"A little. She'd switch when she got frustrated with me."
"Say something."
"Mm?"
"In French."
"Il pleut comme vache qui pisse," I say, because it's raining and it's the first thing Grand-mère would have said.
He laughs."What does it mean?"
"It rains like a pissing cow."
"Montréal's a poetic place."
"Grand-mère was."
The rain keeps going. The fire moves. I'm cold in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature, the kind blankets don't fix. He notices, and he gets up to add a log.
He crosses behind me. The back of his hand brushes my shoulder on the way — not deliberate, just the consequence of the cabin being small and him being large — but my body doesn't process it as accidental. My body leans into it like it's been waiting.
I catch his wrist.
He stops. I stand up. I don't let go of his wrist, and I turn around, and he's close enough that I have to tilt my face up to see his properly. His eyes in this light are the colour of wet moss.
Rafe’s hand comes up to my jaw, warm and dry, the callus at the base of his thumb pressing against the soft place under my ear, and he tips my face up another inch. He kisses me.
It's slow and thorough and completely focused. His beard is softer than I expected. His other hand settles at the small of my back, pressing me in, and I can feel exactly how much he wants this against my hip. He's not concealing any of it, and the directness of that, the simple honesty of his body telling mine the truth, makes me whimper.
He brings me down onto the wool blanket and takes the flannel off me one button at a time, which should not be as unbearable as it is. His eyes stay on my face the whole way and I want to tell him to hurry up and I don't, because the slowness is doing something to me, a tightening low in my belly that getsworse with every brush of his fingers against my skin through the open fabric.
When he pushes it off my shoulders he doesn't move to the next thing. He just looks at me. His eyes drop, come back up, and the weight of that look goes through me like something physical.
His hand traces my collarbone. One slow drag of his fingertips and my breath goes shallow.
The bra comes off and his mouth finds the base of my throat at the same time and I stop tracking anything except the heat of it. He moves down and closes his mouth over my breast and I arch into him before I can think about it, a sound pulling out of me that I didn't choose. His beard rasps against the underside and I grab his hair and he does it again, harder, and the hand he has spread flat on my ribs is the only anchor I have to anything.
My jeans. He pops the button and works them down with my underwear and I lift without being asked because I need them off, I need his hands on me, I have been thinking about his hands on me for two days and I am completely done waiting. He is still dressed and the wanting is so sharp it almost hurts.
He settles between my thighs. His palms press my legs apart, wide and deliberate, and he looks at me, all of me, open and wanting and past pretending otherwise and my face goes hot.
Then his mouth is on my pussy and I stop knowing words.
He doesn't tease. He doesn't work up to it. He goes straight to where I need him, tongue flat and slow and devastating, and when my hips push up he pins them with his forearm and doesn't change his pace — doesn't speed up, doesn't acknowledge the begging my body is doing — just holds me down and keeps going exactly as slowly as he wants to. Two fingers push inside me and curl up and find a place that makes everything go white at the edges. I can't move. Can't close my legs. Can only lie there with my hands in his hair and my backarching off the blanket while he takes me apart with the specific unhurried focus he brings to everything.
His beard rasps against my inner thighs. His fingers work me open and his mouth works my clit and I am making sounds I have never made before in my life, sounds that the two-weeks-ago version of me would not have believed she was capable of, and I don't care, I can't care, there's no room for anything except the heat of his mouth and the curl of his fingers and the tight coiling pressure of an orgasm he keeps walking me right up to the edge of and then pulling back from.
When he does it the first time I actually whimper.
"Don't stop," I manage. "Please don't!"
His mouth brushes the inside of my thigh. "Tell me."
"I want to come. Please. I want —"
He goes back and I sob out loud with the relief of it. His tongue works me in slow circles while his fingers press deeper and I'm shaking, both hands fisted in his hair, and just when I'm right there — right on the edge of it, desperate and trembling — he slows again. Holds me at the crest and keeps me there and doesn't let me go over.
"Rafe."
