Chapter 16 #2
"Eighth grade. After my dad left. The jokes about him ran for a year, and then one October they stopped. All at once, like somebody flipped a breaker." I watch his face very carefully. "I never found out why. Was it you?"
He turns his glass by the stem, one slow rotation.
"You weren't supposed to know that," he says.
"Finn."
"It wasn't noble." He looks up, green eyes level in the amber light, and lets me see him.
"Freshman year I had exactly one kind of power, and it was the lunch table.
I found the girl running the worst of it out by the bus loop and told her the Gable family material was finished.
That if it kept going, high school was going to feel very long for her, and I had the whole cafeteria and nothing better to do.
" He holds my eyes. "Your dad leaving wasn't up for laughs.
Even I knew the difference. There's a line that shouldn't be crossed, so I made sure it wasn't."
The breaker. All these years I assumed a teacher stepped in, or the town simply got bored, but it was him. A freshman, spending the only currency he had on a girl he delighted in tormenting himself, and never once collecting on it.
"I cried with relief that October," I say, the words raw and honest. "In the girls' room by the gym. I could handle your teasing, but those girls making jokes and savaging me over my dad leaving was a lot. Thank you for putting a stop to it."
"Darcy. Don't thank me."
He reaches over, slow enough to be refused, and runs his knuckles along my cheekbone. The calluses I've wondered about since the auction are rough and warm and unbearably careful, and I do the only honest thing I've done all afternoon. I turn my face into his hand.
He kisses me slow, once, like he's confirming Thursday wasn't just a lapse in judgment.
Then I take a fist of that white shirt and pull him toward me and he comes off his hay bale and brings me up off mine.
The glasses get abandoned somewhere I lose track of, because his mouth is on mine and his hands span my waist like they've been waiting all week for the assignment.
My back finds the loft post. His body follows, warm and solid all the way down mine, and when I sigh into his mouth he makes that sound again, the low one, the one that has been following me around since Thursday, and it is so much better at the source.
"We're at a public event," I say against his mouth, not stopping.
"I own the barn." He drags his lips down my throat.
Heat pools low in my belly and keeps sliding lower, until the ache between my legs is impossible to pretend about.
His palm leaves my waist and slides up under the hem of my top, rough and warm on bare skin, ribs, higher, and stops at the band of my bra.
Asking. I arch into his hand, which is an entire answer, and he groans against my neck and covers my breast with his palm, thumb dragging over my nipple through thin cotton, and the pull of it wires straight down my body and my knees go soft.
He's hard against my hip. No apology in it, no hiding it, and knowing I do that to him makes me braver than I've been in years.
I get my hands under his shirt, caressing his flat stomach, feeling a raised line of scar along his ribs I want the story of later, and the muscles jump under my fingers like I'm the dangerous one here.
"Damn, Darcy." My name against my jaw, wrecked, a warning with nothing behind it.
"I know," I say, and kiss him again anyway.
His breathing has gone ragged. His hand at my breast has a fine tremor in it—this man who hangs off cliffs by his fingertips, shaking because of me—and I am about two heartbeats from suggesting we take this to the blanket when a voice floats up through the floorboards.
"Walter, look! I think this is the original barn."
We freeze. His mouth stops on my throat. Below us, footsteps, the scuff of sensible sandals on old planks, a second voice wondering aloud whether the barn is part of the tour.
"Shit," I breathe.
Finn lifts his head, and his face is pure delight, like I've just handed him a trophy he intends to keep.
He presses one finger to his lips. We stand flattened together against the post, his heart slamming against mine through two shirts, my top rucked up over his hand, both of us shaking with the effort of laughing silently while unsuspecting Walter and his wife debate barn architecture ten feet below us.
It takes them an eternity to wander back out toward the music.
"This," Finn whispers into my hair, "is now the single greatest thing that has ever happened in this barn."
"Better than the comics?"
"Don't make me choose." He kisses the tip of my nose. "Yes."
I laugh into his shoulder, helpless, and he holds me through it, and somewhere in there his hand slides regretfully out from under my top and sets the hem straight. We put ourselves back together in the amber light. I fix my hair. He fails to fix his. There is hay involved.
We climb down from the loft and sneakily exit the barn. At the tree line he stops. "Give me a head start, or I'm going to walk in there holding your hand in front of the entire town."
"That would be a statement."
"Don't tempt me. I love a good scandal." He steals one more quick kiss, then backs away toward the equipment sheds, empty bottle swinging, grinning like the theft went perfectly. "Enjoy the rest of the tour, Ms. Gable."
I give him his head start. I walk back alone between the rows, rehearsing composure, and by the time I reach the tent I am a calm, unremarkable woman who has been admiring the vines.
Annie is waiting with two glasses. She hands me one, looks at my hair, and picks out a piece of hay with two fingers, holding it up like evidence.
"Nice tour?" she asks.
"Mm-hm. It was... educational," I say, in my best teacher voice, and fool exactly no one.
Least of all myself.