Page 11 of Always Be My Baby

After a thorough inspection, I figured out that the door releasing the ice into the bin stopped opening. The buildup of ice it caused inside the freezing mechanism then kept more ice from being produced.

In the end I manually opened the small door and propped it open with a paper wedge, directing the servers to check the ice levels every time they came back to the server station and to turn the machine off when the bin was full to avoid an icy avalanche onto our floor.

We were simply too busy at the moment for a proper fix.

“Marilee,” Serena said, catching me off guard. “You’re so handy.” She chuckled as if being handy were humorous? “Girard must feel so thankful not to have those ‘honey do’ lists that so many other men are tasked with.” She chuckled again. “Though I read an article that said men secretly like feeling useful around the house. It makes them feel like men or something. Lucky for me because I can’t fix anything.”

My right eye started to twitch and I looked to Lena for providence while fighting off the urge to… to… I was too irritated to come up with some painful zinger on the spot. But Lena reached over to gently squeeze my arm.

“You’re reading too much into it,” she whispered to me alone. Then to Serena she said, “It’s good for women to be able to do things for themselves.” The fake smile she plastered across her face for Serena cemented Lena as the best, best friend a woman could ask for.

Saved by the phone, my cell rang. I had it set up for my office phone to ring in on my cell when I was away from my desk. I answered, relieved to give me an excuse to leave without engaging Serena in any more conversation. I gestured by pointing my finger toward the kitchen to let Lena know we had to walk. She followed, keeping up pace next to me. Once we reached the office, I switched the call back to the office phone. Sometimes I loved technology.

And on that thought I had to laugh, if only in my head, because the man calling was from Diagnostic Technologies. He wanted to rent the extra dining room for a large party.

“We’d be happy to work with you. But as I’m in the process of training an assistant manager, I’m going to hand the phone off to her.”

He made some sort of silly quip before Lena introduced herself and proceeded to figure out a night suitable for his company’s needs. I let her do everything. She needed to know exactly what to do and where to find our schedules, how to access it and how to enter the information.

Before I had the chance to take a breath, Girard’s voice sounded in my earpiece. “Sorry to bother you, sweetheart. But we’ve got a major spill out here that needs to be taken care of.”

Ah, the glamorous life of a restaurateur.

Girard

Hump day. I knew what I’d rather have been doing this morning. Instead Floyd and I arrived home from our extra-long walk. Extra-long and extra cold. If he loved me, he wouldn’t ask to be taken all over the neighborhood through all that heavy, wet snow soaking my boots. It seemed he liked to change the white to yellow. Normally, I loved yellow, too. Not that yellow, though.

He galloped into the living room, where we found Lee sitting on the sofa wrapped up in her favorite quilt reading on her tablet. Whatever the story, it must’ve been funny because she threw her head back laughing. Seeing as she occupied herself with a solitary activity and had Floyd to keep her company, I toed off my soggy boots, hung up my coat, and made my way back to my office after a stop in the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Between Lee and I, given the amount of coffee we consumed every day, we always kept a pot brewing hot and ready so that neither of us ever found ourselves waiting for a steaming mug. Priorities.

I’d come up with a tentative plan concerning where I wanted to take Lee for our getaway, but I’d yet to finalize the plans. It came down to three hotels. In all truthfulness, high-end hotels that cost a boatload to book, but this being our first trip together, it had to be special. What kind of asshole skimped on his girlfriend's first vacation ever? If it wouldn’t ruin the element of surprise by needing to take her to get a passport, and I thought I’d actually get her to go, we’d be on a flight to Rome or Paris. As it stood, with Lee being Lee, this was the best I could come up with. I got lost perusing all the photos each website posted to help me decide which experience I wanted for this particular weekend.

And I couldn’t lie, I got way too caught up in picturing Lee naked in each of those locations. The woman was a vision any time of day, but when I got her underneath me au natural—damn. No words, there were simply no words and apparently no paying attention to the rest of the world around me seeing as I neglected to hear Lee walk into the office until she was rounding my desk. I slammed the laptop shut.Smooth, Girard… real smooth.

She looked at me, a shocked expression on her face. I stared back, smiling, but sweating at the same time because if she caught a glimpse of any of my research, the trip didn’t stand a shot of coming to fruition. Lee needed to see that her people could handle the restaurant in our absence. For this to work, it needed to be a surprise attack. I envisioned a, “Guess what, Lee? We’re leaving now.” That sort of thing.

“You’re watching porn?” she asked.

“I don’t watch porn.”

“All guys watch porn. Don’t they hand it out on like your fifteenth birthday as some sort of rite of passage?”

“Yes. We stand outside shirtless and beat on our chests before we’re presented naked boobies to ogle. I remember it fondly.” Then I wiped a pretend tear from my eye, flinging it away.

Lee cracked up, as I hoped she would. “Okay, well... you slammed the laptop shut pretty fast. In my experience, when guys do that… it’s porn.”

“There could be other reasons.” I thought that would reassure her, but with the way her eyebrows shot up, as if several horrifying thoughts raced through her head at once, I quickly realized my mistake.

“Like what?” she asked, drawing the question out suspiciously.

Damage control. Damage control. “Why are we talking about this when we could be doing something else much better?” I waggled my eyebrows at her. Lee had a thing for the eyebrow waggle and thus, I knew it’d distract her.

She climbed onto my lap, her knees straddling me, wrapped her arms around my neck, and bent in to press her lips to mine. Of all the ways we fit in each other’s lives, this was by far my favorite. Her soft, warm body pressed against mine. I stood, moving my hands to hold her bottom. Lee wrapped her legs around my waist to keep from sliding down and I walked us into the bedroom.

I laid her down on the bed and proceeded to show her exactly why I didn’t need to watch porn. Nothing I could watch on the screen equaled what we did together in this bed or on the sofa, against the wall, leaned over the table. We’d pretty much christened every surface in this entire house at one point or another.

In the back of my mind, I knew we had work to get to, but dammit if I couldn’t get myself to care. I wouldn’t call it a conscious decision, but it was at that point that I slowed things down, drawing out every motion. Every kiss, every nip, every suck, every thrust. Her body clenched around me. Those tiny breath hitches were by far my favorite sex noises Lee made. With every hitch, she opened her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, and arched her back into the mattress, making her press her forehead to mine.

Time slowed down for us. Nothing else in the world mattered aside from her and I losing ourselves in the moment. The feeling. Each other. Her body trembled underneath me. She brought me to the edge of sanity until I couldn’t hold on any longer and finally let go.

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