3,475
Sara gently touched the odd patch of skin on his left cheek; the one that never blended in all that well, a few shades lighter than the rest of his face. He always had to shave the damn thing a different direction than the rest of his straw-coloured beard.
"How many here?" she purred to him, and the game began again.
"One hundred and seventy-three," he replied with a hungry smile from his wide, wry mouth. She was wearing the black, lacy chemise she'd purchased a few days earlier at Mandy's Boutique over in La Porte.
She traced the tip of her finely nailed index finger along the entire edge of the scar and then sealed the inspection with a kiss.
He'd been sitting up in bed, enjoying the distant Houston lights visible from the glass doors of their bedroom veranda, when Sara had come strolling in with a half glass of merlot and a wicked grin on her face. He wore nothing save for a pair of black silk shorts he used for eveningwear in the dry heat of the Texan evenings.
Now, she touched the spot above his right eye.
"And how many here?"
"Seventeen the first time, then another fifty-seven with the graft," he replied, his smoker's wrinkles at the corners of his mouth coming to life.
Another kiss.
The game had begun when she'd ceased being just his physical therapist three and a half years earlier, and had moved in. The first time it repulsed him a bit, until he'd managed to work it into his admittedly thick, Texan skull that this tour of his body was just a more personal extension of his therapy, and that he was extraordinarily lucky to have such a smart, sexy lady as Sara Needy to watch over him.
She ruffled his golden mop of hair, now shot through with more than a little grey.
Sara stretched across his body now, like a cat insistent on getting between a reader and his morning paper. The scent of her stirred him, and the darkly tanned, flawless skin of her back lay before him, across him. Thankfully, some of his body parts had been left alone by the sharks, and one such part was now beginning to stir.
Cupping her warm hand over the decades old scars where his right arm had once been, she asked again.
"Three operations for a total of six hundred and ninety-four."
The game continued until the tally was above three thousand and she came to settle on the crescent shaped lesion across his stomach, just below his navel. He'd (thankfully) been unconscious by the time he'd received this wound, but he'd always wondered how big the bastard was who'd inflicted it.
The scar ran well beneath the elastic rim of his shorts, and her beautifully muscled fingers began to make their way along his personal Mason-Dixie line.
He reached down with his left hand and stayed her for a moment, lifting her chin toward him so he could stare into those stunning, deep brown eyes.
"I love you, Lady," he told her.
There are points in your older years, he knew, that you could still feel the wistfulness of youth. Sara and he were both far enough along to recognise these moments when they came, and they shared the comfortable silence of a few heartbeats until her eyes finally dropped to the task at hand.
"What can I say? Every girl dreams of a man that can keep her in stitches."