Chapter 27 Eva
Eva
Eva’s body hummed with the things she hadn’t said. I want. I want. Like a heart, it beat inside her, steady and stubborn and strong.
She wanted to know why he’d tattooed a bird he hated into his skin.
She wanted to know who he spoke to when he thought she wasn’t listening.
She wanted to know where he’d gone when he left these mountains.
She wanted to know who he’d become when he stopped being hers.
The boy Eva remembered had been more conscientious about preserving life than any other person she knew: Everything was finite, so everything was precious. Eva wanted to know if he still believed that, after all this time.
“A better goodbye?” he echoed.
A lump grew in Eva’s throat as she nodded, turning her hand and moving her thumb over the pulse point in Arthur’s wrist. It would hurt. She knew that. There was nothing good about goodbyes.
“What did you have in mind?” Arthur asked. He sounded the way she felt. Nervous. Needful. Full of want and fear.
Eva scooted a little closer and guided Arthur’s hands to her waist. “Touch me.”
He splayed his hands over her ribs.
“More than that,” she chastened.
And so he slipped his hands beneath her sweatshirt, still heavy and damp from the river.
One hand wrapped around the small of her back and tugged her close to keep her from falling off the cot.
The other sculpted upward, and Eva sighed as he relearned the soft plane of her stomach and the valley between her breasts, aching from the pleasure she found in his touch.
The air between them pressurized with desire.
“Kiss me,” Eva husked.
Arthur moved at a glacial pace in the dark, so careful even now, making Eva’s body tense with anticipation.
It was better that she couldn’t fully see him.
Instead of becoming self-conscious, Eva felt grounded and present.
She touched the soft give of Arthur’s beard under her fingertips, the edge of a sharp jaw underneath.
She heard the catch and pull of his breath, so honest and rough it made her breath catch too.
Wanting was contagious.
Arthur’s kiss left the taste of rain on her lips.
It settled her nerves. Glaciers were slow, but they carved whole valleys with their movements.
So did he. Arthur took Eva’s face in his hands, pressing his lips worshipfully to the corners of her eyes.
When a tear slipped free, Arthur caught it on his tongue, a low hum radiating from his chest.
He felt so good.
Eva’s shoulders dropped, and she wound her arms around his neck.
As a girl, she’d lived on folktales. They were the water to her family’s roots, and she’d grown up on stories of bargains and broken hearts. Even Dad’s stories often ended in tragedy. When she was young, Eva thought it terribly romantic to love what you were destined to lose.
Now she called bullshit. It was easy to say that you’d die for someone, but what Eva really wanted was the kind of love that stood its ground when things got difficult, the kind of love that chose to live.
For years, she’d fed her anger to survive, picturing her heart like a garden made to wither in the cold, and she’d blamed Arthur for killing the part of her that had believed in their story.
But his touch awakened something in her again.
As Arthur moaned into the skin of her neck, pressing his lips to her body and making goose bumps erupt down her arms, Eva wondered if maybe she’d been wrong all this time.
Gardens never really die, after all. Seeds lie dormant, and soil goes fallow, all in the faith that one day, when the conditions are right, it will bloom again.
Eva crossed her arms and pulled the damp and dirt-stained sweatshirt over her head, leaving her in nothing but a sports bra and his boxers.
Arthur let out a breathless laugh. “I’m so glad you decided to sleep in those.”
“I needed shorts,” she said defensively. “It was only meant to be for one night.”
“I’m not complaining.” He ran a finger over the top of the waistband, sending a shiver across her skin. “You are so beautiful, Ev.”
Warmth rushed over her skin. “Fever again?”
“Fever wouldn’t make me a liar.”
True. If anything, Arthur seemed to be letting more things slip. At least he had an excuse. Eva didn’t know what had come over her to explain the words tripping from her lips. “I missed you too, you know.”
Arthur groaned, slanting his mouth over hers again.
The energy in the room seemed to shift, a sudden uptick of urgency underlying every new touch.
Eva’s restraint was unspooling by the second, every press and catch of his lips undoing her, shaping her, rebuilding her into something new.
She clumsily helped Arthur out of his shirt.
He was shivering, his clothes too damp on his chilled skin. She needed to get him warm.
Arthur lifted the sports bra over her head.
The physical relief turned to pleasure as he warmed a path across her collarbone with his lips.
The reverent brush of his fingertips up the curve of her breast was enough to drive Eva mad.
An ache gathered between her legs. When his thumb brushed her nipple, she gasped, and he licked the hollow of her throat.
“So fucking beautiful,” he murmured.
Eva loved his dirty mouth. She tipped her head up, letting her eyes briefly close as she rolled her hips, seeking the relief of friction.
It was strange how this moment straddled the line between known and new, the past and the present colliding with simple shocks of touch.
Eva had plenty of stolen memories she’d created with Arthur in every corner of her family cottage, the greenhouse, even the Honey Shoppe.
He’d made his mark on every place that mattered to her.
Maybe that was why his absence had been such a ghost, haunting her through the years.
The cot was too narrow for Eva to stretch out the way her body craved, so she planted her hands on the wall instead. Moss softened under her palms, growing in the dark. Arthur gripped her waist.
“Am I hurting you?” Eva asked, all too aware of her still-throbbing ankle hanging off the cot behind her and how it underscored every moment of pleasure. Arthur was in even worse shape.
“No.”
“Because we could slow down,” Eva said, worried now.
“If you want,” Arthur panted.
When Eva lifted her body and dragged it against his, Arthur let out a long groan. When she did it again, he seized her by the hips. “Ev,” he begged. “Please, tell me. Do you want to slow down?”
“No,” she whimpered.
Arthur slipped a hand between her legs, his fingers gliding over the front of the boxers.
A shock of pleasure stole her breath. Eva covered his hand with one of her own, guiding him to the place she wanted.
Arthur nodded in understanding. It was an agonizingly slow reacquainting, and Eva thought she might die from the relief of it, and from the way his focus narrowed on the sparest details as he learned, anew, what she wanted.
“Fuck,” Arthur whispered, dropping his face into the crook of her neck.
Eva clung to him, rendered speechless by the promise of relief building inside her, only to retreat again.
Arthur tugged at her waistband. “Please. Let me take these off.”
And Eva realized this was the groveling she wanted. Arthur’s impatient desire made her feel strong, wholly in charge of her own body and the pleasure she took from his touch. She lifted her hips and let him pull the boxers down her legs, savoring the pressure of his hands on her skin.
Her body hummed at the return of his fingers to where she needed him most. She was silk to a flame, her fibers undone. She was honeycomb under a heated knife, her spine arching as she melted against him.
When Arthur sucked the delicate spot beneath her ear, his exhale hot on her skin, Eva gasped.
Her climax crashed through her like a tide against the shore. She moaned in gratitude as Arthur kept kissing her neck, her jaw, all the while working his fingers inside her until the bliss faded to a distant ache, and she slackened against him.
A better goodbye.
Arthur gathered her close. He still burned, a steady fever hiking ever higher. When Eva licked her lips, tasting salt, she realized her cheeks were wet. A little more tension fell away, and she thought for a moment that it would be so cleansing to cry all the grief out.
But the pressure of Arthur’s embrace chased away her desire to weep. Eva slumped against him, wholly wrung out. She took great pleasure in feeling the spread of goose bumps rising at her touch. “Well. We definitely didn’t slow down,” she murmured.
Arthur barked a laugh that made Eva’s chest feel warm and bright.
He should always laugh like that.
When the pain in her ankle outweighed the temptation to stay wrapped in his arms, Eva extracted the pretzel her limbs had made around him and slid off the cot, her muscles warm and tired.
Her eyes had adjusted a bit to the dark. The storm grew more boisterous outside. A clap of thunder boomed directly over their heads. Bug let out a yowl.
“Hang on,” Eva said softly to the kitten, kneeling on the floor beside the cot again and blindly sweeping her hand under the bed frame. A mistake. Bug swiped in alarm.
“Ow!” Eva drew her hand back and sucked the wounded skin. “Sorry, girl.”
“She scratched you?” Arthur asked.
Eva nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see. “Yeah. She seems scared of the storm.” She bent, more cautiously this time, squinting into the deep shadows under the cot. When lightning flashed, Eva caught a glimpse of movement: Bug pressed into the corner.
She saw something else under the bed as well. Eva frowned and reached to glide her fingertips along the straight, smooth edge of the object she’d missed before. It was some kind of… box? No. Her thumb caught the cool edge of a metal latch on the side. A trunk?
“I think I found something.”
Eva hauled the trunk out, the bottom scraping loudly against the floor.
Bug jumped, yowling in protest. Eva undid the heavy latch, and the lid came unstuck with an audible crackle, the wood groaning as she lifted the top free.
The smell of must and old, worn canvas filled her nose.
Eva recognized it, flashing in an instant to the camping trips she’d taken with Dad and Izzy growing up.
“What is it?” Arthur asked.
Eva reached inside, fumbling as she tried to make out the items. Her fingers closed around a cool metal cylinder. She huffed a laugh and held up a flashlight in triumph. “Supplies!”