He shook his head, then lowered his lips to her breast, kissing. He ran a tongue over her nipple and lifted his head and looked into her eyes. “I want to hear it.”
“I swear to God, I didn’t cry over my last three husbands.”
“Do you always have to bring them up?” he asked.
She smiled at him as her hand wandered. “Maybe we should talk about the fact that even when I mention ex-husbands, you’re hard as a baseball bat.”
“Are you done with your shower?” he asked. “I might have the erection of a twenty-year-old right now, but if I try to do it in this tub, I could break my sixty-two-year-old back. And then I’ll be no good to you.”
“We can’t have that,” she laughed. “And really, to be completely honest, that’s not the erection of a twenty-year-old. At least as I recall. Go with forty-year-old.” She smiled and shrugged. “As I recall.”
“Come on,” he said. He put her hand on him. “That’s solid steel, right there.”
“Walt,” she said. “I’m in love with you. It feels like the first time I’ve ever been in love. I don’t want it to go away. I hate being here when you’re there. I can handle little bits, but not long separations. I’m happiest with you.”
“I’m not going to let this happen to us again, honey. I’m not giving you up. And if any of those hotshot movie stars flirts with you, I’m going to shoot him dead.”
She laughed. “Walt, you just sweep me off my feet when you get all tender and talk murder like that.”
“No more crying, honey. I love your smile. I love your smart-ass remarks, your laugh, the way you don’t let me get away with anything. Now, come on, you dry me off and I’ll dry you off and then we’ll go at it like a couple of kids.”
“You’re on.”
Walt had the weekend with Muriel. After dinner, they went back to bed. She put a DVD in her portable player and they watched half a movie before pausing it to make love again. In the night, she woke him for yet another. In the morning, sex was the first thing on his mind.
Muriel took him on a tour of the movie lot on Saturday, introduced him to a few people who were working, showed him her trailer. “You could as easily live here,” he said, impressed. “This is a helluva RV.”
“I know, and there are nights we work late and I just shower and sleep here. But it’s good to get away from all this commotion to decompress. I like that little house.”
“Do all the other actors live in little rented houses?” he asked.
She shook her head. “They all have different needs. A couple stay on the lot, some stay in hotels in Butte or Missoula. A lot of crew stays in the motor lodge at the end of town. And some crew brought families and their own RVs. There’s something like a tent city on the other side of the lot.”
“It’s not fancy,” he said. “I thought it would be fancy.”
“Not usually. There’s a lot of money wrapped up in this—people are working hard to get the job done, and on time. Every day we spend here costs tens of thousands of dollars.”
They spent Saturday afternoon touring the local area from the car, stopping off in some antique stores because it was an addiction of Muriel’s. They ate in a diner in a town no bigger than Virgin River, bought a few things to take home for dinner and Sunday-morning breakfast, sat on the front porch with their glasses of wine and people waved to them as they walked by.
They visited a local stable and took a couple of gentle horses out along a mountain trail, walked along a local river holding hands and had long, seamless, almost endless talks about everything and everybody.
And then Monday morning arrived, in spite of the fact that both of them wished it never would. Muriel had to report to the set and Walt would drive back to Missoula and fly home. She had to leave the house before he did, so he walked her out onto the front porch to say goodbye.
“That was a damn fast forty-eight hours,” he said.
“I’ll talk to you tonight, though it could be late. It was wonderful having you here, even if it was only for a little while.” She smiled up at him. “I’ve never had so much sex in my life.”
“Really?” he asked, lifting an eyebrow. “Even when you were younger?”
“Even then.”
“I must be getting better with age,” he said. “I’m coming back for another round.”
“You are?”
“Yep. I’m going home and making airline reservations for a couple of weeks from now, so put it on your calendar. And I’m going to keep coming back often until this godforsaken movie shit is over.”
“It might be bad luck on my Oscar for you to refer to it that way.”
“I just hope your next movie isn’t filmed in some Middle Eastern desert—I’ve seen enough of those in my life.”She lifted a brow. “My next movie?”
“If you decide to retire for real after this one, I can live with that,” he said, grinning. He ran a knuckle along her cheek. “Did we talk about everything? Anything lingering out there we didn’t cover?” She shook her head. “Well, there’s that one thing that kind of goes with I’m in love with you,” he continued. “If you want to get married, I’m game.”
“I don’t know…”
“And if you don’t want to, it’s okay. As long as I have your naked body up against mine on a very frequent basis, I’ll get along. I’m leaving the whole issue completely up to you, Muriel.”
“Why, Walt?”
He shrugged. “I don’t have a problem with marriage. I liked it, it worked for me. No boogeymen or curses as far as I’m concerned. Whatever you decide you want to do, either way I’m claiming you. Don’t try to wiggle out of it. It’s a done deal.”
“I don’t want to get out of it. I like you.”
“You love me,” he corrected. “Passionately. Desperately. Insatiably.”
“I do,” she laughed.
“You make me feel twenty-one,” he said. “Honest to God. And when the fabulous sex simmers down a little, you’re the best friend I’ve had in a long time. Muriel, you’re not a convenience. I’d walk across a mile of cut glass in my bare feet to hold your hand and talk to you for one hour. You’re everything to me.”
She sighed deeply and her eyes glistened a little. “I’d better go before I give up the only Oscar of my lifetime by playing house with you.”
“Tell me I’m everything to you, too,” he said.
“Damned if you aren’t,” she said. “Now kiss me in a way that will hold me for a couple of weeks.”
“Kind of took you by surprise, didn’t I?” he teased. “Admit it, you didn’t think this would turn out to be so much, did you?”
“Walt, the second I saw you blush when you asked if I was married, I knew. And I wanted you. Right then. Right there. Sweaty and naked on the trail.”
That made his smile huge. “You didn’t let on.”
“I hadn’t wanted something like that in a long, long time,” she said, smiling. Then she rose on her toes and planted a big sloppy one on his lips, holding him close. “I adore you,” she whispered against his lips. “I’ll count the seconds until you’re back.”
Cheryl brought sandwiches to the park the next Sunday afternoon and Dan brought them the Sunday after that. It didn’t take them long to fully share their unfortunate pasts. When Cheryl began telling him about when she started drinking heavily as a teenager, he said, “You don’t have to tell me all this, you know. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I like having a picnic with you because of who you are now.”
“Are you opposed to hearing it?” she asked.
“It’s not that. But you don’t have to run it by me to see if I’m going to stick or run scared.”
“Dan, I’ve told the story so many times, I can do it in my sleep. That’s what we do at AA—tell our stories. It’s kind of amazing how we can still find new things in the old story after months. After years.”
So he listened. It started in high school and just got worse and worse until by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she was drunk most of the time. Then she told about Mel Sheridan coming for her one morning, carting her off to a treatment program right in Eureka and now she couldn’t let herself get very far away.
“I think that’s a good woman there,” Dan said of Mel. “That man of hers, now, there’s a piece of work.”
“Jack?” Cheryl asked. She laughed. “Oh, I had a bad thing for Jack, back when I was drinking. Bad. I’d have followed him anywhere!”
Dan picked up her hand and held it. “You over that now?”
She got a strange look on her face. “Listen, I can’t handle anything more complicated than friendship….”
He gave the hand a squeeze and smiled. “Try not to get ahead of me, Cheryl. I don’t have anything complicated in mind. This is all I’m looking for—Sunday picnics with a nice woman, maybe a little handholding sometimes. Maybe we’ll get closer down the line, maybe we’ll just be friends who have a sandwich and tea. This is okay, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” she said doubtfully. “It’s just that I haven’t had a regular, normal, healthy relationship that I can remember.”
“Me neither,” he said. “It’s kind of scary wonderful, isn’t it?”
Dan wasn’t making any fast moves, and it was extremely deliberate and well thought out. He didn’t call during the week except to be sure they were on for Sunday. It wasn’t just because she was so skittish—it was also him, cautious. After a wife leaving him and a son dying was followed by a stint in jail, he wasn’t at all interested in a relationship that was going to suck the life out of him. All of a sudden, after all the healing he’d had to do, he was real reluctant to threaten what turned out to be peace of mind.
His recovery had been a long, arduous one. He came home from Iraq wounded and with some emotional issues, a lot like young Rick now. In fact, from the time he left for Iraq until he was released from prison, it had been one excruciating journey. Well, he was barely coming out of a long, dark tunnel. He wasn’t going to throw it away by moving too fast with a woman who had her own recovery to worry about.
But he liked her. She was cool and didn’t know it. When she could let go of that whole town-drunk thing, they talked about when they were real young kids and what they thought they’d grow up to be. Dan had always liked to build, but he thought he’d be building race cars. Cheryl loved animals, but never had a pet growing up. She had wanted to be a veterinarian, but in fact had barely finished high school. Their jobs right now were real mundane, construction and waiting tables on the early shift in a diner, yet just filling in the blanks for each other could soak up at least a couple of hours. They talked about the people they dealt with on the job and friends of theirs. Cheryl had a whole network of friends through AA who’d become her lifeline and Dan claimed some of his newer acquaintances from Virgin River.
He filled her in on Rick—Cheryl had known Rick since he was about two. “He’s really struggling with all his stuff—the war, the amputation, the girlfriend, the body image—you name it. He has a smorgasbord of crap to deal with. I keep looking for an in to tell him we could talk about some of that stuff. I’ve been there, man. But he’s got me at arm’s length. He’s not letting anyone close. I think it’s killing Jack slowly.”
They didn’t have to get much beyond that second Sunday lunch before laughter was as natural for them to share as the stories of their hard times, their daily lives, their gossip.