Earth Bound (18 page)

The lamp in the motel room was dim, casting everything in a dingy, muddy orange glow.

Parsons tucked his shirt in, fastened his pants, and finally slipped on his glasses. He adjusted them once, twice, but they never quite settled into place.
 

He’d found release—they both had—but he didn't feel better. Something was missing, or perhaps it had never been in their encounters and he was only now noticing the absence.

Maybe he shouldn’t have told her about George. It had shifted things between Charlie and him. Not that George’s history was a secret—the town of Bullock, Oklahoma, was erecting a statue, it was so well known—but somehow, it didn’t feel like his story to tell.

It was George’s story, and he was wasn’t here to relay it. There was a statue in a town square and the half-assembled truths his bumbling kid brother could pull together—but that wasn’t the real story. What he’d said tonight wasn’t
George’s
story, and Parsons didn’t like to tell things wrong.

He rubbed a hand across his mouth. He was exhausted, and it was turning his thoughts morbid. He had to stop this.

Charlie was at the mirror, reapplying her makeup. He’d missed her look into the mirror, the assessing one. She was on the final step: putting on her lipstick, painting the deep sweeps and bows of her mouth a shade of red that ought to be illegal.

When she had finished, she capped the tube with a quick, decisive motion, and then inspected her work.

Her gaze caught his in the mirror, her expression open and exposed. For the very first time, she acknowledged he watched her as she did this. Acknowledged him
before
her mask was completely in place.

Something shifted between them, slid almost—but not quite—into place. He took one step toward her, then another, and still she held his gaze. His heart took up an odd rhythm, and he sensed the thing that had been missing hovering at the edges of this scene.
 

He kept coming closer.

When he was right behind her, he wrapped his hand around her arm. She had all the time in the world to stop him, but she didn’t.

Parsons turned her toward him, and her features were now bared to him, no longer filtered by the mirror. He set his thumb on her lower lip. It was obscenely red against the color of his skin, stark against the paleness of her own. He let her breath wash over him for a moment, and then he dragged his thumb down to her chin, smearing her lipstick in the process.
 

He took in what he’d done. Yes, that was what he wanted, this face of hers marred. He only ever saw her putting her makeup on—he wanted to take it off. Deliberately.

He put his thumb back to her lip and smeared again. Her lips were gloriously messy now, almost completely undone.

The third time he did it, she parted her lips and took his thumb deep within her mouth.

He gasped even as he smiled. She always had to surprise him. She sucked on his thumb, making his heart pound and his breathing go harsh.

Then she dropped to her knees and reached for his belt.

“You don’t have to—”

“Shut up.”

So he did, because her nimble, cunning fingers had undone the buckle just like that, and his mouth seemed to have stopped working. There was the sweetest pressure of her knuckles against his belly as she worked at the button and zipper, and deeper pressure within as his need for her rose again.

Her palms were warm as they slid along his cock, almost comforting. Then her grip tightened and all thoughts of comfort were swamped by the sharp yearning her touch always brought. His eyes slipped closed, a groan rumbling through him.

She touched his cock, feather-light, different than any other caress she’d given him. When he looked again, she was brushing one cheek, then the other along his straining length, her breath whispering in the wake of her skin. Then she pressed her mouth where her cheek had been, leaving behind a smear of red lipstick.

Jesus.
She hadn’t even taken him in her mouth and already his knees were weak, his skin hot, and his nerves sizzling.

She wrapped her hand around the base of his cock, setting the angle, and he braced himself for what came next. He slid his fingers into her hair and closed his hand. Her gaze met his, an emotion he’d never seen before from her flickering in the amber of her eyes. He tried to give it a name, but before he could, she tore her gaze from his and took him deep within her mouth.

No preamble, no hesitancy—only the hot, wet clasp of her mouth, one of her hands gripping his ass tightly to anchor her.

She’d never done this to him before, but clearly she had some experience, because she was so fucking
good
at it. The perfect, mind-blotting amount of pressure, her tongue working the length of him along with the barest scrape of her teeth, a counterpoint to the softness of her mouth that heightened everything.

But of course she would be accomplished at this. She was talented at everything, and he, lucky bastard that he was, had her skills entirely at his disposal, at work and here in this room. All his.

His eyes snapped open. No, that wasn’t right.
This
wasn’t right, although it felt… He swallowed hard, the earlier sense of some fundamental absence rushing back, jostling against his hunger for her.

He pulled away, his hand still anchored in her hair, his breathing rough, unsteady.

“What’s the matter?” She sounded almost angry.

“Nothing.” He shook his head and brought her back to her feet. “No, that’s not true. This…”
 

Then it came to him, exactly what was missing, what he needed to fill the emptiness. “I don’t want you on your knees with me. I want us toe to toe.” He brushed his lips across hers, the sweetest kiss he’d ever given her. Or anyone. “I want us to be face to face.”

One of them was trembling, and he couldn’t tell if it was him or her. But there were tremors in her arm, his hand, at the point where they joined. Her eyes were wide, her lower lip quivering, and she looked as if she might kiss him or cry.

He waited for her to come to him, to accept his invitation and close the distance between them, equally matched this time.

Her trembling stopped. And she took half a step back. She pulled her arm out of his grip, her expression closing. “
I
want
this
.” She dropped back to her knees.

He let her. And he didn’t stop her when she put her mouth back on him, didn’t protest when she sucked him into oblivion, because who was he to demand more of her?

There was only a twinge of shame when he came in her mouth, because her fingers had dug tight into his thigh, as if demanding him to come. So he gave her what she wanted, and from now on, he’d give her nothing more.

She released him, and the air was cool on his damp cock. She tucked everything away, fastening his pants and re-buckling his belt.

He simply let her, limp and drained as he was.

When she was done, she got to her feet all on her own and went back to the mirror. She tucked her hair back into place, undoing the damage he’d done. Then she snatched up a tissue and rubbed the red lipstick from her mouth, erasing all evidence of his attempt to fracture her mask.

She gave herself one last assessing look to make sure she’d gotten all of it, and slowly, deliberately, she uncapped her lipstick and re-painted her mouth, covering it once more.

Her fingers trembled as she did it, but there wasn’t even a hint of a smudge when she was done.

And then she was gone.

The problem began in the main computing office. Charlie clutched two monographs to her chest. She needed the cover of them to feel out Parsons after last night, after his intimate confessions and his request she meet him
toe to toe
and
face to face
.

The truth was they had developed a wonderful rapport, both at work and during the hours they filched at Mulligan’s. She prayed they hadn’t wrecked it: he’d been vulnerable and she’d pushed him away. His vulnerability had been too heavy, too demanding—she couldn’t carry his need and her own. So she’d dropped to her knees when he’d asked her for more, quite literally ducking the issue.

But they might have destroyed their camaraderie in those moments, and the thought made her feel… bereft.

She didn’t want to wait until the next staff meeting to know where they stood. So she’d dug two articles out of a pile on her desk as a pretense. She merely had to slink out of her office without anyone asking what she was up to.

Her grip tightened on the papers. She didn’t have to slink at all. She was going to see Parsons to discuss some recent developments in computing. There was nothing wrong with that.

She started across the room with purpose.

“You busy?”

Jack’s words halted her progress. He had a pencil behind one ear and another between his teeth and a messy stack of notes in his hands. He looked worse than she felt, probably because she and Hal had trusted him with an important problem: reducing the data lag between Cape Canaveral and Houston. Well, the kid had wanted greater responsibility.

She swallowed a smile. “Yes, I have to step out for a minute. I have a question for Parsons.” There was no point dissembling.

“Why?” This plaintive question came from around the pencil.

She had the sense Jack might latch onto her arm and never release her. He was badly stressed.

“Processors. I’ll be back soon. Do you have a theory?”

He stabbed a finger at the top paper in his stack. “Yes!” This came out more like
yeth
. “It’s the cables.”
 

“The fables?”

“Cables.”
 

She’d known what he meant, of course, but teasing Jack was always fun. Watching him try to solve this problem was like watching a baby bird leave the nest. And he was right: She and Hal already knew they needed to upgrade the cables.

“Well, I’ll be back in a minute and you can tell me about your solution.”

Jack made a noise of frustration as she left, one she wanted to echo when she ran into Dot and Beverly just outside the door.

“Coffee break?” Bev asked, holding up her empty mug.

“Sorry, I have a quick errand and then I have to help Jack.”

She darted down the side corridor that housed the computing department to the building’s main hallway. She passed the break room, the crew systems division, and a wide bank of windows, from which she could see the entire ASD campus.

She was close now. She only had to make it down the steps and across the vestibule and she’d reach her destination.

But in the middle of her path stood Lee Carruthers and another of the Perseid astronauts.

“This day is turning into a nightmare,” she muttered.

“Howdy, stranger,” Carruthers said to her. “Or should I say Dr. Eason?”

He put special emphasis on her name, even going so far as to waggle his brows. He no doubt thought this was sexy. She thought it was ridiculous. Did this sort of thing work for him? Sadly, she suspected the answer was yes.

The other astronaut standing with him—Storch—watched her with evident interest. She ignored him. She could only handle so much testosterone at once.

“You should not,” she said to Carruthers. She offered this with a half-hearted salute and kept going. She didn’t have time for this.

“Aren’t you impressed I figured out your name?”

She stopped and glared at Carruthers. He sounded disappointed, and his entitlement made her grind her teeth together. “On the whole, no.”

Storch snorted and looked her over again. She’d just made herself more interesting, which of course hadn’t been her intent.

“I think you should be,” Carruthers offered. “I had to ask two people.”

“It’s deeply sad. Such wasted effort. You’ll have to ask someone else to explain rejection to you. I’m certain this gentleman can oblige.” She pointed to Storch and whirled on her heel.

She could hear them laughing all the way to Parsons’s door.

Charlie knocked and waited. She hadn’t waited for him to formally admit her in months and months. She might not have ever done it, at least not since he’d interviewed her.

Before she could process all the feelings churning inside her, he called, “Yes?”

She took a deep breath and entered. He hadn’t bothered to look up as she’d come in. He probably assumed she was someone boring, like the guys from retrieval. She wasn’t sure if she was going to be a pleasant surprise or a horrible nightmare.

She set down the papers she was carrying in front of him. They weren’t anything important—two recent articles on new processors that she wouldn’t normally bring to his attention—but she’d needed an excuse to see him.

He glanced up and his brows arched the smallest degree. “What are these?”

There were purple bags under his eyes and his shirt was badly wrinkled. He looked more tired than usual. There was also a blotch of dried shaving cream beneath his ear. She wanted to wipe it off, but she didn't want to embarrass him. She was trying to make sure everything was fine, not develop more personal moments.

She regarded him. Did he feel odd seeing her again?