The Awakening of Dr. Brown

It should have been a silly question. What five-year-old child wouldn’t miss his mother? But she asked it with childlike curiosity mingled with an element of wistfulness, so that it seemed to him unbearably touching…almost heartbreaking. As if a blind child had asked him what it was like to see.

“I did,” he said quietly. “Terribly, at first. I was only five, after all. After Dixie came to take care of us, things were much better. Eventually I hardly missed my mother at all, except after a visit, or talking to her on the phone. That would sort of bring it all back. But…the visits and the calls came farther and farther apart.”

“I take it you don’t see much of her?”

“I saw her fairly often when I was in California, since that’s where she and her husband live. Other than that… no. She calls me on my birthday. Christmas. Things like that.” He paused, chopsticks poised. “What?” Through some sort of shimmering veil, he could see her watching him the way a cat watches a particularly interesting species of mouse. “What?”

Still she said nothing. Roughly two seconds into the silence it occurred to Ethan that the shimmering veil he was having trouble seeing through was tears. And that they were present because someone had apparently ignited a blowtorch inside his sinus cavities. His body temperature, he estimated, must be somewhere near boiling.

“Holy cow,” he wheezed, staring incredulously into the carton he was holding. “What is this stuff?”

“Oh, dear me,” Phoenix said in a tiny and tightly controlled voice, “I think you might have gotten hold of some of my Szechuan by mistake.” She barely made it through the sentence before dissolving into gales of helpless laughter.

Ethan stared at her through his tears in utter disbelief. His head was on fire, his eyes and nose were running like faucets, he could barely draw breath, and she was laughing?

“Water,” he croaked, and lurching to his feet, staggered off to the kitchen.

She found him there a few minutes later, hunched over a sink piled full of haphazardly rinsed dishes, refilling a coffee mug with water straight from the tap. She went up behind him and put her hands on his waist.

“Hey, Doc, come here…let me.” Her voice felt low in her throat and still warm with the laughter. She felt warm all through her insides, in fact. As if she’d downed a straight shot of whiskey.

He drew back from the sink to give her a look of dark reproach. From the beard on his chin to the roots of his hair, his normally golden tanned skin had a distinctly ruddy cast. For some reason when she looked at him the warmth inside her seemed to gather itself into a hot ball, right in the middle of her chest.

She steered him firmly toward the kitchen table until his backside come against its edge. He leaned on it, folded his arms across his chest, closed his eyes and gave a sigh of surrender. When Phoenix heard that sound, the ball of heat in her chest melted…pooled in the lowest part of her body.

She moved closer to him. When the cold water touched his face he started and caught her wrist, his eyes crossing slightly as he focused on the wet towel in her hand. She saw a flash of dismay in their nut-brown depths before he closed them again. “You’ve been in my bathroom,” he said in a thickened murmur, and gave another small sigh. “I suppose you know, this means you have to marry me. I have no secrets from you now.”

Laughter tumbled again through her chest, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth to hold it back. Doc’s defenses must really have been laid low, she thought, for him to say such a thing. She felt sure it wasn’t the sort of joking around that came naturally to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said in an unreliable voice, left ragged by the recent excesses of mirth. “I…truly am.” A residual bubble of laughter burst from her in spite of her best efforts to stifle it.

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said dryly, “I can see that.”

“No-really. I am. I was going to say something when you first picked up that carton, but then you started eating, and you didn’t say anything, so I thought…you…liked it…” Her voice had grown softer with each word until finally it just sort of…faded away.

Slowly, she raised the damp towel to his face. When she touched his forehead with it, just above one eyebrow, he closed his eyes. And that was her undoing. Such a small thing. Such an enormous thing-an expression of total trust. What it did to her was so unexpected, so sudden, she could neither prepare herself nor defend against it. Wanting struck her like a rogue wave, nearly knocking her off her feet. The laughter and the warmth inside her were washed clean away, leaving her cold and shivering with a need to be held, to be wrapped in his arms and pressed close to his warm, solid body.

“Like it?” he murmured, eyes closed. “I couldn’t even taste it, not at first. Next thing I know, I’ve got tears streaming down my face.”

“It does sort of sneak up on you…” Shaken, she drew the towel across his eyebrow, then pressed it, oh, so gently against his eyelid. She heard the soft rush of his breath, released in careful measures through his nose. The tender, shadowed skin beneath his eye flinched, and she felt an overpowering desire to kiss him there.

But…in another moment her hands would tremble, and she couldn’t have him know how fragile she was, how undone by his nearness. So, to keep them from betraying her, she set them in motion once more, laying one lightly on his shoulder to steady herself while the other drew the towel downward over his cheek to where the boundaries of his beard began. Framed in neatly trimmed honey-brown, his lips seemed utterly defenseless, and tempting as forbidden fruit.

So focused was she on his mouth, so steeped in the imagined feel and warmth and taste of it, that she didn’t even know at first when his hands intercepted hers. Lost in a fog of uncertainty, not knowing which way to go, afraid to take even the smallest step lest she stumble over a terrifying precipice from which she knew there would be no return, she stood helplessly while he removed the towel from her hand.

Slowly, warming her cold hand in both of his, he drew her fingers to his lips.

Fascinated, she watched her fingertips press the satiny cushion of his lips, while tears inexplicably gathered in the back of her throat and she braced herself in utter panic, certain she wasn’t going to be able to hold them off. Then…she felt his breath flow like heated oil over her fingertips, seep between them…into her palm. A glorious warmth spread over her hand and all through her, poured deep inside her-the sweetest and most intense pleasure she had ever known. The fog lifted; lightness filled her. She caught her breath and smiled.

“I meant to seduce you, you know,” she whispered.

He opened his eyes, looked deep into hers and gravely replied, “I know.”

A laugh spiked through her chest and emerged in a sharp little cry, more like a whimper. Had she been so obvious? She must have been-it surely couldn’t have been his ego that had led him to such a certainty. She’d never met a man with less ego.

She didn’t know what to say. Didn’t want to say anything, afraid even one more word would alter the course they seemed set on, like a pebble beneath the wheel of a runaway wagon. But it was impossible to be silent. “This isn’t the way I planned it,” she murmured, frowning.

Again he replied, “I know.” And this time, it was he who smiled.

Still holding her hand in both of his, he turned it and pressed his mouth against her palm. His eyes narrowed slightly in that way he had, but didn’t close, instead clinging to hers in silent question. Her heart gave a painful leap. She was afraid, so afraid, that he wouldn’t find the answers he wanted, afraid that if her eyes were indeed the windows to her soul, he would look inside and might not like what he found there. That he would stop. And she desperately did not want him to stop.

Almost without her conscious will, her fingers unfurled against his cheek. When they met the warm and slightly sandy texture of his smooth-shaven skin her whole arm tingled. Desire was a crushing weight inside her; her legs trembled with it.

Though she was never conscious of having given it permission, she felt her body sway toward his…bow into his embrace, powerless as a willow in the wind. His hands were like breath on her skin…his breath a caressing touch. His lips pressed melting warmth into the hollow of her throat…his hands brushed shivers across her back. Her hands found their way to the warm, strong column of his neck like fledglings coming home to roost.

Wanting came to her now, not as a weight but like a song, like the inspiration that sometimes brought her out of a sound sleep late in the night with the words already clear in her mind and the music true and right on her tongue. Wanting, and certainty… Bursting with awe, trembling with the terrifying wonder of it, she closed her eyes and leaned into him, silently pleading. Praying. Let this be. Just…please…let this… be.

His lips began to move in short sweet paces along the side of her neck, his beard the barest whisper on her