Chapter 4
Chapter Four
GABI
Three days since he kissed me. Three days of him showing up at dusk.
He doesn't push. That's what's wrecking me.
Reese Redwood comes down off his mountain at the same time every evening, sits on my porch step while I write inside, and stays until I come out.
Sometimes we talk. Last night we didn't. He carved while I drank tea and the silence was so comfortable it terrified me.
Tonight he brings elk. Already butchered, wrapped in brown paper, his handwriting on the label in dark pencil. For Gabi.
"You don't have to keep feeding me," I tell him from the doorway.
He sets the package on the rail. Straightens. His eyes find mine, and even in the dark they catch the lamplight with that faint gold ring I've been noticing. Green edged in something warmer. Something animal.
"I know."
He smells like pine. Just pine. Clean, uncomplicated, nothing underneath it but male and mountain. My bear rolls under my ribs every time that scent reaches us, a low warm pull she hasn't stopped making since the night he kissed me.
"Come inside."
The words come out before I can think about them. His whole body goes still. That particular Redwood stillness I'm learning to read, where the man freezes and the bear decides.
"Gabi."
"You've been sitting on my porch for three nights. It's cold." I hold the door wider. "Come inside."
He comes.
The cabin is small. Smaller with him in it. His shoulders take up too much of the kitchen doorway when he leans there. Hands in his pockets, watching me move to the stove. The awareness makes my skin prickle.
I put the kettle on. Turn around. He's closer than he was.
"You been writing tonight?"
"Trying." The notebook's open on the table, half a page.
My grandmother's wedding. The way she described my grandfather's bear, cream white against the snow, bigger than any grizzly in the territory.
The way she said his name when she told the story, soft, like it still belonged in her mouth even twenty years after he died.
Reese looks at the notebook. Doesn't touch it.
"The stories are good?"
"They're all I have left."
His jaw tightens. That faint shift of muscle under the beard I shouldn't be tracking as closely as I am. "They're not all you have left."
The kettle whistles. Neither of us moves toward it.
"You kissed me three nights ago," I say, "and then you left."
"Yes."
"Why."
He pulls his hands out of his pockets. Slow. "Because if I didn't leave, I wasn't going to."
The kettle screams. I reach behind me, click the burner off without turning around. The silence that fills the space is thick with steam and want.
"Don't leave tonight."
He crosses the kitchen in two steps.
His mouth finds mine and there's nothing soft about it this time.
One hand on my jaw, tilting my face up. The other at my hip, fingers digging in through the flannel I sleep in, which is his flannel because he left it on the porch two weeks ago and I stole it and if he recognizes it he doesn't care.
His tongue slides against mine and my spine hits the counter and the sound I make into his mouth is embarrassing and I do not give a single damn.
"I can smell you," he says against my lips. Low. Almost a growl. "Been smelling you for three nights on this porch. Every time you come out that door I lose my mind."
My hands fist in his shirt. I pull him closer. "Good."
He lifts me. Hands under my thighs, up onto the counter, and steps between my legs. The position puts us face to face. His forehead drops to mine, breathing hard, thumbs pressing circles into my inner thighs that make my hips tilt on their own.
"Bedroom," I manage.
He carries me there. Down the short hallway with my legs around his waist, my back against the wall once because he stops to kiss my throat, teeth scraping the spot where my pulse hammers. My bear surges, cold and wanting, pressing against the underside of my skin in a way she hasn't in years.
The bed. He lays me down on it, follows me, braces on one arm. His weight over me is enormous and warm, his body running hotter than any human man's should.
"He pauses, reading my face.
I grab the front of his shirt, pull it over his head. Auburn hair on a broad chest. Muscle carved from actual labor. A tattoo down his left arm I can't make out in the lamplight.
"Get out of your head, Resse.”
His laugh is quiet. Surprised. Then his hands find the hem of my stolen flannel and he pulls it up over my head in one motion, baring me to the warm cabin air.
No bra. His eyes track down my body, the full breasts and the soft belly and the hips, and the look on his face isn't polite or careful. It's hungry.
"Christ, Gabi."
He bends. Mouth on my collarbone. Down. Tongue tracing the curve of one breast before his lips close over my nipple, sucking hard enough that my back arches off the mattress.
His hand cups the other breast, thumb rolling the nipple, and the dual sensation pulls a moan out of me I can feel in my toes.
Lower. His mouth drags down my stomach, over the soft swell below my navel, and when he hooks his fingers into my underwear, I lift my hips. He pulls them off. Tosses them somewhere behind him. Settles between my thighs with his shoulders spreading me open.
The first drag of his tongue up my pussy makes my hand fly to his hair.
"Oh god."
He groans against me. Actually groans, the vibration running through my clit as his tongue works slow, deliberate circles. He eats me like he does everything else. Patient. Thorough. No rushing, no performance, just his mouth learning me with a focus that makes my thighs shake.
Two fingers push inside me. Curl. Find the spot. His tongue flattens over my clit at the same time, steady pressure while his fingers work, and the orgasm builds so fast I dig my nails into his scalp.
"Reese. Reese, I'm gonna?—"
He doesn't change a single thing. Keeps the rhythm exactly where it is, steady and relentless, and I come with a cry that sounds like it belongs to someone who isn't alone on a mountain.
My hips buck against his mouth. He holds them down with one arm across my pelvis, licking me through it until the aftershocks have me twisting away because it's too much.
He kisses my inner thigh. Reaches for his jeans.
The condom wrapper tears in the dark. His cock is thick, flushed at the head, and when he rolls the condom on I watch his hand work it down the shaft with my mouth dry.
He settles over me. Lines up. Pushes in.
Slow.
"God." My nails bite into his shoulders. He's big enough to stretch me, thick enough that I feel every inch, and when he's fully seated he holds there. Breathing through his teeth. Forehead pressed to mine.
"You good?"
"Yes. Fuck. Deeper, I need it d–"
He rolls his hips takes the thought clean out of my head. Deep, grinding strokes that press him against everything inside me. My legs wrap higher around his waist. He shifts the angle. My vision blurs.
"Right there. Don't stop."
He doesn't. One hand braces beside my head.
The other slides down, thumb finding my clit, pressing in tight circles while he fucks me with a rhythm that would be casual if it weren't so devastatingly precise.
Every stroke pushes me up the mattress. Every pass of his thumb tightens the knot in my core.
"Gabi." My name on his mouth. Low. Rough. "Look at me."
My eyes open. His are gold. Full gold, no green left, the bear right there at the surface while the man works my body with both hands and every ounce of patience he's been storing up for thirteen years alone.
The second orgasm takes me apart. Full body, spine arching, his name coming out broken as my pussy clenches around him. He follows three strokes later with a groan he buries in my neck, hips stuttering, his whole body shuddering above me.
The silence after is warm. He doesn't pull out immediately. Stays braced over me, forehead on my shoulder, breathing hard. One hand strokes my hair back from my face.
"You okay?" he murmurs.
"Mmhm."
He pulls out. Deals with the condom. Comes back to bed and pulls me against his chest, my back to his front, his arm heavy across my waist. The cabin ticks with cooling heat.
Outside the wind moves through the pines, a sound I've been falling asleep to for months, except now there's a heartbeat behind me that my bear has matched her breathing to.
"Reese."
"Yeah."
"Thirty of you. In the valley."
His thumb traces my hip bone. "Thirty."
"And none of you have ever seen a polar bear."
"No."
I close my eyes. Press back into the furnace of his body. "My grandmother was the last one I ever met. She died when I was nineteen. My mother stopped shifting after my father died. Said there was no point being what she was if there was no one left to be it with."
His arm tightens.
"She was wrong," he says.
The tears come without permission. Quiet. I don't wipe them because his hand is already there, thumb catching them at my jaw, turning my face until his mouth presses against my temple.
"You're not the last of something dying," he whispers. "You're the beginning of something that survives."
My bear goes silent. Warm. Content in a way I forgot she could be.
I fall asleep in his arms, and for the first time in four years, I don't dream about snow.