The Hardest Cut, page 23
“It’s a slippery slope. You have a piece of cake, then the next day you’re putting milk in your coffee, then you have dressing on your salad, and suddenly you’re up three pounds. It’s easier to keep it off than to have to lose it. I’ve had to be really careful since I drank so much at the party at my house.” I remembered talking to him after all those drinks and suddenly wished I hadn’t mentioned that night.
“That party was weeks ago,” he noted, but I just shrugged again. “I think you’re a little hard on yourself.”
“The Woodsmen dancer uniform isn’t very forgiving, either. But sometimes…sometimes I just want a burger. And chocolate cake, too, even though I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday.”
“So what’s wrong with turning twenty-five?” he asked me again.
“Doesn’t it seem awfully old?”
He laughed and put his arm around my shoulders. “No, it seems like you have a lifetime ahead of you.”
“I’m the oldest person at the Woodsmen cheerleader practices, besides the coaches,” I pointed out.
“I’m the oldest person sitting on this beach right now. So what?”
“Maybe I should stop dreading my birthdays,” I said slowly. “But as my mom always says—”
“If this is going to be another comment about your shelf life or expiration or whatever, I don’t want to hear it,” Ben interrupted me. “It took me a while to interpret everything you said to me at your party, but that idea made me pretty angry. Do you seriously think that?”
I nodded. “It’s true, Ben. Just like a football career, looks are gone pretty quickly, and they won’t last at all without a lot of work and some good luck, too.”
“That’s only important if how you look is the only measure of you. Why is that the most important thing?”
“Everybody has something, don’t they? Something that sets us a little apart? Like Hallie, and how smart she is and determined and generous. Or like you, how you’re able to make someone a better football player, but more important, how wonderful you are with Tessa, so patient and sweet. And how you listen to what people say, really listen. And how hard you work at everything, and how you take care of other people, like me with my stupid ankle, and…and you have a lot of good qualities.” I’d noticed so many things, millions of things, that made him wonderful.
“You make me feel about ten feet tall. Thank you for saying that.”
“It’s all true, all of it.” A gust of wind stirred my hair and Ben’s arm pulled me a little closer.
“You know, I always thought of myself as a football player. When my career was over after my injury, I wasn’t sure what I had left.”
“Maybe you started out as a guy but you sure went beyond, didn’t you?”
“Why can’t you do that? You already have,” he told me. “You’re not just a collection of body parts. You’re the woman who’s so determined to succeed that she danced on an injury that would have kept most people from walking. And you’re loving, so loving with Tessa. My daughter is a different little girl now because of how you’ve cared for her. Here.” He carefully dabbed at my eyes with his sleeve. “You’ve changed her life, Gaby. Both our lives. You make my ugly house feel warm and welcoming just by being in it. I can’t wait to come home and see you there. Tessa runs to me and you smile and it feels…that’s how coming home should feel.”
“Really?”
“Really. None of that depends on how you look or on how little you eat, which bothers me a lot. Maybe you could go and talk to the team nutritionist and figure out a better way. Would you, if I could set that up?”
I bit my lip. “I guess. Maybe.” It was kind of scary to think about changing anything, because I’d always had a lot of discipline about my diet. I didn’t want to lose control.
“Maybe becoming a Woodsmen dancer isn’t the best thing for you,” Ben mentioned.
“What?” I jerked away from where I’d been snuggling up against his side. “You mean, you don’t want me to make it?”
“I want you to, because you want it so much. But does it make you happy? Are you enjoying it, or are you anxious and worried about it?”
“I’ll enjoy it a lot if I make the squad,” I answered, but I felt almost nauseated when I considered the cuts that would happen in the coming week. “And it would have made my dad so proud! I have a plan that I’ll tell my mom that she has to watch just one Woodsmen game, and there I’ll be dancing on TV. She would think I looked really beautiful…” No, she’d probably tell me that TV added ten pounds and she could see a lot of jiggle when I did the tumbling passes. I sighed. “I started the try-outs thinking I needed to make the squad to prove something to myself, to prove I could still do something worthwhile.”
“You do that every day at my house. You don’t need some weird orange outfit to prove anything.”
“You don’t like the dancers’ uniform? It’s iconic!” I protested, shocked.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not a huge fan of orange. But don’t tell anybody at the stadium, ok?”
I laughed. “I can keep a secret.” Oh, gravy. I felt that terrible clench in my stomach again, because I was keeping another secret from Ben: the secret that I was an adulterer like his wife. “Ben, I should…I have…” I should tell him. I had to tell him.
But he had bent to put his face near my neck. “What perfume is this?”
“I don’t wear perfume.” I felt his nose brush against my ear and his breath against my skin.
“You smell so good. Sometimes I can smell it in the house, too. Like a flower.”
“Oh, it’s just soap…” He was definitely nuzzling me now. His lips whispered down my neck and kissed the hollow of my collarbone. “It’s this gardenia stuff but it’s expensive so I only use a little…Ben?”
“Gaby.” He pulled me against his chest and cupped his other hand around my cheek, tilting my face to look me in the eyes. I watched his get closer and flutter closed as he kissed me, just once, just softly. He pulled away a little but I put my own hand at the nape of his neck to draw him back. So he kissed me again, deeper, his tongue now touching mine and my breath catching somewhere in my throat. It seemed to go on and on, just kissing and holding each other there on the beach beneath the big moon that had risen over the lake.
“We should go in,” he murmured. But his mouth was on my neck again, and I felt his teeth gently nip my ear. He moved my head to give himself better access to the other side, and I couldn’t help a little moan. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like this, if I ever had before. Like my skin was barely holding me together. Like I wanted to shove him onto his back in the sand and rip off his clothes and put my hands and my lips and my tongue—
“Gaby?” a faraway voice called from the direction of the house. “Ben?”
“We should go back in.”
“Yes,” I mumbled, pushing my mouth back to his. “Sorry, yes,” I sighed, and pulled away. “Yes, let’s go to the house.”
“It’s cold water, right?” he asked me, pointing to Lake Michigan.
“You haven’t felt it yet? Yes, very cold!”
“Great. I’ll be right back.” He waded right up to his knees and then dunked his head as I watched with my mouth hanging open. “I needed to cool down,” Ben explained when he came up the beach to where I sat.
He reached and pulled me to my feet, and like I usually did, I put my weight on my left side. “Walking in the sand is a little difficult,” I admitted. “I’m still not totally steady on this particular surface.”
“That’s fine,” Ben remarked. “I’m happy to help.” And he picked me up, holding me to his chest. My arms immediately went around his neck and I remembered the last time he’d carried me, when I’d tried to keep myself stiff and away from his body. This time, I couldn’t help myself from snuggling right in, close enough to kiss away the water droplets from the soft skin under his chin and around his ear. I shouldn’t have, and I knew it. I shouldn’t have had my lips anywhere near Ben Matthews, not with my history and with his, not with the fact that as a Woodsmen employee, I was supposed to stay away. With him as my boss, it was just a bad idea. And not with him vowing that he didn’t ever want to get married again, or even date, and I had just figured out that I wanted those things for myself.
But I kept kissing him because I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help how I felt about Ben.
“Honey, you’re undoing the calming effects of that cold water.” He stopped on the path. “Do you want to come over? I mean, come back to my house, later tonight?”
My mouth went so dry that I couldn’t swallow. I certainly couldn’t speak to say yes, but I tilted my chin up and down and nodded. I saw Ben’s white teeth flash as he smiled in the light from the big moon that filtered through the pine trees. I did want to, and gravy, this was probably another bad idea. But he bent to kiss me and—
“Gaby?” Hallie called, and she barreled around from behind one of the trees and directly into me and Ben, nearly sending all of us over. “Oh, there you are! Tessa wanted you.”
“I’m coming,” Ben answered. “But I may need to go into the lake again, first.”
“No, I mean she was asking for Gaby,” Hallie explained. “Something happened to one of her braids, and apparently only you can fix it,” she told me, and laughed. “Tessa is so cute. We’ve all been playing and Gunnar just said to me that he hopes that we’ll have a—” She stopped mid-sentence. “Nothing,” she finished. “Nothing! Just come on back to the house.” She turned and took off toward their deck.
“Hallie! Hallie Holliday, stop right there!” I hollered. “Ben, go! I think she just admitted that she’s having a baby. Catch her!” I kicked my good leg in the air, urging him into forward progress. “Run! Now!” I demanded. He started laughing and neighing like he was a horse, but we did head off in hot pursuit. And I got a wonderful present, which was that I was going to be an aunt again, and Marley found out that she was going to be a big sister. We celebrated with another slice of the birthday cake and Ben fed me a bite. It was delicious.
∞
I tried to take my own advice. Hadn’t I told Marley to stop staring in the mirror, that Cavin had liked her when she’d come to school in her grubbiest clothes and with her teeth unbrushed? Well, I was definitely not forgoing my oral hygiene, but I tried to reassure myself that it was the same way with Ben. He’d seen me right after practice, glowing a lot and with my hair not at its smoothest. He’d seen me with a disgustingly swollen ankle that he’d treated with ice himself. He’d seen me with my nose running like a faucet due to a sad commercial for the Humane Society. I’d cried so hard watching it that I hadn’t been able to speak, and he hadn’t minded my puffy eyes, either. He’d also promised that he would adopt one of those poor, unfortunate dogs.
I started humming the song from the commercial. Whoops, here I went again. I folded a tissue and caught the tears before they rolled out of my eyes. As soon as I moved out of my condo where pets weren’t allowed, I was going to adopt five of those dogs myself. No, I had to stop thinking about the dogs!
Ben. I needed to think about him, because I was going over to his house, and he was going to see all of me. I’d taken another shower and done a very, very careful shave of the areas that no one had been looking at for a long time, and I’d used a little more than a capful of the gardenia bodywash that he liked. But Ben was the one who had just given me a big talk about how I was more than a collection of body parts, wasn’t he? So I didn’t have to worry, I told myself firmly. No reason to worry.
But still, the habits of twenty-four years of living were hard to break (I didn’t count my first year, when my mom had done my grooming for me). I carefully studied my pores in the magnifying mirror and removed one extra hair from my left eyebrow. I considered more blush, too, because I was very pale, but all I had to do was think about Ben kissing me and suddenly my face was flooded with color. Way too much, in fact, so I added extra powder to tamp that down.
Maybe I was more than body parts, but my body was what he’d be seeing tonight, more of it than even my dance clothes showed off. And I wanted this to be wonderful between us, for him to enjoy it so much that he would decide that dating and marriage could be in his future. I wanted to make him look past my past, too.
Well, then my body parts and what I did with them were going have to be extra special. Tonight was going to have to be so mind-blowing that he wouldn’t even care when I told him about Shep. Maybe after tonight, Ben wouldn’t think twice when I explained that now I did want to get married and did want kids. I’d have to get him out of his head with ecstasy, so that he’d be willing to go after those things with me, too.
Ok, so all I had to do was use my powers of sexual persuasion to change his mind about his future as a single guy and also alter his views on morality. I watched my face get pale again in the mirror. Sure, no pressure. Not to mention that since he was a Woodsmen coach, I wasn’t supposed to…maybe that was a problem for another day, because the ones for tonight were big enough.
I wasn’t even that good at the sex stuff, I didn’t think. I’d slept with a few of my boyfriends—not too many, because I always heard my mom’s voice telling me not to give away my precious gift since I’d never get it back, and also how no man wanted a well-used wife. It had been fine when I’d done it. Nothing earth-shattering like Hallie sometimes mentioned, but fine. And “fine” wouldn’t be enough for tonight! How would I ever pull this off?
I thought about the last time I’d been close to this particular act, but I then tried to forget it. With Shep, it had always been very quick to finish, and then my exits from our motel rooms had come even quicker. As in him telling me, “Ok, Gaby, it’s time to go. You first and then I’ll follow in a while so no one sees us leave together.”
But our final episode had been really bad, because Shep hadn’t even been able to, well, perform, and he’d told me that I just wasn’t doing it for him. That had actually been a problem a lot for us, which didn’t make me feel any better about my chances of swaying Ben tonight with my ultra-sexy moves. Oh, good gravy. What was I doing?
My phone lit up and I looked at the screen.
“Are you coming?”
I looked at the words and then typed, “Yes.” Ok, yes. I was.
Ben was waiting on the porch when I stopped in front of his house, and he came down the steps to my beautiful, Oscar-green car. “Hi,” I said as I got out, but he just kissed me. He backed me up against that green paint and kissed me, and kissed me, and picked me up so that my legs went around him and he held me under my butt to get me even closer.
“Hi,” he answered, but he was now moving his hips against mine, and it felt so good that I was already gasping. “Let’s go inside. Quietly,” he reminded me. He slid me down slowly to stand next to the car. “Can you walk?”
No, but not because of my ankle. He had just kissed me breathless and we weren’t even in the house yet. I was still wearing my coat. “Yes, I’m fine!” I panted. “Yes, let’s go!”
I hadn’t spent any time in Ben’s room beyond when I’d gone in looking for Tessa when we played hide and seek. “Beautiful views from the master bedroom!” I had planned for the listing, but that was about as much as you could say for the low-ceilinged room with the strange stain on the wall, one tiny closet, and no attached bathroom. None of those features mattered to me tonight, because my attention was focused only on one piece of furniture: Ben’s big bed.
He walked me to it until the back of my knees bumped up against it, then he helped me remove my coat, and then clothes started flying. I really hadn’t needed to put so much thought into what I wore, except that I should have picked something with fewer zippers and fasteners and more Velcro for easy removal. But soon enough, we were both down to our undies and lying on the bed next to each other, our bodies pressed so tightly that there wasn’t a space between us.
Ben’s hands wandered down to my hip and he rubbed, and then to my butt which he also rubbed, and then to my thigh, which he pulled over his hip, opening me to him. “Tell me what you like,” he whispered.
“I like…I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?” He picked up his head, a silhouette in the dark room. “How do you like to be touched?”
“Um, I don’t…I haven’t given that much thought. What you’re doing is great,” I encouraged him. “I’ve really liked everything a lot so far.”
He laughed quietly. “We haven’t even started.”
Maybe not, but I was already more primed and ready than I’d ever felt in the past. “I don’t know what to say,” I told him. “I can’t really do all that sexy talking because I don’t like to say most of those words. It’s just not very nice language.”
Ben laughed again, this time as he kissed my neck. It made a very, very pleasant vibrating sensation there, making me think of other areas where a little vibration…
“Let’s just try things out,” he suggested. “You can show me, and I’ll show you.”
I nodded and he used that movement to adjust my chin and find more places on my neck that made me shiver. And I looked for his, discovering a spot just above his collarbone that made him say, “Mmmm,” and grab my butt to pull me even closer. When he did that, we rubbed together more in our private regions, which made me say, “Mmmm,” too.
“Like that, honey?” Ben did it again, circling his hips against me.
“Yes, just like that,” I encouraged him, my voice choking. “Just like that, please!”
He laughed more, and I did, too. I hadn’t known that sleeping with someone could be so funny. No, not funny—fun. He touched my breast and I gasped and then leaned into his hand. “Tell me,” he murmured.
“Yes, but—can you rub—”
Ben unhooked my bra with a very practiced move and it joined my clothes on the floor. He swept his knuckles over my nipples and I nodded. “Yes! But also, more.”
“More,” he repeated, and used his fingers now to squeeze and softly pull. “And more,” he added, and put his mouth there to suck and tease with his tongue. He rolled us so that I lay on top, and he put my elbows over his shoulders so that everything was just dangling right there in his face. Then he moved back and forth, flicking his tongue, using his hands to cup and massage. “You like it when I touch your breasts,” he noted.
