16. Jade
JADE
Iwake up in the guest room.
I went back at some point—after Killian's breathing had gone even and his hand was heavy and still on my stomach.
I lay there in the warmth of him for a long time and then I eased out from under his arm and found my sleep shirt in the dark and went down the hall to my own room.
I don't know exactly why. Something about wanting to think by myself.
Something about not being found there in the morning in a way that made a statement I wasn't ready to make.
Though I'm not sure what statement that would be. The whole arrangement is already a statement. The fourth chair is already a statement.
I shift in the sheets and feel it immediately—the soreness between my thighs, the deep ache of two nights and two men and neither of them gentle about it.
It's not bad. It's not bad at all. It's the kind of soreness that has information in it, that knows where it came from, that makes me press my thighs together and feel the full weight of the last forty-eight hours sitting right there in my body.
I'm still a little wet.
Not from now—from last night, from Killian, from the staying and the holding still he made me do.
The warmth of it settled and stayed the way he told it to.
I lie in the guest room sheets and I'm aware of it the way you're aware of something you chose to keep.
I put my hand flat on my own stomach, just for a second, where both of them put their hands.
Cormac's and Killian's. Both of them staying.
Both of them pressing gently like something they wanted to hold in place.
I keep waiting to feel insane.
That's the thing I keep circling. I lay in Killian's bed last night in the dark and I thought: this is the moment it hits me.
The ex's father and then the ex's brother and me in the middle of it with no pill in my medicine cabinet and both of them inside me in the same forty-eight hours.
I kept waiting for the part where it felt wrong or broken or like something I'd have to explain to a therapist in six months.
It doesn't feel like that.
It feels like walking into a room I've been standing outside of for two years and finally sitting down. Not because the room is perfect or because I'm not still half-terrified of what I'm building here. But because my body knows exactly where it is and it isn't asking to leave.
I haven't taken my pill in two nights.
I'm aware of it the way you're aware of a door you left unlocked—not panic, just the fact of it sitting at the edge of everything else.
Two nights. Two men. Cormac's cum in me two nights ago and Killian's last night, both of them staying, both of them pressing my belly like something was already there to protect.
The odds of anything coming from two nights off a two-year prescription are very small. I know the biology. I know the numbers.
I also know that the part of me that stood at the medicine cabinet yesterday and put the pack back was not thinking about numbers.
I think about Killian saying better than none.
I think about Cormac's hand on my stomach in the cellar two nights ago—not asking, just there.
I think about what it would mean if the door I left unlocked actually opened.
I think about sitting at that table for two more years, or ten more years, with the north slope going gold out the window and the ledger open and all four chairs filled.
I don't think it feels insane.
I think it feels like something I've been wanting for longer than I know I've been wanting it.
I get up. I find clothes. I go downstairs.
Cormac is at the table with the ledger.
Of course he is. Seven-ten by the kitchen clock.
The lamp on, the coffee made, the morning coming through the window at the same low angle it always does in early October.
He looks up when I come in and reads my face the way he always reads my face—all the way, nothing hurried—and then he looks back at the ledger.
"Coffee's fresh," he says.
"I know," I say. "Thank you."
I pour a cup. I sit in the fourth chair.
We don't say anything about last night. We don't say anything about the night before.
We drink our coffee and look at the window and the north slope going gold and this is just Tuesday morning, the same as all the Tuesday mornings before it, except it isn't and we both know it isn't and neither of us needs to say so.
This is the thing about Cormac. He named what needed naming at breakfast yesterday and now it's been named and he's done talking about it. The rest is just living in it.
Killian comes down at seven-forty.
He pours coffee and leans against the counter and looks at me—one look, steady and unhurried, the kind that carries everything in it without performing any of it—and I look back.
I hold it. His jaw still has the edge of the bruise from Ryan's punch, going yellow now. He looks like a man who slept well.
He sits across from me, not beside me.
Cormac turns a page in the ledger.
The competition is in the room. I can feel it the way you feel weather—the pressure of two men who have both had me in the last forty-eight hours, sitting at the same table, neither of them saying anything about it.
Cormac with his coffee and his ledger and the absolute stillness of a man who went first and knows it and doesn't need to make a point of it.
Killian with his coffee and his eyes and the patience that is not quite patience, that is the controlled version of something that isn't patient at all.
Ryan comes down at eight.
He pours coffee. He sits. He doesn't look at Killian and Killian doesn't look at him, which is its own conversation.
He looks at me—carefully, just for a second, the way he's been looking at me since the north slope yesterday—and I look back and I don't give him anything except the fact of being looked at.
He nods. Half an inch. He picks up his coffee.
Four of us at the table. The north slope going gold.
The ledger. The competition humming underneath everything like a second current.
I think about what Killian said on the winery step—half of you is better than none—and I think about Cormac's hand flat on the tasting table and his voice saying come and see the barrel room and I think about Ryan on the north slope yesterday with his jaw tight and his whole truth out in the cold air between us.
I drink my coffee. I eat the eggs Killian makes without being asked.
Nobody talks very much. Nobody needs to.
Cormac catches me in the barrel room after lunch.
Not on purpose—or not on his purpose, if that's even a distinction that applies to him.
I'd gone in to check the brix reading on the east row sample, the thing I'd been thinking about since he mentioned the drainage reroute two days ago.
He came in behind me and I heard his boots on the stone and I didn't turn around immediately. I waited to see what he'd do.
He came to stand beside me. Not behind. Beside.
We both looked at the sample in the light from the high window.
"Drainage is holding," he said.
"I can taste it," I said. "It's different. Not worse."
"No." A beat. "Better, I think. By next year."
I looked at the sample. He looked at the sample. The barrel room smelled the way it always smells—oak and wine and cold stone and the close dark that lives down here regardless of the time of day.
"Killian wants to walk you through the '22 before harvest," he said. "The east row."
"I know."
"Let him." He picked up the sample glass, looked through it at the window light. "He's been wanting to do that for a year."
I looked at the side of his face.
"You're not—" I stopped. Tried again. "You don't feel like this changes anything. For you?"
He set the glass down.
"It doesn't," he said. He looked at me then, steady and direct, the look that is not a performance and never has been. "I went first. I'll keep going. That's not up for discussion and it doesn't need to be."
"And Killian?"
"Killian wants what he wants. He's always wanted it. You know that." He picked up the ledger he'd carried in—he always has the ledger—and made a note in it, unhurried, like we're still talking about drainage. "What you do with that is yours."
I watched him write.
The barrel room. The cold stone. The smell of oak and wine and the estate going on around us in every direction, the harvest two weeks out, the rain on Thursday, the work that will still be here every morning after everything else.
"What about Ryan?" I said.
Cormac's pen didn't stop.
"Ryan," he said, "is learning what patience costs." He finished the note and closed the ledger. "He'll learn it correctly or he won't. Either way it's not your job to teach him."
He picked up the ledger and walked back toward the stairs.
"The '22 is in the third rack," he said, over his shoulder. "Second row from the left. The ones with the blue chalk marks."
He went up.
I stood in the barrel room in the cold and the dark and the smell of everything he'd built here, and I thought: this is my house now too.
Not the way a guest thinks of a place as theirs.
The way you think of something you've walked into and decided to stay in.
The fourth chair. The table. The ledger with my name in it somewhere, in Cormac's handwriting, in some column I haven't looked at yet.
I picked up the sample glass.
I tasted it again.
Better, he said. By next year.
I believed him.