Chapter 16
Sixteen
Wren
By the second night after Dot’s visit, I’ve stopped trusting myself.
My skin runs a fever that isn’t a fever.
Every sound lands too loud. Every smell is a hand on the back of my neck.
The low pull toward the wall I share with the firehouse has gone from a hum to a shout, and I keep losing whole minutes standing in the middle of the shop with a cloth in my hand, staring at nothing, aching with no word for it yet.
I close up early. I can’t serve customers when I’m like this, half-feral and embarrassed about it.
I’ve packed the nest higher every night.
When it gets bad, I go up and press my face into Cal’s flannel, or Eli’s gloves, or a tea towel that still smells faintly of smoke and pepper.
It takes the edge off for an hour before it comes back sharper.
I know what Dot told me. I know exactly what my body’s doing and exactly who it’s doing it about.
I’ve simply decided that knowing a thing and doing a thing are two different animals, and that I’ll hold the line on the doing if it kills me.
I’m wiping down the counter I have no business thinking about, willing my body to hold the line two more days, when Cal knocks on the glass.
I should not open the door. I know exactly how thin I am tonight. But my hand’s already turning the lock, because some deep new animal part of me hears cedar through a pane of glass and simply overrules the rest of me.
“Hey.” He steps in, and for once he isn’t grinning.
He’s careful. Watchful. A man who can feel he’s walking into a charged room.
“I’m not staying. I wanted to check the oven’s holding and drop the auction papers off.
” He sets a folder on the counter, some form I can’t make my eyes read.
“Dot said you weren’t feeling great. I won’t crowd you, I swear.
I know we’re meant to give you room, I’ll just—”
“Cal.”
“—go. I’ll just go.”
“Cal.” I come around the counter toward him. His scent reaches me all at once. Cedar, sweet hay, warm skin. My whole body tips toward it like a plant toward a window, and the ache drops low and clenches. “Don’t go.”
He goes very still. “Sugar.” Low, and strained to breaking. “You’re pre-heat. You don’t know what you’re—”
“I know exactly what I want.” And I do. That’s the terrifying part.
The heat’s burned away every careful thing I usually hide behind, and what’s left underneath is only the truth, and it’s that I’ve wanted this specific man for weeks under all my sensible reasons.
“I’ve wanted you since I dropped scone on your boots and tried to shake my hand anyway.
Since you fixed my shelf and didn’t keep score.
This is me asking, clear as I’m going to get before it takes me. If you don’t want—”
He kisses me before I finish the sentence.
There’s nothing careful in it now. He backs me into the counter, takes my face in both hands like it’s something breakable, kisses me deep and slow and thorough.
Where Rhett was a struck match, all flash and heat, Cal is a house fire.
He spreads. He gets into everything at once.
He kisses like he means to be graded on it and has all night to earn the mark.
“I’ve thought about this,” he says against my mouth, “so much it’s humiliating. You have genuinely no idea. The cold showers, sugar. I’ve been personally responsible for a drought.”
A laugh startles out of me. He swallows it, pleased. Then his hands are under my shirt, and the laugh turns into something else.
His hands map me slow, like he’s memorizing, thumbs dragging up my sides, and everywhere he touches lights and stays lit.
He’s in no rush. That’s the thing that gets me.
Rhett came at me like a man grabbing something before it could be taken back.
Cal touches me like a man who’s decided he has all the time in the world and intends to spend every second of it on me.
It should make it easier to keep my head. It does the exact opposite.
He gets the shirt off in one warm sweep. Then he just looks. And the plain disbelief on his face is its own kind of undoing, a big golden man staring at me like I’m a thing he can’t believe he’s allowed to hold.
“Look at you,” he breathes. “How’s a man supposed to get through his whole day with you so close, looking like this?”
“You talk too much.”
“I’ll stop.” He does not stop. He drops to his knees on my bakery floor, hooks my leggings down my legs, and settles my thigh over his shoulder like he’s got a plan and it’s a long one. “Hold onto the counter, sugar.”
Then his mouth is on me, and every clever thing I had left goes out of my head.
He’s thorough here too. Of course he is.
Patient and greedy at once, learning the exact thing that makes me gasp, then doing it again, and again, his hands spread wide on my thighs, holding me open like there’s nowhere in the world he’d rather be than on his knees on my floor.
I get a fist in his blond hair. I stop being quiet.
When I come, it rolls all the way through me, and he works me down out of it slow and hums against my skin like I’m the one who did him the favor.
Nobody’s ever taken their time with me like this.
That’s the thought that surfaces, unwanted, right through the pleasure.
Every man before Cal treated me like a stop on the way to somewhere better.
This one is kneeling on a cold floor at nine at night like I’m the whole destination, and my stupid heart is trying to build something out of it while the rest of me just wants him to do that again.
“One more.” His voice is wrecked, his mouth shining when he looks up. “Give me one more, then I’ll get up there. I’ve waited weeks, I’m not rushing it.”
“Cal, I need—”
“I know what you need.” He kisses back up my body, slow, finally rises, kisses my mouth so I taste myself on him, warm and unhurried even now, even with both of us shaking.
He gets his own clothes off. He’s built like the rest of them, broad and gold and flushed.
When he lines himself up and pushes into me by slow degrees, we both make a sound like something finally set down after being carried too long.
“There.” Forehead to mine, breathing hard, holding still inside me like he needs the second. “There she is. Been picturing this exact face since the scones, and it’s better. Course it’s better.”
Then he moves, and unhurried is over.
He’s got one arm banded around my back so I can’t slide off the counter, the other hand working between us, finding me slick and shameless already, and he talks the whole way through.
But it isn’t Rhett’s clever filth. It’s Cal, warm and stunned and reverent even when the words go dirty.
Good girl. That’s it. Take it, sugar, you feel so fucking good, you feel like the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
He tells me how good I am until, for a few stupid minutes, I actually believe it.
He watches my face the entire time, like he can’t spare the seconds it would cost to shut his eyes.
I lose the thread of everything that isn’t him.
The counter’s cold under me, he’s hot everywhere else, one big hand splayed at the small of my back keeping me right where he wants me.
The pull of the heat and the pull of him line up into one unbearable want.
I claw at his back. I say things I’ll be embarrassed about later.
Please. More. His name, over and over. And every one just makes him hold me tighter, go deeper.
“I’ve got you. Right here, sugar. I’ve got you, and I’m not going anywhere. ”
I feel the swell start at the base of him before he says a word, the knot thickening, catching, stretching me. This time I know what it is. I clench down around it on purpose, greedy for it. He curses low, shakes apart, spills into me with my name in his mouth like the end of a prayer.
“Not the real one,” he manages, tying us together, curving his whole warm weight around me. “Just the small one. Save the real one for the heat. God, Wren, when the heat comes, if you’d let us—”
He doesn’t finish it. He just holds me, knotted to me, breathing into my throat, and here it comes. The thing I’ve braced for since he walked through the door. The cool-off. The easy joke. The light exit that will tell me it was nothing, the version I know how to file and survive.
It doesn’t come.
He lifts his head and looks at me, and there’s no grin covering anything. His face is wide open. What’s on it is so far past a good time that I have to look away, and he catches my chin in his hand and won’t let me.
“Hey. No. Look at me.” Soft. Certain, and I’ve got no armor against it. “That wasn’t nothing. I need you to actually hear it, because I think somebody along the way taught you it’s always nothing. That was not nothing to me. Not one part of it.”
And that, God help me, is so much worse than a light exit.
Because a light exit I know cold. I have a whole life built out of surviving light exits.
What I have no defense at all against is a warm, honest man tied to me, telling me the truth with his heart sitting right there in his face, while my throat closes and the dangerous thing climbs up in me again. The one I keep stamping flat.
Hope.
I’ve spent twenty-eight years making sure nobody ever got close enough to say a sentence like that to me and mean it.
And here’s Cal Shaw, knotted to me on a flour-dusted counter, saying it plain, meaning every syllable, with no idea he just walked straight through the one wall I built my whole life to stand behind.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “Cal. Don’t be kind to me right now. I can survive a lot of things tonight. I can’t survive kind.”
“Too bad, sugar,” he says, gentle as anything, and kisses my forehead, and doesn’t go anywhere at all.