"Stop talking," she says, but she's smiling when she says it, and then she kisses me.
She takes what she wants. I let her because watching her take it is its own thing — the focused, direct quality she brings to everything she cares about, applied here, applied to me. She gets my belt open and wraps her hand around my cock and strokes once, slow, like she's taking a measurement, and I stop being articulate.
"Thereyou are," she says, with satisfaction.
"Yeah," I say, and flip us over.
She lands on her back and looks up at me and I take a second just to look at her. She’s flushed, hair loose, completely unguarded, and then I get my hand between her thighs and she's soaked and makes a sound that goes straight through me.
"Hops."
"I've got you," I say.
I work her with my fingers and watch her face, which is its own thing — the way her expression shifts when I find the right angle, the way she tries to stay composed for about four seconds before she stops trying.
She's vocal about what she wants and I appreciate that enormously.There, harder, don't stop— she says it like directions, clear and specific, and I follow every one. She comes with her thighs clamped around my hand and my name bitten off in the middle, and I give her about thirty seconds before I pull her hips to the edge of the bed and push into her.
She arches up. "Yes!"
I set a pace and she meets it, her legs around my waist, heels pressing into my back like punctuation. This is different from the first time — less careful, no walls left to come down. She reaches up and grabs my shoulder and pulls me closer and I go, bracing over her, and we find the rhythm that works and then Ipush it harder because she asked me to and the sound she makes when I do is something I'm going to be thinking about for a long time.
The pub below us has started filling. My whole life is twenty feet down and it is very far away right now.
"Like that," she says, voice dropping, trying to keep quiet. "Exactly — don't—"
I don't stop.
Her whole body pulls tight and she comes hard, nails in my shoulder, my name somewhere in the middle of a sound that is not fully a word, and I hold the pace through all of it and then I let go, pushing deep and stay there, her name once into her hair, and finish with my teeth pressed to her shoulder trying to stay quiet because Bev has excellent hearing and I will never hear the end of it.
We don't move for a while.
She ends up across my chest, breathing evening out, and I'm tracing something slow on her shoulder blade and she lets me for a long time before she asks.
"What are you drawing?"
"The name of the beer we made together."
"You already named it?"
"Before I knew what it was for." I keep tracing. "I thought it was a beer I hadn't made yet."
She lifts her head and looks at me.
"What's it called?"
"The Wild Sullivan," I say.
She puts her head back down. Her hand on my chest goes still, and then she turns her face into my shoulder and I feel her smile.
Below us, the pub fills up. The town goes about its business. I kiss her shoulder and I am as happy as I know how to be.
seven
Sage
TheHarvestFestivalrunstwo days and the second day is gold from start to finish.
I'm up before Hops and I'm at the tasting room window drinking his coffee and watching Silver Ridge wake up below us in the valley.
