3. Sloane
Sloane
He knocks at seven-thirty the next morning with a small toolbox in his hand. I'm still holding my coffee. "You don't have to do this right now," I say, although I’m very happy he kept his promise.
"Better to do it before the heat sets in." He looks at my coffee. "You'll want to finish that first. It's not comfortable under there."
"Under where?"
"Crawl space. Access panel's on the north side." He says it like this is obvious information I should already have about my own cabin. Maybe it is. "About two feet of clearance. You'll want to change your shoes."
I look down at my shoes. "What's wrong with my shoes?"
"Nothing, if you're not going under a cabin."
Twenty minutes later, I am under a cabin, in the dirt, in different shoes, and he was not wrong about the two feet of clearance.
I have approximately one inch of headroom to spare, and there is a spider situation happening in the far corner that I am choosing not to look at.
Holt is beside me, flashlight in his teeth, already elbow-deep in the pump housing.
"Hand me the channel-lock," he says, or tries to, around the flashlight. It comes out as han muh uh hanel-awk.
"The what?"
He takes the flashlight out of his mouth. "Channel-lock pliers. Red handles. Should be on top in the box."
I find them and pass them over. He works for a moment in silence — the particular focused silence of someone who knows exactly what they're doing — and I hold the flashlight where he points and pass tools when he asks and try to be useful in a space that smells like old earth and pipe compound and, faintly, like him.
"Pressure switch threads are corroded," he says. "Might take a minute.""How long have you been doing this kind of thing?"
"Since I was about twelve."
"Your dad teach you?"
"My uncle." A pause, a small grunt of effort. "The one who built this place, actually. Different uncle."
I look at the side of his face in the low light — the jaw, the scar through his eyebrow, the complete and total absorption in what his hands are doing. "So you grew up out here."
"Born in Timbercrest. Left for a few years. Came back."
"Why'd you come back?"
He glances at me sideways. "Hand me the basin wrench. Looks like a long handle with a jaw on the end."
I find it and pass it over. "You don't have to answer."
"I know." He works for a moment. "Came back because this is where I make sense," he says, like it's the most straightforward thing in the world, and goes back to the pipe.
I lie there in the dirt with the flashlight, and I think about that — where I make sense — and I think about Billings and my apartment and my very sensible career and the four-hour drive I made to get here, and I don't say anything.
"Brace here," he says, and guides my hand to a section of pipe. His fingers close over mine, adjusting my grip, and he doesn't let go immediately. Neither do I.
"Like this?" I say.
"Yeah." His voice is lower. "Just hold it steady."
He works. I hold. The crawl space is close and warm and smells like earth and him and the fitting goes on with a series of sounds that suggest it was not easy, and then he says "okay" and I let go and he does something with the basin wrench and then he's still.
"That's it," he says.
"That's it?"
"Go turn on the tap in the kitchen. Leave it running."
I extract myself from the crawl space with somewhat less dignity than I'd like and go inside and turn on the kitchen tap and stand there waiting.
For a moment nothing happens. Then there's a shudder in the pipes, a cough, and then water — real pressure, steady and strong — running clear over my hand.
I feel it through the floor a second later. A clean, solid thud. The pump catching.
Holt comes up through the access panel and stands in the yard brushing dirt off his shirt. He's got a streak of grease along his jaw and I probably have the same and neither of us mentions it.
He looks at the cabin with that expression — the quiet satisfaction of a man who has fixed a thing and considers that sufficient, no more and no less.
I look at him looking at it, at the grease on his jaw and the set of his shoulders and the easy way he's standing in my yard like he's been standing in it for years.
I need to stop doing that.
***
The next three days develop a pattern before I notice there's a pattern.
He's up before I am — I can hear the maul going from my bedroom window in the early cool.
I make coffee. I work on the cabin. He appears at some point, checks something, fixes something, and doesn't ask permission.
I don't ask him to stop. It's practical.
We share a well, a woodpile, and an access road.
This is purely functional. I have a very convincing internal monologue about this that I deliver to myself several times a day.
On day two, he appears in the doorway of the back room while I'm on my hands and knees with a pry bar. He looks at what I'm doing.
"Need a hand?"
"I'm fine."
"You've been at that board for twenty minutes."
"I'm aware of how long I've been at it, thank you."
He leans against the doorframe. "There's a trick to old cedar. You go straight at it, the grain fights you. You have to come in at an angle."
I sit back on my heels and look up at him. He's got sawdust on his shirt and his arms crossed and he is absolutely not smug about knowing this, which somehow makes it worse. "Show me," I say.
He crouches down beside me — close enough that I get sawdust and clean sweat and something underneath both — takes the pry bar, angles it fifteen degrees off what I was doing, and the board comes up clean in one pull. He hands the bar back without comment.
"That's annoying," I say.
"The wood or the technique?"
"You knowing the technique."
He chuckles with satisfaction. He stands back up and goes back to whatever he was doing, and I go back to the floor, and we don't talk about it, and I think about that almost-smile for an embarrassingly long time.
On day three I'm pulling up a warped section of floorboard when he appears again. "Subfloor's good," he says. "I checked it two years ago."
"I know." I sit back on my heels. "Your uncle put down the wrong thickness when he replaced this section — see how it cups? Too thin for this much foot traffic. Easy fix."
He crouches beside me and looks at the board. He's close enough that I can smell sawdust and clean sweat and something underneath both that I am not going to examine. "Cabin has good bones," he says.
I look at him. "That's exactly what I thought."
He looks back at me. Neither of us moves.
It's the second time we've said that to each other and we both know it, and we both stay very still in the back room with the warped floorboard between us and I'm acutely aware of the exact distance between his shoulder and mine, and I've been aware of it for three days, and I'm not doing anything about it.
He stands up first. "Hardware store in Timbercrest will have the right thickness."
"I already ordered it."
He goes back to what he was doing. I go back to what I was doing. I call my business partner that evening to say the renovation is taking longer than expected. She asks if the contractor is cute. I hang up.
Day four, and the heat is the kind that makes you stupid — thick and still, the pine resin smell gone syrupy.
By noon I've given up on the back room entirely and taken myself to the porch.
Holt is at the woodpile and his shirt has been gone since midmorning and I'm aware of this the way you're aware of the sun: constantly, with your whole body, while technically looking at something else.
By five, the light has gone golden and heavy and I have written approximately forty words that are useful and drawn three detailed illustrations of nothing.
I watch him for a moment that is definitely longer than a moment.
Then I go inside, fill a glass with cold water, fill a second one, and walk out to the woodpile.
Basic human decency. Offering water to someone in July heat. Completely normal thing to do.
He hears me and sets down the maul and turns. Sweat-damp, chest heaving, his forearms dusted with wood shavings. He looks at the glass in my outstretched hand and goes still — not surprised exactly, more like he's been waiting to see if I'd do it and is satisfied to have his answer.
He takes the glass. His fingers close over mine and neither of us pulls back. "Thank you," he says.
"You've been out here all day."
"So have you."
"I've been on the porch."
"I know," he says, in a way that makes it very clear he's been tracking exactly where I've been all day, same as I've been tracking him.
"Holt."
"I know."
"I was going to say — do you always work until dark, or—"
"I know what you were going to say."
I look up at him. The late sun is behind him, and he is looking at me with the same patient, certain attention he gives to everything. I have been feeling this way about him for four days, and I'm done pretending I haven't. "Okay," I say. "So say it."
He sets the glass on the woodpile. Takes one step toward me. "I've been thinking about you," he says, "since the minute you got out of that car." His hand comes up slowly and tucks a piece of hair back from my face. His palm stays on my jaw. "Every day."
"Tell me."
His eyes go dark. "I've been thinking about getting my hands on you since the second you walked across that yard." Low, certain. "Thinking about how you'd sound." His hand slides to my hip and grips, and I stop breathing entirely. "Thinking about making you come before I'm even inside you."
"Holt." My voice doesn't sound like my voice.
"Yeah," he says, like that's the answer to everything. Then his mouth is on mine and his hands are in my hair.
He kisses me the way he does everything.
I get my hands on his chest and he makes a low sound against my mouth and walks me back against the woodpile and I go, the stacked wood solid and warm at my back, him solid and warm at my front, the late sun in my eyes.
I don't care about any of it except his hands and his mouth and the sound he makes when I pull him closer.
"Been thinking about this," he says against my throat. "Every single day."
Holt gets my shirt over my head and unclasps my bra with one hand and his mouth is already on my breast — hot and deliberate, tongue and then teeth, exactly light enough to make me arch into it. "You're so goddamn beautiful," he says against my skin. "I've been losing my mind."
His hand slides between my thighs without hesitation, and when his fingers push inside me he makes a rough sound low in his chest.
“Yes!” I squeal. Then his thumb finds my clit and I stop being able to agree with anything at all.
He works my body with total focus — reading every shift of my hips, every catch in my breath, adjusting without being asked.
I've got both hands fisted in his hair and I'm rocking against him.
When I come, it hits hard and fast and I clench around his fingers.
He keeps the pressure there, steady, wringing every last bit of it out of me until I'm gasping against his shoulder.
I reach for his cock before I've fully stopped shaking. He's hard and thick and the sound he makes when I wrap my hand around him makes me want to do it again just to hear it twice. "Sloane." A warning. Not much of one.
"Right now," I tell him. "I mean it."
He pushes inside me and I feel every inch and my head drops back and I moan out loud into the open evening air and I genuinely do not care. He goes still with himself buried deep, forehead pressed to mine, both of us breathing. "Okay?" he grits out.
"Move," I say. "Please."
He pulls back and drives into me and the sound of it, skin on skin, the solid weight of the wood at my back.
He gets a hand on my ass for leverage and sets a pace that is exactly what I needed and didn't know how badly, deep and relentless.
I dig my nails into his back. He groans against my throat and goes harder.
"You feel so good." Rough, almost wrecked. "Fuck, Sloane. You feel so goddamn good."
I come with my whole body clamped around him, my face pressed to his neck, and he swears and drives in deep and follows me, shuddering hard, his hands gripping my hips like I'm the only solid thing left on the mountain.
We stay like that. The evening air is warm around us. A bird somewhere in the pines doing its completely indifferent bird thing.
I become aware that I am sitting on a woodpile.
I start laughing. I genuinely cannot help it — the whole situation strikes me as exactly as absurd as it is, and I'm laughing into his shoulder.
He lifts his head and looks at me with this expression I can't name, open and unguarded, like my laugh is something he wasn't prepared for and doesn't want to stop.
I press my lips together. Fail. Keep laughing.
“What is it?” He asks with a crooked smile.
“Just… everything. I’m lucky I don’t have a splinter on my butt.”
We both laugh for a while longer, then I find my shirt. He helps me down. We stand in the long evening light, wood shavings almost certainly in my hair, and he looks at me like a man who has decided something and is at peace with the decision, which I find I am also at peace with, which is new.
"I should…" I gesture vaguely at the cabin.
He nods. Steps back. Gives me room. And I walk back inside on legs that are not entirely reliable, close the door behind me, and lean against it in the cool dim of the front room.
Well. That happened.