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“Don’t be ridiculous.” I held out a hand. “The Black River is fucking freezing. Bathroom’s down the hall. Drop your clothes outside the door and I’ll toss them in the dryer while you get a hot shower. Take your time and I’ll make coffee to warm you up from the inside. Then we can head over to Steve and Kenny’s.”
She looked like she was going to fight me, but I gave her the sternest look I could manage and pointed in the direction of the hallway that ran past the kitchen.
I gave her a few minutes to get situated and when I heard the bathroom door softly close again, the shower already on, I hurried to scoop up the laundry. My face flamed when I realized she’d lefteverythingfor me, and I wondered if the delicate pink bra and underwear were supposed to go through the dryer. They looked a little too fragile to survive the baking heat.
By the time she emerged from the shower, wrapped up in my bathrobe, I had her underwear drying over a box fan in the living room and her shorts and tank top were tumbling in the dryer.
“Interesting method,” she teased, appearing in the kitchen with the way-too-lacy bra in her hand. I couldn’t help but picture her in it, which made me uncomfortable in all the bad ways.
“Didn’t wanna wreck it in the…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence and resorted to some caveman hand gestures instead. I had no idea how to launder ladies’ delicate things, and just handling them made me feel like I was doing something dirty.
Then the secondary thought hit me, that she was completely naked under my bathrobe. She was swimming in it, her hair wrapped up in a towel, her feet bare and for the first time a very unwelcome thought rushed through my brain:What would it be like to have a woman in my life again?
“You ok, Beckman?” She plopped the set on my kitchen chair and stood there, only steps away, looking at me like I’d grown another head.
“Yeah.” I swallowed hard, wondering if it would be weird to take another hit from the bottle still sitting on the table. “Probably low blood sugar.”
“Huh.” She unwound the towel and let all that glorious wet hair fall down her back. “I’d have guessed something like you had a case of the 36B’s.” Her grin was wicked and predictably, my eyes fell to her chest. I hadn’t actually read the tag on the bra, but that sounded about right. She wasn’t a big girl, not more than a handful–that made my cheeks flame again–everything about the woman was just right.
“Zip it, VanBuren.” I was surprised by how annoyed my voice sounded. I’d teased her mercilessly when she was a kid and here we were, decades later, and I was the one who couldn’t take a joke.
She held up her hands, a small smile on her face, and I remembered the first time I’d realized Madelyn VanBuren was agirl. She’d left a bikini hanging to dry in the downstairs bathroom. I’d been twenty-one years old, completely aware of what it meant to be a woman–or thought I knew–and then I walked into that bathroom to find the tiny black triangles hanging over the towel rack and I damn near lost my shit then and there. I’d made some stupid excuse to Steve and left, though we were supposed to be studying for a big exam. I couldn’t very well tell him that his sixteen-year-old sister had just thrown me for a total loop.
Thinking back, that was when I’d begun to avoid Madelyn like a bitch-ass kid, not the grown man I was. She’d been way too young–jailbait–and for a while every time Steve invited me over I’d come up with an excuse or find a way to meet him somewhere other than his house. He must have noticed, because it went on for the next year, until we graduated college and were off to a sandbox.
Steve had a girlfriend he’d been dating on and off since high school, so that took a little of the pressure off me when it came to best friend duties. A lot of the time he was so wrapped up in his girlfriend that I was just a study partner or a hangout buddy. That probably kept him from giving me a black eye, just because he was so wound up with his girlfriend that he didn’t see me drooling over Madelyn.
I didn’t do anything real serious with the ladies because, 1) I had no money to take them out, and 2) there was this pesky little brunette who kind of took over my thought processes, and that was a real fucking problem.
I poured coffee for both of us and then, since it was ever so slightly closer to five o’ clock than it was to noon–and I had Madelyn VanBuren sitting in my kitchen, inmybathrobe–I added some whiskey and a dash of cream.
“I see how it is,” she teased, lifting her glass to clink against mine. I had no idea what she meant by that and promptly scalded my tongue with the boiling liquid now flavored like paint thinner. Perhaps my pour had been a little too generous.
We drank our coffee in relative silence and when the dryer buzzed somewhere down the hallway, I couldn’t help but sigh in relief. If I had to spend much more time looking at her in my bathrobe, I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t do something stupid and blame it on the whiskey.
Madelyn dressed in the bathroom and the two of us walked to Steve and Kennedy’s place together. I had to fight myself the whole way, not to reach over and take her hand, and I had no idea what that shit was about. Envisioning Steve’s face, if I walked into his kitchen holding his sister’s hand, was enough to talk me right out of that stupid fantasy.
Thankfully, Teagan did her best to keep me distracted that afternoon. The kid was the cutest thing I’d ever seen, and for some reason she always lit up when she saw me. Kennedy teased that it was because I was “pretty,” always grabbing a handful of my hair as she said it.
Kids weren’t in the cards for me, though I liked them just fine. But to have kids you need one of two things: a careless accident, and/or someone who plans on sticking around to raise them with you. Clearly I had none of the second and I’d always played a very careful birth control game–not that it had been particularly necessary the past few years. I’d kind of turned into a hermit after Harlowe hooked up with Aaron and the two of them got married. I didn’t go out to pick up girls and when women slipped me their numbers, I made no effort to call. Lucy was my only girl these days, and that was a pretty sad statement.
Teagan loved Madelyn almost as much as she loved me, occasionally tiring of sitting on my lap and reaching out to Mads with a call for “Mah.” Kennedy thought it was hilarious, but I think if she’d called me Dada, Steve might have had a few things to say about that.
I’d fallen into a bit of a rut since Lincoln Bannock, who’d been handling our Special Activities team at the time, told me it was time to find a new career. Being filled up with bullets meant some muscle loss, and having only half of my left lung meant I was no longer able to handle some of the more strenuous requirements.
I’d been back in Watertown for almost eight years now. Steve called it quits on SAD at the same time I did, telling me that if we couldn’t serve together he was going to return to Watertown and make Kennedy commit. He’d met her years earlier, home on a leave, but she’d been gunshy. The guy had asked her out again and again before she gave him a single date. Then he asked her to marry him five or six times. She kept telling him no, sending him back out into the field with a broken heart.
Watertown was the sort of place where things changed slowly. Most of the people who grew up there stayed and raised their families in the same schools, parks and churches they’d grown up in. Sure, some drifted off to the big city, but for the most part the people I’d grown up with were still locals.
In a way, since Watertown was so familiar, it was comforting. Other times it was maddening, just small enough that if there was any business to know, everyone knew it. Thankfully enough I was boring, so I rarely found myself being tumbled in the gossip mill, but you know: when other people are bored they’ll invent just about anything to entertain themselves.
I wondered if Madelyn had missed it at all, during all the years she’d been away. I certainly hadn’t missed parts of it, except for the fact it was quiet and predictable, which was attractive to someone who’d lived in chaos for years.
As the afternoon wore on and it became apparent I was in no hurry to leave, I started to notice Kennedy and Steve exchanging some funny looks. Kennedy looked smug, but Steve looked a little more…murderous, something I hoped was just my imagination.
As the sun began to set, I finally excused myself. I had a shift early the next morning and a cat to feed, and sitting next to Madelyn on the too-tiny loveseat for the last couple hours had done nothing for my sanity. She smelled like my body wash and shampoo and I couldn’t have told you why, but it was hot. I could only hope she didn’t notice that I was constantly shifting, trying to hide my groin from her view. It was too easy to “slip” and brush up against her, which was doing nothing to help.
Kennedy, for her part, knew exactly what she was doing. She’d insisted we all relocate to the tiny den once Teagan went down for a nap, knowing full well that room was furnished for a cozy family of three: two tiny love seats and a single bean bag. She knew what the seating arrangement was going to be, and she spent the rest of the afternoon looking ridiculously pleased with herself when I had to wedge myself into that tiny loveseat next to Madelyn and spend the rest of the afternoon trying not to let my knee drift toward hers or our arms brush. It was fucking impossible, and Kennedy knew it.
