by Merry Farmer
“So as you can see, Paradise Space Flight offers many unique perks to their employees,” he said in as much of a businesslike voice as he could manage.
Angelica hummed and reached for his penis. He was already halfway aroused, and her gentle stroking had him stiff again in no time. “This is quite the rocket,” she cooed. “I wonder how long it would take to get it to launch.”
“Forget launching,” he growled, the pleasure coursing through him doubly intense because of the swell of affection he felt for her. “I wonder how long it would take for it to reach Venus.”
“Let’s find out.” She rolled him to his back, shrugging off the covers as she straddled his hips. The sight of her full, naked body in all its glory, her breasts round and tipped with dark nipples, the trimmed hair at the juncture of her thighs inviting, had Dennis wishing the box of condoms he’d bought just in case was within arm’s reach and not somewhere on the floor.
She had just wrapped both hands around his throbbing penis and begin working him when the distinct chime of a cell phone broke the increasingly hot mood. It wasn’t his phone. Angelica’s hands kept up their work for a few more seconds before she paused. Dennis was torn between telling her to ignore the phone and concentrate on driving him crazy with lust and politely asking if she needed to answer that.
She hesitated long enough that the call went to voicemail, then started her sexy teasing again. Dennis relaxed his head against the pillow and groaned in appreciation as she stroked and explored him. Until her phone rang again.
This time, she let out a frustrated growl and climbed off the bed to search for her purse.
“Uh, would it be rude of me to ask you to find the box of condoms while you’re down there?” he asked, hoarse with pleasure but laughing all the same.
“Good idea.”
She gave up the search for her phone in favor of fetching the box of condoms from the other side of the room. Once again, the call went to voicemail. Angelica let out an exclamation of victory as the retrieved the box and returned to the bed. She pulled out the strip of packets, detached one, and almost had it open when her phone rang again.
Dennis—still spread-eagle and erect—let out a heavy sigh and closed his eyes. Angelica made a frustrated sound. She tossed the condoms aside and got up to fetch her purse. Her peevish look intensified when she pulled out her phone and looked at the screen.
“You better have a really good reason to call me right now, Tee. I’m about to—”
She stopped mid-sentence, her mouth dropping to an “O.” Her angry expression melted to shock, then worry. Dennis sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing. His heart thumped with alarm as he walked to her.
Angelica glanced up at him as she said, “We’ll be there as soon as we can.” She pulled the phone away from her ear and tapped it to end the call. Dennis didn’t need to ask before she said, “Mrs. Brown’s house was struck by lightning. The fire department is there, but Latoya says it’s going up in flames.”
Dennis didn’t have to think twice. “You use the bathroom first and get dressed. We’ll get there as fast as we can.”
Her eyes were so filled with worry that he leaned in to kiss her before walking her halfway to the bathroom. As soon as her energy and focus returned, she continued on her own to clean up, while he did his best to gather their clothes. The ache in his groin over what might have been was a small price to pay when the people he cared about were in trouble.
It was still almost forty-five minutes before they were able to retrieve Angelica’s car and drive out to the old neighborhood. The air on the street was acrid with smoke as they pulled up and found a spot to park on the curb along with emergency vehicles. It was dark, hot, and humid, but half the neighborhood looked like it had come out to watch the disaster. The flames were gone by the time Dennis and Angelica raced up to Mrs. Brown’s front yard, but smoke still curled up in black plumes, and one entire side of the house—the side that included the front room where he and Angelica had worked that morning—was black with fire damage.
“Bless you two,” Mrs. Brown’s distressed voice came from the side of one of the flashing fire engines. “Bless you both.”
Dennis twisted to see Mrs. Brown standing alongside Mr. Fellowes and Mr. Jeffries, Leon there as well, offering comfort. All three elders looked worn and drawn. They were in their robes and slippers, hair messy, like they’d gone to bed and had to flee the house in a rush. Dennis hadn’t realized how old they’d become until he saw them like that. He hadn’t realized how much his old neighborhood had changed or how few of the people he knew growing up weren’t there, watching the scene with the others. He’d assumed nothing had really changed.
But everything had changed. Angelica broke away from where she had been clinging to his side and rushed to hug Mrs. Brown. She’d spent the night with him, or would have if they hadn’t been called home. Except this wasn’t home. Things weren’t the same. He glanced to the blackened side of the house. Of all the bizarre times to realize that life as he’d known it on the block was nothing but a memory, that was it.
He glanced back to Angelica, who was now hugging Mr. Jeffries. The Angelica who had bared herself so openly to him that evening was not just the girl who had turned him upside down as a kid. She was that girl, but so, so much more. And now he had the chance to start over with her.
Spirit strangely renewed and completely at odds with the catastrophe in front of him, Dennis marched over to Mrs. Brown, folding her into a hug. “I’m so sorry for this, Mrs. Brown.”
“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” Mrs. Brown wailed.
“We’ll think of something,” Dennis promised her. He acknowledged Leon with a nod. Leon returned it, dead serious. “Don’t you worry,” Dennis went on to Mrs. Brown. “We’ll take care of you one way or another. It’s what we do, right? We take care of each other.” He had never felt so determined about anything in his life.
“Bless you, son, bless you.” Mrs. Brown wept against his shoulder.
There was nothing to do after that but to stand by and watch as the firefighters doused the last of the flames deep inside the house.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Leon explained as the night wore on. “The rooms on the west side of the house weren’t touched by the fire, but they have a lot of smoke and water damage.”
“And the fire was started by a lightning strike?” Angelica asked, her arm still around a sagging Mr. Jeffries.
Leon nodded. “The fire chief said they see it sometimes with these old houses when they aren’t grounded. And I hate to say it, but the debris from the renovations, some of which included flammable materials, probably didn’t help the situation.”
“Latoya’s not going to like that,” Dennis said, feeling terrible for his old friend. He craned his neck to see if he could spot her among the people at the scene. She was busy talking to what looked like the fire chief and a police officer. “They can’t blame her for this, can they?”
“No,” Leon said, rubbing his tired, soot-streaked face. “She’s been running a tight ship in there. But renovations, no matter how tidy they are, have hazards that otherwise wouldn’t exist. And at the end of the day, I’m hoping the insurance company will consider this an act of God.”
They all nodded, but Mrs. Brown shook her head. “What are we going to do?” she continued to lament.
Dennis glanced over her head to Angelica. She met his eyes and nodded. “Let’s start by getting you folks away from here and someplace cool and dry,” she said. “My mama’s house is just down the way here.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Jones can give you all places to sleep for the night at least,” Dennis agreed.
They started to usher the trio of elders down the road.
“I don’t want to go live in no home,” Mr. Fellowes insisted. “Those places are the pits.”
Dennis and Angelica shared another look over his head. “You won’t have to go into a home, Mr. Fellowes,” h
e said, but he wasn’t entirely sure. He knew nothing about any of the elders’ financial situations, other than their need to share a house. He wasn’t even sure if they had family nearby who might take them in or if that would be the best thing for them.
“We can’t let them be forgotten or be swept into some system,” he whispered to Angelica half an hour later, after the old folks were settled on the sofa at the Jones’ house, sipping tea to calm their nerves. Leon had gone back to the house to support his sister. That left Dennis and Angelica in the kitchen, doing what Dennis remembered their neighbors doing any time there was a crisis—putting together a tray of snacks, even though it was the middle of the night.
“We won’t,” Angelica began, chewing her lip. “But I’m not sure what we’ll be able to do for them. I’ve been so busy with graduate work since forever that I haven’t really kept in touch with what’s going on in the neighborhood.”
“I’m in the same boat.” He sighed. “But we have to do something.” He stopped and studied Angelica’s anxious, determined face, breaking into a smile. “Between the two of us, we’re bound to come up with an idea.”
Angelica paused her fretting long enough to look up at him. Her expression softened, and the corners of her mouth lifted in a faint smile. “You think so?”
Dennis stepped closer, drawing her into his arms with the same comforting strength he had used with Mrs. Brown. “Sweetheart, with both of us working on the problem, there’s no obstacle in this world we can’t think our way around.”
She let out a scoffing laugh, but rested her head against his chest and wrapped her arms around him all the same. There was something decidedly bittersweet about the gesture, especially when Angelica closed her eyes and sighed, “I sure hope you’re right.”
“This is just another ploy to come get you to work for PSF, by the way,” he said, then kissed her forehead.
She leaned back to look up at him with a quirky frown. “What are you talking about?”
“See how well we work together?” He smiled. “This is a test to show that with the two of us working as a team, every problem in the universe can be solved, whether it’s finding the right home for our elderly neighbors until they can rebuild or building renewable fuel sources for interplanetary rockets or—” He paused, brushing his fingers along her cheek and cradling her jaw. “Or transforming an entire childhood’s worth of emotions and experiences into something entirely new and wonderful.” He raised his voice and his eyebrows in question at the end of his sentence. “Come back to Haskell with me.”
Her smile grew, but she didn’t speak right away. The silence took on a feeling of anticipation. Dennis tensed, holding his breath. She had to say yes. He wasn’t sure he could take it if she turned him down now.
At last, she heaved a sigh and leaned into him once more. “You sure do ask a lot of a woman after a day like the one I’ve had.”
Dennis’s smile stayed in place, but a shot of panic zipped through him. So much for the “yes” he’d pinned his hopes to. Her reaction wasn’t an outright rejection, but it wasn’t the overwhelming show of support and affection he’d been hoping for.
No, he told himself, she was being affectionate. She was leaning on him for support in a tough time. Just like she’d blown off decades’ worth of steam with him back at the hotel. They were in this together.
But she still hadn’t given him an answer about Paradise Space Flight. There was still time for the old Angelica to change her mind and pull a fast one on him.
Chapter Nine
Angelica hadn’t had so many things happen within a single, twenty-four-hour period of her life since…she couldn’t think of a single other time. By the time dawn began to break the day after the fire, the day after she’d made love to Dennis, the day after she’d nearly lost him, she’d barely had a wink of sleep. The roller-coaster of her life wouldn’t let her. All she could think about as she lay on the sofa, pretending to be asleep so her mom wouldn’t worry, was Dennis asking her to go back to Haskell with him.
She’d tossed and turned and thought about it all night, dragging herself, bleary-eyed, to the kitchen in the morning. He was asking for more than just her coming to work with him. He was asking her to build a life with him, to throw her lot in with him. That was exactly what part of her wanted. The rest of her was terrified of losing who she really was to someone else again, the way she’d lost herself by choosing Vanessa and Emily and their crowd years ago. But Dennis wasn’t like that.
Which was why she still wasn’t sure whether she deserved him.
“I have a little savings,” Mrs. Brown reported, quiet and pale, at the kitchen table as Angelica and her mom cooked breakfast for the old folks. “I doubt it’s enough to rebuild the house, though.”
“Don’t you worry about that right now, Essie,” Angelica’s mom told the woman. She brought a platter of fresh-cut fruit to the table, resting her hand on a defeated Mr. Jeffries’ shoulder as she placed the dish where everyone could reach it. “We’re all here to help you out.”
“We certainly are,” Dennis said from the kitchen doorway.
Angelica’s senses shot to full alert in spite of her drowsy state, and she twisted to glance at Dennis. Her heart knocked against her ribs. He was pale and tousled, with streaks of soot across his face and staining his shirt. His hands were covered in soot too. Somehow, in spite of the state he was in, he was the most beautiful thing Angelica had ever seen. His indomitable smile as he went over to greet the old folks, kissing Mrs. Brown’s cheek and leaving a smudge mark, might have been why.
“It’s not a total loss,” he said to the elders, then sent a look Angelica’s way. “The entire front, right-hand side of the house is little more than cinders, and the fire inspector is pretty sure the whole thing will have to come down and be rebuilt—” Mrs. Brown let out a wail of grief, and Dennis immediately rested a dirty hand on her shoulder. “—but a lot of your belongings can be salvaged from the back of the house. Furniture, clothing, mementos.”
“That’s something,” Angelica’s mom said.
“What about water damage? Smoke damage?” Angelica asked.
Dennis let out a sigh and headed to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. “There’s a lot of that. But not everything is lost.”
“I’m not moving into a home,” Mr. Fellowes repeated his statement from the night before. “I’m not letting no strangers take care of me in my dying days.”
Angelica’s heart squeezed in her chest. “We won’t let that happen to you, Mr. Fellowes.”
“If they even take care of you to begin with,” Mr. Jeffries added. “Some of those places let you rot in your bed while they collect your pension.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Angelica repeated, frustration and helplessness filling her gut.
“It’s not gonna happen because I’m not going,” Mr. Fellowes went on. Mrs. Brown swallowed another wail.
“Can I get you some coffee, Mr. Fellowes?” Dennis asked, the slightest hint of an edge to his voice. He shot Angelica a look that said anything they could do to stop the old folks from descending into panic had to be done.
“Thank you, son,” Mr. Fellowes said with a sigh.
“Don’t you worry your head over this, any of you,” Angelica’s mom said with a renewed sense of purpose. “I think I’ve got an idea. You just hold tight.” She nodded her head and strode out of the room.
Angelica watched her go, praying that she really did have an idea. She sent Dennis a hopeful look as he crossed to the counter to pour coffee for all of the old folks. He shrugged slightly, then went to work making a fresh pot. Angelica watched him work for a minute, fretting over her own problems as much as those of her neighbors. She went to the fridge to find eggs so that she could make omelets, but her glance kept drifting back to Dennis.
She could do a heck of a lot worse than Dennis. In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to do better. Dennis was everything she could ever dream of. He was kind and intel
ligent. The way he served coffee to the old folks, the way he devoted his time to them when he should be worried about catching his plane back to Wyoming, was proof he had a good soul. And the way he’d made love to her the night before was heaven itself.
So why was she hesitating? Why hadn’t she packed all her bags and booked her ticket to Wyoming right then and there?
“This is what I was looking for,” Angelica’s mom said several minutes later when she strode back into the room. She held a slip of paper in her hand.
“What’s that, Mama?” Angelica put more enthusiasm into her voice than she felt in an effort to nudge the elders out of their gloom.
“It’s the number for Viola Wright’s niece, Michelle. You know, the one who works in real estate?”
“I don’t see what a real estate agent is going to be able to do to fix our problems,” Mrs. Brown sighed.
“She could do all sorts of things,” Dennis said, his voice optimistic, as he moved to look over Angelica’s mom’s shoulder.
“She specializes in temporary housing for low income individuals,” Angelica’s mom explained. “I’m not saying it’s a permanent fix, but at least she’d be able to find a way for you all to stay out of a home while your house is rebuilt.”
“And just how are we going to rebuild?” Mr. Fellowes grumbled.
There was a pregnant pause before Dennis came out with, “I can pay for it.”
All eyes in the room snapped to him.
“At least, I can help to pay for it,” he went on.
Angelica’s body felt too small to contain the joy—and the guilt—she felt. “You’d do that?”
Dennis shrugged. “It’s the least I could do. PSF pays well, and honestly, I’m not a big spender. I’ve got a little something saved up.”
“Bless you, son, but you don’t have to do that.” Mrs. Brown tried to get up to hug him, but Dennis made sure she stayed in her seat to rest.
“I want to do it,” he said. “You can figure out a way to pay me back later.”