5. Chapter 5 #2
The house is ten minutes north of town, down a private drive through birch trees, and when the trees open up at the end I stop arguing about pasta because I stop having words entirely.
Cedar and stone, long and low along the top of a bluff, with windows two stories tall facing the water.
Inside, the great room ceiling runs to a ridge beam the size of a telephone pole, and the lake fills every window, blue to the horizon, moving.
There's a kitchen with a range I'm afraid to touch, a wine fridge with a note taped to it that says HELP YOURSELF.
NOT THE SCOTCH. H.B., a stack of folded towels on the stairs that smells of lavender, and a deck off the back with a long table, a built-in grill, and steps that switchback down the bluff to a private dock.
I walk straight through the house and out the back door and down all sixty-one steps. I count them. At the bottom I take my shoes off and stand on the warm boards of the dock in the sun.
The water under the dock is clear enough that I can see stones ten feet down.
A sailboat leans across the middle distance.
Somewhere up the shore a kid yells and there's a splash and then laughing.
The waves come in small and patient against the pilings, and I stand there with my shoes in my hand until the gala, the office, the tally in my coat pocket, all of it, feels genuinely far away.
I don't hear him come down the steps. I just feel the dock shift under his weight, and then he's beside me, hands in his pockets, looking out at the water. We stand there for a while saying nothing, and it's the easiest silence I've had in years.
"I'm not used to this," he says finally.
"Private docks?"
"Being somewhere nobody can reach me." He says it lightly but his thumb moves to his belt, to the spot where a pager clip would be.
It isn't there. He touches the empty spot once, then drops his hand.
"I haven't been fully off in four years.
There's always a resident with my cell, or my father two doors down on the floor, or a transplant that might come in.
" He looks out at the water. "It's so quiet it's making me a little nervous. "
"Give it a day. I'll teach you. I'm good at lying down."
He laughs and the sound carries out over the lake. "I know you're good at lying down."
I roll my eyes. "Shut up, Julian."
I put my shoes back on so we can climb the sixty-one steps, because somebody promised me pasta.
He cooks at sunset with his sleeves pushed up and his watch on the counter, and I sit on a stool with a glass of white wine and watch his forearms, which is a legitimate activity and I stand by it.
The butter browns in the pan and the whole kitchen smells of it.
He moves around a strange kitchen the same way I imagine he moves in an OR, no wasted motion, finding things on the first look, and there's something about a man tasting from a wooden spoon with his head tipped that I'm not prepared to fully examine right now.
My phone rings on the counter. MOM.
His eyes go to it, then back to the pan. I pick it up and step out through the slider onto the deck, pulling the screen half closed behind me.
"Hey, Mom."
"Hi, baby. Is this a bad time? It sounds windy."
"I'm outside, it's fine. What's up?"
"Okay, don't be mad." Her voice does the bright thing, the cheerful note laid over the worry, the one I've known my whole life.
"The water heater's making the noise again, and Stan came and looked, and it needs the valve.
The part's a hundred and eighty, and with labor it's two forty.
He can come tomorrow but he needs the part money up front, and I get paid next week, so I can put it right back—"
"Send me Stan's number. I'll pay him directly."
"You always do this."
"Because you always need me to. Take a hot shower tomorrow night and try to relax."
She laughs, and the worry comes out of her voice like air out of a tire. She tells me about her neighbor's tomatoes and I lean on the deck railing and watch the sun go low over the water while she talks. When we hang up she says love you more, which has ended every call since I was nineteen.
The slider is still half open.
When I come back in, he's plating the pasta, two wide bowls, working a lemon over the little grater. He doesn't say anything.
"Water heater," I say, sitting back on my stool. "Two hundred and forty."
"I wasn't going to ask."
"You were four feet from an open door."
He slides my bowl across the counter and leans on his forearms across from me. He looks at me without pity, which is the only thing that makes it possible to keep going.
"You didn't even pause," he says. "Most people sigh first. There's usually some kind of tax, even with family. You didn't charge her a thing."
"She never charged me anything." I look at my bowl.
Steam coming off the pasta, the smell of brown butter and parmesan, lemon.
"My dad left before I was born. I've never met him, don't want to, that's a closed file.
She raised me on diner shifts, doubles on weekends, and twice when I was a kid the power got shut off and she lit candles and called it camping.
" I take a bite. It's stupidly good and I almost tell him so and then don't. "I was nine before I figured out we weren't camping.
So yeah, she's bad with money. She is. But she was never once bad with me.
Two hundred and forty dollars for a water heater is nothing.
My childhood would've bankrupted a better accountant. "
He's quiet. His head is tilted just slightly, the spoon still in his hand, and there's something in his face he isn't managing, and I look back down at my bowl before it can finish.
"This is the same pasta," I say. "From before."
"It is."
"It's better."
"I've had six years to practice." He says it simply and picks up his own bowl.
We eat at the counter with our knees almost touching, and we talk about nothing, his first residency apartment with the radiator that sounded like someone living in the walls, the first wedding I ever ran where the cake table collapsed, the time Kate maced a pigeon by mistake, and he laughs with his head back.
After, he washes and I dry because I demand a job, and the kitchen goes dark except the stove light, and we end up on the deck with the lake completely black below, loud against the dock, and I'm leaning on the railing and he comes to lean beside me, close enough that his arm is warm down the whole side of mine.
"Christina."
"Mm."
"The arrangement." His voice is low. "Three days, then everything goes back. That's still what you want."
The waves come in. The sailboat is a shadow now, just a mast light moving slow.
"That's the deal," I say.
He turns to face me, and his hand comes up slow, pushing my hair back, fingers grazing my ear and my jaw, and he leaves it there, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, and the lake keeps coming in below us in the dark.
"Then I'm not wasting three days," he says.
I kiss him first. I can't help it. I'm up on my toes with both hands full of his shirt, and he catches me mid-rise, both arms closing all the way around me, and the railing presses cold through my shirt as he turns us.
His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, the spot below my ear that makes my knees stop being useful, and I say his name and even I can hear what's in it.
"Inside," I manage. "The whole house and I want the tour."
He walks me backward through the slider with his mouth still on mine, one hand finding the hem of my shirt, and the tour gets exactly as far as the kitchen island before he lifts me onto the cold stone of it, steps in between my knees, and pulls back just enough to look at me.
My shirt is half off my shoulder. His chest is moving.
His hands are flat on the counter on either side of my thighs and his eyes are on my face, just my face, like the rest of the room stopped existing.
"Six years," he says. "I want it on record that I waited six years."
"Noted." I pull my shirt over my head. "Now catch up."
He does.
His mouth comes back to mine as he strips my bra away, palms sliding up to cup my breasts, thumbs brushing my nipples until they tighten into aching points.
I arch into him, tugging at his shirt until he yanks it off one-handed.
Skin to skin, the heat of him is unreal.
He kisses down my throat, teeth grazing my collarbone, then lower, sucking one nipple into his mouth while his hand works the other.
I am already soaked, thighs squeezing around his hips, but he does not rush.
Julian lifts me off the island and carries me upstairs, mouth never leaving my skin.
The bedroom door clicks shut behind us. He sets me on the edge of the bed and drops to his knees between my legs, hands spreading my thighs wide.
The look on his face, hungry, focused, certain, makes my breath catch.
"Let me." His voice is rough.
He hooks my underwear down and off, then leans in and licks a slow broad stripe up my center.
I jolt. He does it again, deeper, tasting me like he's been starving for exactly this.
When his lips close around my clit and suck, gentle at first then harder, I cry out.
Two thick fingers push inside me at the same time, curling just right, stroking that spot that makes my vision spark.
"Oh fuck—" My hands fist in his hair. He sucks my clit in steady rhythm, tongue flicking fast while those fingers pump deeper, faster. The wet sounds fill the room along with my broken sounds. Pressure coils tight and fast.
"Julian, I'm going to—" The words break apart as I come hard in his mouth, thighs clamping around his head, hips grinding against his tongue. He doesn't stop, sucking and stroking me through every pulse until I'm shaking, oversensitive, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes.
Only then does he rise, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes dark and wild. He sheds the rest of his clothes and climbs over me, cock heavy and flushed against my thigh. I reach for him, stroking once, twice, feeling how hard he is.
He lines up and pushes in with one smooth thrust, burying himself completely. We both groan. He's thick, stretching me perfectly, and the fullness after coming is almost too much. He starts slow, letting me feel every inch, but I dig my heels into his back.
"Harder," I say.
He gives it to me. The pace turns punishing, hips snapping forward, the slap of skin loud in the quiet house.
Each thrust hits deep, grinding against my clit on every stroke.
I'm clawing at his shoulders, saying his name on a loop.
He hooks one of my legs higher, changing the angle, and I see actual stars.
"Christina, god, you feel." His voice breaks. Sweat slicks our skin. He drives into me harder, relentless, one hand braced beside my head, the other gripping my hip with a grip I'll feel tomorrow. I come again, clenching around him so tight his pace stutters and he curses.
He follows right after, burying himself deep, coming with a low wrecked sound, pulsing hot inside me. The warmth of it, the way he keeps rocking through it, draws out every last tremor in me.
We collapse together. I'm boneless, mind blank, nothing in it except the feeling of him, the weight of his chest against mine, his heartbeat slowing under my ear. He rolls us so I'm draped across him, legs tangled, his hand running slow and steady up and down my spine.
The lake murmurs outside the cracked window. My body feels heavy, spent, completely still.
He presses his mouth to the top of my head, hand never stopping.
"Sleep," he says, quiet. "I've got you."
I do.
Everything else, the arrangement, the three days, what comes after, dissolves into the dark.