“The butchering? It’s not so bad. I mean unless you get queasy around blood”
“No,” she says softly. “I don’t think I could do this whole off-the-grid thing. I think it would drive me a little crazy, to be honest. What if you want to go to the movies? Or enjoy a cup of coffee you didn’t have to make yourself?”
I know where she’s going with this. I get plenty of readers who send me letters asking me the same sort of thing. I know this life isn’t for everyone.
But in my bedroom, earlier, when I was taking Evie against me, when my hands were running over her soft skin, I thought that perhaps we could be something beyond this night. I thought we could be something real.
“I’d be lying if I told you there aren’t times I get a little stir crazy. I go to town about every eight weeks and pick up things I need. I’d say on a whole, eight weeks of making my own coffee isn’t so rough. Like I said, I don’t take anything for granted.”
Evie bites her bottom lip, straightens her shoulders, her body language telling me that my words aren’t the ones she wanted to hear.
“What is it? What did I say?”
“It’s just that when you say it like that, that you don’t take things for granted, it implies that everyone else does. I guess ... it’s kind of hard to hear. I wish you didn’t think of me that way.”
The popcorn starts smoking.
“Dammit.” I lift the pot off the burner, realizing it’s scorched. Using a potholder, I carry it out the front door and set it in the snow. The snow is still falling heavily. She’s followed me to the doorway, and I turn to look at her.
“I don’t think of you that way. I believe you live a full life and care deeply for those around you,” I say, speaking from my heart. “And, I’m sorry, I know you really wanted to string popcorn.”
“I don’t need it.” She sighs and reaches out for my hand. “Come inside. Let me warm you up.”
Chapter Nine
When Everett pulls me into bed that night, my heart feels torn. Which is strange. On one hand, I have this ridiculously dreamy man who has a massive boner for me holding me tightly against it. But on the other hand, I know this isn’t going to last... and I wish it could.
At the end of the blizzard, I’m going home to my little cottage, going to continue as if this never happened, because no matter how perfect Everett appears, his life couldn’t be more different than mine.
Even me, a girl with endless amounts of optimism, can see that there’s an expiration to this rendezvous.
Everett pulls me toward him until our noses touch. I reach out my hands and run them over his beard. It’s soft, and I have a sneaking suspicion he uses some sort of handmade balm for it. A smile crosses my lips, and before I lean over and kiss him on his lips, he kisses me.
“Are you always in your head like this?” he asks.
His hands run over my spine, down to my ass, and he squeezes it ever so slightly. Hard enough, though, that I know what he wants.
Hard enough for my body to tell me what it wants, also.
“I don’t think people would say there’s that Evie, she’s a thinker.”
“No? What would they say.”
I roll on top of Everett and push up so I straddle him. I unbutton his flannel shirt, the one I’m wearing, slowly. The lamplight glows across the room and his dog Johnny Walker sleeps at the foot of the bed.
“I suppose they would say there’s that Evie, she’s always the life of the party.”
“Did you like our Christmas party?”
“I did.” I shrug off the shirt, leaving my breasts bare. His hands gravitate toward them instinctively.
“Me too. Strange, not having shared this place with anyone for five years. That’s a long ass time.”
“You’ve gone five years without having sex? I feel honored.”
“Pretty close. The first year I moved here, I was still dating this woman back home, and I’d go visit her for long weekends but eventually we both knew neither of us was willing to sacrifice the lives we had chosen for a life with each other.”
I close my eyes, arching my back as he thumbs my nipples. It’s a double-edged sword, giving into the way my body feels, and simultaneously pushing down the way my heart constricts.
Everett may be a ruggedly handsome mountain man, but there’s no way our lives can merge. His words, his last girlfriend, hit too close to home.
It’s crazy to even be thinking any of these things after just one afternoon with this man, and I don’t know why women seem to be programmed to think about futures with men they’ve just met, but I can’t help it.
Maybe it’s because of the serendipitous way we met, maybe it was the unexpected way our bodies connect. Maybe it’s the way he takes my hands and laces our fingers together, pulling our bodies closer still.
Everett kisses me and I pin his hands over his head, my breasts pressed against his chest. My ass in the air. His mouth on mine.
“Oh, Evie.”
Our mouths part and our tongues meet and heat rushes over me, onto him. My body is on fire; his cock is so hard. I feel him beneath me, my pussy grinding against his length. Wanting him in me, desperately.
And I don’t want to wait.
“Take me, Everett. Now.” I pull up so that I’m sitting on him, pressing a hand on his chest, my other hand beginning to stroke his long shaft up and down, up and down. “Now, Everett,” I whimper, needy in a way I have never been before.
“Shh, we can take it slow, baby,” he tells me.
I’m already lifting my ass, ready to sink down on him. I don’t wait. I need my pussy filled with his cock, the massive rod that makes him a man. Makes my pussy cry out in pleasure. I moan in delight.
This might all end in the morning.
I am not leaving here with any regrets.
“You want a condom?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I’m on the pill.”
He nods our eyes meeting. Everett makes me feel so understood with just one look.
“I just want to feel you in me, Everett. This might be our only chance... and I want... I want to hold on tight... I don’t want to lose you yet, not before I’ve really had you.”
He must understand exactly what I mean because he doesn’t say anymore.
He just fills me up with everything he has.
Chapter Ten
The next morning, I wake up with Evie in my arms. Yesterday felt like a dream, but now it’s morning, and she is here. This is real. She is real.
It feels like I’ve known her forever, or maybe just that I have been waiting for her, forever.
I guess it’s like that with people sometimes, though I can’t say I’ve ever had that instant connection with another person -- the kind you see in movies or read about in books.
The kind that is fiercely loyal, the kind that keeps you up all night trying to figure out how the fuck this will all work.
It’s complicated. While not everyone believes in that at-first-sight stuff, the bigger issue is the reality of her life not lining up with mine.
That truth is glaring me in the face. I tossed and turned all night, half the time in agony, and the other half in complete devotion. When my cock was buried deep inside her pussy, everything made sense. She and I were one, our bodies puzzle pieces. Our lives seemed to fit.