Matt laughed but his voice sounded sad. "Same to you, Jenny."
Nobody seemed to have much to say after that. After finishing their beers, Kim and Tony took off back to the condo. Jenny whispered something in Matt's ear, then flicked her tongue against it. He smiled and nodded. The two got up and walked toward the house.
"Guess it's just you and me," Dean said.
"Guess so," I said. I didn't want this to end. I'd do anything to keep this vacation from ending. I hoped he didn't look at my face, because I was beginning to cry.
"Was I a pretty good lay?" he asked.
I laughed a little. "Maybe the best I ever had." Then I looked at his face, and he could definitely see the tears reflecting the fire's light. "Definitely the best I ever had."
He smiled back at me, his blue eyes seeming to twinkle. They were unquestionably wet. "That's encouraging," he said.
I laughed. "That's not what you're supposed to say," I said.
"What am I supposed to say?" His voice was soft and low.
I paused. "What if I asked you not to leave?"
Without hesitation, he said, "I have to leave."
"I know, but what if I asked you not to go? What if I asked you to come with me to a place where summer never ended?" I asked, my voice trembling a little bit.
"You have your own dreams, Rachel. You'd have to leave those behind," he said.
"I could deal with that." I was dead serious. "What do you think?"
Dean didn't answer right away. He hugged my shoulder and pulled me in closer. "There's something I haven't told you, something that you should probably know."
The tone of his voice told me that this was something big. He's married, I thought.
"I'm not just going back to the army base tomorrow. Well, I am, but it's temporary," he said.
He's got three kids, and he lives off base, I thought.
"There's a war going on right now between one of America's allies and a much larger army. They have no chance of winning without our help. So we're going to help." He paused. "I'm going to help."
I looked at him, suddenly feeling tiny and lost. "What do you mean?"
He sighed. "I leave for Saudi Arabia in three days. Our whole company is. We're going to be there in case the Iraqi army won't leave Kuwait."
I was shocked. "You're going to war? Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"Because this is a vacation. Because I didn't want to think about it. Because I thought that you wouldn't want to hang out with me if you thought of me as a trained killer instead of as a pretty face." He smiled, but it was an empty smile.
I laughed. "Don't be ridiculous. I never thought of you as a pretty face," I said. I started to laugh at my own joke, but I couldn't. Instead, I began to bawl openly, leaning into his shoulder. I didn't want him to go anywhere, and I certainly didn't want him to go to war.
Dean let me cry, stroking my hair gently. The fire began to go out in front of us, having consumed all the fuel that had been put into it. My heart felt the same way. In one week, I had known such intense highs that my heart had burned like a star, and now that it was starved of fuel, I felt it being extinguished.
I moved my head from Dean's shoulder. He tried to hide it as he wiped a tear away, but I knew. I looked at him. The dying light of the fire was just enough for me to see those crystal clear blue eyes. "Make love to me, Dean. Make love to me like this is the last night we'll ever spend together."
Dean nodded
, then moved in to kiss me. There, on the beach where I first laid on eyes on him, the two of us became as one. I cried as I spent the last night I figured I might ever have with him.
Before that, I had never felt that close to anyone, and in the twenty years since then, I never did again.
Chapter 14