Between Here and the Horizon(81)

I won’t feel hollow, or bereft.

I won’t look out of the windows of my lighthouse and see only greyness and misery where there was once beauty.

I won’t stare at my cell phone, waiting for you to call.

I won’t mourn the loss of you.

I won’t cry (in a very manly way).

I won’t pray your parents decide to close down their restaurant after all and move to the east coast.

I won’t watch The Sound of Music over and over again, wishing for my too-good-to-be-true girlfriend to return to me.

Every second.

Every minute.

Every hour.

That would make me the lamest guy in the world.





Yours, temporarily,





Sully Fletcher.





P.S. check your phone.





I picked up my phone from my nightstand, skin prickling all over with hurt, eyes stinging a little too brightly at the words he’d written down on the paper…until I saw the text message waiting for my on the screen.

At some point, Sully had changed his name in my contacts from ‘Hottest Guy In The World’ to ‘Lamest Guy In The World’. The lone message he’d sent to me contained few words, but they hit hard.





Sully: Don’t do it, Lang. Don’t go.





I sat up in bed, staring at the note, re-reading it over and over again, knowing now what he was really telling me. He did love. He would miss me. He didn’t want me to go. Later, over dinner at the house, I tried to talk to him about what he’d written, about what he’d asked of me, but it was difficult. The children were too excited, covered in glue and glitter yet again from making love heart and cupid decorations with Rose. And of course Rose was with us, too, and so it was almost midnight by the time we had a second to ourselves.

Sully never stayed at the house. He didn’t seem to mind visiting for extended periods of time, but I still caught him every once in a while staring off into the distance, or standing in the doorway of a room with a lost look on his face. It was easy to forget that the house we were living in was the same house where he grew up. Each and every inch of the place was full of memories for him, no matter how expertly it had been renovated. And I just so happened to be sleeping in his parent’s old bedroom, which freaked him out endlessly. He never stepped foot upstairs if he could help it.

In light of that, I tended to sleep over at the lighthouse with him whenever we wanted time alone together. More and more often Rose was staying with the children overnight and I was sneaking out of the house under a cloak of darkness, spending the night with Sully, only to drive back home at the crack of dawn before Connor and Amie woke up.

Tonight would be no different. We didn’t make it back to the lighthouse, though. Sully drove halfway home, and then peeled off down a narrow track, taking us in the opposite direction. When he stopped his truck, we were in front of what looked like a ruined castle, the roof disappeared, most of the walls tumbled down. The snow covered what little standing stonework remained, obscuring what was left of the structure, so all I could make out were a few odd sections of wall and the very tops of some of the huge foundation stones.

“Why have we stopped here?” I asked.

“Because I’m going to f*ck you now, Lang. I couldn’t wait until we got back to the lighthouse. This was the closest place I could think of where we wouldn’t be seen.”

“No way! I’m not having sex with you in your car. It’s freezing cold, Sully.”

“*.” He unfastened his seatbelt, and then he reached across and unclipped mine, too. “Straddle me. Climb up out of your seat and straddle me, before I spank you for being disobedient.” He was joking, but there was a scandalous glimmer in his eye that made me blush a little too hotly. Being spanked by Sully wasn’t such a horrible prospect. In fact, the idea of his hand tanning my bare behind made me want to press my knees together in the weirdest way.

“We can’t be more than ten minutes from your place. Can’t we just go back there? Where it’s warm?” I tried not to think about being bent over his knee, but the image was well and truly cemented in my brain now.

“I swear to you now, you won’t be cold for long, Lang. I’ll have you hot and bothered in no time.” He buzzed back his seat so that it reclined almost flat, smiling wickedly at me the whole time. “Look,” he said, taking hold of my hand. “Feel this.” He guided me to his pants, where I instantly felt the huge hard-on he was hiding in his jeans. He was harder than hard. He was rock solid. He closed my hand around him, closing his eyes.

“If I let go of your hand right now, Lang, what are you gonna do? Make me drive you home? Or are you going to let me use this,” he squeezed his hand on mine again, emphasizing just how turned on he was, “to make you come?”

When he put it like that, heading straight back to the lighthouse seemed like a hasty option after all. “Hot and bothered, you said?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.

He opened one eye and peered up at me out of it. “So hot. So bothered.”

“Okay, then. Show me.”

“I was hoping you would say that.” His calm demeanor a second ago was all an act. The second I green lit his evil plan, he sprang up and had hold of me, pulling me out of my seat toward him. I didn’t have time to protest, or even spread my legs in order to sit myself on top of him properly. Sully had everything under control, though. His hands were strong, and my body seemed to melt to his will without any effort on his part. The next thing I knew, my hair was twisted into a knot around Sully’s fist, my shirt was hiked up, my bra pulled down and Sully had my left nipple in his mouth. He massaged the swollen bundle of nerves with his tongue, flicking it, pinching it between his teeth, and the sensation was so big and so immediate that I could do nothing but struggle to regain my breath. It wasn’t happening, though. My lungs were working at half capacity and couldn’t catch up with my body’s need for oxygen.