by James H Roby
Her skin was dark like the hue of rich chocolate. The complexion was flawless. He finished with her arms and moved to her legs. His eyes passed over her breast. Small, but perfect, they rose and fell at a slow steady pace under her bra. He tore his eyes away with some effort. He felt her calves, and had to remind himself that he was not caressing them. He started on the bottom of the legs. He moved inward, slowly. A few scratches presented themselves – nothing serious. The imperfections helped Jordan concentrate on what he was doing. Over the curve of her thighs, his hand slid inward. His finger brushed alone the edge of her panties. Nothing found, but he could have sworn she drew in the last breath a bit more sharply.
His task completed, Jordan leaned back and blew out a long breath. He felt a chill travel through his body. He had always hoped he would get to touch Robin again, but this was not what he had in mind. He stood up and went into his dresser. Nothing within would fit her, but he did come across a Nike blue and gray sweat suit. Better than nothing. He put it out next to her.
“I, er, don’t have anything for you to wear,” Jordan said. “Normally I hide my client in one of our safehouses. Usually, it’s women. Hiding from boyfriends or abusive husbands, stuff like that.” He paused. “They’re not in my name. The houses…Actually, they’re in my dog’s name: Galahad Enterprises.” Jordan laughed at how silly that sounded, spoken aloud. He immediately realize Robin couldn’t care less. He cleared his throat.
“Any way, I’ll be in the bedroom down the hall. The bathroom’s through the walk-in closet.” No response. He felt the weight of the world collapse on him. He turned to leave.
“What happen?”
Her words stopped him in his tracks. He stood silent, his back to her, thinking of a way to formulate his thoughts.
“Small made a deal with some drug dealers.” He said. He stopped again to think of a way to verbalize the madness of the past few days. “He was going to give them this drug called…”
“No. What happened?”
Jordan understood. He turned, not wanting to, but he knew he had to face her. He owed her that much. Her eyes penetrated deep into his. His throat went dry. He struggled to find his voice. “What do you want me to say?”
“The truth,” she said. No anger, just a desire for an answer – any answer.
Jordan leaned back into the doorframe. His eyes searched the ceiling for an answer. “I don’t know. I was leaving. Going away. I mean, shit, I was assigned to Minot! I can’t tell you how much that sucked. It was hard for me, going from the world to that…wasteland. I knew I couldn’t give you what you needed.”
“What did I need?” Robin asked, her voice even and calm which worried Jordan more than if she had shouted at him. Why was she so peaceful? Did she, like him, realized at this late stage in their relationship, only honesty mattered? Too often, lovers tried to keep painful truths from each other with little lies. A lie here, a lie there and soon all you have is lies. Is that what killed their relationship? It was pointless. Time had made it easy to say what should have been said so long ago.
“You needed more.” Jordan said. The words came out like a sigh. “A normal home. A man who would be there. I don’t know if you know, I didn’t stay in North Dakota long. I ended up doing…some dangerous things. Things…I can’t even tell you. You didn’t deserve that. Wondering if I was dead or alive. You were better off without me.”
He held his breath, wondering how she would respond. He was ready for almost anything, except what she did. Robin laughed. It was a quiet little laugh. She lowered her head and laughed a little louder. Jordan’s eyebrow shot up.
She looked back at him, her face etched with anger. For the first time during this case, he felt a touch of fear in the base of his belly.
“That was always your problem, Jordan Noble. Do you know what that is?”
Dumbly, he shook his head.
“You were always trying to be a hero. I didn’t need a hero. I didn’t want one. I wanted…needed a man. I needed you.”
Jordan felt like he had been slapped in the face. Was it that simple? Did he throw away his life, his happiness over this? Over some ridiculous notion he had to be something greater than he was? He could have just accepted what he had, loved her and, surprise! Be loved in return? Through thick and thin? For better or worse?
It was too much. It was too simple. Had he been so stupid? He couldn’t face her anymore. She must have hated him. Tears burned his eyes. He spun to leave.
“Jordan.”
He turned back. Robin stood and as she did, the jacket fell off her shoulders. He was entranced as she, slowly, purposefully, strolled towards him. She stopped just as her breasts, those perfect breasts, brushed his chest.
“But you are my hero.” His eyes searched her face for answers. Something to make sense out of all this. Nothing was there. He loved her. He had almost from the moment he saw her. He probably would, one way or another, for the rest of his life. The question was if she loved him. After revealing her view of their split, how could she? But here she was. Training, discipline and experience had forged him into the man he was now. Nothing, however, could prepare him for the mystery of a woman.
Robin grew as she stood on her toes. She reached behind him and switched off the light. The moonlight bounced off the river and filled the room. She started backward, taking his hands in each of hers. He allowed himself to be led. Robin stopped at the edge of the bed and for the briefest of moments, paused. In the darkness she looked into his eyes. Jordan found he wasn’t breathing. She laid back on the bed, pulling him down on top of her. Under him, Robin’s body was soft but firm, just as he remembered. Just as he dreamt. He hovered there, as if something would happen and he’d wake up in Kansas or something. Her hand slid to the base of his neck, drawing him in. Just before their lips met, Robin said the words Jordan had waited over ten years and would have waited a lifetime to hear:
“Make love to me, Jordan Noble.”
~
Jordan and Robin lay next to each other on the bed absorbed in the afterglow. They weren’t wrapped in each other’s arms. Instead they lay side by side, too drained for any kind of post-love holding. Jordan feared his heart stopped beating. Like his life had zenith and it couldn’t get any better. He was being ridiculous, he knew, but the moment was, in a word, overwhelming. The loss of Robin had been an itch he couldn’t scratch. Now, here he was next to her – just after making love. Life was good.
Then she snored.
Robin’s eyes fluttered as she woke herself. She stared up at the ceiling for several second before she rolled her head toward Jordan. Her face split into a smile when she saw him.
“What are you looking at?” she seemed to be self-conscious. Maybe it was her nudity. Maybe it was the sex.
“Hey,” he said. He had no smart Aleck response – not yet. He was coming down off the high. Looking into her eyes, made him twenty again.
“Hey.”
They laid for a while just looking at each other. Words would break the spell, and drug dealers and dead bodies aside, they only wanted to be in this moment. Somewhere a clock ticked off the seconds. A distant horn of a vessel on the river made its lonely cry.
She drew in a long breath. It trembled on the way out. “That was-”
“Yeah, I know.” They smiled. The sex uniting them, at least temporarily, as one being.
“Why didn’t we do this before?”
Jordan rolled onto his back. A cough of a laugh in his throat. “You’re kidding me, right?”
She looked back and her face twisted in confusion. “No. What?”
Jordan’s mind went back to a twin bed in an apartment five miles from the campus of Michigan State University. Her breath so close to his. A plea on her lips – to wait…to do the ‘right’ thing and consummate their love within the holy bonds of marriage. He went back to a younger him, more eager and ready, and ultimately more frustrated then he had ever been or would be.
&n
bsp; “You wanted to wait,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” she rolled to him. The darkness of the room made her a black form. “Why didn’t you just, take me?”
His next breath came out hot. Not too different than a bull before the charge. “I was respecting you. Your wishes. Even your crazy maddening ones.” He was angry but his fury was cooled by the fact the frustration he felt for over a decade had been sated. Her hand brushed across his face and another swell of affection came over him. He couldn’t see but he knew she had a sad little grin on her face. He was tired of feeling bad and awkward with her. And at the very moment, he had something rising inside he wanted to share with her.
She said, “So, Mi-not?” Her voice paused his intentions. She said the word as if it was part of an alien language – which in a way, it was. “Tell me about it. Was it really that bad?”
His eyes did a circuit. “It was worse. Imagine the most horrible place on earth, then multiply by ten.”
“Seriously, Jordan? Why you got to be so dramatic?”
He propped up on both elbows. “It had wind chills a hundred degrees below zero.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Hand to God. The damn state was trying to kill me.”
She adjusted the sheets – bringing them over the curve of her breasts. “Whatever, Jordan. Anyway, you were doing that missile thing?”
“Yup.” Jordan had long ago accepted most Americans knew about the existence of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force, but didn’t really trouble themselves over the details, like where they were. So, he didn’t bat an eye when Robin asked about the ‘missile thing’.
“But you said you weren’t there long.” She put her chin in her fist, like she was getting ready for a story. “Where’d you go after that?”
His arms came behind his head. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
She tugged his arm. “Come on. Tell me.”
“I was a spy.” He said matter of factly. Like he just announced he was a weatherman. He had, of course, passed to an individual not cleared for such, top secret information. But he knew, one – operatives had passed classified information to girlfriends and wives since the dawn of time and two – Robin wouldn’t believe him.
“Get outta here.” She pushed his arm this time.
“Told ya.”
“A spy?”
“Yes.”
“A James Bond with gadgets kinda spy?”
He rotated his head toward her. “You know, we in the community hate that reference. James Bond. Psst. Guy couldn’t get intel from a Girl Scout let alone a real world source, with all his fancy cars, tuxedos and exploding pens.”
She reared back. “Excuse me. Don’t want to offend the community.”
“All I’m saying.”
A few seconds ticked by and only the drone of the air conditioner acted as the soundtrack of the darken room. Jordan kept his hands behind his head and eyes on the ceiling. She was quiet and he knew why. She was deciding. Deciding if what he told her was true. She was balancing what she expected of a man Jordan’s age along with the memory of him back in college, against the things he done that very night. It would take a few minutes. He could admit he wasn’t that impressive back at MSU. But, even in a modest estimation, he was pretty damn impressive during his one man rescue of her. It would be a little scary, lying next to a man who had killed five or six men only hours ago, but she would come to terms with it and the only possible answer.
“So…a spy.”
Now he turned to her. “NOC, is probably a better term.”
“Knock?”
“Yeah. Non Official Cover. I was a HUMINT, that’s Human Intelligence agent operating in secret overseas.”
She cocked her head to one side. “So, James Bond then?”
A sigh. “James Bond without the gadgets. Most of the time I was just pretending to be someone else to get information out of the enemy.”
She curled her body, entranced by the story. “So you were in the CIA?”
“No. The D-IA. The Defense Intelligence Agency.”
She gave him the side-eye. “You made that up.”
He shrugged. “Nope. CIA gets all the press. There are sixteen publicly acknowledge US intelligence agencies. DIA is one.”
“Publicly acknowledged…listen to you. So how many are there really?”
“Nineteen.”
She moved in closer to him. “Jordan Noble. You think all this spy talk is sexy, don’t you? That girls dig it.”
He moved in closer to her. “You do.”
A giggle followed by a kiss. “Maybe a little. So are all your boys Knocks?”
“Just E-Man.”
She pondered for a moment. At the closer distance, he could see her lips twist. “I can see that. There’s no way I’d believe that Don Ross was a spy.”
“How about Malcolm?”
Her head shook. “I don’t know him like that.”
He laughed for a moment. She drew a breath to ask another question. He broke in to stop her. “It’s probably better I don’t tell you anymore.”
The attitude busted out of her, complete with head roll. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah, really. I mean, if I tell you too much, it could get classified.”
She lifted her hands. “Isn’t all this classified?”
He sighed and his tone got dark. “It was a dangerous world. The war on Terrorism. All that shit.” He turned away and reflected as he really hadn’t since he left. The impact his actions had made. He somehow balanced all the deceit, the sacrifice, the violence against the real good he done. The lives he saved. Maybe, by extension, hers. A laugh. It was too much not to be silly. Unbelievable.
The idea, the objective was to prevent attacks by enemy powers on the military forces of America. Which in turn, protected the homeland from direct and indirect attacks. What he actually did, wasn’t so ethical.
As a NOC his cover, his legend, was James Black, an account manager for one of the nation’s largest financial brokers, Bradley International. Bradley, since the end of World War II, had seen to the financial needs, the monetary brokerage and the greasing of wheels of clients from all around the world. The three founding members, all Army officers who served under General Omar Bradley were stanch patriots, which seemed in stark contrast to the quasi-legal and flat out illegal services Bradley performed for Nazi, Communists and now terrorists. The answer was Bradley was a shell company of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Oh sure, a great many persons employed by Bradley were financial professionals, but at least fifty percent of the company was operatives of the Department of Defense. This fact alone could be something of an issue in light of international laws – not that every major country in the world doesn’t do something similar. Still, good works was done and bad people were stopped. And Jordan Noble was a part of it.
He sat up in the bed. Bringing his elbows to his knees.
“Jordan?”
He heard her but most of his facilities were focused on a different issue. The reason for his depression. He didn’t miss the service. He needed it. To have a mission. To make things better. To be the good guy. And as crazy as it sounds, Cody Random had given him the opportunity to be the good guy. Uniform or no, there would always be monsters to slay.
“Jordan.” The call was a bit firmer this time. He lay back down. Robin pushed herself up on one elbow. He smiled at her body lit by the moonlight. Each curve was revealed in the low light. She shook her hair out - her eyes gazed longingly, even hungrily at him. They weren’t done, apparently.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I thought...”
“Now what are we going to do?” She gestured around the room and out the window as if to indicate everything. “About this mess.”
“Now, you stay here, safe. And me, well, the fellas and I go after Random.”
Robin laughed. A short little giggle at first. Then a long full out chuckle. “Jordan Nob
le. You never change. You and your delusions of heroism. And you’re flawless grammar. What did Cookie do to you?”
Jordan shot her a look, “That’s Mrs. Noble to you.”
Jordan’s mother, nicknamed, Cookie, had hammered home the importance of good grammar to Jordan at an early age. Anytime he started with ‘Me and…’ she quickly corrected him. Only people close to him knew about that. Like former girlfriends. And new lovers.
“Cookie!” Robin shouted and lifted herself with her arms, towering over him. Jordan retaliated with a tickling attack. The two play-fought, grunts intermixed with laughter and the occasional scream. Beyond the door, Galahad’s barks and howls went unheeded. Jordan allowed her to pin him. She sat on his chest, laughing and breathing hard.