Chapter 19
Nineteen
By April, by the time the first buds broke, we were in love.
It didn’t take long for us to get there, for us to reach that place.
We were destined for it, the way our hearts gravitated toward each other, drawn by some invisible thread that defied everything we knew to be true.
Love, as I’d discovered, was a mysterious, shape-shifting force.
Jackson’s love was a potion that was as safe as it was exhilarating, as tender as it was untamed, a love materialized before he said the words. Waste not.
Within this whirlwind, we had a farm to plant, an expansion to oversee.
Each day was a ballet of labor, our hands deep in the soil, our minds focused on growth and progress.
The days blended into a sameness that we all enjoyed—craved, even.
Jackson and I promised ourselves we would take it slow, savoring each moment, to allow things to unfold at their own pace.
That was what we told ourselves. Most nights, after our walk, we would say goodbye with a sweetness that bordered on ritualistic.
But it was a lie, a facade we maintained while knowing deep down that there was no slowing this force between us.
One evening, at the kitchen door, Jackson drew me close, his arms encircling me.
The kiss he placed on my lips was more of a prelude than the night’s final note, an open-ended conversation to be concluded later, not the “good night” it was.
As the night deepened, I slipped out from my cabin and back into the house, quiet so as not to disturb Tibb and Luke.
I found Jackson’s door open, the room empty, the bed made and undisturbed.
On my way back to the cabin, I saw him on the porch, standing still in the soft glow of the light.
The night around him seemed to bend, a sight that made my heart leap.
His presence reached out to me, subtle but undeniable.
His body relaxed as he saw me. Without a word, I rushed into his arms, and he lifted me effortlessly, his lips finding me in a kiss that was urgent and demanding.
“I can’t do it. I don’t want to sleep without you,” I said between kisses.
The words surprised me with their bluntness, a raw honesty laid bare.
“I know,” he said as he carried me inside the cabin. “We don’t have to.”
Minutes later, we were tangled in each other, limbs entwined, faces inches apart.
With heavy-lidded eyes, he stared down at me.
“Where have you been?” he whispered as he slipped the strap of my dress off my shoulder and kissed it, each word layered with a double meaning.
Because he wasn’t talking about this moment. He meant his entire life.
“Looking for you,” I whispered, the words tasting like truth. Deep within me, my body had known all along, even before my mind caught up that this, the farm, with Jackson, right now, was where I was supposed to be.
His hands stilled for a moment, then tightened around my waist as his forehead rested against mine. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“You have?”
“Oh yeah…” he breathed, his voice a soft rasp as he laid me back, removing the dress and my panties. There was desire in his eyes but also rampant emotion. “I would have waited forever.”
“You don’t have to wait anymore. Take me. I’m yours.”
“Damn, Leigh,” he said, looking down at my naked body on display. “You are so perfect. So wild. Your body. Wearing the scars of everything you’ve lived through.”
“Touch me,” I asked, running my thumb across his lips.
He trailed a finger on a slow journey down my stomach, stopping at my slightly raised scar.
His lips followed, pressing a tender kiss to the mark.
I inhaled sharply at the touch. My fingers moved without thinking, skimming over the roughness of my own scars before I leaned up and brushed my lips against them.
We were bound by those scars and healed by them too.
A lump formed in my throat, but I managed to whisper, “Jack.”
He groaned, low and long, a beautiful sound. “I like that. Say it again.”
I moaned his name again. “Is it always like this?” I asked. Because I needed him to tell me, help me make sense of these feelings that had taken root so deep inside me. I had never felt anything like this. My body and soul turned inside out.
He looked up at me with those eyes that have always seen right through me. He knows what I mean, and the softness in his eyes made my heart ache even more. “Never,” he said, his voice low and certain. “Only with you.”
“Yeah,” I whispered, barely able to find my voice. I couldn’t fully grasp it, but at that moment, I didn’t need to. It was enough. He was enough. “Only with you.”
“The more you open up to me, the more I want you,” he said, hooking his forearm behind my knee and sliding into the tight clutch of me. “God…I can’t get enough of you,” he said as he moved inside me.
“I don’t want you to.”
I discovered I liked sex. And Jackson was all too happy to allow me to explore what I liked.
He allowed me to explore, with my fingers, lips, and tongue, him and his powerful body, which came honestly through hard work and years of chopping wood, and the thick and long lower part of him, which came from genetics and the Almighty.
And he explored me, his fingers and tongue serving as an alarm clock, awakening areas that had never been active.
There was no one way, one position, I preferred over the other.
He was a luxury I couldn’t seem to sip. But I loved straddling him, face-to-face, holding his eyes with mine, and rolling my hips deep while he pressed me close to him, raking his fingers down my spine.
Something had broken loose inside of me, inside of us.
The clues were in the kisses on my neck and across my breasts, in the soft words of praise he whispered in my ear when I climaxed.
He couldn’t stop loving on me. And we couldn’t stay away or keep our hands off each other, often sneaking away for afternoon romps in my cabin or unrolling a blanket in a field among the early wildflowers starting to bloom, to satisfy our need, me clothed in nothing but his bare arms. Our need at turns wild and tender, rough and ripe.
The feelings of him a tattoo on my skin. A gift.
It wasn’t just the sensations of sex but what accompanied it.
What it meant to be human, to hold a capacity for both pleasure and pain, was laid bare before me.
I had sipped from the cup of suffering, but never had I felt such a depth of desire.
It seemed unfair that such bliss was concealed beneath the surface, waiting to be revealed.
I knew then what it felt to be human, to feel it all, to live within the full spectrum of emotions and sensations.
And that as a human, I was capable of so many things.
I became more aware of my body, more than I ever had—what it held, what it gave, what it took.
It absorbed, it released, it ached. It breathed and lived in the back-and-forth of pain and joy, the ebb and flow that makes us alive.
I knew all the ways love could hurt, but none of its pleasures.
Until now. In the stillness of those nights, after Jackson and I made love, when sleep came for him, I’d lie there, wide awake, pressing my ear to his chest, his heartbeat steady beneath my cheek.
My heart swelled with the love I felt for him.
Lila had known that feeling too. In her short life, she tasted the joy of love with Robert.
She’d come home still smelling of him, his scent lingering in her hair, in the air, as if he were in the room with us.
She’d bite her lip, a soft smile playing at the corners of her mouth, and stare, unfocused, caught in a world of her own, a world with him in it.
Now I knew what she saw, what she felt. She’d found love where it wasn’t supposed to be, and now I had too.
I wanted to tell her about it, this new kind of happiness, the kind you could never quite explain but only feel.
I thought of Mama too. She had her own history, her own ancestors.
In these quiet moments, I began to understand the person she became, the way she had lived, and something began to shift inside me.
I could see it now, the pull that had kept Mama in that trailer, the way love had wrapped itself around her like a chain, making the impossible feel simple.
It didn’t make sense—not really. But somewhere in that understanding, the sharp edges of my anger toward her softened.
Love makes you do wild things, with a lack of reason that makes it feel flawless.
It didn’t make her actions right, but I had finally reached a place where I could at least understand, that love could bend you into things you never thought you’d be.
Jackson slept through all of it, unaware that even the quiet moments with him were stitching the cracks in me I hadn’t realized I needed to fill.
As he slept, he mended me a little more.
He had guided me here, but this part of the journey, I had to discover on my own.
The door had been opened and what walked through wasn’t just understanding but clarity.
The truest moments of my healing were not just with him, they were because of him.
Luke and Tibb pretended not to notice how disheveled we were before dinner or that we arrived late for breakfast. Until one evening, when we were in another haste to have each other.
A knock sounded through the cabin door, accompanied by footsteps pacing along the porch.
Muffled noises, a hushed conversation, filtered through the door before another knock and Luke’s voice.
“Uh…Jack?”
“Go away, Luke,” Jackson said, removing his shirt and lowering to his knees at the foot of the bed.
The pacing started again, louder and harder. Luke knocked again. “Jack…I need to talk to you.”