by Serena Bell
She rested her cheek against his chest, loving the hardness of his body under the softness of the knit shirt. She put her arms around him and stroked his back, pressing her hips against him until she felt him harden.
“Over medium,” she said, and his laugh rumbled under her cheek. She could have stayed there all day, but he stepped away to slip the spatula under his eggs and deposit them on plates.
She shivered and wanted him back.
They sat across from each other at the kitchen table. Sunlight streamed in.
“Let’s go to Dungeness Spit today,” he said.
She laughed.
“No. Don’t tell me we did that last time, too.”
She nodded.
“Huh,” he said. “You know what’s crazy? I feel like he—the old me—is a different guy completely. Like he’s your ex. And I’m—well, I’m trying to one-up him.”
“Um,” she said, “you’re jealous? Of your old self?”
She was teasing him, but the truth was, she loved the heck out of that. He was jealous. Of the last guy who’d had her. Even if he was his own usurper.
That felt big. Real.
Maybe—maybe this would be okay. Maybe they would spend the day together and it would all become clear—to both of them. Maybe they’d get to a place of certainty and at least half-promises, enough that she could call Stefan and tell him she’d changed her mind, she wasn’t coming. That’s what she’d do: she’d give it today to play out, and then she’d make a decision.
“Yeah. Crazy. Told you. And not exactly jealous. But—I want you to be thinking about this me. Not that me—”
His voice had softened, and she realized it was a real confession. On the same scale as the one he’d made last night, that he wanted to feel that way about her again.
The man she’d fallen in love with had been amazing in so many ways. She had admired him and wanted him and imagined a life with him. But this man—
This man was letting her in in a way that man hadn’t.
She’d thought she’d opened her heart to the old Hunter, but the new Hunter made her want to lay herself open. Peel back her skin and let him slip inside with her, draw him down deep.
“Oh, that guy,” she said, putting some flippancy in her voice. “He’s totally old news.”
She’d caught him off guard and made him smile again, and God, that smile—the lines at the corners of his eyes, the creases in his cheeks that were almost, but not quite, dimples.
Her heart felt like it was going to burst. Yes, she had a really tough decision to make. But not right this second. Right this second, she just wanted to be here. In this kitchen, him asking her to spend the day in the sunshine with him.
“I’d love to go to Dungeness Spit with you.”
“In anticipation of your ‘yes,’ I made sandwiches.”
She laughed out loud at that, and he ducked his head. “Let me guess. Not a surprise?”
She shook her head, and he gave her a wry smile in return. It was one of the things she’d fallen for about him. That he didn’t assume the care and feeding of the girls was her responsibility. On their Lakeshore Park outing, he’d bought them all lunch at the snack shack. And before, he’d often taken responsibility for packing a picnic lunch. She didn’t have much of a history of relationships, but she’d heard enough women bitching about their husbands to know that wasn’t a thing you could take for granted. And hell, after a lifetime of being a single mom, she didn’t take much of anything for granted, and he’d been almost too much to absorb. A guy who cooked breakfast. A guy who made sandwiches.
A towering, built, gorgeous guy who could rock her world in bed and do all that.
She looked up to find him watching her.
“What are you thinking about, beautiful?”
“You’ve—you’ve never called me that before.”
“I knew that other guy was a fucking idiot.” He set his fork down and reached across the table to push a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re crazy beautiful.”
She lost her breath, the way he was looking at her.
—
Hey, man. So glad you’re okay. We were a little freaked out. And sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Shit’s crazy right now. But we’ll be home soon! Can’t wait to see you and hear about what’s been going on. Yeah, I know what happened. I can’t believe no one told you. I guess things got chaotic and they were just trying to save your sorry-ass life. Anyway, gist is, we went into a building that was supposed to be empty, it wasn’t (goat fuck), full of T-men, brief firefight. A grenade took out a corner of the building and there was a haji woman trapped under some rubble. She probably had been using the building for shelter before the insurgents went in and then was too terrified to show herself. You tried to get her out, we tried to talk you out of it, but you were a crazy man, H. No one could get you to stop digging. I mean, you were like in there, fingernails bloody, the whole nine yards. And then there was another explosion. Probably another grenade. She was killed, you took that piece of rebar in the chest. I’m sorry to be brief, but I gotta run now. Feel free to ask questions if you want. I might not get your email before we’re outta here but I’ll try to get back to you if I can. Stay safe. Guess that’s easier now, huh?
“Hunter?”
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been staring at the screen. Just—staring. He’d stopped to check his email before they left for the spit, and here he was, some number of minutes or hours, or for all he knew, days later.
“What is it?” Trina came up behind him and touched his hair. His whole body leapt to life at the touch, despite how wired the email had made him feel.
He pushed his chair back a little, gesturing to her that she should read the screen.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Hunter.”
“I still feel like it’s something that happened to someone else, though. I mean, I see the story. I get that she was probably scared, crying. But—the way he described me—I’m not that guy. I’m the weigh-the-consequences, think-it-through, figure-out-a-plan guy. Not the guy who starts digging in the rubble like a madman when his men are telling him to get the hell out.”
“You could write back to him. Ask him.”
“Do you think he knows?”
“He might.”
The pain of it was, he knew. Somewhere down in the depths of his mind, he knew what had happened that day. But he couldn’t get to it. It was locked behind a wall.
“God,” he said quietly. “I hate it. That there’s all this stuff in there. Buried. That I can’t see. Like it’s waiting for me.”
“Isn’t that kind of true of all of us?” Trina asked. She put her arms around him, pressed her breasts against his back. For a brief moment, the pain and darkness in his head receded.
“What’s buried in your head?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know, do I?”
“You know some of it. You must have things you push down.”
“I try not to.”
“No buried anger?”
She laughed. “Well, plenty of hostility toward Stefan and his limited contributions toward Phoebe’s well-being. Twenty-three chromosomes—I guess I should be glad that it was the right number, right? Expensive Christmas gifts that mainly serve to make her notice how not expensive most of mine are. And cash when I beg nicely. But that’s hardly buried.”
“You don’t act bitter.”
“I don’t want to be bitter. And I don’t want her to hear me being bitter. If we’re going to make this thing work, we have to go into it with a good attitude.”
“Are you excited about it? The job?”
He turned in his chair so he could see her face. He wasn’t sure, not anymore, what he wanted her to say.
She bit her lip. “Yes. Of course.”
That heavy feeling in his chest—that was disappointment.
“But—there’s a part of me that’s not sure, either. Whether this is the right thing.”
And that was fear.
He didn’t want to let her go, but he was terrified of the alternative. Of her staying.
What if—
What if he couldn’t—
What if he disappointed her the way he’d—
“I’m afraid he’ll let her down. I don’t think he’ll be very involved. I think she’ll be sort of a trophy daughter to him.”
So it wasn’t that she didn’t want to leave him. It was that she didn’t trust Stefan Spencer with Phoebe.
“How could anyone make Phoebe just a trophy?” he demanded. “She’s terrific.” For the last week, he’d been teaching Phoebe to use the power tools. She was fearless and full of ideas, wanting to know why things had to be done a certain way, suggesting out-of-the-box alternatives, and then listening intently as he explained why her ideas could—or might not—work. If she were his daughter—
If he’d gotten Trina pregnant, instead of Dee?
Impossible to imagine, of course. Impossible to imagine the world without either Clara or Phoebe. But if he’d gotten Trina pregnant, he would have done the right thing by her, just as he had by Dee. And if Phoebe had been his daughter, he never would have let her out of his sight, up and left to live a thousand miles away. And as for the token gifts and making Trina ask for money…
He would never have let them go. Never have let them find family in another man.
If he’d been her real father.
If he’d been a man who knew himself capable of love.
“Phoebe is terrific.” She smirked. “It’s my genes.”
He laughed, and it snapped him, once again, out of the dark place he’d been tempted to go.
Chapter 18
The ground of the spit wasn’t smooth and sandy but a mix of slippery seaweed, ankle-slaying stones, and pebbles that slipped and slid underfoot. To either side of them, Puget Sound undulated in their peripheral vision, bringing vertigo in waves.
They’d calculated the tide correctly, which meant that it was still going out, and there was enough beach for walking, but not an abundance of it, and what beach existed was canted ever-so-slightly downward to the left.
She’d forgotten how much being out on the spit felt like being at sea in a boat. She felt unmoored, unprotected—but also utterly thrilled by the wind whipping around her, the ocean air moving in her hair—very much as she imagined a traveler setting out on a long ocean voyage must have felt.
Hunter took her hand. The girls had run on ahead, and then stopped to examine the beach detritus, repeating the pattern again and again to keep their distance from the adults. Which was fine with Trina, who squeezed Hunter’s hand tighter and tried to think only of how happy she was in this exact moment in this exact place. If you tucked yourself tight enough into the present, the past and future could go screw.
“So. The infamous first kiss. How did that come about?”
Not the safest terrain, when her own feelings had begun their free fall.
She wanted to ask him what the hell they were doing. What they’d been doing last night, kissing like that, touching like that. What they were doing today, playing at courtship in the face of her departure. What they were doing.
But he didn’t know the answer any better than she did. She knew that. All she could do was tell the story and hope.
“We each, separately, took the girls to the same sleepover party. By that point, we’d had a few charged moments, but we’d agreed nothing was going to happen. For all the aforementioned reasons. You were leaving, you didn’t do love, it would confuse the shit out of the girls if they found out, blah blah blah. I pulled up to drop off Phoebe, and I saw you there with Clara, and I decided not to get out of the car because I didn’t trust myself. I already had enough experience to know that my resolve was nonexistent when it came to you and that no matter how good my logic was, if I got within a couple feet of you, it was dead. But you came over and leaned down and peeked in the car window. I could feel—”
She hesitated and he turned, his eyes quizzical.
“That buzz, you know?”
“This buzz?”
He stopped walking for long enough to bring his face near hers and sure enough, there was the electric thrum that always leapt between them.
When she drew back, she saw that his eyes had darkened and his lower lip softened. Her body softened, too, an echo.
“It was a warm summer night and probably a full moon or something. It was the kind of night when things happen, whether you want them to or not. And I did. I wanted things to happen. I’d been wanting it day and night for days and days, and—”
She felt heat roll through her at the memory.
“So yeah,” she said, recovering the power of speech with some effort. “You leaned down. And all you said was, ‘I’m feeling like grabbing some sushi. Wanna come?’ I knew I should say no. I sort of even tried to say no. But you convinced me it would just be a quick dinner. I knew what was going to happen, I think. We were both just waiting for a chance to do the wrong thing, but I went anyway. Maybe because it was that kind of night. Where everything is more intense. All your senses. Everything feels like sex. The air is charged and the food is foreplay—you watched me eat like you couldn’t take your eyes off my mouth, and I’ve never thought sushi was sexy, but it was that night. I will probably never eat salmon nigiri again in my life without thinking about sex.”
He laughed.
“You paid for me. I tried to refuse, but you insisted. I kind of knew right then that we were going to blow right by our own rules, but I kept lying to myself for a while longer. Which is why it seemed totally reasonable for me to go back to your house for a drink.”
“And…?”
“There might have been some kissing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And it was pretty good.”
“Just pretty good?”
She knew he was going to kiss her before he did it. Deep, his palm strong on the back of her head, till she was having trouble catching her breath. Then he let her go.
“Couldn’t let the other guy get the upper hand?” she teased, because it was either that or fall into his arms and beg him for—for something.
“You just looked so sexy. Talking about it. I could see it all over your face. You get this kind of—dazed look. Your cheeks get pink and your mouth gets soft and your eyes get—sleepy.”
He’d caught her between the reverie of memory and the intensity of the present—his hand had moved from the back of her head to her arm, but it still felt like a strong magnet—and she felt that bone-deep craving move down her gut and between her legs.
“But okay, yeah, maybe I didn’t want the other guy to be your gold standard.”
“The other guy’s toast on the kissing front,” she said. “He was toast last night. Everything else is just icing. Or butter, I guess.”
“Booyah!” he said, and they both laughed. “And then what happened?”
Oh. Right. This part of the story.
No point in sugarcoating it.
“That was when you said it was a mistake and you couldn’t do it again—for all the reasons we’ve talked about. So we called it off for a bit, and for a week or so we avoided each other. Or I avoided you anyway. I did a couple of pickups and drop-offs from the car, we didn’t talk, we didn’t email—and then Phoebe got the stomach flu while she was at your house. Actually, both girls. I couldn’t take her home because she was violently ill, and you offered for the two of us to stay until Phoebe was more stable. And—”
She tripped and he steadied her, an arm snaking around her waist and drawing her close, so it was harder to walk but she didn’t protest because he felt so good. Warm and strong, sturdy and familiar.
“I loved watching you with Clara. I loved that you didn’t avoid her like she was plague-stricken. You held her head when she was sick and you sat by her bed and you brought her sips of ginger ale. And—you must have felt the same, because after the girls were both asleep, you came down to the guest room and—”
/>
“We had sex?”
She snuck a peek at him and saw the slight tilt of his smile grow. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, dude. First you explained to me why you were so gun-shy.”
“Because of Dee.”
“You told me that you’d followed your dick—”
He shot her a look and she grinned. “Your words, not mine. And she’d gotten pregnant, and you had to get married. You said you couldn’t regret Clara. And given Clara, you knew you’d done the right thing. But—”
“But it wasn’t what I would have chosen. I trapped myself.”
“Yeah.”
He held her gaze for a moment, and she saw the same pain there she’d seen when he’d told her the story that night. Regret, and something else. Something she couldn’t quite name.
And just like that other night, he turned away abruptly, closing down her access to what was hurting him.
They walked in silence, the wind brushing damp hair off the back of her neck, making her shiver.
“And then?”
She felt the narrowness of the spit suddenly, the vastness of space and sea on both sides. “You said you never wanted to make that mistake again. Confusing lust and love. And you said—” She hesitated.
“You said your attraction to me was so intense that you didn’t quite trust yourself.”
She finished, and he stopped. He looked at the sky, showing her the long line of his throat, already speckled with stubble, the hollow just above the collar of his T-shirt, where a pulse beat.
He pulled his gaze down to meet hers. Held hers prisoner, her blood thrumming everywhere.
“It still is.”
The world spun around them.
“I lose my breath when you get close to me,” she confessed suddenly. “It’s that intense. Like a hand squeezes my lungs. That’s never happened to me before.”
“Not the first time?” His eyes were bright.
“Not like this. Not like this combination of joy and—” She hesitated. What she was trying to describe was the fierceness and suddenness of her arousal. But the words were unfamiliar, and not meant to be said aloud. “Pull,” she said feebly, but his eyes lit like he knew exactly what she meant. “Like a whole body, every molecule committed, leaning toward feeling.”