My Secret Lover Is His Brother novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Shed

In the cannery shed Henley and Tiernan fight about the name she never gave him, then fall into each other on the half-planked hull; at dawn her father's boat is gone from its mooring.

I went down the back stairs in my boots and my cardigan and let myself out through the kitchen.

Tiernan was waiting by the sea wall with his hands in his armpits.

"You'll freeze," I said.

"I've been standing here an hour."

"Why didn't you knock?"

"There's a Hallowell on every stair."

We walked down Mill Row without touching.

The tide was out, and the whole harbor smelled of weed and diesel and cold.

The cannery shed stood at the end of the row with one yellow bulb burning over the door.

He unlocked it and I went in ahead of him, because I knew the way.

Inside, the half-planked hull of a twenty-two-foot peapod lay on its sawhorses.

Cedar shavings drifted around my boots.

Nobody spoke until the door was shut.

"You knew who I was," he said.

It wasn't a shout.

It was worse than a shout.

"From the first night," I said. "I saw you at the Lamplighter and I knew the Hallowell jaw."

"And you never said Pascoe."

"I never said anything. I said Hen."

"Why?"

I'd rehearsed it for three months, in the truck, on the boat, in his bed.

None of it was there.

"Because the first thing I ever learned about your family was a number," I said.

"My father's number. Nine years of paying it down and still the number never moved."

"I wanted one place where it wasn't in the room."

He stared at me.

"You thought I'd put it in the room."

"I thought I would."

"I wouldn't have."

"You don't know that."

"Hen."

He rubbed his face with both hands, and sawdust fell off his forearms.

"I wasn't surprised by the name. I'm only sorry that it was my father who said it."

I heard it as kindness.

A lie, but a kind one, from a man who couldn't bear to say, You made a fool of me.

I wanted to put my fist through his chest for it and I wanted to cry.

"Don't be nice to me," I said. "I can't stand it tonight."

"What do you want?"

"I want you to stop standing over there."

For one second neither of us moved.

Then I crossed the shavings and took two fistfuls of his sweater.

I pulled his mouth down onto mine.

He made a rough sound against my lips, and his hands closed on my waist.

He kissed me.

I didn't let it stay gentle.

I dragged the sweater up over his head and threw it into the sawdust.

His chest was warm, hard and a little damp, the dark hair thick across it.

I pushed him backward against the ribs of the hull until the cedar creaked.

"Hen, slow," he said, laughing a little, breathless.

"No."

I opened his belt.

I had his jeans open and my hand around him before he could say anything else.

He was already hard, thick and heavy against my palm, and he let his head fall back against the planks and groaned.

"Christ."

"Say my name."

"Henley."

It hit me low and deep.

He had never said all of it before.

I stroked him slowly, thumb dragging across the wet head of his cock, and watched his jaw lock.

"You're going to make me come in your hand," he said.

"Not yet."

I took my cardigan off, then my shirt, then my bra.

The shed was cold and my nipples drew tight at once.

His eyes went over me.

He turned us.

My back hit the hull and the cedar was smooth and cool against my spine.

He dropped to his knees in the shavings and dragged my jeans down my legs with my boots still on.

"Tiernan."

"You said slow was no."

"I said," I started, and his mouth landed on me and I lost the sentence.

He licked me open with long, flat strokes, then circled my clit with the tip of his tongue until my knees went.

I tangled my fingers in his hair and held on.

"Right there," I said. "Don't stop. Fuck, don't stop."

He didn't.

He pushed two fingers inside me, curled them, and sucked.

I came with a cry that bounced off the tin roof, shaking, my heels skidding in the dust.

He stood, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Now," I said.

I wanted him inside me so badly I could taste it.

He lifted me by the backs of my thighs and I wrapped my legs around his waist.

He pushed into me in one slow, deep stroke, and we both stopped breathing.

"God, you're tight," he said into my neck.

"Move."

He moved.

Hard and deep, my back against the hull, the whole frame knocking against its sawhorses with every thrust.

I bit his shoulder.

I dug my nails into his back and told him to go harder, and he did.

"Mine," I said, and I didn't know why I'd said it.

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

I tightened around him on purpose, and he swore.

"Don't," he gasped. "Not yet, I'm not done with you."

He carried me three steps to the workbench, swept a coil of rope onto the floor and set me down on the edge.

I leaned back on my palms with my legs wide and watched his face.

He gripped my hips and fucked me slowly now, all the way out and all the way in.

His eyes stayed on the place where he disappeared into me.

"Look at you," he said hoarsely. "Look at what you do to me."

"Then give it to me harder."

He did.

The bench shuddered and the tools rattled in their rack, and I heard myself begging, nothing, just his name and yes and there.

He reached between us and rubbed my clit in tight circles.

I came again, clenching around his cock, and he followed with a ragged shout, buried deep, his forehead against mine.

We slid to the shavings together and lay there with our breath steaming in the cold.

He pulled his sweater over us both.

"Don't marry him," he said into my hair.

I looked at the roof beams.

"I'm not marrying anyone I don't choose."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

His arm tightened around me, and neither of us said anything else for a long time.

I woke to a grey window and the phone buzzing on the bench.

Joslyn.

Three missed calls, and then a text I read twice.

The Ada P. is gone off the mooring.

Somebody towed her away in the night.

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