By the third day, he’d run out of excuses to keep her. And the fact she’d soon leave made him way too unhappy for his liking. She’d only be five hundred yards away, but that may as well have been five hundred miles, especially when he’d gotten used to having her so close, close enough to kiss, close enough to slide himself into… He shook his head.

“Don’t worry, Joe,” she said with a little smile. “I won’t be underfoot for much longer.”

So pretty, but sometimes so dense. He started to correct her, but then changed his mind. What could he say? That he wanted her to stay? Joe looked over toward her, uncertainty creeping in his mind. Sex with her must have warped him somehow. He’d always thought he had at least some inkling of what Verna was thinking, but now he had no clue. Was she anxious to leave, or was he just reading into it? Her passion hadn’t waned, quite the opposite. As she’d relaxed, gotten more comfortable, it had only grown. But still, that didn’t mean she wanted to continue what they’d started, and as cowardly as it was, he was afraid to ask for clarification.

“So what happens tomorrow?” she said.

“The power looks to be coming back on in most places, so they’ll start moving through, fixing any remaining outages and then work on debris removal.”

“Joe,” she scoffed, looking at him sternly. “I wasn’t talking about the storm.”

“Oh, ohh…” he said, allowing a little smile of embarrassment to cross his face.

“Well?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Neither do I,” she said, shaking her head now.

“What do you want to happen?” he said

“What do you want to happen?” she responded.

After a beat of silence, they both laughed.

“Fine, supersoldier, I’ll go first.” She sobered. “I’d like to see you again, but only if you want to,” she hurriedly added.

“Good. I want to.” Then it was his turn to sober. “Verna, are you sure it’s a good idea though?” As much as he wanted to see her again, as nearly impossible as it was to imagine not being with her again, he was uncertain. They had chemistry, true enough, but he couldn’t say that whatever they’d shared could exist outside of the circumstances of the storm.

“Don’t worry, Joe. I won’t fall in love with you or start following you around. Well, unless I want to creep you out for fun.”

“You say that, but feelings have a way of springing up on people.”

“My God, you are so arrogant. Maybe you’ll fall in love with me. Ever consider that?” she asked, surprisingly playful given what he’d thought would be a hard conversation.

He shrugged. He hadn’t thought of that.

“So how’s about you take care of your feelings and I’ll take care of mine?”

He nodded, and she stepped closer to him and began lifting his shirt.

“Now come give me a proper good-bye,” she said in a throaty whisper.

---

“This is ridiculous, Joe. I can walk across two driveways unaccompanied,” she said later that evening as she and her escort stood on his front porch.

“Whatever. At least I didn’t make you wear a coat.”

She rolled her eyes, remembering how he’d insisted she bundle up for the harsh thousandth-of-a-mile journey until she’d put her foot down.

“Good point. Though as we’ve arrived on my doorstep in the time it took for you to utter that sentence, I think mine proves valid as well.”

She unlocked the door and then turned to him, unsure of what to do now. Maybe she should thank him again.

“Thanks—”

He cut her off with a quick, hard kiss on her lips.

“We’ll talk later,” he said and then headed back toward his house.

“Try not to miss me too much,” she said when she finally found her voice.

He didn’t stop, but she heard his deep laugh, which triggered her own. When he reached his porch, he turned back and she waved. Then he closed the door and she closed hers, trying to ignore how empty her house seemed now that she’d shared his.

---

Joe had wanted to look back, see Verna’s smiling face, but he didn’t. He’d had a hard enough time accepting that she was leaving and knew that if he’d looked back, he might have done something embarrassing like ask her to stay. So he spent the evening moving from room to room, remembering how warm Verna was, the silky softness of her skin, how indescribably incredible he felt when he was deep inside her.

A buzz from his cell phone pulled his attention away from thoughts of Verna.

U in?

The message was from Sommers, and though Joe didn’t have specifics, he knew the message could only mean the team had been deployed.

No.

He wasn’t in and hadn’t even been notified that something was up. And even worse, he felt relief that he hadn’t been included, and that relief left in its wake a sense of shame that left him breathless. He’d asked for a break and gotten it, and he couldn’t pretend that spending three days with Verna, or even spending three days alone, wasn’t preferable to what he might face out there.

It was the truth, one he’d eventually have to come to accept, but it also cut him deep, proved that he wasn’t the man he used to be.

Cool. C U later.

He could imagine Sommers, excited, ready to go conquer the world, where he was just an old man past his prime.

Disgusted, he shook his head and walked up to his bedroom, the silence and emptiness of what had been a full and vital place with Verna in it pressing down on him, making him long for her presence so deeply that the need for her was a physical ache.

But he wouldn’t surrender to it.

Verna didn’t see it, but he did. She was so full of life, had her entire future ahead of her, and she needed someone who had the same, not a washed-up has-been like him.

So he’d spend time with her, didn’t think it would be possible for him not to, but he’d keep his distance, make her keep hers, and when she was ready, he’d let her fly.