Page 13 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Guy Next Door

My hand slides down, unbuttoning her shorts, then into the heat of her. She’s already drenched, her panties soaked.

“That's my good girl.”

She grips the back of my neck as I stroke her clit, my mouth moving on her nipple. She arches her back, her cries getting louder. When she comes, she shouts out, and I hold her through every last shudder.

I stand in the middle of my workshop with my arms full of her and my cock in a condition that borders on medical.

Eventually she lifts her head. Her mouth is swollen, her pupils blown.

“Your turn,” she says, and reaches for my belt.

I catch her hand.

She blinks up at me. “Did I do something?…”

"No." I bring her knuckles up to my mouth and kiss them. If she touches me, I’ll come in my pants. I want our first time to be with my cock inside her.

“Tomorrow… come over to the house tomorrow. There’s something I want you to see.”

Chapter Five

MEGAN

The next evening, I change three times before I leave the house, which is a lot of effort for someone going to pay a friendly visit to their neighbor. I bring a bottle of wine and my sketchbook.

Harris is on his porch steps with a coffee, and there's a fox sitting at the other end of the boards. I stop dead: it’s the fox I drew through the window when I was spying on Harris. The fox’s summer coat is lustrous, black stockings on his front legs and a white tip on his brush. Where his left eye should be, there's a seam of pale scar tissue.

“Don't come at him straight on,” Harris says, without turning around. “He’ll know you’re not a threat that way. Come and sit with me.”

I walk cautiously in a zig-zag up to Harris’s porch and sit next to him.

“This here is Kit, he’s been coming out here three winters now. He turned up half dead the first one. Something attacked him; I helped patch him up.” Harris passes me two blackberries. “Hold your hand flat.”

Kit takes his time. He comes up to me, checking the treeline twice, and by the time he's close enough that I can smell him, ferns and wild animal musk underneath, my arm has gonenumb. He lifts one blackberry off my palm delicately, like he’s being polite.

Then he takes the second one, chews it, goes to lie down in the sun, and puts his brush over his nose.

“He's never done that with anyone but me,” Harris says.

“Done what?”

“Stayed and gone to sleep.”

I get my sketchbook out of my bag and draw the fox. When I look up, Harris is gazing at me.

“Come with me,” he says.

He takes me out to the workshop and to the door with the lock on it. Inside it's cool and dry, and every inch of the wall is covered in photographs.

A great gray owl coming off a fence post at first light, the whole big span of its wings open, feathers lit from behind. A doe with her fawn. Sunset and sunrise over the snow-capped mountains. And a young, one-eyed fox standing in snow with his head turned back over his shoulder.

“Harris. These are incredible. Why are they locked away?”

“My sister's seen some. She lives in Alaska.”

I go along the wall and every one is better than the last. “You could sell these.”

“I used to.” He says it flatly, and I stop talking. “And entered competitions. There was a guy I sometimes buddied up with. Dave. I sent him an owl photo, and asked what he thought of the crop. Six months later it took a national prize with his name under it."