I take her shirt off. She gets mine. Her hands are sure — no hesitation in them. Cold air hits my back and I pull her in before she can feel it, her chest against mine, her skin warmer than the hillside.
I work my way down her throat. The hollow of her collarbone. The place just below her ear that makes her go still and grip whatever she can reach. I get her bra off and take her breast in my mouth and her back arches hard off the grass. I spend time there — thumb on one side, mouth on the other — until she's pulling at my hair trying to move me somewhere else.
I take my time getting there.
I get the rest of her clothes off and sit back on my heels and look at her in the last of the light. Long enough that she reaches for me.
"Come here," she says.
"Not yet."
I go down and get my mouth on her pussy and her thighs snap together against my shoulders before she forces them back open. I start slow — flat of my tongue across her clit, no rush — and she makes a sound through her teeth and pushes her hips up. I pressthem back down with my forearm and keep the pace I want, not hers. Not yet.
Her hand finds my hair. Grips.
I work her clit until her breathing goes ragged, until the hand in my hair stops guiding and just holds on. I slide two fingers inside her and curl them and her stomach pulls tight and she saysfuckunder her breath like she didn't mean to say it out loud. I feel her get wetter around my fingers. Her thighs are shaking now, small tremors she can't control.
I don't stop.
She comes with her hips grinding up into my face and her fist yanking my hair and my name tearing out of her throat — my first name, the one I buried at twenty-two, the one she picked up the first week like it belonged to her and never put it down.
I come back up and she's already reaching for me. Gets her hand around my cock before I've settled my weight and strokes me once, slow, watching my face while she does it. I press my jaw to her temple and breathe through it. She does it again. Tighter this time. Patient and deliberate, like she's paying me back for every minute I spent downstairs.
"Now," she says.
I push into her slow and feel every inch of the heat of her pussy around my cock, the way she pulls a breath in through her nose and holds it as she takes me. I bottom out and stop. Her legs lock around me. Her nails find my back.
I pull out and drive back in and she exhales hard against my ear.
Again. She tilts her hips to take me deeper and I give her the angle and she bites down on my shoulder softly. Her whole body moving with me now. I get a hand under her hip and hold her where I want her and she saysright there, don't stopand I stay exactly there, same depth, same angle, and work her until her legs start shaking again.
"Harder," she says.
I give her harder. Her pussy tightens around my cock and she tips her head back into the grass and says my name again and I feel it in my chest the same place I always do.
She comes the second time with her face turned into my neck, shaking, and I go right after her with my forehead dropped to her shoulder, hands fisted in the grass on either side of her, both of us out in the open air with the whole valley below and nothing above us but stars.
I don't move for a long time.
She keeps her hands in my hair. The stars are properly out now, east to west. The only sound coming up from the valley is the river.
After a while I reach into my coat pocket.
Flat stone. Palm-sized. Same gray-green granite as the piece she brought me the first week. One face polished smooth, one face rough.
I put it in her hand.
She lifts it. Turns it. Reads it with her fingers before her eyes can.
Daniel.Just his name. Cut deep and clean — no flourish, nothing extra. Just the name, held permanently in something that lasts.
She holds it a long time without speaking, letting out a soft sob. A sound of healing more than grief.
I let her.
seven
Ivy
