Page 12 of Wild Harvest Mountain Man

"You're soaked," he says. "You've been soaked since you opened the door."

"Oh, God."

"I'm going to make you come on my hand first, because you're loud and I want to hear it before the bed starts. Then I'm going to fuck you."

"That's fine. That's an acceptable plan."

"Then be quiet and let me."

I am not quiet. He takes his time, curls his fingers exactly where he learned to on Monday, and gets his thumb going in slow circles on my clit that do not speed up no matter what I do with my hips. I get a hand around his cock because it's there and because I want him to have to concentrate, and his breath goes ragged against my jaw, and he doesn't stop.

"Daniel!"

"I know."

"I want—"

"I know what you want." He turns his hand and the angle changes and I lose the end of the sentence entirely. "You'll get it. Give me this one first."

When I come it goes through my legs and up my spine. "Come here," I tell him. "Come here, come here—" I want more. I need more.

He pushes in slow, all the way, and stops there and hangs over me on his forearms with his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we've come up a slope.

The bed does start squeaking, and it's as bad as advertised, and neither of us cares. He gets a hand under my knee and opens me up and goes harder, and I get my heels into the backs of his thighs and take it.

"Touch yourself," he says. "That's it. I want it while I'm in you."

I come the second time with his name in my mouth and my hand between us and his whole weight on me, and he goes three strokes and follows, shuddering, saying something into my hair.

The heat and sensation of our post-sex bliss settles over me and I forget about everything else but him.

seven

Lena

"They're not a substitute for anything," I tell the man in the fleece vest, for the fourth time this morning. "Don't put them in a stroganoff. Put them in butter with salt and stop there."

"My wife makes a stroganoff."

"Your wife can make a stroganoff with the cremini." I wrap two hundred grams of hedgehogs in paper and fold the ends. "These, you eat on their own."

He pays. He goes away happy. Beside me Daniel is not looking at the scale.

"You've sold more in three hours than I usually do in a day," he says.

"You don't tell anyone what to do with them."

"I tell them what they are."

"Daniel, that is a feature of you and it is also the reason you were still holding four kilos of trumpets at noon last Sunday." I bump him with my hip. "You need a front of house. It's a whole job. Some of us went to school."

The square smells like woodsmoke and cider and wet canvas. It’s the last day of the market — forty years running, and every stall along the east row has that end-of-thing energy, everyone selling down rather than holding back, prices getting soft after two o'clock. The orchard people opposite are giving away seconds by the bag. Somebody's got a fire drum going by the bandstand for the bonfire crew to build off tonight. The maples on the north side of the square have gone entirely and the larches up the valley are that unreasonable gold they only do for eight days a year, and I know that now, because a man told me the name of a tree.

I've been behind this table since six-thirty. My third day as a person who lives here.

I started at The Larch House. Odile put me on the pass for a soft service of nineteen covers and stood behind my shoulder for the first forty minutes and then walked away without saying anything, which I have since learned is the highest compliment available in that kitchen.

Yves never answered my email.