Wait: The Brazen Bulls Beginning Page 7

  Clearly on board with that plan, Mo snuggled in and kept on munching. She was a hearty eater, he was glad to see. It seemed like girls had gotten skinnier while he was away. And all the models were like sticks, like that Twiggy chick. Mo had nice curves exactly where they belonged.

  She plucked another popped kernel and held it up for him. Though she no doubt expected him to take it with his fingers, instead, he put his mouth around it and took the chance to taste the salt and butter on her pretty fingers.

  Her head turned and she looked up at him, but she didn’t take her fingers back. Those eyes could undo him if they looked too long into him.

  He released her hand. “What do you study at OU?” he asked, to turn down the heat.

  “Right now, everything is ‘general education,’ so I’ve been taking classes in a lot of things—literature, economics, history, and maths—but I know what I want to major in.”

  For the most part, her accent shaped an American way of speaking. He supposed she’d been here long enough for Oklahoma to have changed her phrasing, without taking the lovely lilt from her voice. But every now and then, an odd word or phrase popped in, like echoes of her past. Brian was thoroughly charmed.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Education. I want to be a teacher.”

  “That’s a worthy profession.”

  She nodded. He felt it against his chest, felt a surprisingly deep intimacy in just that, how close she was to him that he could feel her nod. They’d been together here for more than two hours, and he’d felt calm and quiet every minute. Even when they’d spoken directly, albeit briefly, about the war.

  He hadn’t even craved a cigarette. He’d started to light up early on, and she’d made a face and asked him not to. Figuring he’d run up to the space between the bathrooms and concession stand when he needed a smoke, he hadn’t minded complying. But he didn’t want to leave her side more than he had to, and a smoke didn’t seem nearly worth that loss.

  “When I first came here,” she said, continuing their conversation, “I was so turned around I didn’t know which end was up. I didn’t want to be here, I didn’t know my family here, I didn’t understand this place at all. Everything I knew was gone. I was scrappin’ with everyone, and my aunt and uncle didn’t know what to do with me. But a teacher I had helped me get right. She let me talk and showed me how to write things down so they’d get out my head. I want to be like that.”

  If she’d been brought unwillingly to the States, and if she lived here with her aunt and uncle, then something had happened to her parents in Northern Ireland. Rather than ask directly, Brian decided to tell her something about himself. “My mom got sick and died when I was six, and my dad got caught in a combine when I was fourteen. My sister and her husband took care of me after that. I’m living with them now.”

  She sat up a little so she could look him straight in the eyes, and she did just that before she spoke. The weighty silence went on long enough for Brian to remember where they were and hear the computer’s voice in the speaker hanging on the window. Hal was its name. Or HAL, he supposed. It was asking if it would dream.

  Whatever had taken her so long to decide, Mo finally spoke. “My folks died together, in a wreck. I was twelve. They went out and didn’t come home. Two weeks on, I lived here.” Her sigh carried the echo of a lost twelve-year-old girl.

  Brian felt that loss in his own heart, and he needed more, needed to join his remembrance with hers in some way. He cupped his hands around her face, felt her hair surround his fingers. When she didn’t give any sign of reluctance or resistance, he bent close and brushed his lips over hers.

  She sighed and drew closer, sliding her hand up his chest, around his neck, into his hair, and on that encouragement, Brian made the kiss something deep and real.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The kiss was remarkable.

  As Brian’s lips moved over hers, as his tongue searched her mouth, as she tucked herself as close as she could and tasted him, Mo remembered her first impression of this man, that wariness of him as a stranger, so rough and dark, showing fresh marks from a violent fight.

  Those marks were all but healed now, mere shadows of the violence that had made them, and that impression of Brian as a violent man had faded as well.

  The man had surprised her all day, since he’d shown up in the store again. She hadn’t been surprised to see him there—he’d been trawling Main Street all week, often enough that Uncle Dave had complained about the noisy bike—and she hadn’t even been surprised that he’d asked her out, truly. She’d got an inkling of his interest as he’d ridden past the shop again and again.

  But they way he’d asked her, and the way he’d been when he’d asked—coming in close and suave, but with such a mundane offer. A regular date at the drive-in, on that very night. Nothing suave about that. He said he was out of practice, and she could believe it. Nothing but will and charisma had gotten him through it, but he had both of those in spades.

  He’d shaved for her. His beard had been longish and unruly, so he’d gone awhile without. He’d shaved for her. Mo had been more moved by that than she should have been.

  And now the way he’d been all night, on this date. This man was sweet.

  He was older, and a veteran of the very war she protested. He was haunted and angry. She could see all that. And yet he was also boyishly sweet.

  And an incredibly talented kisser.

  The touch of his lips, his tongue, his breath, his body—oh Lord, those hands!—swirled through her like fairy dust, and sparked her attraction to wildfire lust. She could scarcely catch her breath.

  Mo wasn’t a virgin; after living through her high school years with a ‘reputation’ she hadn’t earned, she’d decided early in her first semester of college to take her sexuality in her own hands and not let others define her. She’d had her first sexual experience with the first boy who’d asked her out, another freshman. She’d said yes on their second date. It had been fine. Pleasant, even—and not as painful, or bloody, as she’d been led to expect.

  He hadn’t called again after, and she’d eventually seen him on campus with other girls. But at least, and as far as she knew, he hadn’t spread stories about how ‘easy’ she was. He’d simply got what he wanted and moved on.

  Her second experience had been less pleasant. She’d gone to a fraternity party with a few girls from her freshman composition class, trying to make friends in this new world of college. The frat boys had served a strange, pinkish punch that they’d called Ladies’ Tea. Most of the night was fuzzy and uncertain, after one or two cups of that concoction, but she remembered enough to know she’d had sex in a bunk bed upstairs. And she remembered Uncle Dave’s frantic lecture when she’d driven home still obviously drunk.

  Since then, she’d reverted to her high school attitude and hadn’t much bothered about boys. And her involvement with the Women’s Political and Cultural Collective at OU had taught her a lot about why boys weren’t much worth the bother.

  But here she was, on a date. With a twenty-eight-year-old veteran. Not a boy.

  When he released her mouth and tucked his head against the side of her neck, trailing his lips and tongue over skin so sensitive she couldn’t help but shiver, when he sighed, “Damn, Irish,” and his breath lifted gooseflesh all the way to her breasts, Mo thought she might have her third sexual experience tonight, right here at the Derrickland Drive-In, in the front seat of a truck.

  She didn’t even know his last name, but she knew him. She couldn’t imagine what two years in Vietnam might have done to him, but she knew him.

  He was an orphan, and that, she knew. He was lost, and she knew that, too.

  He leaned forward, shifting their tangled bodies so Mo was nearly lying across the seat, and he was nearly lying atop her. His hand slipped down over her arm, to her waist. The rough skin of his palm on her bare skin made her gasp and writhe, and her reaction drew from him a groan and a decidedly earthy flex of his hips, provi
ng to her how badly he wanted her.

  And oh yes, she wanted him, wanted to give him what he needed, take from him what she wanted, perhaps finally feel something good and real in this act.

  It was that thought that stopped her. She wanted something good and real. If they had sex right now, and this man disappeared, this particular man, Brian, who was not a boy, Mo thought what she’d feel would be more than disappointment or even the shame of knowing she’d been used.

  How is a coed like a toilet? They both get flushed after you use them.

  If Brian disappeared tomorrow, Mo thought her heart might bleed.

  She set one hand on his arm just as his hand slipped under the back of her bra. Her other hand, she set on his chest and pushed—not a shove, just a steady pressure.

  He backed off at once and looked down at her. He was panting, and even in the unsteady light from the movie screen, she could see his need. It was nearly enough to make her change her mind.

  But she didn’t want him to disappear.

  “Are you a good girl, Miss Mo?”

  “I’m as good as I want to be,” she answered, and he smiled.

  “I like that answer. You want to stop?”

  “I want … I want it to be something special.”

  He brushed a lock of hair from her face. “Something tells me you’re something special.”

  “I want to wait until we both know that for sure.”

  Their eyes locked for a moment. “Then we’ll wait.”

  Something on the screen from the movie they weren’t watching flickered bright colors into the cab, and they glinted over the beads of the chain he wore around his neck. Mo reached for that bit of chain, but Brian set his hand over hers before she got hold of it.

  “Let’s watch the movie,” he said and pulled her up to a sitting position. “I wonder what we missed.”

  It had been her idea, but Mo was disappointed they’d stopped—but she felt something warm and calm flowering in her heart. He wasn’t angry, or even demonstrably disappointed. He wasn’t ready to end the date, even though she’d stopped him and told him he wasn’t getting lucky tonight. He understood. She truly believed that. And he liked her enough, for who she was, to wait until she was ready.

  She picked up the bucket of popcorn. “Does it matter? We couldn’t be any more confused than we were before.”

  He laughed and tucked her under his arm again. “Good point.”

  ~oOo~

  Brian finally lifted his mouth from hers, but he didn’t go far. His hands were at her hips, gripping the top of her Chevy’s door. His boots framed her Keds on the gravel lot. His body leaned over hers. Mo had her arms around his waist, under his flannel shirt, over his cotton t-shirt. She could feel the flex and twitch, and the steady heat, of his firm torso. Against her hip, she felt something even more compelling.

  Here they were at her car, at the end of their first date, and Mo wasn’t ready for it to be over. Maybe she shouldn’t have stopped him earlier. Maybe it would have been worth it, even if she never saw him again, to feel this man’s body all over, with nothing between them. Because it would have been remarkable. Despite her scant experience, she was sure of that. Every time he touched her, he seemed wholly focused on her. Body, mind and soul.

  But she didn’t know him enough. She wanted to know everything, and she didn’t yet know more than a few kernels of truths.

  He slid his hand through her hair, watching the path of his fingers down to the ends of the strands. “You are beautiful, Irish. So damn beautiful.”

  Feeling uncharacteristically shy, Mo ducked her head a little and watched her hands sweep up from his waist, over his chest. Under his t-shirt, she felt the rest of that beaded chain, and understood he was still wearing his dog tags. But he’d stopped her when she’d played with the chain before.

  When her fingers paused over the shape of the tags, he stopped her again.

  “You still wear them.”

  He nodded.

  “But you don’t want me to see.”

  This answer, he gave her with nothing but his eyes. No, he didn’t want her to see.

  She didn’t understand. “Why not? What do they say that’s so secret?”

  “No secret. They say the same thing every set of tags says. Name, service number, blood type, religion.”

  “All things I don’t know about you, and the answer’s right beneath my fingers.”

  “You can just ask.”

  “Right, what’s your last name, then?”

  “Delaney.”

  Mo laughed in surprise. “You’re Irish?!”

  Her humor made him smile. “Well, it goes back a ways, and only on my father’s side. And not the right kind, I guess. My great-granddad came from Dublin.”

  “Ach. Well, close enough, then. But the real question is, are you Catholic?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not much of anything, but the folks were Episcopalian. My sister and brother-in-law are, too.”

  Mo couldn’t help the face she pulled. “You know that’s just Church of England dressed up in American clothes, yeah?”

  He frowned. “Is it important?”

  To her father, it would have been everything, no matter how many generations removed from the seat of the conflict. To her mother as well, because of her father’s strong feeling. Brian wouldn’t have been allowed to cross the threshold of the flat she’d been born in.

  But to Mo?

  Did she care that this man, this veteran of a terrible, unjust war, was also from unionist stock? How many ways could he land on the wrong side of her principles and still be appealing to her?

  At least this many.

  Her father was part of her past, part of a world that was no longer her own. Here in this one, Brian Delaney was an Oklahoman, not an Irishman, and here his heritage didn’t matter. Nor did hers. Mo was Oklahoman now, too.

  “It’s not important at all.”

  ~oOo~

  When Mo got home, the house was dark. She moved as carefully and quietly as she could, tiptoeing even on the walk up to the front door, turning the knob and swinging the door open and closed by degrees, setting it back in its latch like she was trying to disarm a bomb.

  “Maureen.” Uncle Dave’s voice was soft but firm. Mo sighed and lifted her shoulders out of their prowler’s hunch.

  She was a grown woman, nearly twenty, but the Quinn household was very much a ‘my house, my rules’ autocracy. “Evenin’, Unca.”

  He was in his favorite chair, in the nearly-dark living room. The television provided the only light, showing the colored bars of the off-air image. It was later than she’d realized. She and Brian had watched both movies—she’d enjoyed Planet of the Apes more than 2001, but tonight she’d decided that science fiction wasn’t her genre. Fantasy, yes. Fairy tales and folklore, certainly. But not weird imaginings of a future years away. Far too bleak and confusing.

  But she and Brian had enjoyed a funny conversation on the way back to her car about the apparent consensus that apes would somehow be involved in the apocalypse. Her soldier had a sharp, dry wit.

  Her soldier. Well, that was dangerous to be thinking already. Except it didn’t feel dangerous at all.

  Right now, however, facing her serious uncle, there was some hazard to navigate.

  “Marcie called while you was out,” her uncle said in the same quiet tone with which he’d said her name. It was the voice of a man who was deeply upset but powerfully in control of his emotions. “She didn’t know you was meant to be studyin’ with her tonight, though she sure tried to save it once she kenned what you were up to, I’ll give her that.”

  Well, damn. It being the night before Easter, when the eggs were dyed, the cakes baked, the Jell-O molded, and the ham prepared, all in anticipation of the gathering after the Easter Vigil Mass at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Mo had done something she rarely had cause to do: she’d outright lied to her family.

  She’d had plenty of cause over the years to omit infor
mation or offer vagueness in lieu of answers, but rarely had she felt the need to tell a tale. Tonight, leaving her family during a traditional time for family, and for something as frivolous as a date and as reckless as a date with a man Uncle Dave and Aunt Bridie would strenuously disapprove of, Mo had spun a yarn about needing to study with Marcie, because finals were coming up, and Econ was her most challenging course this semester. A big lie costumed in small truths.

  Now, she didn’t know what to say.

  He got up from his chair and took a place on the sofa instead. “Come sit, a leanbh.”

  Oh, she was truly in for a roasting if he was pulling out the Gaelic. Feeling far younger than her years, Mo hooked her jacket on the hall tree and left her purse on the floor beside it. She kicked off her Keds and went to sit with her uncle.

  He picked up her hand right away and held it close. “’Twas a boy, aye?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, you’ve not been out with so many boys that we’d think poorly of that. I’m not in such a hurry for it, but your aunt worries you don’t look hard enough for a young man to call yours. Why’d you feel it necessary to lie?”

  “Because tomorrow’s Easter.”

  “And you knew we’d miss you here, with all we had goin’ on.”

  Again, she only nodded. Her uncle was quiet for a bit, staring at their laced hands.

  “Is that all it is, that tonight wasn’t a good night for it? Seems a flimsy reason to shake our trust, Mo.”

  He was right. It wasn’t the timing at all. It was the man. Even before she’d known how old Brian was, she’d known he wouldn’t be acceptable to her family.

  Or she’d feared it, at least.

  But she was a grown woman, and Brian was no boy. Tonight had been no mere date. There was no use to be had in prevaricating, and she was no sneak.