Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Noah
Fuck.
I roll over, punch and fluff the pillow, shift my restless legs, pretend I can't feel my screaming bladder. My knees ache, and I haven't even gotten out of bed yet.
I smell coffee, though, and I thank myself for remembering to set up the auto-brew last night.
That was something Taylor always did, and it's been hit-or-miss since she died whether or not I remember.
Weird how the thought of her name doesn't bring instant, excruciating agony like a gut punch, now.
It hurts, just not as bad as it used to.
In those early months, that thought would've left me on my knees.
Now, it's a bad cut while chopping carrots instead of a gunshot to the solar plexus.
I toss the blankets back and roll out of bed, grunting as my stiff joints protest. They'll loosen up and I'll stop feeling it in a few minutes, but the first few steps, first thing in the morning are a little achy these days. Aging is a bitch, ain't it?
I wander into the kitchen in my underwear, pour myself a cup of coffee, dash a splash of half-and-half into it, stir, and step out onto the front deck.
Yes, it's 23 degrees out. Yes, it's brutally cold with the wind chill taking it down to single digits, especially when I'm clad in nothing but a few inches of cotton, but it's bracing and wakes me up. Weird habit, I know.
I head back inside, sip coffee, and browse the news on my phone. I got a voicemail from Jim last night after I went to bed; he’s always been a night owl.
"Heya, good buddy, it's Jimbo. Listen, a reporter from some website based in Juneau wants to do an interview with you.
Something to do with the intersection of sports, firefighting, and fundraising.
I dunno, she went on and on for like ten minutes, and I admit I tuned out a little.
I know you're not likely to agree, but I gotta pass along the message.
Anyway, that's it. Call me back…after seven am.
Not everyone is up at five-a.m. every day. Freak. Kiddin'. Love ya, bud. Bye."
I grin as I listen. God, I love that guy. He's loyal to the bone, kindhearted, and funny. He's quite literally given me the shirt off his back; I make a mental note to call him later.
I stare at my phone, at the list of old voicemails. There are some recent ones from Jimbo, Frankie, Noel, Doug, Lisa, our union rep, about my dues…and the last voicemail I ever got from Taylor.
There's a missed call notification, too—MORGAN WHEELER in red letters.
And if that's not a metaphor for my life right now, I don't know what is: a three-year-old voicemail from my deceased wife and a missed call from a woman I'm developing some extraordinarily confusing feelings for.
The missed call was at 5:23 this morning—while I was out on the porch in my underwear. No voicemail, though.
Knowing she's a morning person like me, I refill my coffee and tap the missed call; for some reason, the phone burbles strangely instead of ringing normally, but I'm not a digital native, so smartphones often confuse me. Yeah, I'm old like that. Or just crotchety before my time, I dunno.
The weird burbling ringing stops, the phone makes a…how d'you describe it? A hum? Blip? It makes a weird sound, and then the whole screen is Morgan.
In the bathroom.
Topless.
It's a split-second look, but the image of her bare chest imprints itself on my brain, permanent, indelible, and infinitely arousing.
While not especially large, her breasts are plump and high, firm and taut, a pair of pert and perky apples ripe for the plucking.
Her nipples are small and darker than the surrounding skin with a small bullseye of pale pink areolae and those delicious little bumps around the nipple and areolae. A handful each, begging to be loved.
Her jet-black hair is loose around her shoulders and she has a hairbrush in her hand. She's not looking at the screen in the instant that this occurs.
In the lower right-hand corner of my screen is a smaller window showing me, close up and obviously shirtless.
"Shit!" I blurt. "Sorry!" For some reason—out of sheer, blind, stunned panic, I guess—I clap a hand over my eyes instead of tilting the phone away.
I hear her screech. "What the hell?"
"What happened?"
"I don't know!" A pause. "I'm dressed, now. You can uncover your eyes." She sounds amused, at least, instead of stabby.
I drop my hand, and she's wearing a pale pink terrycloth robe. "Morgan, I'm so, so sorry. I had a missed call from you, and I was just returning it."
She frowns at the screen. "I didn't call you. When was the call?"
"Five-something. Five-twenty, five-twenty-three?"
She winces. "Shit. That may be my fault. I dropped my phone and spilled my coffee all over myself. I must have accidentally FaceTimed you, like a butt-dial kind of thing. I dropped the phone into the couch cushions when the coffee burned me, and I must not have heard it ringing."
"Are you okay?" I ask. "Is it a bad burn?"
She does something to her phone that makes the view flip around to point away from her, and suddenly, I'm looking at a big, angry red splotch of skin on her upper thigh.
Creamy skin.
A curve of toned muscle.
Good lord, that's a sexy leg.
Focus, asshole.
"Yeah, that's a pretty decent burn there, Morgan. Run cool—not cold—water on it for a few minutes. If you have aloe vera or petroleum jelly, slather that on there nice and thick."
"Thanks, doc. Never been scalded before. What would I do without you?" She grins. "Sarcasm, obviously. I'll be fine. I do appreciate your concern, though."
Awkward silence.
"I, um…" I meet her eyes, trying not to see that her robe is slipping open, showing me a glimpse of the inner curves of her breasts. "I'm sorry you got burned."
She shrugs. "My own clumsy fault. Phone slipped out of my hand, knocked my coffee out of my other hand, and there you go, boiled Morgan thigh."
"It's not blistering or anything?"
She shows me the burn again, which isn't entirely helpful, especially when she wobbles the angle and accidentally shows me little more than she'd intended to—the pink gusset of her underwear. My brain short-circuits.
"Um. I. You." I shake my head like a wet dog. “Sorry, not awake yet." I'm a shitty liar, and she can tell.
The knowing half-smirk is all the proof I need that she knows exactly why my poor idiot caveman brain is wobbling in circles like a drunk circus bear on a broken unicycle.
"Uh-huh." She carries the phone out of the bathroom, through her bedroom—rumpled bedsheets and a thick down comforter, bedside table with a phone cord—down the stairs and into her kitchen, where she pours herself a cup of coffee.
I rub my forehead with a knuckle. "Morgan, I…"
The screen wobbles and blurs, and then she's seated on a couch, tugging her robe closed again and grinning at me. "Cat got your tongue?"
"Yeah," I mutter. "Two of 'em."
"I don't normally answer the phone topless, just so you know. But then, I don't normally FaceTime people, either, so…"
"Me either. It was ringing funny, but I didn't know what that meant."
"You didn't notice the fact that your front-facing camera was on?"
"Um…no? I mean, yeah, I did, but I guess I didn't realize what that signified. I'm kind of a Luddite, okay? The chief had to basically force me to start writing and filing my reports on a computer a few years ago because I prefer to do most things the old-fashioned way."
Morgan laughs. "I like to think I'm pretty tech savvy, but then my daughter will do something, and I’ll realize, oh, no, no-no, I’m definitely not. She basically runs my Instagram for me."
"Never been on the Instagram."
She cackles, head dropping forward as she laughs…and then snort-laughs. "Oh god, please don't tell anyone I snorted."
"What's so damned funny, Morgan?"
"The Instagram."
"Why is that funny?"
“Because it's a classic old guy who doesn't do social media thing—putting the in front of things. The Instagram, the TikTok, the Facebook. Nothing marks you as old and out of touch like saying the Instagram."
“Well, I guess I am old and out of touch."
I realize I'm out of coffee, so I take the phone with me to get more.
But I need both hands, so I prop the phone against the ceramic jar containing the fresh grounds while I grab the creamer from the fridge…
momentarily forgetting that she can see me like I can see her…
and I'm in nothing but a pair of tight black boxer-briefs.
When I come back to the coffee pot, Morgan's cheeks are red again, and she's looking down, not at the screen.
Which is when the penny drops—I look at the screen and realize that I've angled it so that as I approached the phone, all she could see was my torso from the chest down…
and my crotch and thighs. Bulge clearly visible.
And by bulge, I mean a very, very clear outline showing exactly how affected I was by the little show moments ago, from which I'm still subsiding.
"So this is going well for both of us," I say, embarrassment likely making my cheeks as red as hers.
She clears her throat. "Yeah. Yep." She tugs her robe together more tightly, not making eye contact.
"Morgan? You good?"
"Yup."
"Turnabout is fair play, I guess," I say. "We both got an inadvertent show."
"Sure did," she mutters.
"We could just pretend this was all on purpose," I hear myself say, the words coming out before I have a chance to think better of it.
Her eyes flick to mine. "Then I'm not sure how equal it is," she says. "You saw my boobs. All I got was an outline." A pause, a hard swallow. "A very…errrr…prominent and…um…impressive outline, it must be said, but still just an outline."
I'm stuck on "prominent and impressive" for a moment. "I am shirtless," I point out, for lack of a better comeback.