The Kiss: An Anthology About Love and Other Close Encounters(55)
He touched his forehead to mine and I sobered in a second. “Is this really what you want?”
“How many times, yes. Yes I want it, I want you. I think I always have.”
I still had a hundred questions tripping over my tongue, a hundred answers he owed me—why he’d waited so long, why he hadn’t said something, why he left it until I was ready to give up before speaking his heart. I was still mad at him, and there was still an argument waiting for us after all of this was over, but right in that moment I couldn’t articulate a word of it. Not with Liam kneeling at my feet, nuzzling my face, his stubble scraping over my jaw as he smothered me in butterfly kisses, working his way slowly but surely to my lips.
“Wait.”
His breath ghosted over my lips, our mouths so close we were almost touching.
“If you hurt me, Liam McGinty, I will have your balls on a plate.”
Liam chuckled at that and caressed my cheek. “If I hurt you, I’ll serve them up myself.”
It was all I needed to hear.
I surged forward, my arms around his neck as I threw myself into the kiss. Not our first, by any means, but still something new and scary-different: so good I felt my heart might explode. I couldn’t turn back the clock and make myself the first man Liam ever kissed, but God help me, I was going to be the last.
*
Kate Aaron lives in Cheshire, England, with two dogs, a parrot, and a bearded dragon named Elvis.
Find her online at http://KateAaron.com
*
A Kiss Through Time
Robert Thomas
Chapter 1: Guns of Mortain
August, 1943
The rain eased as the heat of the day began to give way, the winds and water having been swept in from the channel. What had surged over the U.S. 30th infantry the past several days had stolen what little strength and resolve they had remaining. The setting sun began to chisel its fading light out from behind the gray wall of clouds before its fall would once again bring darkness to this tiny forgotten town, this backwater in Normandy. Pfc Willy McGuiness slid his hand across his dirty forehead wiping away the water that had dripped from beneath his pot helmet into his eyes.
“You fixin’ to sleep your turn ta’ night?”
“I most certainly am.” Willy looked up at his companion and smiled. “One of these days I’m going to teach you how to speak proper English, Hooker.”
“What?” The smile from the big southern boy rivaled the setting sun. “It’s the only English I knows.” Hooker stretched his frame out across the first dry patch of ground he had seen in days. “If’n I talk like you, I’ll never be ‘llowed back in Alabama.”
“There’s other places to explore in this world, Hooker.”
“Likes where? Here? Where we even be at?”
“Well, maybe not here.” Willy looked quickly for a dry patch but was too tired to even care and plopped his butt down into the wet muck. “We’re on the outskirts of a little French town called Mortain.”
“How you know that?”
“I read the sign.” It was Willy’s turn to smile this time. He wearily shook his head and held up his hand. “No, I can’t read French.”
“Then how ya know...” The sudden and unmistakable sound stopped Hooker in mid-sentence. It was a sound they knew all too well; the grinding metal of wheels on tracks. “Maybe it’s one of ours,” he said in a low whisper.
“We don’t have anything in front of us, not ours anyway.”
Hooker rolled to his left off the dry bump into a shallow depression, his right hand bringing his other companion, his M1 up to his side. Willy slipped forward splashing water on Hookers back as he fell into the same depression, his rifle, covered with oil and grime at the ready. They had faced a fire-fight each of the last six days. Reinforcements had been promised. Lieutenant always said they were on their way. That was the running joke; they were, but for someone else.
The sun slinked back in behind the sullen sky and ensured the night world would come quickly. Willy slipped his hand into his breast pocket and pulled out the tattered photo. No matter the situation, she always brought a smile to his face. He kissed her softly and slid it back in his pocket. As he looked up, the flash from the Panzer’s 75mm gun was the last thing they would see in the light of day.
*
The sun broke through the low clouds beating back the morning haze. The end of August was always her favorite time of the year. The New England weather cooled August much quicker than most other parts of the country. She preferred it that way, not one for the hot summer months. She was more of a winter girl, a winter girl waiting for her soldier to come home, her lover, her new husband.
Kathleen McGuiness was flush with a new life. She had married her sweetheart, the only boy, the only man she ever loved. It was a hurried affair but she didn’t mind. There were much larger issues in the world; the war, the rationing and the hardship. But she was a girl to stand on her own two feet. Her family had known hardship before, having fought through the depression when she was just a child. She chuckled at the notion, not much more than a child still, her mother had thought the day she married Willy McGuiness.
Her thoughts ambled back to the day of their wedding. The small church on Main Street across from the seawall in the heart of Camden looked as perfect as any girl could imagine. Its white facade had withstood the pounding weather for over seventy years. It had seen the celebrations of baptisms and christenings, weddings and its share of funerals many of those fishermen, their lives lost to the brutal Atlantic.