by Carly Keene
But there’s nothing for it now. It’s 6:28 a.m., I’m almost late, and I still don’t have shoes on.
When I throw on my Nikes and come out of the locker room, there he is. He’s still in his dark blue uniform and steel-toe boots, facing away from me, standing in the middle of a clump of nurses, including Emma and Lisa. And I’d be super annoyed, but he appears to be backing out of the entanglement in the friendliest possible way, saying he’s happy to meet them and happy he’ll be working with them. Then he turns around and sees me, and smiles with his whole face. My entire insides go gooey as warm caramel, because Troy Mueller smiling has the same effect as a beautiful sunny day when you’re sick of winter.
I’m so screwed. I am so. Screwed.
FOUR
Troy
My God, she’s still so beautiful. So much else, too, but so beautiful.
“Willie’s?” I ask, watching her sling her tote bag over her shoulder. The little knot of nurses around me starts murmuring, but I ignore that.
“I thought Waffle Hut,” she counters. “It’s closer.”
“Food’s better at Willie’s. In Carver Ward, you know it?”
She tilts her head to one side, not looking at me. Nods. “Okay.”
“Will you drive? My Jeep’s at the station.”
This time she looks at me. “Okay.”
The familiar waft of Chanel No. 5 off her sweater has my chest aching. My Dee. She’s clearly tired, but that pulse at her throat is busy. Her hair’s a bit darker, or maybe it’s just damp. There are tiny lines near her eyes and mouth, and this fills me with a sad tenderness, because we’ve spent the past eight years apart. Same lovely pink mouth. A deep breath has her beautiful tits rising under that baggy sweater, and I have to tell my dick to calm the fuck down.
We start out the ambulance bay door, heading for the employee parking lot.
“So how is it that you’re in the area?” she asks, direct as ever.
I lay my path out briefly for her as we’re walking: inpatient rehab and Alcoholics Anonymous. She nods. I tell her about EMT training and certification, and my two years working near Charlottesville. Two years working the east side of Richmond. Recent transfer to Short Pump due to administrative personnel-shuffling.
“You’re doing well, then,” she says firmly. She stops next to a beat-up white Camry. “This is me.”
I’m surprised to recognize it, and then I’m not surprised at all. “You’re still driving your brother’s old car?”
“It still gets good gas mileage,” she says, defensively. “And it’s paid for.”
I nod, fighting the bittersweet feeling of knowing her.
“What?” she snaps, unlocking the doors.
“You don’t change much,” I say, hearing the nostalgia in my voice. We get in. I have to slide the seat back to accommodate my legs, as usual. I take a deep breath. “I have. I’m not the same guy I was when I last saw you.”
“I hope so,” she says acidly, latching her seatbelt. “Because you had your head completely up your butt back then.”
Good old Dee, unwilling to say “ass.” I smile.
When she starts the ignition, the car roars like she’s been pressing on the gas pedal, and she makes an exasperated noise.
“No, you’re right. I had my head firmly located up my posterior. Took a lot of therapy in rehab to show me that, but I know my behavior was pretty shitty.”
She shoots me a suspicious side glance and pulls out of the parking space.
There are eight million questions I want to ask her on the short drive to Willie’s, but I hold back. I let her interrogate me about what my brother’s doing now (the Navy), and whether my friend Mokembe is enjoying playing defensive back for the Chargers (yes, and I miss him). I let her catch me up on her friends. I know what this is: she’s putting up her walls between us, not letting me get too personal.
Which means she’s nervous and on edge. Which means she’s remembering a lot of things about us, when there was an Us. Which means that maybe she’s wishing there still was an Us.
Because Deena is perfectly capable of ignoring me the way countless Southern ladies have ignored social undesirables over the last couple of centuries, and she didn’t do that. She agreed to breakfast in my company. Of course, she could simply be planning to tell me to go fuck myself in a very public place, but that doesn’t sound much like the girl I used to know. A straight-shooter concerned with propriety, my Dee.
We pull into a parking space on the street in front of Willie’s, and I hop out, intending to go open her door for her, but she’s already stepping out of the car by the the driver’s side. Very efficient, my Deena.
This street’s not very busy before 7 a.m., not like downtown, but I hear sirens close by. Very suddenly there’s the noise of a speeding car behind us, and the sirens are much louder. I take a fraction of a second to look behind me, and I don’t waste another piece of that second to hustle her out of the street by her upper arm, pressing her against the front of the building while a white sportscar followed by a cop car go tearing past.
I stand there pressed against her, feeling my heart rate jacked by adrenaline, feeling the softness of her breasts against my chest and the warmth of her breath on my throat. We’re both breathing fast. I let the siren fade in the distance before I start to ease my weight back onto my heels. It’s then I notice that her hand is bunched up in the fabric of my shirt.
“You okay?” My voice is hoarse from adrenaline and desire.
“Yes.” Hers is breathy, and the remembered sound of it has me back at full-mast inside my duty pants.
I don’t let go of her. But she doesn’t let go of me, either. She tilts her face up to mine. The longing in her eyes matches the ache in my heart. It is the easiest thing in the world to bend my face to hers and kiss her. I kiss her with all the pain and guilt and need and desire in me, feeling the satiny skin of her lips on mine. Feeling her hand at the back of my head and the little hum in her throat, her body rising up on her toes to be closer. The smell of her skin and her perfume. The taste of her mouth. The thousand thousand ways we still fit together.
The kisses go on, deeper and hungrier, more insistent than the need for food, but we reach a point where it’s either stop kissing or go at it like dogs in the street, and I drag my lips over to her ear. “We can’t keep meeting like this,” I pant into her ear, trying to make light of it.
“I know,” she says, and licks my throat.
I growl. “Stop. Stop, or I’ll fucking take you right here.”
“Is there somewhere close?” she says, her voice husky. I have to close my eyes and fight down the rush of lust that hits my body, but when I look up her gaze is pinned on mine. “Yes,” she says. “It’s like that. I don’t know whether to kill you or rip your clothes off, but now.”
We stare at each other for three seconds. “If you’re going to kill me, you’re going to need some privacy. My apartment’s two minutes away.”
She hands me the keys.
FIVE
Deena
Troy’s right. His apartment is literally two minutes away from Willie’s, and some part of my mind is noticing the shabbiness of the mostly un-rehabbed buildings in this area while the rest of it is thinking how much I’ve missed his touch. How alive I feel around him.
He’s going to break my heart again. But the rush of feeling that swept over me the very second he pushed me out of the path of that speeding car woke me up to how shut-off and dead I’ve been without him, and I’m starting to understand that being hurt is part of being human. I can’t afford to not be human anymore.
He pulls me out of the passenger seat, and I just manage to grab my tote bag before we’re running across the parking lot to his door. He’s fumbling with keys when I reach up to kiss him again, and we practically fall through the door of his first-floor apartment. I barely notice the door locking behind me because I’m unbuttoning his shirt, kicking off my shoes, kissing him, pulling his shirt off, kissing h
im, reaching for his belt buckle, loving the solid length of him under my hand, kissing him, moaning at his warm hands fitting my breasts so wonderfully in the cool air, kissing him. For a few ecstatic seconds our bare bodies are pressed together, and then he’s picking me up. “Bed,” he says firmly.
I want to shriek at him to put me down, it can’t be good for his knee, but in just a few strides my back hits the mattress and I lose what little control I have remaining to me.
Troy’s long fingers are stroking over my breasts, down my waist, to my private parts, and I go mindless with the pleasure of them on me. I’m so wet. I’m so shameless. I spread my thighs for him, running my hands over every part of his body I can reach, and then those clever fingers are finding all the good spots, making me buck my hips and cry out.
Then I can barely reach him anymore, just his hair, and he’s licking me with a rhythm that catches up my whole self and drives me toward the cliff. It doesn’t take long before orgasm has me blind and shaking with pleasure.
When I can see again and the room has stopped spinning, he’s leaning over me. “Be right back. Condom. I think I have some somewhere.”
“No!” I can’t bear the thought of a barrier between us. Not now, when I have abandoned barriers and walls and everything else. I grab his arm and yank him back to me. “I need you, Troy. I need you now.” My voice breaks, and tears start to flow.
“Oh, Deena,” he says in the tenderest voice, and kisses me again.
“Now,” I insist, and I reach for his beautiful penis, hard for me. I guide him to my entrance, rubbing the tip of him over all my most sensitive places. “Now, please.”
And finally, finally, he’s inside me, us fitting together the way we always did and still do, hand in glove. I think he’s crying too, but I’m too swept away by the exquisite torture of the friction of his hard shaft insist my soft aching sheath. I love the way his hair spills down over his shoulders and across my breasts. I love it long like this.
“Baby,” he says in my ear, and kisses my earlobe. “Deena. My love. I missed you so much, baby, I’m so sorry, I would have given anything to have you back again, I’m so sorry,” and finally his words trail off into noises without meaning as we crash into each other, urging each other on to completion.
I lose control completely. “Fuck me, Troy, my lover, fuck me with your gorgeous hard cock, fill up my cunt, please, please don’t stop!” The dirtiest things come out of my mouth while we’re locked together, and I do not care. I just don’t want it to end before it ends.
It finally ends, my body clenched down on his in spasms of climax while he shoots his hot juice inside me. And it’s not going to be enough; it’s only enough for now. We have things to say to each other, further bridges to cross. But this one was, I think, the deepest chasm to bridge.
He slides off me, gasping for air. I’m breathing hard too, but somehow so happy. He kisses my cheek, then my mouth, then my shoulder, and I think he even goes to sleep for just a few seconds, completely spent.
I must have known, somewhere deep inside myself, that it would be easy to forgive him, and that may have been why I resisted it for so long. Why I avoided him. I lie still, wiping tears from my face, and look at him. He’s so beautiful. We’ve missed so much time together.
When his green eyes open, we smile at each other like idiots. “You’re not sorry we did that, are you?” are his first words.
“No.” I cup his cheek in my hand. “Except I’m sorry that I didn’t let you tell me you were sorry.”
“Yeah, that was pretty dumb of you,” he says lightly. “I can only hope it makes you appreciate me more.”
“I think it does.”
“Good. We should appreciate each other a lot now.”
I stretch, feeling that all-over body glow. Then my stomach growls, and Troy laughs. “I have eggs and cheese. How about an omelet?” He hops off the bed naked and holds his arms out for me.
I go into them, smelling the familiar spice-and-musk scent of his skin. I lick one of his nipples, and he exhales sharply, cupping my buttocks and pulling me closer to him. “You’ll go hungry if you don’t stop that.”
“I’ll stop for now,” I admit.
He puts on sleep pants to cook in, and tosses me an old UVa t-shirt that hangs partway down my thighs. I feel almost naked, but in a good way. My stomach growls again, and Troy’s eyes have gone a vibrant, happy green. I feel good from scalp to soles.
SIX
Troy
I can barely keep from humming as I make us a four-egg cheese omelet to split. I put Deena to work on the single-cup coffeemaker, sneaking glances at those long beautiful legs below my old t-shirt. It’s sexy as hell, especially because I know she’s otherwise naked. And once I’ve satisfied our appetite for food, we’ll go satisfy our appetite for each other again.
And again, and again, if I have any say about it.
As I cut the omelet in half and plate it, I can’t stop myself from asking. “Are we together now?” I hand her a plate.
She takes it and sets it on the small table in the dining room just steps from the kitchen. I get out utensils and the half-and-half. She never used to take sugar in coffee, just in iced tea, so I point to the sugar bowl on the table.
To my surprise, she dumps in a spoonful and stirs it, sipping with every evidence of pleasure.
“I love you,” I say without even thinking about it.
Her eyes meet mine. She opens her mouth, and then her eyes fill with tears.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to say it.” I take a big bite of omelet.
“What do you mean, I don’t have to say it?” She sounds a little annoyed.
“I mean, you make decisions with your whole self. If we’ve just made love like that, you’ve decided to forgive me. Whether you can say it yet or not, it’s okay.”
“All’s right with the world?” she says. She’s not eating.
I eat more omelet, thinking how to explain. “It’s easy. I mean, I think it’s easy. You’re probably still going to put me through hell until I apologize sufficiently.” She makes a skeptical noise, but I keep going. “And that’s right. You should expect me to grovel, because it was my fault.” She rolls her eyes. “No, seriously, listen. I fucked up. I fucked up really badly.”
“You sure did.”
“And I know it. And you know it. And we both know how sorry I am. But I think it’s going to take a while for you to really trust me again, and I’m saying that’s okay with me.”
“Why?”
“This is the easy part: because I’m going to be trustworthy. Because I know I am. All I have to do is keep living the way I want to live, and you’ll see. You’ll see I have become the man I always thought I was before the rug got pulled out from under me.” I look at her eyebrows knotted together and the sadness on her face, and I lean across the little table to kiss her forehead. “You’ll see. I promise.”
“Easy for you to say,” she mutters.
I kiss her forehead again. “Yeah. And I promise to stick it out. Even when you’re mad at me for the past, I will be here. I’ll be here for you. Deena, I love you. I’m sorry for being a shithead.”
She toys with a bite of omelet. “You’re sorry for sleeping with that girl?”
Wait, what?
“Sleeping with what girl?”
She gives me a murderous glare. “That girl. The one I saw you kissing at Kembe’s party.”
“Her? I never slept with her. I just kissed her.”
“And groped her,” Deena says grimly. “I saw your hands in her back jeans pockets.”
“Okay, yes. I groped her.” I sigh. It’s truth time. “Because you were looking.”
“Because I was looking,” she repeats, blankly.
Oh damn. Whole truth time. I sigh again, bigger. “Okay. Look, eat something, okay? I know you, you get emotionally volatile when your blood sugar drops.”
“Most people do,” she says, making a face at me. “All right, fine, I’ll ea
t.” She starts forking up omelet.
“Multigrain toast?” I offer. She shakes her head, her hair falling out of her messy bun. “Marmalade? Cherry jam?”
She swallows a bite. “Cherry jam?”
It’s her favorite. I smile to myself as I put two slices of bread into the toaster.
“So tell me why you were kissing someone else while I was looking,” Deena says. I’d be scared of her eviscerating me, if she hadn’t just fucked me forty ways to Sunday. She might be mad, but she’s here. She hasn’t armored up.
I lean against the kitchen cabinets. “You know how it was for me,” I say softly, “when I blew out my knee. Career gone, just like that. And I guess I was just so angry. I couldn’t stand it when people kept reminding what I had left, when I’d lost so much. It just burned me up inside.”
She’s looking at me with that level gaze, really listening.
“I got tired of people telling me to cheer up. It was like everybody wanted to ignore my loss like it was no big deal, I should just shake it off and keep going. Trouble was, I couldn’t see where to go or how to get there. I’d totally lost my gameplan. I couldn’t understand how I could keep going, or even why I’d want to.”
She shakes her head a little. “But you still had so much. You weren’t just a jock, Troy. You never were.”
The toast pops. I put the slices on a plate and butter them, then take the jam out of the fridge and bring everything to the table. When I sit down and hand her a piece of warm crunchy toast, I try to explain. “You’re right. I wasn’t just a jock. But that was a big part of my identity, and I’d just lost who I was. Nobody seemed to get that.” I look right into her eyes. “Even though you were still there for me—when I was cranky and in pain and being the biggest kind of whiny asshole? You didn’t really get it either. And the words just wouldn’t come out of me.”
“When did they start?” she asks, and takes a bite of her jam-smeared toast.
