Chapter Five #2
I could have deflected. A joke about tasting methodology or extraction protocols. I could have been the version of Flora who maintained professional composure and did not suck honey off a beekeeper’s finger in the fading sun of his kitchen.
I closed my lips around his finger and sucked the honey off.
His whole body went taut. I felt the change: the catch of air in his lungs, the tension locking through his shoulders and down his arms. The honey was thick on my tongue. Underneath it: salt, skin, the taste of him. I locked onto him and watched his expression darken.
“Trouble,” he said. Low, stripped.
“I’ve been trouble since I crashed into your bee yard.”
He kissed me.
The urgency from the counter a week ago had burned fast and desperate.
This was measured, his hand curving around the nape of my neck, his thumb tracing the hinge of my jaw, tilting my face up so gradually my breath shook before his lips even reached mine.
He tasted like knapweed honey. The kiss deepened and I felt it in my fingertips, my hip bones, the backs of my knees.
He pulled back. His finger caught my lower lip. Then he picked up the jar of spring wildflower, the pale gold, the first honey he’d ever handed me, and kept his eyes on mine while he drizzled a thin golden line along my collarbone.
The honey was languid. Heavy. It traced a path down my skin and I shivered so hard my teeth clicked.
His mouth followed the trail. Lips, the wet heat of him, the scrape of his beard from my collarbone to the hollow of my throat. I gripped the table edge. The noise that came out of me should have required a permit.
“Come here,” he said against my skin, and slid his hands under my thighs and lifted me. I wrapped around him, all limbs, all contact, flush against his full length, and he carried me down the short hall to his bed.
He set me down. Pulled my shirt off, unhooked my bra, and I lay on his sheets while late sun striped through the window in bands of gold. His gaze moved over me with the concentration he gave a frame of comb: intent, absorbed, missing nothing.
Honey fell across my breast, slow and warm. His mouth closed over my nipple and I grabbed the sheets in both fists and forgot my own name.
He took his time. He followed the honey from one breast to the other, his tongue chasing every thread of sweetness across my skin.
He tipped the jar and let more run down my ribs, licked them clean, moved lower.
Poured a thin ribbon around my navel, and his lips closed over the circle, and then his hand pressed flat against my stomach, low, gentle, right where I always pressed my own hand when I thought no one could see.
“I want to taste all of you.” The words rumbled against my hip. His voice had dropped to a place I felt more than heard. “Everywhere the honey goes. Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop.”
He pulled my pants off. My underwear with them. Drizzled honey along the inside of my thigh, and I gasped and grabbed the headboard because the sensation, viscous and warm, trailing toward my pussy, shorted out coherent thought.
His tongue found my clit first. One long, intentional stroke.
I cried out loud enough to terrify the local bird population.
He traced the honey from my inner thigh in a wet, languid path and then his mouth was on me fully, honey-slick, and the combination of sweetness and heat obliterated every thought I’d ever had about anything.
He was thorough. Patient. He read every sound, every shift of my hips, adjusting until I was shaking under his grip.
His palms pinned my thighs open, sticky golden prints on my skin.
His tongue circled, pressed, and I came gripping the headboard with both hands and saying his name in a register I’d never visited before.
He didn’t stop. His mouth went soft. He coaxed the aftershocks out of me one by one until I was gasping, trembling, liquid.
He kissed my hip. Looked up.
“Good?” He barely had a voice left.
“I need — give me a second. Also, everything is sticky.”
“It’s going to get stickier.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise.”
I pulled him up and kissed him, tasting myself and honey on his mouth. I ran my hands down his chest, his stomach, and reached for his belt. “Last time, you told me your self-control wouldn’t survive my mouth on you.” I worked the buckle loose. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Flora —”
“My turn.”
I pushed his jeans down. Closed my fist around his cock, hard and heavy, the pulse of him against my palm, and slid down the bed. I kissed his hip, the groove of muscle at his groin, and took him in my mouth.
He groaned. The sound resonated in my spine.
I took my time, tasting salt, giving back what he’d given me.
His fingers found my hair. Not guiding. Resting, tangled in my curls, his hips rolling once with visible effort.
The sound he made when I took him deeper, ragged and torn, my name snapping in half, sent a bolt of heat through me that had nothing to do with being touched.
“Stop.” He was breathing hard. “Flora. I need to be inside you.”
I lifted my mouth off him. Grinned up at him. “Confirmed.”
“Get up here.”
I crawled up his body and he rolled over me, his weight settling between my thighs. He reached between us. His thumb circled my clit, still slick, and the afterglow from the first orgasm bloomed into fresh urgency. I rocked against his hand.
“Now,” I said. “I mean it.”
He pushed into me. Inch by inch, with a patience that made me grip his shoulders and drop my forehead to his collarbone.
This was nothing like the counter. That had been frantic and half-mad.
This was intentional. He pulled almost out.
Sank back in. I felt him everywhere — the stretch, the fullness, the heat where his hips pressed mine.
He set a rhythm. Slow, deep, his forehead touching mine. His eyes were open and on mine, and the intimacy of being looked at that directly while he moved inside me cracked me open somewhere I’d been holding shut.
“You ruined my whole life,” he said against my lips. “You showed up on my mountain and talked to my plants and ruined everything I had figured out.”
I laughed and it broke into a moan as he hit a depth that dissolved my peripheral vision. “I ruined your coffee pot. Your life just got caught in the blast radius.”
His lips found my throat. His hand slid from my hip to my stomach, spread wide. He stroked the skin below my navel, and he spoke against my ear.
“I want to put a baby in you.” Barely a whisper. His hips rolling deep, his palm firm on my belly. “I want to fill you up. I want —” His voice fractured. “I want you to carry my baby, Flora.”
The orgasm hit me before I was ready. His words, his hand over our child, the vast impossible irony.
I shattered. Clenching around him, crying out, nails raking his back.
He followed with a groan that moved through both of us, his face in my neck, fingers still splayed on my stomach, over the place where what he was asking for already existed.
We lay still. Breathing. Honey on the sheets, in my hair, smeared across both of us in warm amber evidence. Afternoon light slanted through the window. Outside, the bees hummed on.
“We destroyed your sheets,” I said.
“I have others.”
“We’ll ruin those too.”
“I’ll buy more.”
I pressed my face to his shoulder and laughed.
He kissed my temple. We lay there while the creek murmured through the open window.
The secret sat heavy on my ribs, heavier than ever, because the man whose hand still rested on my belly had just whispered what he wanted.
I was the only person in this cabin who knew he already had it.
I SLID OUT OF BED AND pulled on my shirt, inside out, naturally.
A fitting reflection of my life choices.
His bathroom was small: shower, sink, a cabinet with a mirror that didn’t close all the way.
I ran water over a washcloth and wiped honey from my collarbone, my ribs, the crease of my elbow where it had migrated through unknown forces.
I reached for the cabinet to grab a towel.
The door swung wider than I intended.
Aspirin. Band-Aids. Dental floss. And behind the aspirin, pushed to the back but not concealed, a bottle of prenatal vitamins.
I froze midair.
Prenatal vitamins. Not a generic multivitamin, not calcium, not the fish oil supplements a health-conscious man might keep. Prenatals. The seal was broken. No dust on the cap.
I picked it up. My fingers trembled. I set it back exactly where it was.
The decaf. He’d switched the coffee days ago and told me he was trying a new roast. The ginger tea that had appeared beside my peppermint the same week my nausea turned relentless. The lighter meals. The water he set beside me without being asked.
I walked out of the bathroom. Looked up.
The loft.
I’d never been up there. It had been storage every time I’d passed through this cabin: spare frames, old equipment, boxes he’d never sorted. The ladder leaned against the wall.
I climbed it.
The loft was empty. Swept clean. The pine floor had been sanded smooth.
I could see the marks where he’d worked it by hand, section by section, the rough grain rubbed to silk.
The boxes were gone. The broken equipment was gone.
On the far wall, where solid pine met the roofline, someone had drawn pencil lines in a neat rectangle. Measurements for a window.
My knees buckled. I caught the railing.
He’d been building a nursery.
All of it collapsed into one picture: the decaf, the vitamins, the ginger tea, the nausea-friendly meals, the floor sanded to splinter-free smoothness, the pencil marks for a window that didn’t exist yet. A room he’d cleared without being asked, for a baby he hadn’t been told about.
I want to put a baby in you. His hand on my stomach. The words cracking in half.
He knew.