6. Killian
KILLIAN
Idon't sleep.
Her door is the second one past the landing. I know because I counted the steps when I went to the bathroom at two in the morning. The line of light under it had been on since eleven. I noted that too. I'm noting things I shouldn't. I have been for two years.
At five I give up and go to the south slope.
It's cold off the valley floor when I start on the first row, still mostly dark, just the equipment shed lamp and the sky going gray at the edges. I work hard. I work until my arms are burning and her door isn't the loudest thing in my head.
The light comes up over the east ridge while I'm still on the wire.
I'm not thinking about Ryan. I'm not thinking about my father.
I'm thinking about her hands. The way she holds a wine glass.
The way she turns her wrist a little when she takes a sip.
I have been watching her do that for two years and not letting myself think about why.
I want her in my bed in this morning light.
Not as the woman my brother was wasting.
Just her. Her hands. Her hair down—the dark auburn of it, the way it goes warm in light, the way it must smell when she's just woken up.
Her mouth. The thing in her face when she's actually thinking about something.
I clip the next wire and move down the row.
The morning crew shows at seven. By the time I'm done with them Ryan's gone to cooperage and my father is moving through the estate without announcing it. I do the east rows alone. I work them and I don't think about her.
I think about her the entire time.
Around eleven I'm on the south fence checking wire tension when I hear boots behind me. I don't have to look. Ryan moves like he's always got somewhere to be, quick and purposeful. He stops beside me and neither of us says anything for a moment, both of us looking at the same thing.
She's on the north slope with my father.
Two hundred yards across the valley floor. They're moving through the rows, her beside him, her head tilting toward whatever he's explaining. His hands move when he talks about the vines—the only time he gestures at anything—and she's watching his hands.
"The east tractor," Ryan says. Still looking at the north slope. "I'll get to it before Thursday."
"You said that about the drainage specs."
"The drainage specs got done."
"Dad got them done."
Ryan doesn't answer right away. On the north slope my father's hand comes over hers—the grip-correction, the move I've seen him make a hundred times with me—and she goes still under it.
"She'd been thinking about the east row Pinot for eight months," Ryan says. Low. Not really to me. "I didn't know that."
"I know you didn't." I clip the wire. "You never paid attention to what she was still thinking about."
His jaw works. He looks at the fence post.
He touched her all the time, Ryan. Her shoulder when she said something funny.
The back of her neck when they ended up in the same doorway.
He'd do it without looking, like reaching for something on a shelf.
She'd go quiet under it for a second before she kept talking.
I watched him do that for two years and the thing that got under my skin wasn't the contact—it was that he didn't know he was doing it.
My father's hand came over hers just now like a decision. That's the difference.
He looks at the north slope for another moment. Then he turns and walks back toward the cooperage shed without another word. His boots on the dry ground, then gone.
She's leaning in to look at something my father is showing her, her auburn hair loose in the wind, catching the morning sun. I watch them until they move into the fourth row and I can't see them anymore.
Then I go back to work. I'm hard from watching them. There is nowhere to put it. I clip the next wire and move down the row.
Dinner is six. She comes downstairs in a dark green sweater I haven't seen on her in a year—soft, fitted, the cling of it across her chest doing something to my pulse that I'd rather not examine in front of my father.
Her auburn hair loose around her shoulders the way it was on the slope this afternoon.
The wind didn't put it back when she came inside. She didn't either.
I look at her. I don't stop looking until my father clears his throat and I sit down.
She has a glass of wine in front of her already. My father poured it before she came down. He's been doing that for two years.
She takes the fourth chair without looking at any of us. One foot tucks up under her thigh on the chair—she's been sitting that way at this table for two years. I have spent two years counting the small distance between her bare instep and her ankle bone like it was something I needed to know.
She picks up the glass. Her hand is small around the bowl.
Her fingertips graze the stem the way I want her hand on me—careful, deliberate, not in a hurry.
She takes a sip. Tilts her wrist. Sets the glass down.
The wine wets her lower lip. She doesn't lick it off.
I have to put my hand flat on the table to keep it there.
She catches me looking—green eyes steady across the rim of her glass, not asking me to stop.
I don't look away. She doesn't either. I take a sip from my own glass and watch her watch me do it. Her eyes drop to my throat when I swallow. They come back up. Her mouth does something at the corner—not a smile exactly, not a question. Acknowledgment.
I'm hard under the table. Worse than I was on the south fence this morning. There's no relief coming for at least an hour. I'm not leaving.
Ryan reaches for the bread basket like he's trying to break a spell.
"Did the rows get finished?" she asks, not quite to anyone.
"They got finished," Ryan says. He passes the bread to her without looking up. "Before Thursday."
"Good."
"The second tractor," my father says, "needs looking at before harvest."
"I'll do it tomorrow," I say.
"I was going to," Ryan says.
"I'm closer."
"Doesn't matter who's closer."
"Killian," my father says.
"I've got it."
"You've got the morning crew at seven."
"I can do both."
My father looks at me—not long, just the look that means it's already done. "Ryan does the tractor," he says. "You do the morning crew."
Ryan doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. I let him have the moment because Jade is watching us with her head tilted and something almost amused in her face, and I'd rather she keep looking than score a point against my brother.
"Fine," I say.
She drinks from her wine. Looks at me over the rim. Her tongue comes out for a second and gets the last of it from her lower lip. I feel that move land somewhere south of my belt with a sound I'm pretty sure I made out loud in my own head.
She watches my face register all of it.
"The Pinot from the east row," she says, casual, like she didn't just do that. "Is it the same clone as last year?"
My father looks at her. "Why?"
"Last year's had something in the finish. Like—not a flaw. Something mineral. I've been trying to figure out what it was."
"The east row runs over a seam of old riverbed," my father says. "You can taste it."
"So it'll be different this year? Since you rerouted the drainage?"
My father sets down his fork and looks at her the way he looks at things that interest him, which he doesn't do with most things. "You'll taste it different. Not worse. Just different."
She nods. She's actually thinking about it—not performing interest.
"The '22 is better," I say. "The seam shows more. I've been pulling bottles for a tasting before harvest—you should come."
Her wine glass is halfway raised and she leaves it there. "Would you actually walk me through what I'm tasting, or just watch me try to figure it out?"
"Depends," I say.
"On what?"
"How long it takes you."
Something moves through her face. Not quite a smile, something she'll come back to later. "I might be here," she says.
I look at her mouth. I shouldn't. I do. She doesn't look away first.
The full lower lip. The part that catches the light when she takes a sip.
The way it moved when she said I might be here.
I want it. I want it on me. I want it with my fingers in her hair holding her where I want her.
I want to know what she sounds like when she's losing the line between being polite and being not.
I have wanted all of it for two years and I'm not pretending I haven't anymore.
Ryan cuts his food into smaller pieces than it needs to be. The fork makes a sound on his plate that's half a beat too sharp every time.
Two years of him sitting at this table not noticing her.
Looking past her at his phone. Answering family questions for her, cutting her off mid-sentence.
Eating fast and leaving the table while she was still mid-conversation.
Never once asking what she thought of the harvest. The Sunday she made a dry joke and my father laughed and Ryan didn't even hear it—she caught my eye across the table.
She looked away. The night last fall when he left her at the bar at the harvest party for an hour while he talked shop with a distributor—I gave her a refill so she'd have something to do with her hands and she said thank you like I was the first person who'd noticed her in two hours.
Tonight he's hearing me ask her about a tasting and his fork can't stop. Now he's noticing.
I can smell her from across the table—clean, warm, something underneath. The same warm I caught at this table for two years and never said anything about. I want to put my mouth on that. I want to know if it gets thicker on her skin in places that have been under clothes all day.
She takes another sip. Looks at me again. Holds it.
"I'm closer to the east cellar than Ryan is," I say to my father. "I can pull bottles tomorrow morning between crew and lunch."
"Pull bottles," my father says. He's still watching her. "Yes."
He settles back in his chair. He's not stepping in.
I hold her gaze across the table for one more second and I let her see all of it. The lower lip. The fork I've been holding too tight for the last ten minutes. The fact that I haven't been looking at anything else in this room since she came down the stairs.
She picks up her wine glass and finishes it.
After dinner she goes upstairs. I help clear, wash up, say goodnight, and go up after her.
I pass her door. The light is on under it. I keep walking.
In my room I sit on the edge of the bed for a minute. Then I stand up because sitting isn't working. I pace. I check my phone for nothing. I take a cold shower because that's what men take when they're trying to stop themselves from doing something they're going to do anyway.
The cold shower doesn't work. It never works. I should know that by thirty.
I get out, dry off, and go back to bed with my hand around my own cock because it's the only thing I can do that's quieter than what I want to do down the hall.
I bring her up—the way she looked at me over her wine glass tonight, the lower lip, the foot tucked under her thigh on the chair.
I bring up her hands. I bring up her hair.
I bring up her sweater fitted across her chest. I bring up what she would look like with that sweater off, on her back in my bed, her thighs around my hips.
I come on my own stomach with her name in my mouth.
I lie there afterward with the same kind of empty I've been carrying since she sat down at the table this evening.
It's a waste of my cum. That's the actual thought. There's something to do with it that's more useful than putting it on my own skin, and there's one woman in this house I want to do that with.
I haven't been with anyone since the brunette four years ago. Careful in bed, never came, liked the lights off. I broke up with her because she didn't want to do anything I wanted to do.
I was about to start dating again when Ryan brought Jade home.
I had a date with a woman the following Friday.
The first Sunday Jade sat across this table I cancelled it the next day.
Jade laughing at something my father said.
Jade pressing her lips together to keep from saying something.
Jade dragging her hand along the back of her neck under her hair when she was thinking.
I knew. I have spent two years not letting myself think about what I knew.
I think about it now.
I think about her body, about the curve of her hips when she sat down at the table tonight.
The shape of her under that green sweater as she leaned across the table.
Her full lower lip. I think about putting my hands on her waist and pulling her against me in the dark, my cock buried in her pussy, as deep as it can go.
I'd do it differently than my brother did—I'd know where she was the whole time, wouldn't let her go quiet.
Instead I'd fuck her slow until she forgot her own name.
I'd make her come on me until she broke loose, her pleasure so loud the whole estate would know it.
I'd put my cum so deep inside her she'd feel it for days, then nine months after.
I would show her what a Flanagan man can do when he's been wanting her for two years and has her whole body to fill.
I get up and pull on jeans and a shirt. My hair's still wet from the shower. I leave it.
The hall is quiet. Her door is the second one past the landing. I've known that since two in the morning.
Her light is still on under it.
I put my hand flat against the wall beside the frame. My pulse is loud. I've been keeping my mouth shut about her for two years. The reason I kept my mouth shut walked into a hotel room with another woman in February. There's nothing left between me and what I want.
I knock twice, quiet. Her voice through the door:
"Yeah?"
I open it.