Vincit Qui Patitur 1

Author's Note: This is the sequel to Alea Iacta Est, part three in the storyline beginning with Quid Pro Quo.

Author's Note 2: To skip to the sex, go to chapter XII. The chapters are listed sequentially, beginning with chapter I in Quid Pro Quo.

XI

Saturday, 1500

Veronica slowly came to full consciousness and saw that it was well into the afternoon. She stretched her arms and back and enjoyed the warm, full, heaviness in her stomach from her breakfast in bed, and a groggy but well-rested feeling. Veronica lay back down for a moment and brought Jack's pillow close to her face, wrapping her arms around it and breathing deeply, taking in his scent. She had never felt the desire to do that with any of the few men she'd dated seriously before knowing Jack, and couldn't explain even to herself rationally why she enjoyed his smell, but she did. Letting go of his pillow after a moment, she sat back up and looked around her, deciding what to do while Jack was still out. She also felt a bit giddy, as this had been the first time in a very long span in which she'd felt ready to conquer whatever the day had (left) to throw at her. Getting up and dressed, she brushed her teeth and stepped into the condo, pulling her robe tightly about her as she looked at the thermostat, raising the threshold a few degrees and thrilling at the efficient speed with which she heard, felt and could smell the heat begin to blow forth from the vents.

Walking to the kitchen, Veronica began taking thorough stock of what Jack had, and what she felt they needed. Most of what she'd eaten in the week prior to Jack's discovering her had been his own bland, simple leftovers of (presumably boiled) chicken breasts and sautéed broccoli. Nutritious, but a meal that had she any choice at the time, would have left a lot to be desired. She'd seen and had felt tempted to take some of the chocolate milk he kept as an exercise recovery drink, but had been too afraid he would notice. She now poured herself a healthy glass of chocolate milk and closed her eyes as she savored the sweetness and richness of the chocolate. It was the first sweet treat she'd had in some time, and she drained the glass before continuing to appraise the state of their kitchen. As she did so, she realized that tonight at least, she could do something different, and she smiled wide and felt excited in being able to show Jack at least as much attention and thought as she had felt that morning as he brought her breakfast in bed.

XII

Saturday, 2030 hours

Jack returned to his condo with a faded green duffle bag over his shoulder. It was thick and full of something, and smelled obnoxiously of moth balls and mildew. He set it down just inside his entryway, near the laundry room and opposite the entrance to his kitchen. It was only after he'd removed the stinky duffle bag that he noticed the far more enticing smell from his kitchen. In fact, he'd smelled it, that alluring, warm smell of spicy food, wafting around the 14th floor as soon as he'd stepped from the elevator. He lived alone in his condo (at least until Veronica had decided to join him) and as a result, he'd always concluded that such smells as caught his attention positively were the work of some talented cooks among his neighbors. He'd never considered that such an odor, itself a harbinger to a more profound welcoming domestic ritual, would ever radiate from his condo.

"Hey, Jack!" Veronica said as she walked quickly out of the kitchen and to him, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him softly. This greeting ritual was in itself enough of a change from his routine to surprise Jack, though he quickly recovered and kissed her back, putting his arms around her waist and holding her close. The feeling of her arms around him, her body close and her lips upon his, coupled with the hunger inducing smell of the meal she'd prepared caused something long dormant in Jack's mind to stir and begin to wake; for the first time in perhaps twenty years of his short life, Jack actually felt as though he was 'home,' in his own home, rather than simply visiting a friend's home, the kind of home he thought of similarly to how Veronica had described his condo tower as almost another world from the mean and often cruel life she'd escaped. "The only thing that's changed about this place is, her..." He wondered silently at the impact she was already having on his life, and it made him happy.

She stepped back and was beaming at him, her beautiful eyes and full, dark lips worked in sync to dazzle him in the wake of her gorgeous smile. He was dumbstruck by her beauty, her affection and happiness, but managed to smile awkwardly in return, looking at her fully and noticing the apron which she wore.

He chuckled softly, and Veronica smiled back, enjoying how cute he looked as his eyes crinkled and dimples formed at each end of his joker-like smile. He asked her, "Where did you find this old thing?" Indicating the worn and faded apron she wore.

"Oh, well, ah, it was folded up in a small box at the bottom of the pantry. Is it okay that I'm wearing it?"

"Sure!" He said. "I forgot I still had it; it was my mother's, and after she died, I got it along with the few other things she had, but I think it's the only apron I have."

Veronica was shocked, and looked down at the apron, then apologetically at Jack. "Jack, I'm sorry, I didn't know! Here, I'll take it off." She reached behind her back and began to untie the apron strings from around her waist.

He put his hands on her arms and stopped her. "Hey, hey, you don't have to do that. You can wear it, in fact, please do wear it, it's the only apron I have in the house, and honestly, you remind me a lot of my mother. I think she would have liked you, and would have liked to see you wear it. Besides, you look hot in it." He said, reassuring her and finishing with his mischievous smile she found so sexy. She put her hands back on his shoulders and began gently squeezing them, enjoying how broad and firm they felt.

"What are you cooking, Ronnie?" He asked, feeling her hands still holding his shoulders. She dropped her hands to her side, then held them behind her back as she cocked her head coquettishly, looked away from him, up and to his right, as though she were examining, quite adorably, the corner above the kitchen door frame where the wall joined the ceiling, and began to slowly sway her body left and right, coyly, as though unwilling to reveal her secret.

"Dinner!" She said playfully, then moved back to him, kissing him again, much deeper and more passionately this time, touching his right cheek with her left hand and snaking her right hand under his left armpit to his back, and holding him tightly.

Jack kissed her for five quick heartbeats, then picked her up by cradling the bottoms of her thighs with his hands, and walked forward into the kitchen, still holding her.

"Just some chicken, broccoli and squash that I found." She told him in between kisses. "I'm glad you came home when you did, I was afraid you wouldn't get home until the food was cold."

He was still surprised by how quickly and naturally she'd become domestic with him, and neither the effort nor her enthusiasm toward him seemed fake. To be sure, a few of the women he'd dated in between his deployments (including one who'd waited for him to come back from a deployment before she decided he wasn't, in fact, for whom she was looking) had attempted to seduce him with home cooked meals and implicit promises of further domesticity, but always in return for something, either a commitment to a relationship he felt no confidence he'd be able to maintain, or some immediate, subsequent act (i.e., meeting her parents, going to a work function or a wedding, etc.), which had only further jaundiced him to the potential authenticity of such behavior. This time, he felt very different. Though everything about Jack's short but extremely intense relationship with Veronica was different from any he'd ever known or contemplated, he'd neither asked anything of her, nor had she predicated or concluded her cooking him dinner upon any action. It felt to him genuine; He cautiously considered that in line with his growing feelings for her, perhaps she just really liked him. He briefly and hesitantly allowed that maybe Veronica was starting to fall in love with him, but even faster rejected the idea as absurd and castigated himself arriving at such a conclusion.

He forced his consideration onto less intangible points of foci. "That smells like a lot more than just baked chicken breasts, broccoli and squash; what do you call that recipe?"

"Well, I don't really know what it's called, I just kind of scrounged up the ingredients and threw them together. I think it will taste good, it smells good!" She said, smiling again at him. "I had to virtually tear your kitchen and pantry apart but I found some seasoning, flour, oil and that was enough for a decent attempt, though I hope we can get some groceries for next time... What?! Why are you looking at me like that? I told you I would cook for you, and I did, but not because I thought I had to. I really appreciated you bringing me breakfast this morning, and I wanted to try and see if I could be as thoughtful for you..." She said, noticing the incredulous look he gave her.

He smiled and raised his eyebrows in surprise, not considering his bringing her breakfast in bed as anything special; it was nothing more than he'd do (though, much less intimately) for a teammate convalescing. He loved the way her thighs wiggled in his grip as she spoke, and the substantial way her breasts, even through the thin fabric of the tee shirt and worn cotton of the apron, felt against him. "I never doubted you could cook, but I did doubt I had any 'seasoning, flour, and oil.'" He explained, chuckling at the bare and bachelor state of his kitchen and pantry. He set her back down on her small, bare feet. Standing thusly, she was two inches shorter than he, and had to tilt her head slightly back and up to continue looking into his eyes. He marveled again at how incredibly sexy she looked to him, and how gorgeously she smiled at him, causing a lump to rise in his throat and his lungs to feel tight.

Feeling coherent speech difficult, he swallowed thickly and quietly studied her eyes under the bright, unrelenting fluorescent light of the kitchen, noticing anew how large and white her eyes were, and how sharply they contrasted with the deep maduro hue of her irises. He looked more deeply into her eyes, feeling like he was losing himself as though gazing into the infinite black depths of the cosmos and beginning to fathom the enormity of how significant she was becoming to him. He put his hands gently along the sides of her face and noticed embedded in her irises, shiny and somewhat amber-colored grains of pigment. As he saw her eyes blink and slowly shift back and forth, focusing on first his left and then his right eye, he noticed how the grains twinkled or scintillated like distant stars, reflecting the bright, overhead light of the humming, cheap-but-energy-efficient fluorescent kitchen lights.

She rendered him awe-struck and feeling more in tune with something other than anger, hate and his desire to inflict ruin than he'd felt in almost three years, before the life he knew became even more ugly and harsh. "Ronnie, you have the most incredible eyes I've ever seen; you are more beautiful than I could ever say properly in words."

Veronica had been truly happy and excited to see him come through the door, and when he'd reacted so positively to her kiss and the realization that the tasty food he'd smelled was her cooking, she began to feel warm and giddy in the pit of her stomach. When he'd picked her up and carried her into the kitchen, kissing her and holding her thighs firmly in his hands, she'd felt her face, neck and breasts flush with heat. When he'd set her down and looked into her eyes so probingly, and put his strong hands so gently on her cheeks, she'd felt her loins begin to stir and grow wet, but when he'd told her that her eyes were beautiful and how in awe he was of her, she felt as though she was on fire; she wanted him so badly, and had been waiting all day to have sex with him again. She felt her nostrils flare slightly as her breathing became deep and fast, her areolae contract and her nipples harden, her lips swell and her ears burn. She could feel the blood surge in her arteries and feel her heartbeat throb along the sides of her neck. She smiled at him cryptically as her pupils dilated.

"Here, let me help you get that apron tied back on." He said, moving behind her and lifting up the limp strands to tie them again. She felt him rustling with the apron strings, and knew he was tying the strings in a 'bunny-ears' type of knot, but it was the feeling of his warm breath on the back of her neck as he stood closely behind her that fueled how badly she wanted him. His breathing was quiet, and felt very warm against her skin, which was already taught from goosebumps, causing the small, invisible hairs on the back of her neck to stand straight up, and to be extremely reactive to the slightest stimuli. As he breathed warmly on her skin and blew against those hairs, she felt tingles race constantly along her neck, turning her on even more deeply.

"It looks like the top strap here has gotten twisted a bit; let me straighten it out for you." He said close to her ear, his breath making those same kind of invisible hairs on her ear shake wildly, making her feel little electric shocks course up and down her neck, through her ear and along her face. She gasped audibly and closed her eyes, awash and euphoric in the endless tingles and impulses he sent through her from such seemingly mundane behavior. She felt his fingers gently slide along the underside of the apron strap, rubbing the exposed, soft skin of her neck, an inch above the top of the tee-shirt's neck, and doing so lightly, his touch was almost imperceptible, and affected her as would have a very gentle stroke of a feather against her aroused, taught skin.

Perhaps because of how turned-on she was, her mind became perceptive to the deeper physical sensations at work within her body that were setting off inside her the most explosive desire she'd felt in her life. Veronica's fertile, ebony body began to respond to the unconscious chemical and behavioral messages the amygdala areas of her brain received from Jack, quantifying and reacting to his handsome face, the surging testosterone of his youth, his dominant temperament and high level of fitness, combined with his deep and strong voice, and her visual memories of how strong and well-conditioned his muscles looked, and her tactile sense of how tight and firm they felt against her body and her fingers. All these stimuli and accumulated biological and chemical data processed in this deep recess of her mind, and alerted her primal psyche to his status as a very desirable mate to father her children, a dominating, strong and independent man who would, in much earlier times, make an excellent hunter and gatherer, and ultimately a reliable defender of her, their offspring and tribe. The net result of all this stimulation, both conscious and especially unconscious, drove Veronica over the edge of her ability to think rationally. She wanted him, needed him, and would have him inside her, no matter anything else.

Jack finished straightening the top strap of the apron, "Her apron." he thought to himself, and glanced over his shoulder and looked at the oven, noticing the door open and the oven dial turned off, allowing the still very alluring food to cool and flood the condo with its aromatic call to dine.

"Hey, Ronnie-" He started to say, but she interrupted him with a guttural and distinctly feminine growl, and he felt her turn aggressively toward him and kiss him, her hands very strongly gripping his neck as she jumped quickly up and wrapped her legs around his waist and squeezed him tightly.

"Holy shit!" He thought to himself, noticing how hot her skin felt against his face and how strongly, almost angrily, she gripped his neck and shoulders, feeling her nails scrape his skin in the fury with which she shifted her hold from one part of him to another. Even as he put one of his hands under her thighs to steady her legs and the other around her waist to hold her tightly to him, he felt her methodically grinding her crotch against him, and how she continued to growl and moan through their kiss, deeply and with alerting quality that captivated his most primal senses. Jack felt his cock very quickly come to a painfully erect state, the muscles in his arms and pecs tense and his blood surge with adrenaline and his desire for her reach a boil.

He carried her stridently out of the kitchen and to his living room sofa, laying her down on her back, atop the long chaise lounge section of the three piece set, and then he tore his shirt from his chest and unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his pants, kicked off his shoes and crudely pulled off his socks. Veronica reached under her back and untied the simple knot holding the apron on her, then lifted it from around her neck and tossed it off and away from her before pulling off the tee shirt she'd worn. Jack pulled down his pants, feeling them pool around his ankles as his hard cock throbbed in the warm, dry air of their condo. He stepped clumsily from the coiled legs and gaping waist toward her. He looked down to see Veronica just laying back and looking up at him, after getting another of his tee shirts off of her. Jack saw how taut and puckered her dark areolae looked, how prominent and tight her nipples stood above her full breasts, and how desperately aroused she looked up at him. But he also noticed that the pair of his boxer shorts she wore still remained as a barrier between them.

He wasted no time kneeling down and taking hold of each side of the center "vent" of the boxers' fabric and tearing them apart, from the bottom seam running between the legs to the top elastic band. The gaping hole in the boxers exposed Veronica's now trimmed, gorgeous pussy, her full, swollen labia and trimmed hair both shiny and iridescent with wetness like polished jet. Jack ignored the almost irrelevant fact that the legs of the boxer shorts still encircled her thighs.

Veronica gasped as Jack tore his way into the boxers, essentially turning the shorts she wore into a pair of chaps, leaving her dripping and swollen pussy open to the warm air of the room, still redolent with the homey smell of dinner. "I want him so bad!" She thought, feeling almost drunk with her desire. She saw Jack's long, throbbing cock in his right hand as he leaned forward from where he knelt before her and between her legs, and positioned it at her slit, which due to her raging desire and swollen lips, had already begun to ever so slightly unfold before him. The touch of the hard, throbbing head of his cock against the warm, hungry lips of her pussy made Veronica's eyes close momentarily as she lifted her head up and breathed deeply, enjoying the feeling and the anticipation she had for all of him.

As she looked back down toward him, Jack pushed smoothly into her pussy, instinctively pausing his momentum before reaching a point at which her wetness would temporarily suspend and she might feel pain. He pulled back very slightly, allowing her smooth wetness to surround and once more coat the head of his hard dick, and then pushed very smoothly the rest of the way within her. It had been almost twenty four hours since they'd last fucked, and Veronica was very ready for him, was fully recovered from the previous night and was so turned on and rested now, she thought only of taking him within her.

When he'd reached the point at which he could progress no further into her (which his rational mind, lost in the recesses of his lust, had concluded was deeper than the previous night), feeling his balls push against her perineum, she leaned forward and kissed him hungrily, her hands writhing against and scratching his skin as she held him close to her, locking him inside of her. Breaking off their kiss, Veronica moved her hands up along his shoulders and neck and took hold of his head and looked very seriously into his eyes. "Cum inside me, Jack..." she moaned hoarsely between deep breaths, and then began to kiss him deeply once more.