Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Stove

He brings wood up Lamphere Hill, lights the stove right, and she pins his wrists on the rug; after, he asks her to tell him what to do again.

On Friday his truck came up Lamphere Hill Road in second gear with a cord of split maple in the bed.

I watched from the front window with a dish towel in my hands.

The road had iced in the shade, exactly as the cup had said it would.

He took the last turn so slowly that I could have walked beside him.

He got out and stood in my yard in a canvas coat, looking at the house.

"Rule two," I said through the screen door. "Say something."

"It's a good house," he said.

"It has a hole in the pantry floor."

"Good bones, though," he said.

"You said that to be nice."

"I said it because my grandfather was a carpenter." He lifted an armload of wood. "Where's the stove?"

I showed him.

It was a black cast-iron box in the front room with a stovepipe that wandered up through a wall.

It had filled the house with smoke every night for a week.

He crouched in front of it, and he opened the damper and the door, and he put his hand up inside the flue.

He came out with soot to the wrist.

"Nobody's cleaned this since the last tenant. Your draft's shut halfway and the cap's choked. I can fix it."

"You bake."

"I do bread," he said. "I also do this."

It took him an hour and a stepladder on the porch roof.

I stood in the yard holding the ladder and looking at the backs of his thighs, and he knew I was doing it.

When he came down he laid the fire himself, a log across two split pieces with kindling under, and he lit it with one match.

It caught and the flue pulled hard.

The stove roared, and the smoke went up where it belonged instead of into the room.

I had been cold for a week.

I stood with my hands out to the iron and my whole face warm.

He sat back on his heels and wiped his black hands on his jeans.

"There," he said. "It'll draw now."

And he waited.

He had not touched me once since he drove into the yard, and I understood it was because of my rule.

He was kneeling on my rug with sooty hands and a streak of black on one cheek.

Every muscle in his back was waiting for me to say a word.

"Come here."

He got up and came.

I took him by the front of the canvas coat and pushed it off his shoulders, and he let it fall.

I pulled his shirt up and over his head.

He was lean and pale, with a line of dark hair running down from his navel.

Old oven burns were scattered across his forearms.

I laid my palms on his stomach.

The muscle jumped under them.

"Lie down," I said. "On the rug. On your back."

He lay down in front of the stove.

The firelight moved over his chest.

I knelt over him in my wool socks and a sweater.

I took his wrists in my hands, one in each, and pressed them down into the rug on either side of his head.

His eyes went wide.

"Stay," I said. "Keep them there. If you move them, I stop."

"I won't."

"You will. You'll want to. I want to see you not do it."

I kissed him.

I kissed his mouth, his jaw, the soft place under his ear that made him gasp.

I felt his hands flex against my grip and stay where I had put them.

"Good," I said. "That's good."

A noise came out of him that was nearly a whimper.

I sat back on his thighs and drew my sweater off, and then the shirt under it.

He stared at my bra.

"Look all you want," I said. "You don't get to touch."

His hips pushed up under me.

"Did I say you could do that?"

"No," he said.

"Do it again."

He did it again, and I ground down against the hard ridge in his jeans, and we both groaned.

I unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down with my knees, and I took his cock in my hand.

He was thick and hot and already wet at the tip.

"Look at you."

"Maura," he said.

"You're so hard for me. Is this what you wanted?"

"Yes."

"Say it," I said.

"This is what I wanted," he said. "This. You telling me."

I stripped off my own jeans and my underwear, all of it, in the light of the stove.

I put my knees on either side of his hips and held him upright in my fist.

I rubbed the head of his cock through my wetness, slow, up and down, until his breath came out in shudders.

"Don't move."

"I'm not," he said.

"Your hips moved."

"Sorry," he said, not sorry at all.

I laughed and sank down onto him.

I took him in a single long slide, and the stretch of it pulled a cry out of me.

I braced my hands on his chest, with his wrists left lying in the rug where they were, and I started to ride him.

I rode him slowly at first.

I rolled my hips and felt him deep inside me, hitting that place I'd forgotten I had, and I watched his face change.

His mouth was open.

He was looking at me with his mouth open and his eyes half shut.

"You're so good," I told him. "Look at you, lying there taking it. You haven't moved your hands."

"I want to."

"I know you do. You can't."

He groaned, a long broken sound.

I sped up, bouncing on his cock, with my hair coming out of its clip.

The fire popped.

The rug was rough under my knees.

Sweat ran between my breasts, and I leaned down and put my mouth next to his ear.

"You feel that? That's me fucking you. That's all mine."

"Yours," he said. "Yours, I'm yours."

"Say it again."

"I'm yours, Maura."

Something in me tightened and tightened.

I found my clit with two fingers and rubbed it hard, in time with each stroke.

His cock was buried inside me and his eyes were fixed on my face.

"Watch me come on you."

"I am. I'm watching."

It took me fast.

It came up my spine and burst, and I threw my head back and cried out into the empty house.

My body clenched around him, and he groaned.

I felt him fighting it, his hips straining up and his wrists still pinned flat in the rug by nothing but my voice.

"Please," he said. "Please, please."

"Now," I said, still shaking. "Come inside me."

He came with a long, ragged cry, arching up off the floor, and I felt him pulse deep and hot inside me, again and again.

I stayed on top of him until he was done.

Then I let go of his wrists, and he lay there with his arms still above his head.

I curled down beside him on the rug.

The stove ticked.

His chest rose and fell under my hand until his breathing slowed.

"You can move now," I said.

"I don't want to."

"Okay."

We lay there.

After a while he turned his head, and his eyes were wet and bright and very serious.

"Do that again," he said.

"Give me ten minutes."

"No. I mean, tell me what to do. Like that. Tell me what to do again, sometime." He swallowed. "I've never said that to anyone."

A man had once laughed at me for wanting this.

Nobody had ever asked me for it.

I turned onto my side and put my hand on his face.

"I heard you," I said.

He didn't smile, exactly.

He looked at the ceiling for a while.

"There's something I think about," he said. "A lot. At work. You'd laugh."

"Try me."

"Not tonight." His voice was low. "I'll tell you, but not tonight. Write it down. On the cup. I'll write back."

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