"More," I say. "Don't stop."
He goes the rest of the way and I wrap my legs around him and he stills again, both hands framing my face, forehead pressed to mine, breathing.
Everett groans and sets a pace that is exactly designed to take me apart — deep and measured, each stroke hitting somewhere that makes my toes curl, and I'm gripping his shoulders and talking before I know I'm doing it.There, like that, don't change it.He listens. He doesn't change it. His cock fills me completely with every thrust and I feel it everywhere and his hands are braced either side of my head and his eyes are on my face, not looking away, not anywhere else.
"Faster," I say.
He gives me what I'm asking for.
The pace he sets then is not patient. His hips drive into me and the headboard finds the wall and neither of us is quiet and I am completely, entirely nowhere but here: this man, this bed, the slick heat of us together, the fullness of him inside me with every stroke. I feel myself tightening around his cock and he feels it too because his rhythm stutters and his breath goes ragged.
"Christ," he says, rough. "Sloane!"
I come with my thighs locked around him and his name in my mouth and my whole body arching up, clenching hard around him, and he follows immediately, one deep thrust and then his whole body going rigid, his face buried in my neck, my name on a rough exhale as he shudders and comes inside me.
He rolls to his back and pulls me into his side without asking, and I go, which is not something I usually do. I'm a retreat-to-my-own-side person, always have been. Except apparently right now what I need is the weight of his arm and the sound of his heartbeat slowing down and the smell of him all around me, because I settle against his chest and feel immediately, completely right.
Neither of us talks.
The window is open and the rain has stopped.
I'm crying. Quietly, barely — two or three tears tracking sideways into my hair. I notice them and Everett notices them too. I feel it in how his arm tightens around me, just slightly, and he doesn't make a thing of it.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don't apologise for it."
"It's not sad," I say. "I just—" The sentence doesn't have an ending I can reach. "I don't think anyone's ever—" I breathe out. The tears stop. I feel scraped clean in the best possible way, like the garden after rain.
Then there's a thud at the foot of the bed. A pause. Fig materialises from nowhere, walks up the duvet like she owns every inch of it and sits directly on my feet.
I laugh.
"She never comes up here," he says.
"She's making a point." I reach down and scratch her ears. Fig begins to purr like a small engine, entirely unembarrassed. "She's right. This is also her bed."
I lie with his arm around me and his cat on my feet and the post-storm light going warm on the walls, and I think:here. This is what here feels like.
six
Everett
Sloane’sboots.Brownankleboots, mud dried along the sole. They've been there every morning this week when I come down to let Burl out. I step around them and let the dog out and stand on the porch in the early quiet and look at the mountains while Burl does his slow circuit of the yard, and the boots are just there, and I have stopped pretending to myself that I don't notice them.
She's been here every day since the storm — sunburned, calloused, smelling of soil by noon. She knows where I keep the feed. She knows which hens will take from her hand and which won't. She knows to check Burl's right hip first because it's worse than the left, and she does it without being asked, kneeling beside him in the mornings with her two fingers pressed gently into his flank while he leans into it and sighs.
She's in the pepper beds when the phone rings.
I'm two rows over. I hear the change in her before I look up — something in how she goes still. She glances at the screen andthen at me and says, "I have to take this," and walks toward the fence line.
I keep staking. I'm not listening. I can hear the register of her voice, measured, professional, and I note it the way I note a change in the barometer.
She's gone fifteen minutes. When she comes back she stands at the edge of the garden bed and looks at the pepper plants and not at me, and she has her phone in both hands the way she holds things when she's working something out.
"Former colleague," she says. "Director position. Vancouver." A pause. "Better than what I left."
I set the stake I'm holding. Press the soil around the base. "What did you say?"
