Love Letters Volume 2: Duty to Please
Page 4
They’d nearly run the last block. Partly out of impatience, but partly because they were freezing. They hadn’t bothered to go back to the spot on the beach where they left their shoes and his shirt. On the boat, he’d been pumped full of adrenaline and had barely noticed how cold it was. Now that the situation was under control, the wind whipping across his dripping shorts sent a chill running from his skin straight through to his bones. Judging by the sound of Ciara’s chattering teeth, she felt the same way.
“Strip,” he said the minute they walked in the front door. “I’ll start the shower.”
He headed toward the bathroom, shedding his shorts and boxers on the way. He’d worry about picking them up later. Right now, he needed to get them both warmed up.
As he closed the shower curtain and pulled up on the diverter, she walked in the door.
“I’m not sure I’m ever going to get warm again.”
“I’m pretty sure I can help with that.”
He grabbed her and she shrieked, but it didn’t stop him from pulling her in close and kissing her. Her hard nipples pressed against his chest.
“Enough. Get in there.” He nudged her toward the shower, smacking her ass as she lifted her foot up over the edge of the tub. “I’ll be right back.”
Evan made a dash for the bedroom and rummaged around in the nightstand drawer for the box of condoms he’d purchased a month ago. Where the fuck where they? He shoved a few items aside and spotted them at the back. Grabbing them, he pulled one out and clambered back to the bathroom. He set it down on the edge of the tub and climbed in.
If possible, she was even more breathtaking standing under the water. Her skin glistened as she allowed the stream to flow over her, small rivers forming from her shoulders and running to the tips of her breasts before turning into waterfalls. As a teenager, he couldn’t imagine a way for Ciara to have been any more beautiful. Obviously he needed a better imagination because she had grown into the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen. He couldn’t wait any longer. He needed to make love to her.
“You are the most elegant and amazing creature I have ever seen.” He leaned in and kissed her, nudging her seam with his tongue until her lips parted and granted him access. Fumbling around, he found the bottle of body wash and poured a generous amount into his hands. As he rubbed the soap over her skin, his cock grew harder and more impatient. When he’d finished cleaning the grime from the bay off the two of them, he leaned in close and whispered in her ear, “Now, I think I promised you a night to remember.”
“That you did.”
He grabbed the condom from the edge of the bathtub and ripped open the wrapper. His fumbling fingers barely managed to get it rolled on. Finally ready, he held her close to him.
His tip lingered at her opening, dipping in ever so briefly before pulling away. She adjusted, putting her foot up on the edge to give him a better angle. The next time, he thrust in all the way, burying himself balls deep in her pussy.
He’d loved having sex with her as a teenager, but then again his raging hormones would have been satisfied by anything. The years made him even more appreciative of how easily she matched his rhythm and sought ways to open herself more to him.
She wrapped her leg around his waist, forcing him in deeper. Closing his eyes, he tried to control himself. He took one of her nipples into his mouth and sucked gently.
“God, that’s amazing.” She wiggled her hips a little. The increased friction drove him crazy. Slipping a hand between their bodies, he found her clit and rubbed gently. She cooed and buried her head in his neck. The combination of the water droplets and the soft kisses she planted across his shoulder was a sensation unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. A million nerve endings came to life, the tingle from each charting a path directly to his dick.
“Fuck.” She yelled and dug her fingers into his back as she came, her inner muscles clamping down around his cock. A few more thrusts and he roared his own orgasm.
After a moment of rest, he hopped out, grabbing two towels from the rack. Wrapping the first around himself, he held out the other for Ciara. She snuggled into it, resting against his body. The steamy air in the bathroom created a cloud around them. “We never got to do that as kids.”
“Can you imagine if one of our parents had caught us?” She rested her head on his shoulder and he ran his fingers through her soaking hair.
“There would have been hell to pay.”
“You know what is exciting? I can think of a hundred other things we never would have gotten away with back then.”
“Oh yeah?” His dick started to stiffen at the thought. This woman drove him crazy and he loved every minute of it.
“Good thing we’ll have plenty of time to try out each and every one.” She winked at him, then grabbed his towel and ran off toward the bedroom.
Evan couldn’t do anything but shake his head and smile. Exactly the information he needed.
*
F Is for Fallout
By Ginny Glass
Josephine Tate, daydreaming on a Sunday afternoon, lied for fun to a blank, cream-colored sheet of stationery. At least, that was how it started and that was how she thought of the first letter—just a few fabrications mixed into a half-truth, a semi-autobiographical fiction. She didn’t feel the least bit guilty as she sealed the lies in a pretty matching envelope and dropped it in the mailbox on her way to buy milk.
Dear G.I.—
My name is Ginger. I’m 32 years old. I’m an artist, mainly impressionist paintings in oil, and I live in New Jersey, though I’m seldom home. My neighbors must think my house is abandoned, as much as the weeds grow wild in the yard while I am off traveling. I’ve been all over the world and I love exotic locales and exploring new places. Iraq is one of the few places I’ve never visited, though I hope to someday.
I’m taking a respite from my globe hopping and enjoying the summer here in Trenton. It’s hot, but probably not as hot as where you are. I’ve vowed to dedicate the summer to finishing some pieces for a gallery show I have upcoming in New York, as well as some modeling work I agreed to before my last trip to Greece.
I’d love to hear about the places you’re passing through and your day-to-day experiences. I hope this letter finds you and the rest of the brave souls over there well, and I await your reply.
Best Wishes,
Ginger Tate
Jo didn’t expect much in response—the pal-a-soldier program’s website said there were always letters that might not be answered, and offered the advice that if an attempt didn’t garner a reply, the sender should try again. Jo had tried once—with a letter that was a hundred percent truth, and it hadn’t done the trick. Worried the original letter was bland and boring, she’d done a little creative writing, even given herself a sassy new name, and hadn’t given the fabrications much more thought. Until Spencer.
*
Spencer Corwin, dripping sweat and trying uselessly to sleep in a hard cot somewhere near Baghdad, responded with a lie of his own sort. It wasn’t an outright lie, more like a workaround of the truth. Besides, it couldn’t hurt anything—he was writing to a woman who was practically a world away, and her letter had been destined to go unanswered before he’d rescued it, relegated to a stack of unselected envelopes that was headed for the Dumpster.
Dear Ginger,
Your life sounds a lot like mine before I got shipped overseas. Things are radically different now. Hazards of the job, I suppose.
My name is Spencer, and how adorable that you are only 32. My last birthday, I decided that age was nothing more than a number. My knees and back often tell me otherwise.
Your travel sounds interesting and I would love to see some of your paintings. A photo of you would also not go unadmired, judging by your mention of modeling work. I’m including a picture of myself. Forgive the desert camo, it’s not the most flattering ensemble.
If it pleases your artistic sensibilities, I will absolutely describe to you the land here a
nd the people and the blazing heat that they say is more bearable because it’s “dry” (a complete lie, by the way. It’s hotter than hell’s barbecue pit over here.) Write soon.
Sincerely,
Spencer Corwin
Jo smiled when she got his reply, flushed when she saw his picture, and wrote back the same day.
Spencer,
Dangerous work for an old man—how long since you’ve been back to the U.S.? Do I detect an accent in your last letter? “Hotter than hell’s barbecue pit” sounds like it should have a twang to it. Tell me where you’re from and, yes, tell me about the desert.
I’ll try and dig up some photos of my paintings, but I’m sending my picture now, since you asked. It’s one of my favorites from a shoot last summer in Milan.
I never thanked you for picking my intro letter. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Ginger
P.S. Don’t knock the camo. It looks great on you.
*
Spencer received her letter and had another on its way to her hours later.
Ginger,
Casablanca. Nice. I actually swiped your intro letter from a stack while I was helping the program volunteers sort new mail. Your envelope had a Major League Baseball stamp on it, it caught my eye. I was born and raised in Missouri. My folks still live there and are diehard baseball fans, go St. Louis Cardinals!
Dear Lord, you are gorgeous. Don’t you dare stop writing, I’ll come to Jersey and hold a boom box up outside your window. How’s that for a movie reference?
Smitten,
Spencer
*
This was how everything went, flirty half-truths, words flying across oceans and multiple time zones. Until the letters got less teasing and more intense. Until the day Jo received the letter that said I need to see you.
The gift tucked inside this letter made her alternately thrilled and nauseated at the thought of having to come clean about the reality of what she wasn’t.
Still, she stood in front of the Lincoln Center, in a black dress that was a tad too short and a tad too tight, waiting on him to arrive.
She was aware that her hair was a bit big in comparison to the sleek, haughty women who filtered into the Lincoln, and that her shoes were a season or two behind. She’d pushed away the insecurities. She’d driven all the way into the city from Trenton, her heart racing, breathless at his request—
Hold on to these, I’ll meet you there.
The tickets to the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Aida that had accompanied the last letter were tucked into her clutch purse. Jo had stayed well past the show’s curtain time, well past intermission, well past the flood of opera-goers who poured out after the show ended. She’d stayed until it was probably unwise to be standing there alone in the dark.
Jo had prepared herself to tell him the truth, prepared for him to be angry, maybe even for him to not want to see her again, but she hadn’t been ready to be stood up. She’d cried on the drive home—hot, angry tears that only stopped when she finally succumbed to sleep in the early morning hours.
It was in the weeks that followed that she found out the truth—that Spencer had almost died and that she wasn’t the only one making things up.
*
“It’s okay that you lied to me, Spence. I love you.”
That sentence, breathed sweetly from the lush lips of a woman named Ginger, was not what woke Spencer Corwin from the coma that had claimed the past two months of his life. It wasn’t the low, sexy sound of her voice that jolted him, blind, into complete and total panic. Not even close.
The slow, steady beeping of a heart monitor—the first sound that Spencer had heard since the fireworks—that annoying, shrill little ongoing beep, that was what woke him.
If he were coherent, he’d be highly annoyed to be interrupted from the soft-focus dreams he’d been having. Nice dreams, where the hot, lush-lipped woman was forgiving him for some serious sins of omission, her fingers running through his hair, her body draped close as her mouth came within a breath of his.
A clawing, suffocating sense of panic greeted him. He opened his eyes to pure and total darkness. The first sharp, fearful breath he dragged in was blocked by the thick length of tubing that ran down his throat. He tried to swallow, but his tongue only pressed uselessly against the plastic.
His hands were free. Within moments, Spencer wrenched out the tubing and was rolling to his side blindly, acid spilling up from his stomach just as his fingers found the railing of the hospital bed. He’d yanked the IV out of his arm and had started in on the multitude of other wires, leads and electrodes that webbed out around him when the first nurse arrived.
Bomblets. That’s what they’d called the hail of little metal demons that had rained down on Spencer’s platoon. Medical personnel had started bursting into the room, and the crash of the equipment and the door hitting the wall and the fact that he couldn’t fucking see had Spencer’s panic increasing. Voices had repeated his name soothingly. Hands had held him down.
He remembered being in the Cougar, the heavily armored vehicle that had brought up the rear of their convoy. He’d been hunkered down in the sweltering metal depths, writing in his notebook. He’d never forget the strange, high-pitched whistling that had preceded the attack. It was like the screech of a Roman candle, and it made him think of the Fourth of July, made him actually take a deep breath, expecting the warm sulfurous smell of burnt-out pyrotechnics. Then, hell had pounded down, thunderous and swift, and everything had gone blank.
One of the nurses told him it was lucky that he hadn’t pulled off the patches taped over his eyes—it had been months since he’d been exposed to light, and the sudden flood of morning sun would hurt like a sonofabitch. Anecdotally, Spencer appreciated the small blessing, but when the doctor removed the medical tape that kept the thick gauze packs over his lids, the nurse’s words echoed like a cruel joke.
Light, hurt his eyes? Shit, he couldn’t even see. That was the worst of a string of nasty surprises. Conversion Disorder, they called it. They had names for everything.
The major damage was confined, physically, to his right hip. He’d been damned near crushed when the side of the virtually indestructible Cougar had caved in like a cheap tin can. Modern science had given him a new hip, and the skin grafting over it felt alien and smooth to his questing fingertips.
He slept in long stretches for weeks after waking, dreamt horrific replays of the attack. He was despondent, alternately angry, lost in a void of blackness with the whole world outside it. He lay in his hospital bed, refusing any help.
Temporary, they said. A physical manifestation of severe emotional trauma. All in his head.
He went to sleep one night and, instead of the amorphous woman, dreamt of a redhead with sparkling brown eyes. The next morning, and for all the remaining mornings of his stay, he threw himself aggressively into physical therapy, therapy-therapy, anything the hospital offered, desperate to have his sight back.
It all helped to some degree, the physical therapy pushing him to regain the strength and rebuild the muscles that he thought he’d never have again. After a few months his vision still hadn’t returned fully. He was able to see vague shapes, blurry outlines and movement.
It will come back, the doctor said. Give it time.
On his discharge day, there was an unexpected package—a plastic bag full of his things. He sorted through the bag before he left, feeling around the contents, the charred smell still clinging to the items they’d saved. His clothing had been cut away, long since discarded, but his wallet was there, and his ammo bag. The ammo bag was empty of shells—he’d used it to carry his papers and his small digital camera, which was also present but most likely toast.
When his fingers hit the slick, smooth coolness of the photo paper tucked in with his notes, Spencer lifted the photo from the pile, bringing it close to his face. He couldn’t make out the features of the woman in the photo, but he’d looked at it so many
times that he knew it by heart.
The slim, oval face was among the most perfect he’d ever seen. The sleek blond hair was cut in a shiny bob that just grazed a sharp jaw, exposing a lithe, elegant neck. Those enormous blue eyes, rimmed with dark, flirty lashes. That mouth. Perfect, but a lie.
This was what she’d sent when he asked for a photo. Spencer had seen her actual photo on a flickering computer screen, just a few weeks after they started writing. When he got past his momentary anger, he’d been intrigued—and more enamored with reality than with the made-up blonde. The woman he was in love with wasn’t a blonde, but a redhead. He’d managed to get a printout of her real picture. It was a rough paper copy and kept in his pocket, so it must have been lost in the aftermath of the attack.
This was the woman he’d fantasized about while he’d been overseas. An artist, a self-professed caramel latte addict, a woman who swore in traffic and who loved opera and Thai food. Jo. It was she who’d made him laugh with her letters about her crazy family and puzzled him with the vibrant but fabricated tales of Istanbul, China and Brazil.
Then there were the other stories. The ones that involved Spencer covered in nothing but her hands and mouth. This was the woman whose letters had set fire to the already-blazing Middle Eastern nights. Jo. Ginger. Funny, that she’d chosen what was possibly a childhood nickname for her faux persona’s moniker.
The last letter he’d sent before the attack had been brief but pointed. He’d fallen for her, hard, and he was scheduled to return stateside in two weeks. I’m coming home. I need to see you.
He hadn’t had time to get her reply. He’d gotten through to his assistant in D.C. a few days later and had a package sent to Ginger’s address. The note inside: Hold on to these, I’ll meet you there.
Spencer had never made it to their date. He’d been ready to sweep her off her feet, dazzle her with his near fame and make her forget his mistruths. It was how he’d handled women in the past.
Now, he was just a man—and after committing so many years to his career and reaping the benefits, he felt adrift, uncertain, humbled by the attack. What good was a half-blind reporter? He couldn’t go back overseas, too much of a liability now. He needed purpose. He needed to find her.