But Ava was real. I ran my hands down her rib cage, over the slope of her hip and then her ass. She was drowsy in my arms. Not quite asleep but a little drunk in the afterglow of her orgasm. God. She'd given herself to me with the same abandon I remembered. I trained her body for mine all those years ago and it seemed we hadn't lost a step.
I pressed her shoulder and she rolled to her back. Again, not asleep but not fully awake either, her full lips curved into a smile and she moaned. My balls stiffened again at the sound of it. I wanted to get to know every inch of her again. I leaned down and kissed her. She nuzzled against me. I meant to have those luscious lips of hers good and swollen before I let her out of this room again. I was off to a pretty good start already.
I leaned up on one arm and looked at her. She was still the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Her body was just like I remembered but with new curves that I instantly loved. Her breasts were fuller; I liked the weight of them in my hand. Ava threw her arm over one eye but leveled the other bright blue one straight at me. Her dark lashes fluttered.
"Be still," I warned her when she squirmed beneath my touch. I still knew where she was ticklish and again, I felt the build of my pulsing desire. I was going to have to fuck her again and soon but I wanted to cherish these drowsy moments with her first.
I ran a finger between her breasts, across the slight rise of her stomach. When I reached her belly button and kept going south, she let out a sigh and her legs fell open. Oh yeah. Ava was still mine.
"I like this," I said as I grabbed her by the hips and tilted her toward me.
"You like what?" she said, raising a blonde brow at me.
"I like having something to hold on to when you're under me."
She wrinkled her nose and tried to squirm away but I held her still. She lifted herself up, resting on her elbows, putting her perfect tits just a few inches from my face. I loved how they swung when she moved. I couldn't wait to watch when I pulled her on my lap and ordered her to ride me.
She touched my face then ran her hand down my chest. Her light touch gave me goosebumps. She was doing the same thing to me as I was to her. Getting to know the changes our years apart had brought to my body. Her brow furrowed when she found an old scar cutting across my hip. It happened in the early days at Marion when I still had to fight every other second to carve out some peace for myself.
"You should see the other guy," I said. Her face went dark, then she leaned up and kissed me there.
I cupped her jaw with my hand. Her face had changed too. It was subtle things. Tiny webbed lines in the corner of her eyes, the girlish plumpness she'd had in her cheeks had thinned into the face of a real woman with wisdom in her gaze.
There was something else too. I almost didn't see it. But on her right hip she had a small black silhouette of an eagle. With the shadows in the room, I hadn't noticed it before. I inched my way down until I brought her hip to my eye level. Ava squirmed again but I held her where I wanted her.
"Is that ink?" As I got close to it, I realized it wasn't an eagle at all. It was a Caduceus symbol. A winged figure around a scepter, with coiled snakes. I recognized it as a medical symbol. Beneath it, barely visible, was the date 2006. "When the hell did you get that?"
It seemed so unlike Ava. She had been as straight-laced as they came.
"Do you hate it?" she asked.
"What? No. I think it's sexy as hell. What else have you been hiding from me?" I laughed when I said it and flipped her over as she squealed with laughter. I held her down as she flailed her legs in mock protest. My cock was straight up, throbbing now as she thrashed beneath me, her round ass thrusting up. Fuck. I wanted to tie her to the bedposts and take more time exploring every new inch of her. And I knew she would let me. She'd be dripping wet for me before I even got one ankle lashed.
But something stopped me. Ava stilled beneath me as if she knew exactly where my eyes rested. In the small of her back, just to the right, her flesh was marred by a series of small, jagged scars. I held her still with a hand at the center of her back while I ran my other hand over her puckered flesh.
"What happened?" My voice came out more ragged than I meant. I let her go immediately when she shifted her weight and turned over. She drew her legs up, hugging her knees, resting her chin on them. She wouldn't meet my eyes at first and that tore at my heart even more than whatever the source of her scars were.
"I hadn't wanted to get into this today," she said.
"Ava," I said, running a hand down her shoulder. "You have a right to your secrets. But I want to get to know you again. No matter what happens next."
In that moment, I realized maybe I hadn't want to get into this yet either. In a way, we were kind of suspended in a little bubble in this room. We hadn't talked about what any of this meant, what the future held. We had so far just enjoyed being with each other in a physical way. It might have been all she was ready for and for the moment that had to be enough.
But my Ava was brave. I'd known that from the minute I met her and something had happened to her in the intervening years that turned my brave girl into steel. It made my heart swell with pride at the same time it was a knife twisting in my gut.
"When I got done with nursing school … " she started. With a casual hand, she tucked her hair behind her ear, then rested her chin on her knees again. " … I wanted something more. I couldn't stand being here in Green Bluff anymore. My parents had moved on to Florida. It didn't feel like I had enough keeping me here. I was kind of rudderless. A recruiter came to the hospital. A few of my classmates had already done it. It seemed so right, so I joined the army."
Her last sentence hung in the air for a moment. Like neither of us were willing to let it sink down to earth.
"My unit was deployed to Iraq," she said and the knife twisted in my gut even more. For an instant, it was like I couldn't draw air in my lungs. My Ava. My beautiful girl. She'd gone to that hell hole when I couldn't be there for her. In that instant, I felt a range of emotions as if she were telling me about it as it happened. Fear, despair, rage, relief. I had a million questions. I wanted to draw her into my arms. I stayed stock still, afraid that if I so much as moved, she'd clam up.
"I did two tours there," she said. "'05 to '06. We were part of the surge. I was stationed at a Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad in the Green Zone. I came home for a while and when the chance came to go back, I did. 2009 until the beginning of 2010. Ten years in the service and then I came home to Green Bluff. Took the job at Green Bluff General. I was surgical nurse for a while but I feel the most at home in the E.R. It's where I can do the most good."
She kept staring at that point on the wall, hugging her knees. She rocked back and forth.
"Toward the end of my first tour, I was part of a Medevac unit. We would go out and evac injured soldiers from the field. My transport hit an I.E.D. There were eight of us. Two came back. I was the lucky one. I just took some shrapnel." She pointed to the web of scars at her hip. "The medic that made it out with me lost his leg."
"Ava-" I made a move to go to her but she stopped me with a hand up. Whatever demons she fought, she wasn't ready to let me comfort her. Why would she? She'd had to get used to doing it without me for so long.
Something bubbled inside me. I wanted to punch something. Wanted to fight whatever ghosts haunted her, made her face go numb like that. She stared at some point over my shoulder and it gutted me to see the deadness in her eyes. Whatever happened, whatever she'd seen, she struggled to put it behind her. God. I never wanted to be the source of her pain again. No matter what happened between us after this, I was damn sure I would never let her be in that kind of danger again.
Then it was as if she flipped a switch in her mind. Her smile came back and the light turned on in her eyes. She looked at me, leaned across the bed and kissed me.
"I don't want to focus on our sad stories, Dex," she said. "We've both lived through enough of them to last a lifetime."
My hands came up and I folded her against me. I kissed the top of her head. "I'm sorry, baby," I said. It was as close as I knew she'd let me get to bringing up more of the past.
"What about Tora?" she asked, deftly changing the subject. "I kept in touch with her for a while. I wrote her letters when I was overseas. She wrote back, sent me pictures. She was the sweetest little kid, Dex. Charlie helped her put together care packages for me a few times. I'll never forget that. She must have been over the moon to have you back."
I smiled. "She's not a little girl anymore; she's twenty-three."
Ava let out a sigh and covered her eyes with her hand. "That makes me feel so old."
"How do you think it makes me feel?"
"Forty isn't old, Dex. But she's good?"
I nodded. "She's off living her own life. I'll go out and visit her again soon."
Ava nodded. I still had a million questions for her. I knew her parents had died. I wanted to know where she lived now. But Ava had different needs and so did I. She swung herself around until she sat in my lap, straddling me. I held her steady as she pressed herself against me. I was rock hard again, had been that way for a while. My cock pressed against her hot sex. I didn't know how I'd done it. How had I managed to breathe for so long without feeling her like this?