Laugh (27 page)

Then he shaped his hands over her, from her nape to her ass, pressing tight. On his way back up, his hands came under her skirt, and he slid his fingers into the elastic of her panties, opened her with his fingertips, rubbed his hard dick against her hip.

She closed her eyes.

He pulled her T-shirt off.

He unhooked her bra, and then she almost yelled, made a surprised noise, when his mouth was instantly licking her nipple, firm, his thumb at the other.

Their hips were circling together, he was just breathing over her nipples, brushing his lips across them, making them hard and tight and pinched. It took all of her energy to keep herself from telling him to stop, because it was too much, it was actually too much—she wanted to shove away from him and get his mouth back to hers, to her neck.

But she let him keep playing instead, let the shiver that skated close to irritation and pain change into something else, because she couldn’t think of anything but what he was doing to her, right now, and the
not
thinking
was more important than pleasure.

Then there were his teeth, his pinching fingers, and she didn’t want to be standing anymore, she wanted to be spread out and held down, she wanted to press the pulse between her legs against something hard, and she didn’t even realize she had shoved her hand under her panties until she felt Sam drag her arm up over her head and pin it against the wall.

“Just let me, baby.”

But she couldn’t stop her hips and she needed pressure, so much, she needed it hard, so bad, she rubbed her thighs together and that was even worse because she was so wet that there was no friction, just hotness, just wetness, just Sam’s mouth behind her ear, his hard body against her aching breasts.

Then he was kissing her, and for a while, that was better. It was better, his mouth and his tongue as desperate as hers, better because she could hear the sounds he made. He sucked her bottom lip and he moved away to breathe and to find a deeper angle, and one hand was guiding her jaw and the other was still pinning her wrist, and she just let herself go, breathing hard and bucking and sweating and moaning and none of it mattered because her neediness gave him something.

She was giving him herself, which was what he wanted. This was what she was, needy, needier, the more he kissed her.

Every kiss was both what she needed, and what he wanted.

“Nina,” he said, smoothing her arm down, pushing her hair back off her forehead.

She opened her eyes to look at him. This close, she could see the lines on his face where he missed with his sunscreen and zinc cream. She could see how the freckles gathered over the bones. She could see how he must have looked as a child. She could see that place between his eyebrows where a deep wrinkle was starting.

His gray eyes—looking at her face, too.

“What?”

“I was going to take you over to the sofa.”

“Yeah?”

“I think so.”

“I want to.”

“Me too.”

She wasn’t sure of what she was saying. She was throbbing, close to coming but not at all close at the same time, topless and warm. She wanted the rest of her clothes off, so as he moved away, she yanked her skirt and panties over her hips.

He brushed the back of his hands over her belly, and she reflexively sucked in.

He laughed. “Ticklish?”

“Kind of. I’m getting a little soft there.”

“I like it. I like all your muscles, and then these …” He put his big hands over her breasts and squeezed a little. “This …” He brought his hands down again over her pooch, shaping it like he had her breasts, and she had to laugh.

“Yeah?”

“I do. There’s so much naked.”

“Like more surface area of naked, is this what you’re saying?”

He grinned at her, and he was so handsome, so beautiful, his hair, his freckles, his old-fashioned face, that she laughed.

“Yeah, more surface area. More naked.”

Then he pulled off his T-shirt, and toed off his shoes, dropped his jeans.

More naked.

He was blushing hot pink from his throat to the divide between his pecs, his auburn hair silky, even around his erection.

She played with that trail, all the way down, before grabbing him at the base, stroking him, running her thumb through where he was dripping, shining, more pink. He grabbed the back of her neck, watched her hand, bucked.

It was sexy, quiet. She was getting slick and wet between her thighs and it felt really good; her boundaries were fading and she was nothing more than the warm air around them and an urgent pulse.

He reached between her thighs and slid between the lips there, found her clit, rubbed alongside it, and she had to bang her head back against the wall when the jolt hit her from her clit all the way inside.

He pressed against her, hot skin on her hot skin, his fingers just inside her. Licked her neck. It was amazing, it made her shiver.

“Come on, Nina.”

But he didn’t lead her away—he angled his cock, hard and gleaming, over the wet split of her pussy, rubbing the head over the hood of her clit, rubbing it hard, breathing hard, letting her feel the underside of him holding her open. She pressed her hand over where they were together and helped him circle over her there.

It was just right, feeling dangerous, a deep throb, the constant urge to slip down around him, take him in, fill herself up. He somehow found her with his other hand, and slid slowly inside her with his finger. It made her squeeze her thighs together, a little.

He eased back out, giving her chills, pressed against her nipple with his wet finger, licked his finger and her nipple together.

“Jesus God, Nina,” he whispered against her throat.

“Yeah,” she said. “Good. It’s good.”

“You’re so good.”

“There,” she said, and held him where the crown of his cock had snagged over her clit and moved her hips, making herself move slow, teasing herself with him, when she looked at them joined with sex and their hands, it didn’t look as obscene as his expression, how his tongue was touching the back of his front teeth and his brows were drawn.

“You like that?” she asked.

“Yeah, feels good, looks better.”

She wanted to push him.

“I want to fuck you.” She said that slowly. She let her breath move extra slow between her lip and her teeth when she said
fuck.

He shuddered. Stopped rubbing and circling, closed his eyes.

“You close, baby?” She pushed her hips. They slipped together, frictionless.

“Wanna come on you,” he whispered.

“You thinking about that? About your come on me, right here, against the wall?”

His thumb found her nipple, circled it. She could see his muscles heaving against his ribs with his breath.

“I’m thinking of coming all over you, my fingers inside you, kissing you.”

“Tell me,” she said.

But he didn’t, he just brought both his hands up, and cradled her face, and it shouldn’t have been possible for that to be sexier than what his hands had been doing, but the tenderness of it made her heart hurt and her belly flip and her pussy throb, all at the same time, so that when he kissed her, licked into her, she felt her eyes burn with tears, and it was so much worse when she heard him, how the noises he made sounded like begging, and he might be saying her name between breaths.

It was only a few steps, really, to her bed.

She took him there, and she helped him with the condom. He couldn’t touch himself, couldn’t touch her, without shaking and that made her want him inside her, to stroke inside of her for hours, because she would never get enough of it.

He pulled her arms up again and held her wrists—when he nudged and stretched inside her, she scooped her hips back before he could thrust.

“Look up at me,” she said even as he met her gaze.

His forehead almost to hers.

He pushed inside, and it was so hard not to close her eyes.

She hooked her leg up around his waist to keep him close.

It meant he could only really rock into her, but that was good, his body ground against her clit as he rocked, and looking into his eyes was so good, and feeling his hand around her wrists, the muscles in her arms pulling long and warm.

“I love you, Nina.”

And there it was, the risk she had taken when she brought him up to make love to her, and that same tender swoop came over her like it had when he’d held her face and kissed her and made everything worse and better.

She’d been chasing that risk, and she didn’t even know if the thrill of it was good or if it was bad, if the way it made this nakedness between them so much hotter meant it was good or it was bad.

So she arched up and squeezed her muscles around him, and kissed him, slow and deep and then, when she was close but it wasn’t happening, she said, “Tell me again, Sam.”

And he said, “I love you, Nina. I love you so much.”

She came. She came and came, almost struggling against it because it was so good she never wanted to stop, never wanted to be anywhere but between that almost coming and coming, ever again.

He rocked into her as she came apart, got tighter, and he never stopped saying it,
I love you
,
I love you
, and it was awful, but it made it so much hotter and better, it did.

She needed him to tell her, for his heart to come to pieces all over her so that she could stop thinking of anything but their skin, their rough breathing.

This pleasure, unbearable, was a naked man, a naked woman, and the distance between them.

* * *

He fell asleep so easily, she decided she would tease him about it later.

Why shouldn’t he, though?

Sam Burnside had the clearest, sweetest heart of anyone she had known. Even as he fought himself and struggled to understand the people he loved, fought them, he never withheld his love.

Everyone Sam loved knew it.

It’s why, she thought, watching him sleep, the people Sam loved weren’t as gentle with him as they should be. They were safe with him, his love made them perfectly safe. Safe to behave badly or to test how much love could bear.

His love made their love better. When they tested it, they found love to be strong beyond measure, able
to bear incalculable losses.

She was using his love, too.

Sam’s love was a certain force when nothing else in her life was certain.

She couldn’t know if this would be a season that would signal the beginning of the end until harvest was in, a harvest already compromised by Tay’s illness and risks she’d taken more than a year ago.

She couldn’t know if Tay would win against cancer and have a happy life.

She couldn’t know if she’d ever find ease and love with her family again, if she would get to be a part of all the hours when, like Sam said, they were laughing.

But she could know that Sam loved her.

Worse, if she told Sam she was using his love to feel certain about something, to feel stronger, he would feel glad that she could, that he had something to offer.

Even if she wasn’t sure what she had to offer him.

Sam Burnside thought he was a difficult man to love.

She sat next to him, leaning against the headboard, playing with his hair while he slept.

Loving him was so easy, she wondered why he was still available for a woman like her to find and to love.

She looked at the little Moon Beam clock on her nightstand. Her mother had given it to her when she was small, to glow against the dark nights in the country. Her mother was always doing that, once they were permanently settled in the United States, splurging on small comforts for her daughter that she would have never needed herself.

Nina wondered now if the reason her mother was so intuitive about those comforts was that while she had learned to set such comforts aside, she still yearned for them.

She could never imagine Juana Maria Paz needing a nightlight, but she remembered her mother telling her a little about living in dorms for migrant workers, which were often trailers or canvas-sided structures with pallet floors, and where her parents worked, near the orchards themselves.

It must have been very dark at night. Quiet.

She thought about her mother, a young woman far away from home, trying to sleep in the quiet, her body tired from working outside all day.

Her parents had always been circumspect about their time as workers, adamant that they had only worked for “good” operations with reputations tested by friends and relatives. She knew, even as a girl, that they wanted her takeaway to be that hard work was a sacrifice that returned dividends.

Except—she had balked, early on, from engaging in contracts with migrant operations, instead partnering with a university program and a gap year program to hire hands. She wasn’t sure where that reticence
had crept in, what she knew from her parents without their telling her.

What might they know of her that she had never credited them with?

It was three hours earlier on the North Olympic Coast in Washington, and her mother no longer worked in the fields. She always liked a bowl of ice cream before bed, and Nina imagined her now, sitting in her glider on the porch with her treat, listening to the birds and insects settle in for the night, or at the kitchen table, flipping through a magazine.

Nina leaned over and kissed Sam over his eyes, his jaw, his forehead.

“Thank you, my baby,” she whispered.

She got up and sneaked into the living room. Picked up Sam’s T-shirt from the floor and pulled it on. Got a pint out of the freezer and her phone, then opened the slider onto her tiny balcony that faced the brick wall of the building next door.

The phone rang twice. Nina imagined the theme song to
La Patrona
singing out from her mother’s phone.

“Hola, soy Juana.”

“
Hola
, Mama. It’s Nina.”

Nina heard her mama’s spoon clink into her bowl.

Nina told her about Tay, about the peppers. About all the pickles and the summer menu at the café.

She told her mama just a little about Sam.

Nina ate her ice cream and listened to her mother tell her about a development initiative the farm was fighting, about teaching a class on harvesting wild mussels.