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verushka70Been reading through old fics on the old Windows partition of my Linux Thinkpad. Unfinished outnumbers finished probably 2 to 1, maybe 3 to 1. Sigh. Found this from 2009 -- not a good year for me. Based on the time-date stamp of the file, I started this a few months after my mother died. It's not exactly finished. It's not exactly unfinished. It is what it is, I guess, and probably as good as it's going to get. All errors are mine; un-beta-ed.
Ten Times Mike Didn't (And Once He Did)
~14,000 words; one shot; Mike/Nathalie; explicit-ish
She touched him first. It was a simple fact. Every time, she touched him first.
1.
At first he was so lost in a fog of shock and numbness, he didn't notice. Audrey was so sick. Sadie was so tough – and so not. (He couldn't call her on it; he was doing the same damn thing, just three times older and male.) Maddie was bewildered, bereft, pretending in her own little fantasy world. He was supposed to be their rock.
But he wasn't the rock. He was never the rock. Audrey was the rock. He was just the boat that came back to the rock every night and sailed out every morning, the boat that wouldn't know what to do with itself without the rock to tether itself to. But Audrey. And Sadie. And Maddie. Needed. They needed. He hadn't realized how much he needed them not to need him, until they really needed him.
And so he didn't notice Nathalie's warmth. She seemed warm with everyone, and his numbness was a nearly impenetrable layer, a thick glove he wore stiffly, not really feeling the things he touched or came into contact with. He didn't notice the looks she shone on him, the soft break of her smile, her curving her body towards his as they sat next to each other in the folding chairs at the support group. Didn't see the flustered way her eyes met his and then dropped, looking anywhere and everywhere but him, and then, emboldened, back at him.
After they were already well down the road together, he looked back on the very beginning, wondering how he could have been so stupid, how he could have missed the importance of all of Nathalie's tells. They are in his mind, now, trapped in cool, cop detail: he recalls her movements and eyebrows and deepening dimples. They come to him like evidence, like video from a security camera, with no feelings attached, as if something in him merely filed the information away, refusing to invest it with meaning.
The warmth, the current between them came from Nathalie. It sure couldn't have come from him. He felt cold, and dead, and numb. Couldn't remember the last time morning wood had been anything more than a bodily function, like needing to piss. Couldn't remember the last time dealing with it had been more than a genital nose-blowing, relief and release so perfunctory, it was only slightly better than a good belch. He woke in the dark from bizarre sex dreams and REM sleep, Audrey (or an empty bed) and the sound of her irregular breathing (or silence) draining away whatever slight twinge of arousal he had, stripped of even normal physical responses by the enormity of possible dark futures hovering around the corner, more and more certain they were not ifs but whens.
He functioned well enough at work. Work constantly distracted, annoyed, required vigilance. Gave him endless opportunities to redirect powerlessness into anger, to righteously uncoil his rage. Helped him forget who he needed and how impossibly much.
At the support group he was supposed to listen. Be open. Be honest. Share. It helped to hear other people say out loud things he said in his mind and refused to voice. But after a while his thick skin of anger from work abandoned him in the support group. Too many other raw, exhausted people surrounded him. Left in its place was a brittle shell that would crack if he tried to talk; it would crack and let everything out – and everything else in. He couldn't.
One day, it was his turn. He couldn't not talk; he'd come for weeks and said nothing, merely nodded a lot in silent sympathy. People had revealed their stories, some in intimate detail, tragic as his or worse, broken and haunted as they were. Mike had listened, comforted to know that at least he was not alone, that there were other people in his shoes, that there were other people who thought the same bad thoughts he did. For in this group it was okay to complain about one's own burdens, not deferring to the saintly sick one – even if he or she had just died – the person who had been cared for, sometimes for a very long, exhausting, depleting time.
He tried to talk; it was about time. He started. But very quickly he stopped talking, throat working, eyes on the paper cup half-full of shitty coffee that he held in his lap. He tried not to clench it, wanting the need to crush it to be rage. Knew instead it was grief that pushed up from his chest and choked him. He prayed the water brimming in his eyes wouldn't spill over.
Nathalie touched his shoulder. With just that touch, Mike felt her interpose herself between him and everyone else. For a few long, silent moments he swallowed several times and said nothing more while her small hand on his shoulder propped him up. Then someone else began talking.
Just her hand on his shoulder was a rope to a drowning man. In that desperate moment, he hadn't thought at all about her reasons for throwing it.
2.
Mike didn't recall how many meetings it had been before he felt the warm tension between them in the front seat of the car, almost a palpable thing. It had been a number of them, of that he was fairly certain. It was so far beneath the cop radar he'd come to use in nearly all facets of life, and he'd been married / out of practice for so long. She was so much shyer, subtler, hesitant and hopeful.
They were talking about how horrible doctors' appointments were, how overloaded with unfamiliar terminology and lacking in definite answers they were. How you had questions in mind but, faced with white coats, forgot them until you were walking back to where you'd parked. He quietly joked about wanting to choke the doctors sometimes. He knew he was such a completely different person with her (and with Sadie, and Maddie, and Audrey) than he was at work.
Her smile shone on him, and there was the briefest laying of her palm on his upper arm. Then she dropped her hand back into her own lap. As he looked at her hand in her lap, as he watched her nervously pinch a pleat of her skirt, he felt a slow warming on his upper arm where she'd touched him, a delayed-reaction heat.
A finger of warmth crept from his skin to his core. Something deep within him turned over, barely believing the whisper of thaw, refusing to come out of hibernation entirely. He paused, and looked up at her eyes, the sparkle in them something almost foreign, a language he'd almost forgotten.
3.
The surprise of her warmth soon became a pleasure, the lone beacon of peace in his life, a gentle flame to warm himself by. It became a pattern that he would drive them to a coffee house after the support group, and they would talk for a while, and then he'd drive her home.
It was just talking. Just coffee.
He drove, he paid – it was just coffee – and he basked. He knew sometimes from Nathalie's smile and the way her eyes softened that he remembered, she reminded him, that he still knew how to throw off his own sparks. He didn't – didn't try to, anyway – but some might have slipped out.
He was surprised he could smile again; even more surprised that it felt genuine. He hated that HR psychology bullshit, but he had to admit that when his mouth smiled – and it only really smiled with Nathalie – it made his whole face smile, and somehow that made the rest of him feel better, less cold, less exhausted, less brittle, less likely to crack.
It was enough. In the midst of the worst misery of his adult life, he had these small moments worth smiling about. Talking and coffee and Nathalie's eyes and her smile and she was twenty years younger than him and just being nice and that was it.
Then, in his car one night, as he dropped her off at her place, she pressed her hand over his and slightly curved herself towards him, her other hand on the door latch.
She was too far away for it to be – that. She was too close for it to be – just talking.
Her hand burned through his hand, down through his thigh where his hand rested. A slender thread of heat crept up his leg, causing a twinge in the root of him that was unmistakable.
She smiled sweetly and wished him a good night. Mike was speechless, then stammered, then recovered and did the same. There was the tiniest hesitation on Nathalie's part as she opened the passenger door and slid away. It told him, seconds after she was gone -- delayed reaction again -- that she barely knew what she was doing to him.
But she was catching on.
The door slammed and she was gone.
The masculine predator in him swam up from his depths for a split second, cunning and instinctual, hot and hopeful.
There was a phone list for the grief support group.
Then he came back to where he was. He had to go home to Audrey, a week post chemo, the sickest part of the process, with two more weeks to go. Sadie and Maddie were waiting. He was driving a station wagon, for God's sake.
He went home. He made a late supper for the kids and soup for Audrey, whose sense of taste and smell were nauseated by pretty much everything else, including foods she'd used to like. She dragged herself out to sit with them at the table in her robe and headscarf, looking wan and sick. She clearly forced herself to participate. The compulsory cheerfulness made Mike grit his teeth. But they all went through the motions: how was school, did you do your homework, how was work Daddy.
Mike helped Audrey back to the bedroom after they'd all finished eating and the kids had left the table. She collapsed with exhaustion back into bed. The smell in the room was the smell of sick people. He recoiled. He stripped and put on his sleep shorts. Brushed his teeth and went to watch TV, knowing he would fall asleep on the couch and stay there until his back woke him before dawn.
The next day he found Nathalie's name on the grief support group phone list and called her to see if she wanted to go out. For coffee.
4.
Meetings between them became more frequent. The guilt sometimes poked him, knowing he left sick Audrey in bed, drained and unable to get up from chemo, unable to really keep an eye on the girls. Sadie watched Maddie far too often, or the kids got stuck at his in-laws'. But the guilt receded in Nathalie's presence. He needed this. He needed it. It kept him alive. It kept him from falling apart or exploding.
After a while, it was not only keeping him alive, it was making him better. With one sliver of life his, just his, for no one else, he regained a level of functionality.
He dropped the kids at school and Audrey at hospital. She would get her chemo, be okay the day of chemo, be okay but slightly wavering the day after chemo, and be unable to get out of bed except to vomit – and usually not even then – from the third day after chemo through the next two and a half weeks. She'd start feeling better the last few days before the next chemo, just in time to get knocked back down again.
Before (before Nathalie), he could only walk out of the room, sickened. Big man with a gun – how many shootings and blood spilled and bodies had never made him nauseous? Long before that, as patrolman, he'd dealt with ETOHs and ODs; they spewed their guts out on kerbs or in the back of the cruiser, and it never bothered him. His disgust kept it at bay. Now, here he was, unable to deal with a sick, frail wife who vomited, and he had to walk out of the room.
But now he helped Audrey if she threw up. Cleaned up anywhere she might have missed the wastebasket or bucket, took them out to empty.
Got breakfast cereal and box macaroni and cheese on the table almost every day for Sadie and Maddie. Made sandwiches for their lunches. Brought Audrey soup and juice and yogurt, encouraged her to eat.
It was working. With brief, stolen moments of with Nathalie – just coffee and talk – it was working for him. The needle of guilt behind it pricked hard sometimes. But it was a huge trade-off, not being crippled and distant from the kids and Audrey, who was so grateful and fragile and made his heart clench.
He went to work. He went home. He did what he was supposed to do.
Audrey finished chemo. But then she got really sick and feverish. He took her to hospital. She had some kind of bacterial infection, sepsis; her white cell count was too low. She was admitted to the ICU with very limited and strict visiting policies. She got antibiotics and fluids. He brought the kids a couple times when he could.
Then he left Maddie with Sadie and went to the support group.
Nathalie was there. He could tell how glad she was to see him. The way she kept touching the necklace around her neck and the top button of her blouse.
They went out for coffee after. He found himself not only smiling but laughing with her, despite the current situation. Once or twice he tried something he hadn't done in years: look down, then look back up through his eyelashes.
She did the same, and suddenly they were flirting.
Oh, God. He was alive.
He drove her home to her apartment. She hesitated a moment without opening the car door.
“I'd ask you up, but...” she finished, smiling at him in the cool blue light from the street lamp.
He smiled, nodded, looked down. “I gotta get in to work early tomorrow, anyway.”
Then her small hand touched his knee. Through his jeans, it burned. A tendril of lust uncurled in the pit of him. He looked up at Nathalie's face, almost frightened by the reappearance in him of something he'd thought dead, surprised his body could react with the rest of his personal life crumbling.
She held his knee, and smiled, and said softly, “Rain check?”
Hell yes, rain check.
“Sure,” he said easily, and smiled back.
They weren't doing anything. If he'd gone up to her place, they would have just kept talking.
Right?
5.
One of the things they didn't tell you was how long the effects of chemo lasted after it was over. Audrey still couldn't stand a lot of the foods she had once loved, and generally had no appetite. When she did eat, she ate portion sizes smaller than Maddie's. She had some of her energy back, enough to force herself to make dinner for the kids some nights, but what she made was pretty limited because so many foods still made her nauseous.
One morning in the bedroom he got down on his hands and knees to find his money-clip, which he'd dropped. He found his mother's ring, which he'd given to Audrey, on the floor. It lay there, on the carpet beneath the dresser, just enough out of reach to be invisible if you were standing upright. He'd only found it because he'd gotten all the way down on the floor.
He pocketed the ring, wondering uneasily why it was under the dresser on the floor.
When Mike arrived in the kitchen, Audrey was sitting there, head scarf on, looking like a pale, thin, ghost of herself. She weakly poured breakfast cereal in bowls for the girls, and then gestured to Sadie to get the milk out of the fridge.
When the girls saw him in the doorway, Audrey turned and looked at him over her shoulder. And smiled. Weakly.
Beneath Audrey's parchment dry skin, under the head scarf, missing her hair, he could see the shape and size of her skull. It freaked him the hell out. He hoped like hell it didn't show on his face.
He clamped down on the fear and made himself smile.
He looked at her hands. The only thing left was their wedding band. And it seemed loose.
As he got farther into the room, within the circle of warmth they created for him, he forced himself to kiss Audrey on the cheek as if nothing was wrong. “You're not wearing any of your rings anymore.”
She looked down guiltily, he thought, but stated the obvious. “Yeah, well. They don't fit anymore. I'm afraid I'll lose one.”
The one he'd found.
He called Nathalie from work. “I have to see you.”
They met in the park not far from where Nathalie taught high school English.
He showed her the ring he'd found under the dresser.
“She's losing that much weight?” Nathalie said. The alarm in her voice was a distant warning bell.
He impulsively asked her to keep the ring. She hesitated, then took it.
He wasn't even sure why he did it. Her expression told him she was similarly confused.
But she accepted it.
He felt the need to retreat. He offered to take her for coffee. She agreed.
When they left the coffee shop, he walked between her and the street, protective. She stopped, and he stopped with her.
Suddenly her arms were around him, up around his neck and shoulders. The sweet, light crush of her breasts pressed against his chest. She laid her cheek against his shoulder and spoke.
“I'm so sorry, Mike.” She hesitated. “If there's anything I can do.” She stepped back, looking up at him with her sympathetic gaze, and slowly slid her arms back down from around his neck and shoulders.
It had all happened so fast that his arms hadn't had a chance to go around her before she stepped away.
Within a couple of seconds, slow to catch up, his body thrummed and his cock beat to life.
He stared at her for a moment, equally disappointed and alarmed. They were almost back to his car, and he abandoned his usual spot between her and the street. Stepped, in fact, out into the street, putting cars between them, walking awkwardly with a quick hard-on just as quickly fading,. He walked in the street past three parked cars to the driver's side, while she walked on the sidewalk, glancing at him first with concern and then with bewilderment. When they got to his car, it was the first time he hadn't opened the door for her. He turned the key in his door and the power locks unlocked all the car doors. He got in immediately and shrank against the driver's side door. Nathalie got in to the passenger side more slowly and neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Then –
“I appreciate–” he began.
“I just wanted to help,” she interrupted tiredly.
“Nathalie, you – you're–” Mike stopped and thought of all the things he'd noticed but never really thought about and certainly never said.
Beautiful. Young. Impossible. Don't know what you're doing. Even though I do.
She just glanced at him, her expression hurt, and then glanced down and away.
Clueless, he thought. You haven't a clue what you do to me, do you?
“I haven't–” He started, and stopped again, just as suddenly.
They hadn't shared those kinds of intimacies. He stopped, thinking he should tell her his cock got hard when a stiff breeze blew, he hadn't had sex in so long, but the last three times he'd tried to do anything with Audrey, it wilted and wouldn't come back. But he couldn't tell her that. And why would he? All she'd done was hug him. Tried to comfort him. It hadn't meant the same thing to her it had meant to him.
He knew nothing about Nathalie, he realized. Nothing. That she'd taken care of her mother for a year and a half before she died of cancer, while she worked full time. That she liked cafe au lait. That she seemed to prefer skirts and dresses to pants, since she wore pants less than half the time she wore everything else that showed her legs.
But Mike knew almost nothing else. Not if she had a boyfriend, or an ex-boyfriend, or a protective brother. He knew she wore no rings. That's what he knew. He'd just assumed she must have a boyfriend or dates or something. She was so young and pretty and unspoiled. How could she not?
How could she, the territorial male in him wanted to know.
“Don't you,” he started over again, much more carefully, “have a boyfriend?”
It was both a relief and also a huge risk, getting that out between them, in the car.
She looked at him and then looked out the window and didn't answer for what seemed like a long time. Bad break-up, he thought, filling in the blank. Maybe a psycho ex?
“No,” she finally answered very, very quietly. Just one word. No more. No details. She'd have been a good defense witness, he realized much later. Much, much later.
“You – you must – you're – your smile –” He stuttered. Then, as she turned shining, solemn eyes to him, traitorous hope choked him, the first true maybe-she's-not-just-being-nice lust hit him, the actual possibilities literally rose in him.
“My what?” she said severely, with a strange emphasis on 'what.'
He gestured helplessly at the whole of her, from her beautiful legs to her hair. “You're – beautiful. I can't believe–”
The slow, sweet dawning of her smile at him was dazzling and suddenly made his chest tight. She dropped her eyes and looked back out the window, but this time shyly, not stony.
“No,” she said again. “I don't.”
It sat there between them in the front seat of his car, her lack of any close, intimate male relationship, a new lens through which he re-viewed all the time spent with him, the way it had incrementally increased over time. It slowly filtered through his brain and down through his gut into the hot core where she'd triggered his erection before.
She wasn't just being nice.
Oh.
He started the car deliberately, and slowly and carefully drove her home, trying to say exactly the same things he'd said the last time they'd gone out for coffee. And, just like last time, they made a future plan for coffee. They both acted like nothing had changed.
But things had changed. She actually wanted him.
He wanted her.
He could just look and want and not do anything about it. Right? You got angry at some asshole who cut you off in traffic, or your boss being a hard-ass, you said, 'I could kill that guy' – but you'd never really kill them. Mike knew that better than most people, walking around carrying a gun all the time: those were just thoughts.
Right?
6.
The needle of guilt prodded him harder now. The next time they had coffee, Mike swore it wasn't going to be any different. There wasn't anything going on, he told himself. Just because she had no boyfriend didn't mean they couldn't be – friends.
And everything went the same, as if they'd never had that awkward conversation about her lack of a boyfriend. Everything was charming and warm and sympathetic and friendly, but not too friendly, just like before. Maybe he spent a little more time looking up through his lashes and smiling, but that was as far as it went.
Until he drove her home to her apartment and parked in front of her building.
She turned and looked at him, and he looked helplessly at her. When she reached across the front seat of his station wagon and put a hand on his cheek, he closed his eyes and ever-so-slightly leaned into it, feeling the thrum through his whole body again.
Her hand stroked down from his cheek, touched his shoulder, his upper arm, and the cuff of his shirt on the way to the back of his hand, then returned to her own lap.
He pumped to life again, suddenly achingly hard.
He wouldn't look at her. He slouched, hiding his hard-on, equal parts guilty and exultant.
She wasn't just being nice. And – there wasn't anyone else. At least, not on her side.
“I better go,” she sighed, melancholy.
No. No. That melancholy would not infect this, too, damn it. He was not giving this up, not giving her up, for anything. Even if this – friendship – was all he ever got out of it. Not now. Not when she was all he had, the one good thing he had – and he didn't even have her.
Because he needed her. She kept him going. Just knowing she was there at the end of the cell phone, at the meetings, for coffee. No. He refused, simply refused, to let one more goddamned thing be taken away from him. He felt his erection falter and it pissed him off. All this goddamned – grief. No more.
“Nathalie,” he managed to say, keeping his voice as even as possible, staring resolutely down at the steering wheel. “I just. Thought. You – spending time with an old man like me. I thought – the group,” he finished lamely.
But even as he said it, he thought to himself, Liar. You hoped. You wanted. That's why you got her number from the list and you called her. And now that you know she has no one, you want more than ever.
She looked at him, then. Ducked her head to look into his face, because he was looking down, away from her, hunched down, hiding his hard-on.
“You are not an old man,” she said breathlessly, and put a hand on his upper arm.
They looked at each other across the front seats.
Her movement towards him, her face approaching, was serious and deliberate. He relaxed a little and let her squeeze his upper arm, feeling the thrill down to the tip of his cock as she tugged his arm ever so slightly toward her.
At the brush of her lips on his cheek near his ear, every wrong and right part of him ached.
“I haven't–” He felt the need to be humiliatingly honest with her. Even though she told him nothing more about her own romantic past. She was young; he was old. Who knew what women her age did these days.
“We haven't – I haven't–” his voice cracked “–I don't know how long. I – can't. With Audrey. I don't know why.”
Warning her what a fool he about to become. And warning her that his body was not that of young men her own age. That he wasn't even sure, despite her new, intoxicating effects on him, he would be able to keep up his end. Literally. The very, very few and very far between attempts with Audrey had. Well. Made his right hand in the shower the only sure thing.
“I know why,” she replied seriously, not looking at him.
He'd spoken of his love for his wife in group, but never between he and Nathalie. In fact, now that he thought about it, although they had started out meeting for coffee and talks to mutually support each other (yeah, right), their time with each other away from the group had quickly become an escape from all the talk of sickness and loss and grief and hovering death. Their talks alone together, with coffee, became times to be lighter hearted, though that didn't always work.
“You do?” He wondered aloud.
“Love. Dying.” She shrugged to mask the sorrow he sometimes saw beneath her surface. The sorrow that, when he saw a glimpse here and there, made him want to do almost anything to banish it.
Love. Dying. Love dying. Dying love. Dying. Love.
“Yeah,” he agreed quietly.
“But.” She hesitated, and now she looked him in the eye. She leaned closer to him. “You're alive.”
He nodded slowly.
Her hand came to rest lightly on his thigh. Not his – hand. Not his – arm. Not his – knee.
“And I'm alive,” she whispered.
Her hand moved on his thigh, stroked lightly up his soft denim jeans, moving close to where they creased.
The throbbing beat through him again, leaving him breathless. This time, he didn't slouch or hunch over to hide it and crush it. He sat back, breathed hard, and pushed his pelvis slightly forward, giving it room as he hardened fully.
She moved her hand to his lower stomach, hesitant but shyly determined, feeling tentatively for it.
When she found it, he heard her sudden intake of breath. But she didn't stop. She pressed slightly harder, then molded her hand around him through his jeans, feeling the length and girth of it.
He tried not to exhale explosively and stretched his legs out straighter in the foot well, giving them both more room, more access. She stroked lightly, uncertainly. But when he breathed hard, and they both felt his breath on their forearms, she understood, and stroked harder.
If he didn't do anything, if she did everything . . .
He bit his lip. Their eyes met, and hers skittered away. This was crazy. In his car. On the street. What were they thinking? Someone could walk by. A passing car's headlights lit up the interior for a second and they both froze like deer on a dark road. And yet.
He did nothing. He very carefully put his right arm over the back and headrest of her seat and gripped it tighter and tighter. His left hand gripped the steering wheel. It seemed somehow very important that whatever happened, she made all the moves.
She stopped and he stifled a moan and didn't look at her. But she moved closer and then she had both hands in his lap, undoing the button, straining to unzip the zipper over his erection. He looked out the window, then squeezed his eyes shut. She fumbled with his underwear, trying to get his cock out through the stupid fly.
After a few frustrating moments of her not getting it right, he let go of the steering wheel, pulled his cock out of her hands and out of the stupid, pointless underwear fly. He shoved his underwear and pants down beneath his balls, and released his cock fully into the cool air of the front seat and her warm, trembling, waiting hands.
He didn't realize until later that he hadn't touched her at all at that point. Except to hand his cock back to her.
If he'd thought she was just going to jack him off and that would be it, he was dead wrong. She ran her fingers – and nails – lightly through his thatch of hair and he found himself sighing, relaxing, relieved it was dark in the car. He knew he had gray hair down there and also knew that there was not a single gray hair on her head, let alone anywhere else on her body. She stroked and gripped and touched and caressed the shaft. Jacked his foreskin experimentally up over the head of his cock and then watched it contract back on its own, exposing the hot, wet head again. She did this several times until Mike wanted to scream with frustration.
Yet he didn't want her to stop, even though he was no closer to coming than he basically had been when it had still been in his pants. He sighed deeply and lowered the back of his seat a notch so he could lean back further, get more room. It seemed he might be here a while, crazy as that thought might be.
She glanced up at him just as he looked down at her hands on him, and it was like someone else's cock, not his. Yet he felt every excruciating detail of her touch. She touched an index finger to his wet slit, and then rubbed the pre-ejaculate between her thumb and finger, feeling the texture. It seemed a little weird. But then again everything about his life was weird, had been weird for what seemed like forever. He didn't understand why it seemed like years had flown by in his life with Audrey, why it seemed Maddie and Sadie had grown up so fast... Then, suddenly, Audrey got sick and time slowed to a crawl. And it seemed as if she'd been sick forever and this heavy thing had hung over him and then the axe of Caleb's shooting fell and the days took forever to end and the nights were even worse.
If this weirdness of Nathalie's – her curious, tentative touching of him – brought him more of her warmth, her calm, her peace in the midst of his chaos, well. It was an easy equation.
When she took his hand off the steering wheel, he looked up at her, but now she was looking down at his cock. She took his hand and wrapped it around his own cock, and then wrapped both her hands around his, which were so much smaller. He could admit now he'd been disappointed (she's not going to do it?), yet flattered and intrigued (she wants to watch me do it?).
Then she moved her hands a few times, slowly, up and down, over his, making his hand move, making him jack himself. There was only one problem: the hand she'd put on his cock was his left hand, and he was right handed.
He gently extricated his right hand from its death grip on the headrest of her seat, and wriggled it down between them. She leaned away from him to let it through, still holding his hand on his cock with both of hers, glancing up at him skittishly. He nudged her hands apart and slipped his left hand off his cock and his right hand on. He slid his hand down to the root of his cock and squeezed, letting her feel the clench of his fingers around his own cock. Showing her she could be rougher, she didn't have to be gentle or delicate, he in fact needed hard, serious, steady attention.
She wrapped her little hands more firmly around his hand and then he started. But he had forgotten that his hammering in the shower was not really how he wanted it, not how he really liked it. It was just what got the job done and gave him release as quick as possible, let him get on with the daily grind.
Now that he could, with her full attention, Mike jacked himself more slowly, more luxuriously. He got himself close and then slowed down and stopped so he wouldn't come. She watched, fascinated; she looked only at his cock, like she'd never seen anything like this before. It was fucking unbelievably hot. Light, rhythmic breezes from her excited breathing hit his hot, oversensitive cock. He couldn't remember the last time he'd leaked so much pre-come. It smeared over his fingers and onto hers. She seemed fine with that, which just made his balls tighter and heavier with wanting.
Eventually he gave in. They were running out of time; it was getting late. Every minute longer they spent parked on the street increased their chances of being caught. Truth be told, that was yet another aspect about it that made it unbelievably hot. He got to a fast, steady rhythm, her hands over his hands, along for the ride, her gaze riveted on his cock, and hammered himself to the edge.
He felt it rise unstoppably. He hoarsely moaned “Kleenex,” which she didn't get, at all.
This (red flag) should have told him something. But it didn't then. By the time he realized she didn't get it, there wasn't enough time to explain. He clenched and pulsed deep inside. The spurts were out of him and on his shirt and the steering wheel and both her and his hands. Some went straight up and fell straight back down.
She gasped. He was grateful for that, in a weird way, grateful for the gasping. She seemed very surprised, and fascinated, and pleased. Why, Mike wasn't exactly sure. He suddenly felt terribly guilty – a new guilt: he'd gotten off, and here she was, completely clothed. His come was on her hands, her hands were around his hand on his cock, but she was no closer to her own orgasm. This seemed somehow wrong.
It was also unbelievably good. Totally selfish, totally blissed out.
He waited for the aftershocks to diminish. Squeezed a little bit more come from his cock for her, since she was watching. He let go of his cock and wiped his hand on his shirt. He leaned towards the driver's side door, unbuttoned the bottom of his shirt. With his shirt tails he wiped his hands, her hands, his cock. She wouldn't let go of his cock even as he wiped the steering while.
He sat there, pants open, shirt tails crumpled and parted around his cock and balls hanging out in the coolness of the car. Still Nathalie held his softening cock in both her hands. He watched her watch and feel the shrinkage of his cock until it was a small, soft, wet thing in her hands. Now he felt less bliss, more weirded and guilty – but still pretty good, somehow. And at a total, utter loss for words.
She finally slipped her hands off, the remaining come sticky now. She hesitated, and he handed her a shirt tail. She wiped her hands and handed it back to him. Nathalie leaned into his armpit, snugged up against him. Right before she settled in, she impulsively leaned up and simultaneously pulled his head down. She pressed her mouth against his for an awkward kiss.
This, this awkward kiss from her – not jacking off for her, with her; not coming in front of her; not coming in her hands – broke Mike's dam.
Her soft lips pressed to his, closed and fumbling, unleashed something deep inside him – an incoherent you started it. It shoved his hands into her hair. It parted her lips with his tongue. It found her mouth wet, wet and warm and so very, very willing. It pulled her onto his lap urgently – strange, considering that he was spent and couldn't come again for a while at least.
Mike kissed her brutally, then realized what he was doing, and faltered.
No matter: whatever released in him unleashed her as well.
Nathalie dragged herself onto him, straddled his right thigh, devoured his mouth. Holding his chin with one hand, she used her other hand to pull his hands, one at a time, to cup her breasts through her blouse. He pinched her nipples through her shirt, then unbuttoned buttons with one hand while his other hand slid over her hip and eagerly cupped her buttock. She rode his thigh. The fierceness of her grinding spiked his arousal so suddenly it was shocking – maybe he would get hard again, right now. Her lust was so unexpected – so hidden – what the fuck – who knew?
This should have been a big clue to Mike Sweeney, Detective – Nathalie fired up like a teenage girl. But. All those cop instincts. Not working. Not there. Not then.
He bent his leg and braced his foot directly below his knee, pushing his leg higher for her to ride, tightening his thigh into iron for her. She rode it and rubbed on him. He fumbled her blouse open and got one breast out, tore his mouth from hers and ducked his head to put a nipple in his mouth, sucking, sucking hard–
She moaned quietly, a strangled sound, rocking and pressing hard, so hard, almost painfully hard, on his thigh. Her thighs clasped rhythmically around his as she rocked, moaning and shuddering, shaking with involuntary, deep shivers. She was so hot there, burning through his jeans, burning his thigh. When she finally stopped moving and dropped her face into his neck, panting hard, he slid his hand down between her panties and his jeans. She was slippery wet. She turned her cheek on his shoulder to face away from him, shy again. He withdrew his hand.
When she turned her face back, still panting, and looked at him through tangled, sweaty hair, he couldn't help it: he sucked the tips of his fingers, tasted her wetness. No mistaking the musky flavor and scent. When she saw him doing that, she tried to turn her head away again.
Mike yanked his fingers out of his mouth and pressed his lips to hers, holding her there with a hand on the back of her head. It was instinctual, marking them both. They both smelled and tasted her faintly on his lips, on the tip of his tongue.
She resisted only for an instant and then their mouths melted together. She – she was – he hadn't expected any of this. Certainly not his own aching, animal need to be touched, for sensual comfort, to come with someone other than himself. Definitely not that it would be so deeply mirrored by her needs. Christ, he'd had no idea.
The kiss broke; she still breathed hard. They nuzzled each other and then she tucked her face into his neck again. He stroked her back and her hair over and over while her breathing calmed. She slid her hands all over his shoulders and upper arms, touching, squeezing his muscles. He flexed them under her touch like a stupid boy half his age, and she squeezed and stroked. They didn't speak.
When they slowly separated, when she slid off his thigh, her panties clung to his jeans for an brief second. He looked in her eyes, and let her look in his. In the cool, blue streetlamp light, hers were clear as a cloudless sky, dilated, unflinching now. He wondered what his looked like to her. He pressed his forehead to hers, then, and she bit her lip and pressed back. She didn't look guilty. He didn't feel guilty.
She slowly gathered her clothes together, tucked her breast shyly back into her bra and closed her blouse; he buttoned it for her. He smoothed down her skirt. She stroked his cheek, then, reaching for her purse with her other hand, she slid the straps over her shoulder and reached for the door handle on her side. Mike impulsively grasped her elbow and pulled her close for a quick press of their lips together, but it just didn't sit right with him, somehow. Before she had even fully opened the passenger door, he was out of the car, on the passenger side, opening it for her.
It was only then that he realized no one who walked past the car would have seen a thing. All of the windows were steamed up.
He walked her to the door of her apartment building. It seemed silly not to come up to her apartment after all that had happened, but she looked tired and happy and a little worried, and – and.
He stopped back at the precinct before going home, sneaking like a thief into the empty locker room, past eleven o'clock on a week night. He had extra clothes there. He showered. On some level he knew the shower and the change of clothes made it hiding now, intentionally concealing his activities. He shoved that thought off as best he could. He drove home alternating between giddy, guilty, anticipating the next time he'd see Nathalie, and playing their encounter over again in his mind.
Over and over.
(continued in Part 2)
Ten Times Mike Didn't (And Once He Did)
~14,000 words; one shot; Mike/Nathalie; explicit-ish
She touched him first. It was a simple fact. Every time, she touched him first.
1.
At first he was so lost in a fog of shock and numbness, he didn't notice. Audrey was so sick. Sadie was so tough – and so not. (He couldn't call her on it; he was doing the same damn thing, just three times older and male.) Maddie was bewildered, bereft, pretending in her own little fantasy world. He was supposed to be their rock.
But he wasn't the rock. He was never the rock. Audrey was the rock. He was just the boat that came back to the rock every night and sailed out every morning, the boat that wouldn't know what to do with itself without the rock to tether itself to. But Audrey. And Sadie. And Maddie. Needed. They needed. He hadn't realized how much he needed them not to need him, until they really needed him.
And so he didn't notice Nathalie's warmth. She seemed warm with everyone, and his numbness was a nearly impenetrable layer, a thick glove he wore stiffly, not really feeling the things he touched or came into contact with. He didn't notice the looks she shone on him, the soft break of her smile, her curving her body towards his as they sat next to each other in the folding chairs at the support group. Didn't see the flustered way her eyes met his and then dropped, looking anywhere and everywhere but him, and then, emboldened, back at him.
After they were already well down the road together, he looked back on the very beginning, wondering how he could have been so stupid, how he could have missed the importance of all of Nathalie's tells. They are in his mind, now, trapped in cool, cop detail: he recalls her movements and eyebrows and deepening dimples. They come to him like evidence, like video from a security camera, with no feelings attached, as if something in him merely filed the information away, refusing to invest it with meaning.
The warmth, the current between them came from Nathalie. It sure couldn't have come from him. He felt cold, and dead, and numb. Couldn't remember the last time morning wood had been anything more than a bodily function, like needing to piss. Couldn't remember the last time dealing with it had been more than a genital nose-blowing, relief and release so perfunctory, it was only slightly better than a good belch. He woke in the dark from bizarre sex dreams and REM sleep, Audrey (or an empty bed) and the sound of her irregular breathing (or silence) draining away whatever slight twinge of arousal he had, stripped of even normal physical responses by the enormity of possible dark futures hovering around the corner, more and more certain they were not ifs but whens.
He functioned well enough at work. Work constantly distracted, annoyed, required vigilance. Gave him endless opportunities to redirect powerlessness into anger, to righteously uncoil his rage. Helped him forget who he needed and how impossibly much.
At the support group he was supposed to listen. Be open. Be honest. Share. It helped to hear other people say out loud things he said in his mind and refused to voice. But after a while his thick skin of anger from work abandoned him in the support group. Too many other raw, exhausted people surrounded him. Left in its place was a brittle shell that would crack if he tried to talk; it would crack and let everything out – and everything else in. He couldn't.
One day, it was his turn. He couldn't not talk; he'd come for weeks and said nothing, merely nodded a lot in silent sympathy. People had revealed their stories, some in intimate detail, tragic as his or worse, broken and haunted as they were. Mike had listened, comforted to know that at least he was not alone, that there were other people in his shoes, that there were other people who thought the same bad thoughts he did. For in this group it was okay to complain about one's own burdens, not deferring to the saintly sick one – even if he or she had just died – the person who had been cared for, sometimes for a very long, exhausting, depleting time.
He tried to talk; it was about time. He started. But very quickly he stopped talking, throat working, eyes on the paper cup half-full of shitty coffee that he held in his lap. He tried not to clench it, wanting the need to crush it to be rage. Knew instead it was grief that pushed up from his chest and choked him. He prayed the water brimming in his eyes wouldn't spill over.
Nathalie touched his shoulder. With just that touch, Mike felt her interpose herself between him and everyone else. For a few long, silent moments he swallowed several times and said nothing more while her small hand on his shoulder propped him up. Then someone else began talking.
Just her hand on his shoulder was a rope to a drowning man. In that desperate moment, he hadn't thought at all about her reasons for throwing it.
2.
Mike didn't recall how many meetings it had been before he felt the warm tension between them in the front seat of the car, almost a palpable thing. It had been a number of them, of that he was fairly certain. It was so far beneath the cop radar he'd come to use in nearly all facets of life, and he'd been married / out of practice for so long. She was so much shyer, subtler, hesitant and hopeful.
They were talking about how horrible doctors' appointments were, how overloaded with unfamiliar terminology and lacking in definite answers they were. How you had questions in mind but, faced with white coats, forgot them until you were walking back to where you'd parked. He quietly joked about wanting to choke the doctors sometimes. He knew he was such a completely different person with her (and with Sadie, and Maddie, and Audrey) than he was at work.
Her smile shone on him, and there was the briefest laying of her palm on his upper arm. Then she dropped her hand back into her own lap. As he looked at her hand in her lap, as he watched her nervously pinch a pleat of her skirt, he felt a slow warming on his upper arm where she'd touched him, a delayed-reaction heat.
A finger of warmth crept from his skin to his core. Something deep within him turned over, barely believing the whisper of thaw, refusing to come out of hibernation entirely. He paused, and looked up at her eyes, the sparkle in them something almost foreign, a language he'd almost forgotten.
3.
The surprise of her warmth soon became a pleasure, the lone beacon of peace in his life, a gentle flame to warm himself by. It became a pattern that he would drive them to a coffee house after the support group, and they would talk for a while, and then he'd drive her home.
It was just talking. Just coffee.
He drove, he paid – it was just coffee – and he basked. He knew sometimes from Nathalie's smile and the way her eyes softened that he remembered, she reminded him, that he still knew how to throw off his own sparks. He didn't – didn't try to, anyway – but some might have slipped out.
He was surprised he could smile again; even more surprised that it felt genuine. He hated that HR psychology bullshit, but he had to admit that when his mouth smiled – and it only really smiled with Nathalie – it made his whole face smile, and somehow that made the rest of him feel better, less cold, less exhausted, less brittle, less likely to crack.
It was enough. In the midst of the worst misery of his adult life, he had these small moments worth smiling about. Talking and coffee and Nathalie's eyes and her smile and she was twenty years younger than him and just being nice and that was it.
Then, in his car one night, as he dropped her off at her place, she pressed her hand over his and slightly curved herself towards him, her other hand on the door latch.
She was too far away for it to be – that. She was too close for it to be – just talking.
Her hand burned through his hand, down through his thigh where his hand rested. A slender thread of heat crept up his leg, causing a twinge in the root of him that was unmistakable.
She smiled sweetly and wished him a good night. Mike was speechless, then stammered, then recovered and did the same. There was the tiniest hesitation on Nathalie's part as she opened the passenger door and slid away. It told him, seconds after she was gone -- delayed reaction again -- that she barely knew what she was doing to him.
But she was catching on.
The door slammed and she was gone.
The masculine predator in him swam up from his depths for a split second, cunning and instinctual, hot and hopeful.
There was a phone list for the grief support group.
Then he came back to where he was. He had to go home to Audrey, a week post chemo, the sickest part of the process, with two more weeks to go. Sadie and Maddie were waiting. He was driving a station wagon, for God's sake.
He went home. He made a late supper for the kids and soup for Audrey, whose sense of taste and smell were nauseated by pretty much everything else, including foods she'd used to like. She dragged herself out to sit with them at the table in her robe and headscarf, looking wan and sick. She clearly forced herself to participate. The compulsory cheerfulness made Mike grit his teeth. But they all went through the motions: how was school, did you do your homework, how was work Daddy.
Mike helped Audrey back to the bedroom after they'd all finished eating and the kids had left the table. She collapsed with exhaustion back into bed. The smell in the room was the smell of sick people. He recoiled. He stripped and put on his sleep shorts. Brushed his teeth and went to watch TV, knowing he would fall asleep on the couch and stay there until his back woke him before dawn.
The next day he found Nathalie's name on the grief support group phone list and called her to see if she wanted to go out. For coffee.
4.
Meetings between them became more frequent. The guilt sometimes poked him, knowing he left sick Audrey in bed, drained and unable to get up from chemo, unable to really keep an eye on the girls. Sadie watched Maddie far too often, or the kids got stuck at his in-laws'. But the guilt receded in Nathalie's presence. He needed this. He needed it. It kept him alive. It kept him from falling apart or exploding.
After a while, it was not only keeping him alive, it was making him better. With one sliver of life his, just his, for no one else, he regained a level of functionality.
He dropped the kids at school and Audrey at hospital. She would get her chemo, be okay the day of chemo, be okay but slightly wavering the day after chemo, and be unable to get out of bed except to vomit – and usually not even then – from the third day after chemo through the next two and a half weeks. She'd start feeling better the last few days before the next chemo, just in time to get knocked back down again.
Before (before Nathalie), he could only walk out of the room, sickened. Big man with a gun – how many shootings and blood spilled and bodies had never made him nauseous? Long before that, as patrolman, he'd dealt with ETOHs and ODs; they spewed their guts out on kerbs or in the back of the cruiser, and it never bothered him. His disgust kept it at bay. Now, here he was, unable to deal with a sick, frail wife who vomited, and he had to walk out of the room.
But now he helped Audrey if she threw up. Cleaned up anywhere she might have missed the wastebasket or bucket, took them out to empty.
Got breakfast cereal and box macaroni and cheese on the table almost every day for Sadie and Maddie. Made sandwiches for their lunches. Brought Audrey soup and juice and yogurt, encouraged her to eat.
It was working. With brief, stolen moments of with Nathalie – just coffee and talk – it was working for him. The needle of guilt behind it pricked hard sometimes. But it was a huge trade-off, not being crippled and distant from the kids and Audrey, who was so grateful and fragile and made his heart clench.
He went to work. He went home. He did what he was supposed to do.
Audrey finished chemo. But then she got really sick and feverish. He took her to hospital. She had some kind of bacterial infection, sepsis; her white cell count was too low. She was admitted to the ICU with very limited and strict visiting policies. She got antibiotics and fluids. He brought the kids a couple times when he could.
Then he left Maddie with Sadie and went to the support group.
Nathalie was there. He could tell how glad she was to see him. The way she kept touching the necklace around her neck and the top button of her blouse.
They went out for coffee after. He found himself not only smiling but laughing with her, despite the current situation. Once or twice he tried something he hadn't done in years: look down, then look back up through his eyelashes.
She did the same, and suddenly they were flirting.
Oh, God. He was alive.
He drove her home to her apartment. She hesitated a moment without opening the car door.
“I'd ask you up, but...” she finished, smiling at him in the cool blue light from the street lamp.
He smiled, nodded, looked down. “I gotta get in to work early tomorrow, anyway.”
Then her small hand touched his knee. Through his jeans, it burned. A tendril of lust uncurled in the pit of him. He looked up at Nathalie's face, almost frightened by the reappearance in him of something he'd thought dead, surprised his body could react with the rest of his personal life crumbling.
She held his knee, and smiled, and said softly, “Rain check?”
Hell yes, rain check.
“Sure,” he said easily, and smiled back.
They weren't doing anything. If he'd gone up to her place, they would have just kept talking.
Right?
5.
One of the things they didn't tell you was how long the effects of chemo lasted after it was over. Audrey still couldn't stand a lot of the foods she had once loved, and generally had no appetite. When she did eat, she ate portion sizes smaller than Maddie's. She had some of her energy back, enough to force herself to make dinner for the kids some nights, but what she made was pretty limited because so many foods still made her nauseous.
One morning in the bedroom he got down on his hands and knees to find his money-clip, which he'd dropped. He found his mother's ring, which he'd given to Audrey, on the floor. It lay there, on the carpet beneath the dresser, just enough out of reach to be invisible if you were standing upright. He'd only found it because he'd gotten all the way down on the floor.
He pocketed the ring, wondering uneasily why it was under the dresser on the floor.
When Mike arrived in the kitchen, Audrey was sitting there, head scarf on, looking like a pale, thin, ghost of herself. She weakly poured breakfast cereal in bowls for the girls, and then gestured to Sadie to get the milk out of the fridge.
When the girls saw him in the doorway, Audrey turned and looked at him over her shoulder. And smiled. Weakly.
Beneath Audrey's parchment dry skin, under the head scarf, missing her hair, he could see the shape and size of her skull. It freaked him the hell out. He hoped like hell it didn't show on his face.
He clamped down on the fear and made himself smile.
He looked at her hands. The only thing left was their wedding band. And it seemed loose.
As he got farther into the room, within the circle of warmth they created for him, he forced himself to kiss Audrey on the cheek as if nothing was wrong. “You're not wearing any of your rings anymore.”
She looked down guiltily, he thought, but stated the obvious. “Yeah, well. They don't fit anymore. I'm afraid I'll lose one.”
The one he'd found.
He called Nathalie from work. “I have to see you.”
They met in the park not far from where Nathalie taught high school English.
He showed her the ring he'd found under the dresser.
“She's losing that much weight?” Nathalie said. The alarm in her voice was a distant warning bell.
He impulsively asked her to keep the ring. She hesitated, then took it.
He wasn't even sure why he did it. Her expression told him she was similarly confused.
But she accepted it.
He felt the need to retreat. He offered to take her for coffee. She agreed.
When they left the coffee shop, he walked between her and the street, protective. She stopped, and he stopped with her.
Suddenly her arms were around him, up around his neck and shoulders. The sweet, light crush of her breasts pressed against his chest. She laid her cheek against his shoulder and spoke.
“I'm so sorry, Mike.” She hesitated. “If there's anything I can do.” She stepped back, looking up at him with her sympathetic gaze, and slowly slid her arms back down from around his neck and shoulders.
It had all happened so fast that his arms hadn't had a chance to go around her before she stepped away.
Within a couple of seconds, slow to catch up, his body thrummed and his cock beat to life.
He stared at her for a moment, equally disappointed and alarmed. They were almost back to his car, and he abandoned his usual spot between her and the street. Stepped, in fact, out into the street, putting cars between them, walking awkwardly with a quick hard-on just as quickly fading,. He walked in the street past three parked cars to the driver's side, while she walked on the sidewalk, glancing at him first with concern and then with bewilderment. When they got to his car, it was the first time he hadn't opened the door for her. He turned the key in his door and the power locks unlocked all the car doors. He got in immediately and shrank against the driver's side door. Nathalie got in to the passenger side more slowly and neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Then –
“I appreciate–” he began.
“I just wanted to help,” she interrupted tiredly.
“Nathalie, you – you're–” Mike stopped and thought of all the things he'd noticed but never really thought about and certainly never said.
Beautiful. Young. Impossible. Don't know what you're doing. Even though I do.
She just glanced at him, her expression hurt, and then glanced down and away.
Clueless, he thought. You haven't a clue what you do to me, do you?
“I haven't–” He started, and stopped again, just as suddenly.
They hadn't shared those kinds of intimacies. He stopped, thinking he should tell her his cock got hard when a stiff breeze blew, he hadn't had sex in so long, but the last three times he'd tried to do anything with Audrey, it wilted and wouldn't come back. But he couldn't tell her that. And why would he? All she'd done was hug him. Tried to comfort him. It hadn't meant the same thing to her it had meant to him.
He knew nothing about Nathalie, he realized. Nothing. That she'd taken care of her mother for a year and a half before she died of cancer, while she worked full time. That she liked cafe au lait. That she seemed to prefer skirts and dresses to pants, since she wore pants less than half the time she wore everything else that showed her legs.
But Mike knew almost nothing else. Not if she had a boyfriend, or an ex-boyfriend, or a protective brother. He knew she wore no rings. That's what he knew. He'd just assumed she must have a boyfriend or dates or something. She was so young and pretty and unspoiled. How could she not?
How could she, the territorial male in him wanted to know.
“Don't you,” he started over again, much more carefully, “have a boyfriend?”
It was both a relief and also a huge risk, getting that out between them, in the car.
She looked at him and then looked out the window and didn't answer for what seemed like a long time. Bad break-up, he thought, filling in the blank. Maybe a psycho ex?
“No,” she finally answered very, very quietly. Just one word. No more. No details. She'd have been a good defense witness, he realized much later. Much, much later.
“You – you must – you're – your smile –” He stuttered. Then, as she turned shining, solemn eyes to him, traitorous hope choked him, the first true maybe-she's-not-just-being-nice lust hit him, the actual possibilities literally rose in him.
“My what?” she said severely, with a strange emphasis on 'what.'
He gestured helplessly at the whole of her, from her beautiful legs to her hair. “You're – beautiful. I can't believe–”
The slow, sweet dawning of her smile at him was dazzling and suddenly made his chest tight. She dropped her eyes and looked back out the window, but this time shyly, not stony.
“No,” she said again. “I don't.”
It sat there between them in the front seat of his car, her lack of any close, intimate male relationship, a new lens through which he re-viewed all the time spent with him, the way it had incrementally increased over time. It slowly filtered through his brain and down through his gut into the hot core where she'd triggered his erection before.
She wasn't just being nice.
Oh.
He started the car deliberately, and slowly and carefully drove her home, trying to say exactly the same things he'd said the last time they'd gone out for coffee. And, just like last time, they made a future plan for coffee. They both acted like nothing had changed.
But things had changed. She actually wanted him.
He wanted her.
He could just look and want and not do anything about it. Right? You got angry at some asshole who cut you off in traffic, or your boss being a hard-ass, you said, 'I could kill that guy' – but you'd never really kill them. Mike knew that better than most people, walking around carrying a gun all the time: those were just thoughts.
Right?
6.
The needle of guilt prodded him harder now. The next time they had coffee, Mike swore it wasn't going to be any different. There wasn't anything going on, he told himself. Just because she had no boyfriend didn't mean they couldn't be – friends.
And everything went the same, as if they'd never had that awkward conversation about her lack of a boyfriend. Everything was charming and warm and sympathetic and friendly, but not too friendly, just like before. Maybe he spent a little more time looking up through his lashes and smiling, but that was as far as it went.
Until he drove her home to her apartment and parked in front of her building.
She turned and looked at him, and he looked helplessly at her. When she reached across the front seat of his station wagon and put a hand on his cheek, he closed his eyes and ever-so-slightly leaned into it, feeling the thrum through his whole body again.
Her hand stroked down from his cheek, touched his shoulder, his upper arm, and the cuff of his shirt on the way to the back of his hand, then returned to her own lap.
He pumped to life again, suddenly achingly hard.
He wouldn't look at her. He slouched, hiding his hard-on, equal parts guilty and exultant.
She wasn't just being nice. And – there wasn't anyone else. At least, not on her side.
“I better go,” she sighed, melancholy.
No. No. That melancholy would not infect this, too, damn it. He was not giving this up, not giving her up, for anything. Even if this – friendship – was all he ever got out of it. Not now. Not when she was all he had, the one good thing he had – and he didn't even have her.
Because he needed her. She kept him going. Just knowing she was there at the end of the cell phone, at the meetings, for coffee. No. He refused, simply refused, to let one more goddamned thing be taken away from him. He felt his erection falter and it pissed him off. All this goddamned – grief. No more.
“Nathalie,” he managed to say, keeping his voice as even as possible, staring resolutely down at the steering wheel. “I just. Thought. You – spending time with an old man like me. I thought – the group,” he finished lamely.
But even as he said it, he thought to himself, Liar. You hoped. You wanted. That's why you got her number from the list and you called her. And now that you know she has no one, you want more than ever.
She looked at him, then. Ducked her head to look into his face, because he was looking down, away from her, hunched down, hiding his hard-on.
“You are not an old man,” she said breathlessly, and put a hand on his upper arm.
They looked at each other across the front seats.
Her movement towards him, her face approaching, was serious and deliberate. He relaxed a little and let her squeeze his upper arm, feeling the thrill down to the tip of his cock as she tugged his arm ever so slightly toward her.
At the brush of her lips on his cheek near his ear, every wrong and right part of him ached.
“I haven't–” He felt the need to be humiliatingly honest with her. Even though she told him nothing more about her own romantic past. She was young; he was old. Who knew what women her age did these days.
“We haven't – I haven't–” his voice cracked “–I don't know how long. I – can't. With Audrey. I don't know why.”
Warning her what a fool he about to become. And warning her that his body was not that of young men her own age. That he wasn't even sure, despite her new, intoxicating effects on him, he would be able to keep up his end. Literally. The very, very few and very far between attempts with Audrey had. Well. Made his right hand in the shower the only sure thing.
“I know why,” she replied seriously, not looking at him.
He'd spoken of his love for his wife in group, but never between he and Nathalie. In fact, now that he thought about it, although they had started out meeting for coffee and talks to mutually support each other (yeah, right), their time with each other away from the group had quickly become an escape from all the talk of sickness and loss and grief and hovering death. Their talks alone together, with coffee, became times to be lighter hearted, though that didn't always work.
“You do?” He wondered aloud.
“Love. Dying.” She shrugged to mask the sorrow he sometimes saw beneath her surface. The sorrow that, when he saw a glimpse here and there, made him want to do almost anything to banish it.
Love. Dying. Love dying. Dying love. Dying. Love.
“Yeah,” he agreed quietly.
“But.” She hesitated, and now she looked him in the eye. She leaned closer to him. “You're alive.”
He nodded slowly.
Her hand came to rest lightly on his thigh. Not his – hand. Not his – arm. Not his – knee.
“And I'm alive,” she whispered.
Her hand moved on his thigh, stroked lightly up his soft denim jeans, moving close to where they creased.
The throbbing beat through him again, leaving him breathless. This time, he didn't slouch or hunch over to hide it and crush it. He sat back, breathed hard, and pushed his pelvis slightly forward, giving it room as he hardened fully.
She moved her hand to his lower stomach, hesitant but shyly determined, feeling tentatively for it.
When she found it, he heard her sudden intake of breath. But she didn't stop. She pressed slightly harder, then molded her hand around him through his jeans, feeling the length and girth of it.
He tried not to exhale explosively and stretched his legs out straighter in the foot well, giving them both more room, more access. She stroked lightly, uncertainly. But when he breathed hard, and they both felt his breath on their forearms, she understood, and stroked harder.
If he didn't do anything, if she did everything . . .
He bit his lip. Their eyes met, and hers skittered away. This was crazy. In his car. On the street. What were they thinking? Someone could walk by. A passing car's headlights lit up the interior for a second and they both froze like deer on a dark road. And yet.
He did nothing. He very carefully put his right arm over the back and headrest of her seat and gripped it tighter and tighter. His left hand gripped the steering wheel. It seemed somehow very important that whatever happened, she made all the moves.
She stopped and he stifled a moan and didn't look at her. But she moved closer and then she had both hands in his lap, undoing the button, straining to unzip the zipper over his erection. He looked out the window, then squeezed his eyes shut. She fumbled with his underwear, trying to get his cock out through the stupid fly.
After a few frustrating moments of her not getting it right, he let go of the steering wheel, pulled his cock out of her hands and out of the stupid, pointless underwear fly. He shoved his underwear and pants down beneath his balls, and released his cock fully into the cool air of the front seat and her warm, trembling, waiting hands.
He didn't realize until later that he hadn't touched her at all at that point. Except to hand his cock back to her.
If he'd thought she was just going to jack him off and that would be it, he was dead wrong. She ran her fingers – and nails – lightly through his thatch of hair and he found himself sighing, relaxing, relieved it was dark in the car. He knew he had gray hair down there and also knew that there was not a single gray hair on her head, let alone anywhere else on her body. She stroked and gripped and touched and caressed the shaft. Jacked his foreskin experimentally up over the head of his cock and then watched it contract back on its own, exposing the hot, wet head again. She did this several times until Mike wanted to scream with frustration.
Yet he didn't want her to stop, even though he was no closer to coming than he basically had been when it had still been in his pants. He sighed deeply and lowered the back of his seat a notch so he could lean back further, get more room. It seemed he might be here a while, crazy as that thought might be.
She glanced up at him just as he looked down at her hands on him, and it was like someone else's cock, not his. Yet he felt every excruciating detail of her touch. She touched an index finger to his wet slit, and then rubbed the pre-ejaculate between her thumb and finger, feeling the texture. It seemed a little weird. But then again everything about his life was weird, had been weird for what seemed like forever. He didn't understand why it seemed like years had flown by in his life with Audrey, why it seemed Maddie and Sadie had grown up so fast... Then, suddenly, Audrey got sick and time slowed to a crawl. And it seemed as if she'd been sick forever and this heavy thing had hung over him and then the axe of Caleb's shooting fell and the days took forever to end and the nights were even worse.
If this weirdness of Nathalie's – her curious, tentative touching of him – brought him more of her warmth, her calm, her peace in the midst of his chaos, well. It was an easy equation.
When she took his hand off the steering wheel, he looked up at her, but now she was looking down at his cock. She took his hand and wrapped it around his own cock, and then wrapped both her hands around his, which were so much smaller. He could admit now he'd been disappointed (she's not going to do it?), yet flattered and intrigued (she wants to watch me do it?).
Then she moved her hands a few times, slowly, up and down, over his, making his hand move, making him jack himself. There was only one problem: the hand she'd put on his cock was his left hand, and he was right handed.
He gently extricated his right hand from its death grip on the headrest of her seat, and wriggled it down between them. She leaned away from him to let it through, still holding his hand on his cock with both of hers, glancing up at him skittishly. He nudged her hands apart and slipped his left hand off his cock and his right hand on. He slid his hand down to the root of his cock and squeezed, letting her feel the clench of his fingers around his own cock. Showing her she could be rougher, she didn't have to be gentle or delicate, he in fact needed hard, serious, steady attention.
She wrapped her little hands more firmly around his hand and then he started. But he had forgotten that his hammering in the shower was not really how he wanted it, not how he really liked it. It was just what got the job done and gave him release as quick as possible, let him get on with the daily grind.
Now that he could, with her full attention, Mike jacked himself more slowly, more luxuriously. He got himself close and then slowed down and stopped so he wouldn't come. She watched, fascinated; she looked only at his cock, like she'd never seen anything like this before. It was fucking unbelievably hot. Light, rhythmic breezes from her excited breathing hit his hot, oversensitive cock. He couldn't remember the last time he'd leaked so much pre-come. It smeared over his fingers and onto hers. She seemed fine with that, which just made his balls tighter and heavier with wanting.
Eventually he gave in. They were running out of time; it was getting late. Every minute longer they spent parked on the street increased their chances of being caught. Truth be told, that was yet another aspect about it that made it unbelievably hot. He got to a fast, steady rhythm, her hands over his hands, along for the ride, her gaze riveted on his cock, and hammered himself to the edge.
He felt it rise unstoppably. He hoarsely moaned “Kleenex,” which she didn't get, at all.
This (red flag) should have told him something. But it didn't then. By the time he realized she didn't get it, there wasn't enough time to explain. He clenched and pulsed deep inside. The spurts were out of him and on his shirt and the steering wheel and both her and his hands. Some went straight up and fell straight back down.
She gasped. He was grateful for that, in a weird way, grateful for the gasping. She seemed very surprised, and fascinated, and pleased. Why, Mike wasn't exactly sure. He suddenly felt terribly guilty – a new guilt: he'd gotten off, and here she was, completely clothed. His come was on her hands, her hands were around his hand on his cock, but she was no closer to her own orgasm. This seemed somehow wrong.
It was also unbelievably good. Totally selfish, totally blissed out.
He waited for the aftershocks to diminish. Squeezed a little bit more come from his cock for her, since she was watching. He let go of his cock and wiped his hand on his shirt. He leaned towards the driver's side door, unbuttoned the bottom of his shirt. With his shirt tails he wiped his hands, her hands, his cock. She wouldn't let go of his cock even as he wiped the steering while.
He sat there, pants open, shirt tails crumpled and parted around his cock and balls hanging out in the coolness of the car. Still Nathalie held his softening cock in both her hands. He watched her watch and feel the shrinkage of his cock until it was a small, soft, wet thing in her hands. Now he felt less bliss, more weirded and guilty – but still pretty good, somehow. And at a total, utter loss for words.
She finally slipped her hands off, the remaining come sticky now. She hesitated, and he handed her a shirt tail. She wiped her hands and handed it back to him. Nathalie leaned into his armpit, snugged up against him. Right before she settled in, she impulsively leaned up and simultaneously pulled his head down. She pressed her mouth against his for an awkward kiss.
This, this awkward kiss from her – not jacking off for her, with her; not coming in front of her; not coming in her hands – broke Mike's dam.
Her soft lips pressed to his, closed and fumbling, unleashed something deep inside him – an incoherent you started it. It shoved his hands into her hair. It parted her lips with his tongue. It found her mouth wet, wet and warm and so very, very willing. It pulled her onto his lap urgently – strange, considering that he was spent and couldn't come again for a while at least.
Mike kissed her brutally, then realized what he was doing, and faltered.
No matter: whatever released in him unleashed her as well.
Nathalie dragged herself onto him, straddled his right thigh, devoured his mouth. Holding his chin with one hand, she used her other hand to pull his hands, one at a time, to cup her breasts through her blouse. He pinched her nipples through her shirt, then unbuttoned buttons with one hand while his other hand slid over her hip and eagerly cupped her buttock. She rode his thigh. The fierceness of her grinding spiked his arousal so suddenly it was shocking – maybe he would get hard again, right now. Her lust was so unexpected – so hidden – what the fuck – who knew?
This should have been a big clue to Mike Sweeney, Detective – Nathalie fired up like a teenage girl. But. All those cop instincts. Not working. Not there. Not then.
He bent his leg and braced his foot directly below his knee, pushing his leg higher for her to ride, tightening his thigh into iron for her. She rode it and rubbed on him. He fumbled her blouse open and got one breast out, tore his mouth from hers and ducked his head to put a nipple in his mouth, sucking, sucking hard–
She moaned quietly, a strangled sound, rocking and pressing hard, so hard, almost painfully hard, on his thigh. Her thighs clasped rhythmically around his as she rocked, moaning and shuddering, shaking with involuntary, deep shivers. She was so hot there, burning through his jeans, burning his thigh. When she finally stopped moving and dropped her face into his neck, panting hard, he slid his hand down between her panties and his jeans. She was slippery wet. She turned her cheek on his shoulder to face away from him, shy again. He withdrew his hand.
When she turned her face back, still panting, and looked at him through tangled, sweaty hair, he couldn't help it: he sucked the tips of his fingers, tasted her wetness. No mistaking the musky flavor and scent. When she saw him doing that, she tried to turn her head away again.
Mike yanked his fingers out of his mouth and pressed his lips to hers, holding her there with a hand on the back of her head. It was instinctual, marking them both. They both smelled and tasted her faintly on his lips, on the tip of his tongue.
She resisted only for an instant and then their mouths melted together. She – she was – he hadn't expected any of this. Certainly not his own aching, animal need to be touched, for sensual comfort, to come with someone other than himself. Definitely not that it would be so deeply mirrored by her needs. Christ, he'd had no idea.
The kiss broke; she still breathed hard. They nuzzled each other and then she tucked her face into his neck again. He stroked her back and her hair over and over while her breathing calmed. She slid her hands all over his shoulders and upper arms, touching, squeezing his muscles. He flexed them under her touch like a stupid boy half his age, and she squeezed and stroked. They didn't speak.
When they slowly separated, when she slid off his thigh, her panties clung to his jeans for an brief second. He looked in her eyes, and let her look in his. In the cool, blue streetlamp light, hers were clear as a cloudless sky, dilated, unflinching now. He wondered what his looked like to her. He pressed his forehead to hers, then, and she bit her lip and pressed back. She didn't look guilty. He didn't feel guilty.
She slowly gathered her clothes together, tucked her breast shyly back into her bra and closed her blouse; he buttoned it for her. He smoothed down her skirt. She stroked his cheek, then, reaching for her purse with her other hand, she slid the straps over her shoulder and reached for the door handle on her side. Mike impulsively grasped her elbow and pulled her close for a quick press of their lips together, but it just didn't sit right with him, somehow. Before she had even fully opened the passenger door, he was out of the car, on the passenger side, opening it for her.
It was only then that he realized no one who walked past the car would have seen a thing. All of the windows were steamed up.
He walked her to the door of her apartment building. It seemed silly not to come up to her apartment after all that had happened, but she looked tired and happy and a little worried, and – and.
He stopped back at the precinct before going home, sneaking like a thief into the empty locker room, past eleven o'clock on a week night. He had extra clothes there. He showered. On some level he knew the shower and the change of clothes made it hiding now, intentionally concealing his activities. He shoved that thought off as best he could. He drove home alternating between giddy, guilty, anticipating the next time he'd see Nathalie, and playing their encounter over again in his mind.
Over and over.
(continued in Part 2)