She stared across the kitchen into his eyes and found more of that defensiveness. She knew him too well.
Lori cupped his face in her hand. "Why can't you admit you want to see her, too?"
Defensiveness fled. A snap of anger replaced it, only to fade as quickly as it had fired. He grazed her shoulder with a knuckle, down her side, just beside her breast, bare and tight beneath her T-shirt. "And why can't you admit you still want me?"
His touch felt too good with only the thin barrier of well-washed cotton between them. His face felt too good in her hand, with barriers between them crumbling faster than she could rebuild.
She backed out of his reach. His hand dropped away as quickly as hers. She definitely knew him too well. "Still using sex to dodge the tough questions, I see."
"What can I say? You know me." He shot to his feet and grabbed a travel mug steaming hints of chicory into the air. "I'll be back from debrief in two hours to pick you up."
The front door closed behind him before she realized she should have demanded he drop her off at her car on his way. Why hadn't she?
Lori crossed her arms over her aching breasts. Apparently, she didn't know herself nearly as well as she thought she knew Gray.
* * *
Two bowls of frosted flakes later, Lori decided she needed to leave. Her clothes should be finished in the dryer soon. She sat cross-legged on Gray's blue-plaid couch and checked her watch for the fifth time in ten minutes. She'd spent most of the past hour working Magda's case from the phone.
Now she should call a cab, leave Gray a note and cut out. Her own work credentials would gain her entrance to see Magda.
And if Gray showed up at the hospital, too? They would behave like adults. She wasn't some high-schooler ducking behind the lockers to avoid a boy.
Lori swung her feet off the sofa and searched the apartment for the phone book. She roamed from the living room, through the kitchen. God, the man loved Air Force blue. His whole place was blue, wood and white. Of course he'd once told her buying a single color scheme meant he didn't have to waste time matching.
And he hadn't. No knickknacks warmed the decor. Just precoordinated furniture. Even his bedroom linens fit the bed-in-a-bag category. Only a smattering of framed airplane prints gave hints about the man who lived there.
A home, but not quite, like the motels and transitory apartments her parents had always chosen.
Lori found the phone book in his computer room and plopped in the office chair to call the cab company. While she waited on hold, she spun in the chair. Pictures of the C-17 littered the white wall, no surprise. His degrees must be in his office on base.
Twirling another half turn revealed a dry erase board, and his first homey touch. Notes scrawled along corners around the childish artwork dominating the space. Someone had drawn a purple outline of an airplane in the middle and labeled it for "Uncle Gray."
How long had it been there? And how sweet he hadn't erased it.
Images bombarded her. Ladislov's giggle when Gray had tickled his side to get him to cough. Magda's smile because of a simple do-rag.
Lori eyed the phone. Maybe she could wait for Gray a little longer. She reached to hang up. A brass picture frame glinted in the overhead light, halting her. She snagged the photo from the desk, the phone still cradled in her other hand.>"When did this happen?"
He shrugged and resumed picking. "Sometime yesterday."
Ping. She winced. Her mouth burned with bile. She'd seen worse injuries just yesterday, tending the children, but somehow this sent her stomach hurtling in roller-coaster flips.
Her mind flashed back to the bandanna tied around his calf on the return flight. In the darkened cockpit she'd seen only the bandanna and what she'd thought were mud stains. Guilt packed a heavy punch. "Why didn't you say something?"
"No need." Pick. Drop. Pick. Drop. "It didn't affect my ability to do my job. Plenty of time for Band-Aids later."
She watched with a mixture of awe and honor as he irrigated a deeper cut with a squirt bottle, pinched it closed and sealed it with a butterfly bandage. "Shouldn't you be at the doctor's office?"
He paused digging long enough to quirk a brow. "I didn't get my degree over the Internet, hon."
"Don't be a smartass, Gray. Shouldn't you have a tetanus shot or something?"
"Soldiers get tetanus shots ten times the strength of a regular dose. Stands to reason, right?" He worked as he spoke, as if the words gave him focus. "Could be hours, even days, before treatment is available in a survival situation. Think what could happen from a simple bramble scratch, followed by wading through some unsanitary sludge pit."
She shuddered.
"We're pumped full of more immunizations than you can imagine." He manipulated the tweezers around the last piece, a heavily embedded square of metal. His words slid through gritted teeth. "Son of a—"