Closer and Closer Page 7

  Reaching past his daypack, he drew something toward us. Lumpy and pale, a bar of some kind with a stumpy white something rising from it. Oh.

  “Here, hold this,” he instructed and drew a safety lighter from his pocket. As the stumpy white thing flickered and caught flame, he grinned down at me.

  “It’s a protein bar,” I said, toneless. Disbelieving.

  “Best I could do on short notice.” He pointed toward my hand. “It’s white fudge and peanut butter, though. Those are the best ones.”

  I glanced between the safety candle-topped protein bar and Walt. I did it again, just to be sure I’d rounded up the facts before me and arrived at the correct interpretation.

  “You’re resourceful.”

  “It’s my job to be.”

  “Oh.” I looked around the trees and rocks and brown earth of his forest. “I guess it is.”

  “Happy birthday, Erin.”

  The phrase was foreign to me. Once I was on my own, there was never a cause to inform others it was my birthday. Before, it was “Happy birthday, Dani! And Erin!”

  “I…um, thank you.”

  I knew I was too quiet with all of it: what he’d done, the notion of the day being mine, exclusively—and under Walt’s notice. Before I could let his gesture, one so kind I know any sane woman would have beamed over it, unravel my composure more, I blew out the candle and handed it back to him. No wishes from me. That was too much.

  His eyes settled across the trail, just over a newly-leafed bush. It burst with conical white fronds, populated with tiny blooms that nearly shivered as a pair of pale blue and black butterflies darted in the air around them, between the shoots of green.

  “We don’t see many of those in the park anymore. Cupido comyntas. Eastern Tailed-Blue. Fairly sensitive species.” The dusk-blue butterflies danced around each other, dipping together, then flitting away, always in mutual orbit, always flirting with a connection. Walt turned back to me, his eyebrows lifting with mischief. “Mating.”

  Nodding as any dutiful student would, my eyes made a hasty retreat to my wayward shoelace. As I crouched over the muddied strings, I tied them—and a few primitive notions of mating with Ranger Walt—into submission with a firm yank.

  And he was chuckling to himself again.

  “You gonna eat this?”

  He swung his body up on the boulder once more, offering me a closeup view of his bicep at work. In my peripheral vision, his hand stretched toward me, offering a boost to his perch. I pretended not to notice, and pushed myself up on the gravelly granite, hoping my arms wouldn’t wobble under me as I kicked myself and my too-tight khaki shorts up to Walt.

  His hand was still outstretched when I got myself on top of the rock, holding out half of the protein bar for me once I’d settled beside him.

  “So how long have you been in…um, known Cla—clover?”

  “How long have I known Claire or how long have I been in the lifestyle?” He took a long drink from his water bottle. “Or how long have I been kinky?”

  “I don’t know.” His directness pinned me down, with no easy route to a more comfortable means of discovering everything I wanted to know about him. I wanted to hear his version of this thing—a lifestyle, maybe—he shared with Claire. And I did want to know, not only because I should if what felt like our mutual attraction became something more, but because of him. Already, I liked him. I wanted to know Walt’s story. Maybe all of them.

  “Kinky. How long?”

  Glancing over at me with a wry half-smile, he laughed softly. “Straight to the point, huh?”

  I shrugged, pulled at a stray peanut and bit into it. “I suppose. I wonder about things, though.”

  “About?”

  “About people. I’m curious about how people figure things out. Not just with—” I gestured toward the forest, like it was where I’d find the perfect example of the parts of BDSM I always was curious about “—that. Being into that.”

  “Hey, Erin,” he said, tipping his shoulder toward mine like a conspirator. “If you have a hard time saying it, you might want to reconsider giving it a try.”

  “Into kink, okay?” I barked at him. My voice hung in the air, making me cringe at it echoing in my ears. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, more gently, and offered me his water bottle. “I was pushing you a little.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I wasn’t apologizing.” His eyes met mine over the clear orange plastic and I snatched the bottle away from my mouth, leaving a trail of water on my chin.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t intend to be rude and I do apologize if you took it like I was, but not for what I said. Anyway, you should be asking yourself why you’re sniffing around at the lifestyle. It’s no kiddie ride.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said and thrust his water bottle back at him as I prepared to push myself from the rock where we sat. “You have a list of criteria to be met just to get into your exclusive little culture? Tell me, does that apply to everyone you meet or just girls, as all of you say?”

  “Hey,” he said, catching my wrist in his hand. “Erin, you got me wrong here. I’m not threatening you with some imaginary yardstick, just telling you to take it slow…to be careful. With whatever you decide to do.”

  His thumb trailed rhythmic and slow on the inside of my wrist, washing away my irritation with each pass of his skin on mine. My body settled back to the rock beneath me and I stilled inside.

  Finally, Walt’s voice broke the silence between us. “I was seventeen.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “The first time I did anything kinky I was seventeen.” He nodded and eased back on his elbows. “My girlfriend at the time asked me to spank her, so I did.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him, waiting for more information, which didn’t come. He watched me, clearly waiting for my reaction. Finally, I waved my hand toward him, encouraging him for more details.

  “And? That’s all?”

  “Pretty much.” He grinned at me and settled himself on his hip. “I don’t spank and tell, even after twenty years.”

  “How did you know what to do?”

  “A spanking is a pretty simple thing. Someone’s hand is going to slap someone’s ass,” he said. “You can add some fancy-hands moves and mix up how you place the bottom you’re playing with, but it’s still pretty much my hand on a girl’s ass.”

  There was no pretense from him. Walt’s logic made sense—and made him seem sensible. But the languid confidence he exuded as he spoke was turning me incapable of much more than nodding and mindlessly pulling my shoelace apart so my fingers wouldn’t shake with the urge to push the smattering of sun-flecked chocolate brown hair from his forehead. My hand on a girl’s ass echoed in my ears. I dropped my shoelace.

  “Hang on a minute. Why girl? Is there a linguistic problem with woman or even lady? Why girl?”

  He leaned back on his elbows again, and flicked his eyes at me, huffing. “Girl. Girl…it’s what you are, I’m pretty sure, since you’ve presented yourself that way. If you feel like a guy inside, that’s your business. Girl…woman…guy…boy, boi with an I. It’s all just words. Shit, I call Lu ‘girl.’”

  “Oh, I think it matters to the person.”

  He nodded and shrugged, sheepish. The thought of neon purple foxtail and leather vest-wearing Lucy being called a girl didn’t bring to mind a good result. “You called Lucy ‘girl’? Really? When?”

  “Once.” He thumped the heel of his hiking boot against the granite underneath us.

  A strong, snorting laugh escaped before I could clench my wrist to my mouth and hold it back. Unable to resist, I turned his own words from the night before on him. “So how did that work for you?”

  “Well, she didn’t break my jaw like she wanted to, so it went fine, I guess.” Unconscious or in an outright effort to prove his jaw did, in fact, still operate as intended, he shifted his chin and grinned up at me. “Tell me what you prefer and I
’ll say that, okay?”

  “I…” And the truth hung in my throat. Walt didn’t back away and so his question didn’t either. After a few seconds, I swallowed and shrugged. “I don’t really care. Woman, girl. Lady makes me think I should wear pearls and have doilies on my furniture. Erin?”

  He shifted his torso to the arm closest to mine and poked my elbow with his free hand. “So why all the trouble about it?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked past the trees to the overlook. Girl was a long time ago in my everyday frame of reference, but I liked how it sounded with Walt’s way of turning it deep and sloping and a little rough on his voice. Questioning it was another one of those logical diversions, the same ones that kept me sitting outside of munches and lurking on web sites for years. “I thought I should care.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Not really, right now.”

  He was watching me. Not merely looking on as I talked, but taking me in. The sense of it rode my spine, and made nerves and muscles I hadn’t considered out of more than necessity go taut. My nipples pulsed at the lining of my bra, in time with the clench nesting into my thighs. I started to remind myself that pulsing and clenching weren’t really me, and that was when Walt poked my arm again. This time his touch lingered, just enough to notice his fingertip was still on my skin.

  “How do you like the woods so far?”

  “I like it.” I took in the rolling, hazy green mountains visible past the overlook. “It’s different here. Not as chaotic as I thought.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the afternoon sun stretch across the wooded valley below us when we weren’t darting glances at each other. Every time Walt’s eyes moved in my direction, I felt the same sense of openness settling into my chest.

  Finally, Walt shifted and cleared his throat. “Hey, Birthday Erin?”

  “Yes?” My voice hardly overpowered the sounds of wind and birds and forest all around us. As I turned my head toward him, Walt’s body rose toward mine. He paused, balanced on his hand so we were eye to eye.

  “I’d like to kiss you. That okay?”

  His nose was scattered with freckles. A tiny mole rested between the crinkled laugh lines at his right eye. And his eyes—not just blue. There was amber circling his pupil, troughs of liquid aquamarines smattered between the wide deep-water blues.

  His forearm brushed mine. My shoulder swept past his bicep.

  “Okay.”

  I tensed my lips a little, waiting for his. They didn’t meet mine. They brushed across my cheek, so close I felt my lashes touch his nose and the tips of his dark curls tickle my ear.

  When he moved away, I knew my cheeks were flaming red, and I had to scuttle after the breath I’d forgotten to take. Once again, I had to glance toward the mountains to reorder my senses and was utterly, completely unable to disguise my surprise.

  I’d watched him, not twenty-four hours before, swinging two heavy black floggers at a woman much smaller in both height and frame than me. It was entirely likely, given his size and apparent stamina, that Walt could have been a brute if he’d been so inclined—and without much to hinder him. But he’d asked for my permission to kiss me. And when he did, it was a soft, chaste kiss on my cheek.

  I wanted to climb in his lap and inhale every broad, earthy, male bit of him.

  “Should probably head back soon,” he said.

  “Do you know about air filters?” I dropped my eyelids twice. Air filters? Of course I’m a seductive temptress. Of course I am. Turning to him, still very close to his face, I blinked again.

  “You mean for your car or for—”

  “For the house I’m renting. Or the HVAC, not the house entirely. I mean, it cools the entire house but—”

  “No, I get it. Sure, what do you need to know?”

  “Where do I buy one?”

  “Uh…” He scratched his earlobe and grinned. “Do you need one? There’s a Home Outfitters in Shanesborro.”

  “Yes. I tried reading the manual…” I glanced down at my hands and smarted over my fingers twined together. Like a girl’s. It was a small thing, asking for help. But asking for help from a man after watching so many of them fail Kathy and then Dani, too, was different. More. And Mr. Jensen, the elderly man next door, could barely understand me when I asked him about them. “I’m not sure how to fix it.”

  “Well,” he said, hopping back to the ground, “how about we drive over to Shanesborro and see if we can figure it out.”

  “Yes, okay.” And as I nodded to confirm it, a small voice sounded in my mind, adding one syllable not yet ready to be put to air.

  Sir.

  Chapter Four

  THE WALK BACK to the visitor center was downhill and went quicker, both of them in silence as their feet fell on the hard-packed trail.

  Inside Walt’s head, a cadence of what the fuck was that thrummed for the entire hour it took to reach the parking lot. The tips of his ears felt like they were near singed, and his fists curled with the urge to punch something big and hard, a sensation he hadn’t known since he was thirteen and his voice started to change.

  It was a ridiculous question anyway. He knew exactly what the fuck that was because he’d been thinking it about Erin damn near constantly since he watched the red tail lights of her car disappear into the night. All day long. Through a couple of nature walks and a stalled RV in the south campground loop, and restocking the supply of area attraction maps in the visitor center. He couldn’t get her out of his head. And then he caught a glimpse of her walking across the grass in front of the visitor center that afternoon, wearing those just-perfectly snug, ass-cupping khaki shorts that nearly caused him to embarrass himself with an unruly erection like some damn teenaged kid.

  Tommy, another of the regular Tops in the mentor program, always said everybody in the lifestyle got at least one date with crazy if they stuck around long enough. Holly, the last woman in the lifestyle Walt had dated, surely fulfilled his quota for a couple of lifetimes. After a bad run with a couple of fucked-up, ego-driven SirMasterlyDom-types, she wasn’t set up to handle more of it. Any of it: submission, pain and sex, a relationship. And so she broke. Into messy, hurt-filled pieces he tried—and failed—to put right.

  As he’d driven away from Holly’s parents’ house that last night and, for all purposes, out of her life, Walt had considered all of the internal landmines he usually avoided: his undefined relationship with Holly, his mom, the way he’d left home at seventeen. It made sense that he’d tried to fix her. It made sense why he kept things just past casual but not too far down the road of commitments and collars. And even though he stayed in an undefined valley between Holly’s boyfriend and her Dominant, it was his job to protect her. Even from herself. Hell, he wasn’t a two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink like the ones Holly’s parents hired for her, but he could damn well recognize a couple of themes.

  After he’d left Holly with her family, Walt didn’t wait to call home. He got Lucy on the phone, excited to tell her he’d managed to cobble the whole shitty eight months of Holly’s slow decline into a story that fit together. He had made some damn sense of what he’d been through, wanted someone to agree with him, maybe, so it didn’t seem so simple to blame himself for Holly’s breakdown.

  “Jesus, Walt, do you think you’re some great mystery?” She’d snorted a laugh as she always did when someone offered up the obvious to her. “I mean, no man is a mystery, but it’s so clear you’re one of those ‘scratch my belly, keep me fed and comfortable and tell me no lies’ guys.”

  It was the only time Luce had let him down. She was hardly surprised.

  “As a professional observer of the pussy, not to mention an owner of one, let me give you a piece of advice. There are women who know that’s who you are and will run all over you with it because you’re too damn gentlemanly to call them out on that shit the first time. But then there are women who naturally want to be like that for you, even if they’ve just—wh
at is it you say—uh…‘slayed a dragon’…some shit like that, and you need to find one of those girls. Hopefully she’ll have a nice rack and let you pink up her ass. Anyway, choose door number two.”

  The enthusiasm of his insight had deflated.

  Was he that transparent? That easy to play?

  He’d never tell Lu, since he knew she had no intention of hurting him. It was well-intentioned advice wrapped in her usual sarcasm, but her words ate at him as he lay awake all night. By the time he returned his rental car and boarded a flight back to North Carolina, he was convinced he should sit out anything but the most superficial of interactions with women.

  Never again.

  And too soon after Holly, watching the aftermath of his best friend Brady’s death and being no comfort to his widow, Hailey, why would he? Two years later, after a very successful run at keeping a relationship on shutdown, there was Erin sitting at the bar inside Area 51, turning to see whom Claire was motioning their way.

  Untested and raw, obviously, and utterly impossible to ignore.

  Door number two.

  Not a tourist. Not a kid looking for attention. And not another housewife, scrabbling after her fantasies instead of taking up yoga or poetry-writing, or some other shit that would do her a lot more good. And he’d brought her up here to one of his few peaceful places, already shown her how to get deeper under his skin than she already had, if she was as observant as she seemed.

  Shit.

  Walt listened to his feet pounding on the ground beneath him. As he walked, old words in voices belonging to his grandfather, Lucy, Holly, Brady, and Hailey replayed in his head. For a good while, he let them talk, until finally he admitted he shouldn’t work over his whole scarred inner self in one afternoon, no matter how tempting it was to dredge up reason after reason to let this thing with Erin alone.

  He’d figure it out later. Anyway, her ass in those shorts would make a saint tell himself lies.