Moment in Time

by Lisa Mondello

  “I was wondering when you were going to finally realize that,” he says in a voice so smooth and sexy that I want to weep. All the anxiety that just hit me melted away.

  “You knew?”

  “Of course.” He pulls me into his arms and at first, I push at him. Heat rises up my cheeks as humiliation washes over me.

  He chuckles as he tries to hold me still in the bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re playing with me.”

  “I love playing with you. In case you haven’t noticed.”

  “You sonuvabitch,” I say with a hiss as I pull away, throwing the sheet off my body and then stalking to the bathroom.

  “Did you also notice that there is nothing about the way I feel for you that says ‘fling’?”

  I stop at the bathroom door without fleeing inside. I know how I feel. As I turn around slowly and look, really look, at Bobby’s face, I see exactly how he feels, too. The way he looks at me makes me feel beautiful. For two years I loathed what was happening to me. I hated the way my body changed me. But Bobby looks at me as if he doesn’t see any of that. He doesn’t see the scars or the hair that is growing in uneven. He sees past the tattoos on my body that were put there for radiation treatment.

  “You see me,” I say quietly. “I love the way you look at me.”

  “I see you. And I love looking at you. I know everything there is to know about you, Jenna Traynor.”

  I sputter and then laugh. “Hardly.”

  “I know you have a birthmark just below your left ass cheek. It’s not a tattoo. It’s definitely something that is all you. I’ve kissed it.” He smiles wickedly and it causes heat to curl up below my belly. “There’s a little scar on your elbow. I’m guessing it came from a clumsy fall.”

  I can’t help but smile. “I fell off my bike and bled all over my new dress one Easter.”

  He chuckles. “What were you doing riding your bike in a dress?”

  I shrug, trying to remember that day. “I was eight. You do stuff like that when you’re eight.”

  “Apparently, you do still do that when you’re twenty, too.”

  I laugh then. “I didn’t fall off my bike this time. I fell running. If you don’t like my clumsiness, shoot me.”

  Light flashes in his eyes. “I’d rather make love to you.”

  “Make love. It isn’t just sex?” I say, crossing my hands over my chest as I walk back to the bed.

  “It’s great sex. But it’s not just sex.”

  “No, I guess it isn’t.”

  He chuckles, which has me looking at him with suspicion. “What?”

  He tangles his fingers in my hair. I love the way it feels so I lean into his touch. “You’re being shy.”

  “I’m not shy.”

  He kisses my lips gently. It was just a brush against my mouth. A tease. “What are you thinking?”

  I hesitate a few seconds, amazed that I’m finding it hard to form the words. I was in love with Jared and Jared let me down. I cried for him. And yet, looking back I know it was nothing like what I’ve shared with Bobby.

  “You’re my first.”

  His brow crinkles.

  “Not my first lover,” I clarify. “Obviously you know you’re not. You’ve…seen my scars, haven’t you? You know what they represent.”

  “You had a baby,” he says. His eyes are so warm and loving. There’s nothing judgmental there. He cups my face with both hands. “I’ve kissed every inch of you, Jenna. Even that little spot where your baby came from.”

  Tears well up in my eyes. He knows. He wasn’t even the baby’s father and I see more sympathy and concern in his expression than I ever saw in Jared.

  But I don’t want to talk about the baby. I want Bobby and his love.

  “You said you’d rather make love. I may have had a baby, but I’ve never made love with anyone but you. You’re my first.”

  “Tell me about your baby,” he says, and I decide it’s okay.

  “Medically speaking, it was a lousy timing. I found out about the cancer when I went for a pregnancy test. Well, that started it anyway,” I say, remembering the look on the doctor’s face when my blood work came back. “Jared wanted me to have an abortion. We’d been arguing about it. But I just couldn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  I ran my fingers down the center of Bobby’s chest because I love the way he breathes in deep as if I’m about to tickle him when I touch his stomach and make a trail with my finger below his belly-button.

  “I held off on chemo. I shouldn’t have, but I did. My oncologist wanted to be aggressive. He said I was young and I had a better chance of getting this thing knocked out of me if I did.” I sigh because the old anger bubbles up in me like it was yesterday. “But then my father decided he wanted to have a say. I was seventeen and he thought he could call all the shots. He insisted I start chemo right away. I…”

  “What?”

  “I put up a fight. I didn’t want it. But then my oncologist sat me down and said we could do low doses in the beginning to see if it had any effect. I agreed only because my father said he’d back down and give it a try. Everything was fine for a while until I was almost six months pregnant. Then all hell broke loose.”

  I get up from the bed and walk to the window, pushing the curtain aside so I can see if it’s still raining. It is. I love the sound of the rain against the window. But tonight, I only hear surf. When I turn around, I see Bobby relaxed on the bed just looking at me standing naked by the window. He doesn’t have that piggish look on his face like the guys who used to watch us do jumping jacks in gym class just so they could see breasts bounce or a hint of thigh when our shorts rose up too high. Bobby made me feel beautiful. All the little scars and the little tattoos to mark radiation positions didn’t matter to him. I know you, he’d said.

  “I lost the baby. Gabby. Her name was Gabrielle and I called her Gabby,” I say, wishing I still had that little girl inside me and felt her moving. I never got to feel all that much. Just flutters. But I knew she was in there. I knew she was moving and living inside me. And then all those chemicals I’d taken poisoned her and she was gone. “Her little body couldn’t take the chemo.”

  I walk back and climb onto the bed and Bobby opens his arms to me to curl in next to him.

  “I know that must have been so hard for you,” Bobby says, kissing my head as I rest my cheek on his shoulder.

  “My immune system was shot from the chemo and they were afraid of infection so I had to deliver her fast. It was awful. And when she was finally born, they let me hold her for a little while. No amount of time would have been enough. I didn’t want to let go of her. I knew that if I survived this cancer that Gabby was probably my only hope of having a child of my own. I have some pictures of her. Me holding her. My mom and dad, too. But she was so little. She wasn’t done growing and…I don’t look at them.”

  “What about Gabrielle’s father?” he asks. I like that he uses her name. He doesn’t avoid it. It makes Gabby real to someone other than just me. Like she was a real person instead of just being a figment of my imagination, which is how it feels sometimes when I talk to my friends.

  He’s stroking my hair and letting me babble on. It’s different talking about Gabrielle with Bobby. We lay there for a few minutes in comfortable silence. I start counting the sound of the waves crashing into shore without even realizing it.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” he finally says. It’s in his voice. That’s how I know it’s true. It’s not just that automatic answer people give you when they want to make you feel better and they have no clue what pain is or how you could hurt so bad in places you never knew existed. Bobby knows.

  I sit up a little in bed and lean on my elbow so I can look at him. The pain in Bobby’s face is unmistakable and I’m finding it hard to believe I never saw it there before.

  “Tell me if you want to. I want to hear about it,” I say. “But only if you want to.”

  “You asked me
once if I was married. I’m not. But I was. I had a wife.” He waits as if he’s waiting for me to process that. Bobby Callahan was married before and suddenly I have so many questions that I can’t decide where to start or even if I should start.

  Had. Past tense. Over.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  He closes his eyes and pitches his bridge of his nose. When he removes his hand and looks at me, his eyes are glassy. “I had a son, too.”

  My heart sinks lower than I ever thought it could. Had. Past tense. Oh, God.

  “It was a typical Saturday night. I’d come home from work and was filthy from getting grease all over me. Donna had…my son with her all day and he was sick, so she didn’t have a chance to make anything for dinner. I was in a shitty mood and so was she, so she finally told me to take a shower and she’d go get some Chinese food up the street.”

  He rubbed his hand over his face. I wait because I do know saying the words out loud feels as if you’re ripping up a piece of yourself or tearing out your soul.

  “It was only a few blocks up the street. Wyatt had been at Donna’s hip most of the day so she took him with her to pick up the food. I figured it would give me some time to clean up.”

  He starts twisting the edge of the sheet between his finger and thumb as he stares past me.

  “We had to get married. Well, no one had a gun to my head. But Donna was pregnant.”

  “And you stood by her,” I say quietly.

  “We were young. There were plenty of reason why we probably shouldn’t have gotten married but we were making it work.”

  I envy Donna that much. She at least had a man who had stayed. I’d cried for Jared when I held Gabby in my arms, wondering if he would even want to see her. Did he want to know that she looked perfect in every way except for the fact that she was so small? Did he even want to be there when we buried her? I never knew because he never returned my call. I never tried again.

  “I heard the crash. I don’t know what happened but the gist of it was Donna had run a stop sign and was broadsided on the driver’s side by a pickup at the crossroad. The weird thing is that I heard it happen. But it didn’t register it was them. Not for a long time. It wasn’t until I realized I was still hungry and Donna and Wyatt hadn’t come back home that I put it together. I ran out of the house and looked up the street in the direction of where I’d heard the sirens. I saw the ambulance and the fire trucks blocking the street. I ran as fast as I could to make sure it wasn’t them. And I’d even begun talking myself into believing it wasn’t because the car…it was unrecognizable. But the impact of the crash shattered the passenger side window and Donna’s purse was thrown out into the street. I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

  I kiss his chest and brush my cheek against his skin as if that small gesture would somehow give him comfort. He doesn’t seem to realize I’ve even touched him. He’s lost. And I get that. I know where he goes.

  “It sucks because the last time my son heard my voice I was irritated. He didn’t hear affection or love from me. His mother and I were arguing about something stupid. Just being annoyed with each other. I didn’t even…I didn’t say goodbye to her when she left. I just walked into the bathroom and closed the door. I figured we’d be fine when she got back. We were always fine after a little distance. I joined the military about six months later. I couldn’t be anywhere near where I was reminded of them. I don’t look at their pictures either.”

  “Maybe one day you will. Maybe we both will.”

  He kisses me then and his lips feel like silk.

  Yelling outside the door caught my attention for just a moment. We both paused as we heard footsteps downstairs and then the slamming of the door.

  “Heather just got home,” I say. With a sigh, I lay down on the bed. I want to share this moment with Bobby, but I’m worried about Heather.

  Bobby seems to know my reaction. “If you want to go make sure she’s okay, I’ll wait here.”

  I touch his face and feel the stubble of his morning beard. Some women might not like the rough patch of skin on a man’s cheek but I love it. I love how it feels when Bobby is kissing my breasts and stomach.

  I hear Heather’s soft sobs downstairs as she moves from one room to the other. And then I hear her bedroom door close. She has to be brokenhearted about something for me to hear her over the surf outside. “I should go to her.”

  But then I hear footsteps going down the stairs and then a knock on Heather’s door. “Heather? Are you okay?” I hear Penny ask.

  “Penny will make sure she’s okay,” I whisper. “Penny is good at that.”

  Bobby kisses my mouth, darting his tongue out to taste my lips. I give him entrance and kiss him deeply. I love the scent of his skin when we’re this close.

  He makes love to me one more time as the sun comes up and lightens the room and I know I can face the day and anything that comes my way.

  #

  Chapter Ten

  Jenna

  Payday was always a day that all the housekeeping girls looked forward to. Me included. I didn’t worry so much about having money to party like the other girls did. Bobby and I preferred to stay in and cuddle in my room most days. But this week, I want to do something special for Bobby. I want to go into town and buy that red sundress, get all made up and cook Bobby a special dinner.

  Penny and Lily had mentioned at breakfast that they were going out to the club on the beach. I have a feeling Penny isn’t really interested in the loud music or dancing. Heather just got a job working there as a waitress and after yesterday’s outburst, I know Penny wants to check on her to make sure she’s okay. Lily just wants to dance.

  That means the house will be empty for Bobby and me. I get to work early and punch the time clock. Then I fill the linen cart with all the supplies I need before meeting with Grace so she can give us our room assignments and our paychecks. But before I can finish filling the linen cart with all the supplies, Grace meets me in the supply room.

  “Do you like working here, Jenna?” Grace asks.

  The question catches me by surprise. “Of course.”

  Her expression is a mixture of concern and annoyance. I begin to wonder if a guest complained about me.

  “I saw you with Bobby Callahan the other day.”

  My stomach drops. “Really?”

  “I thought I made it clear that my girls are not to be in a closed guest room with a guest.”

  My heart pounds faster. That was weeks ago when I’d walked in on Bobby. Why would she bring something like this up now?

  “You did.”

  She starts to say something and then looks up as if she’s fighting for the right words. “I don’t have a rule that people who work here can’t date guests. But Beverly Pickam does.”

  “Bobby Callahan is her nephew. Not a guest.”

  She nods. “Technically, yes. But not everyone knows that.”

  “I haven’t broken any rules. Me and Bobby are never in his room here at the Inn,” I insist.

  Grace nods. “Okay. Just…watch yourself, Jenna. People talk. Beverly is going to find out and when she does, she probably won’t be happy. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  I nod quickly. “I’ll remember that.”

  Grace hands me my paycheck, but suddenly all the excitement about having Bobby all to myself tonight has vanished. If Grace knows about Bobby and me, then it’s a sure bet that Beverly knows. My days at the summer house could be numbered.

  * * *

  Bobby

  The red dress was stunning on Jenna. She looks even more sexy as I peel it off her body now that we’ve finished dinner. The chicken she’d cooked was dry. The vegetables were mushy. But I’m a man who can eat mushy vegetables when there is a beautiful woman like Jenna wanting to get naked with me.

  As the dress puddles at Jenna’s feet, my breath hitches in my throat.

  “You weren’t wearing underwear under this thing?” I ask.

  “You have the proof
. Why are you even asking?” she says with a giggle.

  “Because I can’t believe I sat through dinner not knowing that.”

  “We never would have eaten dinner.”

  I pull her into my arms, but she pushes back. “No fair. You need to get naked too.”

  With one quick movement, I pull my shirt over my head and toss it to the floor. I unzip my pants and pull them down along with my underwear in one quick motion as Jenna undoes the back of her bra and tosses it aside.

  She turns away and I grab her from behind. “I’d love to make love to you this way,” I say, bending her over so she needs to crawl on the bed.

  Jenna gets on all fours on the bed and lifts her ass just a little higher, driving me wild. I run my hand between her legs and feel how wet she already is and I want to drive myself in her hard. She gasps as I touch her, but lifts her hips higher. My hard-on is so strong I’m afraid I’m going to hurt her as I enter her, so I tease her with my cock, stroking it on the outside of her vagina as I reach around her and play with her clit from the front.

  And then I feel it as my hand brushes against her groin area. My heart hammers in my chest. But not from the intense desire that had been driving me crazy moments ago. This time it’s from fear.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, turning around to look at me.

  Part of me wants to continue to believe there is nothing wrong. But what good comes from that? I’d already tried to run away once in my life. Every time I was stationed in a new place, the first thing that met me was the very thing I was running from.

  I make a trail over her back and then to her front The same trail my hand had taken just a few seconds ago when I’d felt a swell that hadn’t been there before. It surprises me just how much I already know Jenna’s body. Somehow I’d committed it to memory. Each curve. Each spot that caused a sharp intake of her breath when I touch her. Where I touch her. Or make her arch her back with pleasure, urging me to give her more.

  But this time, I hesitate. This time, I don’t want to feel that swell of skin.