I wake up with a hundred and ninety pounds of extremely well-crafted man wrapped around me. His beautiful, sculpted arm drapes over me, his calloused outdoorsy-guy hand rests on my breast. His nose is tucked in my hair, his erection pressing into my lower back.
“Hey,” he murmurs.
“Hey, yourself.”
He tugs me closer. “I have an idea,” he says. “We shower…”
“Separately?”
“Fuck no,” he says, grinding on me.
I giggle.
“And then we go get breakfast pastries at Rush Creek bakery.”
I try to picture it. Nan, Rush Creek’s resident gossip, owns the Rush Creek bakery, and there will be no end of talk if the two of us show up together for breakfast. On the other hand, as Easton pointed out last night, everyone who matters already knows.
“Okay,” I say.
“Yeah?” he asks, like he hadn’t been expecting me to say yes.
“Yeah.”
I can’t decide which I love more, soaping up the hard planes of Easton’s body or the moment when he takes the soap from me and returns the favor, his fingers knowing and skillful. He crowds me from behind, takes my hands, and lifts them to the cool tile, gliding his thick erection over my soapy skin.
“Here,” I say, lifting down the detachable shower head. “Get that soap off.”
He does. He reaches for the condom he’s balanced on the shower’s shelf, and in a feat of athleticism that’s probably par for the course for men named Wilder, pins me against the wall and—with shower head in one hand and himself in the other—enters me from behind.
He’s hard and thick and fills me completely, and when he turns the detachable nozzle on my clit, his long, callused fingers holding me open to his ministrations, I’m helpless. I come, weak-kneed, clawing the tile.
“Oh, fuck, Han, you feel so good—”
His words fall apart to groans, grunts, shouts, his body rigid behind me.
“I didn’t realize how handy this thing was,” he says, looking down at the shower head he’s holding. He’s still inside me, and I’m still throbbing around him.
“Men never do,” I say. “Now you know.”
“I have lots of ideas about how to use this knowledge,” he says, slowly releasing me. He hangs the shower head and reaches for towels just outside the steamy glass door. Hands me one.
“E,” I say, caressing the thick plush. “I don’t think I’ve ever used a towel this nice.”
He shrugs. “I like nice things.”
“Maybe that should be your new Wilder identity. The Nice Things brother.”
“Ha,” he says.
“The Good With Oral brother?”
He grins. “You really think they’d let me take that one for myself?”
“No. Definitely not.”
He takes the towel from me and rubs me down gently. It feels amazing. I think I purr.
“You know what I think?” I say, when I pop my head back out of the fluffiness. “I think you’re the Just the All Around Best Wilder.”
I say it in the same spirit of teasing that I made my other suggestions, but his eyes, when I meet them, are serious. Tender and, I think, a little wistful. “Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah.”
My own chest hurts, and I need to say something to deflect. “But don’t let it go to your head.”
He smiles at that, and the softness in his expression fades. The moment feels like a delicate bubble I’ve popped. And I want to bring it back… but I don’t know how. I search for the right words, the true words, the soft words, but I don’t know what they are or how to put them together. How to express what Easton is to me: as welcome as the right rock pressed into my palm, as substantial and comforting as the weight of a worry stone in my pocket, as playful as one skipping across the surface of the river.
But somehow, “you’re the skipping stone brother,” doesn’t seem like it’ll sound as good spoken out loud as it does in my head.
Easton takes longer than I do to get ready, which doesn’t surprise either of us. I sit cross-legged on the bed and realize it’s been several days since I checked my emails.
There are emails from four of my brothers, four of five replies to my “party for granddad” subject line, and my heart squeezes, a strange heavy thud.
I read all four emails, then slump back against the pillows on Easton’s bed.
Four nos.
My brothers are polite but firm. As human beings, they couldn’t be more different from each other, but their answers all follow a formula: too busy, but even if I weren’t, I can’t imagine coming back there to celebrate that pain in my ass. But please, come visit! I’ve got plenty of space, and I miss you.
And I can’t blame them for not wanting to come back. They all lost a lot, too, and unlike me, none of them could see the squishy heart beating under my granddad’s rough exterior… but…
“Hey,” Easton says quietly. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lie.
He squints at me. “Han.”
“I’m fine.”
He sighs. “Let me try another tack. What did you just see on your phone?”
Even in the face of a direct question, my brain squirms, trying to find a way around admitting how unsettled I am, but in the end, I give in.
“My brothers aren’t coming to my granddad’s party. Well, four of them aren’t coming. My email to Tuck straight-up bounced.”
Which means he changed his email address and didn’t tell me.
That one hurts. A lot.
Honestly, they all hurt.
Easton sits down on the bed next to me.
“See?” I challenge him, intending to tease. “You can’t keep me from getting hurt.”
But the words don’t come out teasing. They come out bitter and raw.
He winces. “No,” he says, “I guess I can’t. But I wish I could. Hanna, you don’t know how much I wish I could.”
There’s a long silence. I want to tell him I do know, and that he’s always been the best bulwark against hurt, but it feels so big and serious, and I’m too scraped up inside to risk it. He’s quiet, too, his shoulders a little hunched.
I hate this, the awkwardness that always comes with soul baring, and I don’t know how to get back to where we were, back to the teasing and the tenderness.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry to bail on the breakfast plans, but I’m feeling like maybe I’d rather just… I don’t know, go home and sulk?”
“Of course,” he says, a little stiffly. “I’ll take you back to your truck, how ’bout?”
“Perfect,” I say. It’s not perfect, not at all. There’s nothing perfect about the way I feel right now, suddenly brittle, but I don’t know how to talk about it.
His gaze scrapes over my face, searching, and I want him to find what he’s looking for, but I can’t stand how exposed I feel, so I look away.
We head outside together, pile into his Jeep, and drive back to Wilder headquarters to retrieve my truck.
But when we get there, Bear is just stepping out of his truck in the parking lot. He looks from Easton to me and back again.
“Hey,” Bear says. “We… okay?”
He looks from me to Easton and back to me.
I nod. Easton takes a moment longer, but then he does, too, his expression softening.
Bear holds out a slip of paper. “I’m sorry this took me so long, E, but I’ve got a job offer for you.” He presses the offer into Easton’s hands. “Salary’s on there. Think you’re gonna like it.”
Easton unfolds the paper, and I can tell just by looking at his face that whatever it says on that paper, it’s way more than he ever thought he’d make.
“Basically, you’ll get to write your own job description, too. Consider that my apology for fucking up with the video. And consider it my promise that nothing like that will happen again on my watch.”
Easton’s mouth is open; he clearly wasn’t expecting that, or the promise of so much freedom in the new job. And my insides feel like they’re made of wet cement.
I knew this was coming. I knew being with Easton was a time-bound thing. I knew I’d lose him. And it’s better, so much better, to lose him to Bear and Colorado and something he loves doing than to… well, whatever’s going to happen next. To him getting bored or moving on to someone else.
That thought makes me sick to my stomach; I can’t believe how many times I joked about him melting a pair of panties that didn’t belong to me.
I will never, ever be able to joke about Easton Wilder’s sex life again. Not as long as I live.