The First Time at Firelight Falls

by Julie Anne Long

  Eden hefted the ball thoughtfully in her hand.

  “Hello, Ms. Harwood,” Gabe said finally.

  “Your Excellency,” she said pleasantly.

  They locked eyes for a long, speaking moment.

  He tilted his head and said, with more of that faux sympathy, “You sure you’re not scared to throw that—”

  BAM!

  She hurled that sucker like a freaking missile. The bull’s-eye target whipped around, Gabe’s arms shot straight up in the air and his eyes and mouth made “O”s and KERSPLASH! Down he went, for the first time that night. Vanishing into the water.

  A delighted roar went up.

  “WOOOOOOO! Eden!”

  She thrust both arms in the air like a champion and took a bow in every direction.

  While Gabe hauled himself back up on the platform and gave his head a shake, flicking the hair from his eyes.

  “What do I win?” she asked him.

  As if in answer to her question, he slowly, deliberately drew off his soaking shirt and shook his wet hair out of his eyes.

  The crowd went stone silent.

  And then there was a soughing sound, like a breeze through a stand of birches, which was essentially a dozen women exhaling in wonder and something close to pain.

  Emily’s harried mom thrust a pink teddy bear into Eden’s hand. “Thank you for convincing me to volunteer for this booth,” she whispered fervently. “Thank you.”

  “Who’s next?” Gabe called cheerfully.

  When the crowd surged forward, tickets in hand, Eden hung back. Way back.

  Far enough so that from up on his perch, his eyes met hers, and she could have sworn they flashed like smugglers signaling the coast. Defiance, and a dare.

  Oh, anyone could go next as far as she was concerned.

  But she was the only one who was going to claim a prize.

  About an hour later, as the sun was lowering, the crowds were thinning, and only a few cars were left in the parking lot, she came across her parents, strolling hand in hand. Tucked under her mom’s arm was a big blue stuffed pig sporting fluffy eyelashes and a smile.

  “Won it for her,” her dad said. Smugly. “Shot a clown.”

  “Never let it be said romance dies,” her mom said.

  Her parents had always been unabashedly, frankly in love.

  She had a hunch they wouldn’t disapprove of what she was about to do.

  “Hey, you guys? I promised Emily and Annelise I’d take them for ice cream, but I forgot something inside school. And then I need to swing by the all-night market and get some breakfast stuff. Do you mind taking them? Promise I’ll be home in an hour, hour and a half on the outside. In time to put them to bed.”

  They both lit up as if they’d won another blue stuffed pig. “We’d love to, honey,” her mom said.

  Gabe swiped a hand through his still-damp hair and heaved a sigh that fluttered the little flag planted on his desk. He picked up his baseball, hefted its smooth, soothing weight in both hands for a second. “Communing,” he snorted.

  It was, however, undeniably, a touchstone of someone he’d loved.

  He liked the school at night. Silence and shadows didn’t bother him. He knew all the ambient sounds, and the quality of the light through the various windows as the sun went down. He knew where Carl the janitor was in his rounds—clear on the other side of the school. The very last thing he’d do would be to lock up. But Gabe had keys, too. They didn’t have security cameras. They were probably a fund-raiser or two in the future.

  He sighed and put the ball back on its stand and pressed his palms over his eyes. When he pulled them away again, Eden was standing in the doorway.

  He stopped breathing.

  He didn’t dare blink.

  Because this was hands down the best damn game of peekaboo he’d ever played.

  She was so precisely what he wanted to see that he wasn’t confident he wasn’t hallucinating, or dreaming, and either way, he wanted it to last as long as possible.

  Behind her the hall was dark, apart from the dim glow of the intermittent sconces that did more to create eerie shadows than to illuminate anything.

  He held his breath when she stepped across the threshold of his office.

  She paused.

  He rose slowly to his feet.

  She turned her back to him.

  His heart skipped. No, don’t go, please . . . even if I’m hallucinating from all the water inhalation . . .

  But it was only so she could pull the door closed.

  He took another step forward.

  She turned the lock on his door.

  His heart literally forgot to beat.

  And then she turned around to face him again, leaned against the door as if by pressing her back against it, none of her doubts or the demands on their time could possibly get in.

  “You said I knew where to find you if I wanted you.”

  He took another step.

  Then another.

  He was midstep when suddenly everything went black.

  “What the—”

  He misjudged his next step, drove his thigh into the corner of his desk, dodged backward hissing and swearing, collided with his guest chair and landed hard on the seat, whereupon it promptly went gliding gently across the pitch-black room as if he’d just boarded the teacup ride at Disneyland.

  Eden yelped as he crashed into her. He grunted as his face was instantly filled with her silky hair and her knee just barely missed his groin and her hands flew off in the darkness beyond his shoulder.

  He caught her before they both toppled. With some deft maneuvering, the two of them got her turned around and her limbs all going the right way, so that he was cradling her after the fashion of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  And as he wasn’t a dummy, he wrapped his arms around her.

  And held on.

  He could feel her breathing—the rapid rise and fall—beneath his arms. She smelled like flowers and coconut. Still.

  A silence, rather stunned in quality, ensued.

  “I must have leaned against the light switch,” she offered on a whisper, finally.

  He didn’t laugh. He didn’t yet want to besmirch the glory of holding this woman with unnecessary conversation. Fate was on his side: he’d only gotten to her faster in a rolling chair.

  “So thoughtful of you to pick me up at the door,” she whispered.

  He found his voice. “Yeah, well, I’m a gentleman . . . at first. That’s how I hook you. And then I do things like this . . .”

  He touched his tongue to her lips, coaxing them open. And what ensued was so scorching, so slow and claiming and carnal, that by rights the metal girders holding up the school ought to have melted.

  Everything else on him was hard as a girder.

  Falling or flying? He couldn’t tell in the middle of that kiss. Both.

  He lifted his lips from hers. Just a very little. He could still feel her breath against them.

  But he could feel her body swaying as her breath came faster.

  He brushed her hair back with his other hand, an excuse to touch the satiny skin of her throat; her heart was pounding.

  “We have about thirty minutes,” she whispered against his lips. “They think I went to pick up milk and orange juice.”

  “That’s the hottest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

  “Is there anyone else left in the building, do you think?”

  “Just Carl.”

  “Do you think he can hear us?”

  “Why, do you plan to be loud?” he said with great interest.

  “Maybe, if you do your job right.”

  In truth, that was more bravado than she actually felt. She was nervous as hell, and so turned on she could hardly bear it.

  “We’re good. Carl’s way across the school cleaning the boys’ locker room bathrooms right . . . now. And his hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

  “You know such sexy things. You’re like an omniscient Jam
es Bond.”

  To reward her for her banter, he slipped his hand up under her shirt and snicked open the latch on her bra so easily it was like he’d previously sent in a practice reconnaissance team.

  Maybe he’d gotten that deft by defusing bombs.

  Wow, this was happening fast.

  For one thing—it had to happen fast, if it happened at all.

  And she supposed they’d essentially engaged in foreplay for weeks now.

  His thumb slid across her bare, already bead-hard nipple. A current of pleasure ricocheted between all of her erogenous zones like lightning in Tesla’s lab. She gasped.

  Dear God. How had she forgotten how good this was?

  Gabe had the ergonomic advantage—hands free and within touching distance of all of the parts of her that were throbbing with anticipation—and he wasted no time exploiting it. He slid a hand, followed her thighs—no delicious dallying on the tender, wildly sensitive inner part, time was of the essence—and slipped a finger beneath the elastic of her underwear and commenced the sort of deliberate rhythmic stroking a flamenco guitarist would envy.

  And each stroke sent pleasure rippling and shimmering over her nerves. Again and again.

  “Oh God . . . Oh Jesus . . . God . . .” She wasn’t certain why she’d launched into a roll call of deities. The pure surprise in her own voice was nearly comical.

  Gabe embarked on a wildly effective three-step campaign: kisses that made her senses spiral, one hand stroking and teasing her breasts, the other at work farther south. She wanted to pitch in, but she was at a disadvantage when it came to reaching or stroking the parts of him that would make him call upon various deities, but she discovered that skillfully applied breath and a tongue tracing the whorls of his ear could make him shudder, then duck his head against her throat for more.

  She shifted in his lap deliberately to hear his sucked-in breath, and to feel the hard poke of his erection. He hissed in a breath.

  And then gave a short, wondering laugh.

  “Eden . . .” His voice was low and prayerful. It cracked on that last syllable.

  Her heart tipped over hard in her chest in supplication, the way Peace and Love did when he wanted a belly scratch.

  She was grateful her expression was cloaked by the dark. She wasn’t certain what Gabe would see in it.

  “Gabe . . . Gabe, I think I’m going to . . . Oh God, any second now.”

  He heard her. He scraped his heels on the floor to get the chair in motion and they sailed over to his settee. If this had been one of the rides at the carnival, they would have made a mint.

  The teeny red number of the digital clock on the shelf behind his desk read nine thirty-six.

  “Hang on,” he said, and she reflexively obeyed.

  She locked her arms around his neck.

  And he actually managed to stand up.

  With all five foot nine of her in his arms.

  As if he was rescuing her from a burning building.

  He must have thighs like pile drivers. If she wasn’t half unconscious from lust before, that realization would have pushed her over the edge.

  She was going to get to touch them. She was going to touch everything she possibly could while the little red numbers scrolled away the half hour she’d stolen.

  The next breath she drew in was ragged and literally hot. As if the two of them had turned the room into a furnace with a surfeit of lust.

  He stood like that with her in his arms for a millisecond longer than he needed to. To prove that he could, perhaps. To turn her on just that unbearable bit more.

  “I just assumed you wouldn’t be able to stand by now,” whispered the wicked, cocky man.

  He lowered her to the settee, and she landed with a soft whup.

  He reached over and slid out his desk top drawer, rummaged for a second and retrieved exactly what she thought he’d been looking for. “Kid brought them to school to use as water balloons. Expensive ones, too. Boy, was his dad pissed. And mortified.”

  The crackling of that package. The erotic, portentous clink of a belt unbuckling.

  The rustle as she peeled off her own underwear and bunched it in a fist.

  So romantic.

  And yet.

  He joined her there, his shadowy bulk hovering for a moment, then looping his arms around her and rolling her into his arms on the narrow expanse as if he were MacGyvering her out of the way of an explosion. The only way they’d fit properly on the settee was if they were locked together. Which of course was the plan.

  She wrapped her legs around his waist and arched up against his hard cock, begging for release that was a mere few seconds of just “. . . please . . . Gabe . . . hurry . . . I . . .”

  And as soon as he guided himself into her, she came apart. Her body arching like a cut wire. Her cells seemingly cast into the ether like flaming glitter. She stuffed her own fist in her mouth to keep the scream from escaping, and the sound she made was his name, and the bliss was nearly intolerable.

  And he was moving now.

  She slid her hands up under his shirt, against his hot, smooth skin and found his heartbeat thundering, and then slid them up to hold on to his shoulders. She locked her legs around his back to pull him deeper and closer. And her head went back hard when he thrust in deeply.

  And the settee thudded softly against the floor like a goat trying to kick down a stall as he drove into her swiftly.

  The dark room and the confines of the time and the space. The rushed, desperate, illicit hunger, the tacit understanding of their lives’ constraints—all of it was ridiculous and shockingly hot.

  And underlying it was something scary—something beautiful and new and so dangerous they might as well have been making love in a hammock suspended between two stars.

  “Eden . . . God . . .” His voice was a wondering rasp.

  His breath was ragged against her throat, as she clung to bare hot skin, and in her ear as she tucked his head there, bracing himself, and her eyes stung from some powerful emotion.

  And then he went still, and his body jerked beneath her hands and his head fell against her chest.

  She held him while he shook like a rag.

  The clock ticked over to ten p.m.

  “Gotta go,” she whispered.

  He sat up, and they reassembled themselves as efficiently as if they were getting ready for work. Her underwear had wound up behind his head. He held it out to her, dangling from one finger.

  Practical cotton numbers. Six to a pack at Target. She was some vixen, boy.

  She shimmied into them and then went to stand up.

  He pulled her gently back by the arm.

  They sat side by side a moment.

  And then he leaned in and kissed her lingeringly.

  They smiled against each other’s lips for a moment.

  “I’ll walk you out.”

  “You’d better not.”

  He thought for a second. “You sit here, and I’ll go do parking lot reconnaissance. And then I’ll walk you out if the coast is clear.”

  And so he walked her out to the car, under the moonlight, and kissed her again, quickly and illicitly.

  And she went off to buy milk and juice.

  Chapter 12

  Two weddings, a funeral, and a fiftieth anniversary party, a Hummingbird meeting (at Avalon’s house up at Devil’s Leap—and Avalon had volunteered to run it) and a report on Egyptians, various other to-ings and fro-ings—while the next week wasn’t a tornado, every minute of it, from its start at four a.m. on Monday on through its conclusion on Sunday, was packed to the brim.

  And while Eden was indeed joyously grateful for the business, it was a struggle not to pause in midsentence when she was talking to a potential client on the phone and indulge in a misty reminiscence about an orgasm that could have registered on the Richter scale. Or to interrupt a future bride endlessly hand-wringing about lilies versus roses by grasping her wrist, gazing earnestly into her eyes and saying, Yes, yes, but l
et me tell you about the best sex I’ve ever had.

  Not that she’d had all that much sex in her life. It was just that she felt she could retire her nether parts, now that they’d partaken of Gabe Caldera.

  As it was, she didn’t tell a soul. It was still too new. She wasn’t a guy, to announce a conquest to his friends over beers with high fives and a yeah, I banged ’im! spirit of joie de vivre. And she definitely didn’t tell Avalon, from a typically siblingesque complicated mishmash of reasons, including that she didn’t want Avalon to be right, and she didn’t want Avalon to be disappointed if it didn’t work out, and she didn’t want Avalon to gush.

  Throughout the week, just the very thought of him created its own ecosystem: whenever the word Gabe would float through her mind—and she summoned it rather a lot—she went hot and weak and motionless, as if she’d suddenly stepped through the door of her nicely air-conditioned flower shop into some sultry jungle. (Which, coincidentally, was an awful lot like how her mom described menopause. Her mom spared no one the details of . . . well, anything, really.)

  She could see what was in the next square on her whiteboard, but Gabe was a question mark. They didn’t text each other. That wasn’t what they did. Yet, anyway. She didn’t have his phone number. She didn’t know when she’d see him next.

  But now she knew that her schedule was full of hair-line fissures through which light and air shone, and surprising nooks into which intimacy of all kinds could be shoehorned. And instead of worrying about what would happen next, she was, for the first time in eons, willing to be surprised.

  On Saturday afternoon, Eden raced up to Avalon’s at Devil’s Leap to drop off Annelise for a Hummingbirds meeting—they were going to learn all about chickens today, courtesy of Mac, and Avalon said she’d bring Annelise home later that evening.

  And after she kissed Leesy goodbye and returned to her car, whom should she encounter beeping open his truck in the driveway but Gabe Caldera. Looking a little sweaty.

  “Hi,” he said. His voice a husk. Devouring her with his eyes.

  “Hi.” The word left her in an expulsion of breath.

  “How are you, Eden?”

  “Never better. Really busy. You?”

  “Oh yeah. Just helped Mac renovate the chicken coop.”