17. Killian
KILLIAN
Iwake up and she's not there.
But I could still smell her on my pillow.
Ryan's already at the counter when I come in, coffee in hand, eyes on the north slope. He doesn't look at me. I don't look at him. We stand on opposite ends of the kitchen in the silence of two men who know exactly what the other one knows about the last twelve hours, and we let that be all it is.
She comes down at seven-forty. Same as yesterday—four days and she's already made it a routine, the fourth chair like it always belonged to her. She pours her coffee, sits, eyes moving around the table the way they always do, reading the room, reading all of us.
"Brix reading on the east row," she says, to the table.
"I'll check it after breakfast," I say.
"I flagged it yesterday."
"I know. I'll check it again."
She looks at me over her mug. One beat. Then she goes back to her coffee and I drink mine and I think about how she sounded with her face in my neck at two in the morning. How quiet the house is now without it.
My father comes in at eight. He opens the ledger, we eat, nobody says anything that matters. The whole meal hums with what we're not saying—the way it's been since she got here and changed the shape of every meal into something I feel in my chest.
I watch Ryan not look at her. His jaw is careful. His hands are steady on his mug. He's doing everything right—everyone in this room can see it—so I eat my eggs, look at the north slope, think: good.
That surprises me.
I thought having her would feel like winning.
And it does—god, it does, I still feel last night in my whole body, the warmth of her around me, her sounds in my ear, the weight of her in my hands.
I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But she's sitting across that table looking at Ryan with the same even eyes she looks at me with, and what I realize is that the competition isn't over because I had my turn.
The fourth chair is not the same as being mine.
She's the fourth chair. The rest of us arrange ourselves around it.
He comes out to the east rows at ten.
I'm already on the third wire rack, the one that's been nagging at me since September.
I hear his boots on the gravel. I don't turn.
He picks up at the end of my section and starts the next one—no commentary, no politics, just his hands on the wire, doing it right, in the cold coming off the coast ahead of Thursday's rain.
We work like that for a while. The north slope quiet around us, just wind in the rows, the creak of equipment, the sky going flat gray-white—weather building out over the water, two days out. I can smell it already. Cold, something clean underneath, the smell of rain that hasn't arrived yet.
"Third sample on the east row," I say eventually.
The wire in his hands. "She flagged that."
"I know. Went back over it this morning. Point four, maybe five."
"Full panel before the rain?"
"She said she'd do it tomorrow."
A beat. He moves to the next section.
"Wire on the south run is loose too," he says. "Past the second marker."
"I saw it."
"You want me to?—"
"Yeah."
He goes. I keep working. I look at him at some point—don't plan to, just do.
Head down, jaw working the way it does when he's holding himself inside himself, the thing I've known since he was eight years old, skinned his knee on the east fence, didn't want anyone to see him cry.
His hands on the wire are steady. He's not making this easy on himself. He's not making it my problem.
My father said something to me once—I was twenty-five, had burned a distributor contract. He came to the barrel room at eleven at night, sat on the step in the dark without turning on the light, and said: patience isn't waiting. It's doing the work while you wait. They're the same motion.
I thought he was talking about the contract.
I look back at my own wire. The cold settles in my hands.
She's alone in the kitchen at four.
Ledger open on the table, pen moving, hair up, a smudge of something on her left hand—dirt or ink. She doesn't look up when I come in, but she goes slightly still—just for a beat—the way she does when she knows I'm there.
I don't go to the coffee.
I come around the table and stand behind her chair, close enough that she can feel the heat of me, close enough to read the page over her shoulder—harvest projections, her handwriting in the margin, precise and angular, her numbers lined up beside my father's.
"You've been in that ledger before," I say.
"He lets me check the projections."
"I know he does."
She tilts her head back and looks up at me, upside-down. "Are you going to hover?"
"Probably."
She looks back at the page. Her pen stays still.
I reach out and move a loose strand from her nape, just my finger, just that—and she goes still in a different way. Not wary. Aware. Her shoulders drop half an inch.
I bend down and put my mouth to the back of her neck.
She makes a sound—low, small, just the breath of it—and her hand goes flat on the ledger.
I drag my lips across the top of her spine, slow, taking my time.
The warmth of her skin under my mouth. The smell of last night still on her underneath the soap she used this morning—her and me, the two of us together in it, something I can now identify the way I know the brix on every row of this estate.
My hands come to her shoulders. She tips her head forward to give me more room.
"Killian." Not a protest.
"Mm."
I pull her chair back, turn it, crouch in front of her. Hands on her thighs, both of us at eye level. She looks at me with dark eyes, a little sleepy at the edges, the warmth that comes into her face when she stops managing herself.
"Anyone could come in," she says.
"Ryan's still on the south run. My father's with the afternoon crew until six." I drag my thumbs along her inner thighs, slow, through the denim. I watch her jaw loosen. "We've got an hour."
She glances at the window. Back at me.
"You checked."
"This morning."
"Of course you did."
I wait. She looks at me for one more beat—the deciding look, the one I've been watching for two years across dinner tables—and then she closes the ledger and pushes it aside.
I get her up onto the counter.
She comes easy, hands finding my shoulders, and I step between her knees.
Get my mouth on hers—not slow, not deliberate, because we've got an hour and I've been thinking about this since I walked in.
She kisses me back with the same urgency, fingers in my hair, and I get her jeans open.
She lifts her hips to help me get them down. Just enough. Her underwear to the side.
I get my hand on her pussy.
She's already wet—slick against my fingers before I've done anything—and the sound she makes when I touch her is the sound I've been hearing in my head all day.
I work two fingers through her slowly, feeling how warm she is, how ready, her hips tipping forward to get more of it.
My thumb finds her clit and she gasps into my mouth.
"Still thinking about last night," I say against her ear.
"Killian —"
"How wet you were. How good your pussy felt around my cock.
" My thumb moves in slow circles and she whimpers, her grip on my shoulders tightening.
"I've been hard since I came in here. Since before that.
" I press a little firmer and she arches into it.
"You have any idea what it's like to sit across from you at that table knowing what you feel like from the inside? "
"Please —"
I take my hand away.
She makes a noise of protest but I'm already getting myself out, and I drag the head of my cock through her—just that, just sliding through how wet she is, not pushing in, letting her feel it.
She's soaking. The head of my cock gets slick with her immediately and I drag it up to her clit and back down and she's squirming, her hips chasing me.
"Ask me," I say.
"Killian." A warning. Not enough of one.
I do it again—slow, through all that heat, the head nudging her entrance without pushing in—and she makes a sound low in her throat that I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the evening.
"Ask me," I say again. "Or I do this all afternoon."
"Please." It comes out broken. "Please, I want your cock inside me —"
I push in.
We didn't use anything last night either.
"Bare," she breathes. Not a question—she can feel it, has to, the heat of me with nothing between us.
"Yeah," I say. "Same as last night."
The heat of her pussy stops the breath in my chest. She's soaking—slick and hot, her body opening around my cock—and I can feel how much she wants this in the wet grip of her as I sink all the way in.
I hold there, fully buried, her thighs locked around my waist, her forehead dropping to my shoulder.
"God," she says.
"I know." I do know. I know exactly.
I pull back and drive forward and she makes a sound—sharp, half-swallowed—then catches herself not swallowing it.
The same thing as last night: the choosing to be loud, the conscious permission.
Her pussy grips around my cock on every stroke, that slick clench and release, and I get my hands on her hips to anchor her and find the angle that makes her breathing change.
She gasps.
"There?"
"Yes—don't stop —"
I don't stop. I work that angle, deep and grinding, and she's slick enough I can feel everything—every flutter, every clench, the way her pussy pulls at me on every stroke like it wants to keep my cock in.
She's so wet. Wet from before I touched her, wet from last night, from two days of not taking anything, both of us knowing what that means.
I can feel it every time I drive into her, the warm slick sound of it loud in the quiet kitchen, and it goes straight to the part of me that would stay buried inside her all afternoon if I could.
The counter edge digs into my hands. She's got her face in my neck, sounds coming out of her she's not trying to quiet, her hips rolling up to meet mine.
I'm watching the clock in my head—not to rush but because I refuse to give Ryan this, refuse to let him walk in on it—and I feel her starting to go, the flutter of her pussy deepening, her thighs shaking around me.
"Come on," I say against her ear. "Give it to me."
She clenches hard—her whole body locking—and comes around my cock.
The grip of her is enormous, hot and rhythmic, pulling at me with every pulse.
I hold on. I don't go with her. The effort of it is the most control I've exercised in my life, and I keep working the angle, driving through every aftershock while she shudders against my chest.
"Killian—" She's wrecked already. "You didn't?—"
"No." I pull back and drive in and she gasps. "One more. You can."
"I just?—"
"Two days of my cum in you." My voice comes out lower than I meant. "Two days bare, not on anything—I've been thinking about it every time I look at you across that table." I press my thumb to her clit—not quite enough. "Tell me you want it to take."
A sound comes out of her that isn't words.
"Tell me," I say.
"I want it." Her voice is breaking apart. "I want your cum—keep filling me up, Killian, please, I want it to—please?—"
That. That's what I needed.
I let go of the clock entirely.
I drive in harder—her second orgasm tears through her and she clenches around me so fiercely my rhythm breaks—and I bury myself and hold there and come.
The grip of her pulls it out of me, longer than last night, more—my cum flooding into her in long distinct pulses while she shakes and clenches around every one.
Her body taking all of it. Both of us still.
She breathes hard against my neck. I stay inside her—another minute, two—feeling how slick and full and warm she is around me. The warmth of what I left. What she's holding.
She clenches softly around my cock. Just once. Deliberate. Feeling it.
"Stop," I say. "Or I mean it, we need the whole hour."
She laughs—low, surprised at herself, from somewhere genuine, the same place the sounds come from, the place Ryan never reached. I feel it move through my chest.
We stay like that for another minute. Her still warm around my cock. Me not pulling out.
"Three days off it now," she says. Quiet.
"I know."
She doesn't say anything else. Neither do I.
I help her down from the counter. We put ourselves back together. She fixes her hair while I refill her coffee and set it at her elbow, and she picks it up without looking at me, already reaching for the ledger, face a little flushed, handwriting back to the same neat lines.
I sit across from her and open my parallel ledger and we work in the same silence—her pen, mine, the kitchen going dark at the edges, the warmth of what just happened still in the room between us.
She looks up.
I don't ask anything. She doesn't explain anything. She turns back to the page.
Then Ryan's boots on the porch.
We both look at the door. Then she looks at me. Something in it I don't have a word for yet—not guilt, not triumph, just the weight of what we're all building here and what it's going to cost everyone to hold it.
The door opens. He comes in cold and muddy, smelling like October and honest work. The room becomes what it was at breakfast—four chairs, all that weather, all that undercurrent. She gets up, warms the kettle, asks if he wants tea in the same easy voice she uses for everything.
He looks at her. Then at me.
"Yeah," he says. "Thanks."
I go back to my ledger.