Chapter 5
five
Tessa
I'm going to find him.
The idea arrives somewhere between the kiss and the drive home and I've been talking myself out of it since last night, which is how I know I've already made up my mind. When I'm actually undecided I don't have to work at it. The working is the tell.
I find the maintenance road. I find the truck pulled off in a wide spot with two others, and the sound of work somewhere ahead — chainsaws, the particular percussion of timber being moved.
I park and I sit for exactly thirty seconds, which is enough time to know I'm not going to turn around, and then I get out.
The trail crew is a hundred metres up: three men working a section of blowdown, two on the far side of a log pile and Beckett near the truck with his back to me, marking something on a clipboard. He's in the same jeans and grey shirt as always, sawdust on both.
He hears me before I reach him and turns before I speak.
"Tessa."
"Hi."
He looks past me at the road, then back. Waiting.
"Sorry for interrupting," I say. "I just… I need to say something and I thought if I waited until pickup I wouldn't say it."
He doesn't move. The men on the far side of the log pile are making enough noise that we're effectively alone, and the trees close in on both sides, and the air smells like pine pitch and chainsaw exhaust and warm dry earth and him.
"You kissed me last night," I say. "And then you pull back and tell me I'm leaving, and you're right.
I am leaving. Sunday." I look at him directly.
"I know what that means for Nora. I know you can't let her attach to someone who disappears.
I know you've been careful about that and I know why, and I'm not asking you to stop being careful.
" I take a breath. "I'm asking if the few days can be ours. Just ours. Before I go."
Silence. The chainsaws cut out. A bird calls once, somewhere above us in the pines, and goes quiet.
He sets the clipboard on the hood of the truck. He raises a hand to his crew without turning around — wrap it up — and then his eyes come back to mine and there's nothing managed about them anymore.
"Come here," he says.
I close the distance. He takes my face in both hands and kisses me. His mouth is certain and his hands are warm and rough and he walks me backward until my shoulders meet the side of his truck and I make a sound against his mouth that I will not be embarrassed about.
The equipment shed is twenty metres off the trail — a low wooden structure, barely more than a roof and three walls, full of chainsaws and fuel cans and a workbench along the back.
There's a tarp on the floor, worn smooth, and afternoon light pushing through the gap where the roof doesn't quite meet the wall.
It smells like motor oil and pine resin and the particular dry heat of a small enclosed space that's been sitting in the June sun all day.
He pulls the door partway shut and turns around, and I have about half a second before his hands are on me, pulling me in like he's been deciding against it for days and has stopped deciding.
His mouth comes down on mine and it's nothing like the porch kiss.
That is careful. This is not careful. I feel it from my mouth all the way down.
I get my hands under the hem of his shirt.
He lets me pull it over his head and tosses it somewhere and I take a moment I cannot help taking — he's broad through the chest and shoulders the way that only comes from actual physical work, the kind of body that doesn't know it's a body, just does things.
Sawdust still caught in the dark hair below his navel. I want to put my mouth on all of it.
His palms run up my sides as the fabric goes and then his hands are on my back and he's looking at me in the half-light of the shed with an expression I've never seen on his face before. Nothing managed about it. Nothing held back.
"Tessa," he says quietly, and dips his head to my throat.
His mouth is hot and his stubble drags across my skin and I tip my head back against the shed wall and grab his shoulders because my knees have opinions about my structural integrity.
He unclasps my bra without fumbling and when his mouth moves down I make a sound that would embarrass me somewhere else, in some other version of this afternoon. Not here.
"Good?" he says against my skin.
"Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. His hands work my jeans open and push them down and then his fingers find me and I stop being able to form full sentences.
He's watching my face while he touches me — not performing, not showing off, just paying attention the way he pays attention to everything, completely, like nothing else in the world exists right now.
His fingers curl and I grip the back of his neck.
"Right there," I manage.
"Yeah," he says. Low and certain. "I know."
He keeps me there, right at the edge of it, longer than is strictly fair.
I am breathing in pieces. I push against his hand and he gives me a little more and I pull at his hair and he gives me a little more than that, and then my whole body seizes up and releases in a long slow wave from the base of my spine and I press my mouth to his shoulder and hold on.
He holds me through it. Both arms, steady, the same way he holds Nora on that sidewalk — like holding things is something he knows how to do, like it comes naturally, like he's been doing it forever.
When I get my breath back I pull away enough to look at him. His jaw is tight and his eyes are very dark and there is a very clear answer to the question of whether he wants this.
"Your turn," I say.
"Tessa."
"Sit down."
He looks at me for one beat. Then he backs up to the workbench and sits.
I get his jeans open. He watches me the whole time, with the scowl gone entirely, replaced by something rawer and more honest than I've seen from him. I climb into his lap and the sound he makes when I sink down onto him is low and broken and I feel it in my teeth.
"Fuck," he says. The word punched out of him.
I stay still for a moment, just breathing. He's big and I'm adjusting and his hands are on my hips gripping hard enough to leave marks and his forehead drops to my shoulder.
"Okay?" he says, rough.
"Very okay." I roll my hips once, testing. "Extremely okay."
He makes a sound that isn't a word. His hands tighten.
I set the pace and he lets me, for about thirty seconds, and then something in him gives way and he stops letting me.
His hands take over, lifting and pulling, and I grab the back of his neck and go with it.
The workbench creaks under us. Outside the birds are loud and the trees are loud and somewhere down the trail his crew is finishing up for the day and none of it is relevant in the slightest because Beckett Hale has his mouth against my ear saying quiet wrecked things about how I feel and what he wants and I am not a person who loses track of herself but I have completely lost track of myself.
"Don't stop," I say into his hair.
His hand moves between us and finds where I need it and I say something that is definitely not a word and he does it again, harder, and I clench around him and the world narrows to this shed, this man, the specific sounds we're making, his breath jagged in my ear.
"Tessa."
I pull back enough to look at his face and his expression is completely open, every wall down, just him at the bottom of it all, and that's the thing that does it. Not the touch, not the heat, not the friction. That face. The real one.
I come hard enough that I have to muffle the sound in his shoulder, my whole body shaking, and he follows right after — his hips stuttering, grip fierce, a single rough sound against the side of my head that he will never, I suspect, make in any other context on earth.
We stay tangled together for a long moment. The shed is hot and smells like sawdust and sex and summer. A woodpecker starts up in the trees outside, completely indifferent to the situation.