9. Jade
JADE
He takes my hand and leads me through the barrel room and I go.
That's the whole thing. That's what two years of Sunday dinners, eight months of pretending I'd moved on, two days in this house and the last forty minutes in the cellar has come to: he takes my hand and I go without question, like I've been going this whole time and only just admitted it.
My feet are bare on the cold stone.
His hand around mine is warm and dry and certain. Somewhere above us Ryan is asleep or not asleep in a room I used to know the creaks of.
None of that is slowing me down.
I spent two years at this man's dinner table telling myself I was here for Ryan.
I was not here for Ryan.
The tasting room is one door down. He unlocks it without letting go of my hand, pushes it open, hits the lamp on the sideboard.
Low-wattage, brass-framed, the kind of light that turns everything gold and close.
Stone floor. Lower ceiling. A long wooden table along one wall, hip-height, thick-planked, scored with years of poured samples and wiped rings.
His handwriting filling the ledger columns at the far end.
The room smells like the cellar but denser—oak and stone and wine-dark air in a smaller space.
Everything in here is his.
I stand in the middle of it and he closes the door behind us.
I hear the lock.
He doesn't move toward me right away. He stands a few feet from me and looks—bare feet on his stone floor, my jeans from earlier, the shirt I pulled back on in the barrel room—and the way he looks makes everything go slow.
I've been looked at before. This is not that.
This is the way he looks at the north slope when the light comes over it in the morning.
Like he has time for this. Like he took that time on purpose.
"Come here," he says.
Two words, low, from the chest. The same voice that settles arguments about Thursday rain and tractors and two brothers who never stop competing. The same voice I filed under not mine for two years at his dinner table.
I close the distance.
He puts both hands at my waist and lifts me onto the table.
Not a question, not a negotiation—his hands find me and I'm up, the table edge under my thighs, and he is standing between my knees.
The height difference settles around us like weather.
Him solid and still. Me up on his table with my pulse in my throat.
Ryan's father.
I'm in Ryan's father's cellar, on his tasting table, with my heart going and my thighs already warm, and the thought should complicate things.
It doesn't.
He reaches for the hem of my shirt. His eyes find mine—one beat, asking. I put my arms up.
He pulls it over my head—my hair falling loose around my shoulders—and sets it on the table beside me. Then he looks at me.
Not at my face this time. At my chest, my stomach, all of me bare in the lamplight in front of him.
His jaw goes tight. His hands, still at my hips, tighten.
He looks his fill and doesn't pretend otherwise, and I sit there and let him, my nipples hard from the cold air and from being looked at like this.
"Cormac—"
"I know," he says.
He steps closer. His hands slide up from my waist, over my ribs, and cup my breasts. Both of them, his broad palms warm against my skin, his thumbs dragging slow across my nipples. I gasp. He does it again, watching my face.
"These," he says quietly. Like a note he's making.
His head dips and his mouth closes over one nipple. Warm. Certain. His tongue moving in small circles, and then the gentle scrape of his teeth, and I make a sound I feel in my throat before I hear it. My hand goes into his hair and grips.
He moves to the other one. Takes his time there too.
By the time he lifts his head I'm breathing in short pulls and my hands are shaking slightly in his hair.
"The bra's already off," I say.
"I know," he says. He's not apologizing.
He gets my jeans open. I lift my hips before he asks and he pulls them down—underwear too—and sets the whole thing on the table beside me.
No fumbling. Never looking down. Deliberate.
His hands come back to the insides of my knees and open me, slow but without hesitation, and I feel everything between my legs like a drawn breath.
The cold air against my pussy. The warmth of him filling the space.
His thumb tracing up the inside of my thigh from the knee and stopping just short of where I need him.
I'm already so wet I can feel it on my inner thighs.
Two days in his house. Two years before that. My body has been waiting for this longer than I've been willing to say.
"Look at me," he says.
I look at him. His eyes are dark, the lamplight warm in them, the crow's feet I've been watching for two years and telling myself I wasn't watching. The gray at his temples. The set of his jaw. He is looking at me like I'm something he's been thinking about and is now, finally, touching.
"Keep looking," he says, and his hand moves.
Two fingers, slow, and the sound I make comes from somewhere low in my chest before I can catch it. He presses in and finds what he's looking for and my hips rock forward on the table. His free hand goes to my hip and holds me still.
"Stay still," he says.
I try.
His fingers move and my whole body wants to follow and the hand on my hip is the only thing keeping me on the table.
He reads me without hurry—what makes my breath catch, what makes my thighs start to close around his hand, where my body pulls toward him.
He finds those places and goes back to them.
"So wet," he says quietly. Like he's noting something. "Look at how wet you are."
I make a sound.
"You've been wet like this all evening," he says. Still that low, certain voice. Still looking at my face. "Since dinner. Haven't you."
"Yes." My voice has gone somewhere rough.
"I know," he says. "I could tell."
His fingers go deeper and I whimper—real, unguarded, the sound of my body past managing. He doesn't flinch. He keeps his eyes on my face and keeps his hand moving.
"Ryan never—" I start.
"I know what Ryan never did," he says. "That's not what's happening here."
"He never?—"
"I know," he says again, quiet and flat. "That's why you're here."
His thumb finds my clit and stays there and I grip the edge of the table hard enough to whiten my knuckles. He works me with both—fingers inside, thumb circling—watching everything cross my face, not looking away from any of it.
"He never looked at you like this either," he says. "Did he."
It's not a question.
He's right. I know he's right. I'm in Ryan's father's cellar with his fingers inside me and he is looking at me like I'm the only thing in this room, like he has been waiting for this and intends to remember every second of it.
Ryan looked at his phone. Ryan looked past me at whatever was next.
Cormac Flanagan looks at a woman the way he looks at a vine he's about to harvest—like she took years to get here and he is not rushing the last part.
I curl my hand around the back of his neck.
"Don't stop," I say. "Whatever you do, don't stop."
"I'm not stopping," he says. And then, lower: "Give it to me."
I come.
Fast and loud—my nails in the back of his neck, his name broken in two on the exhale, my hips rolling forward into his hand.
He keeps it exactly where it is and lets me ride it out.
The orgasm goes through me in long waves, my thighs shaking against his sides, and he watches every second of it.
Doesn't look at the ceiling or the door or his own hand. Watches my face.
When I come back he's still watching.
"Good girl," he says.
The two words land low in my belly like a match. He withdraws his hand, slow, and my body tries to follow.
He steps back. Not far. Just enough to reach for his belt.
I watch.
He unbuckles the belt. Lets it go. His hands at the buttons of his jeans, the same unhurried pace as every other thing he does in his life.
When he pushes the jeans down I see what's underneath them: the V of his hips, the flat of his lower stomach, the shift and flex of muscle when he moves.
He is built the way the rest of him is built—twenty-seven years of physical work, nothing soft, nothing unused.
I look at his stomach, his hips, the breadth of him, and then I look lower.
He's hard. Thick and long, longer than I expected and I expected something based on the width of his hands, the weight of him when he walks, all of it. The blunt head. The girth of him. The fact that he is bare, nothing between us, and I am already wet enough to feel it drying on my inner thighs.
Two years I watched Ryan reach for the drawer.
I make myself breathe.
He doesn't move toward me yet. He takes my hand from the table and sets it on his chest, over his shirt. His heart is going. Not as fast as mine, but going. He's been holding all of this for two years and I can feel what that's cost him under my palm.
He covers my hand with his.
"Tell me again," he says.
In the barrel room I said yes. He wants it here. Now. In the lamplight with nowhere to hide.
"Breed me," I say.
Something moves through his expression—quick, profound, the thing that happens when a decision made a long time ago finally arrives at its moment. His hand tightens over mine.
He steps between my knees.
I feel the head of him at my entrance, warm and thick, and I hold my breath. He keeps his eyes on my face and he pushes in slow.
The sound I make is full and raw and comes from somewhere I didn't know existed.
He stills immediately. Both hands to my hips, firm and anchoring.
"Breathe," he says.
I breathe.
My body is adjusting—the stretch of him opening me, the warmth, the actual physical fact of no barrier between us.
I can feel him. I can feel every inch of him, the heat of his skin against mine, the thickness of him seated inside me, the pulse of him against my walls.
I tilt my hips and get a fraction more and the stretch deepens and I want more of it.
"More," I say.