I Slept With a Stranger at the Wedding, and Monday He Was My Boss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Dance Hall
An hour after Brady dumps her by text, Katrina spends the night with a stranger at a wedding, and on Monday he walks through the screen door of the nanny job she signs for in front of him.
At 9:40 on Saturday night, my boyfriend of fourteen months texted me "we're done, don't make this weird" from the bar thirty feet away.
I read it at the edge of the dance floor, in a green dress I had bought for this wedding.
Brady leaned on the bar with his back to me, in his good boots, laughing with his friends.
He did not turn around.
I walked up, ordered a beer, and drank half of it where he could see me.
He still didn't look.
For fourteen months I had paid half his truck note, four hundred and ten dollars a month, because he said it was temporary.
I was on my fourth beer when a man I had never seen took the bottle out of my hand.
He set it on the bar and said, "Dance with me."
He was tall and sunburned across the back of the neck, in a pressed white shirt with the cuffs turned back.
He had gray eyes and a scar across the web of his left hand, and he smelled like cedar and clean sweat.
"I don't know you," I said.
"Good."
"What's your name?"
"I'd rather not say," he said.
"Don't tell me yours either."
I should have walked away.
I put my hand in his.
The band was playing a slow two-step, and he laid his palm flat against the small of my back and held me closer than the song asked.
His hand was big and hard with calluses.
He didn't talk.
When the song ended I stayed where I was, and so did he.
At the second song he put his mouth beside my ear.
"I've had a bad spring," he said.
"I'd like one night where nobody knows anything about me."
"Same," I said.
"Mine started an hour ago."
He pulled back far enough to look at me.
His eyes went down to my mouth and came back up.
"My truck's out back," he said.
I looked across the room.
Brady had turned around at last.
He stood watching with his beer halfway to his mouth, and his face had gone slack.
I took the stranger's hand and walked out the side door right in front of him.
We didn't go far.
He drove down the farm road behind the hall to a peach shed.
Past it stood a low board cabin where the pickers sleep in summer, with a padlock hanging open on the door.
"The bride's father showed it to me," he said.
"He says nobody's using it until June."
"You came prepared."
"I came to dance," he said.
"Then you walked out in front of me."
He shut the door behind us.
Moonlight came through one window onto an iron cot with a bare mattress.
He stood in front of me and didn't touch me.
"Tell me no," he said, "and I take you home."
"Kiss me."
He did.
His hand came up into my braid and tilted my head back, and he kissed me slowly, like a man with all night who meant to use it.
I got my fingers in his shirt and pulled.
Buttons skipped across the floor.
He laughed against my mouth, low and surprised, and I laid my palms on his bare chest.
He was hot and hard and lightly furred, with a long old burn across his ribs.
"Turn around," he said.
I turned.
He found the zipper at the back of the green dress and drew it down to my hips, and his mouth followed it.
He kissed the back of my neck, then each knob of my spine, and the dress fell around my boots.
I stood in my underwear in the dark with my hands on the iron rail of the cot.
He stepped up behind me and cupped my breasts.
"God," he said, into my shoulder.
"You're something."
His thumbs dragged across my nipples and I arched back into him.
I felt how hard he was against my ass through his jeans.
"I want your mouth on me," I said.
"Where?"
"Where do you think?"
He turned me around and sat me on the edge of the cot.
He knelt on the plank floor, hooked his fingers in my underwear, and slid it down my legs.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Look at you," he said.
I put my hand in his hair.
He pushed my knees wide and put his mouth on me.
The first slow lick went all the way up, and I made a sound I had never made in my life.
He did it again, and then he found my clit with the flat of his tongue and stayed there, patient and sure, circling.
A thick finger slid inside me and curled.
"Oh, God," I said.
"Right there."
"Good," he said, against me.
"Show me where."
I showed him.
I held his head and rocked against his mouth, and the pleasure climbed my legs and tightened low in my belly.
When he added a second finger and sucked, I came with a cry that went out the open window into the peach rows.
He kept his mouth on me until I shoved at his shoulder.
He stood up, wiping his chin with his wrist, and looked at me sprawled on the cot with my legs shaking.
"Condom?" I said.
"Back pocket."
"Good."
I unbuckled his belt myself.
When I had him out of his jeans I took him in my hand, thick and hot and heavy.
He groaned and put his forehead against mine.
"Slow," he said.
"I've got you."
"Not that slow."
He laughed.
He rolled the condom on, lay back on the thin mattress, and pulled me over him.
I set my knees on either side of his hips and sank down on him an inch at a time.
He was big, and it burned and filled me, and I stopped halfway with my hands flat on his chest.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked.
His eyes were dark and wide open, and he had stopped breathing.
"There you are," he said, hoarse.
I took the rest of him.
I rode him slowly at first, with his hands on my hips and the old cot creaking, and then harder.
He sat up and wrapped an arm around my back and took my breast in his mouth.
I held his shoulders and moved on his cock until I couldn't think.
"Come on, sweetheart," he said, into my skin.
"Let me feel you again."
His thumb found my clit between us.
I came around him with my head thrown back, shaking, and he said a rough word and rolled us over.
Then I lay on the mattress with him braced above me, and he drove into me deep and hard.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and met him.
"Say it," I said.
"Say what?"
"What you want."
"You," he said.
"All night.
"Just this."
He came with a shudder, buried to the hilt, his face in my neck.
We lay on the narrow cot with the cicadas screaming outside.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, "Thank you."
"For what?"
"For not asking me anything."
We did it again before the sky changed, slowly this time, with no light at all.
I left before sunrise with my shoes in my hand, and neither of us had the other's number.
He slept on his stomach with one arm hanging off the cot.
I stood in the doorway and looked at his back for longer than I should have.
Then I walked three miles home down the dark farm road.
By Monday morning I had $212 in my account and a loan payment due Friday.
A rent notice was taped to my door.
The clinic where I'd worked had closed in January, and the feed store had cut me to eleven hours a week.
Brady had texted once since Saturday, a photo of the truck note with the words "your half is late."
On the shared laptop, a job ad had been open for six weeks.
It said live-in nanny, Kneupper Orchard, five-year-old girl, room and board, $1,800 a month, start immediately.
Brady had left the tab up.
Three times in the last month he had said, "The Kneuppers pay well, you know," without looking up from his phone.
I called the number at seven.
A woman answered on the first ring and said, "Can you be here at ten?"
The orchard was twelve miles out of town.
The house was long and limestone with a deep porch, and peach trees ran away on both sides in rows.
I wore my best blouse, white cotton with small blue anchors, and sat on the porch with my application on my knee.
The woman was in her sixties, silver-haired, in a canvas apron, with a hawk's sharp eyes.
"Marlene Kneupper," she said.
"You've worked with children?"
"Two summers at a day camp.
"I was a vet tech.
"I can handle a scared animal, and a scared kid can't be much worse."
She almost smiled.
"Three girls have quit on me since March," she said.
"The last one lasted four days."
A white work truck was parked at the end of the drive with a Kneupper Cold Storage decal on the door.
I knew that truck.
I knew the dent in its fender where Brady had backed into my mailbox.
I stood up so fast the pen rolled off my knee.
"Whose truck is that?"
"A salesman who drops papers off for my son," Marlene said.
"He'll be in the warehouse office by now.
"Sit down, honey."
I sat.
My heart was going so hard I felt it in my teeth.
I had $212, and a rent notice, and no clinic.
The screen door creaked behind me.
Boots on the boards, slow and heavy.
A man's voice said, "Mama, I told you I'd do the paperwork."
I knew that voice.
I had heard it say "Good" and "You're something" in the dark.
I looked up.
He stood in the doorway in a gray felt hat and a work shirt, six foot two, sunburned at the neck, with a scar across the back of his left hand.
He saw me.
Every bit of color went out of his face.
"Dane," Marlene said, "this is Katrina Pfluger.
"Miss Pfluger, my son.
"The job is yours if you want it."
Dane Kneupper said nothing at all.
He stood and looked at me, and I could see him doing the sums.
I thought of my rent notice, and the truck at the end of the drive, and the way Brady had looked at me across that dance floor.
I picked the pen up off the boards.
I looked straight at the man I had slept with and said, "I'll take it, Mr. Kneupper.
"I'll start tonight."
Then I signed the contract on the porch table, in front of him, with my own name.
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