CHAPTER 8 #2
Not like the Wisteria. Not performance, not impulse, not a room full of witnesses and a story to sell.
She put her hands on my chest — both hands, flat, fingers spread — and she kissed me with her whole body leaning into it, and there was sawdust on her skin and my shirt on her shoulders and the morning pouring through the workshop windows, and I stopped thinking.
My hands went to her waist. Thumbs against the bare skin above her waistband where the shirt had ridden up.
Her skin was warm and impossibly soft and I pulled her into me and felt her whole body press against mine — hip bones, ribs, the flat of her stomach — and the sound she made against my mouth went through me like a current.
I backed her into the workbench. Her hips hit the edge and she gasped and I used the moment to change the angle, one hand sliding up her back under the shirt, the other braced on the bench behind her. She arched into me. Her fingers were in my hair, gripping, pulling, and the kiss went deeper.
She tasted like coffee and nerves and something sweet from the gloss she'd worn the night before. My hand slid higher under the shirt, over the warm line of her back, and she shivered hard enough that I felt it through both of us.
Then she broke the kiss.
"Wait," she said, breathless, forehead against mine. "Just—"
I stopped. My hand stayed at her back. The other was braced on the bench beside her hip. I could feel her breathing. Mine wasn't any steadier.
She opened her eyes and looked at the workshop around us — the bench, the clamps, the half-cut stock, the dust floating in the light.
"Here?" she asked.
"Yeah."
A beat.
Then she nodded once. "Okay."
She said it like a choice, and that was all it took.
She pulled the shirt over her head — my shirt — and for a second it caught in her damp hair before it came free and dropped to the floor with the walnut shavings.
She was standing there in just the cutoff shorts, flushed across her chest, breathing fast, and I had to put my hand flat on the bench to keep from grabbing at her too quickly and making this rougher than it needed to be.
I kissed her again instead. Her mouth, then the corner of it, then her jaw. My hand came up over her ribs and found her breast, and the sound she made was small and wrecked and real. She leaned into my palm like she'd been trying not to all week.
"Beckett."
"Yeah."
That was all I had. My voice was already gone rough.
I dropped my mouth to her throat. My thumb brushed over her nipple and she arched against the bench, one hand landing in my hair again, the other gripping my shoulder hard enough to leave a mark.
I went down because there wasn't any version of this where I didn't.
I got to my knees on the workshop floor, looked up at her once, and put my hands on the button of her shorts.
"You sure?"
Her answering nod was immediate. "Yes."
I undid them, dragged them down her hips, took the rest with them. She stepped out barefoot onto the dusty boards, and the sight of her there — naked in the morning light, one hand braced behind her on the workbench, sawdust on the arch stock beside us — hit me low and hard.
I kissed the inside of her thigh first. Then higher. She trembled under my hands.
When I put my mouth on her, she gasped and nearly lost her footing.
I caught her with one arm around her hips and held her there, steady against the bench while I learned her the fastest way possible — what made her breathing break, what made her curse softly under it, what made her grab the back of my neck like she needed an anchor.
She'd been wound tight for days. Maybe longer than that.
It didn't take much.
Her body locked, then broke. She came with a strangled sound she was clearly trying not to let out, shaking hard enough that I had to tighten my grip to keep her upright.
The workbench knocked once against the wall.
A clamp rattled in its tray. Her forehead hit my shoulder when I stood, and she stayed folded into me for a second, breathing like she'd run somewhere and only just realized she'd arrived.
I lifted her onto the cleared end of the bench.
The walnut surface was cool under her skin. She looked dazed and flushed and completely undoing me.
I shoved my jeans down just far enough to get my hand around myself and pushed in close between her knees. Her hands found my shoulders again. Held there.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," I said.
Her eyes came to mine, dark and steady in a way that made the rest of me feel anything but. "I won't."
Then I kissed her once more and pushed into her.
She took me with a sharp inhale, her head tipping back, her fingers digging into muscle.
I stopped long enough for both of us to feel it — the fact of it, the irreversible reality of being joined like this in the middle of my workshop with the arch half-built behind us and the whole week waiting outside the walls.
Then I moved.
The first few thrusts were slow because they had to be. Because she was tight and I was trying not to lose the last clean inch of my self-control too early. But she met me almost immediately, her legs coming around my waist, her body asking for more without any room left for confusion.
The bench gave a little under us, solid but not silent. Tools clicked softly in their tray every time I drove into her. Sawdust stuck to the backs of her thighs. My hand slid under one knee to open her wider and she made a sound into my mouth that nearly finished me on the spot.
"God," she whispered.
I kissed her again because if I let her keep talking I was going to come too fast and say something worse.
It got less careful after that.
Still controlled. Still deliberate. But not careful.
Her heel pressed into the small of my back. My hand was at her throat only long enough to feel her swallow before it moved to her hip again. She kept pulling me back when I tried to slow down, and that did something terminal to any remaining distance I'd been pretending we still had.
When she came again it happened around my name.
Not loud. Just broken apart by it.
Her whole body tightened under me, then clamped down in a way that stripped the last restraint clean off me. I followed her a second later, my forehead against her shoulder, my hand braced on the bench beside her, every muscle in me locked hard through the release.
For a few seconds after, neither of us moved.
The fan in the corner kept turning. Somewhere outside, a truck went past on the road. Inside the workshop it smelled like walnut dust, heat, sweat, and sex.
I eased back carefully, breathing hard. She was still gripping my shoulders. When I looked at her, her eyes were open now, fixed on my face like she was trying to memorize what we'd just done and also decide whether it had ruined us.
Maybe both.
I found the shirt on the floor and handed it to her.
She pulled it on without a word, the gray cotton swallowing her back down to mid-thigh.
I fixed my clothes with clumsy hands and turned to pick up the marking gauge she'd knocked loose earlier, because if I didn't touch something familiar right then I was going to put my hands back on her and start this all over again.
She slid off the bench. Stood at the window with her arms folded tight across herself, looking out toward the yard and the dead cottage beyond it.
I stayed where I was.
No apology. No easy line. No version of this that made the room lighter.
After a long silence, she said, very quietly, "Well."
I let out a breath that didn't feel big enough for what had just happened. "Yeah."
She turned then. The shirt was mine, the look on her face wasn't. That was all Nora — shaken, bright-eyed, furious at herself for being shaken, and past the point where either of us could honestly call this temporary.
"We still have the rehearsal tomorrow," she said.
"I know."
"The wedding the day after that."
"I know."
"And my mother already thinks this is a love story."
I looked at the half-built arch on the bench behind me. At the clean cuts. The measured lines. The project that had seemed complicated yesterday and now felt simple by comparison.
"Yeah," I said. "That's the problem."