Chapter 9 #2
“Grain sacks first,” she said. “Loft. Rats have been getting bold. I found one the size of a small dog sitting on a sack last week, looking at me like I was the intruder.”
“Charming.”
“He was, actually. Very confident. I almost felt bad shooing him.” She nodded toward the pile.
Six sacks, each the size and approximate weight of a moderately stubborn child.
“They’re fifty pounds apiece. Maybe sixty.
The merchant was either lying about the weight or his scales need calibration, and I’m inclined to believe the scales because the man had the face of someone who’d cheat his own mother. ”
I lifted the first sack. Fifty pounds felt like nothing after six years of carrying wounded men off battlefields, but fifty pounds up a ladder into a loft with low beams was its own kind of challenge.
Angelina steadied the base while I climbed, the wooden rungs creaking under our combined weight, and when I reached the loft I hefted the sack onto the stack with a grunt that probably sounded more dramatic than the effort warranted.
“You don’t have to show off,” Angelina called from below. “I’m already impressed. You could whimper a little. It would humanize you.”
“I don’t whimper. It’s in my contract.”
She laughed, and the sound carried through the barn with the warmth that Angelina’s laughter always carried.
I did the sacks one by one. By the third, my shirt was dark with sweat, the fabric clinging to my back and shoulders.
Angelina handed them up from below, her wings shifting with each movement, adjusting for balance, and I caught myself watching her white feathers.
Years of physical work had left her with the kind of strength that didn’t announce itself, the toned arms and straight posture of a woman who had lifted more than her share and rarely complained about it.
“You’re staring,” she said, handing up the fifth sack.
“Admiring the technique. Very efficient.”
“Mm. Sure that’s all you’re admiring?” Her eyes held mine for a beat, and then she was moving to the next sack and the moment dissolved.
The oak beams came next. They were long, awkward, the kind of weight that required two people and a certain amount of creative swearing.
Angelina took one end, her wings half-spread for balance, and I took the other, and we maneuvered them through the barn door and across the yard toward the eastern pasture where the new fence was taking shape.
Her body was close to mine, the heat of her through her thin work shirt, her wings brushing against my arms with each adjustment, and the physical closeness felt charged in a way it never had before.
Or maybe it had always been charged and I was only now noticing, the same way you don’t notice a scent until someone points it out, and then you can’t stop smelling it.
We set the beams down beside the partially completed fence, and Angelina straightened, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. A strand of honey-blonde hair had come loose from its knot and stuck to her damp temple, and I had the sudden, absurd urge to reach out and tuck it behind her ear.
Instead, I said, “Water break?”
She nodded, and then she hugged me. Just like that, arms around my waist, her face pressed against my chest for one brief, warm moment.
I felt her breasts through her shirt, firm and full against me, and the sensation sent a confused jolt through my body that landed somewhere between comfort and something I wasn’t ready to examine.
She smelled like bread and sunlight and the herbal soap she made herself, and her body was soft in all the places Gabriella was lean, and the comparison arrived unbidden and left me standing very still with my arms around Angelina while my brain attempted to process approximately seventeen conflicting signals at once.
She pulled back, her hands on my shoulders, and smiled.
“Thank you,” she said simply, and then she was walking toward the house for water, her wings folding neatly behind her, and I stood by the fence posts and tried very hard to think about anything other than the warmth of her body or the memory of Gabriella’s.
The orchard came next. Sabrina hovered beside the north-facing apple tree, her wings beating in slow, steady strokes as she reached for a cluster of ripening fruit, the basket hanging from her forearm.
“Hands,” she called when she saw me. She lowered the basket toward me, heavy with apples, and I took it, our fingers brushing in the exchange.
“These are getting ridiculous,” she said, gesturing at the tree. “It’s like they heard you were home and decided to show off. ‘Look at us, we’re apples, we’re very impressive, please carry us.’”
“I feel used.”
“You’re a vessel for fruit. Embrace it.” She drifted a little higher, reaching for another cluster, her dress pulling across her breasts, and I looked away and found absolutely nowhere safe to rest my eyes because the entire orchard was Sabrina-shaped this morning, all long limbs and knowing smiles and the energy of someone who was testing boundaries she hadn’t fully defined yet.
We worked. She handed down baskets, I carried them to the house, and with each trip the questions got sharper, wrapped in teasing but carrying an edge I hadn’t heard from her before.
“So,” she said during my fourth return, hovering beside a branch with apples in both hands. “You and Gabriella seem… close today.”
“Do we?”
“Mm. Very. The kind of close that involves prolonged eye contact and the occasional touching of hands that lasts approximately three seconds longer than friendly hand-touching typically lasts. I’m taking notes. For science.”
I hefted another basket. “Science should mind its business.”
“Science is very nosy.”
I carried the basket away before she could continue, and when I returned she was watching me with an expression that suggested science had several more pages of notes and no intention of stopping.
The chicken coops were my last stop. Gabriella was there, kneeling in the dirt beside the vegetable rows that ran along the coop’s eastern wall, a trowel in one hand, a cluster of uprooted weeds in the other.
She looked up when she heard my footsteps, and the smile that spread across her face was the kind that rearranged the light in the yard.
“There he is,” she said. “The man of many talents. How many apples did you carry?”
“Enough to feed a small army. Or one very enthusiastic girl with a competitive streak.”
She laughed, and the sound did something to my chest that felt dangerously close to affection, which was ridiculous because affection was the tamest thing I’d felt for her in the past twenty-four hours and my body apparently had a hierarchy of responses that started at “affection” and ended somewhere in the vicinity of “inappropriate and enthusiastic.”
She stood, brushing dirt from her knees, and reached for the watering can beside the coop. Her hand found mine instead, fingers interlacing briefly, and then she was passing me a tool I hadn’t asked for.
“You’re sweaty,” she observed, her eyes traveling down my chest to where my shirt clung to my stomach. “It’s a good look. Very… agricultural.”
“Thank you. I cultivate it carefully.”
She laughed again, and when she bent to retrieve a coil of fencing wire her dress rode up her thighs just enough that I could see the pale skin above her knee, and my brain, the helpful organ, immediately supplied the memory of those thighs wrapped around my hips yesterday beside the lake, and my cock, which had been behaving itself with admirable restraint for approximately forty-five minutes, decided this was the moment to resume its previous programming.
I turned away, picked up a feed sack that didn’t need moving, and carried it to the other side of the coop with more purpose than the task warranted.
Gabriella followed.
“Gabriel,” she said, her voice low, close to my ear. She was beside me suddenly, her body angled toward mine behind the relative privacy of the coop wall. “I can still feel you. From yesterday. When I move a certain way. It’s… distracting.”
The words landed like a physical thing, heat spreading through my chest and settling lower, and I turned to her and found her eyes dark and hungry.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Angelina at the water pump, her hand on the handle, her gaze fixed on us with the focus of a woman who had just connected several dots.
And beyond her, near the orchard’s edge, Sabrina had landed beneath the tree and was ostensibly examining an apple with the concentration of someone using fruit as camouflage for surveillance.
We broke apart. Gabriella returned to her weeding, and I carried another sack of feed to a location that conveniently required me to face away from everyone for several minutes.
The water break came when the sun was high enough that shade became not a luxury but a necessity.
We gathered under the big oak at the yard’s center, the same tree that had been providing this service for longer than any of us had been alive.
Angelina passed the water jug, cool and heavy, and we drank in turns.
Sabrina dropped onto the grass beside me.
Her thigh pressed against mine, her wing extending loosely behind my back, the feathers brushing my shoulder with each small adjustment.
She leaned into my side, her head coming to rest against my shoulder, and the casual intimacy of it felt both familiar and entirely new.
“Long morning,” she murmured.
“Productive, though.”