5. Zara
five
Zara
My phone buzzes in my jacket pocket, still slung over a nail by the barn door. I almost let it go to voicemail. Then it buzzes again, and again, three times fast, and something about the rhythm of it makes me cross the barn and dig it out.
Forecast alert. Harsh red text against the dark screen.
Rourke's phone goes off half a second later, still sitting on the workbench where he left it. He reads the screen before he's even got his shirt fully buttoned, and I watch his whole body go still in a way I've learned means something's wrong.
"Hard frost." He's already moving, reaching for his boots by the barn door. "Tonight. Three days ahead of what they told us this morning."
"How bad?"
"Bad enough I need every tree that isn't picked, picked, before four a.m., or I lose whatever's still hanging." He's dialing before he's got the second boot on, phone against his ear, already talking to someone about the east block. "You don't have to be here for this."
"I know."
Sixty acres left standing, unpicked, at maybe four hundred dollars a bin once it's sorted and boxed.
I do the math without meaning to, still catching my breath from ten minutes ago, watching him become a different man in front of me — the one who runs a crew, not the one who just had me against a workbench.
If the whole crop gets hit tonight, that's most of a year's income gone between now and sunrise, gone the way a bad hand of cards is gone, no getting it back after the fact.
My editor wants the piece filed by morning.
I have more than enough to give her — four days of notes, more color and detail than I know what to do with, a quote from Rourke about patience I've already built the whole opening paragraph around in my head.
I could walk back to the inn right now, write the whole thing in an hour, file it clean, and be asleep before his crew's even finished the second row.
I stay anyway. It isn't even a real decision by the time I make it.
Trucks start pulling in within twenty minutes, headlights swinging across the yard, gravel popping under tires.
Five guys pile out, half of them still zipping jackets, one of them carrying a thermos in each hand.
Nobody asks why I'm here. Nobody asks why my hair's still damp at the temples, why I smell like cedar and cider instead of whatever I smelled like this morning.
They've got a crop to save. That's the whole conversation.
Rourke doesn't ask if I want the job either. He just shoves a pair of gloves at my chest — two sizes too big, the leather cracked at the knuckles — and drops a headlamp over my head that smells like someone else's sweat. I pull the strap tight and don't say anything about either one.
"Row four," he says, already moving past me. "Start where the tape's tied off."
The first tree's fine. I can see what I'm doing, the beam catching red skin against dark leaves.
By the third tree the beam's not reaching past the first foot of canopy, and I'm picking by feel — fingers finding the stem, twisting, checking the give of the fruit against my palm before I trust it into the bag.
My hands go stiff around row six. Not cold exactly.
Past cold. My fingers stop feeling like fingers and start feeling like something borrowed.
I keep going. Somebody's got to take row four if I stop, and everybody else already has a row, and the last thing I want tonight is to be the reason two rows sit half-picked when the frost comes down.
"You should go warm up," Rourke says, passing me on his way down the row, voice pitched low enough that the crew a few trees over doesn't catch it.
"I'm fine."
"Zara."
"I said I'm fine." I meet his eyes in the dark, headlamp catching the frost already starting to silver the grass between the rows, turning every blade of it faintly luminous.
"This is your whole year, Rourke. I'm not going to sit inside and write about it happening while it's happening twenty feet away from me. "
He doesn't argue the point any further. Just looks at me a second longer than the moment strictly requires, some calculation moving behind his eyes that I don't have time to read before he's moving again, calling out to the crew about the east block, about which trees still need clearing before the temperature drops the final few degrees that'll cost him the fruit for good.
Somebody passes a water bottle down the row around two, and I drink from it without asking whose it is.
Nobody stops working long enough to make small talk.
Every so often someone flexes their hands against their thighs, shakes them out, goes back to it.
I do the same. My knuckles have stopped bending right — they just sort of lock, curl around a stem, release, lock again.
By four the sky's still black but the frost is everywhere now, thick on the grass, furring the edges of every leaf I can see in the headlamp beam.
My back's been bent so long it's stopped complaining and gone somewhere past that, a dull ringing ache that's less pain than static. I haven't felt my toes in an hour.
The last bin goes up on the truck at four-fifteen. I hear it before I see it — the low grind of the forklift, the thud of wood settling into the stack — and then Rourke's voice, pitched to carry across the whole yard.
"That's it. That's the last one."
Nobody cheers. Everyone's too tired for that. But I watch the crew straighten up one by one, watch shoulders come down all around me.
Rourke walks out past the last row and just stands there.
Looking at it. Frost catching every bare branch, silver all the way down the line, nothing left hanging.
His shoulders drop last, slowest of anyone's — like he needed to see it with his own eyes before he'd let himself believe the count was real.
"We got it," he says, mostly to himself, like he's checking the fact against reality one more time before he lets himself believe it fully.
"You got it."
He looks at me then, like he's recalculating something important and doesn't mind at all what the numbers are telling him this time around. "You didn't have to stay for this."
"I know."
"Your deadline—"
"I have everything I need for the piece.
I've had it for two days now, if I'm honest." I pull my hat lower against the cold, hands too numb to manage it well on the first try.
"I stayed because I wanted to be here. Because I couldn't imagine being anywhere else tonight, watching this happen from a hotel window instead of from inside it, in the cold, with everyone else who actually cares whether this year holds. "
He doesn't say anything to that right away.
But something shifts in his face — the last of whatever careful distance he's been keeping since the barn, since the first taste of cider, finally giving way entirely.
I understand, watching him watch me in the gray predawn light, that he's stopped waiting for me to prove this is real.
He just believes it now, plainly, the way he believes a tree's ready to come down or a frost is going to hit.
I can see the exact moment it lands in him, settling somewhere behind his eyes like something finally allowed to rest.
"Come inside," he says, rough with exhaustion and something warmer underneath it. "You're freezing, and it's not fair to either one of us if you get sick before I've even figured out what I'm doing about you."
"You're doing something about me?"
"Working on it." Almost a smile — the real kind, the rare one, the one I haven't earned from him until tonight, until four hours in the frost proved something words alone hadn't quite managed to. "Slowly."
We walk back toward the farmhouse together, boots crunching through grass gone stiff and white, the whole orchard behind us finally quiet after a night that could have gone very differently.
I don't ask him what he means by working on it.
I think I already know, and I think some part of me has known since the second afternoon, standing under his trees, forgetting for the first time in years that I was supposed to be somewhere else entirely.
Inside, the kitchen's dark and warm, and Rourke doesn't turn on the lights. He just peels his jacket off and drops it over a chair, then reaches for the hem of my sweater.
"You're soaked through," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You said that four hours ago." He tugs the sweater up over my head before I can argue, and the cold air hits my damp skin and I shiver hard enough that my teeth click. "C'mon."
He leads me down the hall by the hand, past a bathroom with a claw-foot tub and a shower stall tiled in river stone, and turns the water on hot before either of us has gotten another stitch off.
Steam starts curling up almost immediately.
He strips down without any particular hurry — boots, socks, the flannel gone gray with dirt, everything landing in a pile by the door — and when he turns back to me I'm still fumbling with the button on my jeans, fingers too stiff from the cold to manage it.
"Let me." He does it for me, unhurried, hands warm against my hip bones as he works the denim down.
He doesn't rush the moment even though steam's already fogging the mirror, even though we're both still half-frozen.
He gets me out of the rest of it piece by piece, careful, like he's got nowhere else on earth to be.
The water's a shock when we step in — too hot at first, then exactly right, the kind of hot that goes straight into your bones and unlocks something you didn't know was clenched.
I press my forehead to his chest and just stand there a second, letting it run down both of us, feeling my fingers come back to life in slow, aching pins and needles.
“Better?” His hands are already moving, working across my shoulders, thumbs pressing deep into muscle gone tight from four hours bent over a row. The water runs hot down both of us. I can feel the last of the cold finally leaving my bones under his hands.
“Better.” I tip my head back into the spray. “You didn’t have to do this.”
“Wasn’t a question of having to.” His mouth finds my throat, unhurried at first, then less so—open, warm, lingering just under my ear until my pulse jumps against his tongue. “Wanted to.”
I feel him get hard against my hip, thick and heavy.
I reach for him under the water, wrap my hand around his cock, slick and warm, and the sound he makes against my collarbone is rougher than anything I’ve heard from him yet—like the whole night, the frost, the crop, all of it is finally allowed to let go now that the trees are safe.
He rocks into my fist once, slow, then catches my wrist and pins it gently to the tile beside my head.
He backs me against the wall. One hand stays braced flat beside my head; the other slides down between us.
He works me open with two fingers, unhurried despite how hard he is against my thigh, curling deep until I’m rocking into his hand and gasping his name against the water running down both our faces.
I’m already so wet the slide of his fingers feels effortless. He keeps the pace steady, deliberate, the heel of his palm pressing against me with every stroke until my thighs start to shake.
“Look at me,” he says, low, and I do. Gray eyes gone dark, water sluicing down the line of his jaw. “Tonight you don’t leave this house. Not for a hotel bed, not for anything. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
He lifts me against the tile like I weigh nothing.
I wrap my legs around his waist. When he pushes into me the sound I make echoes off the stone—half gasp, half broken plea.
He’s thick and deep and perfect, stretching me open in one long, steady slide until he’s buried to the hilt and I can feel him everywhere.
My body clenches around him on instinct; he groans low against my throat and holds still for a second, forehead pressed to mine, giving me time to take him.
He doesn’t go slow. Four hours of cold and fear and adrenaline finally have somewhere to go, and he gives it all to me—deep, hard, relentless.
Every thrust drives me higher against the tile.
One hand grips my thigh hard enough that I know I’ll feel the shape of his fingers tomorrow; the other fists in my wet hair, tilting my mouth up to his so he can take every sound I make.
I can feel every inch of him sliding in and out, the stretch, the drag, the way he fills me completely each time he bottoms out.
“You stayed for me tonight,” he says against my lips, not quite a question. “Every damn tree, freezing, and you stayed.”
“I couldn’t leave you.” My nails drag down his back, leaving red lines the water immediately starts to rinse away. “Couldn’t imagine it.”
“Good.” He drives into me harder at that, like the words themselves are permission. “Because I’m not done needing you here.”
I come with my face pressed into his shoulder, water roaring in my ears, his name breaking apart in my throat. The orgasm hits so hard my vision whites out for a second; my whole body locks tight around him, pulsing hard and rhythmic, milking him with every wave.
Rourke follows right after, groaning low against my neck, buried deep, hips stuttering as he spills into me. Both of us are shaking under the spray, holding on like the tile might disappear if we let go.
He just keeps me there a minute, still inside me, foreheads together, water going lukewarm around us. His free hand traces slow circles at the small of my back like he can’t quite make himself let go.
“Told you I was working on it.”
“Slowly,” I say against his mouth. “You said slowly.”
“Changed my mind.” He kisses me once, soft and sure. “Turns out I’m done being patient about you.”