The Lonely Hearts 06 The Grunt 2 (28 page)

He thrust into her again.  This time with more power. 

She clawed the dresser with her nails and screamed out. 

Pulling out, almost to the very tip of his manhood, he focused on her body.  “This is what’s real, Daisy,” he said, pushing all the way back down inside of her again. The slap of skin against skin echoed through the room and her wetness splashed against his thighs.  He groaned as his balls tightened.  “This is all that matters,” he said, voice strained. 

She tossed her head back, black wet hair falling over her shoulders, mouth open in ecstasy and bucked against him, begging for more as he planted his prosthetic leg and good foot firmly in the carpet.   Gripping her hips, he gave her what she wanted.  Pounding hard into her body, he watched himself in the mirror, pumping deep as he could go, as hard as he could.  Her voice vibrated as she moaned.  With one arm extended back to brace her hand against his arm, she held on as he unleashed powerful thrusts into her.  Over and over again, he pumped into her without a single other thought, until they both reached a violent, loud climax at the exact same time. 

Her scream finally ceased, but she was stupefied by the orgasm.  That was by far the best that she had ever had in her young age and it was given by a man that she didn’t even know. 

Daisy fell against the dresser, refusing to look at the mirror or him as he pulled carefully out of her.  Her body convulsed and her skin was beet red.  Heaving and trying to get her breath, she closed her eyes in embarrassment. 
I should have left when I started to
, she thought to herself.     

Gavin looked at her, leaning against the dresser in a completely weakened state and bent to kiss her.

“Don’t,” she said, balling up her fists.

Gavin stepped back. “Did I hurt you?” he asked, concerned. 

Daisy rose up and smoothed her hands over her hair.  “No,” she said, inhaling a breath.  In a state of confusion, she scanned the room, grabbed her panties and shorts and went over to the edge of the bed to slip them on. 

Gavin blew out a breath.  “What then?” he asked, watching her curiously.

Daisy stood up and pulled her shorts all the way up on her thighs.  Zipping her pants, she bent down and grabbed her shoes.  “I just wonder how that would have felt if you had felt it too,” she said, looking over at his guns intentionally.  “If you could feel anything.”

Gavin stood naked, still wearing his condom, still sweating but did not say a word.  Had he just allowed himself to be that transparent? 

Daisy waited for an answer; when she saw that he would not give one, she gave a cynical laugh.  “Jake?” she said, snatching her keys off the nightstand.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“Go fuck yourself,” Daisy said, storming out of the door and slamming it behind her. 

Gavin scratched his head.  Stunned by the woman’s outburst, he shook his head and went to the door to make sure it was locked. 

Women. 

Looking at his watch, he grabbed the remote, turned on the television and headed in the shower. 

Great, now he only had 30 minutes to get to his next appointment.

Chapter 22

"And like the old Soldier in that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old Soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the sight to see that duty."

-
        
General Douglas MacArthur

Before dusk broke the horizon, David Lawless had already been up for a couple of hours.  Only he hadn’t been running or working out, watching news or studying. Today, he was doing something much more important.  Grasping the top of the headboard with one hand and holding up Kelly’s long refined leg with the other, he slammed into her body one slow thrust at a time.  Sweat poured from his face down onto her breasts as he bit down on his lip fighting the sincere desire to fill her with his seed.  His body glowed against the dim candlelight on the nightstand beside three bottles of champagne.  Music played in the background.  Soft red rose petals covered the bed.  The sound of a woman screaming throughout his loft apartment and beyond the confines of the door were pronounced and undeniable. 

But David didn’t care.  He didn’t care if he woke up the entire neighborhood, if the police came knocking, if the fire department kicked down the door, he was going to make love to this woman until he had his fill.  Only, so far, even after five times, he couldn’t get enough. 

Kelly’s dark brown skin gave dramatic contrast to his white sheets.  He stroked her face, running a finger from her cheek to her mouth, then inserting the digit to watch her suck on it slowly. 

The blood raced through his veins as he felt that familiar strain again.  Seeing his face tense, Kelly locked her leg around his shoulder and pulled away from his finger.  “Don’t you dare slow down,” she ordered. 

“Don’t you dare move,” he said, eyes blazing with intense seduction.

She held on to him, fighting back her own orgasm, but his beautiful virile body made it difficult to resist.  A wave of heat rushed over her body and suddenly shock waves caused her to curl her toes and shake uncontrollably.

“Yes!” she screamed out.  “Yes! Yes!”

In her own ecstasy, she had not noticed that the very sight of her pleasure had sent David over the threshold and his seed spewed into the condom. 

Breathing hard, he wiped a hand over his high and tight and looked down at her with a loving grin.  “What was that?  Number four?”

“Number five,” Kelly said, pulling him to her to kiss his lips.  “I love you.”

He studied her face in silence.  “I love you,” he said, rolling over on his side to look up at the ceiling.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, detecting something in his tone.

David reached behind him and tucked his pillow.  “I just realized something.”

“What’s that?” she asked, still too weak to move.

“Tonight’s going to be too late,” he said, pushing himself up in the elevated queen-sized bed.

Now Kelley was curious.  “Too late for what?” she asked, turning toward him on her side.

Reaching over on the nightstand, he pulled open the drawer and pulled out a box.  He turned to her with the small blue box in his hand and smiled.  “I know how you hate traditional.”

She looked at the box without saying a word.

“And you know how I love traditional.  I was going to do this in front of my folks at dinner tonight on one knee and flowers, but I know your style. You like privacy.  You like intimacy.”  He hiked his brows. “In a way, right now at this very moment seems perfect.” 

Kelley pulled her eyes from the box in shock. 

“David,” she said speechless.  Putting her hand over her mouth, she sat up beside him, resting her back up against the tall headboard. 

He sat up in the bed and took her hand.  “I’m a man that knows what I want in this world, and I don’t settle for anything less.  I knew that I wanted to be a Marine from the time that I could pretend.  I knew that I wanted to be blessed to have a family like my father and a wife that I could cherish, like he cherishes my mother.  But I never imagined that I’d find someone as beautiful and amazing and smart as you.”  He bit his bottom lip.  “This tour was hard for me, but not as hard as it was for others.  I made a promise to myself to go after everything that I want and not to stop until I have it.  Well, outside of being the Commandant of the Marine Corps, I want you. I only want you.  I want a wife that I can come home to every night, raise a family with, someone who will be there by my side from the day that we walk down the aisle to the day that we die, not because it is expected but because it’s what we want.”  His bedroom eyes gazed up at her, expecting for her to be in joyful tears, but he was surprised to see that she was grimacing like she was going to be physically ill. 

“David, I can’t marry you,” Kelly said in a matter-of-fact tone.  Gently, she pulled her hand away, but the residue of rejection still permeated the room. 

David was confused.  “Did I miss something?” he asked, pulling the cover over his exposed lap. There was no way he was going to be rejected butt ass naked. 

Kelly shook her head as she tried to put into words what he had just said.  “You want a wife that you can come home to
every night
. You want a wife that cooks and cleans and throws elegant parties off the shore and wears fucking Prada suits to pick out groceries.” She laughed at the thought.  “You want to be the Commandant of the Marine Corps and sit in back rooms of parties smoking cigars with the rest of the Boy’s Club in your perfectly squared away dress blues and your chest full of ribbons.”

So far David didn’t see what the problem was.

Kelly put her hand on her chest.  “I want to be Commandant.  I want a long, successful career in the Marine Corps. I’m a
lifer
,” she said with conviction. “I knew that I wanted to be a Marine when I was five years old.  I turned down,
I don’t know how many
jobs in the civilian world to join the military.” Her brows furrowed.  “The truth is I’ll never be there when you get home.  I’ll be off on some assignment.  The kids, while beautiful, will spend most of their lives with the nanny and eventually you’ll divorce me because you’ll resent the fact that we’re more than just similar like people say, we’re the same person, David.  Therefore, you’ll have no choice but to compete with me, and no matter who wins, we’ll both lose.”

David held the box in his hands in silence.  This wasn’t what he had expected.  How had he missed all the signs? How had he not known that this wasn’t what she wanted?  He swallowed hard and took his gaze off the end of the bed. “I’m very sorry that I misread you all this time,” he said, clenching his jaw.  He looked at her now with a mix of pain and disappointment. “I thought when you said that you loved me…”

Kelly reached over and drew his face in with her hands. Kissing him on his lips, she took a deep breath.  “I do love you, very much.  And that’s why I can’t allow myself to let you make this decision.  Hearing you profess what you want in a wife makes me understand how much I’m not the one for you.”  She released him and pushed her head against his.  “Please try to understand.”

David didn’t. He reached back over to the nightstand and put the ring away.  Closing the drawer, he realized that she hadn’t even ask to look at the two-carat solitaire diamond from Tiffany’s.  He shook his head.  It hurt, but she was right.
She was no housewife.
 

Without another word, he jumped out of the bed and slipped on his boxers.  With a flick on the computer, he turned off the music and headed toward the bedroom door. 

“Where are you going?” she asked, pulling the cover over her body.

David turned to her and smiled.  “I’m going to the kitchen to fix us our last breakfast.”  He winked at her. “I might not know much else, but I know how you like your eggs.”

***

Today was turning out to be a pretty shitty day.  Brett didn’t like hospitals, and he didn’t like clinics.  Unfortunately, in the last four hours, he had been to both.  The appointment with the Navy Hospital on base early that morning hadn’t turned out like he expected. 

According to the team of doctors who crowded around the room in their white coats and green smocks staring at him like he was a circus freak, he would need an additional surgery to fix his knee and there would still be permanent damage. So the pins that were in there now would be there forever.  The good news was that his shoulder had healed up well and so had his broken ribs.  But for all the good news that they were spouting off, no one told him, regardless of how many times he asked, if he would be transferred back to Recon out of the Wounded Warrior Battalion after he was healed. 

Instead, they all gave the same generic answer with painted on smiles.  “Let’s just get you healed up first, and we can focus on that after.  This is going to be a long process.  Blah, blah, blah.”  He was so sick of hearing that. 

For the time being, he was pulled out of his hard plaster cast and given the more manageable walking boot he had been fitted for a week ago.  But he still had to use the crutches, at least for a while. 

“Stand on the crutches. Put your bad foot on the floor, lightly. Lean your body weight on until it hurts. Then walk like that, partial weight bearing. When this becomes easy, lean on it more, until you can dispense with the crutches,” the doctor had ordered while making Brett do it a few times to watch his technique.

Brett thought the entire set up was bullshit.  Why did he need a doctor to tell him how to walk when he had been doing it for 35 years just fine?  Still, like a good Marine, he practiced a few times, quietly brooding, until they were satisfied with his mobility. 

He didn’t care.  Whatever it took.  The point was that he had been in this damn thing for eight weeks and he was more than ready to be on his own two feet and back in the gym.      

When he came back out into the waiting room, Courtney had seemed thrilled. She lit up like a Christmas tree when he walked over to her, although when he had left her their earlier, she had sulked.  She wanted to hear what the doctors had to say first hand, but he knew that if she came in there with him, she’d be advocating for him to retire. 

That simply wasn’t happening.

Now after being asked a million questions by his wife in the car about what the doctors had said to him during his visit, he was sitting in a CDX laboratories about to move one step closer in this case to identifying Cameron’s biological father. 

The original court order had been set for weeks before, but Mr. Benson had filed for a continuance based upon his clients “fragile physical state.” He even brought official records and statements from the base to substantiate his claim. The Court had bought the argument hook line and sinker and gave Brett a few more weeks to get the test completed.  At the time, that little breathing room seemed like a lifetime away.

Well, a
few weeks
had passed quickly.  And here he was.  He looked around the clinic at the men and women waiting and felt instantly embarrassed.  Ducking his head, he put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. 

I don’t belong here
, he thought to himself. 
I never cheated once.   I was always a good father and a good husband, and this is what it got me.

“Black,” a woman called out as she stepped out of the door and waved for him to follow her.

He took a deep breath, grabbed his crutches, stuck them under his arms and meandered across the floor for everyone to gawk at before finally disappearing with her behind the large door.

The older black woman in pink flower scrubs walked him to a small room. “If you come in here, Stacey will be right in to see you.”  She looked up at him with a small ounce of sympathy.  “You can have a seat over in the corner.”

“I’d rather stand,” Brett said, stepping inside of the small room.   He looked around nervously. 

She had been doing this a long time and picked up on his angst.  “Can I get you a cup of water or something, hon?”  Stepping in the room with him, she pulled a napkin off the table and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” he said, taking it. 

“I promise it won’t hurt. It’s just a quick swab on the inside of the cheek,” she explained.

“It’s going to hurt more than you know,” Brett said, wiping his brow. 

***

Courtney wanted to scream.  She wanted to pull the car over and just fucking scream until there was no more air left in her body.  But instead, she kept her eyes on the road and drove to her mother’s house in silence, trying not to feed off the negative energy that Brett had been given off since he rolled out of bed this morning. 

Turning up the radio a little louder, she cut her eyes at him once and turned down the street to her parent’s house while he sat looking out of the window like he wanted to be anywhere but with her.

Feeling her millisecond glare, he looked over her way just in time to see her turn her head.  “What are we going over here again for?” he asked, turning down the radio.

“Mom said that we were all having dinner at David’s request.  I guess it’s his last one for a while since he’s back at the base.”

              “Lucky him,” Brett said, wishing that he could snatch his boot off. His toes were itching and all that he could do was wiggle them. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Courtney snapped.