24. Brooks
Brooks
“Ember is sparkly.
Daddy needs sparkly.”
— Sophie
The steering wheel catches a fraction of an inch to the left when I pull out of the hardware store parking lot.
Beside me, the passenger seat is empty.
Two dog-eared phone books and a scratchy wool blanket sit where Sophie usually claims her throne. She’s been staying at Nana’s for the last few days while I finished the ridge washout cleanup, hauling mud and clearing debris.
It’s been a brutal three-day slog, but the nights were a different kind of haze.
The second the sun dipped low enough to hide me in the shadows, I was already heading for Ember’s house.
We haven’t even had sex yet, but these past few nights of heat, friction, and the slow, deliberate work of learning her body have been an agonizing kind of discipline. The kind that feels less like restraint and more like punishment I keep choosing.
She makes it very clear what she wants. She always has. And it takes everything in me not to give in all at once, to stop thinking and just take what she’s offering.
Instead, I find myself fixated on the details. The small reactions. The places she sharpens under my hands, the ones she softens into without realizing it. Like if I pay close enough attention, I can map her properly—like understanding her might somehow make this manageable.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it makes it worse.
Because now I’m walking through the world with it under my skin, something live and insistent, like a current I can’t turn off no matter how still I stand.
I shift the truck into third, the gear stick shaking against my palm before it drops into place with a heavy, familiar notch.
Earlier this week, Sophie had been rambling about snails, insisting that Ember told her they had financial potential and a five-year guarantee from Manhattan.
A short, dry laugh leaves my nose before I can stop it.
“Yeah. Well. Manhattan’s got a lot of things we don’t,” I mutter to the empty cab.
Like a woman who walks into a room and somehow makes every damn thing brighter.
I tighten my grip on the wheel immediately, annoyed at myself.
Jesus Christ.
I’m talking about her like I’m sixteen. But then again, sixteen-year-old me never had Ember standing in my kitchen in tiny shorts, arguing about goat feed while looking at me like she wanted to climb me like a tree.
So maybe this is worse.
My traitorous brain is currently busy picturing Ember’s mouth.
Specifically, the way she tastes. The way she sounds when she finally breaks—the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
My cock twitches, heavy and demanding against my denim. It’s a constant, dull ache that’s only getting worse.
I want her legs wrapped around me, I want to feel her gasping against my chest, and I want to hear her say my name when I finally slide inside her.
My phone vibrates in the cup holder.
Ember: The goat shed looks significantly less like a dumpster fire now. Don’t get used to the professionalism.
I let out a breath, my thumb hovering over the screen.
I shouldn’t reply.
Me: Professionalism isn’t usually your style anyway. You doing okay?
She replies almost instantly.
Ember: I’m currently covered in more paint than the shed is. I think I’m officially a part of the woodwork now. Still coming by later?
The later hangs in the air like a promise. I don’t type Yes. I don’t type I can’t wait. I just lock the screen, but my pulse is racing.
Nana’s place sits at the very end—a low-slung, white-painted farmhouse with a green tin roof that’s turned the color of river moss. The house feels like it’s sinking half an inch into the loam every decade, settling itself deep into the earth.
When the engine dies, the silence of the woods rushes back. Before I can even unlatch my door, the screen door gives that double-clack screech of a rusty spring.
Nana steps out onto the porch, her old blue cardigan pinned at the throat with a silver brooch. She’s small—shrinking, really—but she carries herself with that iron-backed posture that used to terrify the town’s troublemakers.
From around the corner of the woodpile, Sophie comes scrambling out, her pink sneakers crunching through the gravel, holding her green plastic bucket like it’s the Holy Grail.
“Don’t you dare bring that mud onto my linoleum, Sophie Louise,” Nana calls out, her voice crisp and clear across the yard. “I just spent an hour with the wet mop, and my hips aren’t up for another round with the Pine-Sol.”
“They’re sophisticated, Nana!” Sophie shouts, skidding to a halt. “They have a portfolio!”
Nana peers over the top of her apron, eyes narrowing. “A portfolio, is it? Did that city girl teach you that word, or have you been listening to the radio again?”
“Ember said it,” Sophie says proudly, pivoting to show me the bucket.
I let out a heavy breath, my boots hitting the dirt with a dull thud. “Afternoon, Nana.”
“It’s four in the afternoon, Brooks,” she says, her eyes shifting over Sophie’s head to pin me. “And you look like something the cat dragged out of the culvert. Did you sleep after that ridge fire, or did you just stare at the pressure gauges until your eyes turned red?”
“I slept,” I lie. “Steering was acting up.”
“The truck always has a hitch when you’re avoiding something,” she says, the sharpness in her tone softening into that knowing, teasing weight. She reaches out, her wrinkled hand catching Sophie by the shoulder.
“Go on around to the rain barrel, Soph. There’s some wilted chard in the compost bin. If those snails eat my geraniums, I’m turning them into bait.”
“They only eat the weeds,” Sophie mutters, but she’s already moving, pigtails swinging.
Once Sophie is gone, Nana turns her full attention to me.
She steps out onto the porch, her house shoes scuffing the boards. She reaches up, her fingers cool and firm as she catches my chin, turning my face to the light to examine me.
“Your pops had that same look when the forest burnt in sixty-eight,” she says, her thumb brushing my jaw.
“Thought if he didn’t stay awake to watch the embers, the whole valley would dissolve into smoke.
You’ve got his nose, Brooks, but you don’t have to take his stubbornness wholesale. It’s a terrible habit.”
“The state crew needed the truck cleared, Nana,” I say. “If the pressure had dropped while they were in the bog—”
“But it didn’t,” she interrupts. “Davis stopped by. Said he saw you down at the bakery. Said the girl was with Sophie.”
My jaw goes rigid.
Davis is my right hand, but he has the biggest mouth in the county. And if he’s talking about Ember, he’s thinking about her, too. And I don’t like it.
“Davis talks too much.”
“Davis talks the right amount for a man who knows I like the truth.” She turns back toward the house. “Come inside. I’ve got tea.”
The house smells like it has since I was six—yeast, dried lavender, and the faint, sugary tang of sun-brewed tea. Nana moves around the counter, watching my reflection in the microwave window.
“Davis says she’s a good worker,” Nana says, setting the glass down with a sharp clink. “Says she doesn’t complain about the flour, and she doesn’t use too much sugar in the icing.”
“She’s efficient,” I say, taking a swallow. It’s ice-cold and syrupy sweet, cutting through the dry taste of ash that’s been in my throat all day.
“Efficient,” Nana repeats. She sits opposite me. “That’s a word for a tractor, Brooks. Not for a girl who sings songs to your daughter.”
I look down at the dark rings the glass is leaving on the oilcloth.
“She’s from Manhattan, Nana,” I say. “She’s here for the season. She’ll be on her way before the first frost.”
Nana lets out a sound that’s half snort, half sigh. “Is that what she told you, or is that the story you’re telling yourself?”
“Nana—”
“I watched your grandfather try to outrun a good thing for three years because he thought his lot wasn’t big enough.” She leans forward, elbows on the table. “She’s painting the shed, Brooks. A person doesn’t buy five gallons of paint if they’re planning to leave.”
I don’t answer. I can’t.
Because the truth is, every time she’s close enough that I can hear her breathing, or see the way she’s already halfway into a moment like she belongs there, something in me recalibrates without permission.
Like the world briefly stops assuming she’s temporary.
For a second, everything feels simple. Like she’s already part of the rhythm of the house, part of the spaces I move through without thinking. Like she didn’t arrive—like she was always just… here.
And then my mind catches up.
Years of learning how quickly things can disappear settle back into my chest. Not dramatic. Just heavy. Familiar. Unforgiving.
I can’t do this to Sophie, and frankly, I can’t do this to myself either.
“She doesn’t know the valley,” I say softly. “She doesn’t know what it looks like when the gap closes in November and the snow stays in the ditches until May.”
“Then you show her,” Nana says, her voice dropping its teasing edge. “You don’t tell her about the winter like it’s a threat. You just build the woodpile high enough that she doesn’t even feel the draft.”
From outside, the screen door clacks. Sophie bursts into the kitchen, green bucket replaced by a massive, yellowed zucchini.
“Look what I found!” she pants, hoisting the vegetable like a trophy. “Nana, it’s giant. It looks like a whale.”
Nana’s face dissolves into a soft, wrinkled grin that makes her look eighty years younger. “Good heavens, Sophie. That thing’s big enough to use for a fence post.”
“Can we make zucchini muffins with it?” Sophie asks, her eyes fixed on her grandmother. “Ember likes muffins.”
Nana looks across the table at me, one white eyebrow lifting in a slow, deliberate challenge.
“Well now,” she says, her voice humming with hidden meaning. “We’ll have to see if your father has enough gas in that old truck to drive down to the bakery later. He’s always been very particular about his schedule, you know.”
I look at the two of them—the stubborn set of Sophie’s jaw and the dry, knowing spark in Nana’s eyes.
“We’ve got the gas,” I say as I reach over to take the giant zucchini from Sophie’s hands. I focus on the vegetable, refusing to look Nana in the eye. “But I’m not driving all the way down there just to drop off a snack.”
Nana lets out a soft, knowing laugh.
She nudges her teacup toward me and leans back, her expression softening. “You’re a stubborn man, Brooks Lawson. And that’s a damn shame, because stubbornness is a lonely life.”
I’ve always known that. What I didn’t account for was how quickly loneliness starts to feel safer than the alternative.