Page 12 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

"You first."

"I love you." Flat. Like a measurement. Like a thing he checked twice before reporting. "Been true a while."

I stop breathing properly after that.

He goes down on one knee in the dirt and works my boots off, one, then the other, and my jeans and underwear come down with them, and I'm standing in his yard in a sweater and nothing else, and I don't care. He puts his mouth on the inside of my thigh. Then higher. My hand goes into his hair and grips.

He licks into me slow, the same way he does everything, and it's unbearable. My leg gives and he takes it over his shoulder and holds my hip flat to the boards with one forearm so I can't move away from him, and I couldn't have anyway. His tongue finds the exact place and stays. He isn't guessing. He hasn't guessed once, not the first night, not since.

"Heath! I'm—"

He doesn't stop. He hums against me and that's the end of it. I come with my back scraping his jacket and my fingers locked in his hair and a sound coming out of me that I've never made anywhere with anyone, and it echoes off the treeline because there's nobody up here for eleven kilometres.

He stands while I'm still shaking. Wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist.

"Turn around," he says.

"No." I get my hands on his belt. "I want to see you."

He goes still. That stillness I've learned to read now — the one that means something's landed too hard to answer. Then he nods once and lets me open his jeans.

I get my hand around his cock and he braces his forearm on the shed above my head and breathes out against my temple. He's hot in my palm. I stroke him and his hips move and he says something into my hair I don't catch.

"What?"

"Said don't stop." He drags my hand away anyway. "Not like that. Come here."

He lifts me. Hands under my thighs, my back on his jacket on the boards, and I get my ankles crossed behind him and he holds me there for three full seconds with the head of him right there, looking at my face.

"Please," I say.

He pushes in and I take all of him and it's so much I have to put my forehead on his shoulder. He gives me time. He always gives me time and I have never once had to ask for it.

Then he starts to move.

It's not gentle. It's the other thing, the thing he's been holding since Thursday when he decided he was going to let me go quietly — every thrust is an argument against that, and he's winning it. The shed wall knocks against my back.

"Look at me."

I lift my head.

"You're not going anywhere," he says. He says it the way he says the weather is turning and the hives are light and the honey flow is done, and he drives into me on the last word and I feel it in my teeth.

"No," I say. "I'm not."

"Say it again."

"I love you."

He kisses me hard enough to bruise and comes with his hand splayed across the small of my back, holding me down onto him, and the noise he makes as he comes is the loudest thing I've ever heard out of him.

We stay like that. His face in my neck. My heels still hooked behind him. My breath and his breath are clouding in the cold.

“I love you.”

six

Heath