9 Letters (28 page)

“A date,” I said.
“Going on a date.”

“That’s good,”
Juan said, brightening. “Everything in its time. First date?
Second date?”

“Probably the thirtieth,”
I said. “It’s been three months or something.”

“Something casual, then.”

“Something casual.”

“She’s found a good
man, if she’s found someone who puts as much thought into the
thirtieth date as the first one.”

“I hope so.”

She met me at my place, and I
presented her with the flowers, and only then did I think it through,
realize we weren’t ending up at her place, so the flowers I’d
bought for her were really for me.

She realized it quicker than I
did, because when I handed her the bouquet she laughed, happy. Then I
laughed too.

She took the flowers and came in,
Muffin alongside her without a leash. Rae was familiar with the
place, already, and she found two vases, cut the stems on the flowers
and put them in water on the table.

The letters weren’t there,
not anymore. They were in my room, in a neat stack in the same drawer
where I kept those wedding photos. They were safe, and close by if I
needed them, but resting quietly just out of sight—right where
they needed to be.

“How much time do we have?”
Rae asked. She stepped up close to me, put her arm around my waist. I
pulled her in tight against me, and her hand ran up along my back,
her nails digging into my skin.

“Our reservation isn’t
for another hour and a half,” I said.

“Whatever will we do until
then?”

I grinned.

Rae was inexhaustible.

We crept up the stairs, hand in
hand, trying to escape before King and Muffin noticed we’d
gone. We failed, of course, and had to get the bedroom door shut
before the terrier and the bloodhound came in after us.

Only in bed, Rae liked being told
what to do. It had taken a little getting used to—Emily had
always been too wild for something like that, and Maggie liked being
in charge, even when she had me act like I was. But Rae made it clear
right off that it excited her when I took control, that she was
comfortable saying no if I tried something she didn’t like, and
that she wanted me to dominate her.

“Strip,” I said.

She did.

Her fingers went to the buttons
on her shirt, her fingers that had brought me so much pleasure. Her
nails had french tips, white against her white shirt, then a moment
later, white against her white skin.

“Your skirt,” I said.
She slipped out of it, leaving her in her sweet cotton panties.

“Lean back against the
wall,” I said.

She did. I stripped down nude,
watching her hand touch herself outside her underwear while I took
off my clothes. By the time I took off my briefs, I was fully erect.
She saw me and her eyes went dark and hungry. I stepped up against
her, pressed myself against her, and let my cock rub up against the
front of her for just a moment.

“Do you want my mouth on
you?” I said.

I was getting better at dirty
talk. I hadn’t mastered it yet, not like she had, but I was
getting the idea.

“Yes,” she said.

I knelt down in front of her, my
mouth poised right in front of her pussy. “Are you sure?”

“
Yes
,”
she sighed.

I pressed my middle finger up
against her pussy, then two fingers against her bare skin next to her
panties, pulling her lips apart.

“Well if you’re not
sure,” I said.

“You’d better start
fucking me with your mouth and fingers, Luke Cawley, or we’ll
be late for dinner.”

I grabbed her panties on the
sides, at her hips, then pulled them down fast. She smelled amazing.
I licked the length of her pussy, lingering as I ran my tongue up
past her clit.

“How do you taste so good?”
I asked.

“Put your fingers in me,”
she said.

I did. She moaned, right off, and
I curved my fingers toward her front and started sliding them in and
out.

“Deeper,” she said.

I went in to my knuckles.

“Deeper,” she said.

I pulled my fingers out and stood
up. I took off her bra, and she was naked in front of me, her face
showing a mixture of happiness and lust.

“Lean over the bed,”
I said. “I’ve got a better idea of how to get deeper in
you.”

She did, her full ass presented
to me, her swollen pussy lips showing. I stroked my cock, looking at
her.

“What are you going to do
to me?” she moaned, looking back over her shoulder.

“To start,” I said,
walking up to her, “I’m going to rub my dick up against
your ass.” I did it, as I said it.

“Then I’m going to
get a condom, put it on, and I’m going to fuck you while you
brace yourself against the bed. I’m going to slide my dick all
the way into you, and I’m going to hold you by the hips while I
do with you as I like.”

“Do it,” she said,
letting out a shuddering breath.

I found a condom on the bedside
table, and lube. Lube is another thing Rae had brought into my
life—she knew herself, and she told me what she needed. I was
glad to oblige.

I put lube on my fingers, then
slid them into her. Three fingers this time, which she likes but not
for long. Three fingers into her wet pussy, then I pulled out and put
my cock in.

She gasped, and I gasped with
her.

It wasn’t a good position,
not for the long haul, but sometimes you have sex in certain
positions just because of the idea of it. Because she liked me
leaning down over her back, breathing in her ear while I was inside
her from behind. I put my fingers in her mouth, and she sucked on
them furiously. I matched my rhythm to the speed at which she sucked
on my fingers, and soon I was fucking her with everything I had.

“Get on the bed,” I
told her, then I stepped back away from her.

She climbed onto the bed, got on
her back. I lifted her legs, curled her up into a ball, then slammed
back into her.

“Fast and hard,” she
said.

So I went fast and hard, holding
tight onto her shoulders as I thrust into her. Soon, she was moaning
hard, and I was moaning with her.

She uncurled, let her legs wrap
up against me. I got a spare pillow and put it under her ass, raising
her up to just the right level for me to go deeper into her. I went
at it, fast and hard, and she got her fingers on herself. I held her
down by the shoulders while she rubbed on her clit and I thrust into
her.

“Slower,” she panted.
“Harder.”

I moved to hard thrusts at slower
intervals, and she rubbed herself faster, started breathing quickly
through her mouth. Shallow breaths. Shallow breaths.

I was panting, myself. That girl
could give me a workout.

“I want you to come inside
me,” she said. “Just fuck me. However you want me, just
fuck me.”

I leaned over to kiss her, and
she kissed me back. As I picked up my pace again she started bucking
underneath me, her moans reaching a crescendo and her orgasm wracking
her body. As her pussy tightened around me, hot and slick, I finally
let myself go, giving her everything I had, while my own orgasm built
up. I clenched her shoulders, tight, and kissed her hard as I came.

“I can feel you,” she
said, halfway too breathless to speak. “Even through the
condom, I can feel you.”

I pulled out and we spooned for a
minute, each catching our breath.

“You hungry?” she
finally asked.

“Hell yes.”

By the time we made it the
restaurant, we managed to stop staring at each other all googly-eyed
and happy, and when we were seated we might have even looked
respectable. I had my flannel tucked in, after all. And Rae was in
that skirt. It was knee-length, which has got to count as
respectable.

She leaned across the table, her
eyes alight with mischief as she told me about a new client.

“I guess they don’t
understand what it is I do,” she said. “They said they
wanted a manual for this thing, it’s a blender, I guess, that
you control with your phone.”

“A blender you control with
your phone?”

“Yeah, I don’t really
get the point of it. The world’s first Smart Blender, that’s
their tagline. But the thing is, I can’t write them technical
documentation if I don’t understand it myself, and no one there
will explain it properly. They’ve just let me log into their
transcripts on the building process, expect me to somehow just figure
out how it works.”

“I’m still hung up on
a blender you control with your phone,” I said.

“You tell the app on your
phone what you’ve put into it, and it spins at just the right
speed. Has sensors that lets it stop blending at just the right
time.”

“Why don’t you just
look at it and stop it when it’s blended?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m
not the market for this thing.”

I couldn’t get over it.

“Maybe,” Rae said,
“maybe it’ll be the next GPS. When I got my license, you
just used a map. Seemed good enough. Didn’t even know what I
was missing. The idea of letting your phone tell you where you were
going, that just seemed stupid. But now I barely remember how I lived
without it.”

“Fair enough,” I
said. “But still.”

“I kind of asked the same
thing, when they hired me. But I had to ask it real carefully,
because it doesn’t really matter to me what they’re
making, not really. The good I do for the world, I do for the
shelter. You know that. This stuff just keeps Muffin in dog food, you
know? So I asked them, real carefully, and they told me that
basically, these things come out all the time. You never know what’s
the next thing you can’t live without.”

“I could live without any
of it,” I said.

“I’d rather not,
though,” Rae said.

That might have been a difference
between us. Didn’t matter. It was minor. I learned long enough
ago that something like that, something that doesn’t matter,
you just let it go past you.

“So they expect you to do
all this work but you can’t do it because they haven’t
told you what to do?”

“Basically.”

“That happens to me
sometimes,” I said. “They say ‘build me a shed.’
And I’ll ask what kind of shed. ‘A shed,’ they’ll
say. Then they’re off at work all day, and I’m just
standing around with my tools thinking ‘what the hell do you
want me to build?’“

“Right, because if you
build them a greenhouse and they wanted a place to hang up bicycles,
they’re going to be pissed.”

“And pissed clients, hard
to get them to pay.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Damn, that’s
annoying.” I smiled and she smiled and then I reached across
the table to cup her face and gently ran my thumb over that dimple
high up on her cheek. It was one of my favorite things about her
face. For a moment time stopped, and I watched her drop her eyes and
blush. Then she pulled my hand away, kissed my palm, and picked up
her glass.

“Cheers to employment,
anyhow,” she grinned. We clinked our beers together. “How’s
it going for you, down at the church?”

“Well, my brother, at least
he knows what he wants. We’re redoing the whole office section
of the church. He said the drop ceiling looked awful and he’s
tearing out the fluorescents. Said God’s house shouldn’t
look like God works a 9 to 5 He hates.”

Rae started laughing at that.

The waiter came, took our orders.
I got lasagna. I always got lasagna at Italian places. Pasta and
meatballs, that’s something I could cook at home pretty much as
well as they could. But lasagna, that’s something else. Even
Emily, who could cook a mean lasagna, had said she’d liked it
when other people made her lasagna. It’s a lot of work.

“So we’re still doing
some demolition and planning, but it’s going well. I might
subcontract out some of it to my dad—he’s licensed for a
couple of the things I’m not.”

“Keep it in the family?”

“It’s kind of a big
thing that Mike came to me instead of Dad, actually. That I’m
hiring Dad instead of the other way around. I mean yeah, Mike’s
doing me a favor, and I can use the work. But Mike isn’t the
kind of guy to just throw me a bone. He hired me because he trusts
me.”

“Hell, all my neighbors
have been after me to give them your number.”

Rebuilding her fence had gone
better than I’d thought. When I’d first started building,
once I had the basics down, I pretty much always finished what I
started and made something functional. Sometimes even something
beautiful. But that fence, that had been the first time I’d
looked at an entire project, planned it out, and had its execution go
exactly as I’d expected. I’d put up her fence quickly,
easily. Hadn’t had to cut any corners, hadn’t had any
problem sinking the posts. Everything that went wrong, I’d
anticipated ahead of time, planned contingencies for. And it was a
damn good fence.

“I’m full up on work
till spring, probably. I can only get about a day of work in a week,
you know.”

“Spring, you think?”

“Yeah, I think I’ll
have enough saved by then. Leave Warren’s, go back to full time
contracting.”

“That’s so exciting!”
she said. “You’ll be your own boss again.”

“How about you?” I
asked. “How’s your plan?”

“I had another stress dream
about my application essay,” Rae said. “You know there’re
only thirty veterinary schools in the country? And no shortage of
applicants.”

“Yeah, but you’re
better than any of them. Smarter, too.”

“Nice of you to say it.”

“No, I mean it. So the main
thing that’s standing in your way is an essay? You’ve got
the undergrad degree, you’ve got the experience at the shelter.
So it’s an essay. Rae, how many of those people applying are
professional writers? I bet not too many of them other than you.”

She blushed. It was cute the way
she could blush.