28. Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Eight
BEN
Her hand is against mine on the bench seat, and I am doing seventy percent of my driving with thirty percent of my brain.
Neither of us has moved. The fiddle station plays, and the two square inches where her skin meets mine burn like a struck match head. I’ve rebuilt a barn with these hands. Pulled calves. Set fence in frozen ground. They’ve never once felt like this.
Be a gentleman. Take her home. Knock in daylight, ledger clean, do it right, do it slow.
Her little finger moves. Slides over mine. Hooks it.
One fucking finger, curled around mine like a question with only one answer, and the plan I built at that cabin table turns to dust.
“Ella.” My voice comes out like a road grader.
“Ben.” Hers comes out steady, which is worse. She’s watching the dark roll by her window, casual as Sunday, while her finger holds mine like a lit fuse. “Eyes on the road.”
We crest the ridge above the home valley, and there it is below us. Something Blue, finished, gold seams in the dark where we hung a dead woman’s lights at midnight, glowing at the bottom of the valley. I should say something about it. Look what we did.
What I say is nothing. Ella turns from her window to look at it, which puts her looking past me, close. I get her face in the dash light, the smell of warm skin and a touch of perfume. The barn can admire itself.
There’s a turnout a quarter mile above the ranch gate. Gravel, a rail, the creek loud below, fireflies working the dark meadow. I have driven past it forty times.
I pull in and kill the engine. The fiddle dies. The creek comes up through the open windows, and we sit one second in the ticking quiet, her finger still hooked on mine, the truck full of everything we haven’t done.
“I was going to take you home,” I say. “I had a plan that involved being a gentleman.”
She grabs my collar with both hands and kisses me.
And the plan goes flying out the fucking window. Thank God. Her mouth is on mine, and it’s nothing like I imagined, and I imagined it plenty. She kisses with the intensity she puts into everything. There’s nothing careful about it. All those weeks of wanting, leading to this.
I get a hand in her hair and kiss her back, my tongue scraping hers, my teeth catching her lip. She makes a sound against my mouth, low, half relief, half demand. It goes through me like current through wet ground.
“Tell me to stop,” I manage, against her jaw, her throat, the freckles I’ve been mapping from a respectful distance for weeks. “Any point tonight. Say the word.”
“Ben.” She pulls back. Her eyes are steady and blown wide at once. “If you stop, I will never forgive you. I have been patient my entire life. I’m done.”
“Thank fuck,” I say, and haul her across the bench seat into my lap.
She lands with a knee either side of my thighs and her hands already at my collar.
The first roll of her hips against me drags a sound out of my chest I don’t recognize as mine.
She does it again, slower, watching my face while she grinds down on me through denim, and I grab her hips hard enough to leave prints.
“Careful,” I grit out.
“No,” she says, and does it again.
I get the little buttons of her sundress open, top to waist, faster than I’ve ever done anything careful.
Lace underneath. I drag it down and get my mouth on her breast. She arches into me with a cry the creek swallows, fingers twisting in my hair, hips grinding down harder.
I work her nipple with my tongue and teeth until she’s swearing at the roof of the truck, then switch sides and do it again.
“Tailgate,” she pants. “Blanket. Now. I am not losing my virtue to a gearshift.”
“Your virtue’s safe.”
“My virtue better not be.”
We spill out of the cab. I drop the tailgate, throw the blanket down, and she pulls my shirt over my head before it’s flat. Her palms run down my chest, my stomach, lower, tracing the line of my cock through my jeans until my breath goes rough.
“I’ve been watching your forearms,” she says. “Workplace hazard.”
I lift her onto the tailgate and strip the sundress the rest of the way off her. The lace goes next, all of it, and then she’s bare in the firefly dark. Her arms start to move, the old covering reflex, and I catch her wrists and pin them gently to the blanket.
“No. Not with me. Not ever with me.” I kiss her throat, the slope of her breast, the soft of her stomach, working down.
“I’ve been watching you like it was my job.
The freckles go exactly where I hoped.” My mouth at her hipbone.
Her breath’s coming fast. “Whoever taught you to apologize for this body should never be fucking forgiven.”
“Ben.”
“Lie back and let a man do what he’s good at.”
“Which is what?” Breathless.
“Taking care of things,” I say, hooking her knees over my shoulders, and putting my mouth on her.
She’s soaked and sweet, and loud. I lick into her slow at first, learning what makes her thighs clamp and what makes them fall open.
Then I settle in on her clit with flat, patient strokes that have her heels drumming my back.
She rides my mouth without a shred of shyness, hands fisted in my hair, telling me right there, don’t stop, Ben, in pieces.
When I push two fingers into her and curl them, she breaks.
Back bowed clean off the blanket, thighs shaking around my ears, a cry that startles the creek quiet.
I work her through it until she goes boneless.
“Oh my God,” she tells the stars, wrecked. “Acts of service.”
I laugh against her thigh. “Told you.”
“Get up here. Right now.”
She gets my belt open with shaking hands, shoves denim down my hips, and wraps her hand around me. My vision whites at the edges. She strokes me once, twice, a smile curling the corner of her lips.
“Well,” she says with a smirk. “That explains the confidence.”
“Ella.”
“Come here, cowboy.”
“Hold on.” It costs me, with her hand on my cock, making me harder than I can remember. “I’ve got nothing on me. Tonight wasn’t a plan, and I don’t carry hope around in my wallet.”
“IUD.” She says it against my mouth, no hesitation. “Two more years on the warranty. And it’s been longer than I’ll admit since anyone’s seen me with my dress off.”
“After June, I got tested for everything the clinic had a name for. Came back clean across the board.” I brush her hair back so she can read my face. “But it’s your call. Say the word and I’ll drive us back for the box in my cabin, and I’ll hate every mile.”
“Ben.” She wraps her legs around me, which ends the debate. “Stop being responsible and come here.”
I settle between her thighs, catch her face in one hand. “Look at me.”
She looks at me, fireflies in her eyes.
I push into her slow, filling her up. She’s tight and hot, taking me with her mouth falling open, nails biting my shoulders. When I’m buried to the hilt, she breathes, “finally,” one word, and it nearly ends me.
Then we move.
Slow and deep first, long strokes that have her clawing my back for more.
Then harder. The angle changes when I hook her knee over my elbow, and she cries out at what that does, so I do it again.
Again. The tailgate complains under us, her heels in the backs of my thighs, my name and God’s traded off in her mouth.
She’s close. I can feel her winding tight, fluttering around me, so I get a hand between us and circle her clit with my thumb, matching my thrusts, and bend to her ear.
“A month,” I tell her, rough, driving into her. “A month of watching you. Come for me, Ella.”
She does. Hard, clenching around me in waves.
And she laughs, actually laughs, bright and amazed at the stars.
That sound finishes me faster than anything her body did, and her body did plenty.
I bury myself deep with her name in my teeth and fill her.
The sky wheels. The creek roars. A firefly pulses on, indifferent, while I come back into my own body one aftershock at a time.
After, we lie tangled in the blanket on the tailgate, her head on my chest, her leg thrown over mine, both of us cooling in the summer air while the fireflies stitch the meadow and the creek talks its endless talk.
“I can hear your heart,” she says, drowsy, fingers drawing idle shapes on my ribs. “It’s going like Beth’s times.”
“It’ll settle. Give it a decade.”
She laughs into my collarbone.
“I need to tell you something,” I say to the stars, because she’s earned the plain version.
“I’ve been trying to think when I last felt peaceful.
” My hand moves in her hair. “I was maybe five. Before everything.” The fireflies rise and sink.
“Turned out what I needed to feel that way again was this. You’re the quietest my life has ever been, Ella, and you’re not even quiet. ”
She goes still against me.
Her fingers have stopped moving on my ribs, and against my chest I feel her heart pick up, not slow down, and when she finally speaks her voice has a careful in it that wasn’t there two minutes ago.
“Ben, I…”
“Mm?”
The creek runs. A firefly lands on the blanket near her hand, pulses twice, lifts off.
“Nothing,” she says against my skin. “It’s nothing. It’ll keep.”
I pull her closer and let it go, because I’m new to peace and don’t yet know its opposite when I’m holding it. She fits herself against me like the answer to a question, and I press my mouth to her hair.
And she lies there in my arms, wide awake, watching the dark.