Chapter 13
MAX
Idrive home with a key on the seat next to me.
It is a small brass key on a small brass ring.
I had it cut at the hardware store on my lunch.
I had not planned to do it. I went in for a furnace filter and I stood at the key board for two minutes and I took my own key off my ring and I put it on the counter and I asked the man to make me a copy.
He made me a copy. I paid in cash. I walked out with it warm in my pocket.
I sit at the red light at the bottom of the hill and I look at the key on the seat and I think about giving it to her.
I think about the small thing it is. A copy of a key.
Five dollars. Two minutes at a counter. I think about what it is going to mean when I put it in her hand.
I think about the fact that I have not given a copy of a key to anybody in eleven years.
Dani has my spare on a hook in her own kitchen, in case.
Nobody else has had a key to my front door since I bought the cabin in 2014.
I think about Evangeline in my bed this morning, asleep on her side, the covers slid from her naked body, more beautiful than anyone I have ever seen.
I put the key in my pocket.
The light goes green.
I drive the last six miles up the county road in the dark. The radio is on low. The heater is on. The truck smells like coffee and engine oil and a thing I am starting to recognize as her, Evangeline, and she must be on my skin.
I pull up the drive.
The cabin windows are gold.
---
She has lit the lamps.
I see it from the truck. The kitchen window is gold. The living room window is gold. There is smoke off the chimney from a fire she has built in the woodstove. I sit a beat in the truck. I put my hand on the wheel. I breathe out.
I get out. I shut the door soft.
I come up the porch the way I came up the porch yesterday. Boots on the mat. Heel to heel. Jacket on the peg. I push the front door open with my shoulder and the smell that comes out of the cabin at me is the smell of meat and onion and something else, butter, bread.
She is at the stove.
She is in the robe.
The robe is loose at the throat. Her blonde hair is down.
Her feet are bare on the kitchen floor. She is so beautiful and my breath catches.
She has the cast iron going at a low heat and a wooden spoon in her hand, and she turns her head when the door opens, and she looks at me, and she smiles a small slow smile that is not the smile of a woman in a kitchen with dinner, it is the smile of a woman waiting for me.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
"You're early."
"By twenty minutes."
"I noticed."
I cross the kitchen. I stop at her shoulder. I put my hand on the small of her back over the robe.
"What are you making?”
"Stew. Bread. Pot's been on since two."
"Smells good."
"It is good."
I bend. I kiss her temple. She turns her face into mine and we kiss, soft, no hurry, her tongue pressing into my mouth and her free hand comes up and rests at the front of my jacket.
The wooden spoon is in her other hand and she holds it out a quarter inch so it doesn't drip on me. I smile against her mouth.
"I have something for you," I say.
"Yes."
"In my pocket."
"Which one."
"Right."
She looks at me. She reaches her free hand into my right jacket pocket. Her fingers find the key. She pulls it out. She looks at it on her palm.
"Max."
"It's the front door."
"Max."
"You should have one. Your own key.”
She closes her hand around the brass. She closes her eyes a count. She opens them.
"Thank you."
"Stop thanking me."
"No."
She lets out a small laugh. It is not the laugh of a woman about a key. It is the laugh of a woman about everything else.
She sets the spoon down on the rest. She turns to face me. She puts the key on the counter beside the stove, careful, like it is breakable. She puts both her hands on the front of my henley, low at my stomach, and she looks up, her beautiful eyes seductive.
"Max." Her voice is a purr.
"Yes."
"Dinner can wait."
"Evangeline."
"Yes."
"Tell me what you want?”
She holds my eyes.
"I want you to fuck me before we eat."
I do not move for a second.
I do not move because I have been driving home with a hard knot of want in my chest for forty miles, because I have been thinking about her since I left her in the bed at four, because I had not let myself say think about sex all day, because I had been carrying the tenderness of last night up around it like a coat.
The tenderness is still there. The coat is still on.
The want is under it, and her saying it plain has just put a hand inside the coat.
I put my hand at her jaw.
"Yes. Bedroom?”
She smiles and she is stunning.
“No, here."
"In the kitchen?”
“Yes. Fuck me here.”
I let out a breath. I can’t get over how erotic fuck me sounds when it comes from her mouth.
"Okay."
She turns the burner off.
She moves the pot to the back.
"Take the robe off."
She unties the belt. She lets the robe slide off her shoulders. She lets it pool at her feet on the kitchen floor. She steps out of it. She is naked in the lamplight in my kitchen.
I look at her.
I let myself look. I let myself take a long count. I let her see me looking.
"Stay there," I say.
"Yes."
"I'll be right back."
"Yes."
---
I go to the bedroom.
I shut the door three quarters. I pull off my henley and my undershirt and my belt and my jeans.
I leave them on the chair. I open the bottom drawer of the dresser where I keep what I keep.
I take out the harness and the strap. I sit on the edge of the bed and I put it on the way I have put it on a hundred times in fifteen years, leg through, leg through, cinch the belt at my hip, buckle to the worn notch, the same notch she ran her thumb along last night.
I stand up. I look at myself in the mirror over the dresser.
I look at the woman in the mirror in nothing but a black harness with a black silicone cock at her hips, and I think about the woman in the kitchen waiting for me, and I think this is my favorite thing in the world to do, and I have not let myself say that sentence in a long time.
I have not had a woman in this cabin to do it with.
I have not had a woman I wanted to do it with at all.
I have done it as a thing I knew how to do and I have done it well and I have not loved doing it.
I love doing it with her. It is the greatest pleasure of my life.
I tighten the strap once more at the worn notch.
I think about the first time I ever put a harness on.
I was twenty-three. I was in a room that was not this one.
The woman who taught me how to buckle it stood behind me in the mirror and put her hand flat at the front of my hip and pressed once, and said, that's where it sits, and I did not understand for a year what she meant.
I understand now. The leather sits on a place that is mine.
The silicone sits on a place that is for the other woman.
They are two pieces of the same thing. I have not thought about that in fifteen years.
I am thinking about it tonight with Evangeline down the hall who is naked at the island waiting for me.
I breathe out.
I walk out.
---
She is where I left her.
She is naked at the edge of the kitchen island, one hand on the counter, watching the door I came through.
Her body is elegant and graceful lines. Smooth curves.
Her pale pink nipples are erect. I want her so much.
When she sees me her breath goes out. Her eyes go down to the strap and back up to my face and back down to the strap. Her lips part.
"Oh," she says.
"Yes."
I cross the kitchen.
I do not go fast. I want her to look. She looks. She looks at all of me. The harness across my hips. The dildo dark and curved out from my pelvis. The flat of my stomach. The scar across the lower right of it she put her hand on last night. My breasts. My throat. My face.
I stop in front of her.
"On your knees," I say.
She drops down obediently, her eyes on mine, her pupils blown with desire. She kneels on the kitchen floor in front of me. Her blonde hair is down around her shoulders. She is looking up at me and she is looking at the dildo at my hips and she is wetting her lower lip without meaning to.
"Hands on my thighs," I say.
She puts her hands on my thighs. They are warm. She slides them up an inch.
"Look at me." My voice is firm.
She looks up.
"Open your mouth."
She opens her mouth obediently.
I put my hand in her hair.
I do not pull. I cup the back of her head. I guide the silicone forward to her mouth. She tilts her head back. She watches my eyes. She takes the head of it on her tongue.
"Yes," I say. "Like that."
She slides her mouth down the dildo.
She is careful. She is curious. She has not done this before. I can tell from the way she is feeling for what to do, soft, soft, eyes on me. I let her find it. I do not rush her. She slides down a little. She comes back up. She slides down a little more. She gets her tongue underneath.
I’m so very very turned on watching her. I can feel my own wetness urgent and insistent around the leather of the harness.
I tighten my hand in her hair and pull her onto me.
"Look at me while you do that."
She looks up. Her eyes are wet at the corner as the dildo hits the back of her throat.
"Good girl.”
I begin to thrust slowly in and out of her mouth as she settles into what she is doing. I hear her moan with her mouth stretched around the silicone.
The sound goes through me like a wire.
I am not going to come just from this. The leather of the harness gives delicious friction against my clit but that is a thing that builds slow, and what is going to make me come is not her mouth on the silicone but the sight of her on her knees on my kitchen floor with her mouth open for me.
Taking all of me in her mouth because I told her to.