Chapter 8 #2
"I mean it," she said, pulling back just far enough to look at me properly, her hands still fisted loose in my shirt.
"Not as a gesture. Not because tonight got emotional and I said something big to match the moment.
I've thought about this before, actually, more than once, lying awake some nights doing the math on whether I could actually ask for it.
I just never had the nerve until right now. "
"I believe you. For what it's worth, I'd have waited as long as the nerve took. Wasn't going anywhere in the meantime."
"I know. That's sort of the whole point, isn't it. That's what finally made the nerve possible."
We went inside together, and this time there was no hesitation in either of us, no careful checking at the threshold, no lingering fear waiting to be talked down. Just two people who'd already done the hard work of choosing each other, meeting that choice now with everything they had.
The night was warmer than the last one had been, full summer pressing close against the open windows, the air thick with honeysuckle and the last of the wildflowers and the low, contented hum of an apiary that had survived a storm and come out stronger for it.
Golden dawn was still hours off, but I could feel it coming already in the particular quality of the dark — the specific stillness that comes right before a summer night tips over into morning.
There was nothing tentative in it this time. Where the first night had been slow discovery, careful and reverent, this one was fierce and certain, both of us meeting each other with the full, unguarded weight of a decision already made.
She pulled me down onto the bed with her, no hesitation in the grip of her hands on my shirt, and I let her set the pace, watching her take what she wanted with the same directness she'd once used to threaten me over a jar of buckwheat honey.
Her hands found me with none of the shyness of weeks before, sure now in a way that told me, more clearly than any words could have, exactly how far she'd come from the woman who'd once thrown a jar at a man for touching her display.
She dragged her palms up my chest, my shoulders, gripping hard enough to leave marks I'd wear proud for days, and when I groaned low against her mouth she smiled into the kiss, delighted at what she could pull out of me now that she'd stopped holding back.
I matched her, met her, gave her everything I had left to give after two months of patient waiting finally paid out in full.
I kissed my way down her throat, her collarbone, felt her breath go ragged and quick under my mouth, her fingers threading rough through my hair and holding on.
When I finally settled between her thighs, her legs came up to lock around me without any prompting, pulling me closer, impatient in a way that made me laugh low against her skin even as my own restraint frayed thin.
"Now, Finn," she said, breathless, no trace of the careful, guarded woman from the farmers' market left in her voice at all.
"Bossy," I managed, and she laughed, and I gave her exactly what she asked for, sinking into her slow and then not slow at all, both of us gasping at the same moment, foreheads pressed together, her nails biting crescents into my back.
We moved together fast then, certain, the rhythm we'd found the first night gone fierce and sure now instead of careful — her hips rising to meet mine every time, one of her hands fisted tight in the sheets and the other clutching my shoulder like she meant to hold on through whatever came.
I felt the slick heat of her everywhere we touched, the slide of skin on skin, the building tension coiling tight low in both of us as the pace built past anything patient, past anything careful, into something raw and claiming and entirely mutual.
There was laughter here too, because there always would be with us — a moment where she said something dry and devastating against my ear that made me laugh loud enough to startle Mustard clean off the bed, both of us dissolving into helpless amusement for half a breath before finding our way straight back to each other, hungrier for the interruption, grinning into the next kiss even as our bodies kept their fevered rhythm.
That was the thing about loving Hazel Dunmore, I understood then, fully, for the first time: even at its most fierce, its most certain, its most claimed, it never once lost its capacity for joy.
She came apart first, my name torn out of her rough and unguarded, her whole body drawing tight around mine, and the sound of it — helpless, real, mine — was enough to pull me right over after her, her name breaking out of me the same way hers had broken out of her, both of us shaking through it together until there was nothing left but breath and heartbeat and the tangled, damp weight of each other in the dark.
The warmth of the night wrapped around us after, honeysuckle and wildflowers drifting through the open window, and somewhere beyond it the first pale hint of dawn began pushing soft gold against the eastern sky — the whole late-spring season we'd fallen in love inside of, tipping now toward summer, toward permanence, toward everything that came next.
When it was over, we lay tangled together as the sky slowly lightened, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing slow patterns down her spine, both of us quiet in the particular satisfied silence that comes after everything that needed saying has finally been said, in every language available to two people who'd spent two months learning how to speak to each other.
"For the record," I said, eventually, "I won the bet."
"What bet."
"Diesel owes me fifty bucks. He bet you'd never crack. I told him he was wrong."
She lifted her head, staring at me with an expression caught somewhere between outrage and helpless amusement. "You bet on me?"
"I bet ON you," I said. "Not against you. Big difference. I always bet on you, Hazel. Every single week, since the very first Saturday. Never once doubted the outcome, honestly. Just didn't know how long it'd take."
She stared at me a long moment, something soft and unguarded moving behind her eyes, and I watched her decide, quite visibly, that this was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her — and watched her decide, with equal visibility, that she would never once admit that out loud.
I knew anyway. I always know.
"You're ridiculous," she said instead, settling back against my chest.
"I'm delightful. We've had this conversation."
"We have. I still haven't conceded it."
"You will. Give it time. I've got infinite patience, in case you hadn't noticed over the last two months."
She laughed, soft and warm against my skin, and outside the window the sky kept brightening, gold spreading slow across a summer morning that felt, for the first time in either of our lives, entirely, permanently ours.