Her laugh was intoxicating, filling his blood with heat until he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand.
But he did stand, tall and naked in front of her. She stopped laughing, but a smile still played across her lips as she scooted forward to touch him, keeping her arms demurely crossed over her chest.
‘No, no …’ Abe undid her red lace bra. ‘Lord, your underwear drives me crazy, woman.’
Fiona brought her hips to the edge of the bed and said, ‘Right now, this is making me crazy.’
She took him in her mouth and he gasped in a shock of surprise. She teased, first just the tip of his cock, then she ran her tongue along the length of his shaft. The way her mouth moved in combination with her fingers … ‘Jesus,’ Abe groaned, resting his hands on the back of her head. ‘You’re perfect.’
She made a pleased sound in the back of her throat and took him deeper, her mouth hot, tight – the sweetest place he’d ever been.
But he couldn’t take much more, and this wasn’t the way he’d wanted to have her.
‘Fiona.’
She didn’t stop, just looked up at him, her eyes wide and still amused.
‘Fiona, for the love of God,’ he choked. ‘Stop.’ Cupping his hands around her ears, he used all his willpower to stop her, almost unable to make himself do so.
Her mouth slid off his cock with a slick pop. Abe swayed. It felt like a swell had just rolled under the houseboat, but the hanging lamp didn’t move. It was just him.
‘You,’ he managed to say. ‘Shit, Snowflake …’ Bending at the waist, he pushed her backward onto the bed so that he was on top of her. He tucked a long blue strand of hair behind her ear. ‘We should talk.’
Fiona’s eyes widened and she pushed herself backward and away from him an inch.
‘Seriously? About what?’
‘No, nothing bad. We’re just moving so fast. Foreplay is good. I say sexy words, you say them back. Doesn’t mean I don’t get to keep taking your clothes off.’ He unzipped her jeans as slowly as he could. ‘Because you have way too many clothes on.’
‘S’true,’ Fiona said breathlessly. ‘I might need your help with that.’
‘I’m your man,’ said Abe. The words felt big. True.
He slipped her jeans from her narrow hips; she lay in front of him wearing only a tiny piece of red lace. ‘Damn,’ he said.
‘What?’ She started to sit up, tried to cross her arms over stomach and breasts.
‘No, darlin’. I want to leave you like this. Dressed like this.’
‘I’m not dressed.’
He plucked at the thin red fabric with his first finger. ‘Some would say you were dressed just right. I think it’s your color.’
Fiona laughed again. Then she caught her breath as his finger explored its way underneath the lace.
‘Then again,’ he continued, ‘I like this color of pink.’
‘It’s red.’
‘No, right here.’ Abe slid the panties down her legs. ‘God, Fiona. Look at you.’
Again, she made that half-effort to rise, and he kissed her down again. She murmured, ‘What?’ against his mouth. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s just so right. Like here.’ He moved his finger into her slickness while he lowered his head to take her nipple into his mouth. Moving his tongue lazily in circles, he touched her deeper, where she was so hot she almost burned him. ‘And here.’
Fiona wasn’t laughing anymore, that was for sure. Good. He wanted her like this, out of breath, super-heated, wanting more. Her hips started to move against his hand.
‘Lots of time, Snowflake.’ He slid his finger in, slowly, so slowly, and then left it inside her. ‘Don’t move.’
She made a displeased noise.
‘So. Let’s talk. Wanna get to know each other?’ As he rolled to face her, keeping his finger very still, he knew the smile on his face was cheekier than hell.
Fiona, though, played along. ‘Oh, good. I’d love to find out what your favorite color is. Right here. With your hand inside me.’
He shook his head firmly. ‘That, my girl, is only one finger.’
Fiona caught her lower lip between her teeth. ‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Jesus Christ, he could do this all night. ‘And my favorite color is the color of wet seaweed. Tell me about you.’
‘I like yellow. I run Fee’s Fill. I’d shake your hand but it appears to be busy.’
Abe leaned forward and nuzzled her neck. He was rewarded with a gasp. ‘Tell me something I don’t know about you.’
She moved farther away from him without moving a muscle, aside from dropping her lashes. ‘You start.’
‘Okay. What kinds of things do you want to know?’
She lifted her eyes, and he read the challenge there. ‘Secret things.’
‘Like when I broke my own truck’s window practicing with my slingshot and blamed it on a seagull dropping a clamshell?’
‘How old were you?’
‘Four months younger than I am now.’
She laughed. ‘I think the insurance company will forgive you.’
‘Forgive me? That window cost six hundred bucks to fix. They’re not going to find out.’ He moved his finger almost imperceptibly, and Fiona’s eyes fluttered. ‘And besides, we should only tell each other the really terrible things.’
Her eyes, those beautiful hazel eyes with their sparks of brown flame, snapped open again. ‘Why?’
‘Because everyone else knows the good stuff.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s be different for each other.’ Abe was so pulled to this idea – to this woman – that he needed this. To be themselves – their true selves – in front of each other.
‘I think you’re supposed to learn the bad stuff as you go.’
Abe shook his head. ‘That’s where it turns into a trick. Bait and switch.’
Her cheeks were deliciously pink as she tried to ignore that his finger was inside her, still but persistently present. ‘Is that even a fishing phrase? Do you bait a line and then switch it for something else?’
‘Yes and no. I don’t care about fishing right now. This game is different. If we fall in love with each other because we think the other person is perfect, we can only go downhill. So, tell me something terrible. Tell me the worst thing. That way I’ll know it first and it won’t matter. As much.’
Fiona’s eyes were so wide there were perfect rings of white around that hazel gold. ‘L-love?’ she stuttered.
‘If. That’s all.’ He kissed her lips softly. ‘No fear now. Just if.’
‘I don’t fall in love,’ she said.
‘Me neither.’ Keeping his hand still, he kissed her again. He could do this forever. ‘So we’re safe. Now tell me the worst part. I’m not going anywhere.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Be fearless. Not all of life is safe; not all of it can be undone. Enjoy the stitches dancing on your needles even if they do the wrong steps. Even the undoing of them is pleasurable, if seated next to the right person. – E. C.
Fiona’s heart was racing so fast she was sure the bed should be thudding underneath her. If he was serious … Oh, God, if he meant what he’d just said …
Love?
If he hated her afterward, and he probably would, it would be so far beyond awful that awful wouldn’t even be in the same time zone. The last thing she thought she could handle was his disapproval.
Why, then, was she going to do this?
For one reason and one alone: Since the first moment he’d touched her, inside and out, he’d been gentle. He was running kisses down the side of her face right now – a touch that both heated and soothed her at the same time. He was listening.
She took a deep breath. ‘I gave a kitten up to the shelter when it wouldn’t stop peeing on my clothes.’
Abe shook his head. ‘Extenuating circumstances. Another one.’
She wiggled her hips backward. ‘I can�
�t be serious when I can feel – you – inside me.’
Without protest, he slid his finger out of her and moved so that his wide hand rested on her belly. She wouldn’t have thought she would like that – too much concentration on where she was soft and slightly rounded, convex. But Abe smiled and brushed her skin softly. His eyes were encouraging.
‘I took on too much debt when I bought the filling station and almost lost my house a few years ago. I’m back on track, but it wasn’t easy.’
‘That’s just a hardship tale followed by a success story.’ His eyes crinkled at the corners. ‘That’s like saying in an interview that your worst trait is your obsessive attention to detail. I’m not buying what you’re selling, Lynde. Give me the real dirt.’
His muscled body was so heated next to hers. Fiona felt a heady rush in knowing that if she flipped her leg over him, she could take this whole thing over. She could get what she wanted at any second. She could make him have sex with her and not tell him a thing.
And yet, Fiona stayed still. She wanted to give him what he asked for.
She tilted her head onto the bed, so that her cheek was against his chest. She didn’t want to look at him when she said it.
‘I was the reason my mother left us.’
Abe’s free arm tightened around her, and he pressed a longer, harder kiss to her temple. ‘Tell me.’
Fiona felt the ridiculous tears spring to her eyes, pushing behind her lids.
‘It’s okay.’ His low voice rumbled, shaking her smaller body. It felt good. Maybe … maybe it felt right. ‘Whisper it to me if it feels better that way.’
‘Can’t we just have sex?’ Last-ditch effort.
‘There’s time for all that, believe me. So much time. Tell me, darlin’.’
So she did. In a whisper, Fiona said, ‘My mother … As soon as I was born, my father was crazy about me. He knew, and I knew, that his love for me didn’t take any amount of his love away from my mother – in fact, for a while, it probably only increased it. I remember Dad being totally wild about her. Over the years, it changed. She just … Nothing was good enough for her. Not our house. Not his job. Not the way we talked or looked or dressed. Not the car he drove, not the food he cooked at night. When we drove through Cypress Hollow, when he found out the lighthouse needed a keeper, she dismissed the idea. Even when he passed the civilian exam, she told him he couldn’t take the job, that she wouldn’t live in a house as old and decrepit as that one was. That it was too tall and too isolated. In the one act of defiance I ever saw him insist on, he took the job as the last Cypress Hollow lighthouse keeper. He knew it was slated to be decommissioned, but while they built and tested the auto-strobe light they still needed someone there.’
Fiona rubbed her hands against her face. ‘So it was us. On that rocky ground, just outside of town. Remember Cypress Hollow then? It was smaller. My mom barely bothered to send me to school. Only the threat that she’d have to home-school me made her let me walk the mile and a half to Ocean View Elementary every day.’ Fiona didn’t dare look at him. ‘In the rain. In the wind and frost. All my mother wanted in life was to be in a snowstorm, but God knows, if it had happened on a school day, she would have made me walk then, too.’
Fiona paused to breathe. She’d almost forgotten to. She balled her hands into fists and rolled onto her side, drawing her arms around her knees. Abe rolled onto his side, too, facing her, creating an enormous C that she fit into. Perfectly.
‘Do you remember the snow that fell in 1983?’ he asked, his arm draped gently over her shoulder, their noses almost touching.
Fiona shook her head. ‘We weren’t here yet. And I was only two.’
Abe gave a low laugh. ‘My mother woke me up early that morning and wrapped me in one of my dad’s fishing jackets. It hung to the ground on me. She said it was snowing, and I was so excited. I actually got dizzy, I remember, the way I ran around and around in my room, tripping over the hem of that coat, while I waited for them to get their cold-weather clothes on. I bounced from window to window. It was all white outside. Like a bucket of paint had just dropped from nowhere.’
Fiona pushed her fists into his chest, letting his big hand wrap around both of them. As he spoke, she could feel the reverberations of his words in his chest.
‘We went outside, and the big thing I remember is how disappointed I was.’
‘Why?’
‘It was, honestly, cold. Not very fun to touch. And then there was the whole not-very-much-of-it problem. When I walked out the door, I’d been determined to make Frosty the Snowman, but I couldn’t even get enough snow packed together to make a snowball, let alone a man with a carrot nose.’
Fiona smiled. She liked thinking of small Abe. ‘Did you at least see it falling?’
He shook his head. ‘I missed that, too.’
‘I’ve never seen it fall, either.’
‘Oh, I’ve seen snow fall,’ he clarified. ‘But never on land. Only when I’ve been out to sea.’
Fiona tucked her legs more tightly, still facing him, resting her bent knees on the tops of his thighs. It felt as if she were climbing him sideways. It felt wonderful. ‘What’s that like?’
‘It’s like a magic trick. These little bits of snow – they really come down in those formations you cut out when you were a child – or here,’ he touched her hip. ‘They really look like that. But when you’re on the boat, and they’re falling, they’re instantly gone. You see one land perfectly on your dark jacket, it’s there for a split second and then it melts down into the wool. So it’s just you on the boat, with this falling … art, and then it stops and you wonder if you dreamed it all.’
Fiona straightened her body, straightening him out at the same time, so that she could press herself against his length. She needed to kiss him.
And Abe kissed her back. He was saying more now, with the kiss. She heard more, in the way his mouth moved against hers, in the way his breathing caught in his chest.
‘Mmmm,’ he finally said. ‘Okay, more. Tell me more. Finish the story.’
Abe held her tight as they lay, still both on their sides. He rested one leg over her, and Fiona was grateful for its weight. It would help hold her down.
‘I was …’
‘You were telling me about your mother and how she made you walk to school, even in snow. Or would have.’
‘It was three miles, round-trip. She wouldn’t let me catch the bus, said I was too chubby and needed the exercise, even though when I look at my school pictures now I think I just looked like a normal kid.’ When Fiona had pulled out the photos, she’d been surprised at how sad her eyes had looked back then. ‘So every day I walked past the bus stop on Highway One. I’d ignore the kids who teased me. The same kids would blow past me on the bus, throwing spit wads out the windows, beating me to school by twenty minutes every day. One morning in seventh grade, I asked my mother to drive me. It was pouring. She said no and I pushed it. I said she was a bad mother. I was twelve, you know? I was just starting to feel like a pre-teen.’
He nodded.
‘She smacked me one.’ Funny, her voice sounded normal saying the words. ‘Right across my face. What I remember most about that moment was how loud it was. You expect the pain, I think, but not the noise of it.’
‘I’ve been in a fight or two.’
‘Did it hurt? When you got hit?’
‘Like a motherfucker. Had she done that before?’
Fiona shook her head. ‘No. Or, maybe once. Maybe twice. I actually don’t remember. I just remember this time.’ She covered her eyes with her hand as if she could hide – knowing she couldn’t. ‘So I just heard this explosion in my head and I jumped at her like I was on springs. I hit her back across the face, as hard as I could.’
Abe gently moved her hand from her eyes. ‘Really? Little ole you?’
Fiona dipped her head. ‘I don’t know where it came from. I don’t think I’d ever even back-talked her before. So both of us are just standing th
ere, bleeding at the exact same place – I guess we both share thin skin at the eyebrow. We’re staring at each other, and I say, “You’re fired”.’
A small smile from Abe. ‘Good for you.’
‘Well, she didn’t like it. She hit me one more time on the other side of my face, and I was too shocked to move. She said …’ Here Fiona paused. This was the part she usually tried not to remember. ‘She said, “You can’t fire me. I fucking quit”.’ Fiona cleared her throat. Saying the words now, it felt like the blows were landing all over again. ‘I walked to school. In English class, your mom pulled me out and made me skip fourth period. She took me to the office nurse, and then after a bunch of paperwork had been filled out, Eliza Carpenter picked us both up.’
‘Mom and Eliza, yeah,’ said Abe. ‘I knew they did a lot of advocating for kids, but … I never knew who the kids were.’
‘Good.’ The vehemence in her voice surprised her. ‘They took me home and talked to Dad in the kitchen with the door closed. I couldn’t hear what they said, and God knows I tried my hardest. When they came out, Dad put his arm around me and said Mom was gone. I didn’t really figure out what he meant until a week later when she still hadn’t come back. She was just gone. And she never came back. Still hasn’t.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Dunno.’ The word was casual. Fiona felt anything but. ‘I think my dad does, but I don’t want to know the answer most days.’
‘You were how old again? If you were in my mom’s class, you must have been …’
‘Almost thirteen.’
‘I was sixteen then.’
There was more to that simple statement, to the look in Abe’s eye, than just an age calculation. Fiona, still lying on her side, twisted forward so that she was sitting, pulling the sheet with her, seated in the circle his body made. She put her hand on his pectoral muscle and felt it jump with tension. ‘What is it?’
‘That’s the year I lost my dad. We both lost a parent that year.’
Now that he said it Fiona did, in fact, vaguely remember that. Of course, it had been huge news, something that had affected her own father. As keeper of the light, he took ocean safety more seriously than anyone else, and he’d been friends with Conway Atwell. Abe, however, had been in high school then. Fiona remembered seeing him for what felt like the first time right around that time. A school friend had whispered to her in front of Tillie’s, ‘That’s Mrs. Atwell’s son. His father drowned.’
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