What had he done? And, maybe more important, what was he going to do now that he’d done it?
“Sleep,” Gina whispered as if she could read his mind, climbing off of him and out of the bed.
She was back almost instantly, with a hand towel from the bathroom. She gave it to him as she carefully took off the condom he was still wearing, vanishing again into the bathroom to dispose of it.
He knew he should get up, get dressed, get the hell out of there, but then she was back, moving across the room with her naked movie-star body. Leaving would require a discussion and probably more tears—maybe even from him this time—and he was too exhausted for that. He’d wait, and leave after she’d fallen asleep.
She turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness, which was a shame because then he couldn’t see her walk back across the room. But she climbed into the bed again, pulling up the covers and settling warm and soft against him, her head on his shoulder, one smooth, cool leg possessively draped across his.
Don’t leave. She did everything but say the words out loud. Max stared into the darkness as she sighed.
“Thank you,” she whispered again.
He kept his mouth shut, because he knew if he opened it, he’d say nothing that would help either of them. He just lay there and waited and tried to figure out what the fuck he was supposed to do now.
It took a little while, but her breathing evened out. She shifted, curling closer to him as she fell asleep—the softness of her breast against his ribs, her hand on his chest, the heat between her legs against his hip, the soft inside of her thigh across his already returning erection. Didn’t it figure? Now he couldn’t keep the damn thing down.
Max waited, counting minutes—until he realized that he’d closed his eyes and lost track of how long it had been since she’d fallen asleep.
Her hand on his chest was warm and solid and
oddly soothing. But then she shifted again, and her hand slid south and found him.
“Mmmmm,” Gina said, and slipped back to sleep, still holding him.
This wasn’t going to work at all, Max thought, and instantly fell asleep.
February 20, 1945
Dear Dot,
Not much time to write more than a sentence or two. I figure that’s better than no word. I live for the letters you and Jolee send. Please forgive me for not giving as good as I receive.
Forgive me also for my last letter—filled as it was with complaints. I am honored to fly for my country. Please don’t ever think that’s not true. But the lack of respect my men and I receive from American servicemen—white servicemen—continues to irk me.
The Germans treat us better, with higher regard. It’s not unusual for women here to date the Negro pilots from my squadron. In fact, one of my officers has asked permission to marry a girl from Munich. A white girl. Both she and her family seem not to care for differences such as skin color. Perhaps it is a German thing. But from what I’ve heard, if Captain Johnson were Jewish—now, that would be intolerable.
I don’t understand such thinking. If it’s not race, it’s religion. I don’t understand why people look for each other’s differences, instead of the ways in which we are all the same.
We all want to be loved.
That’s what it comes down to, I think.
God forgive me, but I’m tired and I want nothing more than to come home.
Your friend,
Walter
March 18, 1945
Dear Walt,
I, too, want you to come home.
By the way, I am at least one quarter German, from my mother’s side.
However, I would not give a flying fig if you were Buddhist or Muslim or Catholic or pagan or Jewish or Baptist or . . .
Oh, you are Baptist. Do I care? Not a whit. Jolee and I visit the Baptist church each Sunday, since she is Baptist, too. The music is much better than that which the Unitarians provide. The congregation is always warm and welcoming. It’s a good church, a joyful church where God is praised—loudly—and people pray for peace and harmony.
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