Disarm by June Gray Page A

was nothing
going to get him to talk?
    After downing our
shots, Henry and I stood around with cold bottles in our hands. Henry continued
to scowl at me and I pretended not to notice by looking elsewhere. Thankfully,
I saw a few of his Air Force buddies across the room and they waved us over to
their table. Henry grabbed a hold of my hand as he led the way through the sea
of bodies, his large frame parting the crowds so that I wouldn’t get swallowed
up.
    “Hey!” Sam,
another captain, raised his beer bottle in greeting.
    I clinked his
bottle with my cider. Henry gave a cool little jerk of the head and said, “Hey,
man.” The two men exchanged a silent look before Henry gave the slightest shake
of the head.
    Sam’s girlfriend,
Beth, gave me a hug before I could figure out what the guys were communicating.
“How are you?” she asked. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
    “I’ve been good.
Busy,” I said, keeping an eye on Henry. “You?”
    Beth started to
say something, but the band began to play and cut her off. For a while, we all
stood there and bobbed our heads to the rhythm of the rock group, all except
for the stiff corpse beside me. Sometimes Henry knew how to really kill a good
time. But as his friend, it was my duty to pull him out of this funk he was in.
    I stood on my
tiptoe and pulled him down so I could yell in his ear. “You wanna dance?”
    He looked at me
then at the near-empty dance floor, then back at me again. “Hell no.”
    I pretended not
to hear. I grasped his hand with a cheeky smile and pulled him through the
crowd and onto the dance floor.
    “I said no,” he
said and turned to leave.
    But I still had a
hold of his hand, so I jumped in front of him and danced to block his way. I
pulled his arm around my waist and gave him my most seductive smile as I began
to sway my hips to the music.
    He rolled his
eyes but I kept on dancing, sure that sooner or later he would relent. He knew
how to have a good time; he just had to be pulled out of that scowly shell of
his.
    The crowd on the
dance floor swelled and I was unexpectedly pinned to Henry, my hips grinding in
to his before my brain could tell it to stop.
    The effect was
instantaneous and twofold. Henry’s expression changed at the same moment I felt
something stir in his jeans. My face went up in flames, but when I tried to
pull away, Henry’s arm tightened around me and pulled me closer.
    “Where are you
going?” he asked in my ear, his warm breath tickling my neck. “I thought you
wanted to dance?”
    My heart was
pounding a million miles a minute through my chest, but I had teased the beast
out of hiding and now I had to face him, come what may. I looked up at him,
acting as if having an erection against my stomach was not a big deal, and
tried to take advantage of our close proximity. “Why won’t you talk to me?”
    “I don’t want to
talk tonight,” he replied, his eyes focused solely on my mouth. The breath
hitched in my throat when he ran his tongue along his lower lip. “I’d rather do
other things.”
    That was about
the time I lost my cool. This was Henry, my closest friend, my roommate, my surrogate big brother. He was a great many things to me,
but he was definitely not someone I made out with. I’d stopped hoping for that
a long time ago, when he’d made it clear that he saw me as nothing more than a
little sister.
    And now here he was,
bowing his head with a dark look on face, his arm tight around my back. The
fifteen-year-old me was squealing with glee, but the twenty-six-year-old was,
admittedly, a little flustered.
    I twisted out of
his embrace and took a step back. My face was overheating, my heart was trying
its hardest to hammer its way through my chest, and my body was tingling with
that special kind of sexual exhilaration.
    Henry’s face
broke out into an impudent smile. “Are we done playing this game?” he called
out to me over the music.
    I nodded. Yes, we
were definitely done. For now.

 
    ~