Chapter 6 #2
I kiss my way back up her body. She reaches for my belt and her fingers are fast and sure, the way her hands are when she’s working through the books, quick and precise, and my jeans are open and she’s pushing them down and I kick them off and then we’re pressed together, skin to skin, nothing between us, and the full contact of her body against mine is the closest thing to peace I’ve felt in years.
She slides her hand between us, and her fingers almost touch as she tries to wrap them around my swollen cock. Her eyes widen with realization.
“Oh thank God.”
I laugh again. She makes me laugh. In bed, with her body against mine, she makes me laugh, and I think: this is why.
Not the chemistry, not the tension, not months of wanting.
This. She’s funny and sharp and real and she makes me laugh when I’m not expecting it, and that’s the thing I didn’t know I needed until she gave it to me.
I settle between her thighs and I look at her.
She looks at me. The rain is on the roof and the cabin is dark except for the kitchen light spilling through the doorway.
Her face is half-lit the way it was on the porch in July except this time I’m not stopping.
This time I’m here and she’s here and the reasons on my list have been overruled by the woman lying in my bed.
I push into her slowly. Her eyes close. Her mouth opens. Her hands grip my shoulders and I feel her adjust to me and I hold still, not because I want to, because the feeling of being inside her is making my brain go blank and I need a second to remember how to breathe.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m better than okay.” She opens her eyes. “You can move.”
I move.
Slow at first. I’m watching her face, reading her the way I read everything, and what I’m reading is a woman who is with me completely. Present, open, holding nothing back. Her hips rise to meet mine and we find a rhythm that’s ours.
I increase the pace. She wraps her legs around me and the angle changes and she gasps and I feel it everywhere. Her nails dig into my back and I bury my face in her neck and the sounds we’re making are filling the cabin the way the rain fills the roof, constant and building.
“Don’t stop,” she says into my ear. “Please don’t stop.”
I don’t stop. I hold her hip with one hand and brace with the other and I give her everything I’ve been holding back. Every careful, measured, controlled thing about me is gone, and what’s left is just a man in a bed with a woman he’s been wanting since July, and the wanting is over.
She comes first. I feel it build before it hits, the way her breathing changes, the way her body tenses, the way she grips me tighter and tighter until she breaks.
Her back arches and she pulls me deep and says my name like it’s the only word left in her vocabulary and I watch her face and the expression on it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I follow her. Hard. My hips stutter and I bury myself in her and the release hits me like a falling tree, complete and total, and I press my forehead to hers and breathe and she breathes and we hold each other in the dark and the rain and the quiet.
For a long time, neither of us moves.
Then she laughs. Quiet. Into the curve of my neck.
“What,” I say.
“The guest mug.”
“What about it.”
“You bought a guest mug because I was coming for receipts. You bought a mug, Graham.”
“It was a practical purchase.”
“It was a declaration.”
“It was four dollars at the general store.”
She lifts her head and looks at me and her eyes are bright and her smile is real and her hair is wrecked and she is in my bed, in my cabin, on my ridge, and the four miles that used to feel like distance feel like nothing.
“You kept it on the counter,” she says. “Not in the cabinet. On the counter.”
“Seemed more efficient.”
“Seemed like you were expecting this.”
“I was hoping.”
She kisses me. Slow, warm, unhurried. I pull her against me and she fits into the curve of my body like she was built for the space and I hold her and the rain falls and everything is exactly where it belongs.
I’ve spent three years in this cabin. One man, clean lines, quiet mornings. I built the shelves and hung the cabinets and I liked things where they belonged.
She belongs here. I knew it the night I first saw her, when I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. When I put my arm around her in a bar and said “Hey, babe” and meant it more than I’ve ever meant anything I claimed was pretend.
The rain eases sometime after midnight. I’m awake.
She’s asleep against my chest, breathing slow and even.
Her hand is on my ribs and her hair is across my shoulder and I’m running the math, the way I run the math on everything, except the math isn’t about board feet or fuel costs or saw maintenance.
The math is about what happens in the morning.
The bridge will be passable by dawn. She’ll drive down the mountain. She’ll walk into her brother’s house. Connor will ask how the books are going and she’ll say fine and the word will mean something entirely different than it’s ever meant.
I should be worried about that. I should be building a plan for it, the way I build plans for everything.
I look at the woman sleeping against my chest. I pull her closer.
The plan can wait until morning.