4. Harris
Chapter Four
HARRIS
I've been awake since before first light, but I've built nothing.
My workshop smells like cedar and machine oil. Dust turns over in the beams of sunlight from the window. I've been standing here holding a chisel like a man who's forgotten what his damn hands are for.
I'm a cobbler man.
I’m an idiot.
Megan went a little pale under those cute freckles, standing in the middle of my yard hugging her sketchbook like a life vest.
Then she went home and texted me. Except she doesn’t know it was me, she thinks it’s someone else. And I got dirty with her, because I couldn’t resist it any longer, being that close to her today.
Today. I have to tell her, before she works it out on her own. And the words need to come from me. I have to make her understand it was never a joke at her expense, and that I'd sooner put a chisel through my other hand than let her feel that way.
Megan turns up mid-morning while I'm sweeping. She knocks tentatively.
“Is it okay if I…”
“Come in.”
She steps into the light. Denim cutoffs, a yellow shirt knotted at the waist, showing her beautiful curves, with her glossy dark hair falling out of its knot. My whole body comes alive as soon as she walks in.
“I brought you something.” She holds something out. “It's a thank-you for helping me look at nature in a different light. Delphine's been insufferable about them, by the way. She's telling the committee she commissioned an artisan.”
It's a sheet of heavy paper with a drawing of a fox on it.
He’s low to the ground, shoulders dropped; head turned back over one shoulder, caught mid-decision. He’s completely alive on that page.
He has one eye. It’s Kit.
“You did this last night?”
She's watching my face far too closely. “This morning. Is it right?”
“It's perfect.”
She laughs, low and surprised, and comes further in without being invited. She trails a fingertip through the sawdust on the bench and picks up a spokeshave, then puts it down again. Looks at the jars of screws and examines the little stove in the corner with its pipe going up through the roof.
Then she stops at the door at the back.
“What's in there?”
“Storage.”
“This has a better lock than your front door.”
I lean on the broom. “Are you always this nosy?”
“Comes with the job. It's called observation, and I’d like you to know that it’s a professional skill.” She grins at me and her face is so beautiful it makes my stomach clench.
She hops up and sits on the end of my bench with her bare legs swinging, and starts asking me about the stands, and the festival.
She’s so happy and carefree that I hate to spoil it, but my phone is sitting in my back pocket like a stone.
She’s looking down at a carving I’ve made so I take out my phone.
I type carefully, watching her face.
You look cute with sawdust in your hair.
Megan stops swinging her legs and takes the phone out. She reads it. Then she looks up at me, and back down at the screen, and up again.
I try not to smile at the shock on her face, but fail.
“You?” she says.
I nod.
“You.”
“Yes.”
Color climbs her neck and floods into her face, and she slides off that bench with her mouth hanging open.
“Oh my God…”
“Yep.”
“Harris Trent, you absolute…” She snatches the dust sheet off the end of the bench and swats me with it, hard, and a cloud of sawdust goes up through the light. "You… sexted me.”
“True. But you sexted me first, gorgeous.”
She hits me again. I stand and take it. Then she's laughing, doubled over with one hand braced on my bench.
“All this time, it was you. Forty feet away.”
“Thirty. Give or take.”
She throws the dust sheet at my head.
When she's finished she stands in the middle of my shop with her arms crossed, breathing hard.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
Here's where I could try to make it a joke, but I don’t.
I put the broom against the wall. “I've been up here a long time. People don't get much out of me. It's not that I'm being difficult…. nothing comes out right, and by the time I've found the words the moment's gone and I'm just some creepy guy who grunted at you.”
She nods.
“Then you sent me that message by mistake, and I could talk. The second I told you, that ends. You go back to being polite to me and I go back to not being able to string two words together. So I gave myself one more day, then another one.”
I shake my head. “I’m sorry, it’s not a good reason. But it’s the truth.”
Megan crosses the floor.
She stops right in front of me, the toes of her sneakers against my boots, and tips her head all the way back to look up at me. Her eyes are bright.
“You know what, Harris? I'm not disappointed. I lay in bed touching myself last night picturing your face in my head.”
I suck my breath in as my cock hardens and lengthens. “You… you…”
She fists my shirt and pulls, coming up on her toes.
I get a hand into all that hair and take her mouth properly, and she opens for me with a little moan.
Hot, sweet and greedy. Her fingers curl into my shirt and drag me down, and when I lift her she leaves the floor without a second of hesitation and locks her legs around my waist.
I put her down on the bench and she hooks her ankles behind me as I kiss her deeply.
“You're huge,” she says, breathless, laughing, hands running over my shoulders and down my chest. “You're actually enormous. I've been…”
“Been what?”
“Watching you chop wood. Constantly. Like a giddy Victorian lady.”
“I know.” I get my mouth under her jaw.
“You knew?”
“Well, I guessed… tried to put on a good show for you.”
She groans and drops her head back, which gives me the whole length of her throat.
I kiss down her neck, then the hollow at the base, along the thin gold chain she wears.
Her skin is hot. She smells like peachy coconut and clean sweat, and every sound she makes goes straight down my spine and makes my cock harder.
The knot in her shirt gives up with very little encouragement.
“Oh yes…”
I get my hands on her waist, on all that soft warm weight of her, and she arches into my palms like she's been starved of it.
Her simple white cotton bra is the best damn thing I've ever seen in my life.
I close my mouth over her nipple through the fabric, then push it aside, licking and sucking, while she cries out and grabs the back of my head.
My hand slides down, unbuttoning her shorts, then into the heat of her. She’s already drenched, her panties soaked.
“That's my good girl.”
She grips the back of my neck as I stroke her clit, my mouth moving on her nipple. She arches her back, her cries getting louder. When she comes, she shouts out, and I hold her through every last shudder.
I stand in the middle of my workshop with my arms full of her and my cock in a condition that borders on medical.
Eventually she lifts her head. Her mouth is swollen, her pupils blown.
“Your turn,” she says, and reaches for my belt.
I catch her hand.
She blinks up at me. “Did I do something…”
"No." I bring her knuckles up to my mouth and kiss them. If she touches me, I’ll come in my pants. I want our first time to be with my cock inside her.
“Tomorrow… come over to the house tomorrow. There’s something I want you to see.”