Chapter 32
Iwake up far too early considering how little sleep we got last night. Tanner and I are still intertwined and neither of us makes any effort to untangle ourselves from the sheets or each other. My body aches in all the right places and glows under his hand that rests against my skin.
We told each other we loved each other last night and part of me worried that maybe it had been the high of the moment that made him say it.
He had told me a few weeks ago that he loved Winnie and I, but last night those words felt different.
They were different. Love and being in love are different.
You can have the first, but I really think maybe we have both.
“Good morning,” he grumbles against my skin and pulls my leg across his hip.
My hips rock against him as he finds his place back within me. We make lazy love as he tells me he loves me again. And again, and again.
“I’m out of coffee,” I admit to him later, when we wake up again almost an hour later.
“Then,” he kisses my temple, “we will go to my place, and I will make you coffee.”
“Okay, then let me get ready.”
Grabbing a towel from the hook, I leave him in the bed. Even though it no longer feels like just a bed, it now feels like mine. Just like this apartment, and Tanner, and this town are all starting to feel like mine. Like home.
“Stop.” I laugh as he tries to step into the shower with me. “I need an actual shower.”
“Why?” he groans into my neck, and I think the feel of his mustache brushing my skin might do me in.
“Because of you. I’m sweaty and you made a mess.”
He pulls back to meet my eyes. “That is one of the hottest things you have ever said.”
“Go.” I push him and he obeys, searching through the pile of clothes on the floor for his own.
Once we’re dressed and the fish is fed, we are heading to his house.
“Shouldn’t we stop by and get your truck from Rhett and Lauren’s?” I ask and he shakes his head, looking unbelievably hot driving my minivan. One hand tapping the steering wheel, the other squeezing my upper thigh.
“Nah, I’ll just tell him you drove me home after Winnie left.”
As we drive by Dollie’s house, we see her outside watering her flowers. She waves when she realizes it’s Tanner driving the minivan and her cheeks round even more with a smile when she sees me in the passenger seat.
“She and her husband owned this entire hill at one point,” he tells me and gives her a wave out the window.
“And she’s been selling it off?”
“Yes and no. She said her son isn’t involved anymore to take care of it. I’m the only one she has sold anything to so far.”
“Does she have any other family?”
“Her husband died a while ago, and she’s only ever mentioned her son a couple of times. I know she has a sister out in Milwaukee.”
We pull up in front of his house, and it feels as much like home as it did the first time.
“I’ll start the coffee if you want to go shower,” I tell him with a squeeze of a hand.
He smiles and kisses my forehead before skipping up the steps.
In the kitchen I shuffle around and set the pot to start, crack the window over the sink, then place a few pieces into the almost finished puzzle.
Once the coffee is finally done, I pour us both a cup and look through the drawers for a spoon to stir in a little sugar when I find the stack of photos I saw the other day.
Most of them are like the ones on the mantel, but one of the photos has a young boy who must be Tanner, sitting on a man’s lap.
The man is frail and thin with a few freckles and a dimple in his cheek.
He looks like Tanner, in fact, a lot like Tanner.
Before I can slip the photo back in the drawer, the floor creaks behind me.
“Sorry.” I look up at Tanner watching me from the doorway. “I didn’t mean to snoop.”
“No apologizing,” he says.
I show him the picture in my hand. “You look just like this man. But this isn’t Dan.”
Tanner lets out a sigh. One that feels like it has been sitting in his lungs for a while.
“It’s not Dan,” he says. “But it is my dad.”
I blink at the picture then up at him. “What?”
“Daniel Auclair isn’t my biological father.” He chews on the inside of his cheek, his eyes almost glazed over as he stares down at the photo in my hands.
“When you said it was just your mom and you—”
He nods. “My father was a trucker. Drove the Michigan and Florida route. He stopped here, got my mom pregnant, and then left on the next assignment back south.”
“Tanner, I—”
He comes closer and picks up the picture.
“He came back a few times. It would be a couple times a year at the beginning. Then less and less. I know nothing about him other than his name is Richard and that he’s from Wisconsin.
My mom won’t talk about it, and honestly, I never wanted to know.
I never knew him to be my dad, you know.
Dan was always my dad. I hardly remember a time in my life without him in it. ”
“And Mayben?”
“Technically my half-sister. We both look like our mom, so nobody really knows, other than the Atwoods. Mayben didn’t find out until we were in middle school. She thought Richard was a distant uncle or something who would just show up randomly.”
I flip the picture over and, on the back, it’s scrawled, Richard and Tanny.
“Come on.” He stirs sugar into his cup, hands me mine, then motions for me to follow him.
“Where are we going?” I question but he slips his fingers into mine like it’s second nature and he simply nods forward as an answer.
First we feed the chickens and sheep, then we loop around some brush and trees before we are greeted by a small stretch of land lined in rows of flowers. All colors. All types.
“My flower garden,” he says, the pride unmissable in his eyes. “I started it when I first moved here and now, well it’s this.”
I step away from him, and I wander up and down the short aisles of flowers.
I recognize the orange and pinks from Winnie’s bouquets.
The milky pink peonies. And the red tulips.
Even the all the yellow flowers. This isn’t like anything I have ever seen.
With a woosh of the warm breeze, I turn back to Tanner.
“This is amazing,” I tell him. “You could turn this into a business. You could open this up, sell bouquets, fresh eggs?” I run my fingers along the tops of the flowers gently. “Field trips. Engagement pictures. Weddings. You could even sell some baked goods.”
He walks over to the little shed with a smile on his lips and brings out a basket and some shears.
“Go on.” He hands them to me. “Pick some.”
“Which ones?”
“Any of them and as many as you want.” He smacks my butt. “They’re all yours anyway.”
And I don’t hesitate. The hot sun beats down against my shoulders as I walk amongst the rows picking any color that feels right.
There are purples, yellows, greens and whites.
In theory the colors sound silly together, but in my hand they’re perfect.
When I am happy with what I have, I walk back to Tanner and show him the basket.
“What’s that one for?” he asks pointing at the single pink daisy in the middle of the bouquet. It really is the only one that doesn’t match.
“They mean gentleness,” I tell him. “All flowers mean something. Roses of course mean romance. Yellow carnations mean unrequited love. Lilies mean innocence.”
“Pink daisies are love,” he says. “Tenderness.”
“Exactly.”
“They’re perfect. Come on. I’ll wrap them up for you.”
I follow him to the shed where he places the basket on the work bench.
There’s a stack of brown sheets of paper and rolls of twine.
He takes the mismatched blooms I picked and puts the chaos of the choices I made into some semblance of order.
His fingers sort the stems like a painter with his brushes.
When he rolls them up in the brown paper and ties them with the twine, they look as if they have all belonged to each other all along.
He turns to hand them to me and his face loses its smile.
“What’s wrong?” His brows knit together as he wipes the few trailing tears slipping down my cheek.
I shake my head, stopping myself from apologizing. “Nothing. It’s never been like this for me.”
“What do you mean?
“This. Waking up together. Spending a day together. Just being together. I was really lonely for a long time.”
He pulls me into an embrace so strong that I know I could pick my legs up and he would still have me.
There is nothing sexual about it, no hidden agenda.
Just wanting to keep each other close. I realize right here that there is nothing I would rather do than just be in his arms, on this land for the rest of my life.
For the first time in a dusty flower shed, I let myself believe that this could last. That my chaotic life could still be pulled together and wrapped up in brown paper and tied with twine and resemble something awfully beautiful.
“Come on.” Tanner threads his fingers into their place within mine again and drags me along.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you one more thing.”
Past the sun-drenched flower field, Tanner leads me down the hill and through a wall of bushes and trees, and I hear it just before I see it. A rushing creek that’s big enough to almost pass as a river.
The summer heat seems to have left its shoes by the door and has made itself smaller here under the canopy of trees. The water sparkles under the little stray threads of sunlight that sneak in through fluttering leaves. Time is frozen here, I’m sure of it.
“Is this still your property?” I ask as we stand on a dirty sand shore watching the water slowly tumble by.
Tanner takes my flowers and sets them down at our feet and then starts stripping off his clothes.
“Yeah. The creek itself winds through the outskirts of Green Branch and even crosses back by Lauren and Rhett’s place. But this is where it’s the deepest.”
“What are you doing?”
“We are swimming,” he says and kicks his jeans to the side. “Come on.”
“What if someone—”
“I have no neighbors. Trust me.” He steps into the water and begins walking backwards, his eyes never leaving mine.
“Tanner.”
“Hannah.” He tilts his head, almost reprimanding me. “Trust. Me. This is a lot less scary than a Ferris Wheel.”
I let out a shaky sigh and push any insecurity aside.
Making love in a dark bedroom is one thing.
Standing on the shore of a creek, naked, in the mid-morning sun is a whole other.
But I do. I trust him. So, I shed my dress and drop it into the dirt alongside his clothes and step into the cold water as goosebumps swarm my skin.
He chuckles. “It doesn’t sit still long enough to get very warm until end of summer.”
I breathe through the shock of the cold as I go deeper and deeper. Pushing myself to keep going even though my insides are screaming to get back into the warm air. My panties the only thing I wear, yet Tanner’s scorching gaze seems to cover me up just fine.
I dip under the surface and sink into the cold water. My body hums as Tanner and I seem to be pulled to each other again and again. The water doesn’t feel any warmer, but my body can’t seem to cool down either. The look in Tanner’s eyes has me burning.
“There she is,” Tanner murmurs as I approach him finally. He brushes my hair back out of my face and cups my cheeks. “How ya’ feeling Mama?”
His eyes dance around my face and it’s only now I realize I never put makeup on this morning, but the look in his eye is anything but disappointed.
He rubs his thumb over my cheek before pressing his smiling lips against mine.
When his teeth graze my bottom lip, my body pushes harder against him as I try to swallow a moan.
“Don’t do that,” he grumbles against my lips.
I pull back and meet his heated gaze in confusion.
“You’re stifling your moans. Don’t you dare stop making your sounds now,” he quietly demands. “Nobody can hear us. But even if they could I wouldn’t give a damn if they sat and listened.”
Desire, which never seems to completely go dormant where Tanner is concerned, courses through me yet again as I wrap my arms around his backside and pull him into me. “Are we going to make it back to your bed in time?”
Now it’s his turn to pull back and give me a devilish smirk. “We’re going to find out. Come on.” He tugs me up out of the water and we barely make it in the front door before our clothes are back off and he has me pressed up against the wall in the front hallway.
I liked these white paneled walls before, but now, every time I run my hands along them, I will think of the groans coming from Tanner as his hips work up against mine.