Chapter 4
four
Ross
She doesn't answer when I knock.
Lights on. Her truck in the driveway. I try the door.
It opens.
She's face-down on her desk, arms folded under her head, laptop open beside her. Three empty coffee mugs in a line. Her notes spread across every inch of the desk — printed maps, handwritten data, index cards pinned in clusters.
I step back and look at the desk. She's been working straight through — the coffee mugs, the notes, the map on the wall with new pins up near the north ridge. She's been driving out to record data and coming home and working through the night.
I fill a glass of water and put it on the desk. Then I go to the kitchen. There's not much — the week's groceries are running low. Eggs, bread, half a block of cheese. I make eggs and toast and bring the plate to the desk.
The smell wakes her.
She sits up slowly, hair flattened on one side, eyes not quite tracking.
"I made food," I say.
She looks at the plate. At me. At the plate.
"What time is it?”
"Seven-fifteen."
She processes this. "I need to—"
"Eat first."
"Ross."
"Celeste." I don't raise my voice. "Eat."
She eats. I sit across from her and drink the coffee she made sometime in the night, now hours old. Color comes back into her face by degrees.
"I found something," she says between bites.
"Up near the creek. There's a ridge that would work as a relay point for the whole northern part of the valley.
If the coverage math holds up it changes the entire picture of what's possible up here.
" She's waking up fully now, animation coming back.
"I've been trying to model it but I need more field data and I was going to go up there today. "
"On a mountain road with no sleep."
She opens her mouth, then sets the fork down.
Looks at the notes spread across her desk — months of work, all of it hers, no one else's fingerprints on any of it.
I understand that this matters to her in a way that goes beyond professional pride.
She built this from nothing, after someone took everything.
Of course she's driving herself past the edge of reasonable.
"Strength isn't doing it all alone," I hear myself say. "I learned that on the rigs. You can push through a lot of things. You can't push through a car accident on a logging road."
She's quiet.
"Lie down," I say. "A few hours. I'll be here."
She looks like she's going to argue. Then, she shrugs.
She goes to the couch. I hear her kick off her shoes. Then quiet.
I pull a chair to her desk and look at what's spread across it. Field notes, speed test data, hand-drawn topography sketches. The map on the wall with its colored pins — yellow for dead zones, blue for marginal, green for workable signal. Mostly yellow.
I find a legal pad and leave her a note about three things I noticed in her northern ridge calculations that might affect the relay math. I don't touch her notes. I don't reorganize anything. I just leave the note where she'll see it.
Then I start on the wiring.
I'm pulling cable through the living room wall when I hear her moving about an hour and a half later. She comes to the doorway, hair down now, looking like a person who's remembered what sleep is for.
"You left notes," she says. She reads them. I keep working. After a minute she comes and stands in the doorway.
"The relay height calculation. You're right, I was working from the wrong contour line." She's thinking aloud. "That actually makes the northern coverage better, not worse."
"Okay."
She looks at me. "How did you catch that?"
"Spent a lot of years looking at topography maps on the rigs. Trying to figure out signal propagation in rough terrain." I feed the cable through to the next junction. "Different context. Same geometry."
She's quiet for a moment. Then she crosses the room and crouches down to where I'm working, close enough that I can smell her shampoo.
"I don't know how to let people help," she says. "I'm aware that this is a problem."
"I know." I turn to look at her. We're very close — closer than the radiator gap, close enough that I can see the particular dark of her eyes, and I'm thinking about the kitchen three nights ago, my thumb on her cheekbone, the way she went completely still. "I'm not great at it either."
The kiss is hers — she starts it, both hands on my face, and it's not tentative.
I drop the cable pull. My hands go to her waist and she makes a sound against my mouth that I feel more than hear, and I pull her in and she comes willingly and the living room floor is not a comfortable place to kneel but I am not thinking about that.
When she pulls back we're both very still.
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she leans in and kisses me again, slower this time, less urgency and more intention, and I bring one hand up to her jaw and she makes a sound against my mouth that does something specific to my ability to think clearly.
"Your relay calculation," I say, when we break apart. "You should go up to Harrow Creek tomorrow. I'll drive."
She blinks. "You'll drive."
"You know where the data points are. I know the road." I hold her gaze. "Split the work."
She looks at me for another moment. Then she nods, once, the way she does when she's decided something.
"Okay," she says. "Yes."
She leads me to the bedroom, looking at me the way she looks at something she's been thinking about for a long time and is finally getting her hands on.
"You're not a quiet person," she says. "In general. Are you?"
"No."
She laughs and comes up on her toes to kiss me. Her hands find my collar, and I pull her in.
She gets my shirt off, and I get hers. We're on the bed. Her hands are on me, and I stop thinking in complete sentences.
She's warm. That's the first thing. Warm, her hands everywhere. When I get my mouth on her neck, she makes a sound that does something specific to my ability to pace this the way I intended.
I get her out of the rest of her clothes and sit back and look at her. She lets me. She doesn't cover herself or rush me along. She just looks back, chin up, like she's waiting to see what I do with the information.
I take my time.
I get my mouth on her collarbone, her shoulder, the soft skin below her ear that made her gasp the first time.
Makes her gasp again now. I work down. Her breasts fit my hands.
She arches into it when I get my mouth on her nipple and says yes, her fingers pushing into my hair.
I suck, and she tightens her grip. Her hips shift underneath me, restless, looking for friction she's not getting yet.
I move to the other side. She makes a low frustrated sound.
"Ross."
I keep going.
Her stomach tightens under my mouth when I move down. Her breath changes, shorter and faster. I drag it out, mouth at her hip, the soft inside of her thigh, deliberately not where she wants me yet. Her thighs fall open.
"Please." Not patient anymore.
I get my mouth on her. She grabs the sheets with both hands.
She's wet and she tastes good. I take my time, tongue flat and slow at first, learning what makes her hips roll and what makes her thighs clamp around my head.
I find the spot that makes her back come off the bed and I stay there, steady, relentless, two fingers pushing inside her while I work her clit.
She rides my hand and stops saying anything coherent at all.
"Don't stop," she manages. "Right there, I'm going to—"
I don't stop.
She comes with her thighs locked around my head, my name on her lips, her hands in my hair pulling hard enough to sting. I work her through it until she's shaking and oversensitive and dragging at my shoulders.
"Up here," she says, breathless. "Now. I need you now."
I kiss my way back up her body. She makes an impatient sound and gets her hand around my cock and strokes. My breath goes out of me hard. She's still shaking from coming and she's doing that. I get my fingers back inside her. She's tight and soaked and clenches around me immediately.
"There," she breathes. "Don't stop."
I work her open, slow, two fingers curling until she's rolling her hips against my hand. Her voice drops lower and rougher with every stroke. She gets close again fast, thighs shaking, hand still working my cock. I let her get right to the edge before I pull my fingers out.
She makes a sound that is almost outraged.
"Now," she says. "Ross. Right now."
I push inside her.
She goes completely quiet. Three full seconds, the longest she's been quiet since I met her. Then she exhales hard, wraps her legs around me, pulls me deeper. I groan into her neck because she's tight and warm.
I set a pace. She matches it immediately, hips lifting to meet mine, hands at my back pulling me deeper.
I get my arm under her hips and change the angle.
She digs her nails into my shoulders and says yes, exactly like that.
I give her exactly like that, hard and steady, until the headboard is hitting the wall and she's stopped being able to form words.
She gets loud. I find out I like that. Every sound she makes chips away at my ability to hold back. I stop trying. I just fuck her, deep and hard. She takes all of it and asks for more.
"Harder," she says.
I go harder.
"Don't stop. Right there, don't, ah!"
I don't stop. I get my thumb on her clit. She cries out and clenches around me, and I feel it everywhere.
"Good," she breathes, ragged. "I want to hear you."
I'm not quiet. Can't be. Not with her wrapped around me, making those sounds. Not with how good she feels. Not with the way she keeps pulling me deeper like she can't get enough. I groan into her neck. She drags her nails down my back and says yes, like that, come on.
She comes hard, her whole body arching up, both hands fisted in my hair, clenching tight around my cock while I keep moving. I follow right after, driving deep, her name in my mouth, her hands holding on hard while I shudder against her until there's nothing left.
We stay like that. My weight on her. Both of us wrecked.
After, she puts her head on my shoulder. Her hand settles flat on my chest. Her fingertips adjust once, then go still.
I look at the ceiling. Outside, the long summer evening has finally gone dark.
"Your pulse is slower than I'd expect," she says eventually.
"I work with my hands for a living."
"Mm." A pause. "The scar on your forearm. The burn."
"Rig accident. The year before Pete."
She takes that in. Her fingers stay where they are, steady. "Does it hurt still?"
"No."
"Okay." She settles against me like that's all she needed to know.