by Anne Malcom
So why do we do it? Either of them?
Even taking that first sip, unless you’re a virgin (in both senses of the word), you know what the end result is going to be.
A headache if you’re lucky.
A disaster if you’re not.
But we continue to drink. Because it tastes good. Because it’s fun. Because they offer us something. Escape. Safe haven. And as bad as the hangover is that first day, we seem to forget it with time and become more than willing to start all over again, memories blurred from just how miserable the morning after was.
He had two things in his hands. Coffee cups and a brown paper bag that had grease soaking at the bottom of it.
He held them up. “Thought this might get me through the door.”
I regarded the man with the muscles and the easy smile. The one who was more than dangerous.
Then I looked at the cup and the bag. The thing in there could have been a severed human head but it was deep fried, and I was hungover, so I’d most likely still eat it.
I snatched them. “You thought right, soldier,” I grumbled, turning on my socked heel and stomping back into my living room.
I didn’t like my chances of getting rid of him, and if I was honest—I didn’t have enough energy to lie to myself while hungover—I didn’t want to get rid of him.
“Sore head this morning?” he asked as he sat next to me on the sofa.
Close.
Too close.
He smelled better than the combination of hot caffeine and fried things.
Dangerous.
I glared at him in response.
“Why are you here?” I said instead, sipping the coffee.
“You remember what I said last night?” he asked, grin gone.
I wanted to lie and say I didn’t remember any of the night, that it wasn’t imprinted into my memory. That no amount of cocktails could make me forgot, for some insane and terrifying reason.
“I’m here because of that. Because of bungee jumping, and running and crunchy peanut butter, babe.”
Instead of lying, I nodded.
“Well then, you know. I’m here for you,” he said simply.
Then he glanced to the TV, like it really was that simple. Wrapped up in a little bow and compact, ready for an afternoon of vegging out on the couch.
Which it wasn’t.
You didn’t share a handful of words with someone, two kisses, then come home from war straight to them like they were your sweetheart for months and have some simple explanation for it all.
For us.
I opened my mouth to say a version of this, but of course, Keltan bet me to it.
“What are we watching?”
I followed his gaze to the TV, which was paused right on Audrey Hepburn looking into the Tiffany’s window, coffee in hand, sunglasses on and looking utterly fabulous. You couldn’t even tell how fucked-up she was on the inside.
That was the idea with most women: paint a pretty picture with clothes and hairdos and jewelry and maybe no one will notice the shambles beyond it all.
But I didn’t think of that. Instead, I gaped at Keltan for not recognizing perhaps one of the most iconic stills in movie history.
Well, apart from Marilyn Monroe’s subway grate scene in Seven Year Itch.
“You’re telling me you don’t recognize her?” I pointed to the most gracious woman in popular culture.
He squinted. “Don’t follow celebrity shit, Snow. Kind of don’t have the time to head to the flicks when I’m in a desert full of people trying to kill me.”
I gaped at him. “I’ll be gracious, like Audrey, and forget you referred to her as ‘celebrity shit,’ as long as that’s the one and only time you do so,” I said, my voice ice.
Instead of looking properly chastised, he grinned. I gritted my teeth and continued. Pretended the grin that should have pissed me off made me want to smile.
I didn’t smile. Well, at least not at men. And at least not at men like him.
Not since him.
“What about your childhood?” I asked, not being able to fathom not knowing the classics. Or watching movies.
He grinned. “I was brought up on a farm in rural New Zealand, babe,” he explained, toying with a lock of my hair. “We were up at dawn, milking cows, fixing fences, tailing sheep. My dad died when I was thirteen. I was the oldest, got the responsibility of farm duties. Me and my younger brother took care of the farm until I left for the army, and then he took over.” He volunteered the information so easily, without hesitation, yet the pain was apparent. He didn’t hide that either.
That meant something. Something pivotal that I couldn’t inspect, partly because of my headache and partly because I didn’t want to inspect it too closely. Luckily, or maybe not so, he continued.
“And when I wasn’t taking care of the farm—before the army, that is—me and Ian were out riding bikes, causing trouble, usually with Gwen not too far behind.” His eyes twinkled with nostalgia and melancholy. “Though most of the time she was the one who brought trouble with her.”
I stared at him as he danced with the memories of the past, and the demons those memories brought. I knew the look. When you forgot for a moment, remembering times with someone you held dear, you smiled until you remembered that memories were all you had left.
I knew how that felt; therefore, I knew the necessity of shaking free of the talons of those memories. If they got their hooks in, you were done for.
“Well. A childhood spent ‘tailing,’ whatever that is,” I said, screwing up my nose, “is not an excuse to not know who Audrey Hepburn is. I’d only accept that if you were brought up in some undiscovered tribe in the Amazon where you spoke in clicks and shot arrows at helicopters full of noisy Westerners.”
He laughed, shaking off the demons. I knew this. Only because those demons recognized like minds, nodded cordially to each other before they disappeared back into their respective minds. Or at least buried them for the moment.
“You take movies seriously, then.”
“I take Audrey seriously, and Hitchcock, and Scorsese, and Coppola, among others,” I said, switching the movie off Pause. “Get ready to be educated on films.” I pointed at him. “If you speak, your invitation to sit in here with me will be rescinded.”
He grinned, making the motion of zipping his lips before leaning back on the sofa, laying his long and muscled arm over the back of it casually.
I stayed upright on account of the coffee and the arm. I didn’t need to be snuggling on the sofa with him.
That would send the wrong message.
Though I thought that ship might’ve already sailed.
Instead, I focused on Audrey.
Audrey made everything better.
For a hundred and thirty minutes, anyway.
“So?” I asked from my position on the edge of the sofa, as far away from the arm and the man attached to it as possible.
He glanced from the television to me, his eyes dancing with a lot of dangerous and delicious emotions.
Especially since they flickered to the sliver of my milky white legs exposed between my thigh-high black socks and black silk shorts.
Luckily, even hungover, my wardrobe didn’t allow for me to look like a slob.
He opened his mouth, but I held up my hand.
“And before you answer, be warned—if you say or even think a bad thing about Audrey, then we can’t be friends.”
His eyes went lazy, and he moved before I rightly knew what was going on and could escape. “I don’t have anything to say about Audrey. Though I’ll admit the movie didn’t suck,” he said. His hand framed my jaw. “But the thing is, I don’t wanna be your friend, Snow,” he continued.
The words were spoken with a rough sort of certainty, an omen of what was to come.
Then his mouth was on mine, slow, leisurely, tender. Yet somehow, despite the gentle movements of his tongue and lips, the kiss ripped something open in me that burned my entire body.
Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t back to full brainpower after all the cells I killed with cocktails the night before.
Maybe it was Tiffany’s.
Or maybe it was just him. The hot, funny, muscled man who’d managed to get my attention, get under my skin in less time than it took for me to break in a pair of shoes.
So that’s why I made a hungry sound in the back of my throat and deepened the kiss, frantically moving myself so I straddled him, immediately pressing my cotton shorts against the hardness underneath his jeans.
“Fuck, Snow,” he hissed through his teeth as I ground myself against him.
“No talking,” I moaned, grasping the sides of his neck and yanking his mouth to mine.
There was no more slow. No more tender. No, it was a brutal clashing of tongues and mouths and teeth and desperation to get closer. To get more.
His hands tangled in my hair, finding purchase on the tie and yanking it out so my locks tumbled down my back and into his hands.
My hands moved from his neck as I continue to rub myself against him, the sparks from the friction stoking a fire that had me in danger of burning up already.
I raked my hands underneath his tee, scratching at the bare skin of his back.
He let out a primal growl, lifting me quickly and deliciously roughly so I was horizontal on the sofa.
He hovered over me, eyes wild and almost black with desire. They moved down the column of my neck to my chest, rising and falling rapidly with my frantic breathing.
“You’re so fuckin’ beautiful,” he hissed. Then he grabbed the bottom of his tee, yanking it off to reveal quite possibly the most beautiful six-pack known to man.
I didn’t get to look, or commission a sculpture of it, because he covered my body with his.
I was momentarily annoyed by that. Then his mouth fastened on mine and his hand slipped into my camisole, pinching my breast roughly so moisture flooded my panties, and I cried out with the sheer pleasure of the simple touch.
Then I didn’t mind so much.
Or at all.
I didn’t mind anything but the way his mouth moved against mine, how his rough fingers tweaked my aching nipples, the heat of his bare torso burning me from the inside out.
There was nothing but the two of us, and it was brilliant.
The utter lack of anything else.
In the back of my mind I heard the door open and shut, but I decided it wasn’t important.
Nuclear bombs weren’t important right then.
Keltan, on the other hand, did think the door was important, so he, most annoyingly, stopped kissing me. He lifted his head in the direction of the door, still pressing every inch of his body into me.
His arm was pressed into the sofa by my face, flexing with the effort of holding most of his weight so he didn’t squash me. Instead of looking to the door, I watched the pulsing in the veins of his arms. I didn’t see the intruder, only heard her familiar voice floating through the desire cloaked air.
“Okay, so the poetry slam was a total bust, and I was trapped talking about some guy called Robert Frost all night, and I just kept drinking wine and then passed out and woke up to—” Polly’s voice abruptly cut off when her heels stopped clicking. “Holy shit,” she exclaimed.
The arm I’d been watching pushed off the sofa as Keltan moved from lying on me to standing. I abruptly did the same.
Polly was holding her bag in the crook of her arm, wearing the same outfit as yesterday, her hair messier than normal and grinning like a madwoman between Keltan and me.
Her eyes went to the torso that had, up until a moment before, been pressed against me.
“Sorry, am I interrupting?” she asked with a grin, eyes darting to mine playfully.
I folded my arms, mostly to hide my nipples, which were protruding through my shirt. “What do you think, Polly?” I hissed under my breath. “Do you even knock?”
She grinned wider. “Don’t you know to put a sock on the door? It’s the universal ‘I’m getting laid’ sign.”
I scowled. “Well, since I’m not a male college freshman in a dorm, no, such an action did not occur to me. I shouldn’t have to do that in the house in which I live. Alone,” I said tightly. I was pissed off. But I kept my cool.
I always kept my cool.
Except when the muscled body of the man two feet away was on top of me.
Then I had no cool.
The arctic would have no cool with that around.
Forget climate change—it was all about Keltan change. Melting my ice caps. The ones that had become so entangled in parts of me that I was resigned to the fact that I’d never be warm again.
But that was not a thought to have in front of my sister, who had just walked in on me kissing such a man.
She moved her attention from me to Keltan. Her eyes went down. Up. Down again, focusing on the abs that seemed to be glistening in the sunlight.
The sun did a lot to illuminate their sheer brilliance that, if I hadn’t seen some of the Sons of Templar men topless, I would’ve thought didn’t actually exist in real life.
But I may have “accidentally” walked in on Cade in the shower when I was a teenager.
And a freshman in college.
And a sophomore in college.
I knew they did exist in real life.
But Keltan was different. Cade was like looking at a delicious carrot cake, even when you didn’t like carrot cake; all you wanted to do was take a bite. With Keltan it was like chocolate, and I fucking loved chocolate, which meant I wanted to devour the entire thing.
Fuck the calories.
Besides increasing my arousal, despite my sister being in the immediate vicinity, the sunlight illuminated flaws in the smooth, tanned skin and the ridges of his abs. A jagged scar running down the left side of his body, long, thin and whiter than the rest.
Another puckered mark a couple of inches below his defined pec. A bullet hole.
My craving for chocolate waned at the very real evidence of how hard the world had already worked to take him away.
I swallowed bile.
I focused my attention away from the body and the ash in my stomach to my sister, drooling over my man.
Wait, did I say “my man?”
“Polly,” I hissed, snapping my fingers at her and wondering if I needed to dose her with a spray bottle in case she humped his leg or something.
Her eyes moved to me.
“I approve. Hard.” Her voice was dreamy. Well, dreamier than usual. “Despite you lying to me about this yesterday.” She shook her finger at me, chastising like she wasn’t six years younger than me and not yet able to legally drink.
Keltan grinned.
I gritted my teeth. “Keltan, this is my baby sister. Polly, this is Keltan.”
“Yes, it is,” she breathed.
Keltan’s grin widened. He held out his muscled arm. “Nice to meet you, Polly.”
She stared at it. The arm. The tattoos snaking up it. She was a sucker for tattoos, unfortunately. Well, and any male who had the chance to ruin her heart. I used to think our difference between men was summer and winter. But maybe I just hadn’t been able to see the leaves for the trees.
“Dude, he has an accent? Why do you still have clothes on?” she asked, quickly shaking his hand with a cheeky smile.
I put my head in my hands.
An echoing horn sounded in the distance. I glanced to my front door, which Polly had left open.
“Oh, right,” she said. “I’ve got a cab waiting for me, and I spent my last twenty getting the wine, which in turn made me pass out on a sofa smelling of old people.” She screwed up her nose. “So, I need you to pay the man who saved me from that. Tip him good,” she ordered, pointing her fing
er at me.
I rolled my eyes. That was not the first time a version of this had happened. Or even the fifth. “I’ll get my purse.”
Keltan’s hand on my arm stopped me from moving. “I got it, babe,” he murmured, eyes dancing with amusement.
He snatched his shirt off the sofa, and both Polly and I watched him shrug it on. The only thing we needed was David Attenborough narrating the process, we were watching him that intently.
He winked at me before heading towards the door where the horn of the cab beeped once more.
As soon as he crossed the threshold and was out of sight, Polly was across the room, snatching my arm painfully.
“Okay, spill. Now,” she ordered.
“Ouch,” I hissed, trying to struggle from her grasp, but for a tiny thing, she was strong. “For someone into peace and free love, you sure are violent with your only sister.”
“Well, that only sister was keeping a big muscled and deliciously accented man from me,” she accused.
I glared at her. “I wasn’t keeping him from you… exactly,” I said. “He only just arrived.”
She rose her brow. “From where? Valhalla?”
I scowled. “No. Deployment.”
She dropped her hand and gaped me. “No. Fucking. Way. He’s a soldier?”
“Wipe your face, you’re drooling.” I gave her a look. “Plus, I thought you were against war. Passionately. You dragged me along to enough marches. That should translate to those who fight in them.”
“I am,” she defended. “But I’m not against men in uniform. In fact, I’m thoroughly for men in uniform. I think I might start up a march to stop the wars but keep the uniforms.”
“Hate to disappoint, Polly, but I gave the uniform up,” a deep voice said from the hallway. “And unfortunately, as long as greedy assholes with guns and money exist, so will war.”
We both jumped.
“Well you shouldn’t. Give up on being a soldier, that is,” I said. “Your stealth skills are pretty good.”
My words were merely that. Words. No way did I want him back over in a place that people, more often than not, didn’t come back from. And even the ones who did come back, they weren’t exactly the people who left either. One only had to ask Jagger, or people who knew him before he came home from the war that disfigured not only his outsides but his insides too.