4. Boone
Boone
T he next morning, she picks at her eggs, barely lifting her gaze to mine as she pushes them around her plate.
"How’d you sleep?” I ask, breaking the silence between us at last. Her eyes flick up to meet mine.
"Not well," she shoots back. "That bed’s hardly comfortable."
I cock an eyebrow. Not exactly the response I expected, given that I’ve put her up under my own damn roof, but I guess nothing about her has exactly made sense so far.
She’s still in those short pants she was wearing before, but she’s got one of my shirts on over the top of it – it sits low on her body, showing a few inches of her chest, like she’s trying to distract me. I let my gaze trail back to her face.
"If I’d known you were going to injure yourself in the forest," I drawl back to her. "Then I’d have made sure to get the place a little more comfortable for you."
She presses her lips together, unable to ignore my sarcasm.
"And what exactly does that mean?”
I lift my chin, meeting her gaze steadily.
"That you could stand to be a little more grateful, all things considered."
She rolls her eyes skywards.
"Oh, could I?” she replies, her voice edged with annoyance. "Because last I checked, you carried me off to your place in the middle of God knows where with no warning and no choice in the matter!”
"If you’d rather be out there in the cold, be my guest!
” I fire back, gesturing to the door. I tried to make this nice for her, at least till she could get herself back on her feet – it's what Anna would have done, and that’s all I’m willing to admit to myself this is about – but if she’s going to come at me with the attitude of an errant child, I’m not going to put up with it.
She springs to her feet, the plates clattering on the table in front of her.
"Maybe I will," she shoots back, and, stepping into her gray shoes, just as weird as the rest of her clothes, she storms to the door and throws it open.
I grunt as I run a hand through my hair, not looking back at her, not willing to give her the satisfaction of knowing that she has made it under my skin.
Woodrow goes to follow her but I plant a hand on the back of his neck and stop him.
I don’t want her thinking she’s going to be rewarded for throwing a fit like this, even if the flush to her cheeks did send something coursing through me that I’d rather not admit to.
I finish up the rest of my breakfast, made with the eggs I got from the town nearby – they’re always telling me down at the grocer’s that I should meet with Elias and offer to bring him and his newly-pregnant wife something while I’m down there, but I’ll be damned if I’ll put myself on the line for a man like that.
We’ve had enough disagreements over the years as it is. He can handle his own shit.
I count out the seconds since she left, waiting for her to think better of it and turn her ass around to come back, but it doesn’t happen.
I snarl a curse under my breath and shove the chair back from the table to take off after her.
If the fall she took before is anything to go by, she doesn’t know this place, she’s going to get herself hurt if she spends too much time out there alone, and I am sure as hell not about to let that happen. Not again.
I stalk out of the cabin and follow the dented marks in the grass that she must have followed to the firepit nearby.
Sure enough, when I arrive there, she is standing over the blackened remains, her arms wrapped around herself, my shirt hanging off her and only making her look even more tiny than she did before.
When she hears my footsteps, she turns to face me, and her lips part – perhaps to offer an apology, perhaps to tell me to leave her alone.
But whatever it is, I don’t get a chance to hear it. Because, before I can stop myself, I catch her face in my hands, and bring my lips to hers.
She lets out a slightly-surprised noise against my mouth, and I think that she’s going to shove me off – but, instead, her hands rest against my chest, her fingertips digging in to my skin, and I drag her to the ground right then and there, ready to start a whole new fire of my own.
"You can’t be out here in the cold," I growl against her mouth, as I move on top of her, pinning her to the ground – her fingertips lace into my hair, her eyes hazy with something overwhelming, something neither of us can quite put into words.
She just pulls me down again for a kiss, her tongue in my mouth with a hunger that I haven’t felt for a long time.
My manhood swells to a firmness I’ve not felt it at in years, in longer than I’d care to admit – I wait for the wave of guilt to wash through me, at the thought of doing this after so long without Anna, but it doesn’t come.
I grasp her face in my hands, pulling aside the pants she’s wearing just far enough that I can expose her, and move my fingers between her legs to make certain that she’s ready for me.
She gasps against my mouth, her breath stuttering for a moment as I graze her folds for the first time. Her hips rise from the ground below, silently begging me for more. And, in that moment, it’s all I want, too.
All the questions I have about this woman have fallen away, to be replaced by the raw, animal need that throbs in the space between us.
Our tongues dive greedily against each other as I draw myself into my hand, guiding my fullness to her entrance as she raises herself up to meet me.
And, in one swift motion, our bodies come together.
The sound she lets out is enough to send a few of the birds in the surrounding trees flying for their lives, but I don’t care.
I fist one hand in her hair and the other in the dirt beside her for leverage as I move into her, hard, deep, frantic.
Her body rolls upwards to meet mine, her eyes almost hazy as she grips on to my shoulders and drinks me in. I can smell her, that soft, sweet, strange scent in the air, and I want to drink deep from it till I’m full to bursting.
I settle for another kiss, one hand sliding down to grip her hip and still her as I thrust into her frantically, filling her to the brim with every movement, listening to the way her breath hitches and tears as she spirals closer and closer to...
Her body bucks against mine in a sudden, wild motion that seems to be utterly outside of her control. I feel her muscles squeeze around me, as though she is trying to draw me even further into her.
But there’s no more space left between us to close – she rakes her nails across my shoulders and kisses me again, breathing me in deeply, and the sound of her soft whimpers is all that it takes to push me to the point of no return.
I sink into her one last time, stilling my body there, allowing her to clench and squeeze around me as muscles spasm with helpless need.
Her cheeks are red, her soft lips parted, and this close up, I can see the smattering of freckles over her chin and her cheeks. I want to trace each one out like a star map, commit it to memory...
I grunt as I finish inside of her, the warmth of my seed entering her at last. She tightens her legs around me and holds me in place for a moment, breathing hard.
In the soft dirt, in the cool air, it almost feels as though with have sewn a seed here between us today.
And, I suppose – in some kind of way, we have done just that.