I startled as he touched my knee, the heat from his palm branding me through my jeans. When I opened my eyes, I looked straight into his.
“What if I don’t want to leave?” he whispered.
I was trembling, I noticed with strange detachment. My hands were curled into tight fists, palms sweating. I’d crossed my legs so tightly my foot was going numb. On his knees before me, Liam tipped his head to look deeper into my eyes, a small smile teasing the corners of his mouth.
“Wha-what?”
“Fifty years, you say?” He scraped his teeth over his bottom lip, flushing out the colour. Outside, a car turned into my street, momentarily illuminating the room with its headlights. It would take less than a second for me to lean forward and claim the kiss I knew he was thinking about giving me.
“Is this a joke?” I asked weakly, clinging onto my last shreds of strength and dignity by my fingernails.
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“Why, then?” I had to know, had to be sure he was really considering giving us a chance. I had to know this wasn’t just another cheap ploy to get me into bed.
“Because I’ve been going crazy missing you these last two months. Because whoever I’m with, I always come back to you. Because maybe you’re right that this can work and I’ve been an idiot all these years for being afraid.”
We shared a small, indulgent laugh at that, the idea of Liam being afraid of anything too absurd to contemplate.
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.
*