Rachel Gibson - True Confessions

Hope slid her free hand down his chest to his flat belly. He sucked in his breath and her fingers curled in the cotton plaid of his shirt. She pulled it from the waistband of his jeans, but Dylan grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the refrigerator while he made love to her mouth. His tongue slid in and out, hot and slick. Her mouth clung to his. She wanted more. She wanted it all. All the hot touches and fiery hunger that had been missing from her life for so long. She wanted to feel him beneath her greedy hands and fought to free them. But when he finally let go, he ended the kiss and stepped backward, out of her reach.

His breath was ragged; his eyes ate her up. He wanted her. He wanted her as much as she wanted him. Her lids felt heavy, weighted as she stared at him, her body aching, responding to all that potent want and need staring right back at her. Yet he turned and walked away.

He moved to the doorway of the kitchen and he stopped. “Hope?”

She looked at the back of his wide shoulder and the brown-and-gold hair on the back of his head. She opened her mouth, but no sounds came out.

“Stay away from the Buckhorn,” he said, and then he was gone.

At nine o’clock the next morning, Hope finished the rough draft of her alien story. She thought the intro might be a bit vague, and she’d waited until the third ‘graph to make her transition, but she thought the article was shaping up nicely.

She’d created a wilderness town populated by shipwrecked aliens who disguised themselves to pass for normal, everyday, small-town weirdies. In reality they passed the time while waiting for their mother ship by tricking tourists and profiting off them in their betting pool.

She’d been working on the article since dawn, when she woke with the outline already written in her aching head. She’d downed several Tylenol with a coffee chaser and hadn’t bathed yet. Her hair was wound on top of her head and held in place with two Bic pens. She still wore her cow pajamas and a pair of slouch socks. She figured she smelled bad, but she knew better than to stop when she was on a roll. While she worked, she never answered the telephone, and only a raging house fire could have forced her to open the front door.

She’d e-mailed Walter the idea for her new article. He’d loved it, but wanted pictures to accompany the story. Believable pictures. Which meant Hope would have to drag out her Minolta and snap a few photos of the wilderness area. Later, she would scan them into her computer and superimpose the likenesses of aliens dressed up as local townspeople. It would take time, but it wasn’t impossible. And certainly not as hard as when she’d morphed Micky the Magical Leprechaun into a reasonable likeness of Prince Charles.

At around nine-thirty, Hope finally took a break. When the phone rang, she picked up the receiver. The call was from Hazel Avery, of the sheriff’s office, wanting to know when she planned to come in and fill out a victim’s report. Hope looked down at herself and told the woman to give her an hour.

It wasn’t that she’d forgotten she needed to go to the sheriff’s office. It was more in the neighborhood of something she wished to forget. She wished she could forget the entire night, starting from the moment she’d stepped foot inside the Buckhorn to the moment Dylan Taber had walked out her door.

Hope hit save on her keyboard and made a backup copy of the alien story. Well, maybe not forget the entire evening, but she definitely should have left the bar after she’d heard about the Flatlander Pool and before Emmett Barnes had plopped his sorry behind in her booth. Her troubles had started as soon as she’d looked up from the napkins she’d been scribbling on and seen his I-know-you-want-me grin.

No, she amended to herself, they’d started the minute she’d began ordering twofers. If it hadn’t been for her excitement over the alien story, she would have paid more attention to how the alcohol was affecting her. If it hadn’t been for the beer buzz, she probably could have handled Emmett. She certainly would have kept her comment about small men and small penises to herself.

Hope peeled off her clothes and stepped into the shower. If it hadn’t been for the boozy glow, she definitely would have kept her hands and mouth off the sheriff.

She let the hot water run over her and didn’t know which encounter had been worse, the one with Emmett or Dylan. One had been scary. The other, humiliating. She’d been wrong about Dylan. He hadn’t wanted her the way she’d wanted him. He hadn’t wanted to crawl all over her. He’d wanted to walk away, and that was exactly what he’d done. With the taste of him still on her lips, she’d watched him walk out the door.

Stay out of the Buckhorn, he’d said. No words of regret. No “Gee, I hate to leave.” No lame excuse. Nothing.

Hope washed her hair, then stepped out of the shower. It had been a long time since a man had made her skin tingle. A long time since she’d let a man close enough for her to feel the warm pull of him low in the pit of her stomach. A long time since she’d wanted to feel a big, warm body next to hers.

Hope didn’t believe in sex without love. She’d been there and done that in college. She was thirty-five now and knew there was no such thing as meaningless sex. If sex were meaningless, it wouldn’t leave you hurt and hollow in the morning. And there was nothing more sad or more lonely than the morning after a one-night stand. Nothing more delusional than a woman telling herself it didn’t matter.

But sex with love required a relationship. A relationship took effort. It took trust, and while she could tell herself it was time to try again, she could never quite place herself in the position to let anyone close. Intellectually, she knew that most men didn’t cheat and create children with their wives’ best friends but knowing it in her head and knowing it in her heart were two totally different things.

Shutting off the dark commentator in her soul was next to impossible. The critic that looked out from her eyes and saw the flaws hidden deep within her body.

Since the onset of puberty, Hope had suffered from endometriosis, and in the spring of her junior year in college, the symptoms became so severe she was left with little choice but surgery. At the age of twenty-one, Hope had a total hysterectomy, which left her free of debilitating pain. Free to enjoy her life. Free to enjoy relationships with men. It also left her unable to have children of her own, but the loss of her ability to procreate hadn’t devastated her. She’d always figured that when the time was right, she’d adopt a child who needed her. The absence of a uterus hadn’t ever made her feel as if she were less female than any other woman.

Until the day her husband had served her with divorce papers and she’d learned that he’d fathered a child with someone else. That news had knocked her flat and leveled her self-confidence. Now she wasn’t sure of anything, least of all where she fit in the world.

Hope dried her body and brushed the tangles from her hair. Three years ago she’d thought she’d handled her life so well. She’d thought she’d picked herself up. She’d restarted her career, taken half of Blaine’s money and his beloved Porsche. But she hadn’t handled anything. She’d just avoided looking at it. She hadn’t picked herself up, she’d just been operating from a flat position so no one could knock her on her ass again.

Last night she’d let herself feel passion again. Let it heat her blood and tease her skin.

She walked into her bedroom and opened her closet doors. Well, maybe “let” was the wrong word. Much too passive. Once he’d kissed her, there had been no letting. No thought of letting, just doing. Once she’d felt the press of his lips and the feel of his hard chest beneath her hands, desire had taken control. For the first time in years, she hadn’t run from it. She’d stood within the warmth of it, feeling it heat her up with the subtlety of a blowtorch. At some point she would have stopped. She would have. Of course she would have, but he’d stopped her, making it seem like the easiest thing he’d ever done. Then, without a backward glance, he’d walked out of her house, and right now, Dylan was the last person in the world she wanted to see. Maybe she’d be ready to face him tomorrow. Or next week.

In such a small town, the only way to avoid him would be to lock herself in her house, but she wasn’t going to do that for two very good reasons. First, she wanted his help in getting old police files, and second, she wasn’t about to give him a reason to think that she gave last night a second thought.

As Hope searched her closet, she told herself she wasn’t looking for the perfect outfit to make the sheriff eat his heart out. She settled on what she would describe as a collision of city girl meets country girl. She dressed in a short turquoise sarong skirt, a turquoise silk halter, and her Tony Lama peacock-blue boots.

By the time she left for the sheriff’s office, her makeup looked perfectly natural, her hair volumized and the ends flipped slightly as if she hadn’t had to curl and spray them into submission.

The Pearl County sheriff’s office sat on the corner of Mercy and Main, and except for the shop advertising “click and shoot-Photos In An Hour,” the building took up the entire city block. The outside of the sandstone building was pocked with age, and metal bars covered the windows in back. A new parking lot had been poured on the east side of the structure and the inside was thoroughly modernized. It smelled of new paint and carpet, and sunshine spilled through the wide windows.

A female deputy, wearing a beige blouse with a gold-star patch sewn above her left breast, looked up from her computer terminal as Hope approached the information desk. She directed Hope through a set of double glass doors with a huge gold star in the middle and the words “Sheriff Dylan Taber” beneath. Inside the office was yet another woman, dressed like the first one. Her salt-and-pepper perm was too tight, and the nameplate proclaiming her to be Hazel Avery rested beside a plastic Jesus. Her desk sat in the middle of the room and squarely in front of a hallway. Hope wondered if, like Saint Peter, she was protecting the hall from heathen passage.