Authors: Kimberly Belle
The look that rolls up his face is heated and tender all at once. It’s like watching desire come to life, and it makes me forget every awful thing that happened earlier tonight.
I miss the dimple
is what I was going to say.
What comes out is, “I think it’s time for that rain check.”
20
Gabe and I end up in bed. Of course we do. After the last aborted attempt, after circling each other for the better part of a good month now, all that pent-up desire had to come out at some point.
It came out in kissing and grinding on my couch, in hands sliding under fabric and over skin baking underneath, in soft gasps and louder moans, and finally, in Gabe throwing my legs around his hips, pinning me to his chest and carrying me upstairs, shedding clothes along the way.
Which brings us to now. Gabe and me, panting and sweaty and tangled on my wrecked sheets.
“Wow,” I whisper into the quiet dark. The word seems pitifully inadequate for what I just experienced. Sex with Gabe was like none I’ve ever had—and at thirty-two, and at the risk of sounding like an oversexed trollop, I’ve had plenty of sex. But this was different. Wild. Spectacular. Unprecedented. “Remind me to send a thank-you card to the mustard heiress.”
He shoots me a wry grin. “Send it to whoever made that dress of yours. I’ve always had a thing for corsets.” I shove him playfully, and he captures my wrist in his hand, kissing the inside of my palm. “And you,” he says, all teasing from his tone gone now. “It seems I also have a thing for you.”
Warmth spreads across my chest, and I close my eyes and breathe him in. “I have a thing for you, too.”
He slides me up his torso and gathers me into him, wedging my head in the crook of his neck, curling me into his big body. My gaze lands on the tattoo I discovered earlier, swirling black letters that trail up the inside of his left bicep that spell out
Zachary
. I trace them with a light fingertip.
“Not many heterosexual men are confident enough to have another man’s name permanently inked onto their skin, you know.”
Gabe gives an amused puff of breath, warm and ticklish on my scalp. “It does get me a few interesting looks at the gym.”
“From the lamenting women or the rejoicing men?”
“Both.”
I laugh, and so does Gabe. Outside my window, a murky mist has floated up from the Potomac, blurring the outlines of my neighbors’ houses and bathing my bedroom in an eerie, purple glow. He buries his face in the crown of my head, kissing my scalp, and we lie there for a bit in comfortable silence.
“Mom says she knew the second Zach was killed,” Gabe says out of nowhere. “Before Nick called, before the army chaplain showed up at her front door, she says she knew. She felt part of herself dying and just knew.”
Tears come to my eyes so suddenly, there’s just no blinking them away. I think about how that moment must have been for Jean, how in the middle of going about her day, while drying her hair or eating an apple or driving to work or the market, she was sucker punched with knowledge she didn’t want to have. It’s impossible if you think about it, really. She
couldn’t
have known, and yet she did. I imagine how she spent the rest of the day trying to talk herself out of it—
not possible, Zach’s fine, everything’s fine
—and then later when the chaplain came, the sick dread that must have sucker punched her all over again at the sound of the doorbell.
“Your poor mom.” I splay my fingers through the light hair bisecting his stomach and press my lips to his chest. “That must have been awful for her. For all of you.”
“I know the risks of war, knew when my brothers got on that plane there was a very real chance one of them would not be coming back, but I never thought it would be Zach. Zach was Superman. He was supposed to live forever.”
“Is that why you put his name on your arm? To keep that connection with him, to keep him close?”
He lifts his head, gives me a look that makes me think I maybe hit a nerve.
“It was part of it, yeah. But the other part is to remember. Not that I would ever forget him, but I don’t know...memories fade with time. His name on my arm won’t.”
My heart squeezes for him, for his pain at losing a brother he so clearly worshipped, but also with something bigger, something completely separate from his brother. What I feel is one hundred percent Gabe. Inking his dead brother’s name on his skin, abandoning his fast-track career to care for his family. Gabe here is the real deal. I know I used those words on his brother, but that’s because I hadn’t met Gabe yet. Gabe Armstrong is the
real
real deal. I scoot closer still, wrapping myself around him until there is not a sliver of space between us.
“It’s not that I want revenge,” he whispers into the darkness. “For the army to go to all this trouble to bury what happened out there, for your father to...” He gives his head a little shake, as if that’s a sentiment he doesn’t want to finish. “By now I’m pretty certain that whoever shot Zach did so by mistake, and I know it won’t change anything, but I still have to know. I can’t move forward until I know what happened to my brother.”
“I get that.” I push up on an elbow, rest my chin on his chest. “And if I can help give you closure, Gabe, I will.”
He watches me for a long moment, his eyes crinkling as he studies me. “I wasn’t expecting you. This. It’s a nice surprise, feeling like this again.”
“Like how?” I know I’m breaking every rule in the book by prodding, but I also don’t care. Gabe left that door wide-open, and now I want to know. I
have
to know. “How do you feel?”
“Like tomorrow might not be so awful with you in it.” He pushes me onto my back and rolls on top, planting a row of kisses from my ear to my breastbone. “Tell me you’ll be in it.”
At first I can’t respond around the sudden lump in my throat, and then it’s because his hand is on the move. It leaves a trail of chill bumps as it wanders up my side, brushing over my ribs, the side of a breast, my collarbone. I gasp as his mouth dips lower, then lower again. My fingers slide into his thick hair, guiding him, and the rough scrape of his beard lights a path down my skin, now hot with lust and need.
“Abigail.” Just one word, my name, but it comes out sounding the way sex with him feels. Demanding. Intense. Just the right amount of rough. His teeth nip the skin just above my hip bone, by my belly button, lower still. “Tell me you’ll be in it.”
“Definitely,” I say, right before I arch up to meet him halfway.
* * *
Gabe sleeps the way he lives, with power and presence. His big body sprawls across my mattress, eating it up with his size and weight, commanding the middle of the bed and most of the covers. At some point near dawn, I wake up cold and shivering at the edge of the mattress. Gently, trying not to wake him, I scoot nearer, pull the comforter back my way. I’m almost completely underneath when Gabe stirs. He rolls into me, gathers me up, wraps the comforter around us like a cocoon, and I settle back in.
I’m drifting off when he whispers into my hair, “I think you should do it.”
I pull back to look at him. His eyes are still at half-mast, but he’s clearly awake. The slack is gone from his cheeks, and his expression is alert. “Do what?”
“Call Mom and tell her yes. Tell her you’ll help her write Zach’s story.”
I don’t say anything for a good minute. This is the place where I’m supposed to say no. Where my head is supposed to shake and my tongue push out some excuse. Where, instead of letting the lines between personal and professional loop around and turn topsy-turvy, I’m supposed to draw one in the sand.
“Why?” I say instead, even though I think I already know the answer. For all the reasons his mother asked me in the first place, Chelsea and my father and how both of them will make me more careful with my words. For finding Ricky, for calling Graciela, for giving the memo to Victoria, for blowing their allegations against the army wide-open. For make-out sessions on couches and whispered midnight phone calls. I expect any or all of those answers.
But that’s not what Gabe gives me.
“Because you’re the only one who I want to share him with.” He picks up a lock of my hair and twists it around a finger, his expression open and sincere. “You’re the only one I trust to do his story justice.”
I was already hovering on the ledge. Gabe’s beautiful words just tipped me over.
* * *
I awake the next morning still tucked into Gabe’s chest. I lift my head and look at the man asleep on the pillow beside me. Gabe’s cheeks are flushed, his thick hair rumpled, one arm thrown above his head in deep REM abandon. Early-morning sunlight catches in the scruff on his cheeks, casting his face in shadows and angles, and happiness balloons inside me, warm and full.
With a kiss to his pec, I slip out of bed, plucking a T-shirt and jeans from the chair in the corner on my way out of the room. I pull them on just outside the door, brush my teeth and wash my face in the tiny guest bathroom, and head downstairs.
Content curation is like erecting a lightning rod and then sitting back and waiting for the storm. While Gabe and I were upstairs...well, not sleeping, exactly, my curation software was getting zapped from every corner of the world wide web, pulling out the relevant content, categorizing it and spitting it into my inbox.
While my computer sorts through the jumble, plucking the best stories from the hundreds of emails like ripe cherries, I dig my old iPhone out of a drawer, restore all my contacts from iTunes and reactivate it with my carrier. I know I’ve got it up and running when Floyd’s name lights up my screen.
“I thought you forgot about me,” I say, half joking, half not. I remember Floyd as being much faster with these types of assignments, which means either he’s really busy, or Maria is turning out to be more complicated than I thought.
“Never, hon. But Maria’s doing a damn good job of covering her tracks. Looks like she’s stashed her cash somewhere safe, and whoever’s been paying her hasn’t made a peep. Until they file a complaint or she gets mugged on her way to the bank, that cash is pretty much invisible.”
Well, hell. Just as I feared. Cash transactions are pretty much impossible to trace unless you mark the money or see the exchange, and since I can’t do the first, that means I’d have to have put a tail on Maria, which I didn’t. Disappointment lands with an elevator-like thud in my belly.
I flip through my mental Rolodex, thinking about people I haven’t thought of in years, considering which one will do the best job for the least amount of money now that I no longer have a budget to cover research expenses.
“Okay, well, thanks for trying, Floyd. I appreciate—”
“Hey, give a guy some credit,” he interrupts. “I don’t ever call a client empty-handed, and...”
He’s still talking when another call beeps through, and I pull my cell away from my ear to check the caller ID. The number on the screen sends a string of firecrackers popping up my spine, and I cut Floyd off mid-sentence.
“I’ll call you right back,” I say, then, without waiting for his reply, press the button, heart thundering, to take the next call. “Abigail Wolff speaking.”
“Hi, Abigail. This is Graciela Hernandez returning your call.” Her voice is high and lyrical and tinged with a Southern accent, just like the one on her voice mail message, and the familiarity of it picks up my pulse. “Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but I hardly ever check my home machine. Nobody ever calls that number but telemarketers.”
I wipe a suddenly sweaty palm across my jeans. “No problem at all. I’m just so glad you called me back.”
“Yes, well...” She pauses to clear her throat. “You said your fiancé knew my Ricky?”
“Yes. At least I think so. I was hoping you could maybe help me figure out the connection.”
“You mentioned something about a letter.”
“Yes,” I say, drawing out the word, buying time while my brain churns out the fabricated half-truth I told Graciela. The problem with half-truths, I’m discovering, is that they are also half-lies. So now I have to come up with a letter, which means first, I have to come up with a reason to stall. “I have a letter, but, um, I’d really rather not read it to you over the phone. Could we maybe plan a time to meet? I’d be happy to come to you.”
“Oh. That would be fine, I guess.” I hear a shuffling like the flipping of pages in a day planner. “When were you thinking?”
“Anytime.” As soon as I say it, though, I feel the warm rush of Members Only man’s breath hot on my neck. If he knows we know about Ricky, then whomever he’s working for does, too. Gabe and I have lost too much time already. “As soon as possible, actually. What does your schedule look like?”
Graciela tells me her job as a hospital nurse gives her a somewhat erratic day in the best of times, but starting tomorrow, she’s putting in extra hours and will be working back-to-back night shifts all through next week. I check my watch and do the math, rounding up and planning in a little extra time for leeway.
“What about today?” I jump out of my chair and hurry to the stairs, but when I see my reflection in the hallway mirror, my hair wild and tangled, Gabe’s beard burn on my chin, I tack on an extra hour. “I could be there by dinnertime.”
Graciela agrees, and after a few more minutes discussing logistics, we hang up. I race up the stairs and into my bedroom, where Gabe is still passed out. “Gabe.” I shake his foot. “Wake up.”
He does, and the slow, sexy grin that spreads up his face when he sees me standing at the foot of the bed makes my entire body tingle. “Why aren’t you naked?”
I shake off the unexpected rush, file it away for a later contemplation. “Because we have a date with Graciela.”
He jolts to a sit on the mattress, his expression suddenly and deadly serious. “Which way’s your shower?”
We shower and dress in twenty minutes flat. While I dry my hair, Gabe borrows my car for a quick trip home for a fresh change of clothes and his toothbrush. I wait for him downstairs, tossing my laptop, notebook, tape recorder and the contents of my purse into a tote bag, filling two travel mugs with coffee. Three staccato beeps of my car horn announce his return, and the two of us steer my car as fast as its little Prius engine will allow to Portsmouth.
“We have a teeny tiny problem,” I tell him once I’ve merged onto 395.
He looks over, his eyes shaded under a John Deere baseball cap like the ones hanging from a rack by the Handyman register. “My beard’s not long enough?”