He texts me at six-thirty:Can you leave her with someone for a few hours.
I can.
I text him back, and he gives me an address that is three blocks off Main Street.
It's a cabin, or close enough — a single-storey house with a deep porch and a yard that runs back to the tree line. Wood-sided, dark-stained, with a light on over the front door. I can smell pine and something cooking. He opens the door before I knock.
He looks different here. Festival-Colm wears a lanyard and carries a radio. This Colm is in a flannel shirt with two buttons open and bare feet.
"Come in," he says.
Inside was a kitchen, a living room with a wide couch, and a fireplace with ash still in the grate from the last winter. Outdoor gear on hooks by the door. Maps on the wall — actual paper maps, topographical, with trails marked in pencil. A huge collection of DVDs.
"Sit down," he says. "I made food."
He brings two plates and sets them on the coffee table, and sits on the other end of the couch.
We eat. We talk. He asks me about Kelowna, and I ask him about Silver Ridge, and it's strange how easy it is, under everything. The same quality that night had, three years ago. The feeling of a conversation that goes further than it should in the time available.
I notice that throughout the conversation, he’s been moving closer. Now his arm is around my shoulder and I have to say, "I've been a single parent for two years."
"I know."
"I don't — I haven't —It's been a long time since I had time for anything that was justmine."
He looks at me, waiting.
"I have time now," I say. "Tonight."
He puts his hand on my face, his palm against my jaw, his thumb just below my cheekbone. The same way he touched me three years ago and the same way it lands.
"I know," he says, and kisses me.
Colm kisses me like he has been waiting, specifically, for this — not the idea of it but the fact of me, in his house, tonight. His hands are careful, and I don't want careful, I want real, and I pull back long enough to tell him so.
He turns me in one motion, so I'm back against the armrest of the couch, and he's over me and that is absolutely what I remember and absolutely what I've been missing.
“God, I missed you.”
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
He gets my shirt off and I get his. Then we’re skin to skin on his couch and his hands are everywhere—rough palms sliding over my breasts, down my stomach, between my legs. Two thick fingers drag through my wetness and push inside me without hesitation. I’m soaked already, and the low groan he makes when he feels it goes straight to my core.
“You okay?” he asks.
“More than okay.” My voice is rough. “I want the opposite of slow.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me, eyes dark and focused. “I’ve thought about this for three years.”
“Don’t tell me that right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I’ll feel it.” I’m already shaking. “And I’m already—”
“Good,” he says. “Feel it.”
He doesn’t go slow. He spreads my thighs wider, lines up, and pushes into me in one steady thrust. The thick stretch of his cock—God, I missed this exact feeling—fills me so completely my back arches off the couch. He’s big, hot, and familiar in a way that makes my breath hitch. Three years and my body still remembers exactly how he fits.
