Ingrams & Assoc 4: Beneath the Surface Ch. 02

I've never been more shocked.

Not shocked enough to try it back mind you -- I think the alcohol helped there -- but damn. That was some kiss. I could feel the soles of my shoes curling. No, I could feel my soul burning.

After a minute, she broke the kiss, if only to get air. She looked at me, eye to eye -- which doesn't happen very often-, staring into my soul, breathing hard, and then said gently, "That's who'll kiss you Thomas."

She kissed me again, more gently, then disengaged, climbing down, using her hands on my chest to steady herself as she clambered down.

She gathered up the steps, lent them against a kitchen cabinet, and walking to the door, said, "I need to go to bed. I'm sooooo wasted..."

And left me standing in the kitchen, catching my breath and wondering what the hell had just happened.

The next morning, I came into the kitchen to find Megan already there, talking intently on her phone, uttering one word answers. She saw me and waved and mouthed, "Coffee" at me imploringly, gesturing at the coffee pot, which was as yet unfilled.

I rolled my eyes at her and got on with making the coffee while Megan wandered the kitchen, staring at things and not seeing them in the slightest, as you do when you are totally focused on an exterior conversation. Or so I imagine -- it's not like I've had a lot of these kinds of discussions.

There were lots of "aha...", "Yeah, got it" and "Ok" being uttered, but I had no idea what the other side of the conversation was.

I made the coffee, and after the pot had finished blurping and sputtering, and I poured a cup and gave it to her. She looked at it, then handed it back, staring at me with her eyebrows pinched in annoyance. "Milk" she mouthed, and I dutifully went and got milk and handed it back to her. She took a sip, absently, and again, the eyebrows came together and she stared daggers at me, all the while uttering non committal words into the phone. Whoever was on the other end, they sure could talk.

This time, after handing me the cup back, she put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and just said, 'Sugar", then went back to her conversation.

I went and found the sugar and, trying to catch her attention, because I had no idea how many sugars she took -- simply not paying attention -- I exaggeratedly put in one spoonful, then another, waiting for her to stop me.

She did, at three, came over, picked up the coffee cup and at the exact same moment said into the phone, "Got it. Gotta go," and ended the call.

I was deflated. All that and she could have just gotten off at any time. Who was this woman, my own personal slave driver?

She smiled mischievously at me and said simply, "Well, that was fun."

I had a clever retort along the lines of "Oh yeah, well, you..." and that was all I had. But I didn't get to deliver it, since she took a sip and then said, admiringly, "Awesome coffee! You have another career if the water thing ever dries up. Barista!"

Again I opened my mouth to retort and she beat me to it.

"Ok, so we have a busy day. We have to move on. That was Dermot. There's been movement. They know we've come out west. They have no idea where, but apparently there have been phone calls to other family groups from Nevada and further west."

I put down my cup, somewhat startled. It had been very easy to imagine this whole thing as some extended vacation. And just a few days with Megan had been the most interesting interaction I had ever had with a woman. Now I was here, getting pulled back to my strange new reality. I'd almost relaxed, but now the apprehension returned full force. Bad people were looking for us to bad things to us.

"Hold on there, Thomas. It's better news than you think. They've just put the word out to be looking for us, but the relationships between these organized crime groups is not as good as you think. While any group out here that did find us would hold us, they probably wouldn't hand us over without extorting some kind of remuneration first. Plus, they won't be looking too hard. As long as we stay off the beaten track, we'll be fine. We just need to avoid places where these kinds of groups look; where they have people like concierges of major hotels on the payroll. They won't be actively looking for us; they would have no idea where to look anyway. We just need to not draw attention to ourselves, move on regularly, and we'll be fine. Trust me."

Easy for her to say. Although, to be fair, she was as much in this as I was. A thought occurred to me.

"How do you know all this?"

She smiled, gently. "Sources. We -- April and I -- left some...devices, in places where they'd do good. We've been listening. April is still on the ground there too -- her cover's not blown like mine, at least we don't think so. Trust us. We have other agencies tied in; it's all going in their little black books. One more charge on the tab that'll be called soon."

I relaxed a little.

"But still, we've been here a while. Time to move on I think? Up the coast? Up for a little coastal view action?"

"You have somewhere in mind?" I asked.

"I do indeed. And you'll love it!"

She was right, I did.

We drove up route 5, to LA, after packing up the little convertible with our few things. I made a point of pushing the passenger seat back as far as it would go, and then slouching down as much as I comfortably could, with a baseball cap on my head. Megan watched, in amusement, finally asking what I was doing.

"Look, there are people looking out for us right? Pretty girl and average guy in a convertible, no one looks at twice. Someone my height? Yeah, they look at that twice. People remember that. No point in making it easy."

At that Megan gave that look again, the scrunched up face one that says, "You have a point".

"Fair enough, now, DRIVE TIME!" she said, with altogether too much enthusiasm.

This time she really put the Mustang through its paces. We were doing a hundred and fifteen in no time flat, and she was laughing, with pure delight in her eyes.

I just scrunched down and tried to keep my hat on, fearing the worst, as Megan wove in and out of the traffic heading up to Los Angeles.

We got to LA, drive through Santa Monica and stopped by the very photogenic entrance to Venice Beach for a late lunch. We had some Asian fusion thing that was totally forgettable, and then got back on the road. All attempts I made to ask where we were going were gleefully ignored or deflected, and so I gave up. I just sat in the passenger seat and tried to enjoy the sunshine and the scenery, - and there was certainly plenty of that -- and not think about a firey death via car accident at all.

We zipped up Pacific Coast Highway 1 through Malibu and shortly after we turned off on to a driveway labeled Paradise Cove.

And it was.

There was a lovely little restaurant at the bottom of the driveway, literally in the sand on the beach. A wonderful white sand beach, with tables and chairs and sun loungers and all the stuff you see in travelogues of California. And enough tanned beach bodies to go around.

Just before the cove itself, there was a sea of trailers, and we turned off early to get the keys to one. Apparently arrangements had been made, and here we were, for a few days at least.

Megan, as she pulled her bag out of the back of the Mustang, said brightly, "Well, what do you think? Good enough?"

I was just staring at the view, down into the cove. It was indeed paradise on earth. Then I looked at the small trailer and frowned.

"Bit small isn't it?" I said, wondering how we'd fit in it.

"Oh, it's cuddly, I think. Besides, we won't spend that much time in there. There's too much around to explore!"

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I had quite forgotten the dread of the morning, being reminded of the fact that we were hunted people.

We spent the rest of the day exploring the cove, with Megan making notes of things to pick up. A new bathing suit, some flip flops, more sunscreen. She showed me how, at low tide, you could walk around the bluff where the water usually came up to, and on the other side was an almost private beach, with some celebrity houses overlooking the beach. Apparently Julia Roberts lived there.

What was even better was that, with the restaurant/bar about thirty steps from our trailer, we could go and booze it up all evening and not have to drive afterwards. Well, Megan could. I was being a little reserved with the drinking after the night before.

While we were there, Megan was insistent I tell her all about my "Wild adventures as a tunnel man". I did laugh at that. Wild Adventures, my ass.

"Well, it's not really that exciting. We do have a few weird things, though. Once we found a massive back up at critical junction. Sewage started backing up and slopping up into overflows. Turns out it was a bunch of chemicals that came together, purely by accident, that solidified a bunch of sewage stuff, and made basically a concrete plug. The thing is, though, none of these chemicals should have been in the sewage at all in the first place. Some were heavy metals, which there is no way should be entering the tunnels under Boston. I had to use a gas chromatograph to track where they were coming from."

Megan, listening intently, scrunched up her pretty eyes in a quizzical frown. Yeah. They were pretty. I noticed. Sue me.

"What do they do? How do they work?" she enquired sucking her fingers where she'd just spilled her margarita.

"It's a small device. It basically separates out different chemicals and tells you what is in a given sample. It has little spinning tubes that push the chemicals apart, based on different gravities they have. I have a luggable one at the office, it's often used to track specific chemicals back to where they enter the drainage system, so we can then turn that over to the EPA, who might go after them, if the polluters are a corporation. We see quite a lot of that. In this case, it turned out to be some toddler who was basically grabbing everything she could find in her house and dumping it down the toilet, because she was fascinated at where it all went. It just so happened that some of the chemicals in the stuff she was dumping mixed together and solidified and formed the plug. Plant food, coins, all sorts of stuff can mix together, one dissolve another, to form different compounds. It took me a few days to track it back to the specific house it was coming from. But that's really about as interesting as it gets. Till you guys came along!"

I grinned at her.

She grinned back, and again, I marveled at how nonchalant we were being, given the circumstances. It was like Boston was on another planet, and we were sitting here, drinking and having a good time.

She raised her glass , and I did the same, and we both drained them, and then it was time for more drinks. They never seemed to end, that night. So much for me going easy on the booze. I appeared to be well on my way to functional alcoholic.

We staggered home around midnight, and Megan insisted on giving me a kiss before she took the bedroom and I tried to fit on the pull out bed in the living room.

While I lay there, I tried to sort out my own thoughts and feelings. Things were going so fast. She'd kissed me the night before, then another one this evening, although less...passion filled, I think that's the right wording. It's not like I have a lot of experience to understand. I had no idea what to think. Was she into me? I doubted that, heavily. She was probably playing some therapy game of some sort. Or something. When you are insecure as I am, the one thing that was hardest to believe was that somebody like Megan could actually like you. So it had to be something else. Like therapy.

Whatever her therapy approach was, it was working. I had to visit the tiny bathroom before bed, to deal with the erection I was sporting after she'd kissed me. It literally took me about eight strokes and I blew out, trying to be quiet since the walls in this trailer were paper-thin.

I stumbled out of the bathroom and collapsed on the bed, thinking thoughts of Megan in a two-piece bikini, all greased up, beckoning to me. Ok, juvenile lust fantasies, but what the hell. It's not like I had a lot of experience to know better. And from what I have heard, even men with a lot of experience can be pretty juvenile themselves when near a hottie in a bikini.

The next day we went to Santa Monica. I wanted to go do the touristy things and see the Hollywood sign, but she assured me we would have ample time to do that. So we did some shopping and spent the rest of the day on the Santa Monica pier, doing some of the rides and basically people watching. I don't know if it was just the sunshine, or being in places I never thought I'd see, but it was a great day. We both laughed a lot -- Megan came up with a game where we had to describe what people did for a living, trying to come up with the most strange ideas we could, based on what they looked like and were wearing. It all got very silly, especially after we had a couple of beers at a Bubba Gumps shrimp restaurant.

But it was the evening when things took a turn I wasn't expecting.

Megan took me to Takami Robata. It's a Sushi place in downtown LA, on the 21^st floor of an office building on Wilshire Blvd, where they'd taken all the windows out. You literally sat next to a drop 21 stories down. It was amazing. I hadn't really tried sushi before, and was a little suspicious of some of what Megan ordered, but I tried to be a good follower, and ate everything, although I did draw the line at some of the squid.

We'd gotten changed earlier, when she'd taken me to a store and literally bought me a new outfit -- which was tricky, bearing in mind my height - and herself an awesome new off-the-shoulder dress. Without even trying, she looked a million dollars, and I looked like a monkey in a suit -- I hadn't even shaved properly that morning, but I was assured that was 'the in thing these days'.

Megan didn't care about cost. She kept flashing a corporate credit card and sighing and saying how annoying it was that we couldn't use it for any of the great hotels.

Either way, I was star struck and felt majorly out of place. I mean, everyone was beautiful, tanned, perfect teeth, and none of them were six foot six with a smashed in face. I felt every imperfection it's possible to have. But I went anyway, trying to be grateful and not feel like a gorilla.

And then something weird happened.

We were sitting at our table, just enjoying being there, and suddenly, at the table next to us, was sat Ryan Reynolds, his (current) wife, Blake Lively, and another couple, consisting of a man that way too perfect a specimen of humanity, particularly in the skin tight shirt he wore, and a woman who was equally gorgeous, and looked like she could give Miley Cyrus a run for her money. She looked like someone -- with some weird makeup - and I couldn't figure out who, till I suddenly got it and snapped my fingers, startling Megan.

"The chick from Blade Runner! Was in Splash?"

Megan caught it instantly and supplied, "Daryl Hannah?" as she devoured some tasty morsel.

What was weird was the lady at the other table -- we'd established her name was June by some shameless eavesdropping, by this point -- heard me, and made eye contact and bowed very slightly, smiling at me.

But the weird part was that both couples were consuming a fair amount of Sake, and getting more and more outrageous. They were obviously celebrating something -- we got snatches of talk about some TV show they'd just made, about some guy who caught his wife cheating at a baseball game, and hacked the big TV's they have there to embarrass her or something.

They had decided to have a competition about who could kiss their date the best, and they were just trading back and forth with more and more outrageous making out, laughing about the result, and taking selfies of it all.

I glanced back at Megan after watching a particularly over the top porno style clinch by June and her -- we assumed -- husband, Dan, and I caught Megan staring at me, with a dangerous smile on her face, and the tip of her tongue tracing her upper lip.

"What?" I said, not understanding what she was looking at me like that for.

She gently laughed to herself and said, "You know, Thomas, I think I'm tired of watching the wannabees over there. I think we can do better. We need to get in on the action. What do you think?"

I was taken aback. Better at what? And then Megan got up, all fluid motion, the dress she wore highlighting the astonishing figure she had, and she came round to me, and pushed my chair back, with me in it, and then just plopped herself down on my lap.

Pausing only to be sure that the other two couples had witnessed this, she then proceeded to kiss me.

And when I say "kiss me", it makes it sound like a teenage make out session of some kind. What she did to me, right there and then, was to a basic French kiss what an atomic bomb is to a bow and arrow.

One arm around my neck, the other holding my hair and pushing my face into hers, she molded her body to mine, and kissed me, hard. Mouth open, eyes closed, tongues everywhere...well, I'd have to say it was electric. The kind of electricity that runs all of LA for weeks.

The thing is, I wasn't expecting it. No one has ever kissed me like that before. Or since, to be honest. I mean, this is the kind of kissing that ends lives, if you know what I mean. A phrase I'd heard before was "the kind of kissing they have in heaven". It seemed appropriate here. I wouldn't have expected a kiss like this even if I was Ryan Reynolds, let alone me. Me!, I mean, me, myself, I. This was unimaginable. And pretty damned great.

This woman knew her kissing business, but then, knowing what I did about her, I wasn't the least bit surprised.

So here we were, in some kind of make-out face-off with Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, and these other two, in a public place, and Megan was kissing me like there was no tomorrow. It was passion, it was excitement, it was naughty and daring. And here I was, with two problems.

The first was that I had an erection that was harder than the bedrock under Manhattan, and Megan was sitting on it, so there was no way she didn't know it was there. The second problem was that I simply didn't know how to kiss her back.

Oh, I know, kissing is not something you have to learn too much -- French kiss, open mouth, insert tongue. But it's more than that, at least if you want to do it right. Later, Megan instructed me on the 'correct' way, i.e. the way that women remember and want more of. It's about not slobbering too much, not too much liquid. About what you do with your tongue -- do you dual with it? Try and shove it down her throat, explore her teeth? How long should it last? Should you close your eyes, or try to look into hers? Although that's not going to work too well since usually you aren't eye to eye anyway. And what do you do about the lips? Are they just there, mashed together, or what? This was complicated stuff. Frankly, understanding hundred of miles of sewer tunnels, gases, filtration and the like was much less complicated. And much much --much -- less rewarding.

Good kissing is an art, and I was quickly aware that Megan was a master at it, while I was a complete novice. There's a right way when someone kisses you and you kiss them back, and obviously I needed to do that, or the effect was ruined. And quite apart from me considering what I thought about public displays of affection, - not something I'd ever really had occasion to think about in the past - worse still...what did I want to do?