Chapter 5
MARCEL
I'm standing on Tina Ackley's front porch at six fifty eight with a bottle of wine I drove to Billings to buy and a bag of groceries I plan to cook for her because taking this woman to Maggie's Diner where every pair of eyes in Grizzly Ridge would watch us eat is not how this night is going to go.
This night is going to go privately.
This night is going to go the way I want it to.
I knock. Two firm raps. The door opens and every strategic thought in my head disintegrates.
She wore the green dress.
The fabric wraps around her body and ties at her waist and the neckline dips just low enough to show the curve where her breasts press together, a shadow of soft skin that makes my mouth go dry.
Her hair is down, those warm brown waves falling past her shoulders.
The vintage glasses are on. Bare feet. No jewelry.
The simplicity of it wrecks me because she's not trying to be anything other than exactly who she is, and exactly who she is makes me want to pin her against the nearest wall and find out what sound she makes when I put my mouth on her neck.
"You're early," she says.
"I'm always early." I hold up the grocery bag. "I'm cooking."
She steps back and lets me in. Her cottage is small, warm, every surface covered with books.
Shelves on every wall, stacks on the coffee table, a pile on the kitchen counter next to a ceramic mug with a quote I can't read from here.
The furniture is mismatched and comfortable.
A reading lamp by an oversized chair that has a blanket draped over the arm and an indent in the cushion that tells me she spends most of her evenings in that exact spot.
The kitchen is galley style. I set the groceries on the counter and start unpacking. Ribeye steaks, asparagus, baby potatoes, garlic, fresh rosemary. Good olive oil. The wine goes on the counter next to her mug, and now I can read it. Words Have Power. The same mug from her classroom desk.
"You cook." She's leaning against the kitchen doorframe, arms crossed. Watching me the way she watches me in the classroom. Like she's reading.
"My grandmother taught me. Said a man who can't feed the people he cares about isn't finished growing up yet."
"Was she from Detroit?"
"Born and raised. Survived the '67 riots.
Raised six children. Buried a husband. Taught Sunday school until she was eighty four.
" I find a cutting board and a knife. Start quartering the potatoes.
"She's the reason I'm alive. Not the Marines.
Not the discipline. Her. She told me before I enlisted that she expected me to come home, and I was more afraid of disappointing her than I was of anything the enemy could do. "
Tina moves into the kitchen. Not close enough to touch.
Close enough that I can smell her. Vanilla and something floral, warm skin and clean hair.
She opens a drawer and hands me a better knife, a chef's knife that's actually sharp, and our fingers don't touch this time.
The absence is deliberate on both our parts.
"Is she still alive?"
"Died two years before I left the Corps. Ninety one years old. Fell asleep in her chair on a Sunday afternoon and didn't wake up." I set the potatoes in a roasting pan. Season them. "I held on for three more years after she died. Then I couldn't anymore."
"What made you stop?"
I don't answer immediately. I focus on the asparagus. Trim the ends. Toss with olive oil and garlic. The work steadies me the way it always does, hands moving through familiar motions while my mind navigates terrain that is considerably more dangerous than any kitchen.
"My spotter. A man named James Okafor. We'd been paired for seven years. He was from Houston. Had a wife and twin daughters. Played gospel music in his earbuds during downtime, which is against every protocol but I never stopped him because it kept him calm and a calm spotter is an alive spotter."
Tina is silent. Completely still. I can feel her attention like a physical weight.
"We were on overwatch in Kandahar. I was behind the glass. He was beside me. An IED detonated eighteen inches from his position." I put the asparagus on a sheet pan. Set the oven to four twenty five. "I watched it through the scope. I saw everything. I couldn't do anything."
"Marcel."
"I left the Corps six weeks later. Drove until I found a place where I could see in every direction and nobody could get close without me knowing.
" I turn to face her. She's three feet away, tears streaming silently down her face, and she's not wiping them.
She's letting them fall like she understands that some grief deserves to be visible.
"I came here to disappear. I wasn't planning on being found. "
"But you were."
"By a woman who writes poetry about longing and teaches teenagers to read Hemingway and wore the green dress because I asked her to." I close the distance. Two feet. One. Close enough that her warmth radiates through the thin fabric and into my skin. "I was found."
She reaches up and places her hand flat against my chest. Over my heart. Her palm is warm and small and she presses hard enough to feel the beat.
"It's fast," she whispers.
"You do that."
Her eyes lift to mine. Hazel shot through with gold, wet with tears she's shed for a man she barely knows but somehow understands better than anyone who's known me for years. The glasses are slightly fogged from the heat of the oven and the heat between us.
I take them off. Set them on the counter the way I did in the classroom, carefully, both hands. Her eyes go soft without them, vulnerable, and she blinks up at me with lashes that are dark and wet.
"The steaks need twenty minutes to come to room temperature," I say.
"Twenty minutes."
"Minimum."
Her hand fists in my shirt. The same gesture from the classroom. Both hands this time, gripping the fabric of my henley, pulling me down toward her with a strength that surprises us both.
I go.
The kiss starts where the last one ended.
Deep, hot, open mouthed. She tastes like the wine she opened before I arrived and something sweet underneath, something that's purely her.
I grip her waist and she gasps against my mouth and I use the sound to press deeper, my tongue stroking hers in a rhythm that I am already imagining translating to other parts of her body.
I walk her backward. Out of the kitchen, through the small living room.
Her back finds the hallway wall and I press her against it, one hand braced beside her head, the other sliding from her waist to her hip.
The curve of her under my palm makes a growl climb up my throat.
Full and soft and warm and the dress is thin enough that I can feel the shape of her through it. No pretense. No armor. Just Tina.
"Which door is your bedroom?" I ask against the corner of her mouth.
"End of the hall. Left."
I pull back far enough to look at her. Her lips are swollen. Her cheeks are flushed. Her hair is already tangled from my hands and we haven't even started.
"We stop when you say stop. Not before."
She grabs my belt and pulls me toward the bedroom door.
The room is small. A queen bed with a white quilt and too many pillows. Books on the nightstand. A lamp that casts warm yellow light. She reaches for the switch and I catch her wrist.
"Leave it on. I want to see you."
Her breath catches. Her pulse hammers against my fingers where I'm holding her wrist. I press my thumb into the beat and watch her eyes flutter.
I untie the dress.
One pull on the wrap and the fabric loosens, falls open. She's wearing a simple black bra and matching underwear underneath, nothing elaborate, and the sight of her makes my cock so hard that my vision narrows the way it does behind a scope. Focus. Precision. Target.
Her breasts are full and heavy, spilling over the top of the bra. Her waist nips in and her hips flare out and her stomach is soft and her thighs are thick and she is, without question, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen through any lens.
I push the dress off her shoulders. It pools at her feet. She stands in front of me in her underwear, breathing hard, chin lifted, meeting my eyes with the same stubborn courage she showed the first time I walked into her classroom and she was terrified and held her ground anyway.
I drop to my knees.
Her breath stutters. I press my mouth against her stomach, just above the waistband of her underwear. Her skin is warm and soft and she smells like vanilla and arousal and I drag my lips down, slowly, following the line of her hip, while my hands slide up the backs of her thighs.
"Marcel." My name comes out broken.
I hook my fingers in the waistband and pull her underwear down.
Slowly. Over her hips, down her thighs, past her knees.
She steps out of them and I look up at her from where I'm kneeling and the sight of her looking down at me, this woman, this poet, flushed and trembling and bare, makes something in my chest crack wide open.
I lift her left leg and drape it over my shoulder.
She grabs the wall behind her with both hands. I lean in and press my mouth against her pussy and the sound she makes is worth every silent, empty night I've spent in that cabin for the past year.
She's wet. Slick and hot and swollen, and when my tongue finds her clit she jerks against my face with a cry that comes from somewhere deep.
I grip her thigh where it rests on my shoulder, holding her open, holding her steady, and I work her with the patience and precision of a man who has spent his entire adult life learning how to be still and focused and present for exactly this.
I lick her in long, slow strokes. Root to tip. Flat tongue against her clit, then pointed, circling the swollen bud until her thighs are shaking. I slide two fingers inside her and she clenches around me so tight that my cock throbs behind my zipper.
"Fuck." She gasps it. The English teacher who grades papers on proper language just said fuck while my fingers are buried inside her and my tongue is on her clit and I want to hear her say it again.
I curl my fingers. Find the spot that makes her back arch off the wall. Press into it while I suck her clit between my lips and she comes apart.
Her orgasm is loud and uncontrolled and beautiful.
Her whole body shakes. Her thigh clamps down on my shoulder.
Her hands leave the wall and grab my head, fingers digging into my close cropped hair, holding me against her while she rides my mouth with a desperation that tells me it's been a very long time since anyone touched her like this.
I don't stop. I ease her through it, gentling my tongue, slowing my fingers, drawing out every aftershock until she's boneless and gasping.
Then I stand. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Reach behind her and unhook her bra with one hand.
Her breasts spill free, full and heavy, dark nipples already hard. I cup one in my palm and brush my thumb across the peak and she shivers so violently that I have to catch her with my other arm.
I walk her to the bed. Lay her down on the white quilt. She looks up at me with glazed eyes and swollen lips and her hair spread across the pillows, and I stand at the edge of the bed and pull my henley over my head.
Her gaze drops to my chest. My stomach. The scars. The lean muscle built from years of carrying a rifle across terrain that wanted to kill me. She reaches out and traces the longest scar, the one across my ribs from shrapnel in Fallujah, and her touch is so gentle that my hands shake.
I strip off my jeans. My boxers. Her eyes widen and her lips part and the look on her face when she sees my cock, hard and thick and aching for her, makes my pulse pound in my ears.
I reach for my jeans and pull a condom from the wallet in the back pocket. Roll it on while she watches. Brace one knee on the bed and crawl over her, covering her body with mine, and the first full press of skin against skin from chest to thigh makes both of us groan.
I line myself up and push into her.
Slow. Steady. Watching her face as she takes every inch of me. Her eyes go wide, then heavy. Her mouth opens. Her nails dig into my shoulders as I fill her, stretching her, and when I'm fully seated she wraps both legs around my waist and pulls me deeper.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. Hazel eyes blown wide, unfocused, locked on mine.
"You're mine." I pull back. Thrust in. Deep. Deliberate. "Say it."
"I'm yours."
I fuck her the way I do everything. With precision and patience and total, consuming attention.
I find the angle that makes her gasp and I hold it, driving into her with long, controlled strokes that hit the spot deep inside her that makes her nails drag down my back.
I drop my head and take her nipple into my mouth and suck while I grind into her and she arches off the bed with a sound that's half scream and half prayer.
"Again," I growl against her breast. "Say it again."
"I'm yours. Marcel. God. I'm yours."
I reach between us and press my thumb against her clit, circling in time with my thrusts, and she breaks. Her pussy clamps down on me so hard that stars explode behind my eyes. I thrust through her orgasm, feeling every contraction, every wave, and when she's still shaking I let go.
The orgasm rips through me from the base of my spine to the top of my skull. I bury myself in her as deep as I can go and come with her name on my lips, not a whisper, not a groan, but a declaration. The way you say something you mean with your entire body.
I collapse onto my forearms, keeping my weight off her. Press my face into her neck. Feel her pulse hammering against my lips, matching mine beat for beat.
Her fingers trace the scar from my ear to my jaw. Gentle. Reverent. Like she's reading braille.
"The steaks," she murmurs.
I laugh. It's been so long since I laughed that the sound surprises both of us. It's rusty and low and real, and she smiles against my temple with the satisfaction of a woman who just pulled something from a man that he didn't know he was still capable of giving.
"The steaks can wait."
I roll onto my back and pull her against my chest. She fits into the curve of my body like she was engineered for it. Soft and warm and breathing against my skin.
"Marcel?"
"Yeah."
"I'm going to write a poem about this."
"I know."
"It's going to be very explicit."
I press my lips against her hair. "I'll expect a signed copy."
She laughs. Her laughter vibrates through my chest and settles somewhere beneath the scars, in the place where I keep the things worth protecting.
One hundred and fourteen men.
And one woman who just changed the math.