Chapter Three #2
We talked while we cooked, and the talking was easier here, looser, the way conversation gets when your hands are occupied and you're not staring directly at the person wrecking your composure.
I asked about the sticky notes in the entomology textbook.
"Disagreements with the author," he said.
I laughed and he smiled — a real one, brief, gone almost before I caught it — and it did more damage than a full grin from any other man alive.
He told me about his honey varietals: wildflower, clover, buckwheat, the late-season goldenrod that tasted like autumn and smelled like wet socks.
Apparently normal. Not a quality control issue.
I told him about a client in Portland who'd wanted a "pollinator garden" that was actually just lavender in rows because she'd seen it on Pinterest. The sound he made, a low short huff through his nose, was the closest thing to a laugh I'd gotten out of him.
I wanted to chase it. I wanted to make him do it again.
The cabin was heated from the stove. The venison was resting.
The roots were in to roast, the sourdough sliced, honey on the table, a jar of spring wildflower, the pale gold one, the one I'd tasted from the comb two days ago.
We were facing each other at the table, actually eating, and my body was vibrating at a frequency that made chewing difficult.
After dinner he opened the jar. Dipped a clean spoon, held it out to me across the table.
I took the spoon in my mouth and the honey hit my tongue, floral, golden, sweet in a way that spread through my whole chest. My eyes closed. I couldn't help it. The sound I made was soft and involuntary and completely inappropriate for a dining situation.
When I opened my eyes he'd moved. He was beside my chair. Close. Close enough that I could smell woodsmoke and honey and the clean scent underneath that was just him. His thumb traced the corner of my mouth where honey had caught.
"I've been wondering," he said, low, unhurried, his eyes on my mouth and done pretending otherwise, "if you taste as sweet as that."
My breath stopped. My brain stopped. The professional boundaries, the reconnaissance mission, the resolution not to sleep with my sperm donor — all of it evaporated. What was left: his thumb on my lip, his eyes on mine, and the fact that I wanted this man so badly my hands were shaking.
"Only one way to find out," I said, and my voice came out barely there.
He kissed me.
Not tentative. Not careful. He kissed me with the full force of what he'd been holding back, one hand cupping the back of my neck, the other gripping the edge of the table.
I tasted honey on his tongue and made a sound I would never admit to under oath.
My fingers found his chest, felt the heat of him through the cotton, the solid wall of muscle. I curled into the fabric and pulled.
He lifted me. Palms under my thighs, picked me up off the chair, set me on the kitchen counter.
I locked my legs around his waist on pure instinct and pulled him in.
The kiss deepened. His hands slid up my thighs, my hips, rucked up the hem of my shirt.
Everywhere he touched lit up, rough palms on bare skin. I arched into it, greedy, gone.
"Wait," I gasped, pulling back just far enough to see his face.
His eyes were dark. His breathing was ragged.
His hands had stopped the instant I said wait, but they were still on my skin, steady.
I could feel him, hard, pressed where my legs were locked around him.
The size of what I was feeling made my thoughts go briefly, spectacularly offline.
"If you stop now," I said, "I will break something in this kitchen. I want you to know that. Appliances will be harmed."
He smiled. "Noted."
"I'm serious. That coffee pot is not safe."
"Flora."
"Yes."
"Stop talking."
I stopped talking. He kissed me again, slower this time, deeper, his palms resuming their path up my sides, thumbs tracing my ribcage. When he found my breasts I gasped into the kiss and rocked my hips into him and felt him groan, low, rough, a sound that went straight through me.
He pulled back. Looked at me, flushed, breathing hard, sitting on his counter with my legs around him and my shirt shoved up and honey still on my lips. "Tell me you want this," he said. Quiet. Direct.
"I want this." The words scraped out of me. "I want you. I've wanted you since you lifted that bee off my nose and I need you to stop being noble about it."
He made a sound, half laugh, half growl, and dropped to his knees.
My brain shorted out. He was on his knees on his own kitchen floor, pushing my thighs apart, looking up at me with those dark steady eyes.
"I've been thinking about this since you moaned at my honeycomb," he said.
His fingers hooked under the waistband of my pants and tugged.
I lifted my hips because my body had taken over completely.
He pulled my pants down. My underwear with them. And then his mouth was on me.
I came apart.
His tongue was slow and deliberate and devastating, the same patience he used on the hive frames.
My head fell back against the cabinet. My hand found his head, the buzz of cropped hair under my palm, my thighs shaking around his ears.
He held my hips pinned, steadied, his fingers digging into the soft flesh.
Each lick. Each press of his tongue on my clit.
Patient and thorough and completely, ruinously intent.
"Oh my God," I breathed. "Oh my... Atlas..."
He groaned into me and the vibration sent me over. I came with my hand over my mouth and his name on my tongue, and he didn't stop. He kept going through the aftershocks, softer now, gentler, coaxing the last tremor out of my body until I was boneless and gasping on his countertop.
He stood. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Looked at me, undone, half-naked, my chest heaving, and said, "Sweet."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. "Was that — did you just review me?"
"Better than the buckwheat."
"I should hope so. The buckwheat smells like wet socks." I was babbling. He was undoing his belt and every coherent thought left my head. "I want... can I..."
"Not this time." His voice was rough. Strained. "Your mouth gets on me and I'm done, and I'm not done with you."
I reached for the counter to brace myself. My hand landed in the spilled honey, thick and golden on my fingers. An idea hit me. I closed my honey-slick fist around his cock.
He went still. Completely, utterly still, except for the sharp intake of breath that moved through his entire body.
Hard and thick and hot in my grip, the honey making everything slick and golden and obscene.
I stroked him once, slow, and watched his jaw clench so hard I thought he might crack a molar.
"Flora," he gritted out.
"Mm?"
"I need to be inside you. Right now."
"Then get inside me."
He pulled me to the edge of the counter. Lined himself up. His thumb dragged a streak of honey across my hip. His lips followed, wet, the scratch of his beard on my skin. Then he pushed into me and I stopped breathing.
He was big. I'd known he would be. I'd felt it. I'd had my fist around him. But the reality of him filling me, stretching me, that slow relentless push until he was all the way in and my forehead was on his shoulder and I was making sounds I'd never made in my life.
"You alright?" he asked against my hair. The words came out raw. His fingers were trembling on my hips.
"If you ask me that instead of moving, I'm going to lose my mind."
He moved.
Fast. Hard. His grip on my hips pulling me into each thrust, the counter exactly the right height for him to stand and drive into me.
I hooked my legs around him and held on.
The honey jar rattled. A mug fell, then a spoon.
I didn't care. His teeth scraped my pulse point and I felt myself climbing again, fast, impossibly fast.
"You feel incredible," he said against my throat, and the careful measured man had shattered into rough breathing and unfinished sentences.
"You're so tight around me. I want to fill you up.
I want —" His hips faltered. Something raw crossed his face, like the words were arriving from somewhere deeper than dirty talk. "I want to put a baby in you."
His voice cracked on it. He pressed his forehead to my shoulder, breathing hard, and I could feel him shaking with the effort of not finishing before he was ready. "I don't — that just —"
"Don't stop." I grabbed his face with both hands. "Atlas. You can't say that to me and then hesitate. That is not allowed. Keep going."
The ground shifted under me.
Because I was six weeks pregnant with this man's child, and the words he was groaning into my skin had already come true.
The irony was so enormous it could be seen from space.
That particular seed had already been planted — by a clinic in Portland, with a syringe and a donor catalogue and considerably less passion. This was a much better method.
"God, yes," I gasped, and I meant it in every possible sense, in ways he couldn't know yet.
My orgasm hit so hard my vision whited out.
I came clenching around him, nails in his shoulders, his name broken on my tongue.
He followed — three hard thrusts, buried to the hilt, groaning into my neck.
I felt him pulse inside me, hot and deep.
His arms locked around me. We stayed there on his kitchen counter, gasping, shaking, holding on.
Silence. The debris-settling kind. The ringing fading from my ears into the specific quiet of a mountain kitchen at dusk.
His forehead was against my collarbone. My fingers were in his hair. The honey jar had survived. The coffee pot had not. It lay on the floor in a puddle of ancient coffee, the handle snapped clean off.
"I told you," I said. "I told you appliances would be harmed."