Chapter 7
Mel
I wake up in a bed that smells like pine and soap and Graham.
For about three seconds I don’t move. I just lie here with my face in his pillow and the blanket pulled to my chin and the gray morning light coming through the window and I take inventory.
Sore in places I haven’t been sore in, well, ever.
Hair that’s going to need a serious conversation with a brush. And I can’t help but grin.
The bed is empty beside me but the sheets are still warm. I can hear the kitchen. Coffee maker. Cabinet door. The sound of a man moving through his own space: steady, deliberate, unhurried.
I find his t-shirt on the floor. Black, soft, too big. I pull it over my head and it falls to mid-thigh and smells like him and I stand in the doorway of his bedroom wearing nothing underneath it and look at the man in the kitchen.
Graham Brady is making coffee in low-slung gray sweatpants and nothing else.
His back is to me. Bare shoulders, the line of his spine, the way the muscle moves when he reaches for the shelf.
He is thirty-four years old and has spent fifteen years cutting timber and every single one of those years is visible in the architecture of his back and I am staring and I don’t care.
He turns. Sees me. His eyes drop from my face to the shirt to my bare legs and back up, and the look on his face is worth every mile I drove to get to this mountain.
“That’s my shirt,” he says.
“It is.”
“That’s hot.”
“Yes, well, those sweatpants should be illegal.”
His mouth does the thing. Except this morning it’s warm and unhurried and real. I cross the kitchen and put my hands on his chest because I can do that now, because last night happened, and the permission to touch him is new and enormous and I’m not wasting it.
He kisses me with the tenderness of a man who is not in a rush. His hands settle on my hips, then down to the bare skin below the hem of his shirt, and the touch is light and warm and goes straight through me.
“Good morning,” he says against my mouth.
“Good morning.”
“Sleep okay?”
“I slept four hours. I feel incredible.”
He laughs. Quiet, low, the laugh I’m collecting like currency because Graham Brady laughing is rare and Graham Brady laughing because of me is fantastic. His hands slide up my sides under the shirt and his palms are rough and warm against my ribs and I stop thinking about coffee.
I stop thinking about most things.
His hands find out what I’m not wearing under his shirt and his grip tightens on my hips and his mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to my neck and I tilt my head back and his teeth graze my throat and I make a sound that’s embarrassing in daylight and I don’t care.
His hands grip my thighs and he lifts me onto the counter in one motion, smooth and sure, and the cold surface hits the backs of my thighs and I gasp and then his mouth is on mine and the cold doesn’t matter.
My legs wrap around him and he steps between them and I can feel him hard against me through the thin fabric of his sweatpants and the contact is direct and deliberate and my hips roll into him before I make the conscious decision to move.
He groans. Low, controlled, Graham even in this, and I want to take the control apart piece by piece so I reach between us and push his waistband down and wrap my hand around him and his forehead drops to my shoulder and the sound he makes is not controlled. Not even close.
“Mel.” My name like a warning and a request.
“I’m right here.”
He pushes the shirt up my body and off. Then his hands are on my bare thighs and his mouth is on my collarbone and I guide him to me and he pushes in and my head falls back and I grip the edge of the counter with both hands because I need to hold onto something solid.
He fills me completely. The stretch of it, the fullness, the way my body opens for him and tightens around him. He holds still for one second, his hands braced on the counter on either side of me, his face in my neck, breathing hard. Then he moves.
The kitchen counter is not a bed. There’s no give, no cushion, nothing soft.
Every thrust is impact and friction and I feel all of it and I want all of it.
My heels dig into his lower back and I pull him closer and he grips my hip with one hand and braces on the counter with the other and the pace he sets is not the slow, measured thing from last night.
This is morning. This is daylight. This is the careful man with his composure stripped to the studs and I am watching it happen and it’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.
“Harder,” I say, because I can, because he told me last night to tell him what I want and I listened.
He gives me harder. His hand slides from my hip to the small of my back and he changes the angle and I cry out and he swallows it with his mouth and the kiss is messy and deep and the counter is cold and I don’t care.
I don’t care about anything except the man between my legs and the way his breathing has gone ragged and the way he says my name like it costs him something every time.
I come with his mouth on my neck and the sound I make bounces off the clean cabinets he built with his own hands.
He follows me thirty seconds later, hard, buried deep, his grip on the counter so tight I hear something creak, and we stay like that, foreheads together, breathing, while the coffee maker finishes behind us with a small, polite beep, completely indifferent to what just happened on the counter beside it.
“Coffee’s ready,” he says.
I laugh so hard I have to put my face in his shoulder.
He makes me breakfast. Eggs, toast, coffee in the guest mug, which I will never stop giving him a hard time about.
I sit at the kitchen table in his shirt with my legs tucked under me and watch him cook and think about the word “domestic” and how it used to sound like a cage and now sounds like a kitchen with morning light and a man who makes eggs without asking how I want them because he already knows.
We eat. We talk. Not about Connor, not about what happens next, not about any of the things we’ll have to talk about eventually.
We talk about nothing. His favorite cut of timber (old-growth Douglas fir, and the way he describes it makes me understand why he chose this life).
My worst day at the firm (the VP who called me “sweetie” in front of a client and the email I sent afterward that got cc’d to HR).
He tells me about a bear that broke into his truck last spring and ate an entire bag of beef jerky and I tell him about the raccoon in my San Francisco apartment and we’re laughing and the morning is easy and the coffee is good and I am happy. Simply, completely happy.
“Shower?” he says.
“Together?”
“Efficient.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“I’m a practical man.”
The shower in Graham’s cabin is small. Not designed for two people.
Which means every inch of his body is pressed against every inch of mine and the hot water is running down his chest and I’m watching it travel the lines of his stomach and my hands are following the water and his hands are in my hair and we’re supposed to be getting clean and we are doing the opposite of getting clean.
He puts his back against the tile and I’m facing him and his hands are on my waist and the water is between us and I’m reaching for him when I hear a sound that isn’t the shower.
The front door. Opening.
We both freeze.
“Yo, Graham!” Koda’s voice. In the cabin. Inside the cabin. “Connor sent me to check the bridge, it’s clear! Mel, you good? I see your truck, you still here?”
My heart stops. Starts again at triple speed. I look at Graham. Graham looks at me. The shower is running. We are naked and wet and Koda is in the cabin and I am Connor Hayes’s little sister standing in Graham Brady’s shower and this is how I die.
“Graham,” I whisper. “We’re in the shower together.”
“I know where we are.”
“He’s going to come in here.”
“He’s not going to come in here.”
Koda’s boots on the floor. Getting closer. “Graham? You home? Your truck’s here, Mel’s truck is here, where the hell is everyone?”
“He’s coming in here,” I whisper.
“He won’t.”
The bathroom door starts to open. Graham grabs a towel and covers me with it just in time.
“Hey man, I see Mel’s truck, where is...”
Koda stops. Dead. Mid-sentence. He’s looking at the shower.
The glass surround is not fully fogged over.
I’m behind Graham but my legs are visible and Graham is very obviously not alone and very obviously not wearing clothes and Koda’s face goes through about six expressions in two seconds, the last of which is pure, undiluted horror.
“OH MY GOD.”
“Koda, wait.”
“OH MY GOD. MY EYES.”
“Koda.”
“I’M LEAVING. I’M LEAVING RIGHT NOW. I WAS NEVER HERE. THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN. OH MY GOD!”
He’s gone. The bathroom door slams. I hear his boots on the floor, fast, panicked, the sound of a man fleeing a crime scene. The front door bangs open.
Graham looks at me. I have never seen this expression on his face before. It’s somewhere between fury and resignation and the specific despair of a man whose carefully constructed world just got kicked in by a man who doesn’t knock.
“Stay here,” he says.
He hops out, grabs a towel, wraps it around his waist, and goes after Koda. Dripping wet. Barefoot.
I scramble out of the shower. I can hear them through the window.
“Koda! Stop!”
“I’M GOING. I’M IN MY TRUCK. I’M GONE.”
“Get back here.”
“ABSOLUTELY NOT.”
I’m pulling on clothes. Jeans, his shirt again because mine is somewhere in the bedroom and there’s no time. I can hear Graham on the porch, his voice carrying across the yard.
“It’s not what it looks like.”
Koda’s voice from near his truck: “It is EXACTLY what it looks like! You were in the shower! She was in the shower! The same shower, Graham! The SAME SHOWER!”
“Koda, listen to me. We are going to tell Connor.”
A pause. “Why? Why do you need to tell Connor? Just... pretend this didn’t happen. I can do that. I’m doing it right now. It’s already fading. What shower? I don’t even know what a shower is.”
I’m at the front door. I push it open and step onto the porch and Graham is standing at the top of the steps in a towel, dripping wet, barefoot on the cold wood, facing Koda’s truck, and he hasn’t seen me behind him.
“Because I’m in love with her!”
Everything stops. The morning. The mountain. The water dripping from his hair onto his shoulders. The word “love” hanging in the air.
I’m standing three feet behind him and he doesn’t know I’m here and he just said he’s in love with me. Not to me. To Koda. In a towel. On a porch. Dripping wet. Because Koda walked into a bathroom and Graham’s first instinct wasn’t to deny it but to explain why it matters.
“You are?” I say.
Graham turns. Sees me. The composure, whatever’s left of it, does something I’ve never seen it do. It doesn’t crack. It doesn’t fall. It just opens, like a door he’s been holding shut that he’s finally decided to let go.
“Yeah,” he says. “I am.”
Koda, from the truck: “Aww. That’s actually really sweet.”
“Leave, Koda.”
“I’m just saying, that was a nice moment and I feel like I contributed to...”
“Koda.”
“I’m leaving! I was already trying to!”
The truck starts. Gravel sprays. Koda’s truck disappears down the drive and the mountain is quiet again and Graham is standing on his porch in a towel, looking at me like a man who just said the biggest thing he’s ever said to the wrong person first and isn’t sure whether that makes it better or worse.
I walk to him. I put my hands on his face, his wet, cold, ridiculous face, and I kiss him.
“I love you too,” I say. “But you should know your towel is slipping.”
He looks down. Adjusts the towel. Looks back at me.
“Inside?” he says.
“Inside.”
We go inside. He closes the door. The guest mug is on the counter where it always is and the coffee is cold and the eggs are a memory and somewhere on a mountain road Koda is driving too fast and probably calling someone and we have about thirty minutes before the whole mountain knows, and I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it.
Graham Brady just told Koda he’s in love with me while standing on a porch in a towel and that’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done, and I will die on that hill. This hill. His.