Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Julian
“There’s a place in Maine that Birdie is always talking about,” Wyn says as a piece of hair falls from the way she’s tucked it behind her shoulders.
Without thinking, I push it away from her face, tucking it behind her ear as she keeps talking.
She looks so damn beautiful like this—hair messy and cheeks pinked.
Her vest is only buttoned in one place, and her feet are bare as she sits on the counter in front of me.
I did that to her, made her wild and come undone.
Of all the things I’ve done in my life, watching her talk to me so comfortably, and the way she makes me feel just by being close to her, might be at the top.
“She went when she was younger,” she carries on. “Found a lighthouse attached to a beautiful bed-and-breakfast and said it was the most incredible winter solstice of her life. I’ve always wanted to see it,” Wyn says as she drizzles honey over the almost-stale bread.
“You never went?” I ask as she holds up the bite of sticky bread and cheese to my mouth.
She shakes her head. “I haven’t.”
I take a bite, and then she licks her finger before assembling another one. “We should go,” I say mid-chew. Fuck, that’s good.
“To Maine?” she asks with a little laugh.
I lean forward and bite the piece she’s just put together. “Sure. Anywhere.” I look at her staring back at me, surprised I would suggest it. “I’d go anywhere you want, Crowne.” Leaning in closer, I nip at her lip. “Thought that was clear by now.”
She looks down at my lips and runs her thumb along my chin and the scruff of my beard. “It sure is starting to be.”
“Can I have a bite of that?” I ask, glancing at the cake she pulled from the fridge.
She nods, smiling, and digs the fork next to her into the side of the layered cake and then holds it up for me to bite.
When the frosting hits my tongue, I almost hum. “Why is that so good?” I mumble.
“All my mom. She can make just about any dessert the most delicious thing you’ve ever tasted. Her superpower.”
“I can’t cook. Or bake, but I can make a decent cup of coffee and order one helluva pizza,” I say, wiping up the honey that dripped on my shirt.
“You should probably just lose the shirt,” she whispers, scrunching up her nose.
I grab the bottom of it and lift it up and over my head, tossing it off to the side.
When I look back at her, she’s paused licking along the side of her thumb. “That was rather easy.”
I keep my eyes on hers when I take a step back and yank my belt out of the loops of my jeans. Smirking, I toss it to the floor and then unbutton my pants. “I wildly misjudged how much you would enjoy me doing this,” I say teasingly.
She smiles. “You’re very nice to watch. Might be one of my favorite things.”
I unbutton and then lower the zipper, taking my pants off.
Kicking them to the side, I pull off my socks and then fix my dick so it’s tucked up and into the waistband of my boxer briefs.
“That’s better,” I tell her as I move back to where she’s perched, nudging myself between her legs so I can be close to her again.
“Hmm, for now.” She wiggles her eyebrows. She holds up a piece of apple dipped in honey like it’s a religious offering. I open my mouth and accept it, chewing it as she does the same.
“I like these,” she says, touching along the base of my neck and down between my shoulder blades. “I thought this was beautiful when I saw the reflection of it in the bathroom.” She bites her lip, I imagine, recalling those moments in that bathroom in Montana.
“I would sit in my dad’s design studio and watch him draft out designs from stones he wanted to repurpose. I was maybe seven or eight, and I didn’t know it then, but that was how he and my grandfather were paid for their cleaning expertise—with jewelry.”
“So then your origin story wasn’t jewelry, it was the cleaning business?” she asks.
“Their origin story. Mine started with jewelry,” I say, watching her closely as she continues drawing her fingers over the dark triangular shapes.
“Turn, let me see the rest of these,” she says as her fingertips glide across my skin. I can’t remember a time in my entire life when I’ve been touched like this, studied, and appreciated. It feels fucking good.
As I turn my back to her and lean my ass against the counter, she traces along the pattern of paper airplane shapes between my shoulder blades.
“Keep talking,” she says softly, and I don’t know if I’ll ever understand what it is about her that makes it easy, but I want to tell her all of it.
My eyes close as she keeps moving her fingers, tracing each paper plane.
“Jewelry made for less curious transactions. It was easy to transfer, pawn, and resell. I didn’t know any of that growing up, but the cleaning business was the first business.
Making jewelry was the cover, and for my dad, the hobby.
” Looking down, I drag my finger across my palm the same way she’s moving hers across my back.
“He would draft out tons of rings and pendant designs on tracing paper. I remember thinking it was really basic stuff, but my dad liked to think through things before just starting. He always had a plan. The Pacific Northwest during the summers, in a beach town, turned busy quickly, but he wanted me to enjoy time off and not be in camps. I think he just liked spending time with me when he could, so I hung out around his workspace. Spending time with him was never a bad thing to me.” I pause, thinking about him like that, so young and alone raising a kid on his own.
“I started making airplanes with his discarded designs. And he’d take breaks and make them with me.
We got pretty good at all the different folds there were.
” I laugh to myself, before adding, “Of all the things we’d done together over the years, something as small and basic as making airplanes on the floor with him ended up being a core memory for me. ”
She leans forward and presses her lips along my upper back, likely kissing one of the paper airplanes.
“It’s always those moments that stick with you for the long haul,” she says quietly, almost as if she’s lost in her thoughts.
As she wraps her arms around me, legs too, I cover her hands with mine while she holds me from behind.
“For me, it’s cakes with my mom. My sisters and I would sit in the kitchen and watch her stress-bake.
She’s not the stand-still-and-reflect-on-her-feelings kind of woman.
” She smiles against me; I can feel her lips pull as she keeps a hold on me.
“I can relate a bit to that,” I say, turning slowly to face her.
She looks at me, weighing what else she might want to say.
“My mom is,” —she breathes out—“complicated, a bit selfish, maybe even an asshole at the core of it.” She threads her fingers into the hair at my nape as she says, “She would repeat shit that famous people said, or quote songs like they were snippets of wisdom that she’d come up with on her own.
Out of all the ones she’s droned on about over the years, it’s the one that Dolly Parton said that lingered loudest for me. ”
“Which one is that?” I ask.
“Find out who you are. And then do it on purpose,” she says with more of a twangy accent than what she typically has.
“She would say prolific things like that and then look disappointed when I was twenty-three and starting a thesis on the chemical composition and complexity of whiskey. We didn’t have the kind of relationship that you and your dad had.
” She lets out an exhale. “I don’t think she knew how to connect with me. ”
I turn around as she drapes her arms around me. I run my hands along her bare thighs. The Whispering Fool T-shirt she’s wearing has the arms cut off and barely reaches past her ass, and it’s the sexiest thing I’ve seen her in. Freshly fucked and not giving a shit looks good on her.
“I didn’t want the things she was always stressed out about.
When I was young, the goal was never to snag a husband and kids.
Or run a loud-ass bar. I wanted the things that made me feel good—a really incredible garden like Birdie’s.
” She looks up like she’s thinking through a list. She smiles when she adds, “Maybe a dog, and to try making something I could be proud of, something as complicated as whiskey, like my dad’s side of the family. ”
“Is it any better now?” I ask, cuffing a piece of hair away from her face. “Now that you know a little more about her and your grandmother?”
She swallows, her demeanor changing to something more rooted and darker.
“I was . . .” she pauses, “embarrassed by all the rumors that circulated about Lu Crowne. Embarrassed of her, for her. And I was her daughter.” She puffs out her cheeks and blows out a breath.
“God, I spent almost my entire graduate program with the single motivation to show everyone how much I wasn’t like her and the rest of my family. ”
“And now?” I ask as she plays with the ends of my hair.
“I thought I might never see them again, her again, and all I could think was that she never knew how wrong I was. That when it mattered, how much I wish I was more like her. How she would have never allowed—” She cuts herself off and smiles, like she just realized something.
“All of the rumors that swirled about her, turned out to be more true than not, and I don’t know what to do with that. ”
A heavy breath leaves her as I trace along her cheek.
When her eyes finally shift to look at mine she says, “My dad wasn’t a good man.
A part of me is too nervous to know if that’s where it all started.
If he was the reason—” She stares at the center of my chest. “If he hurt her enough to make it okay and ignore her moral code.”