His hand massaged the small of her back and she felt her knees get weak. She took a deep breath to steady herself, then said, “I’d like to take you to meet my brother, Theron. He lives in Milwaukee. But first let’s clean up these dishes. Then, since you so coyly suggested it, let’s slip upstairs in a Freudian way and get seriously naked.”
When Jake’s cheeks reddened, Callie laughed, a deep, throaty woman’s laugh. “Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking about that!”
Jake dearly enjoyed seeing her laugh. She had a way of throwing her head back and unashamedly displaying a mouthful of beautiful teeth that he found captivating. When she did it her hair swayed and her eyes crinkled. The effect was mesmerizing. You wanted her to do it again, and again, and again.
“The thought did flit across my little mind,” he admitted, grinning, watching her eyes.
“Ooh, I want you, Jake Grafton,” she said and kissed him.
A shaft of sunlight streamed through the open window and fell squarely across them in the bed. After all those months of living aboard ship, in a steel cubicle in the bowels of the beast where the sun never reached, Jake thought the sunlight magical. He gently turned her so their heads were in the sun. The zephyr from the window played with strands of her brown hair and the sun flecked them with gold. She was woman, all warm taut sleek smoothness and supple, sensuous wetness.
Somehow she ended up on top and set the rhythm of their lovemaking. As her hair caressed his cheeks and her hands kneaded his body, the urgency became overwhelming. He guided her onto him.
When she lay spent across him, her lashes stroking his cheek, her breath hot on his shoulder, he whispered, “I love you.”
“I know,” she replied.
Theron McKenzie had been drafted into the Army in 1967. On October 7, 1968, he stepped on a land mine. He lost one leg below the knee and one above. Today he walked on artificial legs. Jake thought he was pretty good at it, although he had to sway his body from side to side to keep his balance when he threw the legs forward.
“It was in II Corps,” he told Jake Grafton, “at the base camp. And the worst of it was that the mine was one of ours. I just forgot for a moment and walked the wrong way.” He shrugged and grinned.
He had a good grin. Jake liked him immediately. Yet he was slightly taken aback when Theron asked, “So are you going to marry her?” This while his sister walked between them holding onto Jake’s arm.
Grafton recovered swiftly. “Aaah, I dunno. She’s so pushy, mighty smart, might be more than a country boy like me could handle. If you were me, knowing what you know about her, what would you do?”
Both men stared at Callie’s composed features. She didn’t let a muscle twitch. Theron sighed, then spoke: “If I were you and a woman loved me as much as this one loves you, I’d drag her barefoot to the altar. If I were you.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“And what about you, Sis? You gonna marry him?”
“Theron, how would you like to have your throat cut?”
They ate lunch at a sports bar around the corner from the office where Theron worked as a tax accountant. After a half hour of small talk, Theron asked Jake, “So are you going to stay in or try life on the outside?”
“Haven’t decided. All I’ve got is a history degree. I’d have to go back to school.”
“Maybe you could get a flying job.”
“Maybe.”
Theron changed the subject. Before Callie could get an oar in, Theron was asking questions about carrier aviation — how the catapults worked, the arresting gear, how the pilots knew if they were on the glide slope. Jake drew diagrams on napkins and Theron asked more questions while Callie sat and watched.
“God, that must be terrific,” Theron said to Jake, “landing and taking off from an aircraft carrier. That’s something I’d love to do someday.” He slapped his artificial legs. “Of course, I can’t now, but I can just imagine!”
Callie glowed with a feeling approaching euphoria. She had known that these two would get along welclass="underline" it was almost as if they were brothers. Having a brother like Theron was hard on a girl — he was all man. When you have a real man only a year and a half older than you are to compare the boys against, finding one that measures up isn’t easy.
Jake Grafton did. Her cup was full to overflowing.
“Is he going to stay in the Navy?” Mrs. McKenzie asked her daughter. They were in the kitchen cutting the cherry pie.
“He hasn’t made up his mind.”
Grafton’s indecision didn’t set well with Mrs. McKenzie. “He probably will,” she said.
“He might,” Callie admitted.
“The military is a nice comfortable place for some people. The government feeds and clothes and houses them, provides medical care, a living wage. All they have to do is follow orders. Some people like that. They don’t have to take any responsibility. The military is safe.”
Callie concentrated on getting the pie wedges from the pan to the plates without making a mess.
“Would he continue to fly?” Mrs. McKenzie asked. “If he stayed in?”
“I suspect so,” her daughter allowed.
Mrs. McKenzie let the silence build until it shrieked.
When Callie could stand it no longer, she said, “He hasn’t asked me to marry him, Mom.”
“Oh, he will, he will. That’s a man working himself up to a proposal if ever I saw one.”
Callie told her mother the truth. “If he asks, I haven’t decided what the answer will be.”
Which was, Callie McKenzie suspected, precisely why he hadn’t asked. Jake Grafton was nobody’s fool. Yet why she hadn’t yet made up her mind, she didn’t know.
I love him, why am I uncertain?
Mrs. McKenzie didn’t know much about Jake Grafton, but she knew a man in love when she saw one. “He’s an idiot if he throws his life away by staying in the Navy,” she said perfunctorily.
“He’s a pilot, Mom. That’s what he does. He’s good at it.”
“The airlines hire pilots.”
“He’s probably considering that,” Callie said distractedly, still trying to pin down her emotional doubt. Had she been looking for a man like Theron all this time? Was that wise? Was she seeking a substitute for her brother?
Her mother was saying something. After a moment Callie began to pay attention. “… so he’ll stay in the Navy, and some night they’ll come tell you he’s crashed and you’re a widow. What then?”
“Mother, you just announced that some people stay in the military because it’s safe, yet now you argue it’s too dangerous. You can’t have it both ways. Do you want whipped cream on your pie?”
“Callie, I’m thinking of you. You well know something can be physically dangerous yet on another level appeal to people without ambition.”
Callie opened the refrigerator and stared in. Then she closed it. “We’re out of whipped cream. Will you bring the other two plates, please?” She picked up two of the plates and headed for the dining room.
She put one plate in front of Jake and one in front of her father. Then she seated herself. Jake winked at her. She tried to smile at him.
Lord, if her mother only knew how close to the edge Jake lived she wouldn’t be appalled — she would be horrified. Jake had made light of the dangers of flying onto and off of carriers this afternoon, but Callie knew the truth. Staying alive was the challenge.
She examined his face again. He didn’t look like Theron, but he had the same self-assurance, the same intelligence and good sense, the same intellectual curiosity, the same easy way with everyone. She had seen that in him the first time they met. And like Theron, Jake Grafton had nothing to prove to anyone. Perhaps naval aviation had given Jake that quality — or combat had — but wherever he acquired it, he now had it in spades. He owned the space he occupied.