Good Husband Material

“Nice,” she commented.

He looked down at her bare leg, a lot of which had been exposed when her dress rode up as she sat down. “Nice,” he murmured right back. Natalie’s long legs had always driven him wild, but they’d been colt’s legs twenty years ago. Now they were strong, elegant and shapely.

He ran around to the driver’s door and quickly climbed inside, not wanting to waste any time. Before he turned the ignition, however, he slid his hand under Natalie’s hair to grasp the back of her neck, and pulled her in for another kiss. He didn’t want to give her too much time to think because he knew she’d let reason talk her out of what they both wanted.

But once he started kissing her, he couldn’t stop. He had his hands all over her, and before he knew it she’d scrambled over the gearshift to straddle his lap.

They were no strangers to car sex. During their senior year, his “car” had been a beat-up compact pickup truck with even less space than the Jaguar, but it had afforded them the privacy they’d needed. He pushed his seat all the way back, then reclined it until they were almost horizontal.

“Nice,” she said again. She had his shirt mostly unbuttoned and her hands rubbing his bare chest, so he didn’t know if she was talking about the car or him.

He slid his hand up her dress to caress her thigh, then her bottom, which was covered with something very silky—and very tiny. “Really nice,” he murmured, fingering the lacy waistband of her panties. “I’d like to see these.”

“You can see them if you take them off.” She claimed his mouth for yet more kisses, hot, wet, open-mouthed kisses with tongues and teeth.

He was not one to argue. In a maneuver they’d perfected with practice so many years before, she leaned down until she was chest-to-chest with him, pressing her wonderful, soft breasts against him. Natalie’s breasts were fuller, softer than he remembered. She straightened her legs and swung them around to the side. Now, with her sitting on his lap with her back to the window, it was easy to whisk her panties off.

“Still agile as ever,” Josh couldn’t resist saying.

“You talk too much. And you’re wearing way too many clothes.”

That he could fix. He had his pants unfastened and unzipped in record time. Natalie reached inside his briefs and wrapped her hand around his arousal, and he sucked in a breath. It had been way too long. He suspected he would have about as much control as a teenager, which was only appropriate, since they were acting like teenagers.

Suddenly a horrible thought occurred to him. “Dammit, I don’t have any protection.”

Natalie laughed. “Josh, get a grip. Remember who you’re with.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Even if I’d been fertile as a bunny rabbit in my twenties, I’m forty-three now.”

“Jeez, Nat, I’m sorry.” How could he have made such a blunder, reminding her of what had torn them apart? “I guess I was back in time, when we did have to worry about that. But I never for a moment forgot who I was with.”

She grinned. “I should take it as a compliment that having sex with me made you forget what year it is.”

“We’re not having sex,” he argued.

“Not yet.” But she soon changed the status quo.

As he entered her, he felt as if he’d come home after a long, long absence. No, he would never mistake her with any other woman.

He tried to make it last, but it took everything he had to hold off just long enough so that she could reach the peak of pleasure. Then he fell into a void, a vacuum in which there was nothing but white-hot sensation. He wanted to stay in that place forever, but it was over far too quickly.

When he returned to the here and now, he realized they were both slick with sweat. They’d been in a sealed car on a warm Texas summer night while generating their own heat.

He cradled Natalie against his left arm while he sat up slightly and reached for the car key. With a flick of the ignition the engine was running, the air-conditioning blasting.

“Well,” Natalie said.

Josh laughed. And when he looked down at her with her dress half off, her hair everywhere, her makeup smeared, not to mention his state of disarray, he laughed again. “Guess we still got it.”

She punched him lightly on the arm. “Is that all you have to say?”

Okay, so he’d never excelled at after-sex dialogue. One of his many failings. “Natalie, that was fantastic.”

“Yeah, we still got it. We’re still crazy. What if our children saw us right now?”

“Shh. Our children aren’t here. And we’re consenting adults. We haven’t done anything wrong.” In fact, he thought it had felt pretty right.

She leaned her cheek on his chest and sighed. “I’m glad you have tinted windows.”

“There’s nobody out here, anyway.”

“Josh, why did we do that?”

Good question. If he thought there was any chance they could start over…But that was impossible. They didn’t even live in the same city. It was a four-or five-hour drive between Dallas and Houston, depending on how far one exceeded the speed limit.

But even if they weren’t geographically challenged, there’d been too much pain between them. Each time they’d failed to conceive, Natalie had gotten a little more frustrated, a little angrier, until those negative emotions had infected every aspect of their lives.

Not that he couldn’t take some responsibility for the mess they’d made of their marriage. He’d been less than sensitive to her insecurities. He’d viewed their infertility as a logistical problem to be overcome. If they just tried a little harder…

He hadn’t realized that Natalie considered her misbehaving ovaries a slap in the face of her womanhood, and he hadn’t understood her emotional storms. Sometimes, when she’d seemed especially moody, he’d just removed himself rather than comfort her and say the things she needed to hear—that he would love her forever even if there was never a baby.

Their disagreement over adoption had been the proverbial straw.

Right now they were wallowing in the good times, the fun times of high school, before real life intervened. But they were riding a pink cloud of nostalgia that couldn’t last for long.

Still, this night could last.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” he said. “I want to make love to you properly, on a real bed, with air-conditioning.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

“What?” What was she saying?

“We need to get back to the reunion. There are so many people I haven’t talked to yet—”

“Nat, you’re making excuses. What’s the real reason?”

She maneuvered off his lap, managing to narrowly avoid kneeing him in the groin. “I don’t regret this, Josh, but I think we should return to our senses.”

“I happen to think making love to you in a comfortable king-size bed is perfectly sensible.” He adjusted his clothes and buttoned his shirt while Natalie located her panties and worked her feet back into her high-heeled sandals. “Besides, I’m not sure you want to go waltzing back into the VFW Hall looking like that.”

“What?” She pulled down the visor and checked herself in the mirror. “Oh, my God, I look like I just had sex in a car. Melissa would know instantly.”

Everyone would know instantly, but he didn’t say so. She opened her little purse and pulled out a comb and a lipstick, working feverishly, first on her hair, then her lips.

“This is hopeless! And I’m all sweaty.” She smelled her hair, then her shoulder. “I smell like Stetson! All right, yes, take me back to your hotel room. I’m going to shower and air out the dress.”