The memories of her father, James’s, wide chest snug against her shoulders and the vibration of his gentle, sonorous tones brought warmth deeper than the sun ever could reach. “He knows I’m like him—hardheaded, independent, and I like to make my own way. But days like the one in Mobile bring his irrational fears swarming back.”
“Can’t blame him.”
She peered at Gavin’s frown and stifled the urge to soothe it. “I told you water’s always called to me. I’ve always loved the river. It’s never the same. It’s never still. It’s like the moon; it changes, every night. When I saw that river house for sale, I knew I had to have it.” Rolling her eyes, she raised her glass. “Not before Dad and Kyle got a hold of it, of course. The sale had barely closed and they were already repairing and updating everything down to the kitchen tiles. There was mold in one of the bathrooms. They gutted it. The outside stairs weren’t to code. The deck was falling down. Every week or so, Dad still shows up for breakfast or dinner. Really, he’s looking it over, every speck of it. Still trying to pacify those irrational fears. In silent ways, at least.”
“He’s a good man who loves you,” Gavin stated plainly. “Any real man’d do the same.”
Love her or look after her? Mavis wondered. Tucking that away for later, she leaned back on one hand and said, “It all comes back to the river. Since I moved from the farm to the water, I’ve had less ‘episodes.’ Bad days have been fewer and further between. You, Dad and my grandmother can argue all you like about what happened a few days ago. But days like this...” A cool breeze licked over her, caressing skin slicked lightly with the dew of perspiration. She turned her face into it and closed her eyes. “... I wouldn’t miss for the world.”
When he didn’t agree, she raised a brow and tipped her head back so she had a panoramic view of the sky. “You might as well ask me to crawl back into that incubator.”
“I’m not asking you.”
He might as well have been whispering. Still, she could hear he was troubled. And she sighed. Because men... Releasing restraint, she shared the warmth with him, placing her cheek on the sculpted muscle of his arm and twining her arm around his waist. She stroked his spine in small circles, then, giving in, spanned her fingers wide and traced his vertebrae—those tired bones that’d held him up through everything. “I wish it hadn’t happened with you there to see it.”
“Don’t do that, Frexy,” he muttered. He lowered his head to her hair. She felt the air from his lungs push through. “Don’t apologize to me.” A curse. “I was useless.”
“No.”
He kept chiding himself. “I was no use to you when you needed me. It’s what I am. It’s what I will always be. You wanna talk about irrational fear? It’s crept in on me every day, every mission since...”
Mavis’s brows veered together when he stopped abruptly. She lifted her cheek to study him. “Since when?” At his short uttered refusal, she slowed the caress on his spine, moving her palm in a horizontal glide over his waist. “You want to tell me.”
“No. I don’t,” he said sharply.
“Yes, you do. Or else you wouldn’t have started. I’m here.” She said it because, again, he needed to hear it. “Tell me, once and never again, unless it’s what you need.”
“That’s what you want?” He was grim. Eyes flat, they drilled straight into the ground between his feet. “You’ve already seen more of my cards than anybody. You want to see the ugly ones, too?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“In my experience, only professionals want that. And they’re paid, Mavis.”
She made sure to steady her hand before placing it over the base of his neck. “I want you to tell me. I want you to tell me all the things you’re afraid to tell anyone else.”
“I’d rather make out.”
The quick stab at amusement couldn’t sway her. “Gavin.”
His defeated breath deflated him swiftly. “They ask you, after every mission. You go into a room, sometimes with your buddies. Sometimes without. They make you break it all down, piece by piece, until every detail of the op has been transcribed, every decision scrutinized, every motive questioned and upheld. Toward the end, they ask: Would you do anything different? Would you have waited a second longer to pull the trigger? Would you have rushed the door a minute sooner? Would turning counterclockwise instead of clockwise have made you more effective? I used to think it was ludicrous because my answer was always the same. Hell, no, I wouldn’t do anything different because I always did the thing I should’ve. I did everything they trained me to.”
He pinched the skin between his chin and neck where sweat had begun to gather. Just like in the Cadillac, Mavis could see it beading along his temple, collecting around the slight hollow adjacent to his ear. “One day, the answer changed. My training never failed me. Somehow, it was something inside me that disconnected. I hit a patch of mental ice and went off the skids.”
“What happened?” she asked.
Pain washed over his face, then trickled away, taking his color with it. “Benji.”
Of course. Benji. Gavin had been the acting medic on the squad Benji was assigned to when he was killed. If stories were true, Gavin had carried him out of firing range. He’d tried to save his life.
It made sense. Benjamin Zaccoe’s fate haunted Kyle, too. It was Benji’s ghost and the sense of duty that Kyle felt that had kept him from pursuing Harmony sooner. It was Benji who had kept Harmony single until she and Kyle had decided to take their friendship to the next level. As gross as it was to have a longtime bestie and a brother infatuated with each other, even Mavis had to admit that Kyle and Harmony’s collision was inevitable. “You feel responsible for what happened to Benji?”
Gavin’s brow rucked. “You’re damn right I’m responsible.”
She picked through what she knew of Benji’s death carefully. “Kyle told everyone Benji couldn’t have been saved.”
“A surgeon could’ve saved him.”
“Gavin, you aren’t a surgeon.”
“No,” he said. The muscles of his face quavered. “No. I’m not.”
Mavis’s mouth numbed. A dinner at the farm came back to her, over a decade past. The conversation around the table she remembered crisply, as if she’d heard it yesterday.
“So, Gavin,” Adrian said, peering across the centerpiece to the person occupying the chair opposite her own. “Have you decided what you would like to do once you graduate?”
Gavin’s mouth twisted into a half smile as he cut his steak with fork and knife. “I thought about joining Kyle at Emory so I could bug the hell out of him, but my grades won’t make the cut.”
“You haven’t thought about what you want to do?” Adrian asked, less judgmental than curious. “You don’t know what you want to be when you leave school?”
Gavin’s smile turned inward. “I don’t know. I’d like to see some of the world, I guess.” At James’s affirmative nod and grunt from the head of the table, Gavin went on, encouraged. “School’s not easy to get into and it’d take forever to finish the way I want. But... I don’t know... I kind of always wanted to be a doctor.”
Mavis’s chin sailed up. “You? Really?” she asked before she could close her mouth. Every face turned in her direction. Adrian raised a brow, quietly reproachful. Reprimanding herself, Mavis fell silent again.
Gavin cleared his throat. “Yeah.” He’d lost what hype the conversation had managed to drum out of him. “I guess.”
“What field?” Adrian asked kindly. “Pediatrics? Psychology?”
“Plastic surgery?” Kyle snorted.
“Hush,” Adrian chided shortly.
“A surgeon,” Gavin granted. “Though nothing superficial. I want to do the gritty stuff. Maybe be a corps surgeon.”
“That’s admirable,” James noted.
Gavin didn’t seem to know what to
do with the compliment from James. He nodded and went back to cutting his steak.
“You’ll never do it,” Kyle opined. He yelped and stared broodingly at Adrian for kicking him under the table. “What? If Gav’s going to do anything military, he’s going to be on the front line with a gun in his hands. He treats every day like a training exercise already. Not that you’ll ever make it through basic. You’ll punch out the first instructor who calls you a worthless piece of—”
“Kyle,” Adrian said in warning.
Mavis eyed her brother. “That’s better than crying, which is what you’d do.”
Gavin barked an astonished laugh. When he turned to her, he smiled at her in a way that wasn’t irritating or smug like all the times before.
She recognized affection even if she’d stopped giving it. Unsure what to do with it and the awareness that flickered like a wakening light bulb under her skin, she looked quickly away again and spent the rest of the night pretending that her family didn’t have company for dinner after all.
She couldn’t deny even after all these years that he’d surprised her that day. She’d never bothered to dig underneath the surface of the troublemaker she knew him to be and unearth all the potential he’d hidden there. Intelligence. Self-effacement. Goals with far-reaching scope.
The tumult burned off him. She could feel it through his arm. “Even if you had been a surgeon, who says you would’ve been in the same place at the same time when he was shot?” she asked. “The chances are nearly nonexistent.”
“Nearly,” he groaned, distant.
She tightened her grip. “You could’ve been the greatest surgeon in the navy and you probably still wouldn’t have saved him. There’s no coming back from an injury like that. Is there?”
“You’re saying he wasn’t meant to be saved.”
Mavis didn’t know how to answer. Not when she could feel the tremor going through him. “Kyle’s going to kill me for this, but I heard him say once that he wished it had been him that day.”
“In my place?”
“In Benji’s.”
“He didn’t say that.”
“Have you not thought the same?” she challenged. “Benji had everything going for him—wife, baby on the way...”
“And what did I have?” he echoed. “Family I avoided more often than not? Some frenemies from high school, aside from Kyle, who didn’t like me anyway? Would the impact back here at home have been smaller if it had been me?”
“You believe that.” Suspicions confirmed, Mavis took the care to breathe slowly, coolly. Her hand flattened. She lifted it from him. “You actually believe that.”
“Didn’t I tell you,” he stated, “if you dug deep enough you wouldn’t like what you found?”
“You think Cole and Briar would’ve been better off?” she asked. “What about Harmony? You think you’re less than equal to Benji in her eyes? If you asked Benji, would he have thought his place in the world bigger than yours?”
“I can’t ask him. Can I?”
“What about me?” she demanded.
Gavin’s countenance cleared. One by one, the shadows strayed off, leaving only questions. “What about you?”
Her heart pounded. The twin surges of rage and need had made breathing unnecessary. She couldn’t draw a single breath. “It would’ve mattered to me,” she concluded. Something damp singed the back of her eyes. She blinked three times in the space of seconds. “You matter.”
“I didn’t then.”
Dropping to a whisper, she asked, “How do you know?” She waded against wisdom and spoke, freely. “I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re here with me.”
He stared at her, questions eclipsed by awe. “Ah,” he breathed, “I’m going to kiss you.”
He took her face in his hands again. They were gentle this time, tipping her chin up so that the angle was right.
Mavis began to shake her head. If he kissed her, he’d lay all the reasons he shouldn’t to waste and she’d no longer care if either of them could handle it. Even though she knew she couldn’t.
“Shh.” It soothed from him to her. He pressed his brow to hers. His mouth skimmed the tip of her nose in a whispered kiss. “You can’t talk like that...and not expect a man to kiss you. Especially a broken one like me.”
“I don’t see broken.”
“No.” He laughed in one hushed burst. “You don’t, do you?” The line of his mouth wasn’t steady. A wince worked over it, unguarded. “I think you know me. What I am. You might know me better than I know myself. And fuck if that doesn’t scare me, Freckles.”
He was right, maybe. She couldn’t take it, knowing what she knew. She couldn’t stand it, knowing he wrestled his soul every night. Not alone anymore. The sentiment blazed like a comet, incinerating doubt. I won’t let you do this alone anymore.
Their lips met. He moaned. Her eyes drew closed. She felt a crease form between them as his lips closed over her upper lip. His teeth grazed once. Then again. All the muscles of her neck and shoulders went lax in approval, sensations rooted deep in sinew. Jaw loosened, she let him confront her, mouth to open mouth, and had never felt so eager or needy.
She pulled back, enough for his hands to slide away. Gripping his shoulders, she climbed to her knees, taking the high ground. She mirrored him, embracing his face and kissing him.
“Mmm,” he said. His arm slid over her waist, looping all the way around her back. He pulled her close.
She licked him, his lips parted in a sneer that was as involuntary as it was wolfish. She licked him once more, encouraging. She found the tip of his tongue with her own and traced it in one teasing stroke. Under her palms, she felt a shudder. It went through him, from bottom to top. Gripping harder, he jerked his chin back. His gaze locked on hers, hard and green. His fingers raked, spread, through her hair. He cupped the back of her head and beckoned her to him again.
It’d be so easy to rock him back to the surface of the towel and take more, deeper.
She withdrew because she felt her tremor go up against his. The urgency between them had built to the height of anticipation. She remembered he was vulnerable—more so than she might’ve been. Slow was the name of their game. It had to be.
He didn’t follow her lead. Holding her close, he laid an open kiss to her cheek. His chest rose on a prolonged inhale. When he released it, it resonated, gruff. A predatory sound that drew her skin taut everywhere.
“You’re prickly,” he murmured against her cheek, “but sweet. Like a pineapple.”
She dragged the tips of her nails gently over the nape of his neck. He was salty and deep. Like the Dead Sea. Even there, she sensed, she’d swim until her limbs felt like noodles and she had no course but to sink. He tipped his mouth beneath her chin to a place that was ultrasensitive and she closed her eyes. The tremor had grown into a consenting shimmy. “Give me a minute. I...think I might have something to say.”
Both his arms roped around her waist. “Nah, baby. We just got started.”
“Yes. But... Gavin, you’re not exactly grounded right now.”
“Right now, I feel like a freaking sequoia.”
Risking it, she lowered her eyes so she could study his features. There was want there, yes, and need great enough she felt the bite of it along the ranks of her inner thighs. A smile stitched the seam of his lips together. She caught herself teasing it with the edge of her thumb and dropped her hands from him completely. “You shouldn’t smile,” she admitted. If only he knew how much him smiling, sincerely, laid her bare. “Not when I’m trying to be sensible.”
“I’ve never wanted to be less sensible.”
Mavis gulped air. “That’s my point. This...all this...it’s nice for now. But what happens in the end?”
“When I leave?”
Mavis lifted a shoulder. “Isn’t that what you’ll do, eventually?
You’ve been very clear. No promises.”
Gavin relinquished half their link, bringing one hand up to his face to rub his lips briefly before propping it behind him and leaning away.
She shifted to her hip, feeling as flattened as he looked. “I’m not fishing for assurances you’re not comfortable giving. I’ve told you. I know you don’t know your place in the world anymore and I’m aware of who you are—who you’ve always been. You’ll go looking elsewhere for it if you can’t find it here. You’re—”
“A drifter,” he concluded, gaze dull and far off. “I run.”
She groped for his hand and gripped it tight. “I want you.”
The truth bomb snatched his head around, back to hers. His brows hitched, surprised. Impressed.
Mavis nodded. “That isn’t something I’m capable of ignoring anymore.”
“Anymore,” he murmured. His jaw softened. “How long have you been ignoring it, exactly?”
“I don’t think it’s relevant.”
“Oh, I think it might be,” he said, mischievous.
“The point is...” she said, trying to strengthen her resolve when she felt weak. So weak. “If we pursue this—whatever happens, I won’t stop you if you need to run. If you need room, just tell me, before. That way I can... I can try to...”
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