She heard the buttons and zippers of his shirt hit the metal tabletop with a ping, and assumed he was standing behind her, studying her back. This was the moment about which she’d dreamed and fantasized for years. She, Theresa Brubaker, clad in a bathing suit that left just enough to the imagination, was about to turn and face the man she loved. And she didn’t have to cross her arms over her chest, nor keep her towel draped around her neck, or hunch her shoulders to disguise the thrust of her feminine attributes.
She turned to find him staring, as she’d known he’d be. Neither of them moved for a long, silent stretch of time. His chest was bare, and the white trunks dipped just below his navel, leaving it surrounded by a thin line of hair leading from the wider dark mat above. His nipples looked like copper pennies in the shade of the umbrella. His ribs were lean. His lips were partially open. His eyes unabashedly scanned her from face to knees, then lingeringly moved back up again with the slow deliberation of an art critic.
“Wow,” Brian breathed. And incredible as it seemed, even to herself, Theresa believed him. The airy word was all she needed to reaffirm her desirability. But she could imagine her damn freckles zinging to life on her blushing neck and cheeks, so she turned to open her bag and rummage through it for the sunscreen.
“You’ll probably eat your word within an hour. You’ve never seen what happens to me when the sun hits my skin. I’m a living demonstration of why physicians refer to freckles as heat spots. And I burn to a brilliant neon pink.” From the depths of her bag she retrieved the lotion and uncapped it, then squirted a generous curl into her palm. “Want some?”
“Thanks.” He took the bottle, and they busied themselves applying the sweet-scented lotion to their arms, necks, faces and legs. When Theresa rubbed it along the edge of the V-neck on her suit, she felt his eyes following the movements of her palm and glanced up to find him putting lotion on his chest. Her eyes dropped to his long fingers that massaged the firm musculature, delving through crisp hair, leaving it glistening with oils. He took another squirt, handed the bottle to her, and they stared at each other’s hands—his running across his hard belly and along the elastic waist of his trunks; hers traversing delicate ribs, and the horizontal line along the bottom of her bikini top before curving into the depression of her navel, then around her exposed hipbones.
The lotion was slick and fragrant. It smelled of coconut, citrus and a hint of berry, filling the air around them like ambrosia. Watching his hands gliding over his skin, Theresa conjured up the thought of them gliding over hers. She dropped to the chair and began doing her legs, stretching first one, then the other out before her, sensing his eyes following again as she stroked the tender flesh of her inner thighs. She kept her eyes averted but saw peripherally how he lifted one leg to hook his toes over the edge of a lawn chair and massage fruit-scented magic along the length of his leg. He’d turned to the side, and she had a chance to study him without being studied herself.
Her eyes traversed his curving back, the buttock, the raised thigh and the junction of his legs where secrets waited. It suddenly flashed across Theresa’s mind why in Victorian times men and women were never allowed to go ocean bathing together. It was a decidedly sensual thing, studying a man in swim trunks.
She dragged her eyes away, wondering if she was supposed to feel guilty at thus new and unexpected curiosity she harbored. She didn’t. Not at all. She was twenty-six years old—it occurred to her it was high time this curiosity surfaced and was appeased.
“Will you put some on my back?” he asked.
“Sure, turn around,” she answered jauntily. But when she was squeezing the bottle, her outstretched palm trembled. His back was smooth and had several brown moles. He had wide shoulders that tapered to trim hips, the skin taut and healthy. When her hand touched his shoulder he twitched, as if he, too, were keyed up with awareness, and had been awaiting that first touch with as great a sense of anticipation as she. When her fingers curved around his ribs to his sides, he lifted his arms slightly away from his body to allow her access. For a moment, she was tempted to run both hands all the way around his trunks and press her face to the hollow between his shoulder blades. Instead she squirted a coil of white into her palm and worked both hands unilaterally across the crests of his hard shoulders and up the sides and back of his neck, even into the hair at its nape. Already the hair was longer, which pleased her. She had never been crazy about his Air Force haircuts, for she’d imagined that if allowed to grow to collar length, his would curve gently in thick, free swoops. As her fingers massaged his neck, he tipped his head backward and a guttural sound escaped his throat. Her palms, as well as the nerve endings along the rest of her body, felt as if they were instantly on fire.
It grew worse—or better—when he turned and took the bottle from her slippery fingers, ordering quietly, “Turn around.”
She spun from the ardor in his eyes, then felt his long palms pressing a cold mound of lotion against her bare flesh, then begin turning it warm with the friction and contact of skin upon skin. His touch made it extremely difficult to breathe, and impossible to control the tempo of her heart, which seemed to rise up and search out the spots his hand grazed, pounding right through the walls of her back. His fingers curved over her shoulder, up beneath her hair, forcing her chin to drop forward, spreading the essence of wondrous exotic delicacies all about her. He massaged the breadth of her shoulder blades, skipped over the elasticized back strip of her suit, and after taking another liberal amount of sunscreen, his fingertips eased up beneath the strap, running left to right beneath it, from just beneath her left armpit to the same spot under her right. Lower they went, down the delicate hollow of her back, and along the elastic of her emerald green briefs, curving upon the sculptured hipbone, teasing at the taut rubberized waistband that cinched tightly against her flesh. The oils made his hands glide sensuously across her skin, and she shuddered beneath them.
His touch disappeared. She heard the faint sound of the cap being replaced on the bottle, then of the bottle meeting the aluminum tabletop. But she didn’t move. She couldn’t. She felt as if she’d never move again as long as she lived, not unless this fire in her veins was cooled and put out. If it wasn’t, she’d stand there and burn into a cinder.
“Last one in’s a moldy worm,” came the heavy, aroused voice from behind her. Then she was sprinting to the end of the pool—running at last!—hitting the water stretched out full length, just at the instant Brian hit it. The shock was breathtaking. From the heat of a second ago her body dropped what seemed a full fifty degrees. She swam furiously, a powerful, controlled crawl to the far end of the pool, her body temperature stabilizing by the time she reached her goal.
Side by side they swam eight laps, and in the middle of the ninth, Theresa spluttered, waved limply and declared, “Goodbye, I think I’m drowning,” then went under. When her head surfaced, he was treading water, waiting.
“Woman, I’m not through with you yet. Sorry, no drowning till I am.” And unceremoniously he disappeared, came up in the perfect position to command her body in an exemplary demonstration of a Senior Lifesaving hold, with his left arm angled across her chest while he hauled her to the far end of the pool beneath the overhanging diving board.
She let herself go limp and be pulled along in an unresisting state of breathlessness and sensuality. His elbow clamped down on her left breast, and it felt wonderful.
At the pool wall he released her, and they both crossed their arms on the sleek concrete, resting their cheeks on their wrists while facing each other, both panting, feet flapping lazily on the surface of the blue water behind them.
“You’re melting,” he announced with a grin, reaching out a fingertip and running it beneath her right eye.
“Oh, my makeup!” She slipped under the water again and scrubbed at her eyelids before emerging sparkly lashed, and asking if she was still discolored. “Yes, but leave it. It’s very Greta Garbo.”
“You’re a very good swimmer.”
“So are you.”
“As I said before, it was about the only physical exercise that was easy for me when I was growing up. But I kind of gave it up too, when I was in my late teens, because I was afraid it would ... well, build up the muscles all the more, if you know what I mean.” He was studying her wet face carefully. “It seems like there are a lot of things you had to give up that I’d never have suspected.”
“Yes, well that’s all over now. I’m a new person.”
“Theresa, is it ... well, are you sure you aren’t overdoing it, swimming so hard? It worries me, even though you said you’re a hundred percent again.”
As if to reaffirm her full recovery, she caught the edge of the pool and boosted herself up, twisting to a sitting position above him with her feet dangling in the water. “One hundred percent, Brian.”
He joined her on the edge of the pool. She flung her hair back, feeling his eyes following each movement as she wrung her hair out and sent rivulets running down her back and over her shoulder. Beneath them the concrete was sun-warmed, and the water soon joined their flesh to the sleek surface with a tepid slipperiness.
He ran his hands over his cheeks to clear them of excess water, then wove his fingers through his hair, running them toward the back of his head, and studying the umbrella at the far end of the pool as he asked quietly, “Theresa, would you feel self-conscious answering some questions about your operation?”
“Probably. But ask them anyway. I’ve been working very hard on my self-image and on trying to overcome self-consciousness. But if you don’t mind, I’d better have a little lotion on my face and back. I feel like most of it washed off.”
They got to their feet, leaving dark gray footprints along the concrete as they made their way toward the opposite end of the pool. Theresa dried her hair, then spread her towel out on the soft grass and sat down on it while applying lotion to her face once more. When she was done, she flipped over and stretched out full length on her stomach, thinking it would be infinitely easier to answer his questions if she wasn’t looking at him.
His hands eased over her skin, spreading it with lotion once more while he asked quietly, “When did you decide to have it done?”
“Remember when I wrote and told you I slipped in the parking lot and fell down?”
“I remember.”
“It was right after that. When the doctor examined my back he told me I should look into having the problem solved permanently.”
“Your back?”
“There’s a lot of back and shoulder discomfort that goes along with it. People don’t know that. The shoulders are especially vulnerable. I thought probably you’d noticed the grooves—they still show a little bit.”
“These?” His fingertips massaged one of her shoulders, and she felt a heavenly thrill ripple through her body before he went on, “I wasn’t exactly looking at your shoulders before, but I see the marks now. What else? Tell me everything about it. Was it hard for you, psychologically, I mean?”
Belly down, on a beach towel, with her cheek on the back of her hand, with her eyes closed, she told Brian everything. All about her misgivings, her mother’s and father’s initial reactions to her decision, her fears and uncertainties, omitting the fact that the feeling had not yet returned to her nipples. She couldn’t force herself to share that intimacy with him yet. If and when the time came, she’d be honest, but for now she glossed over that and the part about being unable to nurse a baby.
When her recital was finished, he was still sitting beside her with his arm circling one updrawn knee. His voice was soft and disarming.
“Theresa, I’m sorry for getting mad at you my first night back. I never understood about a lot of it.”
“I know. And I’m sorry I didn’t at least write and tell Jeff, and let him tell you what my plans were.”
“No, you were right. You didn’t owe me anything. That first night when we went for the walk, I’ll admit part of my problem was I was scared. I thought maybe now that you’d taken the big step you’d be out for bigger fish than this underage guitar man whose past isn’t quite as pure as you deserve.”
His words brought her head up. Bracing on one elbow she twisted to look back over her shoulder at him. “I long ago stopped placing any importance on the differences in our ages. You’re more mature than most of the thirty-year-old men I work with at school. Maybe that’s why you were so ... I don’t know. Understanding, I guess. Right from the first, I sensed that you were different from all the others I’d ever met, that you really did look into me, the person, and judge me by my inner qualities or shortcomings.”
“Shortcomings?” He flopped down on his back almost underneath her partially lifted chest and touched the tangled locks above her left ear. “You don’t have any shortcomings, sweets.”
“Oh, yes I do. Everybody does.”
“Where they been hidin’?”
She smiled at his playfulness, glanced down at her forearm, and answered, “Several thousand of them have been lurking just below the surface of my skin and are just now coming out to introduce themselves.”
Indeed, her “heat spots” were heating up. The freckles on her arms had already grown so fat their perimeters were dissolving into one another.
He rolled his cheek against the towel, pulled her soft inner arm to his lips, and declared quietly, “Angel kisses.” He kissed her again, higher, almost at the bend of elbow. “Have you been kissing any angels lately, Miss Brubaker?”
She studied his green eyes, and let her feelings show in her own. “Not as often as I want to.” She smiled and added impulsively, “Gabriel.”
“Then what do you say we remedy that?” With a swift flexing of muscle, he was on his feet, reaching out a hand to tug her up. He gathered towels, togs and lotion and handed her the bag. She followed willingly, walking at his side while one light hand guided her shoulders as she crossed the grass toward the sliding door of his apartment.
She stepped inside where it was cool and shaded. She heard him snap the lock on the screen door, then step to the drapery cord and draw the curtain closed until the midday light was even more subdued through the open weave of the fabric. It threw gentle checkers across the thick carpet and her bare toes. She had the fleeting thought that her hair was probably plastered to her head in some places and flying at odd angles in others, and that her makeup was all washed away. Behind her she heard a metallic click, then the soft
shhh
of a needle settling onto a disc. She was frantically scrambling to find her comb in the bottom of the tote bag when a guitar introduction softly filled the room, and an insistent hand captured the drawstring bag and pulled it from her nervous fingers, as if Brian would brook no delays, no repairs, no excuses.