Closer and Closer Page 9

  Chapter Five

  IN FRONT OF ME, the taillights on Walt’s truck flickered erratically again, dimming almost to dark before his brake lights flared bright red. Squinting, I lowered my window and called out into the night.

  “Walt?”

  His arm shot from inside his vehicle, waving me on.

  “I can’t go around.” Shifting my own car into park, I engaged my hazard lamps and pushed myself further out the window. “Walt, I don’t know where I am and I can’t leave you out here alone.”

  The driver’s side door opened and Walt stepped from his truck. He walked toward me, jaw clenched, his face highlighted by my car’s headlights.

  “Hey,” he said, crouching down to my level. “I’ve been having some trouble with the transmission lately.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Nah, I’ve got it.” He stood, and motioned past his disabled truck. “If you just stay on the highway another seven or eight—”

  “Walt, I’m not going to leave you here.”

  “—miles. No, you head on home. I’ll be—”

  “No.”

  He stopped and shocked me by actually looking surprised I’d said no to him.

  “No?” Drawing his hands back to his hips, he turned to me and tipped back on his heels so he could catch my line of vision.

  “No,” I said, and swallowed at my suddenly thick throat. “It’s dark. I won’t leave you alone.”

  “Erin,” he said, chuckling, and gestured to his broad torso. “I’m not exactly worried about a big bad guy coming after me. I could probably take him.”

  I opened my door and pushed it toward him as I stood, sending him backtracking toward the flashing lights on his truck.

  “The manly man act doesn’t impress me.” I marched toward his car, willing myself not to look back at him. I couldn’t purr in his ear or say the right sort of provocative things about his lack of underwear, but I could be reliable. I could be helpful for him. Those things I knew how to do.

  Suddenly, the dark beyond the jumble of newly-leafed trees lining the road loomed higher, and that dark within them, a deeper, blacker dark than anything I’d experienced in California. There were live things in there. With teeth and fangs and claws and possibly even venom.

  Walt was close on my heels. And, without another thought about what lay beyond the reach of the traffic lights beyond Walt’s truck and my own car, I was very glad for the safety I felt around him.

  “Hey, be careful, just walking off down the road in the middle of the night like that,” he said as he reached my side, taking my elbow and steering me away from the right traffic lane even though it was completely devoid of traffic.

  “I’m not just walking off, I’m walking to.” I swallowed at the surge of my own relief to be back beside something solid and tangible. When we arrived at the driver’s door, I motioned to the interior. “I’ll steer. You push.”

  As I pulled at the worn silver door handle, his hand reached toward mine.

  “Wait a minute, there. What do you think you’re doing?” Walt’s fingers closed around my hand. The same span of chest he’d just suggested as invulnerable rose and fell with his breath, mere inches from my face.

  “You have two options: one, you can get me rolling down that hill on the cross street and I’ll pop the clutch.” He scowled down at me, apparently not impressed with his first choice. “Or two, I can put the truck in neutral and you can push it through the intersection to the opposite side of the road, just over there. Then we’ll call my auto club and have your truck towed to a mechanic.”

  “Three, you’ll get back in your nice little car, put it in drive, and follow Shanesborro Highway about seven or eight miles, down to the intersection with highway 54, and—”

  “Excuse me,” I said and opened the door. Before he could catch me, I was inside, seated behind the wheel, although unable to completely touch the pedals.

  “Erin, you don’t know how to do something like this…”

  “Of course I do.” Scooting forward, I depressed the clutch and brake and shifted the truck into neutral. “Do you have any idea how many times my mother ran out of gas before I was old enough to drive the car to the gas station and fill the tank myself? Why would you assume otherwise?”

  “You—uh…really?”

  I pointed to the doorframe and took the wheel. “Push, Walt.”

  With the force of his considerable size, he leaned against the steel frame, grunting softly as the truck began to inch forward. Without the benefit of power steering, keeping the stalled truck under control as we crested the intersection’s slight incline was difficult. Thankfully difficult. I had no choice but to look forward and not at Walt, glancing side to side for oncoming cars, as the truck gained momentum.

  Once the truck had coasted safely, deep into the roadside gravel, I pulled the emergency brake taut and finally allowed myself to look up at him. Hands planted above him, his arms spanned the open door. I scanned his chest, following the line of his shirt’s tiny white buttons to the waistband of his jeans. It pulled free there, exposing a narrow line of tanned skin at his hip.

  Just to be sure, I tugged at the emergency brake again.

  “Okay, Super Girl, let’s get your car out of the middle of the road.” He grunted and stepped aside. I handed him his keys and without a look his way, started for my car, the lone source of light on the remote stretch of road. Damn whatever was beyond those trees. “Erin. Wait.”

  “I’ll be fine.” I continued along the road. Behind me, Walt muttered a florid word or three and slammed his truck’s door.

  “Do you understand—” he snarled, feet falling heavy on the pavement behind me “—what wait means?”

  “I can handle it myself.” I forced myself to not look up at him as he reached my side.

  “Hey, I told you the same thing, but you sure as hell didn’t listen.”

  I stopped at the corner of the intersection and looked up at him, shrugging.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing to me.” His hand cupped my elbow and he nodded toward my car. “C’mon now, hurry.”

  Once my car was parked, idling, in front of Walt’s truck, he took out his flip phone and punched numbers into it. He listened, scowling, as the tinny sound of a female voice filled the car. After repeating the process with an answering male voice, he flipped the phone shut and rubbed his broad hand over his face.

  “Will you let me call my auto club now?” I asked quietly.

  “No, the truck’ll be fine here overnight. Tommy Blackwe—Shadow…aw, fuck it, Tommy—from the club? He owns a wrecker service. I’ll give him a call tomorrow morning.” He sighed, his chest filling wide and falling as he sank into the passenger seat, rubbing at his eyes.

  A wave of exhaustion, not unlike one that came from any one of my admins during the long build-out we’d executed to open the data center on time, flowed from him. Pushing the truck across the road wouldn’t have exhausted Walt physically. Nonetheless, he seemed fatigued.

  I paused to check the intersection and drove, sending silent good wishes to Walt’s abandoned truck as we passed. After some minutes’ quiet, he shifted his long legs, a little awkwardly, so he faced me.

  “What’re you doin’, Erin?” His voice had turned a little hoarse and sounded more than tired. Weary.

  “I’m driving,” I said, shrugging and smiling as I watched him from the corner of my eye.

  “You know what I mean. What’s got you coming around the club like you did last night, when you can hardly bring yourself to say B and D, or S and M together.”

  “What?” I clenched my fingers hard around the steering wheel. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not patronizing you.”

  “It sure sounded like it.” I smirked and turned my voice to a deep drawl. “Aw, little darlin’, y’all ain’t the kind of girl who belongs in a corset and a collar.”

  “Hey, that’s not what I meant,” he said, h
is voice taking on a husky huff of its own. “You’re assigning a hell of a lot of pompous damn intentions to me just asking you a valid question. And by the way, I’m not that much of a prick. And I’d never call you anything as condescending as little darlin’.”

  How could his voice dip that low?

  “I didn’t say you were. I just don’t understand…” I focused on the swath of light in front of me. Not the time, place, or especially person to open that topic.

  “Understand?” I felt his eyes on me, watching me in the faint gleam of the car’s interior. Minutes passed. I drove, stubbornly silent, hardly aware of Callahan’s now-familiar streets as they passed. But very aware of every movement of his body, so close to mine.

  He still watched.

  “I don’t understand why it’s so easy for women like them,” I said finally.

  “Like who? You mean Nicole and—uh, her friend?”

  Blinking hard, I clenched my jaw, nodding. “Yes. They walk into any situation, every environment, and it’s always so easy for them. How long have you known them?” I shifted the car into park and turned to him.

  He considered it a moment. “I guess six months, maybe? Don’t remember exactly when they turned—”

  “So, to be generous, eight months. In eight months, women like her—like Nicole—can decide it’s perfectly acceptable to go into a new situation, all alone—”

  “Nope. Come to think of it, I believe those two showed up together,” he said, considering, as he scratched his earlobe.

  “Fine. Together. Arm in arm. Two comrades in kink, right? They turn up together and manage to ignore years of expectations and social bias and their own insecurities.” I paused at the sound of Walt’s voice. “Pardon me?”

  “No, it’s nothing. Was just saying neither one of those girls are what I’d call insecure.”

  “And that’s wonderful!” I cried, throwing my hand into the air. “It’s absolutely right and valid that those girls should be without a single drop of insecurity. In charge of their own sexuality. Making their own choices about how to enjoy their bodies. It’s absolutely. Fine.”

  My voice reverberated through the car, still echoing in my ears. Finally, after a number of seconds, Walt scratched his earlobe again, eyebrows rising.

  “Hey, Erin, you care if I ask you a question?”

  “Um…no.”

  “What are we doing at your house?” He gestured toward the compact, pale green cottage that was, in fact, my house. “And of course, at the risk of sounding like a patronizing prick again, assuming this is your house.”

  I sighed, the heaviness of it much like his from earlier.

  “It actually is my house.” I shrugged, sheepish, and turned a hesitant smile to him. “I must have gone on autopilot when we started argu—um, talking. I need a jacket and to…um…Would you like to come in for a minute? I could make some tea. I might even have some popcorn, if you’re still willing to help with the air filter?”

  His left cheek rose, a half-smile in return. “Still want to share those Sno-Caps?”

  “I can’t make any promises,” I said. “But if you’re still willing to help me with the air filter?”

  “Be glad to,” he said, grinning, and opened his door. “And I’ll take my chances on the Sno-Caps.”

  Inhaling hard, I looked away, giving myself a few beats to catch the diverse threads of words and emotion that had just passed between us. Before I could gather my bag and phone and open my door, it swung open. Walt waited in the space beyond, his hand extended toward me.

  “Ready?”

  Chapter Six

  HER HOUSE WAS NEATER than Lu’s, which shocked the hell out of Walt, because if there was ever someone too uptight about housework, it was Ms. Lucinda Johns, of the Richmond Johns. Lucy was many years gone from her upper-class Virginia debutante roots, but she still insisted on having a housekeeper come around once a week, same as the mother who’d disowned her.

  Erin was still puttering around in the kitchen when he finished with the air filter. Walt glanced around the living room. The light curtains, matching beige sofas, and big, square oak coffee table all looked off-the-truck new. Even the little kit of homeowner’s tools she handed him when he took the cover off the heating and air unit looked brand-new. It was a simple thing, took thirty seconds to change.

  Last time he and Lu were in Atlanta, she’d run him around a Pottery Barn store for a couple of hours, comparing do-dads for her guest bedroom. Eventually she gave up and dragged him clear to the opposite end of the mall into Neiman Marcus, a place the Johns women knew like their own homes.

  Lu and her inherited money considered a store like Pottery Barn for furnishing a mostly vacant spare room, but Erin had bought the whole living room package—and kept it so it looked unused.

  “The tea will be ready in a minute.” Her voice shook him from his thoughts. He found her across the living room, watching him as she pulled a dark blue sweater around her shoulders. Walt lingered by one of the soft-looking sofas, unsure how to move or where to sit around things that surely meant a lot more than furniture to her.

  “This is a nice place,” he said instead, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets.

  She glanced around the room, smiling. “Thank you. I like it a lot. It’s the first time I’ve lived in a house.” Motioning an invitation to the opposite side of the sofa, she sat down. “We—my mom and my sister and I—lived in apartments. Mostly. I think we might have lived in half of one house for a few months when we were in Wisconsin.”

  “Wisconsin?” Walt lowered his body carefully, hoping the wood wouldn’t groan as it bore him. He turned his knees to accommodate the narrow space between the couch under him and the coffee table. “Hope it wasn’t winter.”

  “It was.” She laughed to herself, a little sad sound she turned into her shoulder. “I was fourteen, and had acne, braces, a bad perm, and was very, very chubby. And yes, it was horrible. After I finished my MBA, I turned down a very good offer from a company in Minnesota, much better financially than the one I had from ThinkMine. I don’t like being cold.”

  “It snows here.” Walt cocked his eyebrow at her. He liked her riled up and with her feathers ruffled much more than sad over a history she’d had no choice in living.

  “True,” she said, brightening. “But not like that. It melts here. There it…it just goes on and on for months.” She stood suddenly and Walt followed, the long-ago lessons in manners his granny had taught him propelling him to his feet. Erin sauntered toward the back of the house, pausing once she was in the next room to glance over her shoulder at him.

  To a lot of people this little house would probably be an inexpensive rental—an old millworker’s house down one of Callahan’s original tree-lined streets that someone had bothered to renovate with a little care so it looked good again. He looked at the room, at Erin, with new eyes.

  The first house she’d ever lived in.

  “I wasn’t sure how you wanted it, so I brought some sweetener,” she said, re-entering, carrying two teacups. With saucers. “I’ve got some popcorn going in the microwave.”

  She looked happy. Comfortable. Like he’d seen Claire look when he visited her and Paul at their home during the week, without the crowds of people turning up for one of Area 51’s afterparties. Seeing Erin content and holding a delicate piece of something that looked like doll’s china out to him stirred up feelings he’d rather stay put to rest.

  Walt accepted the tea, the cup and saucer fumbling around a little in his big hand.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?” he parroted, and looked back to the steam rising off of his tea. “Oh what?”

  “You thought I meant the other tea.”

  “I didn’t know there was other—I mean there’s different flavors, and there’s that herbal stuff that Claire always drinks—”

  “No, you meant iced tea.” She reached for the cup and took it away from him. “Or sweet tea. That’s what you say down here. In the South it
’s sweet tea, right? I’ll get you something else.” She turned, starting for the kitchen again.

  How many times had she done this? Enough to understand living in different places meant learning the little differences, and knowing that learning them could help her fit in. The idea of her always trying so hard, and her little teacups and saucers, and the carefully ordered living room of her first house made Erin come into full bloom, right before his eyes.

  Screw good behavior. He wanted her.

  “I have apple juice…and mil—”

  Before she could finish, Walt crossed the living room in three long strides. He had to have his hand under the full curve of her ass and get her against him as quick as possible. He needed to taste Erin, and all the flower- and spice-smelling, soft, clean space that belonged to her could only be made better with her lips and her scent and her pressed into him.

  He held on to her arm as he leaned down, pulling her with him as he reached blind behind her, their kissing more important than finding a place to settle the cup sloshing hot tea over his hand. Erin’s mouth opened, her tongue found Walt’s, and a sweet girl’s sigh rose from her throat just as the plate landed on something that sounded solid to his ear. His fingers just made it to the slope between her ear and shoulder when something crashed to the floor behind them.

  “Damn,” he growled, half out of frustration from the lost sensation of Erin’s lips pressed against his as her body curved into him, and half-pissed at himself over causing something small and probably important to her to break. Looking over her shoulder to survey the damage, Walt guided her away from the shards of china surrounded by a puddle of tea. When he looked back to Erin, he expected a pair of knitted eyebrows and a heavy glare.

  He found her almost as he’d left her: eyes half-lidded and round, lips still open.

  “I’m sorry, Erin—your cup…”

  “It’s okay. I’ve got nineteen more tea cup and saucer sets,” she said, completely sincere, and pulled Walt back into another kiss.

  “Wait, you count your cups?” He couldn’t help laughing against her lips.