Chapter 19
Shay
Students will be able to study the geopolitics of pantries.
I didn’t want to leave and I couldn’t figure out why.
I had lesson plans to write for next week and a call from my mother to return but none of that was enough to get me moving.
Any time in the past hour would’ve been great to make my exit.
We’d shared hefty wedges of a truly delightful birthday cake while Gennie worked at charming me into attending the Harvest Festival with her and Noah this weekend.
Now she was tucked away in bed after a hard-fought bath and Noah was busy insisting I wasn’t to help him with the dinner dishes.
Though I knew Gennie had been hiding something this afternoon, I hadn’t expected this wonderful little event. My heart was still overflowing from the pure joy of it. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so many good things all at once.
Birthdays were strange occasions for me.
As a young kid, I’d had a few typical parties—as typical as anything was within my mother’s Upper East Side set or London’s in-crowd—but those events had always been far divorced from any emotional significance.
By the time I landed in my first boarding school, I had expected nothing from a birthday.
Maybe a call from my mother if she wasn’t in a remote war zone.
Later, when I came to live with Lollie, my relationship with this day turned sour. I was suddenly aware that birthdays were family events loaded with traditions and customs I’d never known. It was more comfortable to distance myself from such things than embrace them.
It drove Jaime crazy, of course. Jaime loved throwing parties of all sort. But I never let her throw me a birthday party. The idea made me squirm and I always talked her down to something simpler, something smaller. Dinner out with the girls. Cocktails at one of the posh new spots. That was enough.
Now, after this evening with Noah and Gennie, with my chest bursting from all these precious little touches, I wasn’t so sour. And I wasn’t ready to leave.
There was often a gravity associated with my visits to Noah and Gennie’s house. There was always a moment when the energy shifted—either within me or from Noah or some other source—and it was time to go. It made sense.
What goes up must come down.
I couldn’t get my hands around that moment tonight. It wasn’t there.
So, I lingered. I tidied the kitchen table while Noah packed away the leftovers.
I organized his refrigerator, including the full shelf of jam experiments, while he repeatedly muttered, “You really don’t have to do that.
” I wiped down the island despite the grumbly growls coming from him.
And now, I felt it necessary to towel-dry the dishes after he washed them.
We hadn’t talked much since that incident at the bar last weekend. Once the initial saltiness passed, the embarrassment hit and I didn’t know what to say to him. I wanted to apologize for being a pain in the ass and crying all over his truck. He hadn’t signed up for that.
That left me back in that weird spot where it seemed as though we were shouting at each other from across a canyon, close enough to misunderstand everything yet too far apart to make the jump and close the gap.
“Where does this go?” I asked, holding up the salad bowl.
“Put it down,” he replied. “It’s your birthday and my house. For fuck’s sake, Shay, you’re not doing the dishes.”
“I want to help.” I set the bowl on the island and started drying another dish. “Thank you. Again. This was amazing. And very unexpected.”
“I can’t very well forget my wife’s birthday, can I?”
Noah did not want me to rattle off a bullet-pointed list of the reasons why this was far more than remembering my birthday.
He’d sooner pick me up and toss me in my car than allow me to acknowledge that he recreated the meal Lollie prepared for most special days or Jaime’s signature birthday cake.
And I couldn’t even start on the earrings. My god. I was absolutely tickled.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said easily.
He shrugged. “It was no problem.”
I went on drying the dishes while Noah washed, setting each item on the island since he wouldn’t direct me to their proper homes. “This Harvest Festival sounds like a big deal.”
“You haven’t seen the signs?” he asked. “They’re all over town. I’m sure there’s one out front at the elementary school.”
“You’re probably right. I don’t know. It’s been so hot, I can’t get into a harvest-y mood.”
“That’s fair,” he murmured.
“I think I know where this one goes,” I said to myself, stepping toward the pantry with the cake platter.
The leftovers were already packed up and ready for me to take home.
Noah refused to keep any on account of his concern that Gennie would cram her pockets with cake and feed it to the farm animals.
I set the platter down and reached for one of the mixing bowls crammed on the countertop.
The contents looked like chocolate pudding.
I grabbed another. This one looked like dry, chocolatey paste.
There were three others, each in various states of preparation though it was clear all of them were attempts at homemade frosting.
I’d assumed Noah outsourced the birthday cake as he had with the meal. And why wouldn’t he? He was terribly busy running this farm and raising a child. I didn’t expect him to make frosting from scratch.
My cheeks flushed as I stared at these bowls. Pressure built behind my sternum. He did this for me. He suffered through at least six batches of buttercream and didn’t bother to mention he’d whipped it up himself.
But it wasn’t about buttercream.
It was cow earrings and poison ivy and loaves of bread every time I turned around.
It was picking me up and forcing me to eat french fries when I was drunk and sad and petulant and it was sending ice cream scoopers to set up my classroom.
It was my friend, the one who had changed so much but not in any of the ways that mattered.
It was my husband.
“Where the hell did you wander off— oh .” He stood in the pantry doorway, staring at the bowl in my hands as he ran a hand over his jaw. “That’s nothing. Just—don’t worry about it.”
The pressure in my chest swelled so big that I had to put the bowl down, wrap my arms around his neck, and press my lips to his.
He smelled like dish soap and he tasted like cake and even if this was the worst idea I’d ever had, it felt completely right.
Seconds ticked by while he stood there, his arms at his sides and his body frozen against mine.
Then, like a switch flipped inside him, a growl sounded in his throat and he locked his arms around my torso.
He let loose, his teeth scraping over my lips, his tongue in my mouth, his beard rasping my chin as he slanted his lips over mine.
It was a wild scramble to touch and taste and hold and it wasn’t enough. Nothing was nearly enough.
I dragged my fingers up the back of his neck and into his hair. He groaned into my shoulder, deep and loud, and it freed something inside me. “Come here,” I whispered, tightening my hold on his hair to bring him back to my mouth.
His laugh was quiet and dark. “I don’t think so, wife.”
“What—” Before I could finish that thought, he picked me up, set me on the edge of the counter, and stepped between my legs.
He skated his hands over my thighs, pushing my dress up as he went.
He drew circles on the inside of my thigh, just above my knee, and if asked, I’d have to say that was the singular source of all pleasure in my body.
Stunned, I watched my legs shaking under his touch.
“That’s better,” he rumbled.
No one had ever handled me with such authority. With such audacity.
He kept one hand on my thigh and brought the other to my face, running it along my jaw and into my hair. He leaned in, nipped at my lips before sealing his mouth to mine. This felt new and wild but it also felt like we’d always done this.
I pried my hands off the edge of the countertop and ran them along his shoulders, up the corded slope of his neck. Again, he groaned but this time he matched it with a hard thrust between my legs and I saw stars. I dropped my head against the shelving as a breath shuddered out of me.
Noah dipped his face to my neck, raining kisses and licks and bites there. Pressing into the crook of my shoulder, tasting the spot behind my ear, inhaling as if he could swallow the scent from my skin. All the while, rocking steadily between my legs, everything about him hard.
There was no hiding it—he was aroused. Very aroused. He wanted this. He wanted me .
“Noah,” I whispered, my fingers in his hair and my eyes hazy. My heart was pounding, shaky breaths heaving out of me. I didn’t know what to say. The best I could manage was “You should’ve told me.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to fuck this up by speaking.” He ran a thumb over my lips and stared into my eyes. For a second, it seemed like he was done, like we were finished here, but he brought his lips to mine once again and my thoughts faded away from me.
Everything I believed to be true shifted and rearranged as he trapped me between his body and those shelves. This strong, quiet man was not indifferent. He didn’t need time to warm up to me. And this wasn’t a performance.
I coasted my fingers along his neck because it made him growl into my skin like he was feral, and though I didn’t understand why, I wanted more of that sound.
He palmed my breast, his hand moving in firm circles that didn’t do anything for me at first but then he swept a fingertip over my nipple and I nearly flew off the countertop.
I needed more. Something, anything. I wiggled until I could wrap my ankles around his thighs but Noah tore away from my lips with a ragged gasp. He dropped his head to my shoulder and kissed along the side of my neck. “I love your hair like this.”
“Short? Or slightly pink?”
“Both,” he said, gathering me in a tight embrace. “It’s like you’ve finally stopped caring what everyone thinks and let yourself be whatever you want.”
My eyes stung as I absorbed those words. “Maybe. I’m not all the way there yet.”
The air was different in here. It was honest. There was no need to hide from anything.
When Noah kissed me this time, it was familiar in the best ways. I knew his lips, his tongue, his beard. I knew the taste of him. And I knew how to sink into this moment and let it feel like forever.
Eventually, he leaned back and untangled the pretzel I’d made of us, saying, “You’ll get there. I know you will.”
He pulled my dress down my legs and ran a hand over the fabric to smooth out the wrinkles incurred from rubbing up against each other in a pantry.
Pausing, he looked me over. If I resembled even a fraction of the chaotic jumble inside me, I was a wreck.
But not the same wreck I’d been for the past few months.
This was a fresh, new form of wrecked. A version I didn’t mind much at all.
A version that felt very much alive and not dried-up or at all hollowed out.
Noah tucked my hair over my ear, saying, “I’m going to walk you out now.”
“Do you have to?”
He nodded. “Yeah. One more minute in here will turn into ninety—fuck, the whole night—before we know it.”
I pressed my legs together and I felt a distinct ache, a clench that nearly stole my breath. I gulped. “Oh. Okay.”
“It’s a school night for you,” he said, as if that explained everything.
With a hand between my shoulder blades, Noah steered me into the kitchen.
He grabbed my book bags and the leftover cake, and led me outside.
For my part, I couldn’t think beyond the heat and desire inside me, and I allowed him to file my bags in the back seat, stow the cake on the passenger side, fasten my seat belt around me.
I clasped my hands in my lap to stop them from shaking.
“Do I need to follow you home?” he asked.
“No. I’m fine.” I breathed a jittery laugh. “And Gennie’s asleep.”
“I can get someone to stay here for ten minutes,” he said, a hand braced on the open car door.
That stance had his t-shirt climbing up his torso, leaving a slice of skin exposed.
A half-moon hung in the sky behind him and I couldn’t believe how good he looked.
Like an angel who knew enough of heaven and hell to walk away from both. “It’s not a problem.”
I shook my head. “How about I text you when I get home?”
His brows lifted as he considered this. “All right. I can live with that.”
“Thank you,” I said, gesturing to the cake.
“Happy birthday, wife.” Noah leaned in and brushed a kiss to my lips. “I’m picking you up for the Harvest Festival. Be ready at seven.”
* * *
Shay: I’m home.
Noah: Yes. It seems like you are.