In This Life

by Cora Brent

  “You know what I admire about you, Kat?” I asked abruptly.

  She cocked her head. “What?”

  “You think everyone is as honorable as you are.”

  She looked down and bit her lip. Maybe she figured the comment was mocking. I hadn’t meant it that way. People everywhere should aspire to be like Kathleen Doyle, full of honesty and hope, rather than riddled with guilt and cynicism like me.

  Kathleen’s phone buzzed and she reached into her handbag to retrieve it. A shadow passed over her face when she stared at the screen and she stuffed the device back into her bag without answering.

  “You okay?” I asked because all of a sudden she was alarmingly pale.

  “Fine.” She plucked a rubber band from my desk and used it to tie up her hair. “So, the conversation took a detour but what days were you thinking about making the trip?”

  “This weekend if that works for you.”

  “It works just fine.”

  “In that case I’ll leave Friday afternoon and be back by Sunday morning. Betty can take care of running the place in the meantime.”

  Kat checked her watch. “Speaking of the store, you need to open the doors in twenty minutes.”

  I leaned back in the thick, cushioned desk chair and reached for her hand. “Twenty minutes is enough time.”

  “For what?”

  I unzipped and extracted my dick. “For this.”

  She was amused. “I thought I already took care of that.”

  I ran my hand up and down the hard muscle because I knew she liked watching me stroke myself and having her eyes on me just made me harder. “Take care of it again. Different position this time.”

  Kat stepped out of her skirt and pulled her panties down. She wasn’t the only one who liked to watch things. I groaned when she inserted two fingers inside. So fucking sexy it was ridiculous.

  “What position did you have in mind?” she asked sweetly and I saw the way her cheeks were flushed, heard how her breathing quickened. She was so into this, nothing at all prim and proper about her.

  I wasted no time locating a condom in my wallet and getting it in place. “Get that shirt off again right now. Bra too.”

  “Full of demands,” she muttered but obeyed with a grin. “Now what?”

  “Now I’m going to suck those sweet tits while you ride me.”

  Kat was gloriously naked when she straddled me. The chair creaked underneath our combined weight but it would hold. I grabbed a fistful of her hair, kissing her hard, and with the other I guided my cock in. She was so goddamn ready it almost killed me to hold out until she climaxed with her tits trading places in my mouth just like I wanted.

  “Oh god,” she moaned, still riding the wave. “You’re so good.”

  I teased her nipple. “How good?”

  “Amazing,” she whispered, hips still bucking as she finished her moment.

  “You’ve never been fucked this good by anyone before, have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say that.”

  “Nash.”

  “Say it!”

  “There’s no one who fucks better than you.”

  I gave in and let myself come while urging her to ride hard right up until the end. The desk chair finally succumbed to all this abuse and the back came off, sending us toppling to the floor.

  “Shit, you okay?” I asked but she laughed.

  “We broke the chair,” she giggled.

  “We did.” I tossed a wrecked piece on the desk. “We broke the fuck out of it.”

  She was still giggling while she gathered her clothes. I noted the time and realized there were now only three minutes until the store opened. Normally Betty would have been here by now, briskly straightening anything that looked even slightly askew on the shelves, but luckily she had a doctor’s appointment this morning.

  Kathleen once again finished buttoning her blouse and I regretted that it would need to stay that way.

  “I have to get going,” she said.

  I pulled my shirt over my head. “Busy day?”

  “Moderately.”

  I kept my eyes on her. Watching Kat had quickly become my favorite pastime. “Come here.”

  “Nash,” she warned, “there’s not enough time for a third round.”

  “Then give me a kiss.”

  She smiled and allowed me to pull her close. She liked to be kissed slow and deep and I could feel her melting in my arms. Sometimes I enjoyed these sweet moments even more than the kinky ones.

  “I wish I didn’t have to go,” she whispered with her arms still wrapped around my shoulders. Then she averted her head, as if she was embarrassed that the words had escaped her mouth.

  I tugged at a lock of her long hair that had escaped the rubber band. “I’m picking Colin up around five. I could grab some pizzas on the way home. Why don’t you and Emma come over for dinner? I mean, unless you’ve got too much work to do.”

  The invitation delighted her. I could tell by the way her eyes lit up for a split second although she seemed determined not to show it. “I don’t think I’ll have too much work. So we’ll be there.”

  “Good.” I pinched her ass. She had a great ass. I could be sitting around and thinking about how many stupid Hawk Valley Happiness coffee mugs I needed to order when I’d remember Kat’s ass out of nowhere and get so hard my balls ached.

  But at this point I really did need to open the store and Kat really did need to get to a client appointment. I released her with some reluctance. It seemed like every time I held her I felt that way a little more, that I just didn’t want to let her go.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said happily and I was really glad I’d invited her over tonight. We didn’t do things like plan outings and dates. We didn’t talk about the future or refer to ourselves a couple. And part of me was starting to wonder if we were going about this all wrong.

  “You want any toppings on your pizza?” I asked.

  “Pineapple.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why would I kid about pineapple? There’s nothing funny about it.”

  “Except for the fact that it has no business being on pizza.”

  “I didn’t know you were a food snob.”

  I grinned and puffed out my chest. “Turns out there’s more to me than my ability to fuck you better than anyone else.”

  She rolled her eyes and opened the door to the office. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  “But you did tell me. And you’ll tell me again.”

  She blushed. “Whatever.”

  I was still smiling long after she closed the door.

  Nash was preparing to leave for his short but necessary trip to Oregon. From the moment I showed up at his house he kept handing out instructions like a nervous new mommy but I didn’t mind. In fact it was rather adorable.

  “He’s got six bottles in the fridge. And there are plenty of diapers in the nursery but in case you need more there’s a stockpile in the hall closet. And I just did all of his laundry so there’s a bunch of those stretchy little outfits in his room. Oh, and if he gets too gassy the bottle of drops is in the hall bathroom upstairs.”

  “Got it,” I said, trying not to smile. Nash had come a long way in a short time. It was hard to believe only two months had passed since the morning I watched him get covered in baby vomit right here in the kitchen after he haplessly overfed Colin.

  Over in his bouncer Colin babbled and grabbed for the toys hanging overhead. His chubby fingers latched onto the fuzzy pink pig and he emitted a squeal of triumph.

  Nash tickled the baby’s foot and looked anxious. “I’ll miss you, kid.”

  I ran my finger over Colin’s smooth cheek and he gave me a drooling grin. “I promise I’ll take good care of him.”

  “I know you will.” Nash raked a hand through his hair. “There’s no one on earth I’d rather leave him with. It’s just the longest I’ve been away from him so my stomach’s all tied up in knots.” He
let out a hoarse chuckle. “Listen to me. I sound like an uptight jackass.”

  “No,” I argued, elbowing his ribs. “You sound like a parent.”

  He looked at me and his eyes were serious. “Thanks, Kat.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  The serious expression left his face and was replaced by something else as his eyes swept over me. The weather had turned very hot this week and I wore a red tank top and shorts, my hair loose and flowing.

  “I like the idea of you sleeping in my bed,” he said softly because Emma was in the next room.

  “I like the idea of sleeping in your bed too.”

  Nash reached out and swept the hair off my left shoulder, his fingers brushing across my skin. It was amazing how the briefest touch from him could produce such a powerful shudder of desire. He slipped one finger under the strap of my tank top and his voice became gruff.

  “I’ll be thinking of you there. In my bed. Doing things to yourself and wishing I was there to do them for you.”

  “What kind of things?” I whispered, feeling as if I might swoon. The physical chemistry between us was magnetic, irresistible. It grew stronger every day.

  “Mommy!” Emma shouted and Nash stepped away from me a split second before she came barreling into the kitchen with Roxie on her heels.

  “What the matter, honey?”

  Emma stuck out her lower lip and her eyes filled. “I forgot Mr. Ford,” she wailed.

  Roxie licked her hand and let out a sympathetic whine.

  “Who’s Mr. Ford?” Nash wanted to know.

  “It’s this stuffed duck my mother had given her at Easter,” I said.

  “You need to get him,” Emma said, nodding over her own solution. “Or he’ll be sad.”

  I picked up my purse. “Is it okay if I leave her here while I run back home?”

  “Sure,” Nash said. He picked Colin up out of the bouncer. “Hey Miss Emma, let’s take Roxie in the backyard so she can show you how well she catches a Frisbee.”

  “A what?”

  “A Frisbee.”

  “What’s that?”

  I smiled. “I’ll be right back.”

  Nash was already heading out of the room. “Take your time.”

  The drive back to my place only took a few minutes. Emma had left Mr. Ford sitting on the kitchen table. His black embroidered eyes regarded me placidly as I picked him up.

  I was locking the front door when a shadow startled me into dropping my keys.

  “There was a man,” said Mrs. Sofia Fetucci. She was eighty-seven, the widow of a former national boxing champion and she rarely left her unit on the other side of the duplex. Last week I’d run into her daughter who confided that she was moving her mother to an assisted living facility down in Scottsdale, closer to where she lived.

  “Are you okay, Sofia?” I asked, bending down to retrieve my keys.

  The tiny old woman peered at me, her faded blue eyes covered with a milky layer of cataracts. I wasn’t even sure how much she could see at this point.

  “There was a man here,” she insisted and the whole incident was beginning to feel a little spooky. I wondered if she was talking about Nash but to my knowledge he hadn’t been here today.

  “He was at your window,” she said, pointing a bony finger at the kitchen window.

  “When?” I asked, looking around and feeling more uneasy than ever. Sofia might seem lost in her own personal cloud sometimes but I’d never known her to hallucinate.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But you saw a man looking through my windows earlier?” I asked for clarification.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She scrunched up her face. “Tall,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “No. He might not have been tall.”

  Well, that narrowed it down. I wouldn’t even know what to tell the police.

  “My elderly half blind neighbor might have seen a nondescript possibly tall man near my kitchen window at some point.”

  “Did you see where he went?” I asked. I wasn’t completely sure the man was real but that didn’t stop the hair from standing up on the back of my neck.

  “No,” she sighed and I saw her hand trembling. She seemed upset and unsteady so I offered her my arm for stability and then walked her back over to her place. Sofia’s daughter had hired a maid, a meal delivery service and also a nurse to check on her mother several times a week but there was no one in the neat little apartment now. Her rooms were a mirror of my place, except all the furniture was covered with crocheted blankets and there were cat cross stitch pictures all over the walls. When I was satisfied that Sofia had everything she needed I left, making a mental note to find her daughter’s contact information and share the strange encounter.

  I got behind the wheel of my car feeling bothered, nervous. Sofia had probably just seen a solicitor or maybe one of the missionaries who would frequently canvas the neighborhood searching for people to spread their religion to. And her cataracts were so bad I wasn’t even certain her version of events was correct.

  But still, the flames of my anxiety were sufficiently fueled and I kept glancing in my rearview mirror. For a few blocks I thought I was being followed by a silver car. It remained a good twenty yards behind me and when I reached Nash’s street the vehicle turned in the opposite direction.

  Nash’s car to the airport was already idling by the curb when I returned. There was a small municipal airport forty miles away where he’d catch a plane to Phoenix and then take a flight to Portland from there. I’d offered to drive him myself but he adamantly refused.

  “Colin’s napping upstairs in the crib,” he said.

  “I’ll kiss him goodbye for you.”

  Nash flashed a grin. “I’ll get to Portland this evening,” he said, tossing a small carry on bag into the waiting car. “Then I’ll rent the truck, drive out to the coast, pack up, maybe catch a few hours of sleep and be on my way back here as soon as I can.”

  “Don’t worry about Colin,” I told him, clutching Mr. Ford and still feeling a little rattled over the whole Man at the Window mystery. “Between Emma and me and Roxie he’ll be well taken care of.”

  Emma suddenly burst through the front door and ran to me, claiming Mr. Ford and hugging the toy in a rapturous reunion.

  Nash paused before sliding into the backseat of the car. His face searched mine. “Call me anytime, Kat.”

  “You do the same.”

  We stared at each other and he started to take a step toward me. I wondered if he planned to kiss me goodbye. I wanted him to. In spite of the fact that we were just good friends who gave each other incredible orgasms I wanted him to give me one gentle kiss before he left.

  But Nash looked over at Emma, who was dancing around the front yard with her stuffed duck, and backed off. He winked at me before getting into the car.

  I watched the car disappear and felt sad for some reason. Or maybe it wasn’t sadness. Maybe it was because I needed Nash Ryan more than I’d ever intended to.

  I held out my hand to Emma and returned to the house where Roxie awaited with her tail wagging. Emma introduced her to Mr. Ford and didn’t appreciate when the dog tried to chew on Mr. Ford’s soft beak.

  After checking on Colin, who still slept soundly as the crib mobile rotated slowly overhead, I returned downstairs to the kitchen, washed the handful of dishes in the sink and checked out the contents of the fridge. Nash had urged me to help myself to whatever I found and I wondered if Emma and I would be eating old cheese and stale bread for dinner. I really didn’t want to embark on a grocery store adventure unless it was necessary.

  But surprisingly, Nash’s fridge was well stocked. I scanned the contents and planned to make a salad and spaghetti for us solid food eaters while Colin would be pleased enough with his formula and canned peaches.

  Emma was talking animatedly in the next room. I listened f
or a moment and couldn’t figure out what she was up to so I went to go see.

  I found a haphazard tea party in progress. Emma was lying on her belly on the floor while Roxie crouched beside her and Mr. Ford stared serenely at the sofa. As I was watching, the stuffed duck did a face plant although Emma was quick to reach out and right him.

  “Sit up, Mr. Ford,” she scolded. “Don’t you like your tea?”

  That’s when I noticed the ‘tea’ was being served on Heather’s carefully acquired antique china.

  “Emma, where’d you get that?” I exclaimed, getting down on the floor and plucking a one hundred year old cup away from the curious snout of Roxie. “These are not toys.”

  My daughter rose to a sitting position and pouted as I started stacking up the pieces. “I can play with these,” she argued.

  “No honey, I told you to always ask first before you take something from here and start playing with it. This isn’t our house. What happened to your coloring books?”

  “Heather said I could play with it!”

  I bit my lip. “Emma, you know Heather couldn’t have told you that.”

  “She did! She showed me where they were in that brown thing.” Emma pointed to the old curio cabinet in the corner of the room. “And she said I could play with this tea set any time I wanted and I promised to be careful.”

  I stopped stacking the tea pieces. “When did Heather tell you this?” I asked gently. Emma was an imaginative child. She might have made up the entire scenario. But my discomfort from earlier returned and I wondered if there was any such thing as the supernatural.

  Emma scrunched up her face in the same way Sofia Fetucci had. “I don’t know.”

  I swallowed. “It wasn’t today, was it?”

  She looked at me as if I’d just asked the most ridiculous question ever. “No. It was the day I came here and made red hearts.”

  “Valentine’s Day?” I asked and Emma shrugged.

  I sighed, understanding now what she meant. Valentine’s Day had been a Saturday and a new client, a custom furniture maker who lived up in the mountains, had begged for some emergency help because his ex-wife had sabotaged all his files. Heather offered to watch Emma and keep her overnight if I was too tired to pick her up. I’d accepted gratefully, though I felt a little guilty because my cousin had only given birth three weeks earlier. Heather had set up an assortment of paper crafts on the kitchen table and promised Emma they would have a special day. She was holding Colin when I turned back to see her waving at me from the kitchen window. I waved back and then faced the drive up to the mountains on a bitterly cold morning.