Flack Meets His Dream

Chapter 10

Friday night came up fast. The week was spent with Flack busy clearing murder after murder. The warm weather heated more than just the concrete and buildings. Blood started to boil and the murders were constant. He rarely got home before midnight and seemed to always get a call-out at 4 am. On those mornings, Isabella would gamely get up with him and while he showered and got dressed, she would fix him some breakfast. While sleep was at a premium, she did not want him going out into the dangers of New York with just coffee under his belt.

Her time that week was spent on mid-terms, mostly agonizingly poorly written on the part of the freshman class. The Great Books class was how Columbia separated their future students from their failures. Either one could keep up the constant and challenging reading, absorb the complex thoughts and ideas, and then regurgitate it back into a complex and thoughtful essay or they couldn't. Those that could, stayed. Those that could not, left. While she was normally a popular professor in most of her classes and sought after for a PhD advisor, she was feared when her rotation on the Great Books class rolled around. She held extremely tough standards for both complexity of thought and the ability to communicate using appropriate language and grammar. In all fairness, she knew that most public and even private school systems did not teach these skills to the degree necessary to succeed in the world Columbia graduates would live and be employed in. She spent the first half of the semester specifically teaching what would be required of their thinking and their writing. By the time mid-semester rolled around, every student knew exactly what was expected and where the bar was. And still so many failed to meet the mark. If they continued to miss the mark, they would fail the class, and therefore be forced to leave Columbia University.

Friday night, Flack went to his place to pick up a few things and run a few errands before heading over to Isabella's at 8:00. She knew he was tired, but hoped the evening would pick him up a little. He could sleep all weekend, they could sleep all weekend if that was what they wanted. Spending quality time with Don in bed sounded like heaven to Isabella. Isabella finished up her grading and lay down to take a long needed nap. She slept until about 6:00, knowing she would need the rest to keep up with the crowd at the bar. Later, she showered with her floral soap and shampoo, letting her hair dry naturally where her waves and curls would reach to her waist. She carefully applied her makeup, emphasizing her emerald green eyes. Between Don's eyes of almost midnight blue and her emerald green eyes, their children, if they had any, would surely be blessed.

Children? Where had that thought come from? They had never even spoken those three little words, much less talked about kids. Isabella shook her head, shaking those thoughts out of her mind. This was not the night to dwell on such things. She pulled her faded very low riders out of her closet and slid them up her body. These were Don's favorite pair of jeans and loved to see her in them. He found her irresistible most of the time, but certainly when she wore these. She wore a white lace thong one could only see if she bent over, and a matching lace push up bra. She didn't really need the push up part, but Isabella enjoyed it anyway and always felt very sexy. And tonight, she wanted to feel very sexy. Her last clothing item was her shirt. She chose her Special Ops tank top. It was white with a flaming skull spread across the front. These Special Ops shirts were very difficult to come by and anyone who knew anything about Special Ops would know that. They weren't sold online or on base. One had to know someone in Special Ops to get one, so it was truly precious to her indeed. It was low cut in the front, displayed her toned and muscled arms to their fullest, and hit her at her curvy waist leaving about 2 inches of skin exposed between her shirt and her jeans. She finished off her ensemble with her Ed Hardy high tops painted with flaming skulls as well.

Isabella heard the door open and Don enter the Penthouse. He tossed his keys and gun on the table by the door as usual, calling out to her. She smiled happily to hear him and walked out of their bedroom onto the landing as he was coming up the stairs. He looked up at her and stopped walking and just stared. He thought she looked like an angel. "Wow! I don't think I have ever seen you look so beautiful Bella. I'm going to be beating them off with a stick. Maybe this isn't such a good idea."

"Is it really ok? It's been a while since I've been to a bar, I wasn't sure. And don't you dare call it off now! I have hardly seen you all week, now I have you all weekend and tonight our weekend starts. A little food, a little drink, a lot of dirty dancing, some pool, all leading to fantastic jealous, slutty, post-bar sex. Sounds perfect to me."

Don walked towards her, a slightly predatory gleam in his blue eyes, darkened now with passion. "You sound perfect to me." He wrapped his tall frame around her, sliding his hands under her tank top and onto her skin. "You feel perfect to me." Isabella could feel his erection through his tight jeans and she rubbed gently against him, causing him to pull her even closer till not even air could pass between them.

"Hmmm, I guess you approve, baby." She smirked slightly at him, and gently pulled away. Even as she pulled away from him, her voice was still filled with arousal, sex, and sin. "Don, if we don't leave now, we won't. And I'm really looking forward to going and hanging out with your friends. You can have your way with me all weekend long, but now, we should go."

"You are so pushy, Bella. I want to ravish you here on the stairs, and you want to go dance in saw dust and drink beer. And by the way, I haven't told them what a shark you are at pool, so try not to take all their money."

Isabella laughed as she pulled him down the stairs. He was still of the mind to head towards the bedroom, so it was slow going. "Only enough to cover our tab and leave a hefty tip, baby."

They reached the bottom of the stairs and he grabbed her to him, pinning her arms to him. He leaned down to her mouth and kissed her, hard, and passionately, and desperately. He ended the kiss so gently she could barely feel it, except she knew her knees were weak and he might be the only thing holding her up.

"Donnie, what…?" Don had never kissed her like that before, and she didn't know what the motivation for this kiss was. It was full of passion and lust and fear and desperation, the last two things she was pretty sure were foreign to him.

He looked at her, his eyes almost black with his desperate passion. "Bella, I love you."

She took a deep breath in. There they were. Those three little words 'I love you.' She was pretty sure he hadn't said them to anyone in a very long time, maybe never.

She let her breath go and smiled softly at him. "I love you too, Donnie. I have since we met."

Isabella felt him release a breath she wasn't sure he even knew he was holding. He pulled her tightly into his arms, burying his face in her hair, inhaling the scent of her, imprinting it on his memory.

Isabella asked him a muffled question as she was buried against his chest. "Donnie, why are you so afraid? I feel your fear, your desperation, your lack of confidence with me, with us. The further our relationship goes, the more I see of this side of you. Have I given you reason to be afraid or is it something else entirely?"

Don stepped back from Isabella a bit and tilted her head up to his, her eyes filled with tears and his too. "I haven't told anyone I loved them for a long time, and even then I'm pretty sure I didn't know what it meant. I know I love you. You have taken a place in every cell of my body. You are home to me, regardless of where you are. And I am afraid and unsure because there is so much at stake. Sometimes I can't breathe for loving you so much. I just don't want to screw it up, Bella."

"Then don't Donnie. You are a grown-up who is perfectly capable of making his own choices. You choose to be with me and no other. You choose to be as safe as possible so you come home to me at night. You choose to respect me and who I am. You won't screw it up. And I won't either. Is there such a thing as happily ever after Donnie? I don't know. We do the best we can, make the best choices, love each other completely, and maybe that is what happily ever after is." A few tears slipped down her tilted face. Don gently leaned over and kissed her tears from her face and then from her eyes.

He licked the salt from her tears off of his lips, and kissed her gently. Then he stood back, looking her right in the eye, "I don't know what happily ever after is, but I know I want it with you. Forever."

A/N: I humbly acknowledge that Flack might be OOC here, but it just seemed so romantic I couldn't let it go. You, as the reader, either love it even though he might be OOC temporarily, or you hate it. If you love it, let me know. If you hate it, keep it to yourself.