by Teresa Hill
"Okay. I vote that we make the most of that time, enjoying ourselves and what we can do, which is really, really good."
"Yes, it is."
"Can we go to sleep now?"
"Yes, baby."
He kissed her sweetly, lovingly, and she fell asleep in that perfect place in his arms.
* * *
He went to get out of their bed early that morning, as he always did, and she didn't want to let him go.
"Not today," she begged, hanging onto him, wanting to wake up with him.
He seemed so serious when he put his face close to hers and looked her in the eye. "The thing is, if I don't get up and walk, loosen up the hip and shoulder, I'll be worthless today."
"Okay. I'm sorry—"
"Don't be. I don't ever want to get up out of this bed and leave you, Grace, but I have to. Just stay right here. Sleep some more." He kissed her softly. "I'll come back and you'll hardly know I was gone."
"Okay."
He got out of the bed, covered her up so she wouldn't get so cold. She watched sleepily as he built up the fire, watched the play of the firelight over the muscles of his back and shoulders and arms. He was almost golden in the light, and she tried to commit every line, every shadow, all the nuances of the light to memory so she could paint him later, when she was gone.
She so didn't want to go.
Grace drifted off to sleep, dreaming of him, of a life she envisioned for herself with him, woke to him slipping back into bed with her sometime later, just as he'd promised he would. His body was cold, she told him, and then she put herself to the delicious task of lazily warming him up, rubbing her whole body against his, touching him, kissing him, stroking him. Finally she licked her way down his body, taking his cock in her mouth, sucking and teasing until she thought he was almost ready to come, and then wanted something else, something more.
"Let's just try this," she said, climbing on top of him, straddling his hips, rubbing herself against his cock.
It wasn't hard, but it wasn't completely soft, either. She used her hands, and he used his, fumbling at times, laughing a bit, but in the end, they made it work. She rocked her hips, rubbing herself against him. When that didn't quite do it, he used the back of his hand to hold his cock against her, stroking her with it and his hand. It was hard to tell at times exactly what he was doing, but it worked.
They could make anything work, she decided.
* * *
She must have dozed in his arms, because she came awake sometime later when he started to get up again. Seeing that she had her eyes open, he sat up on the mattress with his back against the recliner. She rolled over to him, putting her arms around his waist, her head on his lap.
"I don't want it to be morning," she whispered.
"I know, baby."
"We could stay in bed all day."
He stroked a hand through her hair. "I don't think the dog would stand for that."
"Well, we could stay in bed most of the day. If your muscles get tight, I'll heat some more towels and loosen you up. I like touching you."
"I like touching you, too, Grace."
"Just think, all those years I've been completely uninterested in being here," she said. "And now, it feels like a magical place."
"Yes, it does," he agreed.
"I don't want it to end. Maybe we could just... drop out of sight, out of our real lives and stay here? Just you and me and the dog? No one else, ever?"
"Okay." He laughed.
She did, too. "Although, my family would come looking for me eventually. They'd go to my in-laws and find out I never showed up there, and they wouldn't stop looking until they found me."
"Well, I've had SERE training. Survive, evade, resist, escape. Might come in handy, if we really want to hide."
"So, there we go. We have a plan." She grinned. "We're really going to do this? Four days, and we're going to—"
"Try," he said. "We're going to try to get this right. To take our time and be careful and try to make this work long-term."
"Okay. That doesn't sound so crazy."
"No. Sounds perfectly reasonable."
"Right. We met. We liked each other. We're going to try to have a life together. People do it all the time." They were going to try to form a real relationship that existed outside the walls of the cabin and away from the lake. "And we're going to keep this a secret, so we don't have to hear anybody tell us how crazy it is to fall for each other in four days."
"Yes. But I already told my brother I met someone. That you were special, the kind of woman a man keeps."
She was smiling so hard her face hurt. "Okay."
"I want to keep you, Grace. I don't want to ever have to let you go."
"Okay."
"Just like that? Okay?"
She nodded, started laughing again. Soon they both were, and the dog was staring again.
"I love how you do that. I tell you things that sound monumental and a little bit crazy at least, and you smile and say, 'Okay.' Like it's perfectly reasonable and you'll do it, because I asked."
"And because it's what I want, too." And then she remembered. "I never even asked. How long are you going to be here?"
"I'm not sure, honey."
"Weeks? Months?"
"A month, maybe more."
"And when you leave, where will you go?"
"I was at the Naval hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, near DC, before I came here. I'm based near there, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, although I've been overseas a lot in the last twelve years."
Then she had an awful thought. "Will they send you back to Afghanistan one day?"
"I don't know, Grace. I won't know for months, five or six maybe, depending on how rehab on the hip goes. I'll have to be cleared medically before they'll let me back on active duty, probably with some limited duty before that, which will be months behind a desk, not in a combat zone."
God, if they sent him back, would she be able to handle that?
He leaned over and kissed her head. "Hey, don't do that. Don't worry about something that might never happen."
"Do you want to go back?"
He winced. "Go right to the really hard stuff, honey. I don't know. Part of me thinks I need to. To face it again and know that I'm... whole, again... me, again. And part of me feels sick just thinking about it."
"It hasn't been that long. I'm sure it feels like forever, but it really hasn't been that long. Plus, we're supposed to be winding things down over there, bringing troops home."
"Combat troops. I have a feeling the Special Forces guys and the intelligence guys will be there a while, if not in Afghanistan, somewhere nearby."
"And if you weren't in the Navy, what would you do then?"
"I really don't know, honey. I'm telling you, I'm a bad bet for any woman right now, way too many things up in the air in my life. I just wish I could be a different man for you. A better one."
"I'm a mess, too. You keep forgetting that. We'll be a big mess together."
"Ahh, Grace. I swear I can't figure out what I did to have you walk into my life right now. I know I don't deserve it."
"I broke in, remember? I didn't give you a choice."
* * *
When Grace finally checked her phone messages that morning, she had one from the hospital saying that Maeve was out of ICU and could have visitors, even the dog outside on one of the smaller terraces. No one else had come to visit her.
So they spent the middle of the day reuniting Maeve with her dog. Tink was overjoyed, had to be held back from jumping on Maeve's injured leg at first, he was so happy. Maeve cried as she fussed over the dog, and Grace cried just watching them together.
"Look at that. He's all she has," Grace told Aidan, as a way of explaining her tears.
"I know," he said, standing there with an arm wrapped around her as they watched the reunion.
"Now I feel bad about every word I've said about my family. They're really wonderful, all of them. I love them so much
, and I'm so lucky to have them. They're just... I'm not used to being the pitiful one, the one everybody's worried about. I'm the happy one. Sunshine and laughter and all that stuff. That's me."
"Nobody's happy all the time, Grace."
"I am. I was."
"Well, nobody gets through their whole life without hard times, and it's not easy to laugh through days, months, years when life sucks. I'm sure no one expected that from you."
"No, not expected. Just... My life had been so easy to that point."
"Well, good for you. You don't have to feel guilty about that."
"I do. Sometimes," she admitted.
"Why in the world, would you feel guilty? You didn't do anything wrong."
"Neither did my brother or sister. Or Mom and Dad—"
"Grace, what are you talking about?"
She shook her head. "I keep forgetting. You don't know—"
"Know what?"
"About the way my life started and what it could have been. Your brother never told you the story?"
Aidan shook his head. "What story?"
"I'll tell you later, when we're alone. Not here."
* * *
They took some time to reassure Maeve that Tink would have a home with Grace as long as he needed one. Grace promised to bring him to visit, at the hospital, rehab or assisted living, and made sure she had numbers to contact them both. When they had to take Tink away from Maeve, he cried, Maeve cried and Grace nearly cried again herself.
"I'm just being silly," she told Aidan.
But this day was going to suck. He knew it.
He held her close with one hand and held the dog's leash with the other as they walked back to her car. They stopped to buy groceries. She wanted to try to cook him a special dinner before she left, if she could manage with nothing but the grill on the deck, and he couldn't convince her that he didn't care about that. He just wanted to know what had upset her.
When they got back to the lake and were unloading the groceries, she dug through her car until she found a complicated-looking digital camera. After they put the groceries away, she wanted to walk down to the lake to take some photos. Tink, the big baby, cried the whole way. He'd been crying a lot since he'd had to say good-bye to Maeve.
"We're not taking the boat out," Grace kept telling him. "Promise."
As they walked out onto the dock, she clicked away, looking like she knew what she was doing. The sun was just starting to sink into the tops of the tall trees, and even to Aidan's unschooled eye, the light was amazing, especially reflecting off the water and the trees.
Then she turned the camera on him.
"Come on," he protested. "Not that."
"I have a feeling I'll want to remember this weekend. It'll be nice to have photos," she said.
"I will never forget it, and I won't need a photo."
"Uh oh. If you hate having your picture taken, I can just imagine how you'll react when I want to draw you. Or paint you."
"Oh, please, no," he said.
"Naked, of course."
He groaned, and she laughed.
"Tell me you're joking, Grace."
"How do you think we learn to draw people? You need to understand the human body, how it works in different positions and makes different movements."
"Honey, paint the dog. And the lake and the trees."
"I will. I'm going to paint you, too."
He winced.
"So, when you said you'd do anything for me..."
"You're going to be using that against me forever, aren't you?"
"So, you didn't mean it. It was some kind of line?"
"No, it wasn't a line. It was a promise. I just never envisioned anything like posing nude. Come on, Grace." He kept arguing with her, because it seemed to be distracting her from whatever had been bothering her at the hospital. "I mean, what would you ever do with a naked painting of me?"
"I like looking at you," she said.
"Scars and all?"
"Scars and all," she insisted.
"How about I promise I'll take my clothes off for you anytime you want."
"But you won't always be with me. I'll need something to remember you by."
"Please, not that."
They ended up sitting on the dock as the sun kept sinking lower in the sky, Grace snapping more photos here and there. She got quiet for a while, and then finally started talking.
"I started thinking about what happened to you when the helicopter crashed, and you wanting to make sense of it, needing to, and please understand, I'm not in any way trying to compare what happened to me with what you went through—"
"Wait. Something happened, and you almost died?" He felt a flash of panic and fear just thinking about it.
"No. Not me. I was never in any kind of danger like that." She shrugged, staring across the water. "Well, I guess I could have been. But I wasn't. That's what I'm trying to tell you. My story. Everyone I love has been through so much, and I've always had this... unbelievably perfect life. I've always thought I was just lucky, but that would mean bad things happening to other people was some kind of bad luck. And it can't be that. I don't believe that. Do you?"
"Honestly, I don't know what to believe anymore, Grace. Tell me what almost happened to you."
"I'm not my parents' biological child. Did I tell you that?"
"No."
"Well, I'm not. Zach and Emma aren't, either. It's not something I've ever tried to hide. It's just... I don't really think about it. Not until someone or some specific thing brings it up. It's just who I am. It's always been that way. I've been theirs since just before my first birthday. They're the only parents I've ever known, and they're wonderful, the best parents anybody could have, and I've had a wonderful life."
"I'm glad, honey. I am," he said.
"And I don't feel like this is some other life I'm living. A lot of adopted kids do, but I don't. This is my life. The real one. The one I was meant to have. I know that. The first year was the aberration."
"Okay. So, how is it that you needed a new home and new parents before you were a year old, Grace?"
"Our biological father was abusive. He beat up our biological mother."
"Oh." And then... God. "Did he hurt you?"
"No. He hit Emma once. Zach was old enough to remember it. It's his first real memory. Can you imagine? You're two years old, and your biological father is hitting your sister and your mother?" She shook her head. "After that, our birth mother took us and left. She was pregnant with me at the time, so I never lived a day with him, never even met him until three and a half years ago, when he got out of prison."
"Prison? She had him put in prison? Good for her. She got that part right—"
"No. Not then. When I was almost a year old, she got really sick and scared she wouldn't be able to take care of us any longer. So she risked going back to her hometown to try to find someone who'd take us in. He found her instead, beat her up and left her for dead in a ditch on the side of the road. She was in the hospital, unconscious for a couple of weeks and died a few months later."
Aidan was scared to ask, but did. "And where were you all this time?"
"She left us in a motel. It was supposed to be for a couple of hours, but it ended up being three days. Emma was eleven. Zach was five."
"Jesus, Grace."
"Like I said, I might as well have missed the whole thing. I don't remember, and even if I did, I probably felt perfectly safe. I was with Zach and Emma. Emma's always been as motherly to me as sisterly. Someone found us eventually. A social worker took us to Mom and Dad's, and for me, life was golden. It was right before Christmas, an honest-to-goodness Christmas miracle."
"They couldn't have children?"
She shook her head. "Mom was pregnant once. She and Dad were young, hadn't been married long. There was ice on the road, and their car slid into an intersection. Mom ended up needing a hysterectomy to keep her from bleeding to death. The baby didn't live a day. It was a girl."
&n
bsp; "God, that's a horrible story."
"It was, but they got through it, stayed together. Nothing else they tried to have children worked. They were ready to give up when the three of us showed up on their doorstep."
And then he remembered. "You're the baby in the basket on the doorstep on Christmas Eve? I remember now. Tommy did tell me once."
She smiled. "There was no basket, and it was twelve days before Christmas, but, yes, that's my story. I was so lucky, and I don't know why. I've never been able to figure it out, and I've tried, Aidan. I've really tried."
"Grace, no one should have to live through what they all did."
"I know. But they did. Emma had years of it, of being so scared. Zach's earliest memories are of chaos and screaming, fists flying and bruises and blood. Mom and Dad had to bury their first child, and I got none of it. Nothing. It's like someone snatched me out of a hell on earth and gave me this perfect existence for so long."
"Good for you," he insisted. "I want that for you, every good thing I can imagine, everything you want. Take it and be happy. Life's too hard for too many people. And if you have to measure your misery against anyone else's, you buried a husband, Grace. Buried him when you were so young. Most people would say that's hard enough for anyone."
"But I know now that I didn't really love him, and we weren't happy together. It's tragic for him, but not for me. Not like it would be for me to lose... someone I really loved. The love of my life."
She looked right at him when she said it, and his heart was suddenly going a mile a minute.
Don't say anything, he told himself. Not a word. Not about loving her. Not yet.
He didn't have the right. His life was a damned mess, and she was... everything he could ever want in a woman, everything he could ever hope to have, and he wasn't going to mess this up by scaring her or rushing her. She was too important to him to risk that.
As far as he was concerned, it was a miracle she was even here and wanted him.
"So," she said finally, "I thought about you, feeling guilty about surviving when so many others didn't, and wanting to make some sense of it, to understand. And I thought... I've tried to do that my whole life and never managed to. I'm afraid you won't, either, Aidan, because I don't think there are any real answers to questions like that."
