Seventeen
“Why did you leave?” she asked, over a supper of shrimp etouffee. Not only had Gabe given her more orgasms than she could count, he’d also fed her the best meals of her life.
“I figured it was the right thing to do.” When the crocodile kitchen timer dinged, he crossed the room and took a pan of bread pudding from the oven. Emma couldn’t decide which made her drool more—the scent of that sweet baked pudding or the sight of Gabe’s firm hard butt in those jeans he’d put back on. “I didn’t have any prospects. You were going off to college in the fall. No way was I going to ask you to give up your dreams to chase mine.”
“You were my dream.” She was no longer embarrassed to admit it.
“Could’ve been a dead-end one,” he said. “By the time it looked like I was goin’ to be working pretty regular, you’d gotten married.”
Gabe remembered Nate’s phone call as if it had been yesterday. He was admittedly foggy about the next few days, having spent them in a drunken pity party of self-recrimination.
“You could have written.”
“Last time I checked, the mail goes both ways,” he said mildly, as he poured the hot whiskey sauce over the pudding.
“You didn’t exactly leave a forwarding address.”
“Nate always knew where I was.”
During the past few days Gabe had come to the conclusion that Nate knew a lot of things. He also suspected that if he’d checked, that so-called construction emergency that had Emma meeting him at the airport would turn out to be as bogus as Richard the dickhead’s tax return.
Not that he minded. In fact, Gabe decided, as he carried the two bowls of pudding back to the bed they’d hardly left this weekend, maybe he’d buy his best friend a case of Scotch as a thank-you gift.
“Let’s not rehash the past, Emma,” he said, handing her one of the heavy earthenware bowls. “We’ll leave yesterday behind, worry about tomorrow when it comes.” He stuck a finger into his bowl, scooped out some of the brown sugar whiskey sauce and drew a ring around Emma’s plump pink nipple. “Right now, I’m suddenly feelin’ hungry again, me.”