21. Jade
JADE
The rain is gone and the estate smells like it—that cold clean of ground that's been soaked through and is now drying in early October sun, the rows still damp underfoot, the air holding the last of the wet.
I put my boots on at seven and I go out before breakfast because I want the rows to myself for a little while, before the work of the day organizes everyone into their stations.
I walk south first. The wires Ryan fixed yesterday are clean and taut—good work, careful work, the kind that doesn't announce itself.
I run my hand along a section and I think about him in the barn in the afternoon light, head down, not looking at me, doing the right thing in the right way.
Not for points. Just because it's the right thing.
I know the difference now. I've been watching men do things for points for two years. I know what that looks like.
Killian finds me on the east side at eight.
He comes through the row ends with his coffee and his ledger—because of course he has both, he is his father's son in every way he'd prefer not to admit—and he falls into step beside me without asking if I want company. Which is also his father's son.
"The '22," I say. Before he can.
He almost smiles. "Third rack, second row left. The ones with the blue chalk."
"Your father told me."
"Of course he did." He hands me the coffee—his coffee, warm, which means he brought it for me and called it his—and I take it and drink it and we walk the row together.
The vines are heavy this season. Good heavy, the weight of a year that came in right: enough rain in spring, enough sun through August, the drainage reroute holding exactly as Cormac said it would.
We reach the '22 section and Killian stops.
He doesn't say anything for a moment. Just looks at the vines the way he looks at everything he's been waiting to show me—with the patience of someone who has been holding something back for weeks and is finally letting it out.
I look where he's looking. The leaves catching the morning light.
The clusters heavy and close, dark at the center.
"Two more years in the bottle," he says. "Maybe three. But you can taste it now if you know what you're looking for."
"Show me."
He takes a cluster in his palm without picking it—just holds it, gently, the way you hold something you know the full weight of—and tips it so I can see the color at the stem.
"There," he says. "The color change. You see it?"
I see it.
We stand in the row for a while after that. The morning coming up around us, the estate going to work on all sides, the tractor starting somewhere on the south slope. His shoulder is close to mine. Not touching. The proximity of a man who knows he doesn't have to reach for anything right now.
"Ryan finished the south run," I say.
"I know. I helped him."
I look at him.
"Yesterday," he says, not looking back at me. "In the barn. Last three sections." He pauses. "He did good work."
Something about hearing him say that—Killian, who has the most reason not to say it—settles in my chest the way the warmth settled after Cormac in the study. Different kind of warmth. The kind that tells you the shape of something is starting to be right.
"He's trying," I say.
"Yeah." A beat. "I know."
We stand in the '22 row a little longer. His hand comes to the small of my back—light, not asking for anything, just there. I let it be there.
I walk back alone.
Killian stayed with the rack to make another note in his ledger and I left him to it and now I'm coming up through the south rows in the morning sun with my hands in my pockets and the estate all around me and I'm thinking about Ryan.
Not about what he did. About what he said.
Because I was afraid you were the only woman I was ever going to love for the rest of my life, and I didn't know how to make you happy.
I've been turning it over since the porch.
I turned it over in the study with Cormac's hands on me, trying not to think, and I turned it over in the sitting room while Ryan looked at his diagram, and I turned it over last night at dinner watching him not reach for my wine.
I've been carrying it the way you carry something you haven't decided what to do with yet.
I think I've decided.
Not today. He hasn't finished earning it and I'm not going to hand it to him before he has, because that's not fair to any of us—not to him, not to the other two, not to whatever this thing is that I'm building my life inside. But the decision is made. When he's ready. When I say so.
The estate comes up around me as I walk—the north slope, the roof of the house, the kitchen window where I can see the light on inside. Cormac making coffee. The fourth chair waiting.
I think: I have been standing outside of something for two years and I am fully, completely inside it now.
I think: I'm not afraid of what that means.
I think about what I'll give Ryan when the time comes. The real thing—bare inside me, nothing between us, his cum and my body holding it the same way it holds the others. He had careful from me for two years. What he gets now is different.
I push open the back door. Stamp my boots. Hang my jacket on the peg Ryan put back yesterday, the one that had come loose from the wall sometime last week without anyone mentioning it. He'd just found the hardware and fixed it. No announcement. It was just done.
I look at the peg for a moment.
Then I go in and pour my coffee and sit in the fourth chair and wait for the morning to organize itself around me, the way mornings do here.