Chapter Six
ATLAS
DAWN INSPECTION. SAME as every morning. I pulled a frame from the first hive and held it to the early light, and for once since Flora Diaz had crashed into my life I was not thinking about her.
I was thinking about the woman asleep in my bed who was carrying my child and had told me everything without stopping for air, standing in my hallway with her shirt on backwards. Different thing entirely.
Good brood pattern. Queen laying well. Foragers already heading toward the balsamroot along the south meadow, the first big push of spring. I set the frame back, closed the hive, and stood in the cool air with my hands steady and my pulse running harder than it should have for a man standing still.
The truth was out. She was still here. And I was checking brood patterns at dawn because my chest was so full the only thing I could do was work.
I was going to marry her. The thought arrived fully formed, no preamble, the way a queen cell appears in a hive. You don’t see it being built. You just look one day and it’s there, inevitable.
From inside the cabin: humming. Off-key, wandering, the kind of humming a person does when they think they’re alone. I heard the kettle click off. A cabinet opening. The blue mug, probably. She’d claimed it without discussion.
I went inside.
She was barefoot at the counter in my T-shirt, the soft gray cotton hanging to mid-thigh, collar wide enough to show her collarbone and the mark I’d left on her shoulder. Her hair was a dark tangle from my pillow. She was pouring tea with the concentration of a woman performing surgery.
“You’re up early,” she said, not turning around.
“I’m always up early.”
“You’re up early and you’ve already been to the hives. I can smell the propolis.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I’m making tea. Your decaf is on the counter, by the way. Your decaf.” She narrowed her gaze. “I want you to know I am composing a formal grievance. In writing. About the decaf.”
“A grievance.”
“An itemized grievance. Point one: you watched me drink three cups of it and compliment the flavor. Point two: you thanked me for the compliment. You looked me in the eye and said ‘I tried a different roast’ with a completely straight face.”
“It was a different roast.”
“It was decaf, Atlas. You decaffeinated me without my consent. I complimented the decaf. I told you it was better than usual. I may have said the word ‘smooth.’”
“You did say smooth.”
“I’m going to be mad about this for a very long time.”
“I can live with that.”
I crossed the kitchen, came up behind her, and put my lips on the curve of her neck. She stopped talking. Her head tipped back and I could feel her pulse, fast, her skin warm through the cotton.
“That’s cheating,” she said. Quieter now.
“I’m not cheating. I’m saying good morning.”
“You already said good morning. You said it with your mouth. On my neck. While I was filing a grievance.” Her breath caught. “Stop doing that unless you plan to follow through.”
I turned her around.
Her back hit the counter edge and her eyes went wide. The same look she’d given me on this counter the first time, and in my bed last night, except now there was nothing behind it. No lie, no cover story. Just Flora, looking at me with nothing held back.
“Flora,” I said, and kissed her.
She tasted like ginger tea and mint toothpaste. Her fingers curled into my chest hair and pulled. The sound I made was not dignified. She laughed into the kiss, loose and surprised. I picked her up and set her on the counter. She wrapped her legs around my waist.
“Bed,” she said into the kiss. “Actual bed this time. We have a bed, Atlas.”
“We didn’t make it last night.”
“We didn’t make it last night because someone got impatient against the hallway wall.”
“You told me not to be careful.”
“And you listened. Which was. Yes. Correct. Ten out of ten. But I’m requesting the bed now. Formally. As a woman whose back has opinions about the hallway baseboard.”
I carried her. Down the short hall, through the door, onto the sheets. She pulled me over her and I caught the hem of the T-shirt and drew it up and off and she lay back and I stopped.
Late-April light striped across her stomach. The soft curve below her navel. I’d been holding my hand there in the dark all week, tracing while she slept. She wasn’t showing yet. But my palm settled on that place, low and open, and this time I held it there and looked at her.
“That’s my baby,” I said.
Her eyes filled. “That’s your baby.”
“You drove nine hours to find me.” My thumb moved on her skin. “You tripped over my hive equipment. You lied about a client who doesn’t exist. You built a garden. And you’re carrying my child.”
“When you list it out, it sounds very dramatic.”
“It is very dramatic. You stalked me with binoculars, Flora.”
“I was observing—”
“From the tree line. With binoculars. That’s surveillance.”
She laughed, wet and bright, and grabbed the waistband of my jeans. “Get down here.”
I went. My lips traced her throat, her collarbone, the three freckles above her shoulder that I’d memorized by touch. Then lower. Her sternum. The dip between her ribs. The skin below her navel, where I lingered, and the sound she made was small and wrecked and I felt it behind my ribs.
I kept going.
Her hips lifted when my mouth reached the crease of her thigh. My hands slid under her, palms on her lower back, and I lowered between her legs. She was propped on her elbows, watching me, her dark hair spilling across the pillow, her breath quick.
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
“You always say that. You said that the first time on the counter and I—” She lost the sentence because I was already on her. Her elbows buckled. Her back arched off the mattress. I licked her deliberate and thorough and her fingers grabbed the sheets in two fists.
No hurry. I’d learned what she liked over the past week and I used every piece of it.
The unhurried circles that made her roll against me.
The light suction that pulled those short desperate sounds out of her throat.
The flat of my tongue steady on her clit until her thighs shook on either side of my head.
“Atlas, God, right there—”
I pressed harder. Her heels dug into my shoulders. She came with a sharp cry, her whole body bowing off the bed, her hand on the back of my head holding me to her while the orgasm rolled through. I eased her down. Kissed the inside of her thigh.
She was staring at the ceiling. Breathing hard. Pink from her neck to her ears.
“That,” she said, “is unreasonable.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Don’t be smug.” She reached for me. “Get up here. I want to be on top.”
I moved up the bed. She shoved me onto my back, climbed over me, her thighs straddling me, her curls falling around her shoulders.
She worked my jeans open, pushed them down, wrapped her hand around me.
I dropped my head back. My breath left in a rush.
Her grip was firm, confident, a stroke that narrowed my vision to a point.
Then she slid down and took me in her mouth, and my hand found the back of her head and my jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached.
She drew it out. She looked up at me while she did it, and the eye contact nearly finished me.
I pulled her off before it could. "Come here," I managed. "I need to be inside you."
She grinned. Wiped her lip. Climbed back up.
She rose up. Guided me. Sank onto me inch by inch, her eyes locked on mine, her lips parting, her breath catching in small pulses. I gripped her hips, my hands spanning from her waist to the tops of her thighs. Tight. Wet. Every inch deeper pulled a sound from one of us, sometimes both.
She bottomed out and held still. Her fingertips dug into my ribcage. Her hair falling around us. She was shaking and so was I and neither of us moved.
“You feel—” She swallowed. “You feel different when I know you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Like you’re everywhere.” She shifted her hips, just barely, and we both gasped. “Before, I was holding something back. I could feel the wall between what I wanted to say and what I was allowed to say and it was... God, Atlas, it’s gone now. All of it.”
I sat up. Her legs wrapped around me, our bodies flush, my hands sliding up her bare back. Her forehead touched mine. Neither of us blinked.
Then she moved.
She rolled her hips and I pulled her tighter and the rhythm built between us, grinding, her breath ragged on my mouth. I kissed her throat. The hollow beneath her ear. The tendon that jumped when she arched.
“Wait,” she whispered. She pinned me down. Both palms on my chest, holding me to the mattress, and the grin came back. “I said I wanted to be on top.”
“You are on top.”
“You sat up. That’s not the same.” She rocked forward and I grabbed the sheets. “Stay down.”
I stayed down. She planted her hands on my shoulders and rode me with a deliberate rolling grind that wiped every thought out of my skull.
Her breasts moved with the rhythm, her belly taut, her thighs bracketing mine.
I wanted to flip her over and drive into her until neither of us could talk.
Instead I lay there and let her take what she wanted and it was the best surrender of my life.
My thumb slid between us and circled her clit and she jerked hard with a sound that vibrated through me.
“Atlas, right there, don’t stop —”
I didn’t stop. She rode me harder, her nails digging into my shoulders, and I kept the rhythm steady and watched her face. Her eyes on me, steady, refusing to close. She was seeing me. Not a profile. Not a donor number. Me.
“I’m yours,” she said. Breathless, her rhythm breaking. “I was yours before I got here. I picked you and then I found you and I’m — Atlas —”
“Come for me.” My voice had dropped to a place I barely recognized. “Let me feel it.”