Chapter 32
Deacon
I took a sharp right turn into the neighborhood and forced myself to slow the truck before I hit a mailbox on my quest to reach Willow.
Yeah, I’d said we should go slow. I’d told myself, no matter how sexy this whole sex-coaching thing was, I’d put the brakes on at some point.
But all that had gone out the window, and now, every muscle in my body moved into action to get to her.
Not just my body. My head was swimming, too.
I pulled up to Cruz’s house, and the porch light flicked on.
I heaved a sigh and cut the engine because she hadn’t heard the last thing the old couple at the store had said, but I did.
He’d said, “It made me happy, so she always gave it back, no matter what. That’s what you do when you’re in love. ”
Love. I wasn’t in love. I didn’t fall in love. I was the guy you had great sex with in a bar bathroom before he deployed, not the one who talked about love. I’d never really seen love up close until I saw Marcus and Sybil with their partners. Love wasn’t a verb in my house growing up.
At the house, the curtains shifted by the door, and I could tell she was standing there waiting for me, eagerly bouncing from foot to foot in nervous excitement.
She knew what this was, though, and as I grabbed my bag from the seat, I strode toward the door, ignoring the landscaping I’d helped Cruz with.
The judgmental bushes and flower beds said enough all on their own.
“You came,” she said, pulling open the door as I approached. She was still in my T-shirt, and the expanse of her thighs below promised what might or might not be underneath.
“You came first,” I said, pushing the door shut behind me and backing her against the wall, a hand behind her head to protect it from the hard surface. “I told you there’d be a next time with the wall.”
She groaned when my thigh slipped between her legs, and I felt her heat through my track pants. “You’re here.”
“I told you I would be.” I settled my hand at her waist and then lower, teasing under the hem of the shirt. “You wanted someone here.”
She wriggled against me and tipped up her chin, her dark eyes hooded as I teased my fingertips along the hemline of the shirt. “I wanted you here.”
Her words hit me like a hundred tiny punches to the heart.
She didn’t want a body, she wanted me, and the thought filled me unexpectedly.
I wanted nothing more than to take care of her, to keep her happy and warm and safe.
And before I could think more about what the couple at the store had said, I lowered my mouth to hers, tasting the sweetness of her lips and tongue as the softness of her body melded into mine.
“You took care of me earlier. Let me take care of you this time,” I said, lowering my kisses to her neck and letting my hand trace up her ribs.
“Deacon,” she said on a pant when my fingertips brushed the underside of her breast, the skin like satin beneath my touch with the promise of those peaked, sensitive nipples. “Please.”
I slammed my lips to hers again, and we stumbled toward the bedroom, the Walgreens bag still hooked around my wrist crinkling, which would be funny if I’d taken a break from her lips and her skin to think about it.
“I imagined you here,” she said, her words breathless as we paused by the bed and I inched her shirt over her head.
“I’m here.” I bent to kiss her neck again, inhaling her scent and exhaling all the reasons I shouldn’t be doing this.
“Let me take care of you.” I pushed her back toward the bed and fell to my knees, focused on the apex of her thighs.
I tugged my shirt over my head and admired her sweet center, but when I bent forward to kiss her belly, I froze, an eruption of pain taking my breath.
“What’s wrong?” Willow’s head snapped up, and her fingers moved over my hair. “Deac, are you okay?”
The ache had been there all day after the falls I took off the bike.
It’s why I’d gone to the store in the first place, but with Willow in front of me and the promise of seeing her fall apart, I’d ignored it.
“My back,” I said through gritted teeth.
Gus must have heard the concern in Willow’s voice, because he’d come bounding into the room and was now sniffing at my legs and licking my arm.
Willow scrambled off the bed and helped me get onto the bed from the floor.
I tossed an arm over my face as I fell onto the bedding that smelled like her.
“You would have been better off with the geriatric unicyclist,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” I’d had bad nights before, I’d suffered from whiskey dick a few times, but this was a different shame.
This one reminded me that this wasn’t the first time I’d promised to take care of someone only to need caring for myself.
“Hey,” she said, lifting my arm from my eyes, and the mattress next to me dipped. “Stop hiding from me.” I blinked against the light. She was sitting right next to me, looking down and stroking my hairline. “What can I do?”
“You were supposed to be coming already.”
“After one minute? C’mon.” She kept stroking my forehead. “I’m sure you’re good, but you’re not a unicycle.”
I chuckled at her bad joke, and a smile tipped her lips. “What can I do?”
“My back seizes up sometimes,” I said, wanting to look away, but her comforting touch on my face felt so good. “Since the surgery. I just need to relax and rub some stuff on it. That’s what I was grabbing at the store.”
“I can help with that.” She hopped off the bed and picked up the bag from where it had fallen on the floor. “Condoms, jelly beans, and Icy Hot.”
“Devil’s three-way,” I muttered, and Willow laughed, the sound delicate and inviting. “You don’t have to,” I added. I tried to roll to the side, determined to handle it myself, but sucked in a breath as my back protested.
“Roll over,” she said, returning to the bed and handing me the bag of jelly beans. “I can help.” She lifted my shirt and pushed the waist of my pants down an inch. “You eat jelly beans while I work. Doctor’s orders.”
“You’re not a vet yet.”
Her hands tentatively worked over my lower back, checking on where it hurt and where was best to spread the ointment.
“Willow’s orders, then.” As she touched my back I pushed away the worry that I wasn’t feeling it fully, that the nerve damage was still impacting me.
It was hard to know if the feeling was all the way back, and I focused on the feel of her fingertips instead, the ointment cooling my skin until the warming sensation took over.
Willow got up to wash her hands and then climbed back onto the bed next to me, checking in. “Relax,” she said, dragging her nails gently over the middle of my back and between my shoulder blades. “I’m sorry my orgasms led to you sprawled out, immobile.”
I chuckled and turned my head toward her, resting it on my crossed forearms. “Plural? You didn’t tell me there was more than one.”
Willow crossed her hand over her stomach, a guilty smile crossing her lips. “I, uh, went for another unicycle ride when we hung up.”
Groaning, I cursed my body. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would happen.”
“Don’t be sorry.” She shrugged and nudged my side with her hand. “I got mine.”
I laughed, wincing at the pain as my body moved. “Who is this cocky girl?”
“I learned from the best.” She shifted to her side and slid her nails up and down my biceps. Her gaze fell to my back, where I was sure she saw the scar along my spine. I had other scars, tons of them, and this was just one more, or I wanted to think of it that way. “Does this happen very often?”
“No,” I said, closing my eyes as she stroked my arm, sinking into it. “Just if I push it too much.”
She kept her stroking moves consistent, and the rhythmic up and down of her nails felt hypnotic.
I’d been thinking about what she’d asked earlier, about how I saw myself as a civilian, and I didn’t have a good answer yet. I was lying here immobile, though, and I knew what she must be thinking. “I can handle it,” I said, beating her to it.
She traced the tattoo on my biceps. She’d seen it before, I was sure—it was the same as Cruz’s. “That Others May Live,” she said, reading the words as she moved a finger along them.
“These things we do, that others may live,” I said, eyes still closed, repeating the motto of the PJs, the thing I’d lived by my entire career.
“I can handle a little pain. I keep thinking about the people who will need us in the future, and what it means.” I couldn’t imagine doing anything else that meant that much to me.
“What did it mean to you?” She continued the stroke up and down my arm, and her words fell on me like a comforting blanket.
“To me?”
“Yeah.” She slid her fingers up my arm and across my shoulders, working into my hair. “To you.”
“It meant they lived. Or it meant they were found. It meant I had a hand in someone going home or back to what they loved, to their families. It meant they lived and it meant I…”
She kept her rhythm, stroking my scalp.
“I did something that mattered. We did something important.”
She worked quietly for a few moments. “You guys were called in when it was bad, right?” I heard the thought she wasn’t voicing and knew she was trying to picture what Cruz was doing at that moment.
“We were called in when it was hard,” I said, trying to ease her anxiety, but imagining the same scenarios, only I knew what details to fill in.
“When someone was in the middle of the ocean or high in the mountains?” She traced the lines of my tattoo, the peaks of the mountains and the blue lines meant to signify the water. “Behind enemy lines.” Her voice softened, and her finger continued over the lines of my tattoo.