“Maddie?” Hank’s voice was stern, like it had been that first night she’d ever met him. “Open your eyes and look at me.”
She opened her eyes.
“Are you a virgin?”
“No . . .” The unspoken “not anymore” hung in the small space between them.
He ground his teeth but didn’t move. Maddie put her hands on his hips to hold him in place, just in case he got any crazy ideas to get all dramatic and not finish what they’d started . . . just barely scratched the surface.
“Maddie?”
“What?” she whispered. He stayed silent. She persisted. “Please don’t make it a thing, okay?” It was a legitimate question. She was asking him politely. Please. Please don’t turn it into something that it’s not. She had agreed to do the same for him, hadn’t she? In that weird way, they were both asking one another to move forward without any judgment—about the past (in her case) or the future (in his).
He huffed a small breath and began to move. It felt so amazing, so complete and whole. He made her feel intensely right in the world . . . on the planet. Like a natural creature. No getting or spending. Just being.
He began to move, but slowly. Probably way more slowly than he was planning on way-back-when, ten minutes ago, with all his promising talk of stop-me-if-I’m-too-rough and all that.
Holding her eyes—then losing his focus when his care of her began to increase his own pleasure—he began to bring her back to him.
“You’re coming with me,” he ground out.
“I don’t know if I can . . .” She felt so out of control. All of the other non-sex sex she’d had in her life had been more manageable, somehow. This just felt completely out of her jurisdiction.
“Stay with me . . .” Hank took one finger and pushed her chin so she was forced to face him. He kept up the slow, relentless rhythm. “Stay with me, Maddie.”
She knew what he meant, to keep her focus on him, to look at him in that moment of joint ecstasy, as both of them rose and shared the intensity of it all. But the possibility—however remote—that he might one day say that and mean it literally, that he wanted her to stay with him for the rest of their lives, that made Maddie realize she might have stepped into an abyss.
Maddie saw in that moment that he was the most beautiful creature she had ever happened upon. Together they were beautiful. Complete.
Then she began to shake.
Not just a slight trembling, but an all-over-body, uncontrollable shaking. Hank pulled her into his arms. She was beginning to curl into herself, and he pulled the sheets and the light cotton blanket over them both and just held her like that until her shuddering body recovered from the shock.
It took a while.
She finally fell asleep about an hour later and Hank slipped out of the bed once he was sure she was totally out. Even through her sleep, she made a sad little dreamy sound when his body broke contact with hers. He tucked the light bedding over her and went out to his living room.
This wasn’t a disaster, he reminded himself. He had experienced and survived legitimate disasters. This was more of a Terribly Complicated Situation. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold beer. He flipped off the top and threw it into the bin, then reached for the drawer to put the opener away. But he didn’t open the drawer. He stood there for a few seconds, then left the opener on the counter. He stared at it. “Why put it back if you’re just going to use it again right away?” The memory of Maddie’s voice echoed in his mind.
Why put Maddie back? She was a grown woman—they’d both just proven that with flying colors—she wasn’t trying to lure him into anything against his will. If anything, she’d been even more cautious about his feelings than he’d been with her body. They could have a few months of bone-cracking pleasure. Even he could see he’d be a fool to pass up the opportunity. And obviously Maddie could handle it; she’d practically orchestrated this whole damn thing. He finished the first beer and cracked open two more to bring into the bedroom.
Stopping to look at his cell phone on his desk, Hank put the beers down and picked up the device. His mother had sent a brief text asking to confirm that Maddie was all right. Hank texted her back that Maddie was fine. Five seconds later, there was a text letting Hank know Janet was going to dinner with Phil. His thumbs hovered over the phone . . . did he need to reply to that? He finally managed to tap, Have fun.
That taken care of, Hank picked up the beers and returned to the bedroom. He set the bottles down quietly and went into the bathroom, then slid back into bed behind Maddie. She hummed her appreciation, settling her backside against him.
He didn’t want to wake her, but he couldn’t help trailing his palm along the perfect curve of her hip, draped in the white sheet and the pale blue cotton summer blanket.
“Do you want me to leave?” she whispered, not looking at him.
He pulled her quickly around to face him. “What?!”
“You said, just for now. So I didn’t know if you meant, just this one time, or just tonight, or what.”
She wasn’t even baiting him or trying to push him to make a decision. Maddie looked into his eyes with plain curiosity, like she was having to decide on a bus schedule, and needed the facts that would let her move on with her plans.
“Do you want to leave?” Hank realized he hadn’t even considered this from her point of view. “I mean—”
Maddie lifted her lips to his, to get him to stop saying all that nonsense. The kiss escalated quickly and she was back to all that faraway moaning and pleading in about five seconds. She withdrew from the kiss, letting her head flop back onto the pillow. “I don’t want to leave until I have to be at work Monday morning, and even then I’ll be hard pressed to leave if you’re still wanting me around.”
He stared down into her eyes. “You knock the wind out of me when you talk like that, you know. Every time. All breezy and accommodating and eager at the same time.”
She smiled and kissed his cheek. “I thought you hated my enthusiasm.”
“You thought wrong.” Hank kept her caged in his arms and had the incongruous thought that one day he would like to meet her family, so he could see what it took to instill that level of confidence.
“You are so entitled,” he said, caressing her cheek with the back of his knuckles.
Maddie’s face turned stormy in an instant. “I am not—”
He kissed her quickly to get her to stop flying off the handle. “I meant,” Hank continued, moving so he was back down on the bed lying alongside her, “that you have a wonderful sense of what you are legitimately entitled to. You have certain ideas about what you can accomplish in life, what you deserve. I didn’t mean it like you were spoiled. I meant it as a compliment.”
She looked skeptical. “I don’t think there are many people in the world today who would take ‘entitled’ as a compliment.” Maddie tried to rearrange her arms so she could clasp her hands up near her chin, in a sort of horizontal version of crossing her arms in front of her chest, which would have just been ridiculous.
Hank laughed anyway, and pulled her to him. He began kissing her again and Maddie sank deeper and deeper into the abyss, not caring about the consequences. Not caring about how miserable she was going to be one day in the not very distant future, when Hank just didn’t show up or didn’t say hello to her when he walked past her window. None of it mattered, because right here in the beautiful present, she was his to do with as he pleased. As he pleased her.
They spent the rest of the weekend in bed, with the occasional foray to the refrigerator or the couch. They watched a movie in the middle of the night, Maddie lounging all over Hank like she had been desperately wanting to do the whole time they had been watching Troy the week before.
By Sunday afternoon, Maddie suggested they go down to Freeport to watch the fireworks. They were back in bed, dozing lightly.
Hank didn’t open his eyes when he spoke, but his hand tightened gently on Maddie’s. “I’m not really g
ood at fireworks.”
“Oh.” Maddie sounded surprised and a little disappointed. She was having visions of the two of them on a blanket holding hands and looking up at the sky and feeling the pounding, explosive claps in their bones.
“You should go with Janet and Phil. It’s supposed to be a really big deal this year.”
“I think I’d rather lie here with you,” she said simply.
His eyes were still closed, but his lips turned up with a satisfied smile. “I like the way you think, kid.”
Maddie rolled into Hank’s arms, lining her body up with his, and fell into a blissful nap. It was one of those fairy-tale sleeps where she felt partially aware of the birds outside Hank’s bedroom window, and drugged by the smell of Hank’s skin on every inhale, but her brain was quiet and she felt like a still peace had settled over her.
A few hours later, they took a shower together and then Hank made a big pot of pasta and they sat at his kitchen counter and ate it with a couple of glasses of red wine.
“I should probably go,” Maddie said, after she’d helped him put the dishes into the dishwasher and they’d finished putting away the pots and pans.
“Really?” He looked a little crushed.
“Oh, you better not look at me like that, Gilbertson—what were you, by the way?” He looked confused. “What was your rank in the Army?”
“Oh, that. Major.”
“Wow. That’s pretty high for someone your age, isn’t it?”
He folded the kitchen towel neatly and hung it over the handle of the stove. “Not really.”
“Why do I get the feeling you wouldn’t tell me it was some huge honor, anyway?”
He smiled and pulled her into his chest. “It’s over. It doesn’t matter.”
“Just because something is over doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.” She said it into his T-shirt and tried not to think of everything as having two or three ulterior meanings. She pulled herself out of his hold. “But I really do need to go. I mean,” she gestured down at her appearance, bare feet and legs leading up to one of Hank’s gray T-shirts, nothing more, “I’d really love to show up at work like this tomorrow, but I think a little sleep in my own bed and some clean clothes might boost my tips. What do you think?”
“I think your tips would be off the charts if you went into work exactly like this.” He wrapped his arms around her waist again. She kind of loved how he always wanted to touch her, to have his hand in contact with her, while they were eating dinner, while they were watching a movie. And in bed, after the obvious times, he always rested his palm on her or draped his leg over one of hers. It felt amazing.
She started laughing a little, then kissed his neck.
“What’s funny?” he asked.
“I was just thinking my body is going to miss your body. All this touching. I’m going to get greedy.”
Hank nuzzled into her neck, and Maddie thought it was probably because he didn’t want her to see he felt the same way.
“Okay,” she tried again a few minutes later, feeling herself getting ramped up all over again, just from those kisses. “Stop!” She laughed again, and he smiled with a hint of guilt, but he certainly wasn’t sorry. “Let me go!”
He did as she asked, then leaned back into the refrigerator, sizing her up, his hands pushed into his pockets, making his shorts tug lower.
Maddie shook her head and rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to try to look hot.” She gestured toward his broad shoulders and narrow waist. His bare chest was tanned and muscled, his hard stomach going pale where he’d pulled his shorts low.
“I wasn’t trying.”
“Yeah, right!” Then she squealed as he tried to lift up her T-shirt for a quick grab before she left the kitchen. She pulled the fabric out of his hold and ran into the bedroom.
CHAPTER 13
The next few weeks it seemed to Maddie that everything slowed down and settled into a wonderful groove. She woke up at 4:30 a.m. and made it to work by five every day. Her waitressing had become second nature. Her familiarity with the regulars. Her banter with Phil. Her friendship with Sharon. And then: the afternoons. Hank was always there. He was usually back around four or five, which gave Maddie time to go for a run or workout down at the boxing gym she’d joined.
The two of them would fall into each other’s arms, usually sweaty and dirty from the day at work or exercise, and none of it mattered because they were desperate for each other. And they’d fall onto the sofa or the bed and replenish themselves with every inch of their bodies after the seemingly endless drought of an entire workday spent apart.
On a particularly sultry afternoon in early August, Maddie turned to him in bed and asked, “Will you take me down to the ocean floor sometime?”
He looked up at the ceiling.
She knew the look. He might want to be touching her all the time, but he didn’t like the slightest effort on her part to get into his head. He didn’t want anybody in there, not even (maybe especially not) himself.
“Why? It’s just dark and cold.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just where you are so much of the time. I just want to see what it’s like. You know what it’s like at the diner.”
He grunted noncommittally.
“Don’t you ever picture me at the diner, just look at the clock at ten in the morning and think, Hmm, I can just picture Maddie at Phil’s spilling an iced tea on Dr. Vinton—”
“You didn’t?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“No!” She laughed. “But I almost did. I’m too good for that now.” She flexed her muscle in her upper arm to show what a pro she had become. “Look at that. I had to start carrying the tray with my left hand because my right bicep was getting bigger than the left.”
“Quite the Lou Ferrigno, aren’t you?” He squeezed the muscle to test how hard she had become.
“Quit trying to change the subject. I want to go to fifty fathoms with you.”
“Why fifty fathoms? Do you even know what a fathom is?”
“No idea. I think my dad has a watch that’s called a Fifty Fathoms, and I like the sound of it.”
He shook his head and smiled, shutting his eyes at her ignorance.
“Don’t scoff like that. How should I know how deep a fathom is? It’s probably like a hundred feet or something. Like a league or a score. Or knots.”
“You’re not even talking about distances anymore. You’re talking about speed. And Abraham Lincoln.”
She punched him lightly on the arm. “Come on. Please let me! I’ll be very obedient. I promise.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you know. Like when you get on a sailboat, I know how to be all ‘Aye-aye, Captain’ and ‘Full steam ahead,’ and all that.”
He stared at her. “How can you be so smart and such an idiot all at the same time?”
She smiled. “I know I should defend my honor and call you out for suggesting my idiocy, but I just can’t bring myself to care when it makes you smile like that and it brings out those little wrinkles around your eyes . . .” She reached up to lightly trace his eyebrow and he softened immediately.
“Three hundred feet,” he said a few minutes later, seemingly out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Fifty fathoms is three hundred feet.”
Maddie put her head up on her bent elbow. “Wow. So fifty fathoms isn’t that serious.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Fifty fathoms is serious.”
“How deep is the ocean . . . roughly?”
“About . . .” He did a quick mental calculation. “About twenty-five hundred fathoms. Roughly. Fourteen thousand feet, pretty much. But there are trenches and canyons that are much deeper.”
“How deep have you gone?”
“Sorry to disappoint, but I’ve only hit fifty fathoms once, and that was with Trimix, a special type of oxygen that you need to go that far.”
“Oh. Is that all?” She turned away fr
om his body as if his accomplishments were rather paltry.
He pulled her back and they laughed into each other, then settled back into the folds and bends of each other’s bodies. Their curves were starting to mesh together with natural ease.
A few weeks later, Maddie had just finished a ten-mile run and was feeling pretty much invincible. She was drinking an iced tea with Janet in the late afternoon on Friday, and they were laughing about Phil trying to tell his ninety-six-year-old mother about the fact that he was dating Janet.
Maddie was still laughing, talking between gasps. “Why does he need to tell her at all?”
Janet smiled. “Because we’re getting married.”
Maddie nearly choked on her iced tea. “You’re what?!”
Janet kept smiling.
“Oh my god,” Maddie said, but she was smiling too. Then, “Have you told Henry yet?”
Janet’s face fell slightly, and she looked at the back of her hands where they rested on the farm table. “I’m sure he’s figured it out.”
“Right,” Maddie said, “because he’s so good at seeing things like that.”
Janet looked at Maddie closely. “You’ve really gotten to know him, haven’t you?”
Maddie wasn’t embarrassed, exactly. After the Fourth of July, it was pretty much an open secret that Maddie was spending all of her free time with Hank. They were always together on weekends, and Maddie was only at Janet’s to sleep on the nights she had to get up at 4:30 for work. Otherwise, Maddie had become pretty scarce.
“Oh, I don’t know if anyone can know Hank. Really. He doesn’t really want to be known.”
“Those are often the people who need to be known the most.”
Maddie shrugged. “We don’t need to go down that prickly path, Jan. We’re all grown-ups, and we’re all going our separate ways in September.” Maddie took a deep breath, then fortified herself. “Except you! You’re getting married! To Phil.”
Janet started giggling. “You are so transparent, Madison. He’s such a sweet, caring person. He really is.”
Love in Maine Page 13