Stroke It

by Ivy Jordan

  “Maybe a little,” Janet said, offering a raised eyebrow of caution to her husband.

  “It might sound a little extreme,” Jesse said. “But Sawyer doesn’t pick up on subtleties. And it’s not like he’s dangerous. If you go over and he doesn’t want to talk, then you can go home. But you need to be there where it’s harder for him to turn you away.”

  “You think I have to win him back at all costs, huh?” I asked.

  “Do what’s best for you,” Jesse said. “I don’t want to tell you how to live your life. But I think that as much as Sawyer needs you, you need him, too. You just might not know that yet.”

  I considered this. I didn’t like to think I needed anybody, but I was also learning that I knew drastically less about myself than I thought I did. I finished dinner and thanked Janet and Jesse for their advice and their forgiveness. I never understood how they could be so consistently forgiving and kind.

  I went out to my car and dialed Sawyer’s number. He didn’t pick up. I dialed him again.

  When I got no answer the second time, I sat back in my seat and wondered if there was any point in trying to revive this relationship. It seemed like the easiest thing to do was to leave it. Like before, when I’d been happy to walk away.

  But then I thought of how Sawyer had come to my work, insisting that I hear him out. He still cared, in his own way, that our relationship stayed alive. He still wanted us to work. And I knew that I did, too. The thought of dating someone else made my gut turn, and I had grown attached to Sawyer, whether or not I liked it.

  I decided that I would go to Sawyer’s house the next day. It was getting late, and I didn’t want to wake him up if he was asleep, nor did I want to get into an argument with both of us tired and stressed. I could go and talk to him the next day, and if he told me no, then at least I could go home and move past all of this.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  SAWYER

  Pete ended up buying a new tarp for his vegetable garden instead of actually getting a roof. At the hardware store, he’d purchased an assortment of new pots and plants to put in the ground. I spend a good chunk of the day helping him get some lemon trees in the ground and trying to talk him out of putting apple trees in as well.

  “It’s too hot to plant apples here,” I told him. I leaned against my shovel and pushed sweat off my brow. “They’ll be dead in a week.”

  “I can keep the sun off ‘em,” Pete insisted.

  And we went back and forth for a while before I conceded, because if Pete wanted to try to plant apples, I didn’t want to stop him. We planted some more, and when it was about time for me to go, I returned the shovel and hoe to the shed.

  “You headed to Quinn’s after this?” Pete asked.

  I closed the door to the shed. “No. Why would I be?”

  “I thought you had some making up to do with her.”

  “Nope.” I took off my cap and winced at how sweaty I felt. I needed a quick shower. “I think I’ll head home and get a shower.”

  “You’re going to have to talk to her eventually.”

  “I tried.” I shook my head. “And it didn’t go so well. She seems to have already moved on. I probably ought to do the same.”

  “Oh, I think that’s horseshit,” Pete protested. “I think you need to be happy. Being without Quinn, that just won’t make you happy.”

  “I can find my own happiness.”

  “You won’t, though.” Pete pushed his cap back. “Just give it some thought, yeah?”

  “I thought you were all for me not getting in a relationship. You said you didn’t care for the thought,” I reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said. “But you have since informed me that I won’t be abandoned when you get married. Besides, I like Quinn. She’s friendly.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “You’re going to hound me about this until I talk to her, aren’t you?”

  “Something like that.”

  I nodded. “Alright. I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it, Pete, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  “No sweat.”

  I went off on my way to drive home. As soon as I got in the house, I bolted for the shower and cleaned up a little. The increasing heat meant that the outdoor labor got just a little grosser, not that I minded. Nothing could measure up to the unfathomable desert heat I’d lived in for over five years.

  I got out of the shower and put on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, making my way to the kitchen to fix something to eat. As I started to go through the refrigerator, I heard a knock at the door. Worried it might be Stacy, I was cautious in opening it, like that might prevent it from being her at all.

  It wasn’t Stacy, though. It was Quinn, and she didn’t look angry.

  “Oh, good. You’re home.” Quinn rubbed her arm and offered a smile.

  All at once, I dearly missed when everything had been calm between us. I missed being able to talk to her being able to hold her. It had been my one piece of familiarity in this strange new world I’d come home to.

  “Yeah,” I said. I opened the door a little wider. “Here, come in.”

  Quinn walked in and stood until I motioned for her to sit on the couch. She did, and I sat on the chair across from her.

  “I wanted to apologize,” she said. “About everything. I got so… I got so scared of how well things were going that I sort of froze up. It was easier for me to accept that you were a bad guy then sort through the emotional complication and, I don’t know, my friend thinks I’m afraid of commitment, which might be a little true, and it’s…” she cleared her throat. “I came here to hear you out because I did a pretty shit job of that last time we talked.”

  I didn’t fully understand what she meant when she said that she was afraid of commitment, but it would make some sense. I didn’t care to a large extent. Whatever the case may be, I just wanted everything back to normal, and I could nod my head along with whatever she needed me to in order to achieve that normalcy again.

  “There isn’t much for me to say,” I said. “I… I’m sorry about what’s happened with Stacy, but I guess we know that’s not the real issue here. I guess we can’t make any real progress unless I come clean about what happened overseas.”

  “Well, I don’t… I don’t want to pressure you.” Quinn frowned. “If you want to tell me, you can tell me, but if you don’t, that’s okay.”

  I frowned. “The way I see it, I can’t come clean unless I tell you. It’s not fair for me to keep expecting you to be patient if I don’t give you something to work with.”

  “I’m not your therapist,” Quinn reminded me. “You’re not obligated to share this with me.”

  “But I want to,” I said. “I want to.” I wanted to prove to her that I trusted her and the best way to do that was to trust her with the one thing she knew I couldn’t tell anyone about. If nothing else, it would prove I trusted her, and maybe through that trust, she could begin to glimpse how much I cared about her. It was the only card I had left to play, and she needed to see me play it.

  “Okay.” Quinn leaned forward a little and bit the inside of her cheek. “Okay, then I’m listening.”

  I nodded and sat back, wondering where to start with this story. “I had a few people in my team that I was close with.” I couldn’t give her the team number, and I wasn’t even sure I could give her names—not giving her the team number and giving only first names would probably be fine. “John and James and Mike and I were the closest in the team. We did scouting stuff, some raids, nothing dangerous. When I went overseas, we weren’t in any immediate conflict, mostly just patrolling and making sure nothing happened.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “We got assigned to go out to this little village a little while away from our camp. We left in the middle of the night, hoping to get there on foot by daybreak. When we got there, we found that a group of extremists had taken over the area. They had a bunch of the villagers hostage; they had a bunch of their own people at gunpoint. Sometimes
people here don’t realize that as much as these groups target Americans, it’s their own country they’re really gutting. Most of the place was rubble by the time we got there.

  “We went looking for whoever was in charge. It broke into a firefight too quickly to process much of anything. Since we were outnumbered, we were just trying to get out of there. I radioed in for backup, a helicopter, some way out, because we were a few hours away on foot and there were hostiles all the way back. We were fish in a barrel, all of us. We ran through the city, looking for cover, and when we finally found it, I radioed for help again. The line wasn’t dead, but the connection was bad, and eventually, we just dispatched our signal. We all sat down, hunkered in this little hole in the ground that some bomb blew open before us, waiting for some help or some sign. And then John shouted ‘grenade.’

  “I jumped. Mike pulled John up. We got back. James… James didn’t move. I didn’t grab him. When the explosion was over, we… we went back, and we found him.” If I closed my eyes, I could see it. If I closed my eyes, that’s all I could see, and there wasn’t any way to escape it. “He’d been… well. He wasn’t quite dead when we got back. I tried to stop the bleeding but there was no stopping the bleeding; you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from, and all at once he just… quit.”

  That moment, the moment James became heavy in my arms, was the moment that haunted me the most. “He just stopped. Help arrived, and we had to leave him there in that hellhole.” I shook my head. “I should have grabbed him. They told me he should have jumped out himself, but Mike pulled John up and I should have pulled James up. I shouldn’t have let them leave him.”

  Quinn’s eyes were wide, and she stared at me with something bordering on the pity that I dreaded receiving from her.

  “I know now that it wasn’t my fault,” I said to her. “He got the same training as we did. He knew the same basics. He knew to back up when there was a grenade, he knew what to do, and he wasn’t fast enough. Even if I’d pulled him up, we would have both been slow, and then we would have both been dead. I know it wasn’t my fault, but I always feel like there’s something I could have done.”

  “You would have died,” Quinn said.

  “Maybe,” I confirmed. “Maybe.” I stood up and ran a hand over my hair. I hated the stillness in the air around us. This was why I hadn’t wanted to say anything to anyone about it. It alienated me, placed this experience on me that no one else could understand, let alone try to process.

  Quinn stood up when I did, and she wrapped her arms around my neck and stared at my face. “I’m glad you didn’t,” she said. “Even with what happened… I can’t help but be glad you’re here. You’re lucky to be here.”

  I kissed her cheek, and she kissed mine. My hands went up to hold her upper arms, smoothing my thumbs over the soft skin.

  “I love you,” she said, her voice near to a whisper in the darkness. “I couldn’t bear to be without you.”

  I sealed the space between us with a kiss.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  QUINN

  I didn’t know how to respond appropriately to what I’d been told. The only thing I knew how to do, and knew how to do well, was to prove to him that I loved Sawyer regardless of what had happened. I kissed him, or he kissed me, and the world went quiet for a moment. I didn’t remember a time we’d kissed so carefully, so conscientiously, with such cautious tongues and lips and teeth and I knew we were going to be alright.

  His hands moved down my arms, and he held my waist to pull me closer to him, and in response, I tilted my head to deepen our kiss. He held the back of my head in his hand, and I struggled not to get entirely drunk on this breathlessness. It was probably horribly inappropriate to kiss him like this after what he’d told me. We should be talking, I thought. We should be talking.

  But God help me, I didn’t want to talk. When he pulled me still closer, my thigh brushed against his crotch, and he hissed at the contact against his building hardness. I couldn’t help but smile a moment, and that smile vanished when he pulled me back to kiss me again. He broke to pull his shirt off over his head, and he pulled mine off, too.

  Instead of trying to have him pick me up and awkwardly carry me across the house, I led him by the hand to his own bedroom. He pressed me against the mattress, the weight of him over me both comforting and suffocating in the best ways possible. My bra came off, his pants came off, all in a flurry of fingers and pulling and breaking kisses.

  His breathing was ragged when he pulled from me and placed a kiss on my jaw. My neck. I felt his teeth scrape the delicate skin on my collarbone and he left a mark there, and I couldn’t care enough to get upset that I wouldn’t be able to hide it well. His hands replaced my bra, and earning soft gasps from me as he replaced his hands with his mouth, tugging with his teeth in just the ways I needed him to.

  My heart thudded in my chest and the heat growing between my thighs was nearly unbearable. I gasped something into the air, only barely recognizable as his name, as his fingers pulled at the edges of my underwear. I felt, at the same time, an unbearable need and the feeling that we had all the time in the world.

  The scruff on his face scratched brilliantly down my stomach. He pressed his mouth to the flat of my stomach before scooting backward on the bed. His hands slid under my ass, and he pulled me towards him, sitting up only slightly to kiss the inside of my knee. Scalding kisses, scorching kisses, as he made his way up my thigh, and when he nipped the upper part of my thigh, I yelped a bit and heard him chuckle, low and throaty, in response.

  “Sawyer, I—” I found myself unable to speak as he brought his kisses higher, and then his lips, his tongue, it all burned between my legs and I wrapped my fingers up in the sheets because his hair was too short for me to tangle my fingers in.

  One of his arms came down around my waist to hold me relatively still, but still, my back arched up as his tongue circled my clit, refusing to give that shock of pleasure that might send me over the edge. I closed my eyes and cried out, trying to push my hips up, to force him to bring me what I needed. In response, his arm pressed back more insistently, his other hand holding my leg open against the bed.

  I drove my ass further into the bed, spine nearly aching for how hard I needed a release. Before I could become upset, before this could become unpleasant, he zeroed in on that button, flicking and sucking and turning me into a complete mess within a few seconds, gasping for breath and attempting to hold on to my senses during my orgasm.

  As I started to become more aware of myself, he brought his mouth back up my torso, leaving soft, almost reassuring kisses in his wake. I pulled him up to kiss me—my years of being revolted by what a man could do to me were far past—and he was more than happy to oblige, and for a few moments we only kissed. Until, that was, I shifted myself and brushed against the tight hardness of his erection.

  He broke away from me to sort through the drawer next to him until he produced a condom. I watched him roll it down his length, and I shook my head slowly at the sight before me. He looked like absolute sin, muscled and erect and panting in front of me, like an animal in heat—but then what did that make me, panting every bit as much with my hair a complete mess and sweat gathered on my back.

  I expected him to push me back against the mattress and make quick work of his own release, and instead, he pulled me close to him, continuing to kiss me. It felt like we truly did have all the time in the world. For a moment, this was beautiful, and then I began to feel more urgent.

  “I need you,” I told him, and he could only grunt in response.

  He pressed himself against me, not entering, merely testing the waters, and I groaned in frustration at his patience. Inch by agonizing inch, he eased himself into me, making soft sounds in my ears when he wasn’t pressing kisses to the side of my neck.

  I pulled my hips up to match him, to nudge him further up inside me, and we both gasped. His head bowed against my neck as he began to move, slowly, in deep thrusts that had
me babbling and aching and pulling at his shoulder blades.

  “Please. Please.” I didn’t even know what I was asking for. I didn’t even know what I needed. I needed more, all at once, at yet I needed for this never to end.

  He thrust faster, and yet somehow deeper, and he brought his hand between us to grind his thumb against my clit. I shouted out into the night as he drove against me and his thumb sped up, and soon, I was lost. I cried out, I shouted, tears collected in the corners of my eyes and I struggled not to tear skin on Sawyer’s back as my ankles dug into his skin.

  He followed soon after with a broken cry against my neck, jutting himself once more, twice more, as I tightened around him nearly unbearably. It grew silent, then, save for the sound of us breathing. I didn’t know that I’d ever have a full set of lungs again. I didn’t know that I ever wanted to be anywhere else.

  He pulled away from me slowly and tossed the condom in the trash. I saw stars when I closed my eyes, and he returned to my side, collecting me in his arms, and I leaned my head against his chest. His heart thudded wildly in my ears, and it filled me with pride to know that I’d done that to him in any capacity.

  “I love you,” he said to me. His voice was both quiet and the loudest thing in the room, rumbling through his chest to travel to my ear.

  I curled up against his tired body and pressed a kiss to the naked skin. I knew, at that moment, that this was exactly where I was meant to be. No matter what it meant to the rest of the world.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  SAWYER

  When I woke up the next morning, Quinn was still gathered against my chest. I didn’t want to move and wake her up—until, that was, I saw that she was already awake, probably in the same predicament.

  “Hey,” I said, not wanting to disrupt the quiet. I could hear birds outside.

  “Hey,” she said back. She smiled up at me, and I wished I could have taken more time, all the time in the world, to appreciate how lucky I was to have her with me. I kissed the top of her head and gathered her closer for a second before sitting up.