Uncommon Pleasure (14 page)

No.
It was more than that. What he’d just felt with Lauren was the surge of connection he felt as part of a team, the daily experience of life with people he trusted and who trusted him. He hadn’t felt that for a very long time, hadn’t wanted to feel it for even longer, but twenty minutes ago, with Lauren he’d been there. It wasn’t about the physical act. It was about the emotions borne from the physical.

Physical, emotional, it was all about Lauren.

He’d been so caught up in the mind-blowing sex that he’d slipped into his old way of being, into the man he used to be. Like a moron he couldn’t just walk without checking on her, and she said the fateful words.

I trusted you. This was all about you.

Lauren felt it, too, and that made it all worse, the emotions exploding one after the other like a series of timed charges against the night sky of his soul. So he walked. Followed Sean down the hall, out the door, and into his car.

“What the fuck are you doing in my car, instead of in her bed?”

He framed his lie in a context that would suit Sean’s sense of honor. “She was falling asleep. I didn’t want to wake her up. Drive.”

Sean turned the engine over and shoved the gearshift into reverse. “So she’s gonna wake up alone.”

Ty ignored him, counting streetlights as Sean navigated out of Lauren’s neighborhood.

“After what we just did.”

She was a big girl. She knew the rules of this game. She wasn’t his responsibility.

Seven lights and a stop sign slipped past before Sean spoke again. “I’m starving. You mind if I drive through somewhere?”

He could eat after that? Ty didn’t think he’d care about food for the rest of his life. “Whatever.”

Sean pulled into the late-night drive-through at Wendy’s and stared at the brightly illuminated menu board. “That was different,” he said absently.

Ty didn’t want to rehash what just happened, but he had to say something. “Yeah.” If different meant hot, devastating. A strange mixture of exhilaration and apprehension turned in his gut. He wanted to hit something. To his utter amazement, he wanted to cry.

A girl’s sleepy voice buzzed from the speaker, asking for their order. “A triple stack combo with bacon, extra large, and a Coke,” Sean said, then turned to Ty. “You want anything?”

“I’m not hungry,” Ty said.

Sean looked at him, but Ty refused to meet his gaze. “Why’d we do that? Why did you let me fuck a woman you care about?”

“I don’t care about her.”

“Great,” Sean said, switching gears without blinking an eye. “If you don’t care we can compare notes. I’ll start, because goddamn, that was the best blow job I’ve ever had. Of course, it’s been almost a year, but objectively speaking, Lauren was incredible. That thing you were talking about…the back of her throat thing…” Sean shook his head. “Nice soundtrack.”

He knew Sean was baiting him. Knew it, because Sean didn’t talk like this, and his face was as red from sheer embarrassment as if he’d run ten miles, but Ty still clenched his jaw against the anger boiling inside him.

“It was probably for the best that Lauren was on top, because even after the blow job my control wasn’t all that great. The whole thing was so fucking hot. Every time you got a little deeper in her ass she’d tighten around me, and when Lauren came—”

If Sean didn’t stop using her name, Ty was going to make him bleed. “Give it a rest, Winthrop.”

Completely unintimidated, Sean just looked at him. “Make up your mind, Hendricks. You either don’t care, or you do. I’ve heard
you and John and the other guys after shore leave. Marines fight in pairs, and they fuck in pairs. Girlfriends are off-limits, but you said she’s not your girlfriend, so she’s just a piece of ass, right? An exceptionally talented piece of ass,” he said meditatively. “So go on, tell me what you thought.”

“I think you’re in danger of losing your teeth to my fist.”

Still completely unconcerned Sean said, “How was her ass? Come to think of it, how do you talk a girl into that? You think Lauren would be up for another round, let me get some practice in?”

Ty swung around in the passenger seat, fist balled at the end of his cocked arm before he saw the drive-through girl leaning toward the window, a bag of food in one hand and an extra-large drink in the other. Her eyes were wide, like she’d heard the whole fucking thing.

Sean held his gaze for a long moment. “Don’t care, huh?”

Jesus
Christ
. “Take your goddamn food before we get arrested for corrupting a minor.”

Sean turned to face the window and hesitated for a split second. Then he reached for the food, set the bag on his lap, and put the drink in the holder between him and Ty. “I know why I was there,” he said conversationally as he dug in the bag, then crammed four french fries into his mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. “Get the LT laid after fifteen months overseas, and in a completely fucked-up, guy bonding way, it was thoughtful. But maybe you should have considered what Lauren meant to you before you did it.”

He tipped his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “She doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said, a lie that he might have been able to pass off as the truth before What Just Happened.

“Bullshit,” Sean said through a mouthful of burger. “Remember that hot little thing about me watching you fuck her, you watching her go down on me? I was there. Watching. You care about her. It
was all over your face, in the way you touched her. And in the end, when she lost all control, she turned to you. Not me.”

The absence of engine and tire noise registered, and Ty opened his eyes. Sean was parked outside No Limits. “She just knows me better. Emotions have nothing to do with it,” he said. He reached for the door handle, suddenly bone tired and sick at heart.

“You can keep denying it,” Sean said quietly, “but it won’t change reality. That’s the shitty thing about reality. Doesn’t change just because you want it to.”

He got out and slammed the door, strode across the lot to his truck, and peeled out of the parking lot. Back at his motel, away from Sean’s relentless questions, he cut the engine and let his chin drop to his chest.

What the fuck did you just do?

On one level the night worked. Sean was clearly back in the land of the living, or at least in the land of the sexually active. But his objective with Lauren was to turn her curiosity about him and about sex against her, and there he’d failed. Spectacularly, if she did that because he was there.

Behind the closed door of his hotel room he stripped where he stood, leaving the clothes in a pile by the door, his keys and wallet in his shoes, and turned on the shower. One benefit to showering at two in the morning was an abundance of hot water. He twisted the dial into the red and stepped under the spray. Pain bloomed where the water struck his skin, and rivulets burned down his back and abdomen.

He didn’t care. He didn’t. But whatever it was surging inside him, hot and anguished and sharp-edged, was too much when the point was to feel nothing at all, and like a snake hidden in the back of a hole, anger bloomed at Lauren, curious, stubborn Lauren, who didn’t back down from a challenge. He’d have to go further, he
realized. Lauren wasn’t picking up signals she should read clearly, that he didn’t give a good goddamn about her, and that this was over.

Tomorrow he’d make himself crystal fucking clear.

*   *   *

Somehow she’d known that, come Monday, he’d be on the bench
, but when Ty strolled onto the lake path and took up position on the bench just before noon, Lauren’s stomach wound into a hard knot behind her rib cage. She’d watched him often enough over the last two weeks to read his body, his demeanor, and even across the lake and three stories up she could feel the tension humming under his skin. He seemed bigger, broader, somehow spoiling for a fight.

She was going to give him one. She gathered her sunglasses and lunch box. “I’m going to lunch,” she told Danelle.

“You sound like you’re marching off to do battle with the county again,” Danelle said. “Based on the way you’ve been pounding those keys, you need a break. Sit in the sun for an hour. It will improve your mood.”

She had a feeling her mood was going to get worse, not better, but that didn’t stop her. A quick trip through the nearly empty cafeteria for a bottle of water, then she pushed open the door leading to the path, strode past the first five benches, and stopped in front of Ty and his folders of paper. The ends of her pink silk scarf danced in the fall breeze, and she wished she’d worn a sweater. Goose bumps rippled up her arms, and for the first time in Ty’s presence the shivers weren’t accompanied by a little rippling thrill in her belly.

He looked at her for a long moment, unsmiling, his jaw set. Then he gathered the papers he’d just spread on the green slats and made room for her. She unzipped the soft lunch box, her movements brisk,
jerky. “You didn’t have to leave. I would have driven you back to the hotel in the morning.”

Her phone buzzed.
You were asleep
.

“Enough with the texting. I’ll bet my car Sean’s on the other end of that audio feed, and after Saturday, we don’t have any secrets.” A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he put the phone away. “I wasn’t asleep. I was waiting for you. Why did you leave?”

“No reason to stay,” he said.

She huffed out a bitter laugh. “Right. Because that was just about sex.”

“Exactly,” he said easily. “Sean said you were awesome, by the way. Best blow job ever. His exact words. Definitely the most memorable night of his life. But I knew you would be.” He turned and gave her a picture-perfect bad boy smile. “Thanks, darlin’.”

Without a sound, her lungs emptied of air, and a hot flush rose up her neck. When she woke up alone Saturday night she’d expected him to be casual about it Monday, but not vicious. Not cheapening her.

Based on prior experiences on this bench, she knew what she was supposed to say next. To spite him, lash out at him, she’d tell him she thought Sean was awesome, too. A nice guy, and would Ty give her his number? She knew Ty wanted to drive her away as clearly as she could read the signs of a nearly unbearable tension in him, the veneer micron thin. He looked like he’d been through a forty-eight-hour stomach flu, skin pale and drawn under the tan, grooves pronounced in his cheeks, and suddenly she didn’t have it in her to keep playing games with him. He was following his own instincts, trapped in a dark hole and in a snarling, locked-jaw, torn-flesh fight to the death with himself, and those fighting instincts would take her down, too.

“I’m glad one of us got something good out of what we did,”
she said quietly. Struggling for composure, she opened the Tupperware and pulled out half a turkey on whole wheat. Took a bite.

He lifted both arms to spread wide on the back of the bench and let his legs drop open as he glanced casually around the lake. “Sometimes you can’t overcome instincts. Sometimes wounded animals don’t want to be healed. Sometimes in the twenty-first century it doesn’t pay to be curious.”

He twisted her words, used her flirtatious, life’s-an-adventure attitude to backhand her with his contemptuous tone, and despite her best efforts, the verbal blow generated an involuntary flinch. “Did you mean to teach me a lesson, Ty?” she asked, only a slight tremor in her voice.

A second passed, stretched into a moment while she met his gaze. Maybe the question was so obvious he wouldn’t bother to respond. Maybe he had the good sense not to respond at all. Either way he just looked at her, mouth in a grim line, eyes hidden.

“It worked,” she said quietly. “I no longer care to know another thing about you.”

It was a lie. She’d always be curious about him, the facets and depths she’d barely begun to explore, but she wasn’t a masochist. Drawing a deep breath, she sat back. The slats on the back of the bench bit into her shoulder blades as she took another bite of her sandwich. Swallowed it dry and sipped from the water bottle to get it down her throat. Ate a carrot stick. Stared fixedly at the lake. She would not run, so she continued on to her treat, a cupcake, slowly peeling the paper back from the bottom, separating the frosted top from the cake bottom, eating both, then brushing the crumbs onto the ground. A robin fought the ever-present sparrows for the crumbs while she snapped the lids back on the plastic containers holding her sandwich and carrots, zipped them into the soft cooler, got to her feet, and walked away.

No backward glance, no regret in her steps. An expert in
standoffishness taught her the walk, tall and proud, shoulders back, stride loose and even. She walked away from him, knowing he’d won. He wanted to destroy himself, and he meant to do it.

Alone.

*   *   *

Ty watched her go, tall and slender in her gray wrap dress and
pretty pink scarf, and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. A faint crackle in his earpiece, then Sean’s shocked, disbelieving voice. “Jesus Christ, Hendricks, that was cruel. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

This was who he was now, so he said nothing, because there was nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. He’d wanted this, and he’d gotten it. She’d been under his skin a little, sure, but actually, he owed her, because now he knew exactly how far he had to go to drive good people away. The casual ones left after a month or two of ignored texts and phone calls. People like John and Sean and Lauren, he had to work harder to move them.

Now he knew exactly how hard. Push a boulder up a mountain hard.
Right. Fine.
He could do this. “There’s nothing wrong with me. After Saturday I’m done with her. She needed to move on.”

Move on she would, based on the way hurt shifted behind her eyes, pushed at the muscles of her face, but never quite settled or broke free. He saw plain as day the moment when she decided there was nothing more to be curious about. A spike of pain drove straight through his ribs when her expression closed off. He’d known her two weeks, and it hurt that bad. Worse was coming. John and Sean were brothers, the bonds formed under fire in Afghanistan. He hoped the end would come quickly. He dreaded the pain.