Chapter 7
seven
Sloane
I took my time to think about the offer, but no matter how I tried to look at the pros, all I could think of was leaving Everett. I didn’t go back to the farm the next morning, and I felt it’s absence like a hole in my chest.
I wait two days before calling Ian back.
He picks up on the second ring, which tells me he's been waiting, which tells me he thinks I'm going to say yes. I know this because I've been on his side of calls like this — the anticipated yes, the logical yes, the yes that makes sense to everyone looking at the situation from outside it.
"I've thought about it," I tell him. "I'm going to pass."
A pause. "Sloane. This is a significant opportunity."
"I know what it is."
"The location?"
"The location is the primary factor," I say. "I appreciate the consideration. I mean that."
He tries twice more, gently. I hold my position. We hang up on good terms because Ian is a reasonable person and because I'm not wavering, and there's nothing to negotiate with a person who isn't wavering.
I sit with the phone in my lap.
Outside the hotel window Silver Ridge is doing what it does on a Sunday morning — slow and unhurried, the mountains in the background, a couple walking a dog on Main Street below. Maple left a fresh jar of wildflowers in the room yesterday. The stems are in the water and the blooms are open.
I know what I'm doing. The same impulse that made me follow a man's truck down a gravel road for a rabbit. My impulses have better judgment than my plans did. I'm working on trusting that.
I get dressed and drive out past the second ridge.
Everett is in the garden. He's staking the late tomatoes and he looks up when my car comes down the drive, and his expression does what it always does: registers, waits.
I get out of the car and walk to the garden gate and he watches me come.
"I turned down the job," I say.
"Sloane—"
"Not for you." I want to be clear about this because he needs to hear it clearly and I need to say it clearly.
"For me. Because I'm not the same person who drove up here four weeks ago and the person I am now doesn't want to go back.
" I look at him. "You are a very significant factor. But you're not the reason."
The morning is quiet around us. The bees are working the borage. Burl is on the porch.
"What is the reason?" he says.
"The beans," I say. "And the fact that I cried after you touched me and felt better.
And the rabbit is about to be released and I want to be here for that.
And the fact that your cat likes me and I talked to Burl for forty minutes about basil and I wasn't embarrassed about it at all, and that's new, and I don't want to lose it.
" I pause, realizing I was rambling. "And you. In all of that, also you."
He opens the garden gate.
We work through the morning and we don't talk about it much more, but it feels good. I pull weeds in the east bed and he stakes tomatoes and at some point his hand finds the back of my neck, briefly, as he passes behind me, and that's everything. That's the whole conversation.
At noon he releases the rabbit.
The rabbit looked great. The splint off, the leg healed clean, the rabbit getting restless in the crate. He carries the box to the east field, the long grass at the fence line where he found her, and crouches down and opens the front panel.
She doesn't move for a moment. Sits in the opening and looks at the field with her nose going.
Then she's gone. A few hops at first, testing the leg, and then faster, and then she disappears into the long grass and the field closes behind her like she was never there.
I'm crying. I don't do anything about it because I'm past pretending tears are something to manage. I just stand in the field and cry about a rabbit and Everett stands beside me and doesn't say she's fine, she's just a rabbit, which is the only thing you can say that matters.
"She went fast," I say, when I can. "The leg's completely healed." I look at the grass where she disappeared. "I'm going to be honest with you. I'm crying about more than the rabbit."
"I know," he says.
He takes my hand and we stand in the field for a while.
That evening the light in the farmhouse goes gold.
That's the only word for it — gold, the specific late-July evening gold that comes through west-facing windows and turns everything warm and still.
I'm in the kitchen and Everett comes in from checking the hives and the light is doing that thing and I look at him in it — all of him, the same way I let myself look in the early days before I knew I was allowed — and something in me has been patient for too long.
I cross the kitchen.
He sees me coming and goes still, hands at his sides, watching my face.
I reach up and put both hands on his jaw and kiss him.
He makes a low sound and his hands come to my waist and then immediately pull me in closer, and I'm already working his shirt out from his jeans, and he says "Sloane," rough and low.
In the bedroom, I take my time with him the way he took his time with me.
I get him on his back on the duvet and I pull off my shirt and unclasp my bra myself and toss it and enjoy the way his jaw locks watching me do it.
His hands come up and I let them. I get his shirt off and his jeans and then I sit back on my heels and just look at him in the gold light and he looks back and neither of us says anything.
"Your turn to hold still," I say.
His chest moves on an exhale. "Sloane."
"I know." I lean down and drag my mouth down his throat, his chest, following the line of his abs, and he goes rigid under me, hands gripping the duvet.
I follow the trail of dark hair down his stomach and wrap my hand around his cock and stroke him slowly and he makes a sound that goes straight through me.
I take him in my mouth and his whole body arches up and his hand comes into my hair, not pushing, just holding on, and I work him slowly and thoroughly with my tongue until he's breathing through his teeth and saying my name with a degree of desperation I find extremely satisfying.
"Come here," he says, rough.
I rise up on my knees above him and guide him to my entrance and sink down, slow, taking all of him, and the sound he makes me even wetter. I stay there a moment just feeling the fullness of him inside me.
He looks at me. His eyes are dark and undone and completely present, all that careful steadiness fractured, and I start to move.
I set the pace I want: deep, rolling, my hands flat on his chest for leverage. This time, he lets me drive, his hands on my hips but not directing, just holding. His jaw is tight and his eyes are on my face and every time I rise and fall his grip tightens and loosens like a tide.
I'm watching him come apart and it's the best thing I've ever seen — this man who is so careful with everything, so deliberate, so in control of his world, completely at my mercy and choosing to be.
Everett gives me everything. His hips start to meet mine and I take it and I ride him harder and the headboard finds the wall again.
I feel every inch of him on every stroke — the thickness, the heat, the specific drag and fill that makes my breath come out ragged — and his hands grip my hips hard enough to leave marks and the sounds he's making are wrecked and low and entirely mine.
I am not thinking about anything on earth except the look on his face and his cock deep inside me and the gold light on the walls and this, exactly this.
I come first, sudden and total, clenching hard around him, his name out of my mouth before I've decided to say it. He follows immediately, both hands gripping my hips, his whole body going tight, and I feel him pulse inside me and I stay with him all the way through it.
I shudder and lie on his chest, listening to his heart slow down. The window is open. The farm is doing its evening things. Fig appears from nowhere and sits at the foot of the bed with her back to us, indifferent.
"Fig," I say.
She doesn't turn around. She's above this.
Everett's chest moves as he chuckles.
We're quiet for a long time. The gold light fades to something softer and the mountains go blue and Burl snores from the porch below the window, steady as a clock.
"Stay," Everett says.
Just that. One word, low and certain, with his arm around me and his heart under my palm.
"I already decided," I say.
He holds me closer. I close my eyes.
Outside, the farm settles into dark. The bees quiet, the hens put away, the east field silver in the last light. Somewhere in the long grass a rabbit is doing what healed things do. Living.
I know how that feels.