Re: Log, Paley Park: Peggy C & Steve R
There was a sharp, bottomless pang of hunger that listed in the belly of every man and woman and everyone else who came up during the Depression. It was hard-nosed need, scrubby, short nails, long soup lines, and the old, graying plaster crumbling onto your head in the morning when the middle-aged bachelor who lived upstairs started stomping around, tending to the laundry he took in, telling people his wife would do it—women were better at these things, was the idea. (He happened to do a good job and made almost a dollar a week.) When you lived formative years with nothing but gnawing hunger, that stayed with you, no matter how many years went by, no matter how much you consumed to fill it. It was need so long denied it became a part of you.
Steve felt it now, a rupture in him, deep, a low knot in his belly that had him leaning in, curling closer, practically lifting Peggy from her shoes a second time. The warmth of the earlier hug was fanned to smoky flames in the man and he blushed as much as she did, smoldering running high through him and burning against his skin where it touched her. It was good. She was good—at this. It was some spring of instinct, since it wasn't experience on his end that did much helping, and Steve moved into her touch gladly and into the sound of his name as it came from her pretty red lips.
—He didn't need breath like she did. Big lungs or something like that. So when she broke back, he blinked, a little jarred from the immediacy of the moment. Her hand was inside his coat, on his chest, and Steve's brain followed parallel to Peggy's. If only there weren't so many layers, this would be easier...
He dropped his gaze, standing stock and sturdy as the woman pulled away some, buffering the frenetic impulse that bound them together before. He smiled something bashful, and that poor cap got another work-over with hands that would much rather still be on the curve of Peggy's hips, and Steve cautiously looked up. He nervously wiped at the lipstick smeared on him, mingling with his flush, painting him all red, and he swallowed. He cleared his throat. And he offered her his hand.
The music was still playing. His eyelashes swept down long when he smiled a little giddily.