Page 93 of The Goat Next Door

He pauses at the edge of the parlor, looking back at me with a look that’s equal parts frustrated and fond.

“Lock the door behind me,” he says, his voice firm. “And sleep. That’s an order, city girl.”

“Or what?” I tease. “You’ll come back and make me apologize again?”

He grins—a slow, dangerous curve of his lips. “You know I would.”

24

Brooks

“Ember is sparkly.

Daddy needs sparkly.”

— Sophie

The steering wheel catches a fraction of an inch to the left when I pull out of the hardware store parking lot.

Beside me, the passenger seat is empty.

Two dog-eared phone books and a scratchy wool blanket sit where Sophie usually claims her throne. She’s been staying at Nana’s for the last few days while I finished the ridge washout cleanup, hauling mud and clearing debris.

It’s been a brutal three-day slog, but the nights were a different kind of haze.

The second the sun dipped low enough to hide me in the shadows, I was already heading for Ember’s house.

We haven’t even had sex yet, but these past few nights of heat, friction, and the slow, deliberate work of learning her body have been an agonizing kind of discipline. The kind that feels less like restraint and more like punishment I keep choosing.

She makes it very clear what she wants. She always has. And it takes everything in me not to give in all at once, to stop thinking and just take what she’s offering.

Instead, I find myself fixated on the details. The small reactions. The places she sharpens under my hands, the ones she softens into without realizing it. Like if I pay close enough attention, I can map her properly—like understanding her might somehow make this manageable.

It doesn’t.

If anything, it makes it worse.

Because now I’m walking through the world with it under my skin, something live and insistent, like a current I can’t turn off no matter how still I stand.

I shift the truck into third, the gear stick shaking against my palm before it drops into place with a heavy, familiar notch.

Earlier this week, Sophie had been rambling about snails, insisting that Ember told her they had financial potential and a five-year guarantee from Manhattan.

A short, dry laugh leaves my nose before I can stop it.

“Yeah. Well. Manhattan’s got a lot of things we don’t,” I mutter to the empty cab.

Like a woman who walks into a room and somehow makes every damn thing brighter.

I tighten my grip on the wheel immediately, annoyed at myself.

Jesus Christ.

I’m talking about her like I’m sixteen. But then again, sixteen-year-old me never had Ember standing in my kitchen in tiny shorts, arguing about goat feed while looking at me like she wanted to climb me like a tree.

So maybe this is worse.

My traitorous brain is currently busy picturing Ember’s mouth.