Hilary Fields - Bliss

His intensity should have frightened her. Instead, it only turned her on more. Come back and finish what you started, she wanted to plead, even though she wasn’t at all sure where that might lead. It had felt like she might get there… felt so incredible she couldn’t believe he was denying her now.

“Do you understand?” he demanded a second time, those green eyes going gold again. He stepped closer, took her chin between his fingers, and brought that incredible heat of his once more within reach.

Sera gulped, nodded.

“And do you agree?” he asked, more gently and with a touch of his regular humor.

Sera didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded again, against his hand. She noticed she was running her own hand down the contours of his back, stroking lower to trace his hips, his buttocks. Her hand wanted to grab hold, and keep hold of that prime male real estate… but he was still talking, and his expression told her she better pay attention.

“Good. I’m glad. Because I’m going away, Bliss—going home to Israel. I’ll be back in a week, perhaps ten days, and then we’ll revisit this. But first”—he lowered his head and kissed her again, at first gently, and then not at all gently—“first, I’ve got to go speak to my wife.”

With one final, brief kiss, he donned his hat and left Sera there, sitting on the counter by the sink, closer to orgasm than she’d ever imagined, and more befuddled than she’d been on her last epic bender.

Speak to his wife?

If you’re finished ignoring me like a pouty teenager, kiddo, there’s someone who wants to talk to you,” Pauline said. She pointed to the phone, which was lying off the cradle on the mosaic-topped telephone table by the sofa.

Sera rolled her eyes at her aunt. She hadn’t been ignoring Pauline; she’d been punishing her for this afternoon’s boorish behavior. There was a difference. But she supposed her affronted act had gone on long enough. Pauline couldn’t help herself—she was congenitally uncouth—and if her interference was playing merry hell with Sera’s love life, well… it hadn’t turned out all bad.

Maybe. The jury was still out on that one.

The jury, and Asher’s wife, Sera reminded herself. Apparently that mysterious paragon wasn’t as out of the picture as she’d assumed—and what it meant for her and Asher, she had no idea. Asher wouldn’t dally with me if he was still married, would he? Somehow she couldn’t picture her landlord as a philandering cheat. She had to have a little more faith in him than that. But still… She shook herself to bring her thoughts back to the present.

“Weird,” she muttered to herself. “Who would call me at Aunt Pauline’s number?” Those few folk she kept in contact with from New York all had her cell number—not that it had been ringing off the hook or anything. She approached the old-fashioned, chunky telephone (which Pauline had bedazzled with flecks of turquoise and fossils she’d picked up in the desert) and gave it a tentative “Hello?”

“What’s going on over there, Serafina?” Margaret’s somewhat nasal, unmistakably New York accent cut through the miles. “Your aunt called me up, all in a lather, and told me I wasn’t ‘doing my damn job.’ You okay?”

Sera glanced disbelievingly at her aunt, who was leaning against the archway that connected the living room and the kitchen, leg-warmered ankles crossed, shamelessly eavesdropping. “You called my sponsor?”

Idly, Pauline began to pick at the unraveling edge of one of her arm socks. “You bet your bippy I did,” she said. “Seemed to me you needed some good advice, and you’re too pigheaded to take it from me. Figured I’d give that Margaret woman a try, since you speak so highly of her, and she’s supposed to be such a font of wisdom and all.”

“How did you even get her number?”

Pauline plucked Sera’s cell phone from her arm warmer, into which Sera could now see Hortencia had knitted little pockets. She waved it demonstratively. “I’m not fooling around here, kid—though I wish you would.”

“Helloooooo. Earth to Serafina Wilde,” Margaret’s impatient voice cut through Sera’s irritation with her aunt’s meddling. “What the heck’s going on out there, Sera? You staying sober? Making meetings? What’s the deal?”

“Sorry, Margaret,” Sera apologized, focusing her attention back on her sponsor. “Yes, I’m fine—still sober, getting to meetings pretty regularly, and doing my program reading at night like you taught me. Everything’s fine—my aunt’s just turned into a busybody in her old age.” Sera shot a baleful look Pauline’s way and deliberately turned her back on her.

“Well, since we’re both here on the phone, you might as well get me up to speed, Sera,” Margaret said. “Clearly something’s got you in a froth, and we both know it’s not good for people like us to get too frothy. Why don’t you start with why the Wilde-Woman took it upon herself to reach out to me, ex parte.”

“I will,” Sera promised. “Just give me a sec.” She spun around and skewered her aunt with a look even darker than the last one. Pauline mugged an innocent expression, whistling at the ceiling and swinging one foot like an overgrown kid. Sera rolled her eyes. Pauline was hopeless—and so was trying to change her. She sighed, her annoyance fading. “You’ve got me where you wanted me, Aunt Paulie,” she pointed out. “Now how about some privacy?”

Pauline looked like she would protest, but at Sera’s scowl, she decamped to her bedroom, muttering about finding the sweater that matched her knit extremities, as it was getting “a wee bit nipply” outside.

“Okay, sorry,” Sera said into the phone. “So what’s happening is, Pauline’s decided to take a stab at running my love life, and she gets testy when she doesn’t get her way. I liked it better when she was only worried about her own O’s and left mine out of it.”

Margaret laughed. “When did she ever do that?”

“Never,” Sera admitted. “Anyhow, it looks like I’ve gotten into a bit of a romantic entanglement, and Pauline just doesn’t know when to quit pushing.”

“Hm,” said Margaret. “What kind of “romantic entanglement” are we talking about—the good kind, or the Blake Austin kind?”

Sera sighed and rubbed her temples, where a rather fierce tension headache was gathering. “The kind that could be really good—or would be, if I were the right woman for this guy.” She proceeded to spill the whole story—all about Asher (whom she deliberately hadn’t mentioned in any of her previous calls to her sponsor), how attracted she was to him, and how, unbelievably, he seemed to like her, too. She finished by spelling out how disastrously their dinner had ended the other night and detailing a rated-G version of their subsequent encounter in the kitchen today. She skipped the part where she’d confessed her broken hoo-ha, but did tell Margaret about Asher’s promise—or was it a warning?—that he wanted to take her out when he returned.

“So anyway, Maggie, I don’t know whether to jump the guy’s bones or hold back in case the whole thing blows up in my face. I mean, after all, I’m supposed to be opening my dream store in a couple weeks, and I really ought to be a hundred percent focused on that. Plus, apparently right now Asher’s winging his way to Tel Aviv on some mysterious mission to make things right with his wife, and he wants to take me out for what he calls ‘a proper date’ when he gets back—” Sera would have kept rattling on, but Margaret interrupted.

“Wait a minute, Sera,” Margaret commanded. Sera could almost see her making the “roll that shit back a bit” gesture she always did with her hands. “Go back to the part where you told this Asher guy you were no good for him. You really said that?”

“Uh-huh,” Sera said, mentally preparing for a lecture. She twirled the old-fashioned phone cord between her fingers.

“Let me get this straight. You told the guy—this guy you describe as practically perfect, and hotter than New York in July—that you didn’t deserve to be with him because you were an addict and a failure?”

“Well, ah…” Sera chewed on a lock of hair. “Yeah, I might have said that.”

“If you were here, I’d give you such a smack on the ass right now,” Margaret swore. “How many times have we read the Big Book together? How many meetings have we sat through? You calling all those people in the fellowship failures?”

“No, of course not…” Sera said meekly. Her fellow alkies were some of the folks she admired most. Hearing their stories of how they’d scraped themselves out of life’s gutters and pieced themselves back together into some of the kindest, most responsible people she’d ever met had inspired Sera herself to stick around and give living sober a chance.

“Damn right, Serafina. As well blame the cancer patient or the diabetic for their disease. You—well, you may have drawn the short straw when it comes to addictive propensities, but it’s what you’ve done to overcome that condition that defines you, not the addiction itself. I mean, how many alcoholics do you know who couldn’t get sober?”

Sera had to admit, she knew a lot. Only a small percentage of addicts ever managed to get—or stay—in recovery.

“And of the ones you know who did succeed,” Margaret continued relentlessly, “how many of them had it easy?”

“Um, none?” Sera forced herself to stop chewing her hair and twisting the old-school phone cord around her fingers. Both were nearly in knots, just like her guts. But Margaret was right, she had come a long way, and she had a lot to be proud of. She couldn’t let this absurd insecurity left over from the Blake years continue to cast a pall on her life. She felt herself standing straighter. “So if I get you right, what you’re trying to say is that I should be proud of my past, not ashamed—or at least, proud of my progress.”

“That’s right,” Margaret said, satisfaction coloring her voice. “You can’t control the way you were born, but you can control how you handle life’s challenges. Now you… you’ve done a pretty damn fine job, if what Pauline was telling me before she put you on the phone is true. Your store’s nearly ready to open. You’ve met a nice bunch of gals. Apparently you even got yourself some kind of badass monster truck. You’re really making a life for yourself out there. Why shouldn’t you have a gorgeous guy in it?”

Because I’m a dud in the sack, Sera wanted to say, but she’d told too many people about her no-O issue and she really didn’t want to go over it again. She had enough people out here hovering over her and monitoring her erogenous zones as it was.

“There’s no guy in the world so great you don’t deserve him,” Margaret continued. “I’m serious, Sera. Don’t blow your chance at happiness because of some outdated idea you have of yourself. You’re a new woman, and you’ve got everything it takes to achieve the life of your dreams. Just don’t let your disease talk you out of it, and you should be okay.”

Sera smiled. “Thanks, Margaret.” She was starting to feel better. Maybe, just maybe, her two favorite female advisors had a point. She should stop assuming she knew what was best for Asher, stop assuming she wasn’t good enough for him, and just let things play out. Asher was no Blake Austin. No matter how badly things went, he would never be deliberately cruel to her. The worst that could happen was that Sera would wind up humiliated—and she was no stranger to humiliation. The best that could happen, however… well, hell. The best would be very good indeed.

She forced herself to listen to her sponsor, who was still talking.

“You want my advice, I think you should lighten up, like your aunt says. That old broad’s got a lot of wisdom in her. Listen to her, and I think you’ll be happier for it.”

Serafina knew better than to argue with her sponsor—a formidable woman who just might come out to Santa Fe to deliver that ass-smacking if she wasn’t satisfied Sera was following her suggestions.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I’ll take that advice.”

Which was how Sera found herself spending the next two weeks on a bona fide Orgasm Quest.

I can’t believe I let you talk me into this, you guys. I hate sweating.”

The four women sat around a brazier in the dim light of a mud-brick Navajo torture chamber. Pan flute music was being piped in from some unseen corner. Clouds of sage incense wafted to their nostrils, while waves of heat billowed from the brazier, like cushioned fists thudding against their overheated skin.