Page 13 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
I come up the porch steps. He watches me and doesn't move. I sit in the other chair, the one I already think of as mine, which I find slightly embarrassing and not embarrassing at all, and look at the mountains in the last light.
"I'm not leaving," I say.
He's quiet.
"Not because of you," I say. "Or notonlybecause of you. I'm staying because this is where I want to be. Because I'm a teacher and this town needs one and because Nora is about to start school and she should have someone who already knows her. Because I was shrinking in Vancouver and I'm not shrinking here." I look at him as I rattle on and on. "You and Nora are the reason I figured that out. But the staying is mine."
He's looking at me. His jaw is tight. "You'd upend your whole life," he says.
"I'd redirect it. There's a difference." A beat. "I've been redirecting the wrong way for a long time. This is the right direction."
The mountains hold the last light. The river is down there below the tree line, steady and constant.
He sets his mug down. He leans forward, elbows on knees, looks at his hands for a long moment. Then he looks up at me.
"Nora cried when she realized you were really leaving," he says. "She's been through enough."
I hold his look, understanding the warning inside of it. The protective Uncle. The “Don’t you dare break her heart, Tessa”. "I'm not going anywhere, Beckett. That's the whole thing I'm telling you."
After a long silence, he nods and takes my hand.
His bedroom is at the back of the cabin, the window facing east toward the dark tree line. He leaves one lamp on and the room is warm and smells like him.
"Come here," he says.
I cross the room.
He kisses me slowly, one hand at my jaw, and I feel the difference immediately — no urgency, no edge. Just him paying attention, his thumb tracing my cheekbone, my hands finding the front of his shirt.
"Beckett."
"Yeah."
"I've been thinking about this since the porch."
"Which night."
"Both," I say.
He makes a low sound and his hands move to my waist and he walks me back toward the bed and I go, and when the backs of my knees hit the mattress I sit and look up at him standing in the lamplight and I reach for him just to have something to hold.
He comes down over me and the first thing he does is nothing. Just looks. One hand braced beside my head, the other tracing from my jaw down my throat, slow. The lamp is low and amber and I can see his face clearly — the scar through his eyebrow, the particular set of his jaw, the expression that is open and unguarded and aimed entirely at me.
"Tell me what you want," he says, his mouth against my collarbone.
"Everything," I say. "Slowly."
He takes me at my word.
His mouth moves down my throat, my chest, lower, and he takes his time at every place he stops — thorough, unhurried. I get my hands in his hair when his mouth finds my stomach and I feel him almost smile against my skin.
"Good?" he says.
"Don't stop."
He doesn't stop. He works his way back up and gets my jeans off without rushing and when his mouth finds me I stop being articulate entirely. I pull at his hair and he takes that as information and gives me more of exactly that, steady and focused, and I press the back of my hand to my mouth because Nora is down the hall and I cannot be loud about this even though I want to be loud about this.
"Beckett." His name in pieces.
