A Favor

He easily opens the bottle of wine, without flair, and pours the both of us a glass. “You’re welcome. You mentioned you don’t cook and I like to cook, but I’m all for easy dishes. When we had breaks in leave I usually stayed with a buddy who had a condo in Virginia and he was bad about cooking. I had to learn to cook so we wouldn’t come off leave slow and sluggish from the crap food we were eating.”

I remember now telling him that, almost as a warning I had listed my faults and not cooking was one of them. “Why weren’t you cooking for yourself when you were home?”

“It was just me and it didn’t feel like it mattered much. Do you still want to do your website or have you decided not to?”

“Well, like I mentioned, I’m kind of inept when it comes to all of that. I thought it would be much easier than it turned out to be. I keep paying for the host site but it just sits there, empty. I need the pictures first and the best photographer I could find in the area is in San Antonio and charges five hundred per photograph. Don’t make that face, there are photographers out there that want one thousand and higher. Photographing a painting isn’t something just anyone can do, for a person to really get the feel of it, it has to be done well. That’s why I thought about doing the gallery, to have the art kind of pay for itself. I’ve finally got savings and now that I do I don’t want to spend it on something that might not work.

Then again the commission is so high on gallery sales I’m highly ambivalent about it. Which is probably why I haven’t jumped up and run to Fredericksburg. Also, some galleries won’t have your work if you are also doing a website so I don’t know. I go back and forth a lot on it.”

“It just seems like such a waste to have a room full of great work sitting there and no one is seeing it.”

“Thanks. This is really good, normally I don’t like spinach cooked.”

“I remembered that and added a little more of the sweet cheese to offset the bitterness of the spinach.”

“I told you that?” I’m trying to remember the drive and where it would have come up.

Sam only nods at my confusion.

My brain is ticking and then it clicks, “Sam, did you interrogate me?”

His only answer is a smile and a sip of his wine.

“Sam, I can’t believe you did that.”

“It’s called reconnaissance baby. Once the target is acquired you have to find out everything you can so you can find the soft spot in.”

I want to be angry and annoyed, anything but smiling and happy at his lack of repentance. “What’s my soft spot in?”

“Zoe, now that would not be something I would be able to share. The target would instinctively attempt to evade or deflect. We can’t have that now, not when the end is where we both want to be. ”

It thrills me, the slow way he rolls my name on his tongue. I shake my head and my head swims as I finish my second glass of wine. I’m embarrassed at being light on my feet after just two glasses.

We finish dinner and I’m up clearing the table. “You cooked, I’ll clean.” I tell him as I wave him away. There really isn’t much to clean, he had done all of it, except the dishes.

Sam shrugs and makes his way to the long leather couch and finds the remotes and grumbles over them while I load the dishwasher and wipe down the counter.

I can’t help it, I laugh as I make my way to him. Sam growls and pulls me down into his lap. “What’s so funny?”

A hand lands on his shoulder to keep me in place. “I thought all men just automatically knew how to work a remote.”

“No, not all men automatically know how to work a remote. Why are there three?”

“This one turns on the television, then once it’s on you select which input, cable or the DVD player, you also use it to turn the sound up or down on the television. Then you use this one for the satellite box, there are like five hundred channels. This one is for the DVD player so you can just ignore that.”

Sam follows my instructions and settles back into the couch and settles me into him and with a little sigh I enjoy the feel of him. His scent is all around me and his body feels so strong and solid against my back. My eyes drift down as he flicks through the channels.

Chapter Seven

I come awake slowly, a slight shifting and I’m pulled back into heat and I know I’m lying in Sam’s arms. Opening my eyes slowly, I’m almost scared of what I’ll see as I had been dreaming of him. It isn’t as bad as I had feared. I’m almost entirely on Sam’s chest, he’s still asleep. In sleep all of his tension is gone and he looks much as he had that first day, except today there is something softer about him. His arm around me

is just below my left breast and I know I should move now, while he’s still asleep, but I want to stay like this forever.

Closing my eyes, the word forever hurts, forever doesn’t last. What the hell am I thinking? Sam had only agreed to six months, but a little voice pipes in, he had said if it worked out he would stay. I have no experience with even wanting to make something work long term. Life had been so transitory my whole childhood I hadn’t looked beyond the end of each day, hell there had been times when even that hadn’t helped. Truthfully, my relationships hadn’t worked in the past because I had always been waiting for the other person to walk away. No one had wanted to keep me before, why would that change?

With Charles, my first relationship, I had been young and naïve and fallen hard. I had wanted so badly to please him, in every way. I had no real starting point for a relationship other than sex, from everything I had read and seen it seemed to be most important thing that mattered. I had tried to give Charles everything he asked for but it hadn’t worked.

We had lasted almost three years but in the last few months he’d pushed limits again and again until I no longer felt comfortable, or safe with him. It wasn’t that I believed what we did was bad or wrong but I simply didn’t enjoy it and wanted it to stop. I received no pleasure from the pain he inflicted. Yet, I didn’t have the courage to say no, so I’d tried to please him in other ways but he wouldn’t allow it. When he’d finally untied me the last time I had known it couldn’t go on but I hadn’t said it. I simply walked away. He had gone after me explaining he hadn’t meant to push me away and was sorry he’d done what he had but he wanted me to react. He wanted me to talk to him, share more than just my body. But it was too late, he’d gone too far. I couldn’t forgive him for what he had done and I couldn’t forgive myself for allowing it.