Chapter Four
ATLAS
I WOKE UP HARD ANDthinking about her mouth.
Specifically the way she’d whispered my name against my shoulder while I was buried inside her, how her breath had broken on the second syllable. The honey on her fingers, slick and golden around my cock. The freckles on her shoulders. I’d kissed three of them, the ones that formed a crooked line above her collarbone, while she came apart under me on the kitchen counter.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, running the whole night back room by room. Her spine arching against my palm. The sound of the coffee pot hitting the floor. Her dark eyes wide open and looking straight at me while the rest of her came undone, and what I saw on her face wasn’t surprise. It was relief. She’d been waiting for this. Maybe longer than I knew.
My cock didn’t care that the sun was barely up. My cock had an excellent memory and no sense of timing.
I got out of bed. Pulled on jeans and stood at the kitchen counter, the one that still smelled faintly of wildflower honey and sex, and poured from the replacement pot. She’d killed the old one. Shattered it clean off the surface while I was between her thighs. Every cup I poured from here on out would remindme of a five-foot-four woman with dark curls and terrible aim who’d broken my coffeemaker with her knee while I made her come.
I drank my coffee. Went to the hives. Dawn inspections, same as always. Brood patterns, queen activity, stores. I pulled a frame and held it to the light and thought about nothing except colony health for thirty uninterrupted seconds, which was a new personal record since Flora Diaz had crashed through my equipment.
Then I thought about her thighs tightening around my waist when I pushed into her and I nearly dropped a frame full of capped brood onto my boots.
She showed up while I was still at the hives. I was on the porch with my second cup when I heard the rental on the gravel and watched her step out.
Different clothes today. She’d been rotating: blue top and jeans the first day, that green tank layered under a flannel the second, the outfit she’d been wearing yesterday that I’d peeled off her and was not going to think about anymore. Today she had on olive cargo pants that sat low on her hips and a rust-colored top that pulled tight across her chest when she reached into the back seat for her bag. Her hair was loose. Not clipped, not braided. Down, a spill of curls catching the early light, and the sight of it hit me square in the sternum because she’d had it pinned back every day since she’d arrived. She’d left it down today. After last night.
She walked toward me with her portfolio case under one arm and a thermos in the other. Smiling. Too many teeth and not enough eye contact, the grin of a person who’d rehearsed looking casual in her rearview mirror and wasn’t pulling it off.
“Morning,” she said, stopping at the bottom of the steps. “I brought tea. From the Juniper. I’m a tea person now. I’ve decided.”
“Since when?”
“Since recently. It’s a lifestyle choice. Very intentional. Nothing to do with — it’s just tea, Atlas.”
She was rambling. She rambled when she was nervous, and right now every word was coming out at double speed, her gaze darting to my mouth and skipping away.
“I reworked the east perennial layout last night,” she said. “After I — after. I had some thoughts about the bloom sequencing and I think we can close that mid-June gap with a second band of —”
“Flora.”
She stopped.
“Come inside. I’ve got wildflower honey for that. The light one. Better than sugar.”
“For my tea?”
“Unless you’ve got a better use for it.”
Her lips parted. She held my gaze for the first time since she’d gotten out of the car, and whatever she’d been holding at arm’s length since last night softened. “I do like a little sweetness,” she said.
“So do I.”
I said it flat. Easy. Like ordering feed. But her breath caught and the flush started at her ears and rolled down her throat, and I took a long sip of coffee to keep my expression neutral. She climbed the porch steps. Her arm brushed mine as she passed and my whole body went tight. Cedar soap and underneath it just her, warm skin and morning. I stood there gripping my mug while she disappeared into the cabin.
We worked. That was what we did, the convenient fiction that the garden project gave us. She spread her trace paper across a flat stone near the planting beds, kneeling in the dirt to check drainage, marking stakes where the summer specieswould go. I worked the colonies on the far side of the property. Thirty yards apart. A professional distance. Completely useless.
Because I could hear her. Talking to the plants, a running low-voiced commentary that she didn’t know carried on the still air. “You’re going in too early, sweetheart, I need you to wait three more weeks,” she told a lupine she was repositioning in her design. “No, absolutely not, you don’t get to go next to the penstemon. You’ll crowd her out.” She assigned them genders and opinions. She was on her knees with dirt on her shins and her voice had dropped into that low warm register she used when she forgot anyone was listening. My cock was straining against my zipper so hard I had to adjust my belt and stare at a brood comb and think about nosema infection rates. It didn’t help. She told the yarrow to respect boundaries and I bit my tongue. My bees had better social skills than I did. At least they could be near a flower without losing the ability to function.
I turned back and scraped propolis off a super I’d already cleaned. Twice.
Midmorning she knelt beside a patch of shooting stars near the creek bank. Her top had ridden up from her waistband and I could see the curve of her lower back, sun-warmed brown skin, the dip of her spine. Her left hand moved quick and sure across the paper while her right rested on her thigh.
Then her right shifted. Palm flat. Fingers spread. Pressed low against her belly, gentle, cradling. She stayed like that, head down, still drawing with her left while the other just rested.
