sound surprised.”
“Shocked. I can’t imagine where you’d even begin.”
“With an idea. Like writing a book, I’d imagine.”
“That’s not at all the same thing.”
“No? Why’s that?”
I shake my head, spread my fingers wide. “Well, because a book is only ever an idea, and then a refinement of the idea. What you do requires mathematics, physics, logistics. Books are just an arrangement of words, anyone can do that.”
“Bullshit. I couldn’t.”
He rolls up the blueprints.
“I’ve been reading Zebra Crossing. It’s more than an arrangement of words.”
I’m surprised, and touched. I’ve never known a guy who’s read my work after meeting me. It’s usually the opposite: the minute a man hears I’m a writer, he’ll bolt in the other direction to avoid having to read a book in which he has no interest.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he says, watching me.
I resume my poker face and clear my throat.
“This house looks expensive.”
“Yeah, it will be. But a lot of the materials will be repurposed and I can do most of the work myself. It will take a while, obviously.”
I want to know where a carpenter will find the money to build a house like this. It feels intrusive to ask, but Jack reads my mind.
“My family has some money,” he says. “My dad owns a chain of liquor stores back East. He settled me fairly well.”
“He’s still living?”
“Yeah.”
I frown, trying to get the lay of the land.
“We had a falling-out,” Jack says. “He basically shoved some money at me and told me to get the fuck out.”
“But if you have money, why do you work as a carpenter?”
“Well, it’s not Hilton money. And a man should always work, whether he needs to or not.”
“Only, not as an architect.”
He takes off his glasses, folds them and sets them aside. Then he slips one arm under my legs, the other around my shoulders, and shifts me in one fluid motion so I’m flat on my back.
“Carpentry is good for upper body strength,” he says.
He stretches out next to me. Twines our fingers together and turns them this way and that to see the effect, a herringbone pattern in brown and white. His hands are rough with calluses, wide and flat and strong. Mine seem like a child’s in comparison.
He tips my face to his and kisses me. His mouth is firm against mine, but supple, seeking. He catches my lower lip between his teeth, nuzzles into the ticklish skin under my jaw. Goose bumps blossom on my neck, and I tuck up my shoulder to make him stop. Smiling, he smooths them away with the palm of his hand and begins to unlace the neckline of my peasant blouse.
“Beautiful,” he says as he uncovers me. “Like an anime doll that fell into a rag bin.”
I can’t help laughing.
“Why does no one like my clothes? This is style.”
He draws the fabric aside and runs a finger along the lace edge of my bra. “I like your clothes just fine, so long as they’re on the floor.”
He unhooks the front of my bra and pushes the cup aside. Then he settles over me, his warm tongue curving around my nipple, his dark hair curling around my fingers. I watch his mouth, entranced by the contrast of his darker, stubbled skin against the pale swell of my breast. He takes my silver hoop in his teeth and tugs gently as he gathers slow handfuls of my skirt and finds the bare curve of my hip, grinning at my thigh-high striped socks.
“I take it all back,” he says.
I get to my knees and take off my blouse and his shirt, my skirt and underwear, run my hands over his chest and the hard slope of his shoulder. I unbutton his jeans and reach inside, wrap my fingers around the solid, dew-tipped length of his cock, and move down his body to take him in my mouth. His skin tastes clean, faintly salty, like the back of my hand before a shot of tequila. I weigh his testicles in my palm, run a thumb across their wrinkled surface and follow the fat speed-bump under his dick with my tongue as I take him to the top of my throat. We fall into a natural cadence, his hand at the back of my neck.
He leans against the cab of the truck, holding my hair aside, watching. His face is impassive, but his body begins to shift. His breathing picks up. The texture of his skin feels smoother and more taut. I want him inside me and worry that he’ll finish in my mouth, but he stops me, pulls me away with one hand tangled in my hair.
He digs a condom out of his wallet and rolls it on, motions for me with his fingers. I straddle him and ease down the length of his cock. I close my eyes. I have never had sex outdoors before, never felt the night wind on my bare breasts or felt this cool lick of air on my clitoris as I am spread apart. It’s electrifying. The heat between my legs crackles like molten lava spilling into the sea, hot meeting cold.
Jack groans and holds me in place. “Jeeeesus,” he says. “Wait, baby...”
I am still, imagining what distraction he turns to at times like this. Work, maybe. Measurements and angles, building codes and deadlines and the drying time of a slab of concrete. I wonder what this feels like to him, how wet, how tight I am around him. Already my cunt is clenched like a fist, contracting in upward ripples as if to draw him deeper inside me.
I open my eyes and he opens his. His gaze sweeps over me with dark appraisal, a fierce masculine pride, proprietary and urgent, and my body answers with an almost painful thrill from someplace low and deep inside my belly. He lifts me up and presses me down, fixated on the connection point between us, his hands splayed wide over my hips.
I lean forward to brace myself on the rim of the truck bed. The tips of my breasts graze his bare chest. He guides my nipple to his mouth, pulls me closer with one hand around the back of my neck, the other stroking my ass, sliding between my legs.
My breasts grow heavy, tingling, wet from his tongue and cold from the night air. My breath whistles past my teeth. He flexes his thumb against my clitoris and lifts me with each thrust of his hips, up and down. I feel him growing thicker inside me. I open my legs, arch back, leaning on my hands with my breasts raised like an offering to the sky. The stars seem to circle overhead. The night air moves over my skin like a cool cotton sheet, catching at my breasts, sliding across my thighs.
He turns his thumb so the tip is pressed right into the cleft of my clitoris, and that feels so good, unbearably good, as though he’s tripped a wire inside me, cut me loose and catapulted me into a rush of pleasure that shoots through my limbs and right to the top of my head. I come and he is chasing me with long hard strokes, clutching at my hips as if he can find more of me if he tries. A deep groan stutters from the back of his throat. His abdomen contracts under my hand.
It takes a few
