3. Fran #2
I laugh, and his almost-smile becomes an actual smile, and something in my chest cracks open a little.
This is the man I see at night, the one who makes jokes, who lights up when he talks about his work, who looks at me like I’m something worth looking at.
This is the man I’ve been falling for in the dark, against my better judgment and every instinct for self-preservation I have.
“You really love this,” I say. “The wood. The work. All of it.”
“It makes sense.” He shrugs, self-conscious, almost embarrassed. “People don’t make sense. They say one thing and mean another, and you’re supposed to just… know. But wood is honest. It tells you what it needs, and if you listen, you can make something that’ll outlast both of you.”
“People don’t make sense.” I watch him. “Is that why you’re so quiet at dinner parties? Because you’re listening for something they’re not saying?”
His expression shifts, something complicated moving behind his eyes. “I’m quiet at dinner parties because I never know what I’m supposed to say. Everyone else seems to have a script, and I never got my copy.”
“There’s no script. People just pretend there is.”
“That’s worse.” He huffs out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “At least if there was a script, I could learn the lines.”
“You’re doing fine right now. Talking to me.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
He looks at my mouth, then back at my eyes, and the warmth has gone hot. Molten. My stomach flips so hard I feel it in my cunt.
“Because you’re you,” he says, simple, like that explains everything.
I let my gaze drop, slow and obvious, down the ink, the chest, the trail of dark hair disappearing into his jeans. “You keep talking about grain and joinery and working with it instead of against it, and I’m going to need you to know that my brain is not in a woodworking place anymore.”
He goes very still. “I - that’s not - I was talking about the maple.”
“I know you were.” I smile, mean and fond. “That’s what makes it filthy.”
“Fran.”
“Mm?”
“You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Talking?” I tip my head, and my voice comes out less steady than I mean it to. “Standing here. Looking at you like this. Yeah. A little on purpose.”
He swallows. I watch his throat work. Those big careful hands flex at his sides like he doesn’t know where to put them, and the air in the shop goes tight enough to hum.
“You should tell me to stop,” I say, softer. “If you want me to stop.”
He doesn’t tell me to stop.
He looks at me like he’s standing at the edge of something high, and then he asks, hoarse, hopeful, barely a sound-
“Can I-”
“Yes.”
He kisses me like he’s been waiting for permission his whole life.
Like he’s been holding back some enormous tide and I just kicked the dam in.
One of those huge hands spans my waist, the other slides into my hair, and he makes a noise into my mouth that I feel in my spine, hungry and startled and relieved all at once.
I fist my hands in his hair and kiss him back like four months of confusion and loneliness and wanting have been waiting behind my teeth.
He tastes like tea and something sweet. His chest is hot against the front of my dress.
When I scrape my nails down the nape of his neck he groans, actually groans, and the sound is so raw I laugh into his mouth, delighted, ruined.
“Fuck,” he mutters against my lips. “You - I’ve wanted-”
“I know. Me too. Shut up and do it.”
He does.
He lifts me onto the workbench like I weigh nothing, and the cold wood hits the backs of my thighs and I gasp, and then he’s standing between my knees, big as a door, hands already rucking my dress up my hips.
Sawdust grit under my ass. His mouth at my throat, open, wet, saying things into my skin like he can’t help it.
“You’re the best thing I’ve looked at all year.” His voice is wrecked. “All year, Fran. You walk into a room and I forget what I was doing. You walked in here and I-” He bites the hinge of my jaw, gentle, then not. “I thought about this. About you on this bench. I shouldn’t have. I did anyway.”
“Logan-”
“Tell me if I fuck this up.” His hands are shaking on my thighs. “I don’t - I’m not good at - just tell me.”
“You are not going to fuck this up.” I grab his face, make him look at me. His pupils are blown. There’s maple dust on his cheekbone. “You listen to wood, right? Listen to me the same way. I’ll be louder than the maple, I promise.”
Something in him settles. Focuses. The same look he gets when a joint is about to come together, attention so complete it’s almost obscene.
“Okay,” he says, and then the socially awkward genius who can’t survive a dinner conversation takes me apart like it’s the only thing he was ever good at.
His palms slide up the insides of my thighs, slow, mapping, and when he finds I’m not wearing anything under the dress he goes still again, a full-body flinch of want.
“Jesus Christ.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t bother.”
“You’re - fuck, you’re wet.” He says it like an accident, like he didn’t mean to say it out loud, and then, lower, filthy with wonder: “You’re soaked. Is that - for this? For me?”
“Don’t fish for compliments with your hand up my dress, Davis.”
He huffs a laugh against my mouth, shaky, and then those careful, ridiculous hands get to work.
He doesn’t fumble. That’s the thing that undoes me.
He touches me like he touches the maple, patient, precise, checking his pressure against every twitch and breath.
One thick finger traces my cunt, spreading me, and I am so wet it’s embarrassing, slick already coating his knuckles.
He watches my face while he does it. Learns me.
When he rubs a slow circle over my clit I jerk and swear and his mouth goes slack like he’s the one getting touched.
“There,” I tell him, wrecked already. “That’s - yes, like that, don’t you dare get polite now-”
“Not polite,” he mutters, and slides a finger into me.
I drop my head back. The shop lights smear.
He’s got a craftsman’s hands, calluses in the right places, and he fucks that finger into me slow and deep, then adds a second when I make a noise that isn’t English, stretching me around the width of him, and I am gripping the edge of the bench hard enough to hurt.
“Look at you,” he says, hoarse, like he can’t believe he’s allowed. “Fuck, Fran. You’re gripping me. You’re so - can I-”
“Yes.” It comes out wrecked, impatient. “Whatever you’re asking. Yes. Please-”
He drops to his knees.
I make a sound I will not be examining later.
Logan Davis, six-foot-whatever of tattooed genius, on his knees in sawdust, pushing my dress up to my waist, looking at my cunt like it’s a problem he’s been dying to solve.
He hooks my thighs over his shoulders, those shoulders, and puts his mouth on me without any more ceremony than that.
It’s filthy. It’s devastating. He licks me like he’s been thinking about it for months, broad and hungry, then he finds my clit and works it with the same unhurried focus he used on the grain, and I am going to die on this workbench.
His hands hold me open, thumbs spreading my pussy so he can get at all of me, and when I gasp his name he groans into me like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard.
“You taste-” He pulls off just long enough to say it against my thigh, wrecked, crude, a man with no dinner-party script and no idea how hot that is.
“You taste so fucking good. I’ve thought about this.
Your legs. This. You on my bench where I can - can I use my fingers too?
I want - I want you to come on my tongue. ”
“Yes. God. Logan, yes, put them back, I need-”
He does. Two fingers, crooked, finding that spot inside me like he can feel it in the wood, and his mouth sealed over my clit, sucking in time, and I come apart with my heels digging into his back and sawdust in my hair and a sound punched out of me that I’d be ashamed of if I could feel anything but this.
He works me through it. Doesn’t stop. Licks me through the shaking until it’s too much and I shove at his head, laughing, swearing, ruined.
He sits back on his heels, mouth wet, chin shining, looking up at me like he’s just been handed something sacred and also like he wants to do it again immediately.
“Okay?” he asks. Still that hopeful hoarseness. Still checking. The contrast is going to kill me. The man who just ate me like a starving thing, asking okay with my come on his mouth.
“Okay is not the word.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. “Come here. Please. I need - I need you. Now.”
He stands. His hands go to his button and then stall, a last flicker of awkward, and I see it, the flash of is this real, am I allowed, so I reach down and do it myself.
Pop the button. Drag the zipper. Shove denim and boxers down those stupid thick thighs, and his cock slaps up against his stomach, heavy, flushed, wet at the tip, and I am going to need a minute.
“Oh,” I say, eloquent as always. “Okay. Wow. That’s - you’re a lot, huh?”
He goes red to the chest. “I - we don’t have to-”
“If you finish that sentence I will bite you.” I wrap my hand around him.
He’s scorching, velvet-over-steel, so thick my fingers don’t meet, and he makes a punched-out sound that I want to bottle.
I stroke him, slow, watch his abs jump, watch his head drop forward.
“I’ve wanted this. You. Don’t you dare get shy now that I’ve seen it. ”
“Fran.” It’s a warning and a prayer.
“In me. Now. Please.”
He doesn’t make me ask twice.
He steps in, drags me to the edge of the bench, and notches that thick head against my cunt. Pauses. Looks at me. I nod, impatient, grabbing his ass to pull him in, and he pushes inside in one long, devastating slide that knocks the air out of both of us.