Rocket Man

by Melanie Greene

  “Her kid with me would be biracial, too,” Dillon pointed out. “Our baby will get nothing but pasty Irish white from me.”

  “First of all, Mags is half Hispanic already, her daddy’s from Guadalajara. Second of all, neither of you dumbasses is getting my wife pregnant, so, maybe you could stop talking about it and open the damn salsa, okay?”

  Dillon grinned. Like all jokers, there was nothing Eddie hated more than being the butt of a jest. Still, he made damn good burgers, in appreciation of which fact Dillon stopped ribbing him, and opened the damn salsa.

  “Anyone for another beer?” Serena asked the group around the fire pit, standing. Not that she’d paced it so she and Dillon finished their longnecks at about the same time or anything. What was she, fifteen?

  “Beer me,” Eddie said, channeling who knew what juvenile comic actor. She was just as happy to let most of his impersonations go right over her head.

  “Dude. Nice try, but, no,” Dillon told him, and stood, too. “I think we need to grab some from inside. I’ll help you restock the cooler.”

  She hid the involuntary grin by reaching for Janice’s empties. “Thanks, Toots,” Janice said, giving her arm a little squeeze. Serena needed to corner her to ask about the Ricky/warehouse situation, but had, at the moment, a more selfish agenda. So far she and Dillon had talked face-to-face, had brushed briefly against each other while loading up their plates, had made, well, more than the completely necessary amount of eye contact while everyone sat around talking. And not even a hint of shortened breath, much less giant red patches burning on her cheeks. Maybe it was just talking to him at work that freaked out her subconscious. Her libido and her dream-brain were getting more and more obsessive about Dillon, no matter what her mind and work-body were saying. So after some thought—okay, a hell of a lot of thought—Serena had decided to let her libido talk her mind into some kind of mature casual sex-and-dating thing. That way she wouldn’t have all the “find a husband” pressure or whatever it was that brought on the hives when she contemplated Dillon’s body, and also, she presumed, she would get to have orgasms with someone else again.

  In the kitchen, alone enough by virtue of the fact that the window looked over the side yard rather than the back, she stood irresolute for just a moment, then moved closer to him.

  “Dillon?”

  He finished dropping the bottles in the recycling and turned, starting back just a tiny bit to find her so close. But then he wiped his hands down his jeans and leaned in. “Serena?”

  Blue smoke eyes, dilated in the low light and maybe, just some, for her, too? Black hair angled over cheekbones so pure and sharp they made her ache to smooth them under her palm. A gentle fresh scent cutting through the lingering hickory smoke on his shirt. Serena drew in a long, careful breath, trying to ground herself. It pretty much failed, though, when Dillon's eyes dropped from her mouth to her swelling chest then shot back up to her eyes. Damn.

  “Just...um. Just wondering if you were still up for going to the market tomorrow?”

  He just kept looking into her. Just looking, then with a quick glance to the door, he made the half-turn necessary to bring himself in contact with her, and all hopes Serena might once have had of breathing properly disappeared forever.

  Finally—finally!—Dillon's internal monologue said ‘screw it!’ and turned away in exasperation, leaving the rest of him rejoicing as he gave up on holding back, gave up on pros vs. cons, gave up on anything and everything that had stopped him, in the past month, from putting his hands on Serena’s body. He touched her lightly, just his fingertips across her lips, her cheek, her hair. Her hair! So smooth, so alive as he wove his hand through it, palming the base of her skull as he lowered his head towards hers. Their eyes met, danced around, met again. Her lips had parted. She wasn’t pushing him away, at any rate. Not pushing, no—her hand had gone around his arm, an electric buzz through his shirtsleeve.

  Dillon's storm-blue eyes had a wide black rim, Serena noted somewhere in the sidelines of her brain, while most of her was focused on the message in those eyes. He was going to kiss her. Hell, she was going to kiss him! Why wait? Hadn’t it been long enough? A day, a week, all the weeks since they’d met—it was beginning to feel as if each of those moments had been wasted, but no more. She slid her palm up to outline his amazing cheekbones, and leaned in, expectant, ready. Time almost stood still, now was forever, they were always in the middle of Eddie’s gingham kitchen, Jorge calling in the background.

  Damnit.

  No, damnit, no, don’t want to listen, don’t want to return. No!

  But it must have penetrated Dillon's haze, too—he did have a haze, didn’t he? Serena blinked and tried to focus on the black of his blue eyes. Dillon closed them, though, and drew deeply for air.

  “Dillon, are you locked in the john? Get out here!”

  Well, trust Eddie to get them to move.

  Dillon kept one hand on her shoulder, stroking it slowly. He blinked again then turned towards the kitchen door. “Yeah, coming!” he called back, then looked at her. A quick, sweet smile. “Serena.”

  “Mmm?”

  “Yes, I am up for the farmers market tomorrow.”

  Despite their longish absence, Janice hadn’t moved over to the seat beside Jorge, so they once again sat with her between them. So much for bumping legs together on the sly, Dillon thought, handing Eddie the cold beer. Maybe he and Serena could just head out quickly. His townhouse wasn’t more than ten minutes from Eddie’s house; he could bear to wait ten minutes to get her in his arms. Maybe. He might fucking well explode on the spot, actually, but he thought he could manage ten minutes.

  “I’ve got some stuff in the morning, so,” he began, but Jorge reached out a hand to his chair.

  “Hang out another minute, okay? I need to tell you all some news.”

  “Aw, come on, Jorge, you’ve got to have at least another year before retirement! You haven’t even joined AARP yet,” Eddie smirked. Not for the first time, Dillon wondered why Jorge—who was actually younger than he was, so Eddie could practically be his very young uncle or something—put up with Eddie’s BS. They were both great guys, and Dillon had very few friends in Houston outside of work, so he was glad they got along decently. But Eddie’s ‘humor’ always found a target in Jorge, and Jorge, instead of fighting back or keeping away, just put up with it. Classic bullying. Dillon tried to stay out of the middle, but he’d once or twice told Eddie to back off, and Jorge to step up. As far as he could tell, it didn’t make a difference, but at least he tried.

  “Hush, Eddie Senior, and let the man tell us. Good news, I hope, Jorge, hon? Are you going to make someone’s baby, because I wasn’t scorning you earlier,” Mags said. “I’d be honored to grow your fruit in my womb.”

  Janice practically did a spit-take, which, if nothing else, broke the tension between Dillon's friends. “’Scuse me?”

  Dillon leaned over to her and stage-whispered. “Eddie apparently can’t father children. Very hush-hush. Magnolia is going to draw straws to see if Jorge or I will do it instead.”

  “Har har har.” Eddie, not happy at the bottom of the joke again.

  “Thanks, Magnolia, I am honored. We’ll return to that in private, yes?” Jorge smiled, that rare event; even Dillon appreciated it as benevolence upon them all. “Not quite that news, no. But I am engaged.”

  “Toots!” Janice was the first voice of surprise and delight, but the rest followed.

  “I didn’t even know you were with someone,” Serena added to the general chorus.

  Jorge was rubbing the back of his neck, blushing a little. “We weren’t going to get engaged until it was legal here, but Bubba says if the mayor can run off to California to get hitched, so can we.”

  “Bubba? His name’s Bubba?” Eddie was clearly about to start riffing, but Magnolia pulled him back.

  “Jorge, honey, we’re so happy for you,” Mags said, shooting Eddie one of those marital looks that clearly said, ‘Get with th
e program, buddy.’

  “Congratulations, man,” Dillon said, standing to shake Jorge’s hand.

  “Oh, Jorge,” Serena said, elbowing Dillon aside to give his friend a hug. Dillon reacted viscerally, surprising himself with the ‘get your hands off my woman’ thud of his heart, even in the midst of this happy news. When Janice and Magnolia joined the hug he didn’t even blink, other than noting that they pushed Serena closer to Jorge in the group. He sighed.

  Okay, okay, the correct friends thing to do was take Jorge out to celebrate—one-on-one, because he’d early on figured out that Jorge’s normally quiet reserve shed like snakeskin once he was out of a group situation. A true photographer at heart, Jorge sat back and observed rather than participated, given the option. But here Jorge had hardly ever mentioned Bubba, and they were engaged, and that meant it was time to remove Jorge from the group around Eddie’s fire pit and give him a chance to talk it out to his heart’s content.

  Dillon shot Serena a wryly apologetic look he hoped sharp-eyed Janice couldn’t interpret, and extracted Jorge from the press of women. The best he could manage was a longish squeeze of Serena’s warm hand as they said their goodbyes, and he and Jorge headed to the nearest of several nearby Starbucks.

  Chapter Twelve

  Serena pulled her little car into a street space a block or two from Dillon's townhouse and texted him her location before she got out and checked her appearance. She was not—not—going to keep breaking into infantile grins once he met up with her. Not. She took some deep centering breaths and willed the feeling of last night’s near-kiss from her mind. Totally not thinking about it. Not remembering the fine-grit sandpaper of his jaw. Not conjuring up his scent. Not feeling a significant anticipatory pull in the general vicinity of her thighs. Nope. Deep, calm breaths, an appreciation of the warm, sunny day, nary a lustful thought in her head.

  It worked so well that when she spotted him walking towards her, Serena didn’t even plaster herself to him, much less send her tongue spelunking down his throat. She was absolutely in control.

  Even if his answering grin did mean that she’d failed on the infantile thing.

  Dillon stopped a few inches shyer of her than she’d expected, which pulled Serena up a little short herself. He seemed to notice and make a leap to recover, gesturing to the main street with one arm while reaching for her with the other, which only made her feel like they were about to waltz or something. Considering his adorably lead-footed performance in Magnolia’s foyer the night before, Serena figured that dancing wasn’t his aim, but something of the momentum was, nevertheless, lost.

  “Morning,” she chirped (chirped? oh but she was losing all semblance of herself today; was this all a terrible idea?).

  “Hey, you made it.”

  “I did.”

  “It’s good to see you,” he added, then gave his head a half-shake and turned to face her full-on. “I’m sorry. I’m being awkward. Let me start again.”

  Serena laughed. “You can’t go back, but you can always go forward.” She suited action to words, stepping the inches necessary to give him a brief hug. “Hi.”

  “Is that some sort of ancient wisdom?”

  “What? The go forward thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  She scoffed as he took her arm and they set off towards the market. “Not exactly. I think I read it on the tag of a tea bag, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t handed down from the prophets or anything.”

  “My illusions are shattered.”

  “I’m so sure.”

  “Hey, you think you know a woman. She shops at farmers markets, eats organic, does yoga, right?” Serena nodded. “So, she does yoga, grows tomatoes; I have to figure there’s an ancient wisdom component in there just waiting to show itself.”

  “I grow herbs, too.”

  “Just what I’m saying. Drinks tea, grows tea, packages tea in bags with fortunes hanging off the end of them. The dots connect themselves.”

  “You, sir, are a laugh riot.”

  He pulled her closer, and not only, she hoped, because of the passing pedestrians. “Anything I can do to put a smile on your face.”

  And then they were stopped, facing each other. Serena glanced away, caught a reflection of the two of them in a shop window. As tall as he was, he didn’t tower over her so much as draw her up to him. It was more unbearable to watch the image of the two of them together than to look directly at him, so Serena turned back. She wasn’t exactly afraid. It wasn’t that. But she felt poised on a precipice.

  Here, on this sun-and-people-filled street, she and Dillon were deciding on a direction forward. His looking at her like that meant there was a direction, there would be movement, the night before hadn’t just been an interlude between burgers and dessert.

  So not ‘afraid’—but ‘nervous’ would work. Yep. Definitely nervous. She faced him, chin up, eyes wide. She licked her lip. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he answered, and pulled her in for a proper hug.

  He would have breathed a sigh of relief, if he wasn’t trying to avoid further embarrassment. God, that had been excruciating. Unaccountable. Why hadn’t he hugged her as soon as he’d seen her? What the hell had he been doing with his arms? Spent half the night flashing to memories of touching Serena in Eddie’s kitchen, then acted like a fucking preadolescent when he saw her on the street, glowing brighter than the day should have allowed. But now. Now his wayward arms were around Serena, and felt right. It shook him a bit, if the truth were told, the rightness he felt. What minuscule parts of his brain that were functioning beyond the rightness were pushing back at him. Nagging at him: isn’t it too much? Doesn’t this feel too good? Shouldn’t he back off some?

  And also, they were in the middle of the street. So he held her to him a moment longer before letting go. She moved back enough to look into his eyes, and he didn’t censor himself by looking away too soon, by hiding too much. At least, he thought not. Her eyes—almost silver in this daylight!—were a shade wary, but warm. Bright and warm and clear on him. Well, that was Serena down to the ground, no games.

  He smiled, reassured. The nagging was just an immature reflex. He was adult enough to recognize that it was just lingering college-age ‘don’t trap me’ stuff, not his present reality. Job, home, excellent woman. It was all good. It was perfectly acceptable, now that he’d nixed the ‘not at work’ prohibition, to start in with a real relationship. His life had room for that. So if holding Serena felt far more momentous than long nights with Kim or Erica or any of those casual dates he’d spent time with over the past couple of years, that was fine. That was good, even. Didn’t he and Kim break it off, after all, because it was always too casual, and neither of them could figure out what compelled them to be together anymore? So, Serena was compelling. Besides, he’d been ignoring his attraction to her since his first day at Lanigan, thanks to whatever bullshit professional ethics he’d thought applied, so it shouldn’t bug him that it was so intense between them.

  Right, then. On to the farmers market.

  “So you and Jorge talked more last night?” Serena asked as they turned into a lot where the produce was set out on various folding tables and blankets. She steered him towards a bee farmer whose soaps were her favorite.

  “Yeah, I made him tell me all in exchange for a coffee.”

  “Why do I have trouble picturing Jorge of all people drinking coffee past dark?”

  “Hey. Don’t make assumptions,” Dillon said, nudging her with his shoulder.

  She grimaced, embarrassed to be falling for an Eddie characterization. “Sorry. I did take it for granted y’all’d gone out for more beers.”

  Dillon laughed. “Nope, Jorge had his limit—two beers—at Eddie’s, so it was Starbucks instead. And, okay, it was decaf. But Jorge isn’t quite as set in his ways as it sometimes appears.”

  Serena snorted, and hoped it wasn’t as inelegant as it sounded to her ears.

  “Hey, now.” He picked up the lavender-beeswax soap she’
d just set down, and sniffed. “Nice. You use this, right?”

  “Are you trying to change the subject?” (Don’t swoon, Serena, it’s just a scent. A subtle scent, but there’s no reason he couldn’t have noticed it on her skin.)

  “Nah, but it’s hard to defend Jorge as much of a risk-taker.”

  “Yeah, apparently if he didn’t have Bubba pushing him out of his comfort zone, Eddie would be more right about Jorge than any of us likes to admit,” Serena said.

  “Maybe,” Dillon conceded, then set Serena’s nerves to jumping again with a decidedly carnal smile. “Sorry I didn’t stick around last night.”

  Probably that was just as well. She hadn’t exactly been in the most prudent frame of mind. “It’s fine.” And then she was the one looking to change the subject, nervous about discussing what might have happened if they’d left Eddie’s together. She settled for moving them on to the next booth.

  Serena added some snow peas to her produce bag and asked the woman about the early rhubarb she saw off to the side. The stalks weren’t particularly firm, though, so she passed. They bought drinks and sat on a bench near the street, shoulder to shoulder. She realized that since the initial awkwardness, they’d pretty much been touching all morning, and it had felt just fine. Her breathing was basically steady, her skin didn’t feel flushed. Her hands weren’t swollen. She nixed the idea of checking her chest for a rash, and figured that if her face had reddened up to an unwarranted degree, Dillon would have mentioned it. So whatever her body’s problem was with getting too close to him seemed to be confined to work. It sure hadn’t protested during that moment at Eddie’s, or the one on the street, either.

  She snapped herself back to the present, wondering if that present would presently contain kissing. “So is the farmers market all I promised? Are you glad I dragged you the blocks and blocks out of your way to visit?”