37. Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Seven
ELLA
It happens at six on an ordinary evening.
Golden hour has the valley lit up like the inside of a peach.
I’m on the porch shelling peas with Mom.
Down by the corral, Ben and Daddy are hanging the new gate they’ve been happily arguing about all afternoon.
Daddy says something I can’t hear. Ben straightens up with the post driver in his hands and laughs.
Head back, unguarded, the laugh I first heard over a creek full of escaped dogs, except now it comes when called. My father got it out of him with one sentence. When he first arrived, that laugh was rusted shut.
I love him.
The thought arrives with no fanfare. It’s been true for weeks, my head just took a while to catch up.
I love Ben Callahan.
Beside me, Mom’s shelling goes quiet. She saw whatever crossed my face just now because she’s May Lockhart and faces are her first language. After a moment her hands start up again, unhurried.
“Peas won’t shell themselves,” is all she says. But there’s a smile in her voice.
Joy ripples through me.
The dread comes half a breath behind it.
Because you can’t love a man and lie to him at the same time. You can care for him, want him, build with him, but none of it’s true if it’s hiding a lie.
So it’s decided. Standing on my mother’s porch with pea shells in my apron, watching him laugh.
Tomorrow, I tell him everything. The honeymoon cabin. Carla in my barn with her hands up begging. All of it.
Tonight, God forgive me, I take one more night first.
He texts at eight. My place. Come when you’re done. Bring nothing.
I come down the hill in the blue dark, and stop on his porch step, because the cabin is glowing.
Candles. A dozen of them at least, on the windowsill, the shelf, the little table, the small room turned amber and moving.
He’s stripped the bed and remade it with quilts.
There’s a jar of wildflowers cut from his own beds.
Ben Callahan, who owns four shirts and a level, is showing off his romantic side.
He’s standing in the middle of the room looking exactly as certain and uncertain as a man can look at once.
“Bringing the band here gave me the best night of my life,” he says. “Figured I should do something for you in return.”
“Ben.”
“Also, Rose told me candles. I want that noted for the record in case it’s too much. I had a whole—”
I cross the room and kiss the rest of the sentence out of his mouth.
It’s different tonight, and we both feel it inside the first minute.
Not the tailgate’s hunger, not the loft’s fire.
This is slow on purpose. He undresses me one button at a time in the moving light, unhurried, kissing as he goes.
Shoulder. Collarbone. The freckles he’s mapped.
When my shirt’s off, he takes my face in both hands and just looks, thumbs at my cheekbones, candlelight in his eyes.
Thoughts of tomorrow enter my mind, and my insides flip.
“Where’d you go?” he murmurs, reading my face like always.
“Nowhere. I’m right here.” I pull the flannel over his head. “Prove I’m here.”
He proves it.
He lays me out on the quilts and takes his time.
Hands and mouth everywhere, patient, thorough, until I’m restless, gripping, saying his name like an argument.
When he finally settles between my thighs and slides home, we both go still for a second, forehead to forehead, breathing each other.
Then we move, slow and deep, the candles throwing our shadow on the ceiling like one creature.
It builds and builds, and I’m close, right at the edge, when he stops.
“Ben.”
“Come here.” He rolls onto his back, pulling me over him, and his hands settle my knees either side of his hips. Then he keeps turning me, guiding, until I understand what he’s steering me toward. I get hot in a way that isn’t only the candles.
“Facing away?” My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. “I’ve never… done it that way.”
His hands go still on my hips. In the quiet, I hear what I’ve just told him, the years of nobody, the boys who never lasted long enough to try anything more exciting than missionary.
“Hey.” His voice drops. “Look at me first.”
I look at him over my shoulder. Candlelight, that steady warmth, and heat burning in his eyes.
“You set the pace. You stop anything you want stopped. And Ella?” His thumbs stroke slow circles on my hips. “The view from back here is the best in this valley, and I’ve seen this valley from a horse at dawn. Now hold my hands.”
He laces his fingers through mine, arms strong under me, and I sink down onto him facing the candlelit window, and oh.
Oh.
The angle’s new, deep in a way that empties my head out entirely.
His hands hold mine while I find the rhythm of it, clumsy for three strokes, then not clumsy at all.
Rolling my hips. Learning it. Taking it.
The quilts under my knees, his low, wrecked voice behind me telling me exactly what I look like from where he’s lying.
God, look at you, sweetheart. That’s it.
Ride. And the old ghost that wants me to be embarrassed about the size and the shape of me gets up and leaves.
When my thighs start shaking, he lets go of my hands, sits up behind me in one strong motion, and wraps me back against his chest. His knees plant.
His hips drive up. One arm bands across my body, the other hand slides down my belly, fingers finding my clit, and his mouth lands open on the side of my throat.
“There she is,” he growls, and I go off like a struck match, crying out into the candlelight, clenching around him hard. He holds me through it and follows two thrusts later, a groan buried in my shoulder, both of us upright, tangled, shaking in the middle of the amber room.
We fold down into the quilts after, boneless, his heart hammering against my spine, his arm heavy over me, the candles burning down one by one.
“Stay,” he says into my hair, already half gone. “All night.”
“Okay.”
“Ella.” Sleep’s stealing his voice. “Best summer of my life. Wanted you to know.”
His breathing deepens. The last candle gutters on the sill then steadies.
I lie awake in his arms with my three unsaid words and my one unsaid truth, watching the flame. The happiness is so large and so close that the missing piece screams.
Best summer of his life. Built on top of my silence. He deserves to know the truth.
I find his hand in the dark and hold on.
“Tomorrow,” I whisper.