Chapter 36
Matt
Afew weeks after the Harvest Ball, I woke to the cold coming through the window, sharper than it had been in a while, and lay there watching the light change.
Winter was pushing in for real now, and it had gotten into the maple out back overnight, hard, so that the last stubborn handful of leaves that had been holding on the evening before were gone by morning, scattered thick across the flagstone below the window.
I could see it from the bed if I turned my head, past her shoulder, past the tangle of her hair against my pillow.
That same tree. The one I’d stood under with her hands pressed to my chest, asking for a promise I’d had no right yet to ask for.
It had all come out right in the end. The festival had made more money than the farm had ever seen in a single season, enough to pay off the equipment loan clean before the bank’s deadline, and the grant had covered everything left standing—the roof, rebuilt properly and finally weathertight, and Iris’s secret loan was paid off entirely.
The farm would go into winter with nothing owed and nothing hanging over it, for the first time in longer than Elizabeth could remember.
And she’d changed with it. A few days back I’d driven up to find her and Iris out on the porch flying paper airplanes off the rail, cackling about whose flew farther, the pair of them utterly ridiculous in the cold.
I still don’t know what set them off. It didn’t matter.
I stood in the yard and laughed along with them at a joke I never got, because Elizabeth was laughing free and loose over absolutely nothing, and a woman who spent a whole fall too frightened to breathe was up on a porch launching paper airplanes with her grandmother, and that was the only thing I needed to understand.
She stirred against me, still half asleep, and pressed her mouth to my shoulder without opening her eyes.
“Stop thinking so loud,” she mumbled. “It’s too early for whatever’s happening in there.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything.”
“Liar. You get a very specific breathing pattern when you’re having feelings at six in the morning.” She cracked one eye open and found the window, found the bare tree, and went soft all over, the way she does. “Oh. It finally let go.”
“Overnight.”
“Good.” She turned into me properly, one leg hooking over mine, her palm flat against my chest like she was checking something was still there. “I like it better bare. Means we’re getting close to the good part of the year.”
“There’s a good part after this?”
“The part where it’s too cold to do anything but stay in bed.” She kissed my jaw, slow and lazy, and I felt every plan I’d had for the morning quietly reschedule itself. “Convince me you agree with my thesis, Officer.”
I did.
I rolled her beneath me, the sheets whispering around us as her body arched up to meet mine.
Her hands slid into my hair, tugging just enough to pull a low sound from my throat, and I kissed her properly then, deep and unhurried, tasting the sleep still clinging to her tongue.
She tasted like home and the quiet promise of every ordinary morning we’d stolen together since the Harvest Ball.
I took my time with her, the way she deserved.
Trailed my mouth down the line of her throat, across the delicate flutter of her pulse, lower to the soft swell of her breasts until her breath hitched and her fingers tightened in my hair.
When I drew one nipple into my mouth, teasing with tongue, she gasped my name—Matthew, not Matt, the full weight of it spilling out like a secret—and her hips rolled up against me, seeking friction.
I gave it to her, sliding one hand between her thighs, finding her already slick and hot.
Two fingers eased inside her, curling just right, and she clenched around me with a broken little moan that went straight to my cock.
“Matt—please—”
I loved the way she said it, needy and sweet and mine.
I reached for the nightstand drawer, grabbed a condom, and tore the packet open with my teeth.
She watched me with heavy-lidded eyes as I rolled it down my length, her fingers tracing my abs, then lower, helping me smooth it into place with a touch that made my breath catch.
Before I could settle between her thighs again, she pushed gently against my chest—warm palms and quiet strength—and guided me onto my back.
I went willingly, heart pounding as she straddled me, knees bracketing my hips.
The sight of her above me, hair tousled and eyes dark with desire, stole whatever was left of my breath.
She braced her hands on my chest and sank down onto me slowly, taking every inch until I was buried deep inside her tight, velvet heat.
We both groaned at the new angle, the way she enveloped me completely.
She started to move, rocking her hips in a slow, devastating rhythm that had me gripping her thighs, thumbs stroking the soft skin there.
Her head fell back, lips parted on a sigh, and the morning light caught the flush spreading across her chest and throat.
I sat up just enough to kiss her breasts, to suck at her nipples while she rode me, her pace gradually quickening.
One of her hands tangled in my hair, holding me to her as her other braced on my shoulder for leverage.
The slick slide of her body around me, the gentle bounce of her breasts, the soft sounds she made every time she ground down—it all built in a sweet, aching climb.
I thrust up to meet her, matching her rhythm, one hand sliding between us to circle her clit with steady pressure.
Her inner walls fluttered and tightened around me, her moans growing louder and more desperate.
“Elizabeth—god, you feel so good,” I rasped against her skin.
She leaned forward, capturing my mouth in a deep, messy kiss as her movements became more urgent.
I held her close, one arm banded around her back, and let her take everything she wanted.
When she came, it crashed through her hard—body shuddering, walls pulsing rhythmically around my cock as she cried out my name.
The feel of her coming apart above me dragged me over the edge right after her.
I groaned into her mouth, hips jerking up as I spilled deep inside the condom, pulsing in long waves while she kept rocking gently through both our releases, milking every last tremor.
We stayed like that for a long minute afterward, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other in, trading lazy, sated kisses until our heartbeats finally slowed. Only then did she ease off me and curl against my side.
Later—much later, the frost long since burned off the glass and the whole bedroom gone warm and bright—she lay with her head on my chest, tracing something absent-minded along my collarbone, and I lay there thinking that a year ago this house hadn’t known what warm was, and now it apparently couldn’t remember being anything else.
Because that was the truth, once I actually looked.
Her boots by the back door next to mine.
Two mugs by the coffee maker, hers chipped at the handle and kept anyway because she liked it best. Her sweaters folded in with mine in the dresser, in an order that made sense to nobody but her.
None of it had happened in a single day.
It had happened the ordinary way good things happen, a little at a time, so slow I hadn’t noticed the exact moment this stopped being a house I lived in alone and started being a house we lived in together.
“I was thinking about how long you’ve actually been living here.” I traced a slow line down her spine, thinking out loud, feeling my way toward it. “Not officially. But actually. I think it’s been a while.”
“A good while, at minimum.” She propped herself up on one elbow to look at me. “Are you about to make this a whole conversation before I’ve had coffee?”
“No conversation. Just this.” I reached over to the nightstand, where I’d been keeping it in the drawer for longer than I wanted to admit, and pulled out a single brass key on a plain ring, and pressed it into her palm. “You already mostly live here. I just wanted you to stop having to knock.”
She looked down at the key a long moment, turning it over once, and when she looked back up, her eyes had gone bright.
“Matthew Hartford.” Her voice had gone soft clean through. “Did you just hand me a house key in bed at seven in the morning with your hair doing something criminal?”
“I did.”
“No speech. No crowd.”
“You already got the speech. This one’s just for you.” I closed her fingers around it and kissed her knuckles, once. “Move in properly. Officially.”
“I have something for you too, then.” She rolled off the bed, entirely unselfconscious about it in a way that still floored me every single time, and came back a minute later with a small flat box she must have smuggled in at some point without my noticing, because I certainly hadn’t seen her hide it.
“I was saving it for Christmas. You’ve clearly started early, so… here you go
Inside the box sat a red plastic name tag, blank space filled in with two words.
MR. PUMPKIN
“Had it made special,” she said, watching my face. “Figured a man ought to have something official to pin on when he comes around to see his lady at work.”
“I’m never wearing this in public.”
“You’re absolutely wearing this in public.”
I laughed, the kind that still surprised me a little every time it came out of me that easily, and pulled her back down against my chest, key in one hand, name tag in the other.
“I love you,” I said, because it never once felt like something I could say too many times.
“I love you too.” She kissed me, slow, and settled back against my chest, and outside the window another handful of gold leaves let go of the branch and drifted down through the cold bright morning, and neither one of us moved to watch where they came to rest, because there was nowhere in this house, or this life, that either of us would rather have been.