Page 100 of Forged By Sacrifice

“Wait, Paul Newman stood for something other than salad dressing?” I teased.

“Salad dressing whose profits go to charities.”

This got me interested. “So, this is someone you really admire?”

He shrugged a little, embarrassed almost. It was kind of cute and sexy all at the same time. “Tell me,” I repeated his words back to him.

“I’ve just read some articles about him. About how he saw the failings of our nation and that they were not because of leadership, necessarily, but because we’d lost our way as a community.” Mac reached for the drawer by his bed where the condoms were kept. That we’d used repeatedly over the last two days.

Instead of pulling out a condom, he pulled out a notebook. Masculine black leather with a gorgeous silver engraving of M.R.W. on the cover. He flipped through it and handed it to me. There were words written in writing that must have been his. It was bold, tall, and slightly slanted. Like Mac, in many ways. Bold with bends you didn’t expect.

The page was entitled, “Quotes by Newman.”

There were several on the page with a couple underlined. One of them read: “I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried—tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out. From The Films of Paul Newman by Lawrence J. Quirk.”

And a second one read: “It’s kind of like those little electric bumper cars where you drive around and see if you can hit the other guy. That’s exactly what the country is like now. You no longer have the sense of community. Of loyalty. It’s lost its sense of group. It has nothing to do with leadership. Everybody’s out there alone, getting his own whacks. Instead of deifying the community, they’ve deified the individual. Maybe that’s necessary in principle. In the Bill of Rights. But… ‘What’s good for the individual is good for the country’? It simply is not true. What is good for the community is good for the country. Once you put the individual on a pedestal, it’s at the expense of everything else. From The Stacks: The Eyes of Winter: Paul Newman at 70 by Peter Richmond.”

I flipped to other pages; there were quotes by other famous people. Some about leadership, some about government, some about community and country. His hand was running along my bare skin as he watched me read his notes. It was intoxicating, like everything about him.

“Wow,” I breathed out.

“You use that word a lot,” he said, hand still journeying over my skin.

“Wow?” I asked, and he nodded.

“Why do you have this?” I asked.

“When we first met Ava, all those years ago, in Rockport, she dropped quotes all the time. Some of them were said just to make us laugh, some to make a point, but I realized some of them were really good. Things that I’d want to be known for saying some day.”

“So, you bought a journal and started writing?”

He chuckled. “You make me sound like a teenage girl, but yeah, I guess. At first, I was just writing them in this old-school notebook—a stupid, spiral-bound thing that kept coming apart. Dani bought me this as a birthday present, and I wrote down my favorites.”

“It’s pretty impressive.”

Mac eased his body over mine, taking the notebook and throwing it to the side of the bed, his length and hardness making itself known. “I agree. Very impressive.”

And he was devouring me again for what felt like the millionth time that weekend, and I let him because it felt incredible to be devoured by Mac.

? ? ?

My alarm went off, and I groaned at the same time a male voice groaned next to me. It took all of two seconds for me to remember where I was. In Mac’s room. In his bed. Where we’d spent all of Sunday learning more about each other than just the physical. Learning things that made him embed himself inside me in other ways.

I kissed the side of his cheek, rough with the scruff that had grown over his face in the course of the two days since he’d shaved. It was enticing, like every single thing about him.

“Clothes please,” I said.

“Reality bites.” His voice was as gruff as the beard on his chin.

I laughed, but I pulled myself from him, picked up his T-shirt from where it had fallen on one of his multiple trips to the kitchen the day before, and the rustle of clothes made him open his eyes and look at me.

“Clothes bite, too,” he growled.

“I don’t think you want me arrested for indecent exposure by walking to school naked.”

He moved fast, coming from the bed and wrapping an arm around me, pulling my chin up so that our eyes met. “I don’t want anyone seeing this body but me.”

“There you go, being all bossy again.”

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