Capture

by June Gray

  “They’re beautiful.” I sniffed them out of habit, and was actually surprised to catch a whiff of a flowery scent.

  “I remember you said a long time ago, after Brian bought you flowers on your first date, that they were a waste of money because they died anyway.” He touched a finger to one paper rose. “These will last forever.”

  “Thank you,” I said, surprised that he remembered a throwaway comment I’d made many years ago.

  I caught him checking me out as he walked inside the apartment, but he tried to play it off with a shrug. “I’m going to go change,” I said.

  “Please don’t. I have a soft spot for that tank top,” he said. “Or rather, a hard spot.”

  “It’s too early for sexual innuendo,” I groaned.

  He laughed. “Okay,” he said, holding his hands up in defeat. “No innuendo at least after breakfast.”

  I set the flowers down on the counter and went to the fridge to get some eggs.

  “Where’s your coffee?” he asked and retrieved it when I pointed it out. He filled the coffeepot and started a brew. He found the bread on top of the microwave and placed two slices in the toaster while I cooked omelets then placed them on plates.

  “What do you have planned for the all-important third date?” I asked, sipping my coffee as we sat across the table from each other.

  “I was going to leave that up to you,” he said. He took a moment to finish chewing his toast. “Today, we are doing anything you want to do.”

  “That sounds like lazy planning to me.”

  He grinned. “The past two dates were about me. I didn’t mean to be selfish about it; all I wanted to do was show you a little bit more about myself. But today is about you.”

  “Whatever I want to do?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Even if you just wanted to have sex all day,” he said, nodding gravely. “I would make that sacrifice.”

  I laughed and rolled my eyes. “You wish.”

  The laughter slid off his face. “I do,” he said huskily.

  I felt my face heating up. Was it hot in here? “I’m going to go take a shower,” I said, pushing up off the table. “And no, that’s not an invitation for you to join me.”

  “Fine. I’ll do the dishes then,” he said with a grin and gathered the empty plates.

  For our third and final date, I chose to go down to Dallas to see Julie and Will a day early. I had already planned on driving down there on Sunday because my parents were flying in to meet their grandson, but I wanted to get to know Julie a little better before my parents met her.

  The three-hour drive in my Prius afforded Henry and me some time to talk nonsense and just shoot the breeze, but even though our conversations consisted of mostly jokes and innuendo, the air inside the car was stuffy with words that were not being said.

  We arrived at Julie’s house around two in the afternoon. Will seemed a little shy at first, which was not surprising since we just met the week before, but he warmed up when Henry handed him a rubber band gun we’d bought at the Cracker Barrel restaurant on the way down.

  “Cool!” Will said as Henry demonstrated the toy.

  Julie shook her head with a tiny smile on her lips. “You’re a bad influence, Henry.”

  “Jason would have done the same,” he said with an impish shrug. He turned to Will and asked, “So your mom doesn’t buy you toy weapons?”

  “What are weapons?” Will asked.

  “Guns, bows and arrows, rocket-propelled grenades.”

  Julie and I exchanged an amused glance. “Okay, Henry, you can give him some weapons,” she said with a resigned sigh. “But I draw the line at flame-throwers.”

  We all went to a fun little place called JumpStreet, per Will’s request, which was an indoor play area made up of trampolines. One half of the room was taken up by long swathes of trampolines made to look like bouncy racing lanes. The other half was set up in different sections, with a dodge ball court, a few slides, and an area for smaller children to play in.

  I’d thought that Henry would sit it out and just watch from the sidelines, but he seemed more excited than Will. Julie and I opted out of the bouncing, not because we didn’t want to play, but mostly because I wanted to know more about the woman who had known a side of my brother I’d never seen.

  We sat at the tables by the waiting area, watching through the plexiglass wall as Henry and Will jumped. Will grabbed onto Henry’s hand as they stepped onto the trampolines, still a little wary of the unsteady ground beneath his feet. Henry led him to the trampoline lane closest to us and they waved at us before taking exploratory jumps.

  “Will’s never been on a trampoline before,” Julie said. “Can you tell?”

  “How’s that possible?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m such a helicopter mom. I’m so scared something will happen to him.”

  I looked back at my nephew and was happy to see that he had let go of Henry’s hand and had already begun bouncing on his own.

  “I guess I’m going to have to just let him be his own person, find his own way. Kind of like what you did with Henry.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed mindlessly, watching Henry. Then her words sank in. I turned my attention back to her. “Um, what?”

  She gave a sheepish little grin. “I’m sorry. That was the worst transition in the history of mankind,” she said. “I just wanted to bring up the subject of your relationship with Henry. He and I exchanged several emails while he was stationed in Korea, so we were able to talk about things.”

  “About Will?”

  “Mostly about Jason and Will. But I noticed that your name always came up in his emails, so I just flat out asked him what happened between you two. He was surprisingly open about it and told me about therapy and what he’d done to you.”

  “Did he sound torn up?” I asked. I imagined Henry crying into his ramen noodles and stifled a laugh.

  “No. He sounded… determined. He said he was going to get you back.” Julie waited for a reply. When she didn’t get one, she asked, “Well? Did he?”

  “Not quite. He’s still trying to make it up to me.” I explained to her the challenge and the added problem of my impending move. “Henry doesn’t know yet.”

  Julie’s face fell at the news. “I’m really happy for you but I was hoping Will could get to know his aunt.”

  “I’ve got it all worked out,” I assured her. “Direct tickets from Denver to Dallas are cheap, about a hundred bucks round trip. I plan on visiting every month if you’ll let me.”

  “Of course,” she said, her sunny smile returning. “Come as often as you want!”

  I smiled at her, sure that she and I would have been great friends if she’d married my brother. “Did you love Jason?” I asked, which took her by surprise.

  “Yeah. With everything I had.”

  “How did you two meet?”

  Julie’s eyes were misty but she gave a rueful smile. “You’re going to think I’m a complete whore, but I met him at a spring break party and we slept together,” she said then added, “but he was the only guy I slept with that whole time.”

  The puzzle piece clicked together. “Henry said something about you. That Jason really liked you but you lived too far away from each other.”

  “We had an on-again-off-again love affair, you could say.”

  “I wonder why he never told us.”

  Julie looked pensive. “I’ve wondered that too. My guess is that he just wanted to make sure we were on-again permanently before he broke the news.” She looked down at her bare left hand. “It was during the deployment that he brought up the subject of marriage.”

  I grabbed her hand, the one with the phantom engagement ring, and squeezed. “Why didn’t you try to contact us sooner? Didn’t you have the apartment phone number?”

  “I did, but I knew Jason wasn’t due to come home for a few more months. When I didn’t hear from him for two weeks, I got worried. I started scouring the news for his nam
e, hoping to never find it. The day I found the story about the airman killed by a sniper in Kabul, I became seriously depressed. My roommate even called my mom, who came down to try and talk some sense into me, not knowing I was pregnant with a dead man’s baby.”

  She pulled a tissue out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes.

  “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I said, touching her hand. My own tear ducts were threatening to let loose.

  “I want you to know what happened,” she said. “I stayed with my mom for a while and tried to pick my life back up. When my coworker, Kyle—who had been in love with me for forever—asked me out I said yes and we began to date, pregnant as I was. The day Will was born, Kyle came to visit us in the hospital with a teddy bear for Will and a ring for me. You have to understand, I was vulnerable and was full of excess hormones so I said yes. I just didn’t want Will to grow up without a dad.

  “Kyle and I got married and we lived in Denton and life was nice for a while. He even wanted to adopt Will, but I always put it off because, in my heart, it didn’t feel right. Maybe that was the first indication that our marriage wasn’t going to last.” Julie stared off into space for a few seconds before collecting her thoughts. “Anyway, by the time I left him and it occurred to me to look for you, you and Henry had both moved out. I’m sorry it took me this long to find you.”

  I squeezed her hand again. “Don’t be sorry. I’m so grateful you contacted us.” I glanced back over to Will, who was jumping circles around a laughing Henry. “I feel like I have a piece of my brother back.”

  “Are your parents going to hate me after they hear that story?” she asked.

  “No way,” I said with a shake of the head. “How can they hate you when you’ve given them a grandson?”

  We turned when we heard crying and saw Henry approaching with a sobbing Will in his arms.

  “He scraped his knee,” Henry said with his eyebrows drawn. He set Will down on a chair and crouched in front of him. “You okay, buddy?”

  Julie pulled an antibacterial wipe from her purse and handed it to Henry, who proceeded to wipe the raw knee gently.

  “Ow, it hurts!” Will said and jerked his leg away.

  “Now Will,” Henry said firmly. The little boy took immediate note of the change in Henry’s tone and sat up. “I know it hurts a little bit but I need to wipe it down to make sure it’s clean. Do you think you can sit still for me?”

  Will’s lower lip trembled but he nodded. He winced when Henry touched the wipe to his knee again but didn’t cry out.

  After he was done, Henry said, “Good job, Will. You are one tough little man.”

  Will sat a little straighter. “Thanks, Henry.”

  Julie nudged me and whispered, “He’d make a great dad.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  Julie insisted that we stay at her house that night, setting us up in a charming guest room with a queen-sized bed.

  As soon as Henry saw it, he looked at me and said, “I can sleep on the floor.”

  I agreed to the arrangement, but at the end of the day, when it came time to turn off the lights, I found I couldn’t sleep. I felt a dull ache in my stomach as I lay in that soft bed, thinking about Denver and what my life would be like without Henry. By the time I decided that things would be so much simpler without him, the pain had moved up to my chest, radiating around one stubborn muscle. “Are you comfortable down there?” I asked him in the dark.

  He didn’t answer for so long, I thought he’d already fallen asleep. Then he said, “Not really.”

  Before I decide against it, I said, “Do you want to sleep up here?”

  His head popped up above the mattress. “You sure?”

  I patted the bed. “Come on, let’s bunk.”

  He climbed under the quilt beside me, careful to keep his distance, and folded his arms behind his head. “Remember when this used to feel so natural?”

  “Yeah,” I said wistfully. I turned to my side and laid a hand on his chest, threading my fingers through his chest hair. “I can’t believe how much we’ve changed since then.”

  He wrapped a hand around mine and pressed it closer to his heart. “But some things are still the same.”

  “Are they?”

  “The way I feel about you will never change,” he said in that husky tone.

  But I knew that had changed too. How could it not when the person himself was no longer the same? “I’m not sure that’s true,” I said.

  He blew out a breath. “Are you going to question everything I say?”

  His anger took me by surprise, rendering me speechless.

  “I’m trying here, Elsie. I’m trying so hard to be the good guy, to show you that you mean everything to me,” he said with an edge to his voice. “But this won’t work if you never give me the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Well, do you blame me?” I asked.

  He was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, “I don’t. But I wish you would stop doubting me.” He turned over, giving me his back. “Goodnight.”

  I heard the frustration in his words but his anger only fueled my own. “You put the doubt there,” I said, flipping to my side and taking a large portion of the blanket with me.

  His gruff voice reached out in the darkness. “I love you.”

  I sighed, wishing that, just once, the exasperating man would let me stay angry.

  The next morning, when the sun was beginning to peek through the blinds, I woke up to find Henry’s body pressed into my back. I realized cuddling was not all he wanted when his hand slid under my shirt and palmed one of my breasts. He moaned into my ear and pulled me closer, gently rocking his erection into my backside.

  Even though we were on unsteady ground right now, I was only human and needed to release the tension that had started building up since Henry’s reemergence into my life, so I squeezed my butt against his hard length, feeling his cock jump each time.

  His hand left my breast and slid down my stomach to the waistband of my pajama pants. The breath hitched in my throat when his fingers crept under my panties and began to draw lazy circles on my clit. His other hand grasped a breast, playing with my nipple.

  “Elsie,” he groaned and bit on my earlobe then kissed along my neck. He pushed one long finger inside me, then two. “I want to be inside you like this,” he said, his hips matching the pumping of his hand. He let out a soft hiss when my vaginal walls squeezed at his fingers, and he crooked them so that they were grazing that sensitive spot as they slipped in and out.

  Fairly soon I was panting, my entire body coiling tighter and tighter. Henry was everywhere, invading all of my senses, inside and out and all around. I twisted my head around and kissed him, sighing when he pivoted his hand slightly so that his thumb was rubbing against my clit.

  “Come for me,” he breathed against my ear and I flew apart into a thousand euphoric pieces.

  His fingers kept up the assault as he wrung out every inch of that orgasm until I was a trembling, moaning mess. When I couldn’t possibly take any more, I pulled his hand out of my pants and twisted in his arms, kissing him as I reached down between us.

  His entire body went rigid when my palm made contact with his cock, but just when I started to stroke, the bedroom door squeaked open and a little voice said, “Excuse me.”

  Henry pressed his face into the pillow and stifled a groan, then lifted his head to look across the room. “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Do you want to play Xbox?” Will asked, standing by the bed. “Mom got me a new game and it can have two players.”

  Henry shot me a longing look; I squeezed his cock in return. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath then turned back to Will. “Okay,” he said, surreptitiously extricating my hand from his pants and sitting up. “I just need to take a long, cold shower okay?”

  Will’s face lit up. “Awesome! I’ll go set it up!” he cried and ran out of the room.

  I grinned up a
t Henry as he gathered his clothes and toiletries, his lips taut and his pants bulging. “Good morning,” I said with a languid smile.

  “For you,” he grumbled and leaned down to give me a kiss. He gazed at me longingly a few seconds longer then, with an exaggerated sigh, stalked off to the guest bathroom.

  4 | ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES

  Julie was nervous as hell at the airport as we waited for my parents to deplane. The original plan was to have Henry pick them up but Julie decided that it would be less stressful to meet in neutral territory first. My guess was that she worried they would judge the life she’d provided Will before they had a chance to judge her personality. I assured her again that they would like her no matter what, but that didn’t stop her from tapping her foot anxiously as we waited.

  I was first to greet my parents when they came out of the security gate, giving them each a warm hug. With our elbows linked, I led them towards the nervous group. “Mom, Dad, this is Will,” I said, motioning for the little boy to come forward.

  My mom dropped her bags and crouched down. She was already crying by the time Will made his way over.

  Will held out his hand all business-like. “Hi. My name is William Jason Keaton.”

  Mom laughed as she shook his hand. “Well hello sweetheart, my name is Elodie Sherman and I’m your grandma.”

  “Are you my dad’s mom?” Will asked.

  “Yes, yes I am.” She gave him a watery smile. “Can I give you a hug?”

  Will gave a small nod and was immediately encircled in my mother’s embrace. “Oh my goodness,” she kept saying over and over. “I have a grandson.”

  I looked up at Dad, and he too was a little misty around the eyes. “He’s the spitting image of Jason,” he murmured. He shook off the oncoming grief and took a step towards Julie with his hand outstretched. “You must be Julie,” he said, shaking her hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Mom stood up but instead of shaking Julie’s hand, she hugged her instead. “Thank you,” Mom said. “Thank you for letting us be a part of his life.”

  Julie shook her head. “I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner.”