“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“A good thing,” Mel answered without hesitation. “A new thing, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“Will people be shocked?”
“Most certainly,” Mel said. “Congratulations, you’ve tamed me.”
Regan took one hand from the wheel, blowing on her fingernails and buffing them across her T-shirt. “Wasn’t so hard.”
Mel’s laughter filled Regan with delight and she spent the next stage of their journey in a pleasant haze, juggling driving and awestruck observation. The land kept changing, shifting, and just when she thought she couldn’t see anything more beautiful than what was in front of her, she would find something even more breathtaking around the next bend.
The desert became less cream-purple, growing red, and they saw the first monument just as Regan’s stomach rumbled in protest.
Mel chuckled and reached out to rub her T-shirt covered belly. “How can something so cute and soft make such a big, scary noise?”
Regan wrinkled her nose. “I’m ready for something to eat. How about you?”
“We could pull over and have a sandwich. Enjoy the scenery for a while.”
“Sounds fantastic.” Regan rolled her stiff shoulders, grimacing at the tightness in her muscles. “I could use a break.”
“I’ll take the next driving shift,” Mel said. “After we eat.”
“You’re on.”
*
Regan got out of the truck and, with a blissful groan, stretched her stiff back and legs. On the passenger side, Mel mirrored her action. Catching her lover’s gaze, Regan wondered once again how she’d gotten so lucky. How did someone like her ever fall for someone like me? She watched Mel lean into the truck, hefting the cooler out from behind the passenger seat. And how the hell does she think I’m so wise and together when I always feel like such a bumbling geek?
Her smile faded, and she drew her eyebrows together in quiet thought as she made her way to the bed of the truck and climbed up.
Mel crawled over to Regan on her knees, offering her a sandwich in one outstretched hand. Her eyebrows were drawn in mild concern.
“Yeah, baby?” Regan took the sandwich with a grateful nod, sitting cross-legged with her back against the cab of her truck.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Mel asked. “You don’t have to, but I just figured if you wanted to, then…I want to listen.” Quiet and tentative, she took a nervous bite of her sandwich after she stopped speaking.
“Why do you think something’s wrong?”
“You looked sad just then,” Mel said. “I hate seeing you sad. What’re you thinking about?”
With a shrug, Regan swallowed a bite of her sandwich. “Just feeling like a hypocrite, I guess.”
“Why?”
“It’s just that I feel like I’ve talked a big game about making changes, about moving past things, but there’s plenty in my life that needs changing and I just don’t know how to do it.” Almost immediately, she felt the relief of having just said the words. “I mean, you want to talk about issues. God, have I got issues. And I don’t have any idea how to overcome them. So the fact that you’ve been giving me so much credit for helping you these last few weeks, well, it makes me feel like a fraud.”
“You’re talking about being shy? The social anxiety?”
“Yeah,” Regan whispered. “Basically.” Does talking about this make it real? “I’ve never really talked about this like it was something that I could overcome. I want to feel comfortable meeting new people. I want to be able to go into situations without feeling sick to my stomach. But what if I—what if I can’t? I don’t even know how to fix it.” Regan slumped her shoulders in defeat, finishing off her sandwich with a listless bite.
“Have you ever thought about seeing someone?” Mel asked in a gentle voice. “Talking about it? Or maybe even looking into medication to help control it?”
It was getting more difficult to meet Mel’s gaze. “I’ve thought about it. I guess I’m scared. Kind of ironic, really. Too scared to see a therapist to talk about my anxiety.”
“I’d go with you, if you want,” Mel offered, finishing her own sandwich. “When we get home.”
The cautious offer brought a genuine grin to Regan’s face. “I really appreciate that. I’ll think about it.”
Mel kissed Regan’s hair, then pulled her down so that her head rested against her chest. Regan sighed, staring up at the impossibly blue sky and the red rock formations that littered the desert. No words passed between them for a while, until Mel cleared her throat.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Aren’t you the one who told me that you didn’t expect me to be perfect? That it’s never too late to change?” The hand that curled around Regan’s shoulders moved lower, stroking over the side of her breast. “Please don’t feel like a hypocrite just because you’re not where you want to be yet. It just means that we’re both works in progress.”
Regan smirked. “You’re getting very good at this ‘tossing my own words back in my face to prove a point’ thing.”
“What can I say? I learned from the best.”
“Indeed you did.”
Mel hesitated a moment, then murmured, “Just promise you’ll let me help you when you need it, okay?”
“You help me, I help you?”
“I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? Of this—of being us.”
“Yes.” Regan leaned up and pressed her lips to the corner of Mel’s mouth. “It is.” She looked down the long road behind them, lonely and shimmering in the desert heat.
“Hey, Regan?”
“Yeah?”
“You know that all this stuff, the shyness, the social anxiety—well, you know it doesn’t matter to me, right?”
She knew that Mel truly believed that, but she couldn’t help worrying about how long it would last.
“What’s that?” Mel asked. “What were you just thinking?”
Am I that obviously insecure? “What do you mean?”
“I saw something in your eyes. Do you not believe me? Have I ever made you feel like those things matter to me?”
Regan flinched at the plain hurt in Mel’s voice. “No. Not at all. I believe you that it doesn’t matter to you. I just—” She struggled for a way to articulate her deepest fears. “Sometimes people think it doesn’t matter, but after a while it gets old, you know? It’s frustrating for people, that I don’t enjoy going out a lot, and that I get so nervous about stuff—”
“Who are these people you’re talking about?” Mel asked. “I’m not going to get frustrated with you.” At Regan’s shrug, she tightened their embrace. “Listen to me.”
Regan lifted her gaze to meet Mel’s. “I’m listening.”
“The only thing that matters to me is what’s happening between us, you and me. Other people have nothing to do with what we have, okay?” Insistent gray eyes searched out Regan’s face. “You think I’m all that anxious to share you with the general public, anyway? I like keeping you to myself.”
Regan felt the hot burn of tears in her eyes and brought a shaky hand up to wipe across her face. “Thanks.”
“I just want you to be happy, baby.” Strong fingers reached over and traced a pattern over her damp cheek, a thumb brushed an errant tear from her face. “The only thing that upsets me about your feelings is that they’re so painful for you, and I promise to give you whatever you need to help you deal with them.”
“I’m not sure how I ever found you. I never thought I would get this lucky. Never.” As soon as she’d said the words, her fears almost overwhelmed her.
Losing her relationship with Sarah, even knowing that some of it had to do with her shyness, hadn’t been terribly painful. But it would surely kill her with Mel. She glanced sideways at her lover. Mel might think they could spend the rest of their lives in a happy bubble built for two, but no one could do that. She watched her lover’s expression change to one of unease.
“You think I’m going to get bored and go back to my old habits?” Mel asked with an edge of disappointment.
“I think you’re only human. And I think I would get frustrating after a while.”
“You need to understand something. Yes, I went to bars. It wasn’t because I really enjoyed it. I’ve been with a lot of women. It wasn’t because they were my friends or because I loved them. I don’t want that anymore.” Mel pulled her into a desperate hug. “You are enough for me, Regan. You fill me up. I don’t need anything else. Just you. Whatever you can give me and what I can give you. Please believe me.”
Incredibly, the knot of tension in Regan’s stomach began to ease. “I do believe you,” she whispered, startled to find it was the absolute truth. “I trust you.”
“Just like I trust you,” Mel said. “Isn’t it cool how that works out?”
“It really is.”
Mel gave Regan a blinding, open look of utter joy and pleasure that left her gasping at its brilliance. “This has probably been the best day of my life. And it even started with incredibly hot sex!”
Regan arched an eyebrow in amusement. “Can’t keep your mind out of the gutter for even a minute.”
“And you’re any better? Besides, you love it. I know you do.”
“Prove it,” Regan said, relaxing into their familiar banter.
“Prove that you love it?” Mel snickered. “Trust me, I have plenty of ways I can prove it. And you’d definitely enjoy them all.”
“And if I did?”
“Then I guess I’ll have proven it, won’t I?”
“You know what?” Regan said. “Forget all this ‘proving it’ shit. Let’s just fuck instead.”
Mel tipped her head back and laughed, a deep, sonorous sound that rumbled up from her belly and exploded out her mouth. She shook with loud guffaws for a good minute, during which time Regan simply sat back and watched with a delighted grin. Finally, wiping tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, she regained control and leaned back with a happy sigh. “I really like you, O’Riley.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, Raines.”
“Come here,” Mel said, and encouraged Regan to crawl between outspread legs. She settled down with her back against Mel’s chest, grinning as strong arms came around her middle. “We’ll keep driving in a couple minutes, okay? I just want a little more of this moment with you.”
“So do I,” Regan murmured. “Being here with you is really making me look at everything through different eyes.”
At Mel’s hum of agreement, Regan opened her mouth to share a sudden, perhaps slightly silly, epiphany. It struck her how nerdy she was going to sound, and she hesitated while she struggled with whether to say anything at all.
“What?” Mel asked lazily. “Tell me.”
“Am I a complete geek if I’ve found a programming analogy in all this? In what we’ve been talking about with, you know, making changes and growing?”
Mel chuckled, kissing Regan’s temple and nuzzling auburn hair with her nose. “You do realize that you’re adorable, right?”
“As opposed to a complete geek?”
“Hush,” Mel said. “I’m interested to hear this. What’s the analogy?”
“Well, I don’t know how much you know about programming, or what you remember from your college class, so this may be totally worthless to you. Hell, it may be totally worthless in any event, but—”
“Tell me,” Mel commanded.
“Do you know what an infinite loop is?”
The way Mel’s body trembled in response startled Regan and she sat there, half in shock, as a wild burst of laughter escaped from Mel’s mouth. “That wasn’t even the really geeky part,” she pointed out.
“Oh, baby, I’m not laughing at you.” Mel stifled her laughter with obvious effort, wiping away the tears that had leaked from the corners of her eyes. “You just happened to bring up the one programming concept I’ll never forget, because it’s the reason I got a C- on my final exam.”
Regan grinned in sympathy. “Trust me, I had my share of infinite loops back in the day.”
Mel scrunched up her face in playful self-disgust. “I was so proud of that answer, but I didn’t have a chance to test it before our time was up. I was supposed to keep doing whatever it was that I was doing—incrementing a timer, I think—until x was equal to twenty. Of course I forgot to increase the value of x at the end of my loop, so x never stopped equaling 1. The professor came over to check my work and my program just kept running…and running…”
“That sucks,” Regan said, wholly empathetic. “When you’re dealing with records in a database, you do something similar. Maybe you want to do something with each one of a bunch of records you retrieve until you reach the end of the records. At the end of your loop, you’d tell the recordset to move to the next record, and to do what it’s doing while there are still records left. But if you forget to move to the next record, you’ll never get past the first record, and you’ll never get to the end of the records—”
“And you’ll be stuck in an infinite loop.”
“Exactly. So I was thinking that people can kind of get themselves into infinite loops, too.”
“Yeah?” Mel murmured. “Like me?”
“Well, yeah,” Regan said. “And me. Things happen that get us into habits, bad habits, and we get stuck in this endless pattern of behavior, accomplishing nothing. Like we forget the move next command. You said you felt old because nothing was changing, right? I think that’s it exactly. Fear keeps people doing the same old thing, no matter how miserable it makes them. It’s unhealthy, and pointless.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“People are like that, though. Doing the same stupid shit every day, making the same mistakes.”
Mel smiled. “Why do you worry so much about telling me what you’re thinking? This makes sense.”
Regan’s cheeks warmed at the compliment. “So you know what happens to a program stuck in an infinite loop, right?”
“It crashes.”
Regan nodded and turned her face to press a kiss against Mel’s throat. “So I’m glad we’ve decided to get out of our infinite loops. And I’m really glad I can share nerdy shit like that with you.”
“I like hearing how your mind works. And honestly, something about nerd-speak turns me on beyond all reason.”
“Then I really am the luckiest girl in the world, aren’t I?” Regan beamed up at the blue sky. “Because, honey, I am all kinds of bursting with nerd-speak.”
Mel grimaced. “Sounds like a personal problem. And painful, too.”
Regan pinched the tan arm that lay across her belly. “I’ll give you painful if you’re not careful, darling.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Regan said. “Plenty of pain. Maybe even the good kind, if you ask nicely enough.”
Mel sat up a little, still holding on to Regan. “Oh! Speaking of pain—”
“Always a sign of a cheerful topic change.”
“Be quiet,” Mel laughed. “I just wanted to tell you that I decided how I always want to remember this day. This whole trip, really. This has all been so important to me.”
“Me, too,” Regan said. “But what does how you want to remember all of this have to do with pain?”
“Because I’m going to get a tattoo,” Mel said. Her voice was light, happy, and it made Regan shiver with pure bliss. “To commemorate this trip, and meeting you, and everything.”
“A tattoo?”
“Yeah. I’ve thought about getting one before, but if I mark myself I want it to be something really important to me. Nothing was ever important enough before now. But I think this is perfect, don’t you?”
Regan licked her lips at a fantasy image of Mel wearing some ink. “Perfect. I think it’s a great idea, actually. I’ve thought about getting a tattoo before. But frankly, I’m chicken.”
“About the pain?”
“Pretty much, yeah,
” Regan said. “You know, my parents used to always tell me that they’d disown me if I came home with a tattoo or piercing. They weren’t completely serious, of course, but I know they’d freak out. They’re pretty conservative.”
“And they raised you?” Mel joked. Regan shrugged, and Mel said, “So you’re chicken about the pain and the disownment?”
“Oh, no. The freaking the parents out factor is actually a plus. Little did they know that it was the pain and not their threats that kept me from doing it,” Regan said. “I take secret delight in confounding them. I think it’s an unconscious reaction to feeling like they don’t know me at all. Sometimes it’s just fun to prove it.”
“We could get tattoos together,” Mel suggested. Kissing Regan’s neck, she mumbled, “I think it’d be an incredible bonding experience.”
“Um,” Regan said, and tilted her head to bare her throat for Mel’s mouth. “Remember that whole pain thing?”
“It’s your decision, baby, but you shouldn’t let a little pain stop you. I’ve heard it’s not that bad.” She scraped her teeth along Regan’s neck, then sucked on pale flesh. “And I’ll hold your hand. And tell you how sexy you are.”
Be brave, Regan. She shifted in Mel’s lap, sighing at the attention being lavished on her by her lover. Isn’t that what you’ve decided today? That you should start being brave?
“You think it’d be sexy?”
Mel grinned hard against her neck. “And how.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Dave and Buster’s?” Regan squeaked. “You’re taking me to Dave and Buster’s?”
Mel pulled into an empty spot at the rear of the parking lot. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Mel, I’ve never even met a woman who wanted me to talk about video games, let alone take me to a restaurant specializing in them.” Regan could hear the unreserved excitement in her own voice and almost laughed at herself. There was no way to explain what it meant to her that Mel was doing this just for her. Instead, she unbuckled her seatbelt and launched her body into Mel’s arms. “This is awesome, baby. The second you mentioned playing Shamus on Atari, of all things, I knew that you were the perfect woman. You just keep proving it over and over again.”
Infinite Loop Page 24
