35. Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Five
ELLA
Ben catches me at the annex door at golden hour and takes the clipboard out of my hands, which is becoming a signature move.
“Walk with me. Ten minutes. No pen.”
“I have the tasting box to prep.”
“The tasting box is prepped. I watched you prep it twice.” He sets the clipboard on the rail and offers me his sawdust-covered arm. “Humor me. There’s a thing I want you to do.”
“Which is what?”
“Look at it. You haven’t yet. You inspect it. Different animal.”
So I take his arm, and we walk my venue in the last gold light, and he makes me look.
The creek path first, Otto’s lanterns staked and level, the luminaire line laid out down to the water.
The beds in full riot, ironweed over my head in places, asters coming on for September.
The honeymoon cabin’s borders somehow fresh and thick again, which I don’t look at too long, and don’t ask about.
My throat aches anyway. The arbor. New decking.
New gutters. The north face in Wendell County oak that glows.
Then the barn. He swings both doors and stands me in the middle of the floor, in the exact spot where I once stood with a heap of string lights and a notebook page. He reaches past me to the switch.
Evelyn’s lights come on.
It’s her sketch. I’m standing inside my grandmother’s sketch.
“Every job’s done,” Ben says quietly behind me. “Every line on both lists. Naomi’s wedding could be tomorrow, and this place would be ready. I finished the last of the loft trim this afternoon, and I realized you’ve been too busy running it to see it.” A pause. “So. See it.”
I turn around, already crying. “Ben. What you’ve done here…”
“We make a good team.”
“Don’t.” I wipe my face with my wrist. “Don’t you dare do the shrug. The decking, the frames, the plumbing you won against, Hollis, the arbor, the beds. You gave me my grandmother’s—”
“The annex power was you, not me. I lost that electrician, and you fixed it with a phone call and a trade. You dreamed this place for years before I ever stepped foot inside it.”
“You gave me back the version I’d stopped letting myself want, you did it while I watched, and you never once took a bow. So stand still,” and my voice cracks, “because I’m not doing the shrug either.”
I cross the floor, take his face in both hands and kiss him. It’s a kiss full of gratitude for the hands that fixed my life, one broken thing at a time. He goes still for half a second, surprised. Then his arms come around me, and he kisses me back like a struck match finding gas.
His hands slide down my back and grip, hauling me against him. I can feel exactly what this is doing to him. It goes straight through me, low and hot.
“Ella.” Rough, against my mouth. “Anybody could walk in.”
“Loft,” I say.
He pulls back an inch and looks at me.
“The stairs are finished,” I tell him, already pulling his shirt loose. “You finished them today. I want to inspect the trim.”
I have never seen a large man move that fast.
The loft smells of fresh-cut cedar and wax, the future bridal suite framed out around us, his dormer window facing west with the last of the sun pouring through it in one wide gold bar across the new floor.
There’s a stack of moving quilts folded in the corner, because Ben Callahan pads everything he loves.
He shakes two out across the boards with a snap, and then his hands are at the buttons of my shirt, unhurried and sure, walking me backward into the light.
“These buttons,” he says, opening them top to bottom, “are an improvement on the sundress. Bigger. A man can work.”
“You did fine with the sundress.”
“I was rushed with the sundress.” The shirt slips off my shoulders.
My bra follows it, his fingers quick at the clasp.
Then his hands are on me, palms dragging slowly over my breasts, thumbs working my nipples until my knees go weak.
My jeans come off next, underwear with them, his thumbs hooking both down my hips in one pass.
I’m naked in the gold bar of light and he’s still half dressed, looking at me with his chest going like bellows.
“On the quilts,” he says, his voice low. “Spread your thighs for me.”
Last time he was patient. This is not patient.
He comes down over me and takes my mouth hard, then goes straight down my body without ceremony, hands pinning my hips to the boards.
He bites the inside of my left thigh with just enough sting to make me gasp, presses a kiss to the mark, does the same to the right, and then looks up the length of me with the sun in his eyes.
“Watch me,” he says, and puts his mouth on my pussy.
There’s no working up to it this time. He eats at me greedily with his tongue flat, then focused, exactly where I need it.
There’s no storm to cover the sounds I’m making.
I try to watch like he told me. I manage maybe ten seconds of the sight of him, shoulders wedging my thighs wide, eyes shut like a man at grace, before my head drops back and my spine bows and I’m grinding shamelessly against his mouth with my fingers locked in his hair.
He growls against me, gives me the edge of his teeth, then seals his lips and sucks.
The gold light shatters. I come screaming his name at the rafters, no fingers needed, just that ruthless mouth.
“The acoustics in here,” he says, against my thigh, entirely too pleased with himself, “are fucking excellent.”
“Get up,” I tell him, still shaking. “My turn.”
“Ella.”
“Up.” I push him back onto his heels, rise onto my knees in front of him, and go to work on his belt. “You’ve been taking care of things all summer, cowboy. Now you let me.”
I shove denim down his thighs and take him in my hand first, hard, heavy, hot, stroking root to tip while his breath saws. Then I lean in and take him in my mouth, and Ben Callahan, the quietest man in Tennessee, makes a sound like a felled tree.
I take my time the way he takes his. Slow, wet, thorough, one hand working what my mouth can’t reach, the other flat on his stomach to feel the muscle jump.
His hand comes to my hair, not pushing, just holding on, and I look up at him the way he made me watch, and the sight of his face nearly finishes me all over again.
Wrecked. Reverent. Jaw tight, eyes black.
“Ella.” Strangled. “Sweetheart. You need to stop.”
I don’t stop.
“Ella.” His hand fists in my hair, and he hauls in a breath like it costs him. “I’m not finishing like this. Not tonight.”
He drags me to my feet and kisses me deep and filthy, both of us tasting of each other. Then he turns me by the hips and walks me two steps to the loft rail.
“Hold on,” he says, against the back of my neck, bending me over it.
I’m looking down at all we created and behind me Ben drags the head of his cock through my wetness once, twice, teasing, until I push back against him and swear.
“Look at it,” he says roughly in my ear. “Everything we built. You keep your eyes on it.”
He drives into me in one deep stroke.
I cry out over the rail and he sets a pace, deep and hard, one hand gripping my hip, the other splayed flat on my belly, pulling me back into every thrust. The rail holds.
The floor holds. He built them that way.
The lights blur below me. His voice is at my ear the whole time, telling me how good I feel, how he thinks about this all the time, how he’s never getting enough of me.
When his hand slides down my belly and his fingers find my clit, I go off like the storm hitting, clenching around him with a cry that fills the whole barn.
“There she is,” he says. “Let the valley hear you.”
He follows me over with three deep strokes and my name breaking in half in his throat, holding me hard against him, both of us bent over the rail above the glowing aisle, shaking.
The sun’s gone to embers through the dormer when we surface, back on the quilts, tangled, my head on his chest, his heart still pounding.
“For the record,” I say, when language returns, “the trim’s acceptable.”
“I’ll note it.”
“The rail’s acceptable too.”
“Load-tested it myself, just now.” His chest moves under me with a laugh, and his fingers trail up my bare spine. We lie there in the cooling light while the first fireflies come up past the dormer glass.
He goes quiet for a while, and I know he’s thinking.
“Spring bookings,” he says at last, drowsy, to the rafters.
“Been chewing on it. We should cap April at two weddings, not three. Give the beds time to come in, mud season’s no joke on that track, and if we’re doing the bridal suite proper over the winter, we’ll want March clear for the finish work.
We can make the money back on May. That month’ll book solid once Naomi’s photos get around. ”
We. We should. If we’re doing. We’ll want. We can.
Four of them inside thirty seconds, a whole next season built out of that little word, and he doesn’t hear himself do it. He’s half asleep in the bridal suite he’s helped build, drawing our future on the ceiling with his eyes shut.
I should let it go by. I don’t.
“We,” I say against him.
A pause. His fingers stop on my spine.
“We,” he says, his voice certain.
I put my head back down on his heart. The fireflies rise past the window. Somewhere below us Evelyn’s lights are still burning over the empty floor.
We. It doesn’t feel like a slip.
It feels like the first thing on next year’s list.
And in the margin, in ink only I can read, he needs to know the truth before he can commit to you. The thought does one cold lap of the warm dark and makes me shiver.