21. Mac
21
Mac
I just needed you to admit it.
I’m home. Eleanor is home. And I’m never leaving.
“I have to ask because it’s been bugging me.” She turns her head and sniffs the suds left behind by the loofa I’m working on her shoulders. “Where did you get this body wash? Is it prescription? There’s just… no smell.”
I grin and move the loofa lower down her back. “I prefer to have all my faculties when I need to focus—strong scents are distracting.”
“Is that why you… this is silly and maybe I’m reading into it, but did you send me flowers that didn’t smell on purpose?”
I’m pleased she got there so fast. “I did. I noticed that you don’t wear perfume so I thought you might also be sensitive to smells.”
She tilts her head back, allowing it to fall against my collarbone. The spray hits her chest and I watch as the water droplets forge a path down, wanting to follow them with my tongue. I bring the sudsy pouf around, running it gently across her belly. She squirms a little at the attention somewhere she’s insecure about. But she’ll learn—I’ll show her there isn’t an inch of her I don’t want to worship with my mouth.
“It’s not like I don’t want to smell nice,” she says, laying her hands on my forearms as I slide down towards the soft curls between her legs. “It’s just kind of a faux pas in the kitchen. You don’t want to throw off anyone’s taste buds. And then even on my day off I don’t because I’m worried it’ll stick to my clothes.”
“You do smell nice.”
“What?” Her voice becomes breathy, distracted, as I inch lower with my soapy, slick fingers. “But, like you just said, I… um, I don’t wear perfume. ”
“If I thought it was perfume, I’d say ‘your perfume smells nice.’ But I said you smell nice, darlin’.”
“Oh.” She gasps as I find her swollen clit. Her fingernails dig into my arm, and her back arches against me, but she’s got nowhere to go and I’m not loosening my grip. “Mac, I can’t—not again—”
“Yes again.” I stroke the little nub, relishing in every broken inhale, every squirm and tightening of her limbs, every shudder. My dick stirs, interested for another round but still a bit oversensitive and numb at the same time. I’ll be ready again soon. In the meantime, I want her to be loose, soft, satiated, and sleepy yet energized, the way only an orgasm can do.
“Come for me, baby,” I whisper into her ear. “You can do it. You can be my good girl.”
She whimpers, moving her hips in small circles counter to my touch. The whimpers become moans and her breath starts picking up. I keep my steady, even pace, though the urge to speed up as her body prepares for its climax is hard to fight—I want to get her there faster, but I know it doesn’t work that way with women.
I drop my lips onto her shoulder, running them over the smoothness I find. I taste her, nip at the skin, fill my free hand with her breast and give the sensitive tip a little tweak. Every movement, every sound, every sensation of her skin against me… it’s all mine.
Her legs start to shake and I know she’s close, so I brace myself in case she loses control of her knees. After a few more strokes, she does, and I’m right there for her. She slumps a little in my arms, slow to get her legs back under her, and makes satisfied little humming noises. When she recovers, she turns around in my arms, hooks an arm around my neck and pulls me towards her.
I love the feel of her stretching against me, breasts pressing into my chest and belly pressing into my cock, and her kiss is equal parts hunger and gratitude. The feel of her desire, knowing she’s trying to keep up—match it with mine—makes me want to head straight back to that bed. We have a lot of surfaces to christen.
But her stomach growls as we step out of the shower and I hand her the towel from the hanger. “You’re hungry,” I observe. “Go put something on and we’ll get some food.”
She looks down, winding the towel around herself. “Oh, that’s okay. I can just go get something for myself and bring it back up. You already ate—”
“Darlin’, I need 4000 calories a day to maintain mass. I could always eat.”
“Show off,” she mutters.
“Either we both go or I bring something up for you. You choose.”
Her lips twitch. “You’re going to spoil me.”
“That’s the plan.”
“I’ll get dressed.” She starts to sort through her clothing in the open suitcase.
I grab the other one and bring it into the closet with me. There’s plenty of room for her stuff in this cavernous walk-in. “You can unpack in here tomorrow,” I tell her as I grab a clean pair of sweats from one of the drawers. A quick check of my watch tells me it’s past 10, meaning Dimitri is in his room for the night and Wes’s night is just beginning, so I doubt we’ll see him.
I decide to forgo a shirt. I like my girl’s eyes on me.
She’s sliding the same oversized shirt she’s been wearing over her head when I walk back in. I remember those sleep shorts, and I really remember how they look with no panties underneath… like now.
“No.”
Her face is surprised as it appears through the hole in her shirt, her hair wild with static, pointing in all directions. She smooths it out of her eyes. “No?”
“I don’t want to see those shorts anywhere but in here with the door closed. That view is only for me, now. Put on pants.”
She looks pointedly at my bare chest, raises an eyebrow and cocks her head.
“I don’t know what kind of point you think you’re making with that look, but it doesn’t matter. Pants, Eleanor.”
She presses her lips together against the smile curving at the corners. With a little shake of her head, she crosses the room, bends back down over the suitcase at the waist—on fucking purpose, most likely—and pulls out a pair of sweatpants. With quick, jerking movements, she pulls them on over her shorts and turns back around to me. “Happy?”
My palm twitches against my thigh. “A smart mouth will also get you laid over my knee, darlin’.”
Her eyes flash with sexual interest, and she bites her bottom lip. “Lucky me. ”
She’s hungry. She’s hungry. She needs food. She’ll probably pass out after the next round if I don’t let her refuel…
I take a calming breath and open the door. She starts moving towards the stairs, but I catch her hand. If Wes is still settling in, he sometimes travels back and forth between his room and office. “Let’s take the elevator.”
“I still can’t believe there’s an elevator.” She sighs, shaking her head, “It’s so not fair.”
I push the button at the end of the hallway, and we hear the gears start to move. “Why, not fair ?”
“Because you’re living like this while I bust my ass for $40K a year. You probably pay half that in rent for the month in a place like this.”
She’s not that far off, but I don’t remember the exact numbers since Wes takes care of it. “A few million per hit, split three ways… tends to add up.” It’s really four ways, since the General takes a cut off the top. I won’t be able to avoid telling her forever, but she’ll be so much safer if she doesn’t know about him.
Her eyes widen. “Guess I’m in the wrong industry,” she says, her tone somewhat harsh. “So much money to end people’s lives.”
I probably shouldn’t have gotten into the specifics, but my instinct was to share any detail she might want. I’m trying not to keep things from her, and it really didn’t occur to me that her reaction would be bitter. “Call it skilled labor and hazard pay.”
“Right.”
I notice how she tries to stand away from me in the elevator, but I refuse to let her create distance—emotionally, anyway. Still, I try to keep the pressure off the question by watching the buttons light up as we descend. “Was it just being reminded of what I do, or something else?” I ask, referring to her rigid posture next to me.
“It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s not,” I say, turning towards her and placing an arm against the open elevator door, barring her exit. “Talk to me.”
She sighs again, looking away. “It’s… well, all my adult life I’ve felt like I had to make a choice between pursuing a dream and making ends meet, only to get this far and feel like I chose wrong,” as she continues the sentence, her voice wa vers. “I sacrificed and scrimped for all those years, and I still picked the wrong dream because I don’t even fucking like it anymore. Do you have any idea how… exhausting that is?”
I watch her angrily wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. “I do. Maybe more than you know.”
Watery blue eyes flick to me, as if to assess whether or not I’m making fun of her. But truthfully, I’m relieved this seems to be more about the money itself than the fact that I kill people for it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all hers from now on, anyway.
“Really?” she asks.
I nod down at her, and move my arm, lowering it to gesture for her to go first through the door. “I don’t know if you know this about the military in general, but it requires a certain suspension of disbelief.”
“I can only imagine,” she says quietly.
We walk towards the kitchen, and I put my hand on her lower back—to guide her, but mostly to put my hand on her. “The training is one thing—there’s a camaraderie with the other cadets, and you don’t really know what you’re getting into yet. But then I spent years thinking that maybe one more mission… maybe just a little longer, and I’d feel like I was where I was supposed to be, or doing what I was supposed to be doing. No one around me questioned their purpose at all. It’s probably why I stayed as long as I did.”
She cranes her neck and sends me a look that’s full of sympathy and understanding.
“It wasn’t years of struggling in poverty or anything, but it was years full of choices that added up to a situation I didn’t want to be in. No one to blame but myself, either, so I did… for a while.”
“How did you stop?” she asks.
I flick on the lights and move towards the table, ushering her ahead. “I found something else I actually wanted to do and figured out how to leave the past in the past.”
She laughs a little. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not, and I don’t mean to make it sound like it is. But you get better at it, the more you practice. ”
I pull out the chair and motion to it, but she shakes her head and spins so she can place a light touch to the center of my chest, forcing me down. “No, you sit. You took very good care of me, let me take care of you.”
I smile because it feels wrong not to, when my girl is offering to remind me that she’s mine. I watch as she works, pulling out a large mixing bowl and whisk, then grabbing some eggs out of the fridge.
“There’s so much I still don’t know about you,” she muses distractedly.
“Like?”
“How old are you?”
“33.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? You were hoping for more of a May-December thing?”
She smiles, looking down, starting to crack eggs into the bowl. “No, I just… I’m really bad at guessing people’s ages. And you did add yourself as ‘grandpa’ in my phone.”
I laugh at the memory. “Oh, that. It’s just a contact name that people wouldn’t think to look at closely.”
She nods, accepting that, then gets distracted by chopping some vegetables. I let her work, not wanting to split her focus when she’s holding a knife. So, I start checking the messages on my phone, and the omelet comes together so quickly that she’s sitting at the table before I can even finish typing my email.
“Thank you, darlin’.” I tuck in with gusto, noticing how much larger my portion is than hers. It’s perfectly cooked, seasoned, and filled with vegetables that are somehow delicious, in spite of their greenness.
“Do you have siblings?” she asks between bites.
“I’m the seventh of eight kids.” Her eyes widen, then her smile is wry. “What?”
“Wow. Eight kids. I can’t even imagine. That explains why you eat like you’re afraid there won’t be enough.”
I set down my fork, and let loose a surprised laugh as I dab the egg off my face with a napkin she brought. “Wouldn’t have put that one together, but you’re probably right. Nothing was ever mine. It’s why I decided to serve—the military was a way out of rural life. It gave me something my family didn’t have, that they couldn’t give. And it felt like a better option than settling down, getting married to someone in the area and always wondering how close my family tree actually was to hers.”
She snorts. “Did most of your siblings do that—settle down?”
“They all have at least two kids of their own now, except my younger brother. But he’s the baby, so he’s not leaving home until he’s got a boot print on his ass. I usually go home for Christmas and they all pity me because I haven’t found my ‘true purpose.’”
“So, your family doesn’t know what you do,” she surmises.
I shake my head. “They think I’m still in the Marines. My mother tells everyone she knows that her son is saving the nation.”
“I mean, technically you still are. Your methods are different…”
“Frankly, they’re not even that different,” I admit. “But it’s safer if they don’t know. I have Wes keep an eye on traffic through the major airports near them but I’m not really too concerned. It’s a whole lotta nothin’ down there. You have to know where to look to find people in that mess of forests and mountains.”
She smiles, and finishes her last bite. “So, where do they think all your money comes from?”
“Oh, they don’t know anything about it. Except for the kids, I guess. All 19 of my nieces and nephews have accounts in their names that’ll get them through college, if they want, and buy their first home. But on the condition that they don’t tell their parents where they got the money.”
“You don’t want your brothers and sisters knowing how rich you are?”
“Nope. Appalachians are a proud people, so they’d expect me to convince them to take my money. I don’t really feel like doing that. Besides, I’m not trying to turn my family into The Beverly Hillbillies.”
She laughs.
When she tries to protest me taking her plate, I shut it down with, “You cooked, I’ll clean.” I give everything she used a quick scrub and set it out to dry on top of the other pans, then take her hand to lead her back to the elevator.
It feels like we’re a normal, 10-years-married couple as we brush our teeth and climb into bed. She sits up against the headboard, applying more cream that she lost in the shower, and I stretch out next to her on my back, hand on my full stomach, watching .
“Can I ask something a bit… strange?” At my smile and nod, she breathes in deeply and asks, “Have you always been so… possessive? Do you always fall hard?”
I tilt my head. “That’s getting dangerously close to talking about exes, darlin’, which isn’t going to end well for whoever you might have in your past.” As long as she never brings it up, I can go right on with my life, pretending they don’t exist. Otherwise, her closets might pick up a few real skeletons.
“No,” she hurries to assure me, laughing a little. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s really… flattering. I just—I’m surprised, I guess. You don’t even know me that well, but you keep saying that I’m yours. And there’s a difference between finding each other attractive—like we both obviously do,” she hurries to add, seeing my lifted brow, “—and learning all the stuff that you can like about someone. Not, like, favorite color; more like the way they interact with the world and how they treat people and what they want from life.”
“I do know some of that. You forget—I was watching you.” As she nods, the memory flashing across her face in that subtle pink blush, I stretch an arm behind my head. “I also bugged your apartment.”
“You what?!” she shrieks.
I chuckle. I knew that would be her reaction, but I’m still amused by it. “Darlin’, I followed you. I stalked you for weeks. Why is that the line?”
“Because I… you…” I see her mind race, trying to remember every embarrassing thing she’s ever done. Then, realization hits. She suddenly remembers what might be the worst—worse than any of the farting or off-key singing in the shower.
I let the smile spread, slow and intentional, as I sit up and turn around to cage her with my body, one hand planted on the mattress on either side of her. “That’s right, Eleanor, I heard my name on those lips that first night, when you fingered that pretty pussy, thinking about me. You didn’t know it, but that was the night you became mine.”
She swallows, eyes round and slightly accusatory. “So, you knew all along—”
“I told you I didn’t need you to tell me you wanted me. I just needed you to admit it. And admit that you wanted to act on it.”
“I just…” she trails off, blushing harder. “I didn’t realize it was… I mean, I guess I just assumed it wasn’t really about me, so much as it was just a quirk of yours. I know some people fall really hard and fast, so I figured—”
I cut her off by gripping her chin and holding her still for a kiss. “Getting dangerously close to calling yourself unremarkable, there, darlin’.”
Her eyes flash with heat, blood rushes to my dick, and our conversation is over.