The cabin was exactly the way I’d left it. Boots by the door. Coffee mug rinsed and upside down on the drain board. Bed made with the corners tucked. All the evidence of a man who kept his environment locked tight because it was the only thing he could control.
I held the door for Tova, and she trotted past me, her collar tags jingling in the quiet. She went straight to the kitchen, checked her water bowl, drank for a solid fifteen seconds, then walked to her spot beside the bedroom door and lowered herself to the floor with a huff that said she considered the evening’s adventures finished.
“Make yourself at home,” I said. “Oh wait. You already did that days ago.”
Her tail swept the floor once.
I stood by the front door and peeled off my jacket. The mud had dried stiff during evening rounds, and it cracked along the creases when I pulled it over my shoulders. My shirt underneathwasn’t much better. I left a trail of dirty clothes from the front door to the bathroom, which was the most disordered my living space had been since I moved in, but I’d deal with it later.
The shower was the only thing on my mind. An hour of barn chores in clothes that had been soaked through and half dried had left me feeling like I’d been rolled in grit and left out to cure.
I turned the handle and stepped under the spray, and the heat hit my shoulders and ran down my back, and for about ten seconds, that was all it was. Warmth sinking into cold muscles, steam filling the small bathroom, my body starting to unclench.
Then the memory of what happened in that overhang decided to join me.
It didn’t build or ease in. It landed on me whole, a full sensory replay my body launched without my permission. Lark’s mouth against my neck. The broken, ragged sound she’d made when I shifted my thigh higher and angled it and the pressure changed.
I was hard before I could form a conscious thought about it. I wrapped my hand around my cock as the memories crashed over me.
I hadn’t gotten into this shower for this, but my body didn’t care about my intentions.
Her hips rolling against me with a rhythm that had nothing to do with grace and everything to do with a woman who needed to get out of her own body. Her fingers twisting in my shirt hard enough to pop a seam. The heat of her through wet denim, concentrated and insistent and so close to the center of her that I could feel exactly where she was chasing it.
I braced one hand against the tile, closed my eyes, and let it have me. My grip tightened and the rhythm built and the water ran down my back, and I wasn’t in the shower anymore. I was in the overhang with her weight against me, her forehead dropping hard against my collarbone as she worked herself against me.My hand sliding to the curve of her ass and pressing her closer and the way she’d stopped breathing entirely for three full seconds before the next sound tore out of her.
My shoulders locked. The muscles in my thighs were shaking and the pressure was building at the base of my spine, and behind it was every sound she’d made, layered on top of each other, her breath and her voice and the raw, broken noise when she came apart against me. Her body going rigid, every muscle locked, and the release that had broken through her so hard it now broke through me too.
My knees buckled, and I caught myself against the tile, breathing wrecked, the water running over me while the aftershock rolled through my legs and my hand and my chest.
I stood there. Let the water run. Let my heartbeat come down.
The water hitting my shoulders was 105 degrees. Endless. I’d been using it every night for three weeks, while about forty yards across the property, a woman walked to a barn in the dark before dawn because her hot water heater was dead and she couldn’t afford to fix it.
I turned off the water. Stood in the silence of the bathroom with steam curling around me and my jaw set so hard my teeth ached.
Six o’clock. I’d told her I’d be there at six o’clock tomorrow morning, and I’d meant it. The only reason I hadn’t insisted on working on it tonight was because I knew she needed space after what had happened today.
If that water heater could be fixed, I’d fix it. If it was dead, we were trading. She could have this cabin with its working shower and its functioning heat and I’d take her cold house until the problem was solved, and she could fight me on that from now until the goddamn mountains fell down.
I toweled off, got dressed, and picked up the wet clothes I’d trailed down the hall. Hung them over the shower rod to dry. Wiped the muddy water off the tile floor with a rag and put the rag in the hamper, and everything was back in order.
Tova watched me from the bedroom doorway through all of it. I stepped over her on the way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Stepped over her again on the way back.
“This is becoming a pattern, you know,” I said.
She put her chin on her paws and closed her eyes.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The cabin was quiet. The kind of quiet that usually crawled under my skin and left too much room for the noise in my head to fill. But tonight, the noise wasn’t the usual reel.
It was Lark.
I knew she was embarrassed about what had happened in the overhang. Known it before she made the joke about the job description—an attempt to bury it or apologize for it or turn it into something she needed to manage so that I was comfortable.
She didn’t need to do any of that. What happened was the most honest thing anyone had given me in longer than I could measure. A woman who spent every waking hour holding the world together with jokes and brightness and sheer force of will had trusted me enough to let all of it go, and I would rather lose my right hand than let her feel ashamed of a single second of it.
I lay back and pulled the blanket up. The bedroom was dark. Tova was breathing on the floor beside me, and I let the rhythm of it pull me down.
Reid was sitting on the hood of a truck, drinking a beer. A parking lot behind a bar in Fort Benning, a Thursday night, hisboots crossed at the ankles on the bumper. He was telling me a story about his sister’s wedding, and I was laughing.
