Page 9 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

"Yeah."

"You're— okay. Okay. Move."

I move. Deep and slow, the whole length, out to the tip and all the way back into her, and she meets me every time. Her hands go flat on my back and then her nails go in.

"Harder."

"No."

"Heath."

"Not yet." I get my hand under her ass and change the angle, and she stops arguing with me entirely. "You've been going fast since you got out of that car yesterday. You'll get it hard when I've had you like this first. Legs stay where I put them."

"You're going to kill me."

"You'll live." I take her wrists in one hand and put them above her head on the pillow and she lets me, and something goes through her when I do it that I feel from the inside. "Look at me. Not the ceiling. Me."

She looks at me.

And here's what happens to me. I've gone whole weeks up here without saying two hundred words out loud. The quiet's never been empty — it's been full, and it's been enough.

I'm inside this woman and it turns out I have things to say.

"You should see your face," I say against her jaw. "Wanted you since yesterday.”

"Yesterday? Yesterday, at the—"

I let go of her wrists and get both hands under her and fuck her hard into the quilt, her heels locked at the small of my back, the frame knocking the wall on every stroke. She's loud. I didn't know that about her and now I do, and every sound she makes goes straight through the middle of me.

"That's it," I say into her throat. "That's what you wanted. Take it."

"Don't stop — don't you dare—"

"Not going anywhere." I get my hand between us and my thumb on her clit and work it in time with the rest. "Come on. Let me feel it. I want you soaking this quilt."

She goes off around me a second time, tight enough that I have to stop moving, saying something with my name buried in the middle of it. I go over right behind her with my face in her neck and my fist in her hair. I make a sound that isn’t quite human, then the room is quiet except for our breathing.

The rain's still going on the roof.

I don't move off her right away, and when I do I don't go far.

I lie on my back with her half on top of me and I go completely still, the way I do, staring at the beam over the bed.

She lifts her head. Looks at me. And then she settles back down with her cheek on my chest, because she already knows what it means.

five

Anaya

October mornings go hard with frost that doesn't burn off till ten. The larch on the far ridge turns that unreasonable gold and starts dropping. And the hives go quiet — genuinely quiet, so that crouching by a box now there's barely a hum under the wood at all.

"They're clustering," Heath says. "Balling up around the queen. From here on they're a furnace with wings and everything they do is about staying warm till February."

He says it like a man reading a clock.

Twelve days. My motel bill is embarrassing, considering I've only slept there four times.

I've made eleven recipes with his honey. A black honey and pepper glaze for duck. A rasam where the honeydew replaces the jaggery and the whole bowl goes savoury and strange and better. A burnt-butter payasam that made him close his eyes for four full seconds. He's got a hot plate and a woodstove and no oven, and I've done all of it up here anyway, because down at the motel my hands work fine and nothing tastes like anything.