Stroke It

by Ivy Jordan

  And so dinner went, naming innuendos and trying not to focus on her too blatantly in public. We laughed throughout the evening, and when we got in the car, the game continued; only now, with her so close, it became less funny and slightly more serious.

  “When I was in high school, a lot of the girls would give their boyfriends handjobs while they drove,” Quinn said.

  I winced. “That’s a terrible idea.” Then I made a point of shifting my hips out of her focus, and we both laughed.

  “I don’t want to crash!” She insisted. “I just remembered that it was something that happened!” She laughed. “Teenagers are stupid.”

  “Adults are stupid,” I said. “There were privates that stick firecrackers up every orifice of their body.”

  “That’s just college!”

  “Where did you go to college?”

  We pulled up at her house, and I opened the door for her. I walked with her up to the front door, and she paused for a moment.

  Her smile faltered, and she rested her hand against my forearm. “This is a really, really bad idea,” she said. She looked down like she was ashamed to meet my gaze.

  I didn’t know whether she meant me walking her to her car, her standing so close to me, or us trying to have a date in general. Either way, she was completely correct. I could smell her perfume, she was standing so close, and out of a million things I could have done, stepping back and saying goodnight was the worst possible thing. I couldn’t step away from her.

  “I think it probably is,” I agreed. I held her waist in my hands and pulled her close to me and kissed her. The world stood still when I kissed her. I felt like a teenager when I kissed her. She leaned against me, and despite what we’d only just said, I could feel her melting in my arms.

  Chapter Eighteen

  QUINN

  I didn’t care that this was a bad idea. I didn’t care about any of the reasoning I’d made after the last time we’d had sex. I wanted this, and I wanted it more than I wanted to be professional or keep face with Sawyer or any of the stuff that, at that moment, seemed so insignificant and far-off. He held me closer to him and kissed me, eliminating any protest that my brain could have formed.

  I broke away to open the door, and I’d barely gotten it closed before Sawyer had me against him again. He kissed me with intention, with a lust, pressing his tongue to mine and exploring my mouth like it was the most important thing for him to do. I could barely keep up; I could barely breathe, trying to remember what it was like to breathe easy.

  I managed to lead us towards my bedroom. As we walked, clothing came off. I pushed my dress off my shoulders, and he dragged it off my waist; I undid the buttons on his shirt as we backed into my bedroom and he pulled the garment off. Eventually, the fumbling grew irritating, but we’d reached my bed, so it didn’t matter.

  He lowered me down gently, like I was made of glass, and I let my hands roam over his chest. I knew SEALs did extensive physical training and had to be in absolutely amazing physical shape; under my fingertips, hard muscle nearly made my mouth water. I broke free from his kiss long enough to press my lips to his neck, his collarbone, mapping his torso with my mouth. I pressed a kiss to his hip, and before I could get much further, he grabbed me and pulled me back up.

  We locked eyes for a moment, him unsure whether he’d grabbed me too hard and me unsure whether I liked it. Slowly, I began to smile, and that smile was all the incentive he needed. He kissed me again, pulling away my bra while I fumbled with his belt. We were all fumbling and frantic kissing and gasps for breath; the assertive sexiness of our first encounter was gone. When I produced a condom from my bedside drawer, I nearly dropped it in my eagerness to get it open.

  But this was better. This was sweet, and honest. This time, as he lowered himself over me and slid against me, he gasped, and the sound was music to my ears. We found a rhythm every bit as easily as we had the first time, something more patient and deliberate than before. He sat back and pulled me up, grabbing my hips in his hands and lifting my ass up without even seeming to exert much effort. Then he began to drive himself in again.

  The angle made my head spin. I cried out as he drove into places I’d never been able to reach myself. I chanted my approval, gripping blindly at the bedsheets. When I opened my eyes to look at him, his head was thrown back.

  He began to slow down, and I stared up at him almost in irritation.

  “I won’t last much longer,” he said, his voice a low growl. He slammed against me once, making me yelp, and then followed that with long, slow strokes.

  I could barely keep my head on straight enough to answer. “I don’t care. But please, harder.”

  He picked up his speed but didn’t drive as deep as he had before. I could tell he was doing this to taunt me and I glared up at him.

  “Harder,” I grunted.

  He thrust into me forcefully, and I cried out. Then again, long, slow.

  I decided to take him by surprise. He began to build up pace again, and instead of letting him set a rhythm, I clamped down on him. His eyes shot open, and surprise painted his features before he detonated, hips bucking without his control.

  His loss of composure set me over the edge; as his hips bucked, I pressed up to meet him and found myself getting lost in the throes of my own pleasure. When we finally came down from it, he moved away from me slowly. He pressed a kiss to my cheek and stood up, walked to the bathroom.

  I was confident that I needed a shower, or at least to tidy up, but I didn’t care. I could wait. I felt spent, and further, I felt incredible. When the sink turned off, I worried that Sawyer was on his way out the door. He returned to the bedroom and sat back in the bed with me, pressing a kiss to my shoulder.

  “You surprise me,” he said. “You know, I think we’ve really gone and blown the whole patient-doctor thing.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t know. I’ve seen it work in sitcoms. I’m sure there’s still some amount of professionalism we can maintain.” This I said to the man who had been inside me about five minutes previous.

  He grinned, presumably for that very reason. “Oh, I’m sure,” he said. He glanced at the door, almost like he expected someone else to walk in.

  “Do you need to leave?” I asked him. I couldn’t blame him if he did; a lot of the men I’d dated I’d dated just for the sex, and they’d left afterward. With Sawyer, some part of me expected that to continue. Even though we’d had an incredible date—I hadn’t laughed so much in a long time. Still, I knew I could romanticize things, and it was very possible he’d gotten what he came here for, and now he had other things to do that day.

  Sawyer shook his head and said, “Actually, I was going to ask if you were okay with me staying.”

  I frowned. I couldn’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t be okay with it. I supposed some people might worry about being clingy or moving a relationship too fast, but at this hour, it was honestly more convenient for him to just stay over.

  “Of course,” I said. Then I laughed. “No, Sawyer, you can screw my brains out and leave me forgetting my own last name, but staying the night is where I draw the fucking line.”

  He laughed at that, and I leaned against his chest slightly. I wasn’t sure if that was too intimate, but it felt like the natural thing to do, and his arm came around me, holding me to him. It felt safe to be there. It felt like he’d never not been there, like I’d always had Sawyer in my bed.

  He was dangerously familiar. I didn’t know what to make of that. But when he pressed a kiss to the top of my head, I became filled with the idea that this was something I couldn’t let go of so easily as I let go of all my previous relationships. This felt like something that I could very well get attached to.

  “I was just making sure,” Sawyer said. “I don’t want to go back home.”

  The therapist in me perked up when he said that, and I tilted my head up slightly.

  “Why’s that?” I asked. I didn’t mean to turn the bed into a therapist
’s office, but I couldn’t seem to turn that curious part of my head off. I could almost hear Babs in the back of my mind chiding me, shouting, ‘Don’t psychoanalyze me!’ But this was a fair question, I thought, and besides, he didn’t have to answer it.

  “If I go home, I have to deal with my dad,” Sawyer said. He made a face. “I don’t want to deal with him.”

  “Is he particularly angry with you today?” I asked. If that was the case, I could certainly understand. But then I also understood just wanting to stay away from toxic people.

  He made some kind of sound as though he didn’t really want to explain himself. Sometimes men got particularly exhausted after sex; I didn’t know whether it was that, the topic, or some mixture of both that made him generally not want to answer it. In any case, I didn’t want to turn my bedroom into a therapy room, especially when the legal parameters of my office didn’t apply here.

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” I told him. Tomorrow, when he would come into my office as a patient. I would probably wear something baggy and pretend we’d never even looked at each other, let alone locked eyes in the middle of an orgasm. This was a complete and total mess, but maybe it was working. Babs might have been right all along—but, of course, she had recommended I not see him as a therapist.

  Either way, we had an appointment the next morning.

  “We’ll talk about it then,” Sawyer agreed, and he yawned widely.

  That was the last thing that I remembered before I fell to peaceful sleep in his arms.

  Chapter Nineteen

  SAWYER

  I stood in my bunker, taking stock of my weapons. I hadn’t fired a bullet yet on this mission, and so far it looked like the entire search would go by without a hitch. I’d been worried about this one. Scouts had reported a lot of the enemy in this area, so we’d all gone in waiting for a fight. So far, though, no signs of the enemy, and we’d picked up a good deal of their weaponry.

  The sun beat down on the back of my neck, and I waved at my comrade standing in the doorway of the building.

  “We’re getting out of here,” he shouted. “I think they’re sending in choppers to pick us up.”

  Choppers? We never had helicopters come in to get us. I ran forward, but I couldn’t seem to get any closer to my fellow soldiers. “What’s going on?” I shouted.

  “The war’s over,” he shouted back at me.

  I tripped on something, and I fell, falling on my face. For a moment I sat there and then picked myself up slowly. I was in a room now, almost certain that I was dreaming but unable to prove it. I peeked up and saw not the sun, but a ceiling.

  “Sawyer!”

  I looked down at the ground and saw Pete wearing full military combat gear. Something in my mind told me this was wrong, that Pete had never been in the military a day in his life. But I moved forward in panic. He leaned against the wall, hand pressed to his side. When I moved it, I could see a wound, blood indiscriminately oozing from something under his shirt.

  “Pete. Pete, hang in there. They’re sending medics,” I said, unsure of where I got that information.

  Pete coughed, and blood splattered on the floor, on my arm. “I’m not gonna make it, Sawyer.”

  “You’re going to be fine, Pete. You’re going to be fine.”

  Pete looked at me, stared into my eyes. His eyes were dark, nearly black, instead of the pale blue I knew them to be. He grabbed my face with both his hands and his mouth opened up to shout.

  “It’ll never be fine!” Pete shouted. “The war is never going to be over, soldier! The war never ended! The war never ended!”

  I tore away from him and stumbled back. He continued to shout, still bleeding, still dying, and I couldn’t run anymore, my legs failed me, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t escape the screaming inside my head: The war wasn’t over, and I was still in it.

  I bolted straight up in bed. A shout had bubbled in the back of my throat, and I held it down, sucking in a breath. My heart thudded in my chest, and I could feel sweat cold against my back, collecting between my shoulder blades. I could barely remember where I was, but I registered Quinn’s bedroom somehow as I fought to regain my heart rate.

  “Sawyer,” Quinn murmured. I looked down and saw her stir; she’d put a shirt on at some point, and she looked up at me, rubbing her eyes urgently. “Sawyer, are you alright?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to collect myself. She sat up and set her hand against my forehead, like she thought I was running a fever. I’d broken out in a sweat, yes, but I wasn’t running a fever.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered, and she rested her head on my shoulder. I was grateful that she knew better than to hold me; if she’d done so, it would have felt wrong, claustrophobic, stifling. The gentle rest against my shoulder was all I needed to make me feel a little more comfortable while I focused on breathing.

  When I’d calmed down, I found her hand tightly in mine, and I released it, embarrassed at how unbelievably sweaty I was. Not to mention the small matter of me waking up with a nightmare in the middle of the night like a damn child. It wasn’t humiliating; she knew better than most people what happened to some people when they had traumatic experiences. But if it weren’t for the fact that she was a psychiatrist and I knew she’d seen worse, I’d have been mortified. At least I wished I hadn’t woken up in her bed this way.

  The sun had come up through the window, so I stood up and decided to get dressed and be on my way. Quinn either went back to bed or didn’t say anything while I pulled on my jeans, my undershirt, and didn’t bother with the button-down I’d had on before. I needed to go do some work; Pete didn’t have me scheduled for the day, but I was sure he could use a hand.

  Before I could duck out of the house unnoticed, Quinn’s voice stopped me.

  “Will I see you later at the office?” she asked.

  I paused in the doorway. “Of course,” I said to her. I had to say that; I didn’t know whether I’d be there. All of a sudden I felt much less sure of myself than I had the night before, and in the eerie light of dawn, I couldn’t be certain.

  I drove home in silence. I didn’t know the radio stations here, and I didn’t care to remember that music had changed and evolved in my absence. The songs I remembered being popular were old news now, and the new music sounded as foreign as what I’d heard overseas. I only now began to realize that I couldn’t earn back the time I’d lost here.

  I crept into the house to find that no one was awake yet. All the better. I got washed up and checked my clock. I still had a few hours before my appointment with Quinn, but I wasn’t going to go to that. I couldn’t go to that, not today. We had three appointments a week—missing one wouldn’t be a big deal, I told myself.

  I pulled up into Pete’s driveway and saw him sitting up on the front porch. When he saw me, he hurriedly put out a cigarette he’d lit—something that made me roll my eyes—and he looked genuinely surprised when I walked up to him.

  “Sawyer, did I put you down for work today?” Pete asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I just wanted to get some air.”

  “Shoot, this is the place for it.” Pete gestured to an empty chair. I tried to remember my dream the night before—I had the feeling it had something to do with him, but I couldn’t remember. I never could remember them, and that was the worst thing about it. If I knew what they were about, I could at least start analyzing them, maybe figuring out what it was that was haunting me. Now, though, I was left to guess.

  “You don’t have any work for me to do?” I asked. I took the seat that was offered, not wanting to be rude to my friend.

  “Well, I’d like you to answer some of my questions first,” Pete said. I could tell that he was worried, and I didn’t want him to become more worried, so I resigned myself to answer whatever he had to throw at me.

  “Alright,” I said. “What do you got?”

  “What’s got you over here so early in the morning?” Pete asked. “It’s the crack of daw
n. The goddamn rooster hasn’t even crowed yet.”

  Pete didn’t have a rooster, but I saw his point. “I was over at Quinn’s and I had a weird dream, woke up, felt a little weird, thought I’d do some work to take my mind off it.”

  “You were at Quinn’s?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’m guessing you weren’t there for a follow-up appointment?”

  “Nope.”

  “Shit.” Pete shoved his cap further down onto his head. “Well, I can’t stop you. Did it all go alright?”

  “Yeah, I mean, it was great. I stayed the night over there because it was easier and I didn’t want to deal with my dad, coming home late and all.” The man treated me like I was still twelve, and I imagined that would probably carry over into me coming home late. “But I woke up pretty early because of a… Quinn calls them night terrors.”

  “Night terrors? My Uncle Tom used to get night terrors,” Pete said. “They’re awful scary. Did she help you out?”

  “There’s not much anyone can do,” I said. “It just happens.”

  “What are they about? Is it stuff from overseas?” Pete asked. His wording made it clear that he was being careful in how he phrased his question, like if he said the wrong word he’d spook me and I’d go galloping off like a deer.

  “Wouldn’t know,” I said. I rolled up my shirt sleeve. “I always forget when I wake up. That’s how night terrors go.”

  “Shit.” Pete shook his head. He stayed quiet for a few blessed seconds. “You know, Sawyer, if you need to talk about what happened, and you don’t want to tell Quinn…”

  “Nothing happened,” I said.

  “Well, you say that, but you’re acting like something must have happened,” Pete insisted.

  “Nothing happened,” I reiterated, a bit more cross. I was getting tired of having to defend myself to everyone.

  “It’s not gonna get any better if you don’t talk about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “So something did happen,” Pete countered, and I rolled my eyes. This was like grade-school fighting, the sort of cross-examination that would take place on a playground.