39. Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Thirty-Nine
BEN
I wake at six out of habit and lie still a minute, wondering why the cabin feels different.
Then I remember. Ella’s on my couch, where sleep ambushed her before the cornbread was out, where I left her tucked under the quilt because waking her would have been a crime against an exhausted woman.
Naomi’s rehearsal’s at ten, the last run-through before the wedding that saves this venue, and my girl worked a fourteen-hour famous-bakery shift into the ground yesterday.
I make coffee quiet. Two mugs. I carry hers over and crouch by the couch. She’s a heap of quilt and loose hair with one hand hanging off the cushion, and my heart flips the way it does forty times a day now.
“Ella.” I set the mug down and press my mouth to her temple. “It’s six. You can have thirty more minutes, or you can have coffee. Can’t have both, the coffee gets cold.”
She makes a sound like a disgruntled hive. One eye opens. Takes in the cabin, the quilt, the light, me crouched there in an undershirt with bed hair.
“I fell asleep.”
“About a minute into sitting down. It was impressive.”
“The talk.” She’s up on one elbow, and she isn’t sleepy anymore. “Ben, we were supposed to—”
“Tonight. After the rehearsal, after supper.”
“Nine o’clock.” She says it like she’s writing it down on something. “Your cabin, and if I try to move it, you say no. I mean that. Whatever I come up with, and I’ll come up with something good, you say no.”
“Noted.” I push her hair back off her face. “Today we get two old women rehearsed. One thing at a time.”
She looks at me a long moment, something moving behind her eyes that I chalk up to sleep. Then she reaches up, hooks two fingers in the collar of my undershirt, and pulls.
“C’mere.”
“Your coffee’ll get…”
“C’mere.”
I go. There’s not room on that couch for a man my size, but somehow we make it work.
I slide under the quilt behind her, and she backs into me, warm, rumpled, smelling of sleep and yesterday’s cinnamon.
What starts as holding stops being holding inside two minutes.
Her hips move lazy against me. My hand wanders under the hem of her shirt, both of us half asleep and wholly interested.
“We have a rehearsal,” I murmur into her neck, doing nothing whatsoever to stop.
“It’s six in the morning.” She pulls my hand where she wants it. “Rehearse this.”
It’s the slowest we’ve ever gone. Barely awake, barely moving, spooned under the quilt with the birds starting up outside.
Clothes go by increments, only the ones that matter.
I take my time with my fingers until she’s sighing, then hitch her thigh back over mine and slide into her from behind, deep and easy.
We rock like that for a long unhurried while, my mouth at her shoulder, her hand in my hair.
Two people saying good morning in the oldest language there is.
When she comes, it’s soft and long, a shudder, my name on a breath.
I follow her over quiet, wrapped around her, the quilt over both our heads like kids hiding from chores.
“Well,” she says, muffled, after. “Good morning.”
“Best one on record.”
“We’re so late.”
“We’re not late. We’re at the far early edge of on time.” I check the stove clock over her head. “Which ends in about four minutes.”
“I can’t move. You’ve ruined me. Tell Naomi the venue sends its regrets.”
So I do the only reasonable thing, which is throw back the quilt, gather her up, and carry her, protesting at a volume that would fool nobody, across the cabin toward the bathroom. I remove the rest of her clothes, kissing her skin as I go and cursing when my cock starts to throb again.
“Not enough fucking time,” I say, pointing and shaking my head.
She drops to her knees, wraps her lips around me and slides her tongue along the shaft before closing around me and sucking hard on her way up. She flicks the tip with her tongue before looking up at me with wide eyes. “Later.”
I groan and pull her up, pressing my cock into her stomach. “How am I meant to get through a wedding rehearsal like this?”
“You’ll cope.”
She shrieks as I whisk her off her feet and into the shower.
“Seriously?” she asks over her shoulder as I push her against the tiles and press against her back.
“You’ve already had one wedding scandal. Having your business partner turn up to a rehearsal with a boner straining against his pants will earn you more headlines from Earl, and we can’t be having that. I’m helping your business here, Ella.”
“Oh, you…”
My cock sliding into her steals her words and makes her gasp. Her hands slam against the tiles and she pushes her ass against me. Water slides over us, and I reach over and lick it off her neck. She tips her head back, and her lips find mine.
“Harder,” she says between kisses. I oblige.
I pull down the shower head, reaching around to angle it against her pussy.
“Fuck, Ben.”
“You like that?”
She answers by tightening around my cock, her body trembling.
I don’t last long after that. When she comes, it’s too much and I explode into her, filling her up as she pulses around me.
Ella collapses against me, breathless.
“Want me to wash you?”
She turns to look at me. “You’d do that?”
I’m already grabbing the soap.
The shower takes longer than showers should, and after we need breakfast, but by nine forty we’re at the barn ready for Naomi, exhausted but professional.
Naomi arrives with Dinah, two readers, a nervous pianist, and the Chattanooga cousin delegation.
For two hours, Ella and I run the whole machine without exchanging fifty words.
She catches my eye across the barn and tips her chin at the doors, and I’ve got them open before she’s turned around.
I lift one finger at the aisle runner and she’s already re-taping the end.
When the pianist loses her nerve at the entrance cue, Ella talks her back with the voice she uses on spooked things while I quietly move the piano eight inches into the light, and the second run-through goes like water downhill.
“You two,” Naomi observes from the arbor, watching us reset chairs in mirror image, “are showing off.”
“We’re rehearsing,” Ella says.
“Mm,” says Naomi, who has never once meant only one thing by that sound.
Dinah’s at the piano, testing her pre-entrance piece for the fourth time. Naomi waits at the arbor where she’ll stand Saturday, watching her fiancée step away from the piano toward her, and decades of love arrive on that woman’s face at once.
“Saturday,” Naomi says, gruff, to the room, to herself.
“Saturday,” Dinah agrees, reaching her bride.
I call Caleb, sitting on the new decking with my boots up on the rail while Ella walks Naomi’s delegation out.
“Twice in one summer,” Caleb answers. “People will talk.”
“Let them. I’ve got news, and you’ve earned hearing it first.” Ella’s down the track, laughing at something Dinah said, her hand in the crook of the old woman’s arm. “I’m staying, Caleb. Cedar Ridge. For good. This is where I belong, and I had to be jilted in a barn to find out.”
The line’s quiet a moment. Road sounds behind him, a dog complaining, which means Bear’s riding shotgun somewhere with his opinions.
“You know what’s funny,” Caleb says at last. “All those years you built that table in your head. Who’d sit where.
You remember telling me that, the fairy lights night, whenever it was.
” A truck door, somewhere. “You were always building it north. Never once occurred to either of us the table might be south.” A beat. “Bear’s sulking.”
“Tell him there’s a heeler down here who outranks him.”
“He knows. It’s why he’s sulking.” Then his voice goes quieter. “You sound like yourself, Ben. For the first time in a long while.” A sniff, and the register snaps shut. “October. First Sunday. Maeve’s counting on it.”
We hang up. I sit on the decking I laid with the phone warm in my hand, and I make a mental list, because old habits die hard.
A woman walking back up the track toward me with the sun behind her.
A wedding on Saturday in a barn we raised from the dead.
A town that calls me theirs.
A talk tonight that has Ella wound tight.
Whatever the last one is, we’ll fix it. That’s what we do. We fix things.
My phone buzzes in my hand. Unknown number, out-of-state code.
Supplier, probably, chasing the gutter invoice. I decline it and put the phone away. Ella’s ten feet off and smiling at me, and no call on this earth outranks that.
The phone buzzes once more in my pocket. A voicemail landing.
I don’t check it. It’ll keep.
Everything keeps on the best days. That’s what makes them the best days.
And it truly is the best day. Because I have no fucking idea what’s about to hit me.