by Amber Burns
“I love that,” I’m saying ‘love’ a lot. “We have to do it again. Next time I’ll have to pack actually furry cuffs. The towel was probably shitty for you, huh?”
I’m planning our next trip like it’s our wedding.
Vanna doesn’t feel the same way.
Her smile slips and she makes to pull away. I trap her by my side, irritation flaring, sex-associated fatigue disappearing with her rejection.
“Not this again.”
“Amos, please,” she’s trying to get out of my grip, I give it to her. What I don’t allow her to do is scurry into that tough shell of hers: The one that’s keeping her from enjoying life, seizing whatever she wants, what’s within her power to take.
Like me. Like us, dammit.
I sit up and she’s slow, but she’s following me.
“First of all, cover yourself,” Vanna hurries to do as I ask, and I’m no longer enjoying the view of her hard, pink nipples. I need to concentrate on something other than my dick, which is all I’ve been doing since we arrived.
“What did you think was going to happen after our night here?”
She’s quiet, her eyes dropping…
“No,” I catch her chin and bring her to face me. “No more avoiding it, Vanna. Answer my question: What did you think was going to happen after our night here? Did you think we were going to fuck lots and then shake hands come morning, go on our separate ways?”
“N-N-No.”
That fucking stutter always ruins everything.
It’s all I need to hear though. I drop her chin and kick out of the bed, locating my pants before my boxers. Pulling them on I slip on my shirt and hunt for my sneakers.
“Where are you going?”
I stop with my shoes in my hands, flinging them out to the sides with my gesture. “You care?” I’m being rude, and hurtful, and spiteful and everything Amos Fuller, Marine Sergeant and grandson of two upstanding people, isn’t.
Normally.
But nothing about my meeting Vanna, nothing about this week has been normal for me.
I feel like I’m tied to her by some voodoo, hoodoo magic; how can I explain how I want to run to her now and kiss that wobbling mouth, smooth out her pleated brow and fuck her to sleep.
“I’m leaving.” I grumble.
I pause at the door, turning around, nostril flaring. “Answer just one thing and you’ll never see me again, at least not after I drop you off at yours.”
I take her silence as a go-ahead.
“Did you ever miss me? Did you ever dream about me? Did you once pick up the phone and then decide not to call me out of some stupid fear I’d hang up?”
She doesn’t answer and I understand the true sense of being crushed, utterly defeated.
I rally one last time. “So that’s it?”
Far from welcoming me back into her embrace, Vanna clutches the sheets around her and it’s my answer.
I stay as long as it takes me to shove my feet into my sneakers. Grabbing a card key, I split for the door.
I’m not going to stay and look at her, remind myself anymore of how it’ll be the last time to wake up to her face, her smile, her throaty, sexy morning greeting, of how there’s no chance of more sex, marriage in the future, and babies that have her dark hair and eyes and my dry-as-the-desert humor.
No way. Count me so fucking out.
I pass the lobby, ignoring staff out front and the other guests and any passing looks of curiosity at the big, bearded guy heading outside in the cold rain in his sleepwear.
The truck is as good a place to crash tonight; albeit a cold place, but a shelter from the rain and most of the chilly evening. More importantly it’s far from Vanna and her rejection and everything I can no longer have with her.
I kick the door, not caring whether I leave a dent. I’m heartbroken. I see it for what it is now, label all those ill emotions swirling through me, making me want to scream and tear out the hair I don’t even have on my head. Anything to stamp the truth in my mind, Vanna is no longer part of my future.
“Fuck!” I curse loudly, glad for the rain’s steady drumming over the truck.
It was raining that night, too, two days ago when I felt no different watching, not stopping, Vanna running from me.
Only this time I’m doing the running…
And isn’t that really the same thing?
13
It takes exactly six days and a handful of hours to realize I’m home.
Home being the ATL, or as I’m beginning to look at it, home as a thousand and some miles from Albany, New York. My leaving was a blur in one way, but it doesn’t explain why I have the crystal clear reel of throwing Pops’ truck into Park, rushing into my childhood home, packing my suitcase and carry-on backpack, and holing up until sunrise and calling the first car rental store to reserve my ride.
I’d flown into Albany, but I’d be driving out, and using that long, fourteen-hour drive to think.
And think I had.
Not that it helped an ounce. I felt more conflicted by the time I dropped the car off at the store branch in Atlanta and cabbed home. The sight of my two-story, three-bedroom beauty wasn’t even enough to pick me up.
It was, sadly, a remainder of everything I’d lost in bringing back with me, back home.
A future of filling the house with sounds of family couldn’t have been bleaker had I opted out of meeting my sister and her wedding party, had I never set foot in Albany, or at gone the way that brought me crossing Sterling Outfits and Vanna’s sweet, fat ass through the display case.
“Like this?”
Shocked back into the present, I blink and take in the sounds of the loud gym, both from the machines being put to work, the grunts and groans of the early-bird visitors, and more slowly I’m aware of my hand over the outer thigh of my morning appointment.
I move it a little too hastily, wondering how long I’ve been touching the pretty redhead. I’m hoping not too long to give her the wrong sign. But her wide smile, almost cat-like in its spreading of her vibrant pinked lips, suggest a little too long.
Fuck, Fuller. Get your head in the game.
I’m harder on myself than usual.
The flirting usually goes over my head… Okay, sometimes it goes straight to my dick, but that’s when the boobs start to accidently puff up to the top of low-cut spandex tops, the legs are busted out in insanely-short shorts, and the braver ones brush up their scented bodies real close.
My interest hardly goes beyond the physical. And I’ve yet to sleep with any client, mine or otherwise, from the gym.
This girl is a prime example of why I don’t try the ‘wham-bam-thank you ma’am’.
She’s reaching for my hand again, settling it over her thigh and smiling coquettishly. “It reminds me to bend correctly, so that I don’t pull a hamstring or something painful like that.”
I’m sure it does.
“It looks like you got the hang of it,” I try and fail to move my hand. She’s settled her palm over me and holding me against her. Leaving me with little choice save to lean in and attempt to make it inconspicuous.
I only have to remember to keep my cool.
Chicks like this latch on tighter when they sense their actions are actually eliciting some response; never mind if that response is unpleasant.
“I really don’t want to pull a muscle. I have an important presentation today. Well, my boss does, but I’m helping pass out portfolios and all that, so I don’t want to be limping all day, right?”
“Sure.”
A one-syllable answer is all I got for her. I’m busy counting down the minutes until I’m free of her for another morning.
Meanwhile I keep my hand rigid over her thigh. Flat and rigid, waiting for her to lift up from the leg stretch, and toss her long red ponytail painfully close to my face, before saying, “That’s a good warm-up, but we should probably hit the weights now.”
We only started to warm up with the leg stretches, but I’d rat
her her move away from me lifting weights than this form of molestation.
Could I sue her for sexual harassment?
As I flip through the forms I read more than a year and a half ago when I got the position at the gym, I’m aware of her buzzing on with her monologue in the background.
“Just a bit more,” she’s going in for leg stretch Number God-I-lost-count. “Besides, you were telling me about your trip. I love New York. Did you go to Broadway? Oh, tell me you went on an evening walk through Central Park? Bryant Park and Battery are really beautiful, too. Super romantic.”
“And, if you haven’t already, Bronx Zoo is just the sweetest place to watch cute little animals. It’s also, like, a really great first-date kind of place. Anyways, what did you do in the city?”
“I didn’t go to that city.” I grit out.
I shouldn’t have told her anything. But she bounced in, as usual, and started whining about having to work without me for ‘a whole week’, completely ignoring the fact she’d been assigned, like all of my appointments last week, to another capable trainer and fellow employee.
“Where did you go then if not the Big Apple?”
No one really calls it the Big Apple, but what I say is, “Albany, actually. Real swell place, too.”
“Never heard of it,” she bounces back pretty quickly though. A bunny on speed, this one. “So what did you do there? Family stuff? Vacation?”
“A bit of both.”
“Did you go up alone?”
Yes, and I came back alone. Now shut the fuck up and give me my hand back, lady.
I make a noise from my throat, more of a groan than anything, hoping this will keep her quiet since she’s decided to ransack my hand.
It doesn’t.
“That’s cool, I guess. I mean, I usually love the whole road trip thing with friends or family or a boyfriend, you know. Don’t have any of those any more – the boyfriend, I mean. Not since Dwayne, my last ex, decided to fudge with my computer and phone: He thought I was cheating when I ended up catching him man-whoring himself…”
“Sorry, TMI, I know. He just makes my blood boil. Um, where were we? Oh, yeah! So what did you do in Aubrey?”
“Albany.”
“That’s what I said, didn’t I? Anyways, what did you do in Albany?” she giggles, at what, I’m not sure. If this is the start of her trying to make this an inside joke, then I’m so done.
I’d love to tune her out, too, but it’s hard with her leaning forward, forcing me to follow and bringing my ear close to her mouth and her sunny voice.
Damn. How can anyone be so fucking cheerful this early in the day?
“No, seriously, it should be illegal to be that happy this early.” I’m posing the question almost an hour later – finally having extricated myself from my peppy redhead appointment – in the boss’ office. “Just tack it up there on the front door alongside the rules that bans dogs, rollerblades, skateboards, nudity and being shoeless. ‘No Morning People Welcome’.”
Jordan’s more of a friend than a boss. From a long line of police officers, detectives and military personnel, he not only ventured from the long-standing tradition to serve, he started his own business at twenty-two and opened this gym, the most recent of three branches, two in Georgia and one in Texas.
We met through his brother, a fellow Marine who’s still serving his country, and we’ve been tight ever since. Jordan was a phone call away to giving me this job, yet he always reminds me that it was my qualifications for the job that got me the position, not some sort of obscene loyalty-slash-sympathy for the Marine struggling to get on his feet as a civvy.
It’s also why I’m speeding through a transfer form.
“You’re going to have to get one of the others to pick this girl up. I’d do it, but then I’d have to face calling favorites.” Jordan chewed into his apple, clearing my form, and signing with a monogram fountain pen.
He’s also the only guy who could get away in this heat in a suit and manage to keep from looking like a douche.
“There, signed and sealed. Not sealed, but it’s signed. Get a signature from one of the others, maybe try Serena or Jessie, girls tend to put up with more crap like that.”
I do manage to corner one of the female trainers, Jessie and manage a trade. It isn’t until three other clients – most of whom I want to dump, that an epiphany settles over me: Maybe it’s all me.
I’m returning the paperwork to Jordan’s office for filing when the boss pokes his balding head out and beckons me over.
“Just the man I wanted to see. You got my phone ringing off the wall.”
“Your phone’s not on the wall.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just pick the phone up and use that smart mouth to stop the caller from calling me again. Cool?” He waves a dark hand, his finger rings glinting in a not douche-y way, which I mean ostentatious. Jordan is so fucking far from that.
He grabs a twenty from his wallet and a folder, heading for the door again. “Lunch, and if that’s your transfer form then toss it on my desk after you clean up here,” he’s talking about the phone.
I settle the form on Jordan’s desk and answer as my boss clears out. “Amos Fuller speaking.”
“You are a hard man to get hold of, Mr. Fuller.” I pull the receiver from my ear, searching my poor database of female voices to ID the caller. I have no aptitude for voice memory; no amount of Marines training and dedicated service could tune my ears.
Kinda like how my ears fail me when I sing.
“Exactly who wants to get hold of me?” the phone is back on my ear, curiosity and suspicion deepening my tone.
I don’t scare off the caller.
She’s laughing. “A week later and you’ve already forgotten me. My, Mr. Fuller, you are the charmer.” The laughter still in her voice, she saves me from asking again, making more of a fool of myself at her humor’s expense. “It’s Violet Sterling from Sterling Outfits in Albany, also Vanna’s sister. Ringing any bells here?”
At the mention of Vanna and I’m tensing, dangerously close to crushing Jordan’s phone in my hand.
I am a little annoyed, and it flares out.
“It hasn’t been a week.”
A petulant response that toes around the source of my irritation, the real problem, but Violet being Violet laughs it off the way I’ve grown used to in the week I’ve known her.
“Don’t be like that. I’m joking. It’s nice to hear from you. You’re a hard man to reach, Amos.”
“I’ve been told. How did you get this number?”
I like Violet. However, I don’t want to get sucked up into a friendship, long distance or otherwise. I couldn’t be her friend and handle knowing Vanna’s close by to everyone but me.
Another thing my girl ruined for me along with a possible friendship with her kid sister, my libido, any hope for a wife and brats of my own, and my mood.
I realize I’ve been more sensitive than usual, and this girly shit’s getting on my nerves. Falling in love sucks and the only thing I’d love to get sucked is my cock.
That’s right. Love can suck my dick.
“What about Iris?” I’ve meandered back into the conversation, catching the tail-end of Violet’s response.
“We had her number in our database, like all our clients – security purposes and all that business stuff.” Thanks to me, that is. Iris wouldn’t have heard of Sterling Outfits if I didn’t suggest she try the styling and consignment services of the Sterling siblings, specifically Violet and big brother Wes.
Violet’s saying, “She gave me your home and work contacts. I called your place, you didn’t pick up so I called this number.” Jordan’s office is where all our calls are directed. The boss-man likes to do everything himself, though he does have Marnie, his PA and beautiful mulatto girlfriend, a real stunner.
“If this is getting you in hot water though, I’ll be happy to call at a private number. Maybe your cell since I’m figuring you’re not at home.”
&nbs
p; I cut her off. “I don’t give it out easily, but I do have cell.” I’m growing prickly the longer this call is going. “What do you want, Violet? I don’t mean to be rude, but yeah, we don’t have much to talk about last I recall.”
I can hear her deep inhale and I don’t like the sound of it.
“Promise you won’t hang up.”
“Fine, but only if you talk fast; I have a client waiting on me,” and that’s a lie.