Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (8 page)

“Jesus. Yes. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

“You were hoping I wouldn’t notice that my pancakes were in evenly cut, non-chokeable pieces?”

“Yes. Or that you wouldn’t say anything.”

“Are you afraid I’ll choke?”

“No. I …” He looked up, and she watched a redness creep from his ear, his temple. He had seemed so confident yesterday that his uncertainty and careful politeness around her, today, might have made her think he had been nothing more than a good Samaritan in the library, except she had not imagined the way he’d looked at her, sent a furtive glance under her blouse. “It’s just that it’s the way I do them up for myself, so the syrup gets all in, and I did mine and forgot not to do yours, and you had gone all quiet.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

“Do you want half my sandwich? I’ll cut the crusts off for you.”

He laughed again, his sort of gruff bark of a laugh that he made to his chest like he wasn’t used to such an involuntary thing. Like it was impolite to laugh at her. “No, thank you.”

She forked in a mouthful of spongy pancakes, saturated with butter and syrup.

“Are these from The Windmill?”

He nodded. Swallowed. He held his knife and fork, one in each hand, the tines of the fork turned upside down. She watched as he used his knife to pile another bite on the platform. It should’ve looked awkward, but it looked practiced, second-nature, and so, foreign. “Have you been there?”

“Of course. It’s a total Lakefield institution. Growing up, it was our birthday place.”

“I like the Amish pancake place near campus as well, but for their giant cinnamon buns. The ones with all the icing on.”

Now Des had to laugh. “Do you eat real food? Like, something other than sugar and flour and butter?”

Hefin smiled into his box of pancakes but then turned to her, still smiling. It was something, that smile. It made him even more beautiful of course, stretched his full upper lip so that a crease appeared in the dark stubble above it, carved those parentheses into his cheeks. But it also seemed rusty, made his eyes cast down as if he were shy. She thought he would prefer that she didn’t see it. “Have you heard of Potato Mountain?”

“No.”

“It’s in the Greek Village neighborhood, where all those student-apartment places are. They serve nothing but plates of potato mash and toppings. You can get anything to go over your mash—fried chicken, gravies, cheese, meat sauce, sausage.”

“Oh my God. That’s pothead food. You’re a pothead.”

“No, no. It’s brilliant. I get mine with chicken curry over.” He laughed into his chest again, and God, he was so cute, even if his eating habits were adolescent.

He took another bite of pancakes, closing his eyes. His lips pressed over the tines of his fork. He ate so neatly, but a crystalline drop of syrup sparkled in the sun at the corner of his mouth. She watched him take a long drink of tea, but the little drop remained.

“Hefin, here. You have syrup right here.” Des pointed to the corner of her own mouth.

Hefin reach up and brushed the opposite side. “Thanks.”

“No,” Des reached over this time and let her thumb swipe over the corner of his mouth. His whiskers flattened, then rose back up, like velvet nap, and she rubbed again. His mouth went soft, but she didn’t look into his eyes. Instead, she maintained her pretense. The syrup had instantly melted when she gathered it, and now it made her thumb drag and slip and she rubbed up and down.

It would be better if she could use her tongue.

She forced herself to pull her hand away and met his eyes. He was squinting, and now she knew what he might be thinking when he looked at her like that. He was thinking it would be better if she had used her tongue.

“You get it?” His voice dropped into that near-whisper range.

“Yeah.” And without even thinking she cleaned her thumb with her mouth, the thumb that had just left his mouth. It was sweet, but there was another flavor there, too. She felt the prickle of millions of capillaries open in her face, to rush the blood through, but she also felt a tight and pinching prickle in her nipples. Between her legs.

“God, Destiny,” is what he said. It fit. He watched her thumb in her mouth and called on God, then whatever else might happen.

He reached up to the corner of his mouth where her thumb had rubbed and touched the place with his fingertips. She didn’t let herself look away from his eyes as she drew her thumb completely from her lips. Then, because her body told her there was
no choice, none at all, she slid her arm across the tabletop and wrapped her hand around his wrist. She gripped it hard, as a counterpoint to the pressure in her chest, in the lowest part of her belly.

Then she felt his hand grip her wrist, like she was readying to haul him from the edge of a cliff. His hand was rough and coarse, exactly as she imagined. Bigger though. Hotter. He easily encircled her wrist and upper forearm.

His squint widened into one of his deep, soft looks, and now she knew what that one meant, too. That he was moments from closing the distance between them. She didn’t care what gap narrowed first—the one between their bodies or the one between their lips and necks and cheeks.

She leaned forward, and the hand near his mouth left it to meet her body and grip her shoulder.

It felt like they were holding each other down. The wind over the knoll had picked up and if not for the four points of warm contact they made on each other’s bodies, they would blow away.

She wanted to explore his arm, his wrist, his hand, but something about the way he gripped her, pinned her, argued against moving at all. Even a little. She didn’t feel like squirming, or restless. She felt expectant. She felt as if she was vibrating at some resonant frequency from her thighs to her chest and it was rearranging everything inside.

Then she did drop her gaze from his. To his mouth, to the jut of his upper lip, that strange upside-down mouth of his she wanted to feel everywhere. Licking his thinner lower lip had become an obsession now, and as soon as she had the thought, his thumb over her wrist started up, back and forth, and the hand on her shoulder gripped tighter.

“You licked your lips,” he said, his voice cracking. The words penetrated the heavy vibrations in her middle and forced them lower, focused them. She wiggled now. She couldn’t not wiggle.

“I want to lick yours, I think.” She whispered, too. Wiggled a little more in his grip, lost one whole side of her body to goose bumps because of that thumb rubbing and scratching over her wrist.

“The first day I saw you in the library you had your brown coat on, the one with the dolphin patch on the elbow.” He moved in so that he said this to her cheek, but not close enough so that anything else touched. She kind of blanked out with his words. He’d been watching her, too.

“There’s a hole there, in the elbow. That’s why I sewed on the patch.” She couldn’t believe she couldn’t think of anything better to say, but it seemed more important to breathe in the smell of his neck, to lean into his grip so he knew he would meet no resistance from her.

“Your hair was in two plaits, one behind each ear. And you were wearing big snow boots. You slid a little, in a puddle of melted snow, and I steadied you, at your elbow.” He slid the hand he had on her shoulder, slowly, to her elbow, cupped it, as if he was demonstrating.

She lost the other side of her body to goose bumps.

“I didn’t know that was you. You were wearing coveralls. You had on a mask thing.”

“But you saw me later, didn’t you?”

She closed her eyes. All the mornings she snuck long looks at him in the work space, memorized how he gripped a panel of wood as his chisel made a long curling cut. He knew. Of course. “I did.”

“It’s been since then.” He turned his head a little more into the crook of her neck, still not touching. But he was holding her up now. She was boneless. Formless. No edges. The breeze and the almost hot sun loosened up everything but where he held her wrist, her elbow, her ear with his breath.

“Since then, what?” She tried to say this right against his ear, so she could feel the curve of it against her lips, but he tipped a little away. So she blew, soft, just the softest warm breath she could manage, and she directed it over his lobe, his neck. His goose bumps trailed in the wake of her breath, and the look of that made her clit feel like it was cutting her, a sharpness surrounded by a rich throb.

How long would it take, just like this, to come?

“It’s been since then that I’ve thought about kissing you.”

Not long at all.

She inhaled. She couldn’t tell if the sawdust smell was his neck or the firs all around them on the hill. She forced herself to pull back, just a little, until she felt him relax his hands where he held her, then she arched forward and rested her cheek against his neck. “How do you kiss me, when you think about it?”

This time, her words moved directly over his skin with her lips. She restrained herself from kissing, licking, but it was so hard, especially when he cleared his throat like
that and she could feel the vibration on her mouth.

He let go of her wrist, and the sweat and heat that had been under his hand was brushed off her skin by the breeze. He used a single finger to hook all the hair away from her nape and drag it so it fell over her shoulder. Then rasped a single finger around and around the bump on the top of her spine.

“Here,” he whispered. “When I let myself think about it, I kiss you here.”

She smiled against his neck. “This is fun.”

“You like torture?”

“Yeah.” She wrapped her freed arm around his side and did her best to snuggle in. He was so steely, it didn’t seem possible he could also be so warm. He was kind of skinny. With the sides of her fingers she skated over each of his ribs.

“You’re tickling me, too.”

“No. Hugging. This is a hug.”

“Ah.”

“It’s a hug for yesterday. For not freaking out when I cried and for telling Carrie about me.”

“What’s the nuzzling for?”

She smiled again and rubbed her nose over his pulse. “That’s for being so pretty.”

Suddenly, his nose was against her neck, his lips against her pulse. “I should nuzzle you too, then.”

But his words against her skin were too much, and when she thought she was just catching her breath, she actually vocalized a groan. “Hefin,” she thought she said, but then felt something wet and hot right where her neck and shoulder met. “Is that …”

It was his lips, turned out and opened so his tongue met her skin, too. She fisted his T-shirt, he gathered her hair in his hand and used it to position her head back so more of her neck was available to him. His mouth barely moved, just kissed and opened. Slowly. Her skin roughened and tightened, more and more with each heartbeat. Her heart felt like it was gasping for something to fill it, as all her blood had pooled away into her sit bones, the tissues of her sex, even into the pulsing crease of her ass.

“You’re sweet,” he whispered.

“Then I’m in trouble, right?” She hoped so. She hoped she was as addicting as cinnamon rolls and pancakes and cream-filled donuts. As every bad thing he had ever tasted.

He sat up, then. She shivered, hard. She hadn’t realized how much heat their bodies were holding together.

He reach up and moved her hair back around her shoulders. “But you are.”

“I’m what?”

“Or we are. I don’t know.”

“This is how they ask girls out in Wales, right? By saying confusing things after cuddling them?”

His eyebrows wrinkled and he huffed one of those laughs into his chest. “That’s the thing.”

“So … Dinner?”

“I’m going back to Wales.”

She let herself be confused, let everything about the moment mix up in her head until she could feel herself protectively float away from her body. “Or we could have breakfast, on the weekend. Pancakes at pancake time.”

“This contract at the library, when it’s over, I’m going back. Helping out my parents a bit, for a while. After that, I’m headed to Beijing to reconnect with a group I worked with there, on an internship sometime ago, and get serious about my consulting work.”

She looked at the lake. “How long?”

“We have about eight weeks left on the library restoration. Then, I’ll go.”

Des turned away from him, counted twenty white horses jumping from their little waves on the lake. “I don’t have any plans for the next couple of months,” she heard herself say. He was squinting at her again. “Do you?”

Hefin stopped on the landing on the thirtieth floor of the Carter Tower and leaned against the peregrine falcon observation window while he regulated his breath, used the hem of his tee to wipe sweat from his eyes.

Thirty flights of stairs, and he still heard her voice—
I don’t have any plans. Do you?
Thirty flights of stairs and he still tasted her on his tongue. Thirty flights of stairs and he couldn’t sweat off the feel of her hand on his ribs, her lips on his neck. Thirty flights of stairs and he still wasn’t breathing harder than he did sitting at a picnic table and telling Destiny Burnside that he had wanted to kiss her.

I don’t have any plans. Do you?

He started on the thirty-first flight. He hadn’t made plans for years, actually. Not since the plans he made with a laughing woman in a twee hotel room in the village of his birth.

You’re coming with me
, she had said, her warm brown limbs akimbo over the white duvet, shining and rich.

No you are
, he had answered, filling his hands with her perfumed skin, his mouth with all the tender places of her body.

To push the hours back, to push the question back, until they had finally sated themselves enough that making plans were all they had left.

He got on a plane. He convinced himself it wasn’t going the wrong direction every time he kissed Jessica.

Then, when there wasn’t anything here for him but her, just like there hadn’t been anything there for her but him, he convinced himself the kisses were enough.

He pushed the question back until Jessica was the question.

Then he pushed her back.