by Anne Calhoun
Cock-sucking lips was the term the Marines in his platoon used, but he’d seen her mouth as well-used after a couple of hours of sex. She loved to kiss, loved to open her mouth and breathe into his, her tongue rubbing against his as he worked in and out of her wet—
Stop.
The state of her mouth almost sealed the deal, warning him to silence. After what he’d done ten months ago he had no business being here, half-stalking her in a parking lot, no business asking her who she’d been with, what she’d done. Howling regret had no right to use sharp claws dripping with acid to crawl up from his bowels and into his chest to slice casually at his throat.
“Abby,” he said curtly.
So much for his much-vaunted impulse control.
In the act of stepping off the sidewalk she startled, regained her balance, and swung to face him. For a brief moment he was glad he’d kept his Oakleys on, even though it was the purple-tinged blackness just before dawn. He didn’t want her to see his eyes.
“Sean?” She took a step closer, into the light. “What are you doing here?”
Shock and disbelief infused her voice, so she hadn’t seen him at No Limits earlier in the night, watching her wait tables in Galveston’s raunchiest, wildest nightclub. She used to drink and dance there, not work there.
“I’m on leave,” he said. I wanted to see you. I missed you. I made the biggest mistake of my life telling you we were both too distracted to make a relationship based on thirty days of hot sex and five months of e-mail work while I was deployed.
And you did exactly what I told you to do. You moved on.
Those thoughts and more lay under his blunt words, but she didn’t hear the subtext. “I meant, what are you doing here at five in the morning?”
She crossed her arms over her torso as she spoke, shoulders hunching slightly as she glanced over her shoulder at the stairway she’d just descended. She looked for all the world like a teenager caught sneaking out of a house. He flashed back to the first night he met her at No Limits. The chemistry had been instant, and lava-hot, but she’d looked so young, so impossibly young, that he’d made her show him her ID before he got a room. It was the freckles dusting her forehead and cheeks, the green eyes, the innocent cast of her mouth. He was sober enough to do the math. Twenty-three to his twenty-eight. Old enough according to the law, young enough to feel a little dirty. At first. Then it just felt right.
Until fear got the better of him.
“I’m waiting for you,” he said, as if it was obvious.
“How did you find me?”
“Lisette told me where you were,” he said, naming another cocktail waitress at No Limits. When he asked where Abby went, Lisette said she swapped closings with her and went home early. He’d rattled off her old address, the procedure of double-checking dates, times, coordinates drilled into him over the last year, and Lisette gave him a new one, thrown over her shoulder as she hurried off to another table. He’d assumed she’d finally moved out of her father’s house.
His assumption made an ass of him.
“Why?”
She’d been young, not stupid. “I’ve been asking myself the same question,” he said. This was a mistake. He should have gone to No Limits the night he got home and ended this for good. But he’d wanted Abby. Red-haired, freckle-starred Abby, now leaving her lover’s apartment at five in the morning.
“You broke up with me ten months ago. You sent me a four-sentence e-mail saying I was a sweet girl, but I had a lot of growing up to do, and neither of us had the time or emotional energy to commit to supporting each other through a difficult situation.”
He’d meant to respect her wide-open, no responsibilities, no ties life, because the home front was different. Life went on there, and she didn’t have to be tied to a Marine fifteen thousand miles away with no time for her. He drew breath to say something calm and rational when the door at the top of the landing opened again and a man’s heavier tread thumped down the stairs.
A uniformed cop, his utility belt in one hand and car keys in the other, rounded the corner. His keys sounded businesslike, metal on metal, at least a dozen. It was the key ring of a man with responsibilities or maybe access to bedrooms all over town. He stopped when he saw Abby, then his gaze zipped over to Sean.
Big motherfucker, even without the vest adding bulk. Paramilitary haircut, paramilitary demeanor, close but not quite the rebar backbone the Naval Academy jammed up your ass to the base of your skull your first day of Plebe Summer. But the guy could handle himself. It was in the way he squared up and shifted his weight to the balls of his feet when he saw Sean.
Without moving, Sean leveled a look at him that said Bring it the fuck on.
“Problem, Abby?” the cop said without taking his eyes from Sean.
“It’s fine, Ben,” she said. Red hair tumbled over her left hand as she rubbed her forehead with her palm. No engagement ring, no gold band, just the smell of the cop’s skin and sweat as a faint breeze drifted from Abby to Sean. “I know him from a long time ago.”
The words seemed to be enough for Ben the Galveston Cop, who looked like he wasn’t any more eager to begin his day with a takedown in his parking lot than Sean was to end his with one. More telling, Ben didn’t show a hint of remorse or embarrassment at Abby’s tousled condition, nor did he look proud, or cocky. He’d fucked her, she was going home, and it all meant nothing, or at least there was no shame in it.
Sean wouldn’t have let another man see her like that, not for the shame of it, but because it was so personal, so intimate. Between them only.
Ben looked over to the Mustang. “That your car?”
Sean gave him the barest hint of a nod.
“Your plates expired four months ago.”
“He was deployed to Afghanistan,” Abby said impatiently. “He’s got a grace period to get them renewed.”
Still expressionless. Ben offered Sean a bare nod of his own, then spoke to Abby as he got in his car. “Text me when you get home safe.”
The message came through loud and clear. Ben had the right to ask that of her, or at least offer the security of checking in with a law enforcement officer. Sean didn’t, and he’d better get to the courthouse sooner rather than later. A blue Shelby Cobra with a red racing stripe and plates that read 500 HSPR would attract attention even without a word from Ben to his colleagues.
Abby watched Ben hoist his utility belt into his truck, then leave the lot. When her attention returned to Sean, he said, “Wow. A cop. Not so sweet anymore.”
Oh yeah, he was the master of impulse control and logical argument. Make it personal, throw it back in her face. Except on closer inspection the shadows under her eyes weren’t the smudged makeup on her lids. They were the deeper purple of exhaustion.
Her chin lifted, throwing her swollen mouth and stark cheekbones into relief. “That’s right. I’m not.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” Say no. Wait. Say yes, because no means booty call…
“No.”
And…that was worse, hearing the word in her mouth, seeing her freshly fucked and doing the walk of shame at five in the morning. “Jesus Christ, Abby.”
“It’s none of your business, Sean. You made it none of your business.”
Cold, flat, and saying exactly what his conscience said thirty seconds earlier. “Right,” he said. “Fine. I’m out of here.”
He turned to get in the Mustang when Abby spoke. “How long are you in town?” The words were high-pitched, just rushed enough to convey a curiosity that overcame reluctance.
He stopped. “A little over a month,” he said.
“Then what?”
“Does it matter?” He hauled open his car door, but Abby’s voice stopped him once again.
“Why did you come looking for me? I thought sweet and innocent were too distracting for a guy with a war on his mind.”
He hadn’t said that, goddammit. Implied it, yes. It was his turn to rub his forehead in disgust. Fuck it all. “Doesn
’t matter, does it? You’re not that girl anymore.”
“No, I’m not,” she said flatly. “I don’t have time for a relationship, and Ben’s not interested in one. That’s who I am now. So don’t you get on your high horse because I’m not the girl you left behind.”
She’d stalked up to him during this speech, hands holding her shoes and her keys spread to either side as she flung the words at him like a slap. He gave up any hope that he’d spend this leave like he’d spent the last, getting the comfort he needed from the person he least expected was able to give it to him. Maybe it was just exhaustion, but she was pale under the remaining eye makeup, almost Goth in her appearance, tightly wound, and thinner than he remembered. She’d turned her back on him and was stalking toward her car, as much as a woman could stalk when barefoot and carrying her heels.
“Abby,” he said, his voice pitched to command. She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. “My Marines were distracted. Unfocused. Texting and e-mailing and checking social networking sites from a fucking war zone. I had to help us coalesce as a unit. Some were married, with kids, or had babies on the way. All of them had mothers who’d sent sons off to war. They needed me focused and there to make sure they got home to their families. The consequences, if we didn’t, were unacceptable.”
Days would go by without a thought of Abby. Sometimes a couple of weeks. But then he’d be hunkered down in a foxhole, and his fears would chase their tails like frantic dogs. The ever-present fear that all his planning and strategizing would be for nothing, that he’d lose a Marine, narrowed his focus to exclude everything but the immediate moment. As the countdown to homecoming entered double digits, then single, a new fear began the whirling, snarling chase in his head: that he’d made the right choice for now, but the aftermath was coming.
The starry swath of bitterly cold, black Afghan sky calmed him, giving him the uncanny sense she was right there beside him.
At that she did turn around. “We all make choices,” she said, the heat gone from her voice, replaced with a heart-turning sadness. “You made yours, and no one, including me, would tell you you made the wrong one.” She lifted her shoes and keys with a shrug, then looked around Ben’s parking lot. “Welcome to your consequences.”
With that she got in her Celica. The engine ground for a few seconds before it turned over, and she steered out of the lot without a backward glance.
And that was that. Except he couldn’t breathe. War created a time warp in his mind, and in that frozen world, despite his e-mail, Abby hadn’t changed. Sweet, cheerful, always smiling and laughing, always ready for a good time. Just out of college and searching for a job, she’d had all the time in the world to spend with him.
With the scent of Abby’s warm skin lingering in the cool dawn air, the sheer ludicrousness of his assumptions sucker punched him. Of course she changed. Of course she’d moved on. She was pretty and vivacious and just the right combination of sexy-sweet. Guys used to go down on their knees at her feet for the chance to buy her a drink, or dance with her, or just talk to her and watch her eyes gleam with the sheer pleasure of being alive. Now she looked wounded, bruised, battered. A different kind of man loved that. They either wanted to make it all better, or they wanted to go there with her. Vicariously live someone else’s pain. Something about the damaged ones made the surrender all the more sweet.
You told her to grow up. Did you really think she’d sit in limbo, waiting for you?
Yes.
He’d told her to change; turns out he’d wanted her exactly the way she was. But she had changed…just not in any way he’d imagined.
Now what?
Now you move on, just like she did.
Cognitive fucking dissonance, compounded by lack of sleep and the total system shock of reentry into suburban life in Texas after a year at a FOB in Afghanistan. He knew the drill. Sleep, eat, keep moving. Make a plan. The next goal to tackle was Life Without Abby. He slid back into the Mustang and started the engine. His cell phone buzzed. Text from Ty Hendricks. No Limits tonight 2200 hrs.
Sean rubbed his thumb over the screen and shifted his gaze to the pale horizon. After leaving the Corps, John Langley, a former staff sergeant, had opened a security business headquartered in Galveston. Ty, John’s best buddy in the Corps, was supposed to be the personnel specialist, but for reasons locked away in Ty’s impenetrable self he’d chosen to work on the oil rigs instead. With his Galveston connection, John told Sean to look him up when he came home. Sean touched base with him, half expecting the contact would be a courtesy call. Instead, because the work sounded interesting, and John obviously needed experienced help, Sean signed on for a month of surveillance in an industrial espionage case. Most days he worked with Ty, who’d mastered the art of silence.
He ran his thumb over the phone’s keypad. Ty was up early, or maybe he’d skipped sleeping tonight, too. So what if Abby worked at No Limits, Galveston’s hottest, sexiest hookup bar? Time for a little payback, even.
He keyed I’ll be there into his phone, got into his car, and floored it out of the parking lot, leaving a pile of assumptions in a shattered heap on the pavement.
* * *
After Sean broke up with her via a four-sentence e-mail sent from a war zone, Abby had imagined the reunion scenario hundreds of times. Like her, he was Galveston born and raised, so she fully expected to see him around when he was home. The grocery store. The bookstore. The park. No Limits, of course, where they’d met.
One deployment and a lifetime ago.
In every fantasy she’d been in control, dressed in something that looked both sophisticated and sexy, her hair done, her makeup subtle but her mouth a nice shade of red guaranteed to draw his eye. She’d developed three different scathing speeches specifically tailored to how he might open the conversation, because she sure as hell wouldn’t. And when the cutting speeches didn’t patch up her wounded pride, she’d practiced cutting him dead for condescending to her while he shredded her heart against a cheese grater.
None of her revenge-based fantasies included him scaring the living hell out of her in Ben’s parking lot after a quickie, three hours of sleep…and another quickie. That’s what she liked about Ben. She could call him at one in the morning and his bed and his body were at her disposal. If he was home, and alone. She wasn’t sleeping with anyone else, but she harbored no illusions she was Ben’s only bedmate.
Driving home on autopilot, her car was already in the crosswalk when the light blinked from yellow to red. She slammed on the brakes and jerked against her seat belt harness. As usual, she was too tired to be driving safely, let alone dealing with Sean Winthrop’s sudden appearance out of the predawn darkness.
“Oh, God,” she moaned.
No perfect outfit. No sexily tousled hair, just a snarled mess thanks to Ben’s hands. Her mouth was probably the right shade of red, though, and her nipples and thighs still tingled from his morning stubble. She’d gaped like an idiot until her exhausted, sex-befuddled brain realized she wasn’t hallucinating, that Sean was actually right there. And if she could see that he was bigger, bulkier, holding himself with a tense, vibrating masculine energy that was new, he was close enough to see…everything.
Including her incorrectly buttoned blouse. “Oh, God,” she said.
The car behind her honked impatiently. She sat up straight and floored the accelerator before letting up on the gas. She’d gotten two speeding tickets in the last six months. One more and she’d lose her license, which meant she’d lose everything else, and Ben had made it perfectly clear from their first night together that he didn’t fix tickets, bail drunk girls out of jail, or get asshole ex-boyfriends’ cars towed in exchange for sex.
The car behind her sped past on the right, the driver alternating his attention between the road and his own face in the rearview mirror as he shaved his jutting jaw with an electric razor. He looked so stupid Abby almost laughed, but she was afraid if she started she wouldn’t stop.
The clock on
the dashboard read 5:22, and the day stretched out in front of her, every single minute booked. Get home, get Dad up, take a quick shower while he dressed, give him his breathing treatments, fix him breakfast, get to school for extra time in the lab, work at her homework, followed by her shift at No Limits. Weekends involved a whole different but equally pressing set of responsibilities, cooking, cleaning, and the never-ending homework.
Exactly what Sean thought she couldn’t handle. He hadn’t said as much in his e-mail, but she could read between the lines. A lot of growing up to do. That’s what he said. Because a twenty-three-year-old college graduate who still lived with her father and didn’t have a job wasn’t nearly as mature a Naval Academy graduate and Rhodes Scholar who was about to lead twenty-two men into combat.
“I’ve done it,” she said. “I am all grown up, Sean. As you just saw.”
She wished she could have seen his eyes. Were the Oakleys in the darkness before dawn some kind of military thing he’d picked up overseas, looking cool and tough and bad? Because he’d looked all three of those things. Square-jawed and ready for action, especially when Ben came down the stairs.
She pulled into her garage, killed the engine, left her No Limits heels strewn on the passenger floorboards, and hurried up the stairs leading into the house. After the diagnosis her Dad had moved from the master bedroom upstairs to his former office downstairs, sleeping on a single bed wedged between his big oak desk and the wall. She knocked on the closed door and cracked it open.
“Dad,” she said softly. “Time to get up.”
His rough, phlegmy breathing halted then started again. He coughed, and she heard rustling as he started to extract himself from the covers. It would take him twenty minutes to get up, shuffle to the downstairs bathroom, and get himself dressed. In that time she’d shower, dress, start breakfast, and tidy up the main floor.
