I didn’t know how to handle the knowledge that I might have feelings for Amy. Part of me still wished she’d never blown into Rio Seco, that I was still living a blissful life ignorant of her very existence. But the majority of me was glad she was here. That same part had started looking for her in places where I’d previously avoided her. I wanted to see her again. That much was sure. I just didn’t want to do what she wanted me to do. It would’ve been easier to spill my secrets if I didn’t have these feelings for her. She’d been right, when we first spoke in the diner. There was something comforting about anonymity. Now that I knew her better, and knew she had a better understanding of my situation, I was even more hesitant to tell her about Iraq.
I was tied up in some pretty exquisite knots about Amy. I wanted to see her. I didn’t want to see her. I had feelings for her. I didn’t want to have feelings for her. The only thing that remained constant was that I didn’t want to talk about Iraq with her, but even that was a little complicated. If I continued to resist telling her, she wouldn’t become the writer she wanted to be. If I did tell her and help her achieve her dreams, she’d leave Rio Seco when she was done writing her story.
I felt like I was at real risk of developing an ulcer, here.
But this little town could be a strange sometimes, when it wanted to be. Back when I hadn’t wanted to see Amy in town, I saw her everywhere. Now, when I did want to see her, Rio Seco just wouldn’t cough her up. She was nowhere to be found. Not the grocery store, not the gas station, not the bar. Not even jogging down the side of the road. Like a creeper, I drove past the motel several times, wondering whether she was even in town anymore. Maybe she’d had sincere regrets about the kiss we’d shared under the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Or maybe I’d hurt her feelings by refusing to let her take me home, for shrugging off the “sure thing” Brody had assured me I’d had with Amy. But her rental car was parked in the same spot. She was still in Rio Seco. We were either just missing each other constantly, or she was holed up in her room, doing and thinking and feeling only God knew what.
One night, though, Amy reemerged into my life, while I was sitting at home, trying to distract myself with a little television. And I just wasn’t ready for it.
My phone rang, and I hesitated, my hand hovering over the display, at the number. I recognized it even though I hadn’t saved it as a contact. It was Amy’s number, the area code unfamiliar. I didn’t even know if it was an LA code or an Alabama one, didn’t know which part of her past she’d preserved with it. I didn’t want to talk to her right now. I couldn’t. And yet I regretted it when that number vanished, when the phone stopped ringing. When the sad record flickered on telling me that I’d missed her.
I’d missed everything. Every opportunity.
Then, though, something strange happened knocking on my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. They guys knew better than to knock. If they had something to tell me that they didn’t want to waste energy over the phone with, they just opened the door and strolled in.
I looked through the peephole and lost my breath. It was Amy. She’d just called me, but she’d been standing outside of my home. She had to know that I purposefully didn’t answer the phone. I hated the way that made me feel, imagining how she must have felt.
“I know you’re in there,” she said. “I heard your phone ring. Then I heard the floorboards creak when you got up to check the peephole.”
“Yeah, gotta get those worked on,” I acknowledged.
“I don’t know,” Amy said casually, as if we were having a normal conversation and not one conducted on either side of a closed door. “I think squeaky floorboards kind of give a place character. They’re like fingerprints. Or the voice of your home, even.”
“I like that voice of my home,” I said. “My home talks all day, then. It’s a chatty place.”
“Do you think it would be okay if I came in to chat?” she asked. “You and I don’t have to speak. I could just make some small talk with the floorboards.”
I opened the door, against my better judgment.
“Can we start over again?” Her face had the kind of pinched look that hopeor desperation could sometimes cause.
“Amy, we don’t have to start over again.”
“I know, but I’d like to. You know. If it’s possible.” She shuffled her feet, scuffing the bottoms of them against the concrete of my stoop. “I feel like we got off to knowing each other in a way that made it impossible for us to recover, to have any sort of real connection. And if we start over again, we could give that a try.”
She looked so chagrined, yet so determined, standing outside my door, in the early-morning heat, that my heart really went out to her. She’d come all the way to Rio Seco to try and become the person she wanted to be, and I was fully standing in the way of that. I wished that circumstances had been different. I wished that I could offer her what she’d come here asking. It just wasn’t something I was prepared to give her or anyone.
“If this is about the story you’re trying to write”
“This isn’t about the story,” she said firmly, then her eyes squeezed shut. “I mean, maybe it is. Maybe it can be, is what I’m saying. Later. Someday. Or never. I don’t know. I just think you and I have something real. Or we could have something real.”
“This is about the kiss. On the Fourth of July.”
“Yes. Yes, the kiss.” She studied my lips, then seemed to shake herself out of it. “I feel a connection with you that’s deeper than it should be, Sloan, honestly.”
“How deep should it be?”
“I don’t know. I came here to Rio Seco in pursuit of a story, and now I’m all twisted up and confused.”
“I know how you feel about the twisted and confused part,” I said, almost apologetically. “Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to tell you about Iraq.”
“I completely understand.”
“But I’ll try,” I said, watching as her dark eyes widened in shock, then disbelief. “I care about you, Amy. I don’t think I would’ve been able to try and talk to you about this otherwise.”
“I care about you, too. That’s why I came over here. I wanted to tell you that I wouldn’t write the story if you were uncomfortable telling me about it.”
“But you want to be a writer,” I said. “You were counting on this story.”
“Other things will come along,” she said dismissively. “I’ll get there someday. This is just a small setback.”
“I don’t want to be your small setback,” I said. “I want you to succeed.”
“You’re serious about doing this?” she asked. “Because I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”
“I want to do it for you.” I took a deep breath, and let it out again. “We can do it right here, right now, if you want.”
She held out her hands. “I didn’t bring my recorder, or even a pen or notebook.”
“Now what kind of writer are you going to be if you can’t even be prepared for unexpected breakthroughs in your stories?” I asked her, smiling.
She laughed, giddy, and threw her arms around my neck to hug me. “Thank you for doing this. You don’t know how much this means to me.” She planted a kiss squarely on my lips, and backed off immediately. “God, I’m sorry. What kind of writer am I going to be if I can’t stop kissing the people I’m trying to interview? I’m just really excited.”
“It’s okay,” I said slowly, hoping she didn’t notice just how “excited” that simple gesture had made me. It was as if my dick had a mind of its own, jumping at the first opportunity. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a woman in my house. It had been that long. I wasn’t looking to be celibate or engage in a hermitage. I just hadn’t…felt like being intimate with anyone in a while. Now, though, my body seemed eager to do all the thinking for my mind. This was ridiculous. If I was going to get emotionally intimate with Amy, my body was looking to jump on the bandwagon and get physically intimate, as well.
“We could just start with some preliminary questions for now, if you want,” Amy was saying. “It wouldn’t even have to be questions. We could have a conversation so I can maybe get a clearer picture of where this story is heading.”
“If you think that’ll work, that’s fine with me,” I said. “Just ask away.”
“Tell away, you mean,” she said. “Tell me about the time you spent in Iraq.”
But where was I supposed to start? She had to know, thanks to my reticence, that there were some really crappy parts to my tour. Was she suggesting that I begin there, and just get them out of the way? I couldn’t just catapult myself into that.
“Well, you already know I’m a Navy SEAL,” I said. “And that I served in Iraq.”
“That’s right.”
I cleared my throat, shifted from foot to foot. “Maybe we should sit down. Would the couch be fine?”
“The couch is more than fine,” she confirmed, plopping down next to me. “Don’t feel nervous. Please. It’s just me. You know me.”
“I know. It’s just difficult.” I smiled briefly at her. “You know, most of the things I did I can’t talk about. The missions are still classified.”
“I can understand that.”
“And what I can talk about, I don’t like to,” I said. “I haven’t even told the other guys any stories from those days.”
“Why not? They’re your best friends.”
“They are. And because of that, there are some things I refuse to burden them with. The minutiae of my time over there is one of those things.”
“I’m betting it’s not minutiae,” she said. “You’re afraid of boring them?”
“I’m afraid of terrifying them,” I said.
“Scary things happened?”
“Of course they happened.” I looked at her, wished we could be doing anything other than talking about this. “And lots of scary things happened to the rest of the guys, too. They don’t go around talking about it. Why should I?”
“To be fair, Jack probably doesn’t talk about it because he doesn’t remember,” Amy pointed out.
“Okay, agreed,” I said, “but we all have secrets we’re keeping from one another.”
“That doesn’t sound like a healthy friendship for you guys, though.”
“We’re not hiding anything,” I said. “We’re just not disclosing everything. It’s different.”
“Men are the worst,” Amy muttered.
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Please continue.”
I snorted at her. “Just because we relate to each other differently than a group of women doesn’t mean the relationship is any less close.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s just that women are a lot more open with each other.”
“Oh, we’re open with each other.” I could’ve told her that the day after the Fourth of July that Brody had grilled me about my sex life, but I wasn’t about to go there. “We’re just not open about the things women are open about past pain and torment, for example.”
“Were you wounded in Iraq?” she asked, leaning forward.
“Not physically, no,” I explained, then hesitated to continue. “There are just some things that…stick with you. Bad things. In a bad way, too.”
“And these are bad things you can talk about?”
“Some of them, sure.” I smiled grimly at her. “But wanting to talk about it is a different animal than being able to talk about it. You know what, scratch that. I don’t even know if I’m able to talk about it.”
“You don’t have to start there, then,” Amy said. “Start somewhere different. Somewhere easy.”
“I hated how hot it was,” I said. “Nothing rivals an Iraqi summer. Nothing. And all the gear we wore didn’t help a bit. I got heatstroke within the first week of getting there.”
“That’s why you warned me about heatstroke,” she said wonderingly. “Because you’d actually had it.”
“And because you were jogging in the desert when the sun was already up.”
“Okay, sure, I was doing that,” she said, laughing lightly. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you more seriously.”
“Just after sunset or just before sunrise are the best times to take a jog, if that’s what you’re interested in doing,” I advised her. “We could go together sometimes, if you want.”
“I would really like that.”
“We could go right now.”
She gave me a knowing smile. “Think it’ll make me forget that you’re trying to tell me about Iraq right now?”
“Saw right through that, didn’t you?”
“I did.” Her smile faded a little bit. “But Sloan, now, I’m serious about this. I don’t want you to do it if you’re uncomfortable at all.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, and I wasn’t sure which one of us I was trying to convince. “This is just something I have to work through. I’m not used to talking about it. It’s going to be uncomfortable.”
“Tell me who your best friend was.”
I blinked at her, a little surprised by this approach. “Margo. Margo Fletcher.”
And now Amy was the surprised one. “Your best friend was a girl?”
“Is that problematic?”
“I didn’t know that any women had qualified to be Navy SEALs yet.”
“She wasn’t a SEAL. She was naval intelligence.”
“Your best friend was a spy?”
“Naval intelligence,” I reiterated, enunciating carefully but nodding my head in the affirmative. “I don’t know why you’re so shocked. Didn’t know women could do it?”
“Stop that,” Amy said, giggling. “I’m not shocked. Okay, I am shocked. But I’m intrigued, most of all. Out of everyone, she was your best friend?”
“She was my best friend.”
“I thought Navy SEALs were into the whole macho brotherhood thing,” she said. “You didn’t click with them, or what?”
“I clicked with them just fine,” I said. “I trusted all of those guys with my life, and they trusted me with theirs. It’s just that you asked me who my best friend was, and I’m telling you it was Margo.”
“That’s really interesting. Why was she the best one?”
My world slowed down to a sudden crawl. Jesus. Christ. All this time, all the emotional baggage and strange attraction…
I only just now made the connection. Amy reminded me of Margo. Physically speaking, they were opposite sides of the coin. But their mannerisms, self-confidence, drinking aptitude, ability to ingratiate themselves to people, make themselves at home in whatever social situation was required…that was all the same.
“Sloan?” Amy had scooted closer to me on the couch. “Are you okay?”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling more than a little shaky. “I think I was just lost in the memories there, for a second.”
“You know what? We can stop for tonight.”
“What? No. I can do this. We can do this.”
“It’s just that you went really pale for a second,” she said, laying her hand on my forehead, and I knew she’d seen me make that sudden connection, draw that inescapable line between her and Margo. God, why was this happening? It was hard enough to talk about Iraq. Now that I knew part of my attraction to Amy was because she reminded me of Margo, it was back to being nearly impossible.
“Your hand feels nice,” I mumbled, just to have something to say.
“Your skin is hot,” she said, brushing my hair back before dragging her knuckles across my cheek. “You’re not coming down with something, are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, though it sounded like I was really far away, even to my own ears.
She was so close to me. So close. Close enough to…
I kissed her long and slow, as if we had all the time in the world and no place better to be, and in that moment, it was all true. Everything that had been making noise at my periphery faded away, and Amy became my focus.
“I hope that one wasn’t a mistake,” she said a little breathlessly, as we parted. “Please don’t let that be a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake if you don’t want it to be,” I said. “I’m just I feel like I’m blundering around. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do, what we’re”
She silenced my rambling with a kiss of her own. She didn’t have to say the words. The shape of her lips against mine, the press of her tongue against mine…those all spoke volumes. We didn’t have to complicate things. We could be together if we wanted to be.
And goddammit, I really wanted to be together with Amy.
We did a slow dance to the bedroom, transforming it into a strip tease once we were past the threshold of the doorway, clothes forgotten on the floor. Her breasts fit so perfectly in my hand, buy my palms were so rough and callous-covered that I was afraid I’d hurt her or scratch her. I handled each globe as if it were the most precious treasure in the entire world, thumbing over her tightening nipples.
“Sloan,” she gasped, arching into my touch. She was so sensitive, and hearing my name on her lips like that…did things to me.
“Please tell me this is off the record,” I bit out, my dick so hard that my pants were uncomfortable, and Amy laughed.
“Off the record, I am going to make you come screaming,” she said, pumping my erection through my pants. “Off the record, I have wanted you to fuck me since I first saw you.”
“What? No in that crowd of protesters?”
“Yes.” So passionate. “Off the record.”
“Yes, yes, off the record,” I agreed, palming the juncture of her legs through her silken, dampening panties before slipping them over her hips and down. She kicked them away, straddled my leg, pressed her womanhood against my thigh. She’d kept the hair covering her mound curly and natural, and something about that in this era of Brazilian waxes turned me on even more, if possible. “Can we stay off the record? Off the record is fun. Let’s never go back on the record.”
“On the record can be fun, too,” she promised me. “But let’s not worry about that right now. All off the record, right now.”
“Okay. Good. Excellent.”
She wrenched a groan out of me as she unfastened my pants and drew my length out through the gap, the teeth of the zipper biting against my sensitive skin. “God, I want this in me,” she breathed, and I was only too happy to oblige her. Too happy to distract myself from everything that had been dredged up by not even five minutes of talking about my time in Iraq.
We moved together like we were made specially for that purpose, specifically for each other’s bodies, and that was something I could hold on to, something that would drag me back into the present and away from the past. This was alive, vibrant, our sweat mingling on our slick skin. This was something far away from my bad memories. This was Amy and me, forging forward together, working point and counterpoint to bring a little goodness into the world. Because this was an act of caring, an act of of love.
That much became apparent when I came powerfully, my last few thrusts sending Amy over the edge, as well, and if I wasn’t so busy losing my mind to that warm place beyond the precipice, I would’ve liked to have studied that feeling for a few minutes.
Instead, I withdrew from her trembling body and brought her close to me, willing, if only for tonight, to let all my worries seep away. I didn’t have to think about all of that right now. I could let everything go.
“Are you okay?” Amy whispered into the dark.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been this okay,” I assured her, stroking her hair.
“It was good?”
“It was the best.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“Don’t ruin my afterglow.” I laughed at a sharp pinch against my arm. “What? I told you. You were magnificent. We were magnificent together.”
“Do you mind if I stay the night?”
“I would mind if you didn’t.”
And she was asleep just like that, almost as if she’d just been waiting for permission to do so, and I was left with my thoughts. Margo drifted back into them, but it was more of a peaceful presence, now. Everything was going to be okay. It didn’t matter that my past and present had a little bit of a convergence. It was the future I was supposed to focus on, and right now, the future was incredibly bright.
I fell asleep wondering if this had just been one fantastical, beautiful, impossible dream, the only sign that it wasn’t being the very real woman curled up against my chest.