“You’ll have to learn at some point.” Another stolen kiss. “Come on.”
He gives my butt a slap and we clear the table and counters together. With each dish I dry, he tells me which cabinet or drawer it belongs in and soon I don’t even need to ask. I just wonder what on earth he did to use this many dishes.
“Now.” He sighs and leans back against the counter. “Am I driving you home? Or will you let me keep you another night?”
“Winnie won’t be home until tomorrow night.”
“Good.” He nods. “I have a few things in store for us.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Yes. First thing is laundry,” he says seriously, then leads to me to a little washroom next to the front door. The washing machine inside has an agitator in the middle and it looks like it has probably lived more lives than something of that age should have to.
“That basket has some clean shirts if you want one that doesn’t smell like dinner. I pulled them off the line yesterday,” Tanner tells me. “I’m going to get the hamper and your dress to put in. I promise it’s not a greasy load, so it won’t hurt your dress.”
“Off the line?” I ask, and he nods. “The dryer died a few months ago and I just haven’t bothered replacing it yet. And besides, it reminds me of when I was little. My mom never used the dryer for anything other than storage.”
He taps the doorframe like he’s fighting himself to leave a room I am undressing in. Once he peels himself from the doorway, I slip the shirt off over my head, drop it into the washer then find a thin flannel in the basket and pull it on. It’s falls to my mid-thigh, and it smells like fresh air and sunshine, like the wicker basket it was in. It’s my new favorite shirt.
When Tanner returns, he stops dead in his tracks, eyes wide at the sight of me.
“Is this okay?” I ask.
He curses, throws the clothes into the washer then turns onme. His eyes are a molten brown and darkened with an unbelievable shade of hunger.
“You.” He shakes his head and lowers his mouth to my neck, then my shoulder, but the flannel becomes a roadblock when it won’t stretch any further.
“You can take it off,” I tell him, but he shakes his head.
“I want you in my shirt for what I’m about to do to you.”
“Speaking of,” I push him off me, “I believe I promised to pay you back for dinner.”
There are flashes of lightning in his eyes as I kneel in front of him, blinking up through my eyelashes. I take my time in teasing him and running my hands along his legs before reaching up to the button of his jeans. His boxers do very little in hiding his want from me now.
There’s a confidence he brings out in me. I never would have initiated this before, but here I am, learning just as much about myself as I am about him. Little pockets of ourselves that no one else has privy to. Like the sound of him moaning my name, the freckle on his hip just below his waistline, the way he gazes down at me with those lust drunken eyes.
After, he pulls me right up to his lips and the slow caution he took with me last night in my bed and even this morning is gone. Instead, now, it is replaced with yearslong hunger. He presses me up against the wall, his lips cursing into my neck. He’s commanding of my body, and it, in turn, knows exactly how to respond. Even as he navigates us back upstairs and into his bed.
Our hands desperately grab at each other to somehow get closer than we already are. Sounds of my gasps, his grunts, and skin-meeting-skin fill the room, and soon we are coming undone together again.
We spend a few minutes catching our breath to the sound of the buzzing fan blades and the gentle clank of the chain tappingagainst the glass light globe. I have no idea how I am going to go more than a few hours without this after today.
“So. Hannah,” Tanner whispers into the dark room. “Tell me about your day.”
“Even the boring parts?”
“In fact, only tell me the boring parts, then we can just re-enact the exciting parts after.”
I turn so that my leg and arm are draped over his body and we do exactly that.
34
“For you.” Tanner steps onto the shady front porch and hands me a cup of coffee. Under his other arm and propped against his hip is the basket of our now clean, damp clothes and it is obscenely provocative.
He steps over to the clothesline off the far side of the porch and hangs our clothes. His shirts, my panties, his jeans, my dress, his socks, his boxers. It’s another image I commit to memory. Both him hanging the clothes, and our clothes themselves on the line together.
I sit in the rocking chair in his flannel and sip my coffee, breath the morning air, and listen to the sheep and chickens rustle around. The late July heat is growing more humid and thick, but I’ll happily sweat in his flannel for this view.
