Warm Heart

by Amy Lane

  Tevyn didn’t let him down.

  His glide into Mallory’s body was so welcome Mallory almost wept with the completeness of it. The next few moments were a long, slow power-fuck, and Mallory couldn’t have stopped the noises coming from his throat if his life had been at stake. He needed this. He needed every second, every millimeter, every thrust.

  The orgasm washing up from his balls was a surprise only because he would have thought he’d been wrung dry by now. Not quite. Slow, painful, it racked his entire body, spilling hot and salty in a chafing spurt. Tevyn gave a holler behind him and collapsed, sweaty, the cloak Mallory had worn on his back for most of the night.

  As he sprawled on the bed, facedown, Tevyn kissing his back and neck, his phone buzzed into the silence.

  “God,” Tevyn moaned. “Already?”

  Mallory half laughed. “It’s nine,” he said softly. “Time to get ready.”

  “No.”

  Mallory wriggled, dislodging Tevyn and then rolling over to kiss him messily, morning dick breath and all.

  “Yes,” he said. “C’mon, baby. You know you need to go.”

  The night before, sometime between round two and round three, Charlie had called and asked them if they wanted to go out to dinner or if they were staying in for room service. Mallory had already been looking at the menu.

  Then she’d told them that Tevyn’s flight left at 11:30 a.m., and Lyft would be there at 9:30. Mallory had set his (brand-new and awkward) phone for nine at the time, thinking it was unnecessary. He was an early riser. Tevyn was too—why would they need an alarm?

  He hadn’t counted on round three, four, or, just now, five.

  “Of course I need to go,” Tevyn groused, sounding younger than Mal for the first time since… since the night he’d asked Mallory to stay. “I….” He ran his fingertips lightly through Mallory’s sweaty beard. “I want to see what you look like again after you shave this,” he said with a wink.

  “I’ll send you a picture—shit.”

  Tevyn chuckled. “Don’t have a phone yet. I may have to buy one at the damned airport.”

  “Dammit. You take mine. I’ll get my own today. I’ll have time after we visit the hospital. Charlie and I might have time to drive home if Damien’s stable, and I’ll catch a flight from San Francisco.” It was a bigger airport; the odds of getting a flight were much better.

  “So I’ll have all your settings?” Tevyn teased. He knew as well as Mallory that about all Mal had time to do was add Charlie to his contact list. He’d planned to import her contacts later that day—hopefully after they saw that Damien was going to be all okay and they were driving home to his apartment.

  “Yup. Charlie. And, you know.” He sobered. “Me.”

  “You’re the only one I need,” Tevyn said, grim and shiny-eyed. “I don’t want to go without you.”

  Mallory swallowed. “I don’t want to let you go. But Missy needs to see a familiar face.”

  “And Damien deserves to have one of us there.”

  And that was the hell of it and the absolute truth.

  “If you begged me to stay, I would,” Tevyn said, and Mallory’s eyes burned. He’d thought he’d been vulnerable splayed out for Tevyn’s pleasure. That was nothing to what Tevyn had just given him.

  “But I love you,” Mallory rasped. “So I won’t. Because I’m going to trust this isn’t the end. That nothing will stop us from finding a way.”

  Tevyn nodded and dashed the back of his hand over his eyes. “I’m being silly,” he confessed. “I—I fell in love with you because you would always be there when I needed you.”

  “And I fell in love with you because you would always be strong enough to do what needed to be done.”

  They kissed, one more time, and Tevyn rolled away to shower.

  Mallory joined him, their hands on each other sensual but not sexual. This was simply a way to not let go for another ten minutes, that was all. Tevyn didn’t have a bag to pack, even—all he had was another pair of those dreadful underwear to put on clean. Tevyn had time to watch him shave, staring in wonder as a leaner, sharper version of Mallory’s face emerged from the dark, week-old beard he’d grown in the wilderness. When he was done Tevyn caressed his soft, newly exposed skin, then stepped back and took a quick picture.

  Mal gasped, embarrassed. He was wearing a towel and nothing else. “Tevyn!”

  “Mine,” Tevyn said simply. “I want to show people I’ve got someone. ‘Who?’ they’ll say. ‘This guy. He’ll take care of me.’”

  Mallory cupped the back of his head and pulled him forward in his own claiming kiss. “I will.”

  “He’ll make my dreams come true.”

  Because that’s what Mallory had tried to do from the very beginning.

  “With every breath,” Mallory vowed.

  “Good. I’ll see you in a few. Text me when you have a new number.”

  One more kiss, and he was gone.

  Charlie was uncharacteristically silent as she piloted her Element through Sacramento traffic to the Med Center. “These people have no idea how easy they have it,” she muttered. “If I was trying to find a parking spot in San Francisco, I’d have to bring a goat, a knife, and a sacred object.”

  “I think in Sacramento they settle for an IPA and some artisan bread,” Mallory bantered back, and Charlie laughed shortly.

  “How are you?”

  What was he going to say? Sore? Heart sore? Irritated at the gods of time, space, and mortality?

  “Tired.”

  “Yeah, that much I gathered. I gotta say, I’m liking you without the beard. Tevyn could wear it—sort of that beatnik-surfer-kid thing he’s got going. You, not so much.”

  “He didn’t shave this morning—I think he agrees.”

  She grunted and took a turn into the gleaming white multilevel parking garage boasted by the Med Center. “So. Am I getting any details today?”

  “Did you get any with Keith?” he countered, not sure he was ready to spill so soon after Tevyn had been inside of him.

  “Occasionally. For example, you once told me he was one and done and blowjobs every other Thursdays.”

  “I was drunk!” Oh God. Mallory needed to warn Tevyn not to let him drink, ever.

  “Do you lie when you’re drunk?” she asked, like she didn’t know the answer to that.

  “No.” He went home with porn stars and got loud in bed—but apparently he got loud in bed anyway, so maybe it was just the porn model that came with the alcohol. Either way, he didn’t lie. As he’d told Tevyn, his sex life with Keith had been pleasant.

  What had happened the night before—and this morning—had not been “pleasant.” It had been earth-shattering, pleasure-to-pain uncomfortable, and glorious.

  “So tell me the truth now,” Charlie said, her lips twisting as she found them a parking spot on the fourth floor. “How was last night?”

  “I hit the octave above high C,” Mallory said with a completely straight face. “I’m pretty sure the people next to us called the front desk for another room—and those walls aren’t thin.”

  Charlie parked the car and burst out laughing, so loudly and so hysterically, Mallory checked twice to make sure she’d turned off the ignition and wasn’t a danger to anyone nearby.

  “What?” he asked. “You wanted the truth!”

  “I don’t know… I sort of wish it had been a bust!” she told him. “I wish he’d been a selfish punk in bed, so I could say ‘I told you so’ and you wouldn’t have to move to Colorado for the summers!”

  Aw. Charlie.

  “We need to fix the cabin up first,” he said, like the idea of visiting in Colorado for the summer, in that little cabin at the base of a ski resort mountain, didn’t make him insanely happy. “But I’m not giving up Mom’s house on the peninsula. I finally got everything painted the way I like it. He’s a wanderer, Charlie. Anywhere I make my home, he’ll come wandering back.”

  She cocked her head. “You’re awfully confid
ent. That’s not like you at all.”

  Mallory smiled a little, not sure if he could explain. “He asked me to stay with him. The night before the crash. And I stayed with him to calm him down, because Missy was dying and he was hurting. And the next day the world exploded, and I said, ‘You should go down the mountain without us,’ and you know what he said?”

  “You told him what?” she asked, visibly upset.

  “I said he should go bring help. And he refused. He said it was all of us or none of us. And he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘You promised you’d stay.’ Because that meant something to him. Because he’d been in love with me all along, but he didn’t believe I’d be there for him until we got down that mountain together. So yeah, I believe in him, Charlie. He believed in me, and it got me down the mountain alive. I believe in him right back, and it’s going to get us through the next couple of weeks, and it’s going to get us through our crazy schedules and his career. I believe, dammit. You should too.”

  “Why would you do that?” she asked, obviously back at the first thing he’d said. “Why would you tell him to go down without you?”

  Mallory grimaced. “Because he had a better chance at survival. I… I didn’t want to think of a world without him.”

  She scrubbed at her eyes. “I am so mad at you right now I can’t even…. Go. Go say hi to Damien. Go make sure he’s okay. I’ll be out here trying to find words for exactly why—”

  He kissed her cheek. “You’re mad because you almost lost me, sweetheart. And I would have felt awful about leaving you. But I didn’t. So maybe stop obsessing about how my love life is screwing with your perception of reality and remember why you love me in the first place.”

  “Because you can say things like that with a straight face,” she said sourly. “Fine. By the way, can I say giving him your phone was both chivalrous and impossibly dumb?”

  “We’re getting another one today, right?”

  She grunted and looked at her own phone, which was buzzing quietly. “Yeah. But he just told me he was boarding the plane and he wants me to tell you he loves you. That’s what’s dumb, because I haven’t been this girl since high school.”

  Mallory winked at her. “Your taste in shoes is way better than it was in high school.” When they’d met in college, she’d been all combat boots and plaid shirts. Now she was all Louboutin and Jimmy Choo.

  “Should I tell him you love him too?” she asked with acid in her voice.

  “Tell him safe travels, and I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Mallory told her mildly. “He’ll know it’s me that way.”

  She sighed. “You’re impossible, you know that? You used to do that to me in college. ‘Yeah, I signed up for this super hard business course that everybody’s afraid of but it looks challenging. Do it with me, it’ll be fun!’”

  “And it was,” Mallory said, heading for the skybridge that took them to the ICU.

  “Yeah, but there I was, hyperventilating, and you just kept smiling. ‘Yeah, look, they’ve got an office in the superbig skyscraper with a helicopter pad—let’s lease it!’ And you’d done all the math and we could afford it, but I was still hyperventilating and you were like, ‘Makes total sense!’ Remember?”

  “That was only six years ago, Charlie. I’m not senile.”

  “But you do that!” she complained, following him. “You look at these things that everyone else thinks are impossible, and you’ve done the math and the logic, and you… you….”

  “Sled down the hill on an airplane wing behind the one guy on the planet who could actually steer the damned thing without killing us all?”

  “Click,” she said, her perfectly made-up eyes widening. “And it all makes sense.”

  He smiled and kept walking.

  “You know,” she said, keeping up in high heels, because Charlie could. “You might want to tell him about how you do that.”

  “Do what?” he asked, all innocence.

  “Never mind. You know? Never mind. By now, he probably already knows.”

  Their banter faded then, because they had entered the ICU. Charlie had texted, and they followed the directions to Damien’s room, arriving in time to see Preston emerge from the sliding glass door and dart away from them to the other end of the hallway.

  “That doesn’t bode well,” Charlie murmured.

  “That’s Preston.”

  “Oh, he’s the one who always had the service dog with him.” Charlie’s voice dropped. “Anxiety?”

  “I think he doesn’t do well with people.” Mallory thought there might be more to it than that, but Preston was smart—he’d helped his brother draw up the business plan—and intuitive. Glen and Damien couldn’t say enough good things about him, and if he was shy around strangers, well, who wasn’t? Mallory’s job was to accept people for what they could do and not be mad at them for what they couldn’t.

  They slid into the room Preston had vacated and saw Glen, scowling at an awake Damien and muttering to himself.

  “Bad time?” Mallory asked, going to the bedside to shake Damien’s hand.

  Damien squeezed his tight and smiled. He looked better and awful at the same time.

  “How’s it going?” Mallory asked because obviously something was going on.

  “Well, they saved the leg,” Damien said, sounding vastly relieved.

  “Which is great and all,” Glen muttered, “but it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be part of the company without it.”

  Mallory thought about the controls of the helicopter. “Aren’t they all hand controls? I mean, it’s not like you step on the gas or hit the brake, right?”

  Damien scowled. “I don’t want to be a burden, like I was on the mountain—”

  Mallory scowled back. “We couldn’t have done what we did without you, you know that, right? It had to be three of us or none of us.”

  “You had to drag my ass down—”

  “And what if we did?” Mal snapped. “If it had been me, would you have just left me in the shelter with a batch of firewood and hoped for the best?”

  “No!” Damien rasped. “But I’m the one who crashed the stupid helicopter in the first place. You and Tevyn didn’t say one damned thing about it, but—”

  “But your intel said thirty knots!” Glen shouted, and they all winced, because raised voices in the ICU weren’t cool. “You were told it was safe, then those winds spiked out of nowhere. I looked at the weather patterns, Damien—I was trying to figure out where the hell you were, remember? Everything we had said you took off in thirty knots, and it should have been choppy but doable. You followed your flight plan. A rush of wind through that damned canyon spiked up and knocked you on your ass. You can’t plan for shit like that! And you can’t blame yourself, and you can’t feel crappy because you got hurt.”

  “Preston won’t even look at me,” Damien mumbled, and Mallory pinned Glen with a whole other glare.

  “Why not?”

  Glen looked away. “Because Damien worried him,” he said. “Me and Damie are the two people in the world he actually talks to. Losing Damien—that would be like losing a lung for Preston. It… it’s hard, when you relate to dogs better than people.”

  “Damien, he cares about you,” Mallory soothed. “You need to calm down and stop stressing your friends out, okay?”

  “Where’s Tevyn?” he asked fitfully.

  “On a plane to Colorado.” He had to breathe through that. It was too soon to let him go.

  “Why aren’t you with him?” Damien demanded, and Mal squeezed his hand again.

  “Because our friend was in surgery and we needed to know he was going to be okay before both of us deserted him.”

  Damien blew out a breath. “Thanks,” he mumbled. “I… I’m being a whiny asshole. But thank you. I know how much you want to be with him right now.”

  “Well, we dragged you down a mountain, Damien. Can’t just leave you now.”

  Damien let go of his hand and waved him to a chair. “Sit. I
need to give you pointers for how to deal with the press.”

  Mallory smiled with all teeth. “You have pointers for that?”

  “Yeah. They start with making sure the back of your gown is tied. The whole world got a load of your backside when you stepped in front of Tevyn and started shooing people out of the room.”

  Mallory’s eyes went wide, and Charlie let out a choked guffaw. “How’d my ass look?” he asked numbly.

  “Scrawny. Tell me you’ve eaten since then.”

  “Two whole times. Skipped breakfast. Felt self-indulgent.” The truth was, he hadn’t even been hungry.

  Damien scowled. “Yeah. I’m still on IV fluids.” His eyes fluttered closed for a moment, and then he opened them. “I’ve got one more surgery,” he said. “This afternoon. Stay till tomorrow, okay? I….” He looked at Glen. “I’d love to see Preston too.”

  Glen nodded. “I’ll make sure he knows. Sleep, man. I’ll keep Mal company.”

  Damien’s eyes shut for what looked like real sleep, and Mallory sighed and looked at Charlie. “You can go home,” he said. “I’ll get on the plane from here instead.”

  She grunted. “I’d stay here, Mal, but….”

  “But we sort of have a business to run,” he muttered. “You know what the only thing I actually brought with me to Donner Summit was, right?”

  “Your laptop? Yeah, I know. I gave Glen your IP address so he could try to track you, but, you know….”

  “It all slid off the mountain with the chopper. Yeah. Tell you what. If you go get me a laptop and a phone, I’ll stay here with Glen and set everything up.”

  Charlie grunted. “Fine. I liked my plan of going into the city better, but fine. I’ll water your plants again—they survived last week, they can survive now.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  She stood and kissed his cheek. “An excuse to go shopping. I should thank you. K Street, right?”

  “Yup,” Glen told her. “And if Mallory’s going to stay, I could use a lift there and back. Damien’s going to want some of his own clothes too. Tevyn’s go bag was the right choice to save, but all Damie’s clothes are back in his apartment in Burlingame.”

  They left, and Mallory sank into the overstuffed chair. The ICU was a scary place—tubes and machines and quietly efficient hospital personnel. But they’d done their best to make visitors comfortable, and that was kind.