Uncommon Pleasure (25 page)

As brief as they were, nights with Sean tilted her teetering world beyond the tipping point. Apparently she could make do on four hours of sleep, too much coffee, and fear-based adrenaline, but three hours of sleep and her body began to whine.
So tiiiiiiiired. Must sleeeeeeeep.
So like a good girl would, like a girl who texted Ben once a month or so, she’d come home after work the last three nights and gone to bed for her usual four hours of sleep.

That shut down the whining, but added a deeper ache to the sustained, low-level exhaustion. Desire simmered low in her belly. Her clothes chafed her skin, the seam of her jeans rubbing against her clit at the most inopportune moments, her nipples teased by any bra at all—cotton, lace, silk, it didn’t matter. It was as if her body knew when Sean’s leave was over that would be the end of fabulous-Sean-sex, and she should get as much fabulous-Sean-sex while she could.

“Stop it,” she said to her body. “Stop
needing
. You’re not going to get enough sleep or enough sex or enough of anything for a long, long time. I can give you coffee. That’s it.”

She walked downstairs and made coffee. Her father sat in his
recliner in the family room, staring at the television. His breathing wheezed, then he coughed his typical rattling, phlegmy cough.

“You okay, Dad?”

“Stop fussing,” he rasped, but the effort of getting the words out only made him cough harder.

The doorbell rang. Abby ignored it and started toward her father, then retreated when he irritably waved her off. The wet, hacking coughs followed her down the tiled hallway as she hurried to the door.

Sean stood on the other side, dressed in cargo shorts, running shoes, and a shapeless, worn gray T-shirt with the Naval Academy logo on the chest. A backpack hung from one shoulder, and for a moment her only wish in the world wasn’t for sleep or sex. It was for the clairvoyance that would have told her to study in something other than a pair of ripped yoga pants rolled low on her hips and a green cami.

“I should be used to you showing up out of the blue,” she said.

At a particularly deep, horrible cough, his gaze flicked over her shoulder. “Is this a bad time?”

“That depends on what you want,” she said flatly, all but daring him to suggest sex while her father hacked up the contents of his lungs.

“Company while I do some reading,” he said, hoisting the full backpack as evidence. “That’s all.”

This wasn’t in the rulebook, him showing up at her house, wanting nothing more than to be in her presence, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to send him away, much less shut the door in his face. So she opened the door wide, and he stepped into the foyer.

“Go on upstairs,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”

“I’ll help you get it,” he said.

“Dad won’t want you to meet him like this. He’s having a bad
day,” she said, and gave him a little push for emphasis. “Second door on the left.”

He climbed the stairs while she hurried back down the hall. The coughing fit was tapering off, leaving her dad with watery eyes, gasping for air. She waited for him to finish clearing the mucus from his lungs, took the small trash can full of tissues into the kitchen and emptied it, then crouched by his chair and patted his shoulder.

“Okay, Dad?”

He shook off her hand. “Who was at the door?”

“A friend coming over to study. We’ll be upstairs.” He nodded, his gaze focused on the television show he never would have watched before. “Do you want me to make an appointment with Dr. Weaver?”

“No.”

“Dad, she said if you weren’t—”

“No. Go away.”

She stood and stalked back into the kitchen, poured out two tall mugs, added cream and sugar to hers, and headed up the stairs. Sean sat on her bedroom floor, his backpack open beside him, books and notebooks strewn around him, his laptop open on his lap and plugged into one of the sockets. A moment’s embarrassment coursed through her, because the room was a FEMA-declared disaster area, dirty clothes piled in one laundry basket, clean clothes in untidy stacks in another, her closet door wide open on the jumble of shoes and unevenly hanging formal dresses. She’d redecorated when she moved home after college, supposedly just for the summer, but she was glad the room was now an adult, if dusty, scheme of royal blue and white. Microbiology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology texts and her laptop occupied every available inch of her desk. Beside the floor, the only other flat, unoccupied surface in the room was her bed.

He wisely hadn’t chosen to sit there, but perhaps the fact that it was unmade and strewn with a tumbled assortment of blue and red pillows had something to do with it. She left the door wide open.

“I can make space at the desk.”

“Abby, trust me. I’ve worked in far worse conditions than a carpeted bedroom floor in an air-conditioned house,” he said and reached up for his coffee.

“You’re really here to read.”

He nodded, and the gleam in his eye was only slightly artful.

One leg tucked under her, she eased into the desk chair and sipped her own coffee. “What are you working on?”

“An analysis of the pharmaceutical industry, the players, trends, competitors, leadership, what’s in FDA testing, that kind of thing.”

She blinked. “Is that for the Marine Corps?”

“No. I’m freelancing while I’m on leave, and the job relates to a smaller drug company. I don’t know anything about the industry, so this is background research.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“So far the job consists of sitting down. Front seat of a truck, outdoor bench in a business park, front seat of a car outside a guy’s house.”

“And now it sounds boring.”

“After getting shot at for a year every time we stepped outside the perimeter, sitting in a car without random gunfire is actually kind of nice.”
Getting shot at
made her heart stutter and her breathing stop. He gave her another only slightly artful smile, and added, “It’s no picnic, but I’ll take it.”

She ignored his lead. “You need to do research to sit on a bench?”

“Not really, but you never know when something you’ve learned might come in handy.”

The sight of him on her bedroom floor, surrounded by books, highlighter, and laptop at the ready, jolted a memory loose from
her exhausted brain. Sean, in much the same pose and clothing but on a picnic blanket in the park, surrounded by books about Afghanistan that were getting as broken-spined and dog-eared as military strategy books. With her head pillowed on his thigh she’d read her way through magazines and novels while he systematically crammed the contents of about twenty thousand pages of text into his brain.

She’d fallen in love with him on that blanket, fallen hard, fast, and apparently alone. The blanket now occupied the back corner of her closet, the green-and-blue plaid wool folded carefully to keep intact the grass and twigs from their last picnic.

He nodded at the stack of books on her desk. “Don’t let me distract you.”

“I won’t,” she said. It was his turn to blink at her firm tone.

For a few minutes she had to fake intense fascination with relational ethics, but then the caffeine spurred productivity. She finished the Ethics reading, wrote her response paper, and turned to the Microbiology outline. Exactly ninety minutes into the silent study session Sean’s watched beeped. He got to his feet and stretched, methodically cracking everything from his neck down to his toes, then looked around the room.

“What’s with the alarm?”

“People are most productive in ninety-minute sessions. Then it’s best to take a break and do something else for about twenty minutes.”

The
something else
they would have done last year hung in the air above her bed until Sean walked to the window. “The lawn could use a trim,” he commented.

“It’s not up to Dad’s standards,” she agreed ruefully, but he’d moved on to the pictures on the walls and shelves.

“I never saw your room last year.”

She hadn’t wanted to rush into anything that might spook Sean, like meeting her bad-tempered father, although in hindsight their
intense focus on each other to the exclusion of family and friends was a missed sign. A very few pictures were arranged on shelves around the room, mostly candid shots of her with friends on spring break. He examined each one carefully, starting with the picture of her with all her college friends, then switched his attention to the last photo.

“Who’s this?”

“My half brother Jeff, his wife, Lindsey, and their daughter, Mikaela.” She yawned, stifling the sound with her hand.

“Want to take a quick nap?” he said without looking at her.

Was she relieved or disappointed he didn’t ask more questions? “Desperately, but I’ve still got a whole chapter to outline.”

“You’ll write a better outline when you’re rested.”

It sounded so tempting, lying down in the middle of the day, in her sun-warmed room, falling asleep to the sound of Sean’s breathing. “I’ll get more coffee.”

“I’ll wake you up in forty-five minutes.”

She laughed. “I can’t afford to sleep for forty-five minutes. Thirty, max.”

“Deal,” he said quickly.

“We aren’t negotiating,” she said.

He just smiled. “You’ll feel more alert.”

“This is temporary, Sean,” she pointed out gently. “Classes are over mid-December. I’ll sleep then.” Until it all started up again mid-January, and that was just her last semester of prereqs. Then the actual coursework began, practicums and clinicals. She should get a CNA license, for the experience, but the pay was abysmal compared to what she made at No Limits, the perfect topic for an Ethics paper.

“But I want you to sleep now,” he said just as gently. “You look so tired, Abby.”

“I am tired. I can afford to run a sleep deficit right now. I can’t afford to get used to—”

“It’s just for now, Abby,” Sean said. “Nothing to get used to. Just a little extra sleep today.”

Why not?
her sleep-deprived, stressed brain asked. Why not enjoy everything Sean Winthrop offers for the duration of his leave? Why not have sex and get extra sleep with someone else in the room who will wake you up if you sleep through the alarm?

“Thirty minutes,” she warned. “You have to wake me up in thirty minutes.”

“I will.”

He didn’t lie down beside her, or tuck her in, or sit by her side and stroke her hair, or do anything else lover-ly or boyfriend-ly. He set an alarm on his watch and stayed on the floor while she curled up on her side and closed her eyes. Dappled sunlight splayed against her closed eyelids, magnifying sounds. The television downstairs, volume rising and falling with the transition between commercials and content. Her own breathing, too shallow to please her yoga teacher. The sensation in her mind of doors closing as sleep crept up on her. Sean’s breathing, steady, slow, deep…

Sean’s hand on her forearm. A gentle squeeze. “Abby.”
Sean’s voice.
“Abby, honey, wake up.”

She blinked and surreptitiously checked for drool. None. She’d slept too deeply to drool. Like something out of a dream, Sean knelt on one knee by her bed, his elbow braced on his thigh, his summer sky eyes unguarded. In that defenseless moment she smiled at him, then memory returned. The clock showed exactly thirty minutes after she’d lain down on her bed. She sat up, cross-legged, and stared blankly out the window.

That felt too much like trust. A promise made and kept, no matter how small, laid the foundation for trust.
Honey
felt too much
like lovers. She cleared her throat. “I need more coffee,” she said. “You?”

The guarded expression darkened his eyes. “Sure. Feel better?”

She couldn’t bring herself to lie. “Yes.”

“Good.”

She refilled their coffee cups, then set to the Microbiology reading. When she was in the middle of outlining the mechanisms of pathogenicity Sean asked, “When do you have to be at work?”

“Seven,” she replied without looking up. “I needed to get caught up on homework so I swapped the late shift with Lisette.”

He stowed his books in his bag as his laptop powered down. “Six for me,” he said. “Gotta go.”

“You really came here to study,” she said.

“I did,” he said without looking up from his position on his knees, wrapping the laptop cord around his broad palm before stowing it in one of the backpack’s many pockets. Sean was terribly organized. “It’s one of my best memories from leave last year.”

Ouch.
She had, perhaps, forgotten to consider that Sean was a person, a rather complex one, and in that complexity lay his unmatched ability to hurt her. “It’s not what we agreed to,” she said, the words no less ruthless for their soft tone.

“I know,” he said, and bent to kiss her swiftly before his electric blue gaze held hers. “I owe you. For this, and several other things I’ve done that we didn’t agree to. Take what you want from me later.”

And then he was gone, leaving only his unique scent and heat in her room, and a vague restlessness in her heart.

Sean was pleasantly surprised to be home for Election Day.
Usually he voted with an absentee ballot, but today he walked into his elementary school at midmorning, after the early morning voters and cameras, and before the lunchtime rush. He checked in with the elections’ official, stepped inside the curtained polling booth, and exercised one of the freedoms he’d just spent a year defending. The booth beside him housed a young mother, alternating between cooing at a baby in a carrier on her chest and admonishing a younger child who was ducking into Sean’s booth while his mother was distracted.

“Lucas, come back here,” she stage-whispered.

Face solemnly composed, Sean looked down at Lucas, dressed in shorts and a train T-shirt, and made a shooing motion at him. The little boy peered up at him, wide-eyed, then crawled back under the curtain to his mother. Ballot cast, Sean exited the booth and accepted his I Voted Today sticker.

“How’s the turnout?” he asked the volunteer as he slapped the sticker onto his shirt just below his collarbone.

She shook her head. “In an off-cycle year we’re lucky to get 10 percent voter turnout. It may be a little higher because of the bond issue for the school district, so 15 percent?”