8. Jade
JADE
I'm still wet from him, walking through this kitchen at half past one in the morning, looking for cold water.
The kitchen light is on low. Someone left it that way, or never turned it off.
Cormac is at the kitchen table.
He has a mug in front of him and a book at his elbow that's open to a page he isn't reading.
He's wearing the same flannel as dinner, sleeves still rolled.
The light over the sink catches his profile—the line of his jaw, the gray at his temples, the hand wrapped loose around the mug. He looks up when I come in.
"Couldn't sleep," I say.
"No." He tips his chin toward the coffeepot. "It's decaf."
I pour a mug because it's something to do with my hands.
I sit across from him. We sit the way we've sat before—easy, no production about it, the kitchen quiet except for whatever the house makes at this hour.
I wrap both hands around the mug. The north slope is a dark shape through the glass, the rows invisible now, just the slope and the sky above it.
I've been in this house for two days. My cereal bowls are on his shelf.
My glass is poured before I come downstairs.
I drove four hours for twenty minutes and I'm on my second night in the guest room.
My body still remembers the last forty minutes upstairs and the man across this table is not asking what I came down for.
"Killian came to my room tonight," I say.
He doesn't react. His expression doesn't shift. "I thought he might."
"You're not going to say anything about that."
"What would I say?"
I look at him. "I don't know. Something." I expected—I don't know what I expected. Some version of a claim. Some version of this is mine and not his. Some line drawn somewhere I could see.
He doesn't draw a line. He picks up his mug, decides against it, sets it back down. The kitchen is so quiet I can hear my own pulse in my throat. He's sitting two feet from me at this table and the heat coming off his arm is something I'm not actively pretending not to feel.
Out the window the slope is dark. In three days it's supposed to rain.
"Come and see the barrel room," he says.
It's past midnight. "Okay," I say.
The cellar is cool the way it's always cool—the same temperature regardless of what's happening above it. He hits the light at the bottom of the stairs. The far end is bright now; the bulb he replaced yesterday. He walks me down the back row at his pace, stopping where he wants to stop.
I've been here once before. Last spring.
I followed him down with my wine glass still in my hand and asked about barrel aging and ran my free hand along the heads as we went.
At the far end my shoulder almost touched his and I felt his sleeve warm against my arm and neither of us moved away right away.
Then he stepped back. Back row's been running warm, he said, and moved to the temperature gauge.
I thought about that for two weeks afterward.
"These are the reserve casks," he says now. He touches a barrel head. The pad of his thumb sits on the wood. "Older oak. What goes in here needs four years minimum before it's ready."
"Four years."
"Some things need time to become what they're going to be."
He moves to the far end. The cellar smell is heavier here—oak, cool stone, something wine-dark underneath. I get it on the back of my throat.
"What's in this one?"
"A pinot from the south slope I planted in 2017. Five years in. I'll know what it is when I open it."
"How do you know it's ready?"
"You don't. You decide. You open it. Either you were right or you wait another year."
I follow him down the row. There's something about the way he says open it that lands low in my stomach.
I'm close enough to him now that I can smell him under the oak. Clean sweat and warm skin and the faint sweet edge of wine that lives on him. Except we're not in the kitchen now. We're in the cellar. Past midnight. Two of us.
"You stepped back," I say. "Last spring. When I was down here."
"Yes."
"Why."
He turns to look at me. He has that quality—the sense that the relevant things were decided some time ago, and this conversation is just the last part of it, the part where they get named.
"Ryan was my son and you were his," he says. "That's why."
"And now."
"Now Ryan made his choice eight months ago." He moves toward me. Not fast—at his pace. "And you drove four hours and stayed two days."
I hold my ground. My heart is going. My body has been awake for almost five hours and isn't going back to sleep tonight.
"I need you to tell me what's happening," I say.
He stops in front of me. Close enough that I can feel the heat of him through the front of his shirt. He lifts one hand and tucks a piece of my hair back from my face, the same finger that grazed my jaw on the slope this afternoon.
His knuckle traces the line of my throat on the way down.
I go very still. Heat lands low in my stomach and stays there.
"I'm done waiting," he says.
He steps closer. The front of his shirt almost touches mine.
He kisses me.
Slow. Open. His tongue against mine. His lower lip catching mine. His teeth gentle when they find me. He tastes like decaf and oak. I make a sound I don't recognize against his lips and he kisses me deeper for it.
I get my hands in his hair without deciding to. He kisses me again, slower, like he's been thinking about doing it for a long time and is allowed now. His mouth opens mine.
When he pulls back his hand stays at my jaw. His thumb is on my pulse.
"Tell me," I say.
"Did Ryan treat you right?" he says, against my mouth.
I don't answer.
"In bed," he says, quieter. "Did he ever finish in you?"
"No," I say.
He kisses me. Once. Hard. His answer to mine.
"No?" he says, lifting back.
"He always wore a condom."
His thumb tightens on my jaw.
"And the men after him?"
"Outside me. Both of them."
He goes still. His thumb is on my jaw. His other hand has come to rest at my hip and he is so still I can feel how much it's costing him.
"Are you on something?"
"Pill."
"Good." He says it without a beat of hesitation. "That's good for now." His thumb traces my jaw. "When you're ready, it'll be easy to just... stop."
The word stop lands between my hipbones. He's already mapped how this works. I take the pill until I want him to put a baby in me. Then I stop. He does the rest.
It turns me on like nothing else.
Then his mouth is on mine again. Different now.
Hot. His tongue in my mouth deeper. His hand at my hip pulls me into him.
My hips meet him without deciding to. I feel him hard against me through the front of his pants.
The pulse between my thighs answers it. I'm wet through my underwear.
I've been since I came down for water. I make a sound.
He swallows it. Kisses me through it. His other hand comes to my throat—light, claiming—and he keeps me there with his mouth.
"Cormac—" I get out, against his lips.
"I know about Killian." He cuts across, calm, even though his breathing is loud now. "He stopped because you stopped him. That's how I know it's mine."
He kisses me again. I open for him.
"Ryan—" I start, between kisses.
"Ryan fucked up what he had," he says against my mouth. Flat. Not cruel. Just true. "And now he's going to learn better whether he wants to or not."
He walks me back two steps until my back hits the cool wood of a barrel.
He doesn't stop kissing me. His hand goes under my shirt—up over my ribs, up under my bra, and his calloused thumb finds my nipple.
I cry out into his mouth. He groans against my lips.
His hips push into mine, his hard cock against my belly through his pants, and he rocks himself against me once, twice. I feel the size of him.
Between my thighs everything tightens. I'm so wet I'm going to ruin my underwear. I tilt my hips up to find friction against him and don't find enough.
I want to know exactly. I want to reach for the buckle of his belt and pull his cock out and find out what it's like to have a Flanagan man's cum inside me for once.
My hands are in his hair, in his collar, on the buckle of his belt—somewhere, everywhere, the entire shape of his body. I keep pulling his mouth back to mine. He keeps coming.
"I'm not going to be careful with you," he says, against my mouth. "I'm going to come in you. We're going to find out what we make."
I can't breathe.
He pulls back a half-inch. His eyes are dark.
"Do you want to be bred?" he says.
The question lands like something that's been falling for a long time and finally hits the ground.
Not a shock—a confirmation. I've been carrying the shape of this question since the first Christmas morning, since the finger brush at the sink, since this afternoon on the north slope when his hand came over mine and my body told me what it had decided.
I've been carrying it since last spring in this room when he stepped back and said back row's been running warm and I went home and thought about it for two weeks.
He didn't ask if I want him. He didn't ask if I'm sure. He asked the real question—the one under everything, the one I've been sitting with in my body for longer than I'll say out loud.
Something in my chest opens all the way.
"Yes," I say.
He kisses me again, hard this time, full. His mouth opens mine like he's going to swallow me. His hand stays under my shirt at my breast. The other one drops from my throat, slides to my hip, then to my thigh. Palm hot on my bare skin. Fingers tracing up.
His mouth leaves mine for my throat. I gasp into the cellar air. His teeth scrape my pulse. His hand keeps going up my thigh. I open my legs against the barrel without deciding to. I'm aching where I need him, wet and past ready. He's an inch from finding out how wet I am.
Then he goes very still.
His forehead drops to mine.
He's breathing harder than I've ever heard him.
"Not here," he says.
"Cormac—"
"Not in this cellar. Not against a barrel where my crew comes through at six." He breathes out. He doesn't move his hand from my thigh. "I want you in a bed. Tomorrow. I want my hands on every inch of you with a door that locks and time to do it right."
Tomorrow.
The word lands hard. I have spent two days in this house being patient about him. He has spent two years being patient about me. Now he wants me to be patient until tomorrow.
I cannot.
"The tasting room is available," I say.
His head comes up.
His eyes go dark in a way I haven't seen on him in two years. The careful look, the steady look, the everything-decided-before-it-happens look—those are gone. What's left is the version he's been holding back.
"The tasting table," he says.
"There's a door that locks."
"There's a door that locks."
He doesn't move for a second. His breathing is loud in the cellar. His hand is still on my thigh. Then he straightens up. Takes my hand. Turns toward the tasting room with my hand in his and walks me there at a pace that is no longer his usual pace.
I'm not running. I'm walking him there.