Page 15 of For a Goode Time Call…
He let go of me and took two steps across the room, pushed at a section of wall—what had looked like a space of bare wall between the loft and the front door was actually the door to the bathroom.
Without his support, I wobbled and swayed. He caught me, pulled me up, and helped me into the bathroom.
I braced myself against the wall, looking at him over my shoulder. “You’re really seeing me at my worst, you know.”
He just laughed. “It’ll make seeing you at your best all the better.”
I shook my head, snorted a laugh. “Nice.”
I shut the door, took care of business with an audible sigh of relief, not even caring if he heard or not. Then, I just had to summon the energy to stand up, pull my pants up, and get out of the bathroom. By the time I’d done this, I was panting. Absolutely zapped.
I sagged in the open doorway, sweating, and feeling like I could collapse at any moment. Ink was in the kitchen, doing something at the stove, humming under his breath—making soup, it smelled like.
I just watched him for a moment.
Why did my chest feel tight? Why did my palms feel tingly? The dull ache way down low didn’t bode well either.
He’d taken care of me, and had been kind, nonjudgmental. He didn’t know me from Eve, but he had brought me to his house, gave me his bed, cleaned up my vomit, made sure I didn’t get dehydrated.
Gah.
Gratitude, that’s all I needed to feel. That’s it.
So, when he turned and saw me, and when his eyes seemed to burn a little brighter at the sight of me, why did that make the tingle at the apex of my thighs shift even worse?
“You look done in,” he said.
“I’ve never felt so weak in my life,” I murmured.
“Bad flu’ll do that to you. I got it real bad one time, couple’a years back. Couldn’t even get out of bed for damned near a week. Juneau was out of town that week; don’t have a phone, no neighbors, and no employees. Thought for sure I was gonna die alone in this fuckin’ thing.”
“Obviously you didn’t.”
“Naw. I basically, just unintentionally, fell out the bed, hit the floor hard enough that I had to replace a few floorboards, and bruised a couple ribs in the process. All that was super awesome with the nasty cough I had, which was bad enough I’d nearly cracked a rib from coughing. I managed to get myself some water, and passed out on the floor. It took two weeks before I could leave the trailer.”
“Trailer?” I looked around. “This is a trailer?”
He nodded. “Yep. Mind, I don’t have a truck to pull it, but I could, if I did. I will, someday. Just pull on out of here, see what there is to see of the world outside of Ketchikan.”
I frowned. “You’ve never left?”
He shrugged. “Been all over Alaska, hunted and fished and hiked and camped and canoed and flown in, on, and over most of the state, but never anywhere else.” He waggled his beard, head tipped to one side. “Well, this one time, when I was maybe sixteen, my uncle and I took his charter fishing boat, one o’those deep-sea ones, and we went way out. Fished our way west over several days. I guess ol’ Uncle Billy was a little in the bottle most of the time, and wasn’t really paying attention to where we were going, and I was just a kid, you know? Suddenly, there was land in view, and big old battleships or cutters or something surrounding us, two of ‘em. They were spoutin’ off at us in Russian.”
“You accidentally sailed to Russia?” I asked, with a laugh.
He nodded. “Yep. Got in a hell of a lot of trouble, too.”
“Can’t they, like, arrest you and take your boat and stuff? Like, really bad, bad trouble?”
“Oh yeah, they can. They were gonna, too. Turns out it was fortunate for me that Billy was blasted off his ass. I could just claim truthfully that I didn’t know where I was going, and he was bombed. Talked ’em into letting me turn the boat around and sail back the way we came.”
“That’s crazy!” I took a step forward, wobbled, meaning to try for the ladder, mere feet away. “I’m gonna fall!”
Ink caught me, burly warm arms cradling me. “Gotcha.”
A moment in time, a pause in reality. His eyes, warm and brown. They made the tingling worse. I’d never felt such a tingle, ever. Like a burn, but all over. Centered down low, between my thighs. A tangible, intense, physical ache, but with a boiling core of emotion. His hands held me, his arms surrounded me. I had to cling to him—my arms around his neck. He lifted me, one-armed, and just held me. My heart thumped, pattered, pounded.
My mouth was fused closed, my tongue seared to the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t speak, but even if I could have, what would I have said?
