“Hey,” I said, sounding breathier than I had any right to, given that I’d just been standing there.
“Hey,” he said back, sounding the same as me.
“New wheels?” I asked, pointing to the quad bike.
“Well, you nicked my car,” he said. “Very rude.”
“Seems a leggy blonde just nicked it, not me.”
He smiled. “That’s Amy. She’s just taking it home. You up for a ride?”
A small part of me was disappointed that we wouldn’t be jumping straight into our conversation, but then again, adventuring together was what we did best. So I swallowed the part of me that wished he would come inside instead and smiled.
“Let’s do it.”
Jack trotted ahead to pull the gate open for me, handing me a helmet as he did. I slid it on and watched as Jack swung his leg over the seat, starting the engine. He pointed to a little step I could use to get on the back, offering me his hand to help, and I accepted it.
Once I was on, it became clear I’d be holding onto him the entire time.Crafty man, I thought. But I wasn’t complaining.
Jack put his helmet on, too, and suddenly I could hear his breathing just behind me and to the left. It was strangely intimate, and disorienting, as if he were whispering in my ear from behind. I wrapped my arms around his torso without even thinking about it, feeling the hard lines of his muscular form beneath my fingers.
“Shall we?” he asked, and I nodded before I realised he couldn’t see me.
“Ready,” I said, and the quad bike lurched forward slightly; not enough to knock me off balance, but enough to make me tighten my grip around him. I couldn’t look straight ahead with the helmet, so I turned my head to the side and rested it against his back.
He drove slowly along the roads, but as soon as we passed the football club and joined the path to the river, he opened it up. Suddenly we were flying, slowing only occasionally to pass people.
As we rode, Jack asked me about my day, and I told him about Greg’s response to the designs I’d sent. He was thrilled for me, congratulating me so enthusiastically that it was actually a bit much coming through the helmet speaker.
We were on the river path for several minutes before we turned off up towards the closest village, and then off into some farmland.
“Are you allowed to ride here?” I asked as we manoeuvred around a closed gate to get into a field.
“Oh yeah, this is Uncle John’s land. This field’s fallow this year.”
We followed a farm track for a couple of minutes before suddenly taking off like a rocket into the field of tall grass to our left.
I’d thought we’d been going fast before, but that had been nothing. We were going so fast that I couldn’t hear Jack’s breathing anymore. So fast that he had to tell me to lean into the turns, and it was only because I was clung so tightly to his body and could feel his muscles moving that I had any idea what I was actually supposed to do and when. It was terrifying at first, but once I let myself cling tightly enough to Jack that we felt like one mass, I was able to relax into it a bit. Before long I was laughing as we caught air going over bumps and drifted around corners.
Then Jack stopped and asked if I wanted to drive, and I’d never said yes to anything more quickly. We swapped places – which involved him getting up and me awkwardly shuffling forward on the seat so he could re-mount behind me – and then he talked me through what the different buttons and levers and rotating handlebars did. He had to go through it twice; I hoped he thought it was because I was just confused, and not because of the real reason, which is how I was concentrating too hard on ignoring the feeling of him pressed against my back, knowing that he’d be able to hear every hitch in my breath.
Once I finally grasped the basics, I was able to get us going, slowly at first but then faster and faster. I found that it felt even more controlled when I was the one doing the steering, and I let myself really open up, then fought the urge to pull the brake when I felt him tighten his grip around me, his hands low around my stomach, his hands brushing the zip of my jeans. He whooped and cheered as I took hard turns and found where he’d managed to get a bit of air, managing at least a couple of inches myself.
When I slowed to turn again, he took the chance to move his hands from their position clasped in front of me to the crease between my hips and thighs, and I couldn’t help but arch my back in response. I realised what I’d done when I heard a sharp intake of breath through the speaker in my helmet, and I accidentally released the throttle, effectively causing us to do the quad biking version of slamming on the brakes.
Flustered, I got off the bike immediately and let Jack take back over. He asked if I was okay and I said yes, that I just got a bit excited about the jump and was ready for him to take over again. He agreed and offered me his hand to climb on again, but I declined this time, using his shoulders instead.
“So I was thinking,” he said, “if you want, we could have dinner at my place? I got some really nice stuff from the farm shop today, and I thought I could make us dinner.”
“Uh, sure,” I said, not sure what I’d been expecting. When I’d seen the quad bike, I’d just assumed that was the activity. The adventure. Going to Jack’s house? That was something else entirely.
But I wasn’t opposed to it. If anything, it made the butterflies I’d already felt whirling around my stomach flap their wings even harder. If he wanted me to come to his, what did that mean for this conversation we were having? My mind raced to the obvious conclusion, which probably only felt obvious because I was pressed up against Jack in that moment, and the butterflies threatened to start a whole-ass tornado.
We pulled back onto the farm track and followed it for a while, almost reaching the road before we came to an old stone farmhouse. I thought I saw Amy disappear from one of the windows. Then we turned up the drive and carried on past the house, passing between more fields, these ones full of what looked like actual crops. We were going vaguely uphill, but then we came to the top, and a tiny little hollow appeared in front of us, a lush pond pooled in the bottom and a small wooden cabin perched half over it.
We parked the quad bike out front, and I stood and admired Jack’s handiwork. When he’d said he’d built his own house, I hadn’t really known what to expect; at times I’d imagined it as some super modern shipping container conversion, and sometimes as a glorified shed. But if there had been a spectrum between those two, Jack’s house wouldn’t have been anywhere on it. It fit perfectly within the landscape, like it was a natural part of it, yet looked so purposefully crafted. The wooden exterior didn’t look cheap or rough but intentional, like an extension of the fields around us.
Walking through the front door, which he held open for me as he watched me take it all in, I was surprised at how spacious the vaulted ceilings made it feel. It was also nice and cool, which didn’t surprise me after the “designing for air flow” conversation we’d had yesterday. It also got much better light than my house, despite the fact that I couldn’t see any actual lights on. Clearly he’d designed for that, too.
