It's easy to be with Piper, so easy to just stay silent and watch. I'm not much of a talker or one for noise. Years of constant companionship and the chatter that goes along with a team comprised of a dozen or more men may be to blame. More likely, it's just how I'm built. Maybe the fact I had to listen to Cara's incessant chatter from conception through my entire life is the reason I prefer the hum of nature to much of anything else. But lately my world has turned too loud, and I've had trouble turning off the sounds in my head. Except with Piper. And JT. Being near them relaxes me in a way yoga does not, in a way running can't. She, they, even in their loudest moments, are the peace I've been searching for since a sniper shattered my world.
Our second date is hours away, in Portland. I drive Piper and JT into the city, and we spend all day at the art museum. Oil paintings, etchings, and litho-somethings are nothing compared to the wonder and pure bliss on Piper's face. Art has never been my thing, but I listen to everything she has to say and get interested because she's interesting. After a late picnic dinner on the way home, I drop her off at her bedroom door with what I plan as a chaste kiss. But when she plunges her tongue in my mouth, it becomes deep and urgent for two minutes before I pry her fingers away from my neck and groan all the way down the hall.
Piper. God, when she sings I get hard. I'm fucking hard all the damn time, and it's driving me insane. She's driving me insane.
So I run, lift weights, fucking cut down a damn tree and hack the shit out of it with an axe, prepping wood to burn in the fireplace for when winter hits and to get my body back in fighting shape. After being down twenty pounds from the lengthy recovery time in D.C., I work on rebuilding muscle and strengthening my thigh. If I can't get it better than stable, I'll never pass the fitness test to return. And there lies one of my problems. I'm constantly pulled in two directions: going back overseas to meet up with my team and Lilyfalls, Piper and JT. I'm not sure how to have both or if it's possible. I think I want it to be. But however domesticated I may be, I'm a SEAL first and foremost. Balancing a personal life with the rigors of this profession hasn't been my priority. It always came first. Now I'm stuck on choices.
It's easy to forget the far-away future when holed up with my makeshift family. For our third date, we leave JT and Gus with Cara. In my truck with the windows down, I take Piper on a slow drive up the Oregon coast. With her hand in mine, held between us on the bench seat, the weather is perfect, a clear sky and bright sun, and so is the company. I pull up on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and although we open our doors we never get out-we just sit and enjoy silence filled with sounds of the sea and the squawks of nature. At some point, Piper swivels, and the back of her head lands on my thigh, our entwined fingers lying on her stomach. But I don't look down. Not yet. Because this moment is somehow more intimate than we've ever been. It's raw. And I hold on to the purity of it all.
When I finally slide my gaze past the sky and peeling dash, along the lines of her pink cowboy boots and up her tanned legs, and over the sweet floral sundress covering her body from my prying gaze, something happens. When my sight stumbles over her plush lips and up and around to her platinum hair fanned over my leg, my chest constricts. After a deep breath, I drop down to her seeking dark eyes, and oh Christ, something happens. Something unravels within me, something different, something I can't pinpoint and have never felt before. All from a silent drive in my truck with the perfect woman. It's sweeter than a kiss, erotic in a way that doesn't involve skin or dirty words, just breath and knowing that my lips belong to her, my words are meant for her ears, and that my heart is as good as gone.
Hours later. I take her home and walk away to another night alone and another morning wishing I wasn't. But then I walk in to this. To Piper making lemon meringue pie because I told her it's my favorite. I want to weep and cling to her legs, begging her to make key lime too. She's just fucking sweet. And so is the curve of her shoulder and the dimple at the corner of her lip. It doesn't matter if I run to Mexico and back-she'll drive me insane. My cock twitches, rubbing painfully against my jeans as I sneak up and press my chest to her back, inhaling her scent and making her squeal. I plead for some of her sweetness, and her answer is to dip her finger in pie filling and stick it my mouth. Like that doesn't turn my balls blue.
More than a week after we move in, night colors the windows a deep navy, JT is knocked out in his crib, and I'm fiddling around my room wishing I was in hers. Cara picked out furniture basics for the house before we moved in. I've got a bed-or at least Gus does. He sleeps on my pillow like it's his. A dresser on one wall and a chair in the corner completes the collection, but I'm missing my woman.