“I’m going to be mad about this for a very long time.”
“I can live with that.”
I crossed the kitchen, came up behind her, and put my lips on the curve of her neck. She stopped talking. Her head tipped back and I could feel her pulse, fast, her skin warm through the cotton.
“That’s cheating,” she said. Quieter now.
“I’m not cheating. I’m saying good morning.”
“You already said good morning. You said it with your mouth. On my neck. While I was filing a grievance.” Her breath caught. “Stop doing that unless you plan to follow through.”
I turned her around.
Her back hit the counter edge and her eyes went wide. The same look she’d given me on this counter the first time, and in my bed last night, except now there was nothing behind it. No lie, no cover story. Just Flora, looking at me with nothing held back.
“Flora,” I said, and kissed her.
She tasted like ginger tea and mint toothpaste. Her fingers curled into my chest hair and pulled. The sound I made was not dignified. She laughed into the kiss, loose and surprised. I picked her up and set her on the counter. She wrapped her legs around my waist.
“Bed,” she said into the kiss. “Actual bed this time. We have a bed, Atlas.”
“We didn’t make it last night.”
“We didn’t make it last night because someone got impatient against the hallway wall.”
“You told me not to be careful.”
“And you listened. Which was. Yes. Correct. Ten out of ten. But I’m requesting the bed now. Formally. As a woman whose back has opinions about the hallway baseboard.”
I carried her. Down the short hall, through the door, onto the sheets. She pulled me over her and I caught the hem of the T-shirt and drew it up and off and she lay back and I stopped.
Late-April light striped across her stomach. The soft curve below her navel. I’d been holding my hand there in the dark all week, tracing while she slept. She wasn’t showing yet. But my palm settled on that place, low and open, and this time I held it there and looked at her.
“That’s my baby,” I said.
Her eyes filled. “That’s your baby.”
“You drove nine hours to find me.” My thumb moved on her skin. “You tripped over my hive equipment. You lied about a client who doesn’t exist. You built a garden. And you’re carrying my child.”
“When you list it out, it sounds very dramatic.”
“It is very dramatic. You stalked me with binoculars, Flora.”
“I was observing—”
“From the tree line. With binoculars. That’s surveillance.”
She laughed, wet and bright, and grabbed the waistband of my jeans. “Get down here.”
I went. My lips traced her throat, her collarbone, the three freckles above her shoulder that I’d memorized by touch. Then lower. Her sternum. The dip between her ribs. The skin below her navel, where I lingered, and the sound she made was small and wrecked and I felt it behind my ribs.
I kept going.
Her hips lifted when my mouth reached the crease of her thigh. My hands slid under her, palms on her lower back, and I lowered between her legs. She was propped on her elbows, watching me, her dark hair spilling across the pillow, her breath quick.
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.”
