Chapter Ten—Linc
After our date, I couldn’t get Sky off my mind. I hadn’t seen her since, and she hadn’t been picking up her phone for the last couple of days. I’d replaced the water heater, and even left a note for her to come and see me if she had any questions about the new one, but I’d heard nothing at all. It was the end of the work week, and the time to request that Sky do me the huge favor I needed—and then convince her to agree—was running out faster every day.
I definitely didn’t want to come across as too pushy, but I also didn’t want to wait too long and then find out that she was seeing some stuffed suit from her office. I wanted to know why she wasn’t returning my calls, and I wanted to know why she seemed to be avoiding me. We’d had a good time at dinner, and I hadn’t done anything with or to her that I wouldn’t have done with a friend’s daughter or a cousin; it had been like torture, but I had managed to keep myself civil and keep my hands to myself.
I spent all Friday dwelling on it, and decided to take myself to the bar; if Sky didn’t want to have anything to do with me—for whatever reason she might have—I wasn’t about to continue chasing after her. I was going to take the implied rejection like a man. But when it came to picking someone else up, I just didn’t have the heart for it. Mandy, my favorite bartender, and one of few women I trusted other than my lawyer, Carol, tried to get me into the groove of things.
“Come on, Linc—there are at least four different women in this bar right now looking at you like you’re the Matterhorn at Disney and suddenly there’s no line,” she said. I had a laugh at that, but to my mind not a single one of the girls she pointed out was nearly as appealing as the girl who was trying to avoid me.
I checked my phone every ten minutes, hoping that she would at least send me a text with an apology, but by midnight, I was ready to go home, ready to give up even on the idea of drinking myself into a stupor. I’d managed to get a bit of a buzz on, but not enough to defeat the annoyance I felt about Lisa trying to take my daughter a thousand miles away from me out of pure spite.
I walked back to my apartment and debated having an end-of-the-night beer. You’re feeling sorry for yourself—you know what that’s about, don’t you, Squid? I’d gotten chapter and verse about self-pity from more than one superior officer in the SEALs. There was no time for self-pity; there was only dusting yourself off and getting back into it. If Sky wouldn’t come near me, I would find some other girl who would be open to the idea of marrying me, or I’d leave it to Carol to come up with some kind of strategy for getting me what I needed in court.
I had finally decided to just go to bed—no end of the night beer, no self-pity—and face the next morning like a man who had some kind of future when a knock at my door shattered whatever peace I’d managed to wrap around myself. “What the hell?” Who could be knocking so late at night? I answered myself immediately: it had to be a tenant with some kind of problem. At least I wasn’t drunk this time.
On the other side of my door, when I opened it, was not just some tenant. It was Sky. I stood there for a moment just staring at her; she was dripping wet, wrapped up in a red terrycloth robe—and, I thought, nothing else—and dripping onto my doormat. She had had makeup on at some point, to judge by the thick smears of black running down from her eyes, and the lipstick that still smudged her lips; and by the way she wavered slightly, even standing still as she was, I could guess that she was quite a bit closer to drunk than I was.
“The hot water thing’s broke,” she said, and then paused, frowned, and cleared her throat. “What I mean is, the new water heater in my apartment is broken. The heating element is out.” I raised an eyebrow at her second, more eloquent statement.
“How do you know?”
Sky rolled her eyes and leaned against the frame of my door. “My first hint was the fact that the water that came out of my showerhead was freaking freezing all of a sudden,” she said. The heater I had installed was one of the new ones—an on-demand heater, without a tank to leak. The water flowed through it, heated up, and went into the pipes—so it made sense that if the heating element had broken or shorted out somehow, she would get a blast of cold water.
“Wow,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say for a moment. “Sky, are you drunk?”
“Mostly,” she admitted. “Cassie wanted to celebrate my first paycheck.”
I had to chuckle a little at that. “Come inside,” I suggested; it was warmer out in the hallway, but I didn’t have any doubts that Sky wouldn’t want to stand outside of my apartment indefinitely. “I can’t fix it tonight—you understand that, right?”
“I figured as much,” Sky said with a sigh.
“But you can finish your shower here.” There I’d been, feeling sorry for myself that this girl was avoiding me—without even knowing why she was avoiding me—and she’d turned up on my doorstep half naked. God bless the shit out of whoever was in charge of quality control for that heating element.
“Thank you, Linc,” Sky said, her voice sounding strange with all the effort she was putting in to sound normal. It was the way I’d heard guys talk to MPs on base when they were trying to beat a drunk driving pullover. I shook my head and watched her pad across my living room, directly towards the shower she’d used the last time she was in my apartment.
I sat on the couch, determined not to go to sleep until I knew what was going on with Sky. I wanted to hear more about the night out, or maybe talk to her about why she was avoiding me. In her current state she might let something slip. I must have dozed, at least a little bit, because I lost track of my train of thought for a while and only got it back when I heard the door to the bathroom open. I caught a quick whiff of the sweet-warm soap that Sky used, and whatever it was she had as a shampoo, and then she was right in front of me. “You’re so nice,” she said. It was obvious she was still more than a little tipsy, and I felt guilty—but not that guilty—about the idea that rose up in my mind. Could I take advantage of her in the state she was in?
“I’m not that nice,” I told her.
“I’m not that drunk,” Sky said, and I frowned. “You’re looking at me like I’m about to puke all over you, and I want you to know: I’m not that drunk.”
I had to chuckle at that, but in fact she no longer had the tone in her voice that had told me, before, that she was trying hard to sound normal.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” she was in the robe again, but at least this time, she had taken the time—and one of my towels—to dry off. I gestured to the couch and Sky looked at me for a long moment before moving to the area I’d indicated. She sat down and looked up at me, and for half a second she looked like every drunk college girl I’d ever seen in my life. Then she took a deep breath, and suddenly she was the sweet-strong—if young—woman I hadn’t been able to get out of my head for days. I sat down, giving her a little space.
“I wanted to thank you for letting me use your shower, and I wanted to apologize for missing all your calls,” Sky said, speaking a little slowly, but without slurring.
“Well, what other shower would you have used? I couldn’t make you take a cold shower, or go to bed covered in soap for that matter,” I told her. “And the calls—it’s no big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Sky said, looking at me. “I should have called you back, but I’ve been dealing with work stuff, and just...” She shook her head. “Will you let me thank you?” I raised an eyebrow at that.
“What did you have in mind?” Before I could suggest anything—and my mind was full of suggestions—she leaned across the couch, wavering only slightly, and kissed me. I would have been lying if I said this kind of scenario hadn’t played through my mind more than once; but even as I steadied her against me, even as I let my hands just barely start to wander over her body, over the thick, plush robe, I felt a little guilty.
I broke away from her lips after a moment and looked into her eyes. I was surprised at how sober they looked. “What?” I shook my head.
“You’re drunk,” I told her. “I may have slept with plenty of drunk girls in my time, but I’m not sure you’re doing this for the right reasons.” Sky frowned, her lower lip sticking out in a pout, and she exhaled sharply.
“I am sober enough to make this decision,” she said firmly. I held her gaze for a few more moments and then thought, Good enough. If she has regrets later, it’s on her. In all honesty, I couldn’t have held back much longer—not with the feeling of her tits pressing against my chest through her robe, and not with the warmth of her body sinking into me, and definitely not with the fantasies that had been dancing through my head for days.
I kissed her, pressing her body as tightly against mine as I possibly could, and taking full advantage of the fact that she was in the next best thing to nothing, and was clearly willing. I let my hands drop down to her full, round ass and squeezed it through the heavy fabric. I heard—and felt—her moan against my mouth at the feeling of my touch. Her hands came to life on me, exploring my chest, moving around to my back, and in a matter of moments I was touching her everywhere I could think of, trying to find the knot on the sash of her robe to tug it untied, so I could expose that delicious body I’d gotten so many little hints of.
I managed to slip one hand under one of the front flaps of the robe, and my reward was more than a handful of Sky’s warm, full, heavy tit, the nipple beginning to harden to my touch. She moaned again, and I thought for a second that it was because she loved it—but the next moment she was pulling back, squirming in my arms in a way that I understood right away. I was hard as a rock, my cock straining at my jeans, eager for the action that Sky had seemed to promise me—but I knew hesitation when I saw it.
“What’s wrong?” I looked into Sky’s eyes and saw it: fear. Not fear like women showed when they thought I was about to blow up at them; fear like when they’re almost certain they’re about to make a big mistake. “We can stop if you want, Sky,” I said.
“I just—I think I was letting my...” She shook her head. “I think I’m more drunk than I thought.”
“Why don’t you crash on the couch?” I couldn’t let her go back to her place—not in the state she was in, and not when she might feel humiliated the next morning, and decide that she definitely didn’t want to see me again or talk to me again until her rent was due. “I can run to the hardware store and pick up a replacement part for your water heater in the morning.”
“I should go back to my place,” she said, tensing up all over. “I’m naked and I’ve been leading you on, and that’s just a recipe for...”
“It’s a recipe for a great story about how you showed up on your landlord’s doorstep soaking wet and got him to let you use his shower and crash on his couch,” I told her. I knew she was still hot for me. She was embarrassed by it, and I didn’t know why, but I had been able to taste it on her lips: she wanted me, even if she was saying no. But I would respect the no.
“I’m not going to sleep on your couch in my robe,” she said.
“I’ll get you a shirt to sleep in,” I suggested. “And a couple of blankets and a pillow out of the guest room. There: is that okay?” She thought about it for a moment and then nodded. I got up—awkward, because of the hard-on still straining to get out of my jeans—and fetched an old shirt of mine from the Navy, almost bigger than she was, pillow and blankets, everything a half-drunk girl might need to feel comfortable sleeping on a relative stranger’s couch. She was almost down for the count by the time I came back, and I had to tell myself I was glad that I hadn’t just moved on forward with her. It had been a near thing.
As soon as Sky came back out of the bathroom in my shirt and padded half-asleep to the couch to collapse, I went into the bathroom myself. I had a big problem to take care of, and I could only hope that she wouldn’t hear anything that would let her know about it. I laughed to myself as I stepped under the hot water flowing from the showerhead, even as I reached down and wrapped my hand around my throbbing erection and started to stroke it. She might be innocent, but she’s definitely not boring, I thought, picturing the night going a slightly different way; if she hadn’t wanted to stop, if Sky hadn’t been just drunk enough to get things started but not enough to want to keep them going in spite of her misgivings.
In next to no time I came, shooting my load down the drain, and as I leaned heavily against the wall of the shower, I had to admit that if Sky was going to give herself to me, I wanted it to be because she wanted to 100%. I didn’t want her to be so drunk that she couldn’t think better of it. I wanted her to be sober and so turned on she couldn’t even think of hesitating. That thought nearly made me hard again, and I got out of the shower before I could be tempted to another round of dirty thoughts that would only waste a bunch of water.