by Anne Calhoun
“Why not?”
She stopped, then hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. The movement caught the straps of all three tank top straps and pushed them up, revealing a plain white bra strap. The jeans, he noted distantly, hugged the heart-shaped curves of her ass in a very delicious way.
“I don’t need you to do things for me,” she said to the lilac bushes growing under the kitchen window. “I don’t need anyone to do things for me. I need to learn how to do them myself. Now I don’t have that chance.”
Semper Gumby. “You’re right.” He waited a second. She didn’t turn around, but she didn’t leave, either. “Do you have time for me to show you how to replace your battery?”
“No,” she said, but she looked over her shoulder at him as she said it. “I’m so far behind on everything I’ll never catch up. But I still want you to show me.”
He followed her down the stairs to the stepping-stones that led through the garden gate, and reached past her to open the gate for her. At the slight contact between his chest and her shoulder she startled and looked up at him, but swept through and kept walking toward the street where her car was parked. She unlocked the car and popped the hood once again, paying close attention while he gave her a crash course in battery replacement and tried not to be too obvious about how distracting the low-cut tank tops were when she leaned over the engine.
“Where did you get those?” she asked, pointing at the case of socket wrenches he’d pulled from the Mustang’s backseat.
“My house. Dad’s got a full workshop in the garage.”
“Maybe my dad has a set,” she mused.
“Most places won’t charge you too much to replace your battery, and then you’ll be sure it’s done right.” He peered through the windshield at the thick textbook on the passenger seat. “How late were you to microbiology?”
“An hour,” she said. “I’ll get notes from a friend.”
“And why are you taking microbiology?” he asked cautiously. The plan hinged on finding out who this new woman was.
“I couldn’t find a job,” she said bluntly. “Apparently majoring in liberal arts wasn’t a good choice in the worst economic downturn in nearly a century. I’m going back to school to get a nursing degree. I want to do a one-year intensive program, but I need to get the prereqs out of the way before I can apply.”
“Do you want to be a nurse?” he asked. The Abby he remembered loved books and movies, and had been the entertainment columnist for the college newspaper.
“I had fun in college, read all the great books,” she said. “Now I want to do meaningful work. After a few appointments with my dad I developed an interest in geriatric nursing.”
There was his in. “What’s wrong with your dad?”
She lifted her chin. “He has COPD. It’s a chronic, progressive lung disease. I’m taking care of him.”
All he knew about Abby’s father was that he was twice-divorced and almost completely uninvolved in his daughter’s life, despite the fact that she lived with him. “How’s he taking it?”
“He’s angry,” she said emotionlessly. “Angry because smoking unfiltered cigarettes for forty-plus years finally caught up with him, and his mortality’s staring him in the face. Angry because he can’t do anything he used to do, like get dressed in less than twenty minutes, or go to work. Angry because the lawn looks terrible without him spending hours on it every weekend. Too stubborn to do anything that might make him feel better, like breathing exercises and taking a walk. And, I think, with two failed marriages and his sons barely speaking to him and a granddaughter he never sees, desperately afraid he’s going to die alone. Or maybe with just me for company.”
He stared at her. “Jesus, Abby,” he started.
“I have to go,” she said, and opened her car door. “I work at five.”
“You coming over tonight?”
The words were out before he could stop them, before he could think through voicing his eagerness, but New Abby was humming away at a speed that didn’t include falling in love any time soon. She looked at him, gave him the full force of those pale green eyes, the look pure challenge as she dismissively lifted one shoulder.
“Come over, Abby. I’ll make it worth your while,” he said.
“Better than sleep?” she asked, but the teasing lilt in her voice held an edge. “I am absolutely desperate for some sleep.”
A soft laugh huffed from him as he leaned over the car door. Her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, then she licked and bit into her lower lip. He knew that signal, knew it well, knew the way to seduce Abby was her mouth. So he kissed her, the car door a grievous barrier between his body and hers as he urged her lips apart and rubbed his tongue against hers as nonchalantly as she’d shrugged off his invitation. Her jaw opened in hesitant stages, then she leaned a little closer…and he backed away.
“I’ll be fast,” he murmured. “Then you can sleep. If that’s what you want. Or I’ll be slow. Whatever you want, Abby. Think about it. Let me know when you come over.”
* * *
The knock on the front door came at two twenty. Sean pulled on a pair of boxer shorts just in case it was some drunk friend of Camilla’s who didn’t know she was out of town. Just in case it wasn’t, he palmed a condom on his way down the hall.
It was Abby. He opened the door, and she ducked under his arm. “You have to set your alarm for five,” she said. “I can’t be late for class again.”
“Fast or slow?”
“What? It just has to go off. I don’t care how the thing buzzes, but it better be loud because—”
He kissed her, the old-fashioned, movie kind of kiss, both hands to her jaw to hold her mouth for his, but mostly to shut her up. “Fast or slow,” he repeated, trusting he’d made the context clear with the explicit, hard kiss.
Her purse landed on the floor with a thud. “Fast. Now.”
Giving her another rough kiss, he backed her to the sofa then spun her around, his touch demanding, careless. She dropped to her knees on the cushions with her forearms braced on the sofa’s back, and he knelt behind her as he shoved her skirt up, tugged her panties down, and tortured himself with a couple of skin-to-skin thrusts against her ass. When he had the condom on he snugged up behind her and reached around to part her folds in search of her clit.
And found her slick, swollen, beyond ready for him, a lightning-quick assessment confirmed when his cock slid into her pussy with a mind-searing ease. “Abby. Fuck.”
She tilted her hips back and looked over her shoulder at him. “You told me to think about it. So I did.” He pulled out and drove back in, forcing a gasp from her throat. “All night. You know what No Limits is like. Sex everywhere. I watched couples grind on the dance floor—oh God—and thought about you.”
She stopped talking as he stroked in, paused, pulled out. Her head dropped forward, and her breath caught. The skin of her ass pressed soft and hot against his lower abdomen. She was slick enough for him to hear his cock stroke through her moisture with each gripping stroke, and she smelled of sweat and desire. Sensory overload. All circuits shut down.
It took no time at all. He braced his forearm next to hers on the back of the sofa, touched the tip of his finger to her swollen clit, set a ruthless pace. Pure animal movement did the rest. She tightened around him, ass and thighs tensing as she hurtled into orgasm with an anguished cry. His breath forced through clenched teeth as he jetted into her.
With a relieved, satisfied little sigh she nuzzled her cheek into her folded arms. He dealt with the condom as quickly as he could, but when he came back to the sofa she’d slipped down into a sleeping ball of Abby. He swept her up in his arms to carry her to the bedroom, but misjudged the width of the hallway and bumped her head on the corner.
“Ow,” she muttered, but she didn’t really wake.
So much for Prince Charming. He turned sideways to walk down the hall and set her down on the bed. She rolled over and tucked her hands under her chin, not ev
en waking as he covered her up.
This wasn’t going to work. At her pace of life he’d need a year to get her back. He lay awake for a long time, strategizing, before sleep claimed him, too.
* * *
“Thirteen more minutes.” The clock read 2:47 p.m. Abby rubbed her gritty eyes and bargained with her tired brain. “Thirteen more minutes and then you can take a nap.”
Her body was no longer stupid enough to fall for blatant lies. She had another fifty pages of reading for her Ethics class tomorrow, a short paper to write in response to the reading, and an entire chapter of Microbiology to outline. She really should schedule another session in the lab to review the previous week’s work. At least this semester she only had one science-intensive course. The semester she’d done anatomy and physiology and statistics, she’d been terrified she’d flunk out of school and into a job at McDonalds.
“Twelve minutes,” she muttered. She blinked hard, then read the same sentence about the history of relational ethics twice, understanding only the conjunctions before the text blurred together on the page. She groaned, closed her eyes, and rested the heels of her hands in her eye sockets.
As brief as they were, nights with Sean tilted her teetering world beyond the tipping point. Apparently she could make do on four hours of sleep, too much coffee, and fear-based adrenaline, but three hours of sleep and her body began to whine. So tiiiiiiiired. Must sleeeeeeeep. So like a good girl would, like a girl who texted Ben once a month or so, she’d come home after work the last three nights and gone to bed for her usual four hours of sleep.
That shut down the whining, but added a deeper ache to the sustained, low-level exhaustion. Desire simmered low in her belly. Her clothes chafed her skin, the seam of her jeans rubbing against her clit at the most inopportune moments, her nipples teased by any bra at all—cotton, lace, silk, it didn’t matter. It was as if her body knew when Sean’s leave was over that would be the end of fabulous-Sean-sex, and she should get as much fabulous-Sean-sex while she could.
“Stop it,” she said to her body. “Stop needing. You’re not going to get enough sleep or enough sex or enough of anything for a long, long time. I can give you coffee. That’s it.”
She walked downstairs and made coffee. Her father sat in his recliner in the family room, staring at the television. His breathing wheezed, then he coughed his typical rattling, phlegmy cough.
“You okay, Dad?”
“Stop fussing,” he rasped, but the effort of getting the words out only made him cough harder.
The doorbell rang. Abby ignored it and started toward her father, then retreated when he irritably waved her off. The wet, hacking coughs followed her down the tiled hallway as she hurried to the door.
Sean stood on the other side, dressed in cargo shorts, running shoes, and a shapeless, worn gray T-shirt with the Naval Academy logo on the chest. A backpack hung from one shoulder, and for a moment her only wish in the world wasn’t for sleep or sex. It was for the clairvoyance that would have told her to study in something other than a pair of ripped yoga pants rolled low on her hips and a green cami.
“I should be used to you showing up out of the blue,” she said.
At a particularly deep, horrible cough, his gaze flicked over her shoulder. “Is this a bad time?”
“That depends on what you want,” she said flatly, all but daring him to suggest sex while her father hacked up the contents of his lungs.
“Company while I do some reading,” he said, hoisting the full backpack as evidence. “That’s all.”
This wasn’t in the rulebook, him showing up at her house, wanting nothing more than to be in her presence, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to send him away, much less shut the door in his face. So she opened the door wide, and he stepped into the foyer.
“Go on upstairs,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”
“I’ll help you get it,” he said.
“Dad won’t want you to meet him like this. He’s having a bad day,” she said, and gave him a little push for emphasis. “Second door on the left.”
He climbed the stairs while she hurried back down the hall. The coughing fit was tapering off, leaving her dad with watery eyes, gasping for air. She waited for him to finish clearing the mucus from his lungs, took the small trash can full of tissues into the kitchen and emptied it, then crouched by his chair and patted his shoulder.
“Okay, Dad?”
He shook off her hand. “Who was at the door?”
“A friend coming over to study. We’ll be upstairs.” He nodded, his gaze focused on the television show he never would have watched before. “Do you want me to make an appointment with Dr. Weaver?”
“No.”
“Dad, she said if you weren’t—”
“No. Go away.”
She stood and stalked back into the kitchen, poured out two tall mugs, added cream and sugar to hers, and headed up the stairs. Sean sat on her bedroom floor, his backpack open beside him, books and notebooks strewn around him, his laptop open on his lap and plugged into one of the sockets. A moment’s embarrassment coursed through her, because the room was a FEMA-declared disaster area, dirty clothes piled in one laundry basket, clean clothes in untidy stacks in another, her closet door wide open on the jumble of shoes and unevenly hanging formal dresses. She’d redecorated when she moved home after college, supposedly just for the summer, but she was glad the room was now an adult, if dusty, scheme of royal blue and white. Microbiology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology texts and her laptop occupied every available inch of her desk. Beside the floor, the only other flat, unoccupied surface in the room was her bed.
He wisely hadn’t chosen to sit there, but perhaps the fact that it was unmade and strewn with a tumbled assortment of blue and red pillows had something to do with it. She left the door wide open.
“I can make space at the desk.”
“Abby, trust me. I’ve worked in far worse conditions than a carpeted bedroom floor in an air-conditioned house,” he said and reached up for his coffee.
“You’re really here to read.”
He nodded, and the gleam in his eye was only slightly artful.
One leg tucked under her, she eased into the desk chair and sipped her own coffee. “What are you working on?”
“An analysis of the pharmaceutical industry, the players, trends, competitors, leadership, what’s in FDA testing, that kind of thing.”
She blinked. “Is that for the Marine Corps?”
“No. I’m freelancing while I’m on leave, and the job relates to a smaller drug company. I don’t know anything about the industry, so this is background research.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“So far the job consists of sitting down. Front seat of a truck, outdoor bench in a business park, front seat of a car outside a guy’s house.”
“And now it sounds boring.”
“After getting shot at for a year every time we stepped outside the perimeter, sitting in a car without random gunfire is actually kind of nice.” Getting shot at made her heart stutter and her breathing stop. He gave her another only slightly artful smile, and added, “It’s no picnic, but I’ll take it.”
She ignored his lead. “You need to do research to sit on a bench?”
“Not really, but you never know when something you’ve learned might come in handy.”
The sight of him on her bedroom floor, surrounded by books, highlighter, and laptop at the ready, jolted a memory loose from her exhausted brain. Sean, in much the same pose and clothing but on a picnic blanket in the park, surrounded by books about Afghanistan that were getting as broken-spined and dog-eared as military strategy books. With her head pillowed on his thigh she’d read her way through magazines and novels while he systematically crammed the contents of about twenty thousand pages of text into his brain.
She’d fallen in love with him on that blanket, fallen hard, fast, and apparently alone. The blanket now occupied the back corner of her clos
et, the green-and-blue plaid wool folded carefully to keep intact the grass and twigs from their last picnic.
He nodded at the stack of books on her desk. “Don’t let me distract you.”
“I won’t,” she said. It was his turn to blink at her firm tone.
For a few minutes she had to fake intense fascination with relational ethics, but then the caffeine spurred productivity. She finished the Ethics reading, wrote her response paper, and turned to the Microbiology outline. Exactly ninety minutes into the silent study session Sean’s watched beeped. He got to his feet and stretched, methodically cracking everything from his neck down to his toes, then looked around the room.
“What’s with the alarm?”
“People are most productive in ninety-minute sessions. Then it’s best to take a break and do something else for about twenty minutes.”
The something else they would have done last year hung in the air above her bed until Sean walked to the window. “The lawn could use a trim,” he commented.
“It’s not up to Dad’s standards,” she agreed ruefully, but he’d moved on to the pictures on the walls and shelves.
“I never saw your room last year.”
She hadn’t wanted to rush into anything that might spook Sean, like meeting her bad-tempered father, although in hindsight their intense focus on each other to the exclusion of family and friends was a missed sign. A very few pictures were arranged on shelves around the room, mostly candid shots of her with friends on spring break. He examined each one carefully, starting with the picture of her with all her college friends, then switched his attention to the last photo.
“Who’s this?”
“My half brother Jeff, his wife, Lindsey, and their daughter, Mikaela.” She yawned, stifling the sound with her hand.
“Want to take a quick nap?” he said without looking at her.
Was she relieved or disappointed he didn’t ask more questions? “Desperately, but I’ve still got a whole chapter to outline.”
“You’ll write a better outline when you’re rested.”
It sounded so tempting, lying down in the middle of the day, in her sun-warmed room, falling asleep to the sound of Sean’s breathing. “I’ll get more coffee.”
