Chapter 4 What We Built
Colt
Saturday mornings used to be sacred.
No phones before ten. No work talk until breakfast. No pants if we could avoid it. The only obligations were each other and the aggressive murder of whatever song was on the radio.
We've been slipping. My phone comes to bed now. I check email before my eyes are open. Last Saturday I took a call at eight while Summer was making pancakes. She didn't say anything. The pancakes were a little burned. I don't think that was an accident.
Today is different.
I wake up to bacon and Fleetwood Mac. Summer is in the kitchen in my old rugby shirt, barefoot, singing Dreams with the pitch accuracy of someone who has never cared about pitch accuracy.
She's using the spatula as a microphone.
Her hair is a structural disaster held together by willpower and a claw clip.
I lean in the doorway and don't do anything but watch her.
"You're killing that song."
She doesn't turn around. "Stevie would thank me."
"Stevie would file charges."
"Stevie would recognize a kindred spirit." She flips a piece of bacon with the flair of someone auditioning for a cooking show she'd never get cast on. "Sit. I made eggs."
"Scrambled?"
"Is there another kind?"
"Objectively, yes. Several."
"Wrong. Sit down."
I sit. She puts a plate in front of me. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast cut diagonal because she swears it tastes better that way and I have never been able to prove her wrong. Coffee. Her bare feet propped on my lap under the table, cold against my thigh.
"Read something for me." Toast in her mouth, no question mark. Summer at the breakfast table, handing me the first read.
"The new chapter?"
"Twelve and thirteen. I restructured the second act. I need to know if the pacing holds."
"Give me an hour."
"Forty minutes. I'm impatient."
"You're a nightmare."
"I'm an artist. There's overlap."
***
I read on the back porch while my coffee goes cold next to me.
The restructure works. More than works. She's done this thing where the tension builds so gradually you don't realize you're holding your breath until the chapter ends and your lungs burn. Her villain is terrifying because he is certain he is the hero of his own story.
I tell her this with the precision she requires. Summer doesn't want it's great, babe. She wants the mechanism. She wants to know if the engine she built runs like she designed it.
"The interrogation in thirteen is the best thing you've ever written."
Her face cracks open for half a second and the composure drops and the girl underneath looks back at me. The one who is still amazed anyone thinks she's good at this. First novel at twenty-one. Bestseller list at twenty-three. And she still doesn't quite believe she belongs there.
"You think so?"
"I know so."
She ducks her head and smiles. Crooked, left eye squinting. The one that has been making me stupid since the day I met her.
I reach across the table and tuck a piece of her hair behind her ear.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Don't nothing me."
"You're pretty."
"Stop."
"Just stating facts."
She kicks me under the table.
***
We head to King's Diner for lunch and commandeer booth four. The booth where she did her chemistry homework and I fell in love with her tray of milkshakes.
Greg comes out from behind the register. Six-three. Hands like catcher's mitts. Quiet gravity. He shakes my hand. Firm. Measuring. A father's handshake, which isn't the same as a greeting.
"Missed you Tuesday, Colt."
"I know. I'm sorry, Greg. Work has been..."
"Busy." He finishes the sentence. "You've been busy a lot."
He doesn't say it with heat. Greg King doesn't waste emotion. Every word is load-bearing.
"I'm going to do better."
"Good." He holds my eyes one beat past comfortable, then nods. "Your usual?"
Sarah appears with sweet tea and hush puppies and a hug that compresses my ribs. Five-four. Smells like vanilla. Could bench press the diner.
"You're too thin."
"I weigh one-ninety, Sarah."
"Too thin. Eat."
I eat. You don't argue with Sarah King about food.
Summer is across from me telling Greg about the new book.
This family loves loud. They feed me too much.
They hug me too hard. They ask why I've been busy and they don't let me off the hook when I give a half-answer.
The Bennet family doesn't do any of that.
The Bennet family loves through proximity and surnames and approval that never quite arrives.
I would burn down every boardroom in Charleston before I'd give this up.
***
We go home lazy and full. Late afternoon light coming through the blinds.
Summer is in the hallway, kicking off her sandals, and she looks up at me with the look I have known since we were teenagers, the one that lives under everything else she does to me.
"Come here," she says.
I'm already moving.
I catch her by the jaw and kiss her hard, with none of the politeness that's been creeping into our weeknights. She tastes like sweet tea. She makes that sound against my mouth, low, in the throat, the one she has been making since the back of my truck when we were teens, and I am gone.
"Upstairs," I say into her mouth.
"You can't wait that long."
"I can."
"You can't."
"Try me."
I pick her up. She wraps her legs around my waist and laughs into my neck and I carry her upstairs because I am twenty-four and stupid and her laugh against my skin is worth every step.
I set her down on the bed. She catches my wrists, pulls me with her, kisses me slow, and then she pulls back and looks at me, brown eyes dark.
"I miss you."
"I'm right here."
"Show me."
I press her gently back against the pillows.
"Arms up."
She lifts them, slow, deliberate, like she does everything in this room. I pull her shirt off her in one motion. She is bare underneath. She watches me find that out and her mouth turns up at the corner.
"Christ, Summer."
"I planned that."
"I know you did."
I put my mouth on her. The soft skin under her jaw. The hollow of her throat. The line of her collarbone. She arches up to meet me and I press her flat with my hand on her sternum, not pinning, just telling.
"Stay there."
"Colt."
"Stay there, baby."
I drag my mouth down. The slope of her breast. Her nipple, taking my time, sucking until she makes a noise and then doing it again until the noise is louder. Her hand goes into my hair and she isn't asking, she is holding on, and I let her.
"Open your legs."
She opens them.
I move down. Her stomach. The curve of her hip. The inside of her thigh, slow, watching her hips shift up off the mattress for me, asking with her body before her mouth catches up. I push her thighs wider with both hands and look up at her, and she looks back at me, dark, focused, completely there.
"Now, Colt."
"Tell me what you want."
"You know what I want."
"Say it anyway."
"I want your mouth on me."
I give it to her. The first slow stroke of my tongue, flat, all the way up, and she makes the sound that means her whole body just turned on at once.
I hold her hips down and take my time. I know her.
I know what she likes and I know what wrecks her.
I work her open with my tongue and then with my fingers, two of them, slow at first and then not, and she is swearing into the back of her hand and I lift her hand off her mouth and pin her wrist to the mattress.
"I want to hear you."
She lets me hear her.
I bring her right up to it and stop. She makes a sound that is half curse and half plea and she grabs my hair.
"Colt. Don't."
"I'm not."
"You are."
"Tell me what you want, baby."
"Make me come. Fuck. Make me come on your mouth."
"There she is."
I put my mouth back on her. My tongue on her clit, my fingers curling forward inside her, the exact rhythm I know she can't stop for, and she watches me, eyes wide, and I watch her go.
She comes hard. Her thighs shake and close around my head and her hand fists in my hair and she says my name three times like a sentence she can't finish.
I keep going until she pushes gently at my hair, the small mercy.
I come up. She pulls me down by the back of the neck and kisses me. I taste like her. She makes a sound at that.
"Off." Her hands at my belt. "Off off off."
I get the rest of my clothes off. She watches me, propped up on her elbows, the most unselfconscious naked woman in the state of South Carolina, and she looks at me like she could write a paper on me, and I am hard enough to drive nails.
"Come here."
I come.
I get over her. She wraps her legs around me. I push into her in one slow stroke and she lets out a long breath I haven't gotten tired of hearing yet.
Fuck.
"There you are," she says.
"Here I am."
I move. Slow, how she likes it when we have time. She holds my face in her hands and watches me, and there is no version of being looked at like this anywhere else on earth.
"Faster, Colt."
I go faster.
"Harder."
I give her harder. She arches up to meet me and her hands move from my face to my shoulders to the back of my neck, and her nails are in me, the small bite that has come to mean she is getting close again.
"That's it, baby. Right there. Take it."
She takes it.
"Tell me whose this is." Against her ear. Low.
"Yours."
"Whose."
"Yours, Colt. It's yours. It's always been yours."
I get a hand between us and use my thumb on her clit and feel her start to break apart under me, and that is what ends me.
I bury my face in her neck and let go and she is whispering something into my hair that I don't catch and don't need to, and we are completely alone in this house and this bed and this thing of ours.
***
Afterward, the sheets are tangled and her head is on my chest. The afternoon has gone to evening. Her finger traces a slow circle on my sternum.
"I miss this," she says. Quiet. "I miss us."
"I'm right here."
I pull her closer and press my mouth to the top of her head and breathe her in and don't think about anything for a long minute.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I glance at it. Reflex.
Cheyenne
Calloway confirmed for Tuesday. We got this.
I don't pick it up. I don't respond. I turn back to Summer and pull her closer and press my lips to her hair.
But I don't put the phone away.
And the screen stays lit on the nightstand a long time before it dims back to black.