5. Megan
Chapter Five
MEGAN
The next evening, I change three times before I leave the house, which is a lot of effort for someone going to pay a friendly visit to their neighbor. I bring a bottle of wine and my sketchbook.
Harris is on his porch steps with a coffee, and there's a fox sitting at the other end of the boards. I stop dead: it’s the fox I drew through the window when I was spying on Harris.
The fox’s summer coat is lustrous, black stockings on his front legs and a white tip on his brush.
Where his left eye should be, there's a seam of pale scar tissue.
“Don't come at him straight on,” Harris says, without turning around. “He’ll know you’re not a threat that way. Come and sit with me.”
I walk cautiously in a zig-zag up to Harris’s porch and sit next to him.
“This here is Kit, he’s been coming out here three winters now. He turned up half dead the first one. Something attacked him; I helped patch him up.” Harris passes me two blackberries. “Hold your hand flat.”
Kit takes his time. He comes up to me, checking the treeline twice, and by the time he's close enough that I can smell him, ferns and wild animal musk underneath, my arm has gone numb. He lifts one blackberry off my palm delicately, like he’s being polite.
Then he takes the second one, chews it, goes to lie down in the sun, and puts his brush over his nose.
“He's never done that with anyone but me,” Harris says.
“Done what?”
“Stayed and gone to sleep.”
I get my sketchbook out of my bag and draw the fox. When I look up, Harris is gazing at me.
“Come with me,” he says.
He takes me out to the workshop and to the door with the lock on it. Inside it's cool and dry, and every inch of the wall is covered in photographs.
A great gray owl coming off a fence post at first light, the whole big span of its wings open, feathers lit from behind. A doe with her fawn. Sunset and sunrise over the snow-capped mountains. And a young, one-eyed fox standing in snow with his head turned back over his shoulder.
“Harris. These are incredible. Why are they locked away?”
“My sister's seen some. She lives in Alaska.”
I go along the wall and every one is better than the last. “You could sell these.”
“I used to.” He says it flatly, and I stop talking. “And entered competitions. There was a guy I sometimes buddied up with. Dave. I sent him an owl photo, and asked what he thought of the crop. Six months later it took a national prize with his name under it."
I suck in a breath.
“I said it was mine and he told me to prove it.” Harris shrugs “I had the original file, but it dragged on the best part of a year. He knew people, and by the end, two magazines had stopped responding to me. So I quit sending things out.” He nods at the wall.
“Kept taking them. Just stopped showing anybody.”
“People should be standing in front of these. In a gallery.”
“It's just animals and birds.”
“No, it’s not. These are special.”
We spend an hour as he talks more than he has since I met him. Explaining why one owl photo works and the one beside it doesn't. The anatomy of animals, how they move; at some point I start taking notes, so I can refer back to them for my illustrations.
I put the pencil down when I realize he’s stopped talking and is gazing at me.
“What?”
“It’s time for bed.”
He carries me across the yard, up the steps, then through his kitchen, with my legs locked around his waist and my mouth on his neck.
His bedroom is plain. A huge bed and one photograph on the wall.
He sets me on my feet and pulls his shirt off, and I get my first proper look at him up close.
Heavy shoulders, dark hair across his chest and down his stomach, a long silver scar under his ribs, the solid thickness of a man who works outside.
“Your turn,” he says.
I hesitate. I’m so short and soft and freckled in front of all of that tan, muscular glory.
Harris takes the hem of my shirt in his big fist.
“I've been watching you since the day you got here… let me see you, gorgeous.”
I lift my arms.
He takes his time getting me out of my clothes.
When my bra comes off he makes a sound low in his chest and cups my breasts in both hands, thumbs working over my nipples until they're tight and aching, and then he bends and takes one into his mouth.
He sucks hard. His teeth catch, gently, and my knees go.
“Bed,” he orders.
I lie down on my back. He hooks my panties off and stands there at the end of the bed looking at me with his jaw set, then takes hold of my ankles and pulls me down the mattress to meet him.
“Open your legs.”
I do it.
“Wider.”
The groaning sound he makes when he sees me spread out for him goes straight through to my core.
He gets down between my thighs with his hands pushing them flat and his forearms braced across my hips, and he doesn't tease and he doesn't rush.
He licks a long slow stripe through my pussy, then closes his mouth over my clit and works me with his tongue until I'm rocking against his face.
Two thick fingers push into me and I gasp.
“Oh! Harris…”
He does what he texted me about on the phone in the dark, when I was alone in that cabin with my hand between my legs and no idea who I was talking to.
That's what does it; the memory laid over the reality of his mouth moving on me.
I come with both hands clutched in his hair, my heels dug into his back, shouting his name.
He comes up the bed while I'm still shaking, mouth wet, and kisses me so I can taste myself.
“My turn,” I say. I get a hand into his jeans; his cock is big and thick, and when I wrap my fingers around it he swears against my shoulder. He lets me stroke him for a while. Then he catches my wrist.
“I’m going to come, gorgeous.”
“I'm on the pill. Clean test after my last relationship.”
“Hasn’t been anyone in a long, long time.”
I bat my eyelashes. “Then what are you waiting for?”
He kicks off his jeans, then, his fingers working my clit, he pushes in slowly, watching my face for every inch of it, one hand under my knee to open me up.
He's big enough that it takes work for him to fit inside.
He gives me a little and stops, gives me more and rests, and by the time he's all the way in I'm more full than I’ve ever been in my whole life.
“That's my good girl. Show me how well you take it.”
Then he starts to move. He fucks me deep and unhurried at first, hips rolling, one forearm braced beside my head, the headboard starts hitting the wall on every stroke.
I get my heels into the back of his thighs and hold on.
He tells me how tight I am and how long he's wanted this.
Then what he thought about in the shower the first week I was here, and every filthy word of it in that low rough voice pushes me closer to the edge.
Then he sits back on his heels and flips me over.
He pulls my hips up and slides in from behind in one long push, and this time there's nothing gentle in it.
One hand spreads across my lower back, holding me down.
The other reaches around and finds my clit and works it in tight circles while he takes me hard enough that I have to brace my forearms against the headboard, and the sounds coming out are low moans.
My orgasm goes through me in deep, strong waves and I'm still shuddering when he turns me over again.
“Megan. Look at me.”
I open my eyes. He's braced over me with his jaw tight and his eyes locked on mine; he comes hard without looking away.
Afterward he pulls me onto his chest and puts his hand in my hair, stroking gently, and keeps it there.
“That photograph,” I say, when I can talk again. “The one in here. Why that one?”
A woman's hands in a bowl of shelled peas, out of focus at the edges, taken from below by somebody sitting on the floor.
“My mother,” Harris says. “It’s the first one I ever took that came out good.”
I press my mouth against his shoulder and lie there, our hearts beating together in the quiet of the night.