"Where were you?" His deep voice carried down the hall. He stood up from where he was leaning against the wall next to Robin's front door and took his hands out of the pockets of his jeans.
"What are you doing here?" Heart pounding Robin walked over and looked at him warily as she pulled her keys out of her pocket and unlocked the door.
"I tried to call there was no answer so I thought I'd take a chance and see if you were here." He reached out and tried to stroke her hair but she ducked through the door too quickly.
"You left the hospital without talking to me about Nancy Dixon." Robin didn't tell him that she left her cell phone home so that she couldn't be tracked. She was sure he would think she was certifiable. Having to think of things like that had never touched his life before; they hadn't even touched hers in a long time. Just as her heart hadn't been touched in a long time, she acknowledged.
"I had some errands to run, things I was going to do since it was supposed to be my day off." Patrick's smile was obviously forced.
Robin put her leather jacket over a dining room chair and turned to see him standing with one hand on his hip and the other ruffling through his hair nervously. She thought about whether she should be mad at him, but realized she didn't really have a leg to stand on, just a lot of inconvenient emotion. "Have you had dinner?" she asked softly.
"No, but I'm not really hungry." He had both hands on his hips now as he tried to look anywhere but at Robin.
"I have some chicken soup from Kelly's and crusty bread." She looked at him, hating the distance between, both physical and emotion. When did that happen, she wondered?
"Sounds good." He looked at her now, unsmiling.
Maybe it was there all along, she thought as she walked into the kitchen and she had been fooling herself, again. She wondered if he had shown up tonight to put an end to their affair. He was acting like it.
She had the soup on the stove heating up and was putting the bread into the oven before he finally walked into the kitchen and offered to help. She directed him to set the kitchen table and pour drinks. A short time later they were sitting in the breakfast nook with the door to Robin's small balcony open so they could enjoy the chill spring breeze.
For the first time since they met there was no banter, no heated conversations, no cheesy come-ons, not even talk about work. Robin didn't know if Patrick thought the silence was unnatural or a sign of how comfortable they had gotten with each other. All she knew was that she was uncomfortable and didn't know what to say. Seeing him so soon on the heels of her confession to Nikolas had thrown her and she felt like she was being sucked into quicksand. Her suspicion that he was there to end things was solidifying into a certainty, although the fact that he was eating with her didn't seem to make sense unless he was procrastinating. She considered that maybe she should initiate the conversation and get it over with?
She was pulled from her thoughts by the ring of the telephone. She jumped up and grabbed it from the wall. "Hello?" All she heard was static and the garbled sound of a man's voice in the distance. "Hello? Can you hear me?" The phone clicked off. She looked at the caller id, which once again read "unavailable".
"Is everything okay?" Patrick asked behind her.
Instead of answering, Robin dialed the operator. "I just got a call on this number from unavailable, it was a bad connection and I couldn't hear who it was to call them back." All she got in return for her request was a lesson on telephone company bureaucracy. Frustrated she hung up.
"What's going on?" Patrick put his hands on her shoulders after she hung up.
Unable to help herself, she leaned into his touch. "Probably nothing." She put her fingers to her lips and thought for a moment. Maybe she was, as she told Nikolas, engaging in wishful thinking? Or maybe she was trying to distract herself from the situation with Patrick? Or maybe she should just listen to her gut, which was telling her the calls had something to do with her father? Her mother's over-casual question from two weeks ago had planted a seed that hadn't gone away. "I need to make a call."
Instead of picking up the cordless phone, Robin walked into her office and used her wired desk phone to make a call to a number that she had memorized a long time ago. She contemplated running out to the payphone, but while she needed the walk earlier to clear her head, it felt a bit too melodramatic now that Patrick was there.
"Uncle Sean? I need your help."
>>>>>>
"Robin, what's going on?" Patrick got up from the couch. "I already cleaned up," he said when she started to head into the kitchen.
"Thanks." She sat down on the couch and curled up into herself. Patrick sat down, almost a full cushion away and facing her.
"What's going on? Who was on the phone?"
"That's the second call with a bad connection I've gotten today. It sounds weird, but I just have this feeling I used to get when I was a kid and my parents were in trouble." She tilted her head. "I'm probably imagining things."
"Did you just try to call your mom or dad?"
"I called my godfather to ask him to get a trace on the calls. Like I told Nikolas it's probably just a faulty auto-dialer and I'm being paranoid."
"When did you tell Nikolas?"
"I ran into him tonight."
"Oh." Patrick put his hand along the back of the couch, his hand almost touching her. "You never struck me as the paranoid type. If you think there's something going on, there probably is."
Robin looked at his hand and then back at him. "What brings you here, Patrick?"
He moved his hand until it was touching her bare arm. "I missed you." The words were said in a husky whisper. The one that was filled with longing and that made her feel like she was the only one he used it with, though she was certain that couldn't be true. She melted into him as he surged forward, cupped her face and captured her lips with his in a sensuous kiss.
>>>>>>>
"Do you have protection here?"
They were still on the couch. Patrick was positioned between her legs, both of their shirts were lying in a heap on the floor and their bare skin caressed with every slight shift.
"In the bedroom," she whispered in between kisses and continued to run her fingers through the back of his hair.
"I want you so much," he moaned into her neck and pressed himself more tightly against her. "All the time." He nibbled on under her chin and unclasped her bra behind her back and slid his hands around her torso to cup her aching breasts. "Never enough. I can never get enough." He surged into her again.
"Patrick." Her moan filled the stillness of the room. She arched into him.
"We need to go to the bedroom. Can we go to the bedroom?" Patrick's questions were as urgent as the hands seeking and giving pleasure on her body.
"Yes."
Patrick stood up and held his hand out. Before she could clasp it he changed his mind and lifted her up and slid his tongue over her as he carried her to the bedroom. In the bedroom he lay her down on the antique metal bed and stood looking down at the wanton picture she knew she made with her pants on and her swollen nubs taunting him. He unbuttoned his jeans, hissing as the pressure on his arousal was released, and he slid them down his legs, taking his underwear and socks off at the same time. Then he positioned himself again on top of her and began tasting of everything she offered as he removed her remaining clothes.
"In the drawer," she cried out as he teased feather-light fingertips over. Moments later he slid himself inside her, inch by inch, filling her and surrounding himself in her tight heat.
"Open your eyes," he commanded as he held himself still. Their gazes locked and he began to move. In, out, up, down, ever so slowly. In contrast, her movements under him were hungry as she tried to grasp at him, but he never increased his pace and with his gaze tender and heated he brought her to the brink and then lost himself in the midst of her bone-shaking release.
He only left her long enough to discard the used protection and moments later was surging inside her again. This time, his moves were hard and lustful and she shattered around him again and again. And again.
"Never enough," he whispered into her ear later as he held her to him and drifted off to sleep.
She didn't bother wiping the tears that slid from her eyes.