Chapter 21. Fisher
The day Frankie gets into town, it feels like time starts trying to gather speed.
The work at Starhopper itself is nothing I’ve got any sort of experience in. I’m more like a ringleader/middleman for everyone to go between. All in all, though, the local hires mesh well with Frankie and his crew, and everyone continues to deliver and hold up their end of things—something I’m told is a rarity for a construction endeavor. Martha O’Doyle is a regular fixture around the build site, but I think I’ve got her figured out now.
“You actually asked that woman for her feedback?!” Sage whispers to me from across the table we’re stationed at in the library today. She’s got a pencil twisted through her hair and a horrified smile tugging at her cheeks. “You’re a sadist.” I feel stupidly bashful when her foot skates up my leg under the desk.
We’ve been stuck in a limbo of sorts since that afternoon in the sunroom last Thursday. The next day, I had to be at Starhopper early for the plumber, and she’d been busy at the farmers market over the weekend with Indy. I’d been inundated with the restaurant and getting it all caught up where I could from Monday to Thursday this week, which means today, Friday, is the first day we’ve been alone together since. Friday afternoons are what we agreed would be our typical time slot for trivia studies and eventual cooking lessons, anyway. Still, that day certainly hasn’t left my mind. Not her silky skin or her taste, not the way the crook of her knee began to sweat against my shoulder or how she’d circled her hips when she got close.
Shit, I’m seconds from begging her to let me dive beneath this desk to taste her again. But I know I distracted her from establishing her rules before, and I don’t want to risk pushing her again in that regard. I have to jerk my thoughts into submission.
Remembering that Martha O’Doyle was the subject we’d just been discussing seems to do the trick.
“True, but guess who was too busy shopping for local artwork that she wasn’t there to hover or yell at any loading trucks today?” I ask. “Besides, I feel like I picked up that method from you.”
She innocently puts a palm to her chest and mouths, “Me?”
“Yes, you,” I say, nudging her foot with mine. “You don’t think I noticed how you supplied Indy and me with usefulness?”
She smiles coyly to herself and goes back to studying the textbook in front of her. I feel like a toddler rocking on my hands with how difficult it is to focus. I let out a dramatic sigh.
“Do you feel you know everything you need to know about the early Pacific Northwest and its timber industry’s rise and decline?” she asks, arching a dark brow.
“Define need,” I say, sulking. I have no idea how my brain ever got me through traditional learning.
“If you can actively study for ten more minutes,” she says, “I’ll show you the attic.”
Intrigued and motivated, I concentrate on everything she’s put before me.
Before I know it, while I’m knee-deep in the drama of timber wars, Sage reaches across the desk and runs her fingertip up my arm, hairs standing on end in its wake.
“Good boy,” she tells me. And I don’t think studying together will ever be a problem again. She gets up and starts sliding our books into her bag, and I follow suit. I can’t wipe off the dumb look I know I have on my face, and if I had a tail, I know it’d be wagging.
She walks me over to the same alcove we visited on our first time here, this time pulling down on the attic stairs and leading me up.
“It’s not a full attic or anything,” she tells me. “Just an extra space I guess they didn’t really account for.”
It’s smaller than I’d anticipated, with a circular stained glass window that makes the room feel like the inside of a kaleidoscope. It’s slanted, but even at the tallest part of the ceiling it’s too low to stand in. There’s a big crate full of clothes, toys, and what looks like a medley of items from over the decades—a big sign painted with “Lost Found” on the front. One corner of the room looks like it’s a bit more intentional, though, with a short case stuffed with books covered in long-haired, nipple-baring men, a few jaggedly drawn pictures hung on a string, clearly done by a kid, and a stuffed animal she surreptitiously tries to kick off to the side. It’s painfully intimate, like she’s showing me into her personal time capsule.
“This,” she says, “is where I had my first kiss.” I find her smiling self-consciously at me. “Venus started letting me come up here when I was seven or eight, but no one else unless I took them up with me. I think she knew I’d need some sort of private space somewhere away from my brothers. Anyway, Shiloh Wilson was my first kiss here. I was in eighth grade, playing spin the bottle with, like, seven other kids.” She lets out a trill of laughter.
“Sordid,” I say. “Shiloh and Sage. Sounds like it belongs on a napkin.”
“Ugh,” she scoffs. “I think he lives in a yurt somewhere in Washington now.”
“You crushed his heart that badly, huh?” I laugh. “Poor Shiloh.”
“Bold of you to assume that I’m not the one left behind and pining for Shiloh.”
Somehow I find that impossible, but… “You’re right. I can’t imagine you leaving anything more hurt or broken than when you found it.”
Something sad passes across her smile, but she reaches out and holds my hand. We sit side by side in peace for a time, fingers intertwined and not saying a word, in all the colors and glittering dust suspended in the air. It’s like time and worry suspend for a little while, too.
“What was it like? Finding out you got a Michelin star?” she asks. “The first one, I mean.”
“Not sure I really ever let myself enjoy it,” I admit. “It felt like the pressure just settled, because I knew I’d have to hold on to it. Mostly felt like fear, or panic.” I search for the discomfort or the disgust in her expression. Any hint that she’s disappointed that I wasn’t filled with immediate gratitude or pride. There’s nothing but curiosity in her eyes. “I think my adrenaline perspective is a bit skewed,” I add with a laugh.
“It got worse with each one?” she says.
I nod. “The day after I found out about the third, I started a small fire. Don’t even remember how. But I remember watching it burning and thinking it was proof that I was a fraud, and… and it sort of felt like a relief, in a way. I think by the time I actually lost the third, I’d already become so detached that it felt like another confirmation.”
“You did deserve them, though. You know that, right? You worked hard and you deserved them.”
I lay a quick kiss to her knuckles. “I do know, now,” I say. “That’s kind of one of the good things about getting fired, I guess. Like, for how much my brain has gone through everything trying to figure out what went wrong, I also remembered all the shit that went right.”
The happiness on her face makes me hungry.
“What were your parents like?” I ask. All this sharing might be dangerous, but it feels like she’s invited me into more than a public library attic, like each piece of her she unveils makes me feel starved for more. I want to know if she went to her prom, where she’s traveled or if she wants to. I want to know what her favorite meal is and if there’s a reason why she loves it the most.
I want to be the one to make her favorite meal, I think. Actually, I know I want that so badly it makes my ribs ache. And I know it’s because I want to impress her. Admittedly, yeah, I’d like to seduce her, too. But I want to cook her something.
“My parents,” she says, her face dividing into a dreamy grin. “My parents grew up here. They were neighbors and strongly disliked one another most of their lives—all the way up through senior year and everything. Dad went off to school out of state, and Mom stayed here.” The more she smiles, the harder she squeezes my hand. “They used to do a whole dress-up thing as part of the festival, so my mom and a bunch of people wore these, like, Regency-era dresses and had to act like they were in character for a day. I’m sad they got rid of it, because I think I’d kill. But, at any rate, my dad had just come home for the summer, and I guess his jilted ex had shown up in town looking for him.”
“The ex wasn’t from here?”
“Nope,” she laughs. “She was from the next county over. And Dad wasn’t perfectly innocent or anything. Apparently, they’d met at school at the end of the semester, and he took her out a few times but knew right away they wouldn’t work out. However, she’d mentioned her family having a houseboat over the Fourth of July at one of these big lakes in their county. And you have to understand, there’s nothing big that happens here for the Fourth, and it can be a bit of a sore spot for us.” She sigh-laughs again. “He wanted to see fireworks and said he wanted to see a houseboat, so he sorta used the girl. Broke up with her when they got back to land.” She winces.
I shake my head and tsk.
“I know, agreed. Anyhow, by the way he always made it sound, this girl showed up to Spunes on the warpath. He was scrambling around in a panic trying to find someplace to hide. Until he saw my mom—in her giant-skirted dress.” Her smile looks irrepressible. “He must have seemed truly desperate, because he managed to convince her to tuck him under it.”
“Now that,” I say, “is how you meet a woman. He sounds pretty slick.”
“Best way to meet a woman is by letting her rescue you?” she asks, delighted. “Yeah, I guess I like that approach, too.”
When I chuckle, she continues. “They didn’t have us until they were much older, and I don’t know. From everything I remember of them, they were just always so interested in life, always going in a bunch of directions and circling right back. They traveled a lot, and they both tried multiple career paths before they settled back in Spunes.
“I think I get my learning quirks from my dad. Like, I’ll read something about a certain period in time and come across a weird word or an expression, and I’ll end up going on a tangent and learning about all the slang of the era. Or I’ll read that cucumbers grow better when they’re planted next to sunflowers, and before I know it, I’ve got a whole floral operation in place.”
“I like that,” I say. “That you like learning new things and you’ll throw yourself into them.”
“You don’t?”
“I like mastering something, I think,” I admit. “I struggle when I don’t feel like I’m good at it, or struggle to jump into something when I don’t feel like I can see and control the outcome.”
“I always felt like cooking was something more naturally acquired, I guess,” she says.
“It is. It absolutely is a creative avenue and it can be some of the most abstract art out there. It’s just also very measurable. If you can manage controlling the ingredients and how they’re grown, how they’re prepared, what quantities or what size you cut them into… it’s all a complicated puzzle, but you can control it in the end.”
She snorts an amused sound.
A minute of contented quiet later, I say, “Speaking of the Fourth, Indy asked if she could go camping with her friend Blake and her family in Gandon that weekend. I wouldn’t be saying yes to, like, some weird, patriotic, Burning Man–type thing, would I?”
“Blake’s good,” she says. “And no, it’s all very wholesome Americana. Only the good sort of weird. Very few psychedelics.” She elbows me with a benevolent smirk. “And that’s where pretty much everyone will be. This place will look like a ghost town.”
“You don’t want to go watch fireworks or anything?” I ask.
She shakes her head nonchalantly. “Nah. It’s too hard to get away with the animals and everything. Anyone that could come take care of them has plans.”
“Maybe…” Shit, my palm feels like it’s blistering and my pulse is hammering all of a sudden. “Maybe I could cook for you or something.”
She bends and kisses me. “Sure. I’d be interested in or something, then, too,” she says. “But.” She swings a leg over and settles herself into my lap, and everything in my core lurches with want. “While dear Shiloh will always be my first, I was hoping I might tempt you into being my best kiss up here,” she says.
I have to take three steadying breaths before I reach up and thumb her lower lip, then lose my breath completely when she pitches forward and sucks it into her hot mouth. “Fuck,” I whisper, my hips arching up against her.
I grip the back of her neck and bring her perfect mouth to mine. “Let me go down on you again,” I beg. “I’ll give you anything you want. I’ll memorize that history book if you want.”
A soft sound crawls up her throat and her knees dig into the sides of my hips like she’s trying to squeeze them together. I feel something like desperation when I look at her face, and I’m not sure which part is my favorite—her flushed, freckled cheeks or those bright gray eyes with her long black lashes. The lips that always look a bit stained. God, even her nose is sexy to me.
Her breathing matches mine in its shakiness. “I want you,” she says, swallowing like she might be nervous or shy, “to teach me how you like to be touched this time.” Her pulse flutters in the base of her throat. This seems to be the only time Sage gets remotely shy, when it comes to her sexual side, but I gather that curiosity and desire urge her on anyway.
I can hear the blood battering my veins, all of it rushing to one place in response. “I can do that,” I say. I want her to feel comfortable to touch me however she wants, whenever she does.
She makes a project of tugging down my jeans to my knees, unbuttoning them and dragging open the zipper slowly. By the time she takes me in hand, I’m panting, fists clenched in the skirt of her dress. The sight of her pretty blue nails wrapped around me makes me groan.
“Jesus,” she says, staring at my dick, mouth open. Somewhere, my ego sheds a prideful tear.
“Make it wet,” I plead.
A rough noise I’ve never made rips through me when she spits on it, before she gives me a long, light tug. “You can make it hurt a little, sweetheart,” I say. I wrap her hand in mine and show her the pressure I like, then grunt when she keeps pumping that way on her own. The calm, studious way she watches me close makes me thrash too far, too quickly.
“I won’t be long,” I admit, more growl than voice behind the words.
“Tell me when,” she says. Some foggy corner of my mind registers that some idiot probably didn’t before. When I look away from her hand and find her face once more, her eyes meet mine. The strap of her dress slips off her shoulder in her work, a lock of hair falling across her face. Oh god, I’m already barreling for the end, and a deep and broken whimper escapes. She moans at the sound, and her dress rides up her hips, a flash of wet, pink cotton peeking through.
“I’m gonna…” I start to say, tilting my hips to lean to the side. She shoves me back down and takes me into her mouth, and I choke on the slew of sound that wants to explode from my chest. My vision goes blissfully white. I gather her and hold her tightly in my lap after, while my heart tries to return to its normal rate.
“That was… there are no words, Sage,” I tell her.
She softly laughs.
“I might love the library,” I say.