Chapter 6
Graham
Her hand is on my chest. I can feel it through my shirt, five fingers spread flat, and underneath them my heart is running faster than it should and she can feel it and I don’t care.
I’m done caring about what she can feel.
I’ve spent five months caring about what she can and can’t feel and the careful management of that distance has gotten me to this exact moment, standing in my kitchen with her knees at my hips and the rain on the roof and her face tilted up to mine, so the careful management can go to hell.
My hand is in her hair. I didn’t stop it this time. My fingers are in the hair I’ve been thinking about since July, the hair I tucked behind her ear on a porch while telling myself I wouldn’t do more, and it’s softer than I let myself imagine, which is more than I’ll ever admit.
“Graham,” she says. My name. Low and steady and waiting.
“I need to say something,” I say.
“If it’s a list of reasons why this is a bad idea, I’ve heard it.”
“It’s not.”
She waits. Her hand is still on my chest. My hand is still in her hair. The rain is doing its thing and the cabin is warm and I have never once in my life done anything without thinking it through first and I am thinking this through right now, in real time, with her face four inches from mine.
“You’re twenty-four,” I say. “I’m thirty-four.”
“I know how old you are.”
“Ten years.”
“I can do math, Graham. I have a finance degree.”
“I’m on your brother’s crew. Connor is my boss and my friend and he has no idea I’ve been thinking about his sister for all these months.”
“Connor doesn’t get a vote.”
“He’s going to have an opinion.”
“He can have an opinion. He doesn’t get a vote. This is my decision. Mine and yours. Not his.”
She says it with the same directness she says everything, and it lands the way everything she says lands: clean, sharp, no room for argument. I’ve been building a case for why this can’t happen, and she just dismantled the whole thing in four sentences without raising her voice.
“I’m not the kind of man who does things halfway,” I say. “If I kiss you, this isn’t a one-time thing. This isn’t the storm and the cabin and a night we don’t talk about. I don’t do that.”
“I know you don’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you bought a second mug.” She says it simply, like it’s obvious, like a mug in a cabinet is a declaration. And maybe it is. Maybe going to town and buying a mug because she was coming to my cabin is exactly the kind of declaration a man makes when he’s not willing to admit the bigger one.
“Because you remember how I take my coffee. Because you noticed I was holding a beer bottle by the neck in a bar five months ago and you crossed the room. Because you drove me home and told me things about myself that nobody’s ever noticed.
Because you stopped yourself on the porch when every part of you wanted to keep going.
A man who does things halfway doesn’t do any of that. ”
The cabin is quiet. The rain is loud. She’s looking at me with those warm brown eyes and she’s not afraid of this and she’s not pretending and she’s not twenty-four in the way I’ve been telling myself she’s twenty-four, as if the number means she doesn’t know what she wants.
She knows what she wants. She’s known since July.
She drove a thousand miles back to this mountain and sat at my kitchen table and told me the truth and she’s sitting here now with her hand on my heart telling me the age on my driver’s license doesn’t change what this is.
“Mel.”
“Graham.”
“I’m going to kiss you.”
“Finally.”
I kiss her.
Five months of not kissing her ends with my mouth on hers and my hand in her hair and her fingers gripping my shirt and the sound she makes when our lips meet, a small sound, quiet, the exhale of a woman who’s been holding her breath for a long time. I feel it in my chest. I feel it everywhere.
She feels like the warmth of a woman I’ve been wanting since a summer night when I put my arm around her and pretended she was mine. I’m not pretending now.
I kiss her slowly at first. I’m a man who measures twice and cuts once and I’m applying that to this, learning the shape of her mouth, the way she tilts her head, the way her hand slides from my chest to the back of my neck and pulls me closer.
Her fingers are in my hair and her legs part and I step between them and her thighs tighten against my hips and I stop being careful.
My hands find her waist. I pull her to the edge of the counter and she wraps her legs around me and the contact is full and sudden and I hear myself make a sound I didn’t plan, low in my throat, and she swallows it with her mouth.
Her hips press into mine and I grip her thighs and she gasps against my lips and the gasp undoes something in me that I’ve been holding together with precision and routine for a very long time.
“Tell me to stop,” I say against her mouth. Not because I want to stop. Because she should know she can.
“No.”
“Mel.”
“Graham, if you stop kissing me to make another list I will lose my mind.”
I laugh. Against her mouth, I laugh, and she smiles into the kiss and this, this is the thing I didn’t know I was missing: a woman who makes me laugh while I’m kissing her.
A woman who argues with me about bookkeeping and chainsaw maintenance and age gaps.
Who meets me in every conversation with the same sharp, direct, unafraid intelligence, and who kisses me back with the same energy she brings to everything else. Full commitment. No hesitation.
I lift her off the counter. Her legs tighten around me and her arms go around my neck and I carry her through the cabin toward the bedroom.
She’s kissing my jaw and my neck and the spot below my ear and her mouth is warm and I’m navigating a doorway with a woman wrapped around me, and I’ve never felt less careful and more certain of anything in my life.
I set her on the bed. She looks up at me and her hair is messy and her cheeks are flushed and her lips are swollen from kissing and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“You carried me.”
“You’re light.”
“I’m not. I’m a grown woman who eats pasta.”
“You’re light to me.”
She pulls me down by my shirt. I go, because I’d go anywhere she pulled me right now, and I cover her body with mine on the bed I’ve slept in alone for three years and the weight of me settles against the length of her and she arches up and the sound she makes is quiet and raw and real.
I take my time. I’ve waited five months. I can wait five more minutes to do this right.
I unbutton her flannel one button at a time.
She watches my hands, and I watch her watch them, and the looking is its own kind of intimacy.
The flannel opens. Underneath is the white t-shirt, thin, and I can see the outline of her bra through it and I pull the shirt up slowly and she lifts her arms and it’s gone and she’s under me in a white lace bra and it’s the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen because it’s hers and this is real.
I kiss her collarbone. Her shoulder. The curve of her neck where her pulse is racing. I can feel it under my lips, fast and steady, and I press my mouth there and stay because I want to know what her heartbeat feels like against my tongue.
“Graham.” My name, breathless.
I reach behind her and unclasp her bra with one hand, which is a skill I haven’t used in long enough that I’m mildly surprised it still works. She laughs when it comes free on the first try.
“Smooth,” she says.
“I have my moments.”
Then my mouth is on her breast and she stops laughing.
Her back arches and her hand goes into my hair, gripping, and the sound she makes is different now, deeper, and I take my time here too because I’ve imagined this, in the dark in this bed on this ridge, I’ve imagined what she sounds like when I put my mouth on her skin, and the reality is better than anything I built in my head.
I work my way down her body. Slow. She’s pulling at my shirt so I sit up and take it off and she looks at me with an expression I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.
Her eyes trace my chest, my shoulders, the line of my stomach, and she reaches out and puts her hand flat against my ribs.
The same way she put it on my chest in the kitchen, like she’s measuring something. Like she wants the data.
“Come here,” she says.
“I’m here.”
“Closer.”
I lean down and kiss her stomach. Her hip. The edge of her jeans where the denim meets skin. My fingers find the button of her jeans and I look up at her because I need to see her eyes when I ask.
“Yes,” she says, before I ask.
I pull her jeans down. Slowly. She lifts her hips and I slide them off and she’s lying on my bed in white lace underwear that matches the bra and her legs are long and her skin is warm and I press my mouth to the inside of her thigh and she shudders.
I pull her underwear down. She lets me. Her breath is shallow and fast and her hand finds my hair again and when I press my mouth between her legs her whole body tightens.
The sound she makes is a word that might be my name or might be something else and I don’t care which because my hands are on her thighs and my mouth is on her and she tastes like heaven and I am done being the careful man.
I learn her the way I learn timber. By feel.
By response. By the way she moves when I find the right angle, the right pressure, the right pace.
She’s vocal, which surprises me. Not loud, just present, and every sound she makes is data and I am cataloging all of it because I am Graham Brady and that is what I do.
Except instead of measuring board feet I am measuring the specific rhythm of her breathing and the way her thighs tighten around my head when I hit the spot that makes her back arch off the bed.
“Graham.” She’s pulling my hair. Not gently. “Graham, I need more.”