I take him in my mouth and his whole body arches up and his hand comes into my hair, not pushing, just holding on, and I work him slowly and thoroughly with my tongue until he's breathing through his teeth and saying my name with a degree of desperation I find extremely satisfying.
"Come here," he says, rough.
I rise up on my knees above him and guide him to my entrance and sink down, slow, taking all of him, and the sound he makes me even wetter. I stay there a moment just feeling the fullness of him inside me.
He looks at me. His eyes are dark and undone and completely present, all that careful steadiness fractured, and I start to move.
I set the pace I want: deep, rolling, my hands flat on his chest for leverage. This time, he lets me drive, his hands on my hips but not directing, just holding. His jaw is tight and his eyes are on my face and every time I rise and fall his grip tightens and loosens like a tide.
I'm watching him come apart and it's the best thing I've ever seen — this man who is so careful with everything, so deliberate, so in control of his world, completely at my mercy and choosing to be.
Everett gives me everything. His hips start to meet mine and I take it and I ride him harder and the headboard finds the wall again. I feel every inch of him on every stroke — the thickness, the heat, the specific drag and fill that makes my breath come out ragged — and his hands grip my hips hard enough to leave marks and the sounds he's making are wrecked and low and entirely mine.
I am not thinking about anything on earth except the look on his face and his cock deep inside me and the gold light on the walls and this, exactly this.
I come first, sudden and total, clenching hard around him, his name out of my mouth before I've decided to say it. He follows immediately, both hands gripping my hips, his whole body going tight, and I feel him pulse inside me and I stay with him all the way through it.
I shudder and lie on his chest, listening to his heart slow down. The window is open. The farm is doing its evening things. Fig appears from nowhere and sits at the foot of the bed with her back to us, indifferent.
"Fig," I say.
She doesn't turn around. She's above this.
Everett's chest moves as he chuckles.
We're quiet for a long time. The gold light fades to something softer and the mountains go blue and Burl snores from the porch below the window, steady as a clock.
"Stay," Everett says.
Just that. One word, low and certain, with his arm around me and his heart under my palm.
"I already decided," I say.
He holds me closer. I close my eyes.
Outside, the farm settles into dark. The bees quiet, the hens put away, the east field silver in the last light. Somewhere in the long grass a rabbit is doing what healed things do. Living.
I know how that feels.
Everett
One Year Later…
It'sMayandtheapple tree is blooming.
It does this every year for five days, sometimes six, and then the petals come down and the fruit sets and it's over until the following spring. I've watched it every year since I've been here and I've never gotten tired of it. This year I've been watching the buds for two weeks, tracking their progress the way I track everything I'm waiting on.
Burl is under that tree.
We buried him in November, the ground still soft, on a grey afternoon after the last of the leaves had come down. It was quiet and it didn't take long and we didn't say much and that was right. He'd had a good last year — the best year of his life, I think, because Sloane was in it and Sloane had a particular talent for sitting on the porch floor at dog level and talking about basil. He went the way good animals go: on his blanket, in the morning, ready. I was beside him. She was too.
The apple tree will bloom over him this week and I'm going to take her out there when it does.
She's in the kitchen.
I can hear her from the bean rows on a call, her voice carrying through the open window, the particular rhythm she has in work mode: efficient, warm, slightly faster than the rest of the time. The farm fresh subscription box operation has been doing well and she's been approached by a farm two towns over about sourcing, which she's thinking about with the focused careful attention she gives to things she wants to do well.
I work through the row and listen to her and think about what this place sounded like before.
