Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (21 page)

She moved away from his kiss so she could really feel it—everything he wanted from her body. She wanted to sink into the pleasure of just being a body, hot and half-clothed and writhing. When his mouth was at her breasts again, she was suddenly pushed to the very, very edge of an orgasm she didn’t want, not yet, not until she could bring it back up from almost the bottom, when she didn’t think she could, but then some thrust or stroke forced it big and sharp and dangerous.

“Wait,” she whispered, or maybe she didn’t, but he stopped. She scrambled for the condoms, and he sat up and took them from her. Took a moment to rub through her folds again, then he hesitated for just a moment, and she thought
Oh God, he’s going to do something just awful
, and he did; he grasped her clit with two fingers, and caught her eyes and looked right into them while he pinched her there, just a slow, wet, and unbearable pressure, and she tried to say something, but moaned, moaned in a way that if she wasn’t being made totally crazy would be sort of embarrassing.

Then he let go, eased away, and it was like she was in the middle of a marathon, gasping, her pulse the fact of every movement. He said, “shhh,” and rested his palm over her mons, pressed gently. And it helped. Sort of.

Not even a little bit.

He started opening the box, and when he saw what he had purchased, the look on his face, even on the very freaking edge of coming all over herself, it was so priceless, she couldn’t help it. She giggled.

“Um,” he said.

“Problem?” She giggled again.

He closed his eyes, slow and tortured. She let him off the hook, took the box from him, opened up the condom, redolent with the smell of popsicles and bright pink besides. “Destiny …”

She grinned, rolling it on, his breath coming faster, his eyes still closed. “Well that looks—
awesome
.”

He didn’t bother looking but came back over her, silencing her giggling with kissing.

Then his hand was over her again, and the head of his penis hot and perfect. She reached down too, tipped her hips up, grabbed onto his waist to control the speed of his slide. The elastic of her underwear pushed and dragged into some unexplainable and teasing position over her clit.

And all at once, she was overcome with the inside-her-inside-him feeling again. She eased up to look, to look at them together like that, and he was looking, too.

It looked good. Her yellow panties and his pink condom made it all decorated in springtime hotness.

She laughed, but it got mixed up with coming suddenly, when he curved his hips back and arched back into her, deep and grinding.

Easy to laugh with this serious and brooding man, who was laughing, too.

Easy to find his arms to grip around her when she needed something, bad, to hang on to.

Easy to be.

To live.

For a while after, after laughing again when he took off the condom, after long minutes of just breathing hard, they held each other. Maybe drifted into half sleep, until she realized that her skin was sticking to his. She peeled herself back and kissed his jaw. “How you doing?”

“I believe I’m doin’ well, thank you.” His accent was heavily slurred over his speech.

“Oh yeah?”

“I won’t recover.”

She bent over and grabbed the quilt. It was beautiful, woven with intricate geometric shapes in bright colors. She pulled it over them. “I like this blanket.”

“Welsh.”

“The blanket?”

“Yes. It’s traditional. They’re milled all over Wales.”

“You seem pretty traditional. In the Wales sense of things. You know the language. You carve—I looked up Welsh carving on the Internet, by the way. You know, the blanket. Your return home.”

He was quiet. Then he breathed in, slowly. He got up, but it was just to sit sideways on the sofa, bring her between his knees so her back was to his chest, his arms around her.

“Never thought of myself as such. Perhaps. My parents are, for sure, like I’ve said. Mum teaches Welsh to the wee ones at school, has a group that makes traditional garb to wear at festivals.” He laughed. “You should see the hats the women wear.”

“What do they look like?”

He played with her hair and told her about Wales. When he talked about his mom’s festivals, and his dad’s sailboat, and the sticky toffee pudding at the inn’s restaurant, his accent dipped and burred like he was singing it. She could see all the rainbow colors of the buildings facing the harbor, the quiet salt creeks, the half-moon window in his childhood room in his voice. He spoke slowly, one memory triggering another, until his fingers in her hair grew still and his words whispered away.

In the dark room, she turned in his arms and watched him sleep. She counted his breaths and he breathed the exact normal amount, over and over. His lashes were curled, and his skin was decorated with small moles here and there—like tiny drops of ink. His top lip was swollen from kissing, and she inched her head the two inches between them on the sofa cushion and kissed it, very softly. His whiskers were blue-black and thick except where there was a little missing circlet of them along the blade of his jaw. She touched it with her finger, the skin soft.

He hadn’t been home for so long, and yet he knew it, as well as she knew her own neighborhood and the people in it.

Here, Hefin was of a kind not ordinarily encountered—his pretty accent and big
hands and quiet endeared. At home, though, he had people.

People who understood how he had grown and lived, and what’s more, he called Wales
home. At home
, he’d said,
my mum never makes toffee pudding because the inn’s is so good
. He’d lived here for years, long enough, she’d found out, that he had permanent residency. He believed that if he’d stay married, to his ex-wife, to
Jessica
, he’d have taken the citizenry test.

He hadn’t stayed married, though, or become a citizen. Or, she thought, looking around, really made a
home
here at all. She thought about that first day they’d spent the lunch hour alone in the park, how she had told him she could see her whole life from the spot that they sat and how he had
understood
that.

How he had explained that in his home everyone had known him and he had known everyone and every corner down to the sound of seawater splashing on a particular rock, which he hadn’t left until he was near her age.

His parents sounded—lovely. He talked about them like she talked about her dad, the little bit she could talk about her mom. As if they had something to say to him and could help him along the way. She couldn’t believe, actually, that he hadn’t gone to them since the divorce, and that just went to show how much he must have been hurt by the end of his marriage and how much he wanted to make a life for them here.

She could easily imagine him falling in love. She wasn’t just teasing when she accused him of mothering—his instinct was to make others feel good and if Jessica had caught his eye so quickly, she must have been completely dazzled and mirrored that dazzlement back to him.

She knew. She had seen how his face had lit, how he looked so seriously into her, into her face and gaze when he was on his knees and touching her. When he was kissing her. It would be so hard to ever walk away from Hefin when he looked like that, and she would have to. He was ready to go home.

He stirred, but in such a way that brought him closer to her skin.

“Hey,” he said. “I dozed off a bit, there.”

She kissed his top lip again. “It’s okay.” She kissed his nose.

He opened his eyes fully and pushed his hand back through her hair. The crease bisecting his forehead all the way to the top of his nose was back.

She kissed the crease.

“I should get going. I have work tomorrow, but I want to go over to Sarah’s first
with some groceries.”

Hefin sank his face into her neck and kissed her there. “You never told me what’s really bothering you, Destiny.”

Des brushed her hand over Hefin’s nape. She didn’t want to say. He would listen, he would really listen, and what was better, he wouldn’t tell her what to do. She sucked in a silent breath through pursed lips, needing bearings. Needing to understand what it meant that right now, she didn’t want to be listened to.

He was too much, after years of jockeying for position in a large and noisy family in a large and noisy neighborhood, his open gaze on her, the quiet intensity of his regard, was too much space to fill with just herself. Right this minute, after sex like that. That inside-each-other kind of sex.

She slid her hand down his back, feeling the knobs of his backbone. “Hefin?”

“Yeah.”

“Why now? Why didn’t you go back after you divorced?”

He sat up, then, and stared over her shoulder for a long time. If any of her past boyfriends had looked like that after she asked a question, she might have retracted it, spared them feeling the way it looked like Hefin did. But they were caught up in good-byes. It didn’t matter. If he wouldn’t answer or told her to leave, it would just be one more question to pile on the pyre of their leaving. Something else that blew away as ashes.

“It was my fault,” was how he started, and how he ended, after he told her a long middle about unmet expectations and frustration and resentment.

“Did she know about Beijing?”

“The internship had just ended, which was why I was in Wales. I had put in for a permanent position with the group, which wasn’t a sure thing, though the references from other members in the group to the other placements I had in for in London and Asia looked pretty good.”

“I know, but did she
know
about it? Like how you felt making the sunflowers?”

He scooped her hair into a loose ponytail, running his hands over it for a long moment.

“Why did you tell me?” she tried.

She thought he wasn’t going to answer, then he did. “Because we’re leaving each other before we’ve even gotten started. How I had felt before didn’t factor into the
beginning of me and Jessica.”

“You loved her so much you were willing to say good-bye to what you had just fallen in love with in Beijing?”

“Yes, I think I did.”

“Do you still love her?”

He turned her around but didn’t look at her, just gently rested her head against his shoulder. It was getting a little cool, but she stayed still even as goose bumps started creeping over her arms. “I think the worst part is the flashes.”

“Flashes?”

“These flashes. About her. Every once in a while, always when I’m least expectin’ it, I’ll hear about her. She’ll email me a bit of news she knows I’d be interested in, or I’ll run into one of our old friends. A couple of times we’ve had a meal together. I learn just enough about her new life, without me, a little flash, to make our life apart seem unbearably real. The first year after our divorce, I right lived for the flashes. The loss of that daily intimacy was the worst side of grief.

“Then the realizin’ that all I’d ever have was flashes, and never enough to piece together and figure out what her life is really like now. Knowin’ that years and years from now, I’d still get flashes, and for a while I tortured myself with this. How would I feel the first time I heard she’d found someone? Became a mother? What if she got ill? Who’d be with her? And then I realized her new loves would be with her. I wouldn’t be there, bedside, if she got ill. For some reason, that was a particular bit of torture for me, I’d rub that over the wound of our divorce like rough salt.”

His accent was thick and his voice low. With her ear against his chest she could hear his voice and his heart at the same time.

“Is that why you’ve stayed here for so long after?”

“At first. Then, it was just like I lost all—impulse. I had done this one impulsive thing in my life and I didn’t have anything left but enough for the day in front of me. Then I started carving again. I was a freelancer on a rain roof project for Lakefield State, and the way it was organized, I had a lot of free time. The project ended, and I read what I would learn was an old article about the project at the library. There were pictures of the panels and the carving style stopped me short. Over the next weeks, I followed through on a lot of impulses, for the first time in a long time.”

He rubbed over her body with the flats of his hands, and she couldn’t help but let
it relax her. “Except for talkin’ to you, that day.”

“When I was losing my shit in the printing carrel.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t bear it because until then you were so determined and businesslike. Walkin’ by all straight and tall.”

“What’s in Wales?”

His hands stilled. “Don’t know yet. I’ve just figured out I need to start there before I ease back into engineering, maybe in Asia, maybe someplace else the group sends me.”

“How do you know where to start, do you think, to find yourself?”

He looked at her. “Sometimes when I pull a panel off the wall, I don’t know if I can salvage it. I start by scrubbing away the rot, to see what’s been damaged and what’s hale. If I can still see what the original carver meant the panel to look like, I’ll try to restore it, whittle the little pieces to build it back up, try to make all the joins invisible.

“In my case, I feel like I need someone to tell me what’s rot. Maybe if I ramble with my mum, dick about with my dad, have them take a good look at me, they’ll tell me, and I can get started on makin’ up the little bits to build myself back up.”

“So you think you can go home and just stick yourself back on?”

He laughed. “I don’t know. I guess I do.”

“What if you’re a great big, brand-new piece of wood?”

“You do your best to plan, but at some point it’s got to be parted into with a sharp tool. More will be cut away than will be saved, so you just have to start.”

“We’ve gotten all metaphorical.”

“The risk of making time with a brooder, I suppose.”

“We’re actually kind of losing time.”

She almost wished she hadn’t ever seen him. That she had borrowed an old laptop of Sam’s instead of using the library’s computer.

She didn’t want flashes.

“I’m going to use the ladies’.” She wiggled off the sofa, careful to keep the quilt over him.