I'd said too much. I could feel the rawness sitting between us, exposed, and the urge to walk it back was already rising.
"Anyway." I finished the beer. "I split wood I don't need and I rebuilt a cabin. That's the whole story."
She didn't try to fix it. Didn't analyze it or reassure me or tell me I was a good person. She turned her hand over on the step and laced her fingers through mine, and we sat there while the sky finished its show and the first stars came through.
Her hand was small in mine. I held it and didn't say anything else, and the silence was the kind that doesn't need filling.
IT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.
I'd been on the couch for ten days. Ten nights of lying there with my feet hanging over the arm, listening to her move around in the bedroom, the bathroom, the soft click of a light going off. Ten nights of the cabin settling and the river running and the knowledge that she was thirty feet away wearing my shirt with nothing under it. I knew because the cabin got cold at night and it was thick enough on its own. I'd seen the thin strap of her bra hanging over the bathroom door, which meant she wasn't wearing one, and that piece of information had been living rent-free in my head for the better part of a week.
I was standing in the kitchen getting water when she came out.
The hallway light was off. The main room was dark except for the last embers in the woodstove. She was a silhouette in the bedroom doorway, bare legs, my flannel hitting mid-thigh, her hair down around her shoulders. She'd been asleep. Her eyes were heavy with it.
"Couldn't sleep," she said.
"Me either."
She walked to the kitchen. Stood on the other side of the counter, where I'd lifted her two days ago, and I could see her thinking about it. Her gaze dropped to the surface and then came back to me.
"Cliff."
"Yeah."
"I'm tired of pretending that didn't happen."
"Me too."
She came around to my side. She crossed the four feet between us, put her hands on my chest, and looked up at me. Her eyes were dark and certain, and whatever had been holding her back was gone.
"Tell me to go back to bed," she said. "And I will."
I gripped her waist. The fabric was warm and underneath it her skin was warmer, and I could feel the tremble running through her.
"I'm not going to tell you that."
She kissed me.
It wasn't tentative. Her hands fisted in my shirt and she pulled me down and her mouth was open and warm and she tasted like toothpaste and underneath that, her. My grip tightened on her waist and pulled her flush against me, every inch, and she made that sound again, the one from the counter, the breathy catch in her throat that went straight to my cock.
I walked her backward until her shoulders hit the wall. Pinned her there with my hips and she gasped, her legs shifting apart, and I could feel the heat of her through the thin cotton of my boxers. My mouth found her throat, the soft skin below her ear, and she arched into me, her fingers digging into my shoulders.
"I've been thinking about this for ten days," I said against her neck. "Every time you walked through my kitchen in that shirt."
"Just the shirt?" Her voice was unsteady, breathless, and hearing Nell Chambers lose her composure was the best thing that had happened to me in ten days.
"The shirt. Your mouth. How you look at me when you think I'm not looking." I kissed the hollow of her throat and felt her pulse hammering against my lips. "The sound you made on that counter."
"Oh God." She pulled my mouth back to hers.
I slid my hands down to her thighs and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around me, the hem riding up, and I carried her two steps to the left and set her on the kitchen counter. The same spot. We both felt it, the callback, and she laughed against my mouth.
"This counter again."
"I've developed an attachment."
She laughed harder, genuine and surprised and warm, and a knot I hadn't noticed came loose. I kissed her while she was still laughing. She pulled at my shirt until I stripped it off over my head. Her palms went flat on my pecs, her fingers tracing down my stomach, and she made a low hum of appreciation that landed somewhere behind my ribs.
