Chapter 14
Fourteen
Mick
The five o’clock bell is still ringing across the valley when I pull up in front of the Elm Street duplex.
Vera is waiting on the porch with a single suitcase and a cardboard box, wearing jeans and a black sweater, her hair loose and blowing wild across her face. I kill the engine, get out, and carry her bags straight to the truck bed without saying a word.
When I hold out my hand, she takes it. She doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t glance back at the door, and doesn’t ask where we’re going.
We drive up the ridge road in the last of the evening light. Her hand rests heavy on my knee, her fingers hooked in the denim. Neither of us says a word, and I’ve never been so hyper-aware of the sound of another person breathing in my life.
Inside the cabin, I go straight to the soapstone stove to get the fire up, while she stands in the middle of my living room with her arms crossed, looking up at the ceiling. I stand by the wood box, just watching her look at it.
“It creaks,” she says.
“It doesn’t creak. That’s the ridge beam settling in the cold. It’s supposed to do that.”
“It creaks.” A small, real smile breaks across her face. “Mick, your house creaks.”
“Get over here,” I say as she comes to me.
For eleven days, I’ve taken every chance the world gave me to put my hands on this woman, but every single time, I was taking her against something—a wall, a line, a laminate desk. Tonight, she’s in my house, and nothing is coming to drag her out of it.
I pull her sweater off in front of the stove. The fire clicks and pops, throwing a warm, amber glow across the smooth brown of her shoulders. When I step back to take her in, she pulls an arm across her chest, her mouth opening to say something smart, but I put my thumb over her lips.
“Don’t,” I say softly, my voice gravelly. “I looked at an empty pillow for three years. Let me look.”
A deep flush creeps up her throat, but she lowers her arm and lets me.
I know her body from a long time ago, the way I know a road I drove every day at twenty and haven’t driven since.
But standing on my grandmother’s braided rug, I find out how much of it I misremembered.
The scar on her knee is on the left, not the right.
She’s stronger now—there’s a lean plane of muscle across her upper back that wasn’t there at nineteen.
Her skin smells like cold autumn air, vanilla, and the unmistakable, intoxicating heat of her own skin.
“Are you cataloguing me?” she whispers.
“Yes.”
“I know what you’re doing—”
“You catalogue everything,” I say, dropping to my knees, pressing my mouth to the soft skin of her stomach, feeling her pulse jump against my lips. “You’ve been doing it since the second you walked onto my floor. You did it to a hydraulic shear. Now hold still and let somebody do it to you.”
A breathless laugh catches in her throat, then dies away entirely as my hands slide up her thighs.
I learn her in the firelight. I make a slow, deliberate study of her, and she doesn’t hurry me.
Twice, she rasps my name in a voice I’ve never heard her use—low, raw, and completely undefended.
Both times, the sheer sound of it nearly finishes me right where I kneel.
When my hands get too rough—when the grease-cracked knuckles and rough calluses scrape against her sensitive skin—she doesn’t pull away.
She catches my hands and presses them flat against her ribs, guiding me.
“Don’t be careful,” she breathes, her chest heaving. “I don’t want the careful version of you, Mick. I want the true one.”
So I stop holding back.
My mouth trails down her thighs, tracing the soft, sensitive skin of her inner leg until I reach the dark spot where her heat concentrates.
When I settle between her knees and open her with my mouth, Vera goes rigid.
Her fingers instantly claw into my hair, her hips hitching off the floor as a sharp, ragged gasp tears from her throat.
She tastes slick, hot, and wildly sweet—a taste I’ve craved through three long, hollow years.
I use my tongue slow and heavy, drinking in the slick friction of her, feeling the frantic, uncontrollable tremor that starts deep in her thighs and ripples all the way through her body.
The smell of her skin, warm and completely aroused, fills my head until I can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but drive her higher.
Her hips arch wildly against my face, her legs shaking violently against my shoulders.
I lock my forearm over her hips to hold her down, taking every helpless sound she makes straight into my mouth until her body shudders in a hard, violent release that leaves her sobbing my name into the quiet cabin.
We move to the bed at some point, though I couldn’t tell you how we got there.
Tonight, she pulls me down on top of her. She looks up at me in the dark bedroom, her hands framing my face, her thumb tracing my cheekbone.
“Stay with me,” she says, the weight of her words hitting my chest so hard I have to rest my forehead against hers just to catch my breath.
“I’m here.”
“No—” Her hands tighten on my jaw, her voice trembling. “Not just in this room, Mick. Here. With me. Don’t go somewhere in your head where you’re bracing for the blow.” She swallows hard, a tear slipping down into her hair. “You’ve been braced since I got out of that car. Put it down.”
I put it down.
As the armor strips away, everything I’ve kept locked behind my teeth for three years spills out into the dark.
“I love you.”
For a second, she doesn’t breathe. “Say that again.”
“I love you.” It comes out rough, thick with emotion, and I don’t try to polish it.
“I loved you at nineteen, I loved you every single day of the three years you were gone, and I love you right now. I’m not saying it because of where my hands are.
I’d have said it in my own parking lot eleven days ago if I’d had the guts for it. ”
“Mick—”
“I’m not finished.” I slide my hand under her jaw, holding her steady so she has to look at me. “You’re going to hear it from me every day for the rest of your life. You’re going to get sick of it, and I’m going to say it anyway.”
Her whole face softens, her eyes shining in the moonlight.
“I love you,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “I never stopped. Not for one day, Mick. Not for one hour.”
I shift over her, gathering her close, and sink into her slow and deep.
There’s no rubber barrier, no ticking clock, nowhere left to run.
The searing, wet heat of her wrapping tightly around me drags a low groan from the back of my throat.
She rocks her hips up to meet me, her hands gripping my shoulders, and we fall into a rhythm that belongs entirely to us—deep, steady, and unhurried.
I prop myself up on one forearm, reaching down to slide my hand under the small of her back, tilting her hips to deepen the angle. Vera gasps, her eyes wide, her entire body clenching tight around me as I drive home. I do it again, slow and relentless, until she loses her breath entirely.
Somewhere in the middle of it, she starts laughing and crying at once, burying her face in my neck, telling me to shut up even though I haven’t said a word.
I wrap my arms around her, holding her tight against my chest, feeling her heart hammering against my ribs while I drive into her until she shatters around me all over again.
Her nails score deep lines into my back, her voice raspy as she cries my name like a vow.
The feeling of her unravelling beneath me pulls the floor right out from under me. My jaw clenches, my breath catching in my throat, and I follow her right over the edge, pouring every last piece of myself into her as my body shakes against hers.
Afterward, we lie tangled in a wreck of flannel sheets while the mountain goes about its quiet business outside the window.
She’s drawing invisible lines on my chest with one finger. It takes me a minute to realize she’s tracing a floor plan onto my skin.
“What’s that?” I ask, my voice rough.
“Your second bedroom,” she says softly. “The one full of lumber.”
“It’s a shop.”
“It has a window with north light, and you’re using it to store a table saw.
” She props herself up on one elbow, her dark hair tumbling over my ribs.
Her face is flushed, her eyes wide and serious.
“I want it. I’d need a desk—a real wood one, not laminate.
I am never sitting at another laminate desk as long as I live.
” She pauses. “I’d need the county’s parcel data, about four hundred dollars of survey software, and I’d have to talk to the town council about whether they even want—”
“Vera.”
“—because Hank Mullins has been running that public-works budget off a legal pad since 1998, and the culvert grid in this valley is a genuine disaster. The water comes off that ridge every spring, and nobody has ever modeled it—”
A laugh erupts from my chest before I can stop it—a real, deep laugh I haven’t felt in three years. She stops talking, looking indignant as she sits up in my bed with her hair wild around her shoulders.
“What?”
“Eleven days ago, you walked into my plant to tear it apart,” I say, smiling up at her, “and now you’re going to fix the storm drains.”
“I’m going to model the storm drains.”
“God help this town.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Mick Hayes.”
“I’m not.” I reach up, wrapping my arm around her waist, and pull her back down onto my chest. She comes without a shred of resistance, melting against me. “Take the room. Take the whole house. I’ll put the saw in the barn.”
She rests her chin on my chest, looking at me quietly for a moment.
“I want to ask you something,” she says, “and I want you to notice that I’m asking first.”
“Okay.”
“Halvorsen found me in the lot this afternoon,” she says.
“He wants me on the buyout team. Somebody has to build the financial case that this plant can stand on its own, take it to a bank, and then take it to whoever at Vantor is stuck holding a factory they can’t knock down.
It’s two years of hard work, and there is nobody else in this valley who can read a term sheet.
” She swallows hard. “That’s a job I could actually do, Mick.
It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, and it would finally be pointed at something I want to keep.
But it puts me in an office at the top of your line for two years, setting the labor numbers.
Across a table from your union local.” Her eyes hold mine. “Across a table from you.”
I think about it.
I think about it for a long, quiet minute, because she asked me out loud in the dark before making the move, and I’m not going to disrespect that by answering fast.
“Any chance you’d go easy on me at that table?” I ask.
“None whatsoever.”
“Then take it.” I feel her entire body relax against me, melting into my side. “Take it. I’ll fight you on every single clause, and then I’ll bring you dinner after.”
A wet, beautiful laugh breaks from her lips, her face pressing into my collarbone.
“Kare-kare?”
“Don’t push your luck,” I say, smiling into her hair.
She’s asleep on my chest inside a minute. I lie there in the dark for a long time, holding her close, listening to the steady, quiet rhythm of her breathing.
Eleven days ago, a woman got out of a silver rental car in my parking lot, and I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was that she’d leave again.
Turns out the worst thing that could have happened is that she’d have stayed, kept deciding my life from behind a locked door, been right about everything, and I’d have loved her anyway without either of us ever saying a word.
We said it.
We stood in a union hall, a permits office, and a boardroom, and we said it out loud in front of the whole world. It took everything from us that it was always going to take, and we’re both still standing.
I pull the heavy comforter up over her bare shoulder, lay my hand flat across her back over her beating heart, and finally let myself sleep.