"My thought, exactly." He smiled, cold and precise. “I have an idea.”
Silence stretched. Then: "Do it. Quickly."
The line went dead.
14
HAZEL
The porch swing kept its lazy rhythm when I turned toward him, the chains whispering our yes back and forth. “What took you so long?” I’d asked, and his answering grin went slow and wicked like a tide deciding to come all the way in.
He didn’t reply with words. He stood, and the swing rocked empty behind him as he scooped me up—one arm under my knees, the other at my back. I made a startled sound that turned into a laugh against his throat.
“Gideon—”
“I’ve got you,” he said, and he did. He lifted me as if I were feathers, an easy heft that didn’t strain. Muscle bunched under my palms where I clutched at his shoulders. He barely shifted his balance.
I’d thought of him as stone and heat and danger. I hadn’t accounted for gentleness inside all that strength.
The porch screen sighed closed. The hallway yawned and narrowed, moon and lamplight laying stripes across the runner, the house holding its breath like it approved of this procession.He carried me past the photographs that had watched decades of beginnings and endings.
At the top of the stairs, I glanced down at his forearms—veins roped, tendons defined, power applied without hurry. I had the strangest urge to cry for no reason except that some part of me had never been carried—never, not like this, not with care as a given rather than a prize you had to earn.
His door gave under his boot like it remembered us. He set me on the bed slow, letting the mattress take my weight inch by inch, hands a lingering heat at my waist as if reluctant to lose contact. He stood over me and the low bedside lamp turned him sculptural: chest broad, shadows carving his ribs, the dark map of hair that arrowed down his stomach where his shirt had ridden up. Copper flashed in his beard when he tipped his head, studying my face.
“Hi,” I said again, because sometimes the small words were the ones that fit.
He huffed a laugh, then bent to kiss me. It started soft—meaningful like the kind of prayer you say with your forehead against a door frame. But heat crept in quick, familiar as the path between us now. The world blurred to scent and mouth and the rasp of his palm on my thigh.
“Wait,” I whispered against his lips, and he froze, all that command and control redirected into stillness for me. It made my breath go strange.
“Too much?” His voice fell to gravel.
“No.” I framed his face with both hands. “I just—before we forget how to use words. Maude.”
He stilled another beat, then a smile tugged one corner of his mouth, small and helpless. “We don’t have to hide,” he said. “She told us so. Solid oak headboard and all.”
Laughter punched out of me, bright and ridiculous. “She did say that.”
“Then we’ll give the furniture a sporting chance,” he said solemnly, and the seriousness of it undid me.
I pulled him down. The kiss changed from amused to aching. We undressed in pauses and looks, like we had hours. Maybe we did. He was careful with me even after careful wasn’t strictly necessary, thumbs at my hips, mouth at my shoulder, the weight of him a shelter. When he entered this time, it felt less like being taken and more like being received. My body met his like it had been designed for this, like it had been waiting.
We didn’t reach for frenzy. We settled, an exhale after a long, long inhalation. His forehead pressed to mine, breath mingling. He moved inside me with a relentless patience—measured, attentive, sure of the result because he was present for every small sign that guided him there. He mapped me with hands and mouth and hips like he truly knew how to listen.
I held his face, my thumbs tracing the grooves time had cut beside his mouth. “We can touch in daylight,” I said between kisses, a little amazed. “We can hold hands while we fix the shutters. We can kiss in the kitchen while Maude tells stories.”
He groaned into my mouth, a sound that felt like agreement and desire at once. “I’m going to kiss you everywhere,” he said. “Kitchen. Porch. Front steps. While you’re lecturing me on epoxy ratios.”
“I’ll never lecture you on epoxy ratios,” I said, “because I don’t know anything about them.”
“You’ll learn, and you will,” he said fondly, shifting his angle until pleasure lanced up and my toes curled. “And I’ll deserve it.”
We laughed into each other’s mouths, and then the laughter collapsed into the kind of quiet that only bodies can keep. I clung, I opened, I let him see. The world telescoped to the heat at the point where we met, the way his hands spread my ribs when I arched, the way his voice dropped rough when he said my name like it was a thing he was allowed to keep.
I came slow, unwinding like a ribbon, hips rolling up to meet him as the sweetness built and built until it tipped and everything inside me spilled into his waiting hands. He followed with a shudder I felt all the way through, eyes dark and soft, a lowyestorn out of him like honesty.
After, we didn’t move for a while. He stayed over me on his forearms, then slid carefully to the side and tugged me into the curve of his chest. The ocean laid its hush through the cracked window. The house relaxed around us like it had been clenching for years and finally remembered how to rest.
