by Lucy Snow
I’d spent years never thinking that could be the case, but what if that was just teenage and 20-something angst and desire for rebellion?
Maybe I’d just been running away from a bigger truth by wandering around the world. I’d helped others thinking it would help myself, but…I knew in my heart that I hadn’t yet found the peace that I’d been looking for this entire time.
Where was it?
Avery stirred and pulled the blankets back, uncovering her head while she dozed, and I marveled at how someone so peaceful could be so strong facing what she had.
I couldn’t imagine going through the passing of a sibling, and not only that, the effects it would have on my family that would never go away. And yet, Avery still fought against them for the right to make her own way in the world - I couldn’t believe her strength.
She pulled the blankets back over her head and I smiled before turning to look back at the window. The snow was still coming down, and for a few minutes it felt like the storm would never end, and Avery and Marty and Clara and I would spend the rest of our lives in this place.
I knew, of course, that that wasn’t true, but it kinda felt like it.
It would be a few more days at most. And then I’d go back to Meridian and hash things out with my father. Maybe I’d join the family business and carry on the name — the idea didn’t seem so foreign to me as it once did.
Or maybe, I had just realized that sometimes the answers to our questions weren’t exactly where we expected them to be.
That left Avery on my mind. She’d pulled me to such high highs and such low lows over the short time I’d known her, and I had opened up to her, in my perhaps limited way, more than I had to anyone before.
It wouldn’t last, of course — we were too different for that to be a practical reality.
But for a few days more, it could. We could keep playing house like we were until the storm went away.
And that would have to be enough for me.
It took a little while, but I managed to fall back asleep.
CHAPTER 17 - AVERY
The next couple days were a haze of snow and sex.
That was not, at all, a bad thing.
The snow I didn’t have any control over, but the sex part, well, I might have been a little guilty in making that happen. OK, a lot guilty. But in my defense, there wasn’t really much to do around the inn except read books and play old board games.
When it came down to books, board games, or having sex with a ridiculously sexy guy, well, I was more than secure enough to admit that that decision was pretty damn easy.
His room, my room, and more than once in the living room once we were sure that Marty and Clara had gone to bed…you name it, we found a place to get at least sort of naked there and fool around.
They were two of the best days of my life so far, and more than once I wished it wouldn’t end. Each time I looked out the window, though, at the road outside covered in snow, I remembered all over again that this wasn’t a dream, that this was real life, and that soon this phase of it would be over.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I said the third morning after we’d started spending our nights together, while we lay in bed. I was resting my head on Eames’ shoulder with his hand wrapped around me. It felt wonderful to be this close to him.
“Huh?” Eames said, sounding like he was barely awake. “You say something?” He reached over with his free hand and cupped one of my boobs, squeezing lightly and running his finger over my nipple.
“Mmmmm,” I moaned as I turned into him wanting to feel his hands over more of me. “I was just wondering what you were thinking.”
He smiled. “I was just thinking if we can go again before Marty and Clara send up a search party to find us and drag us down to breakfast.”
I playfully punched him on the shoulder. “Luckily besides the two of them there’s no one else here, so that’s gonna be a thin search party.”
“True, but they’re a crafty couple, I don’t doubt they could rig some sort of steam machine to come look for us.”
“Perhaps,” I said, then blushed. “I also don’t think they think we’re missing. I have a feeling they know just what we’re doing.”
Eames turned to face me. “You’re right, you do make a lot of noise.”
“Shut up!” I said, feeling myself turn even more red. “That’s not what I meant!”
“Yeah, but it’s true. You do make a lot of noise,” Eames repeated, but this time he tweaked my nipple as he said so, pulling another moan out of me.
His hand reached down and after feeling how wet I was, he slid a finger inside me — my eyes almost rolled back up in my head it felt so good. “Please,” I gasped, “don’t tease me like that.”
“Oh, I have no intention of just teasing you, Princess,” Eames whispered as he rolled over, pulling his finger out to place it on the bed as he climbed on top of me and I spread my legs. I was beginning to get used to having his thick cock inside me, but even so, the first time he pushed himself inside me each time was slow and a tiny bit uncomfortable before it gave way to the pleasure that I was quickly becoming addicted to.
Eames leaned down and we shared a deep kiss that ended as he trailed his lips down my check to my neck and shoulders. I lay back in the bed and let him tease me with his tongue, my hands pressing against his back, pulling him in and pushing him out as he guided his cock inside me.
I was getting closer and closer to yet another orgasm when Eames stopped, staying inside me but hovering above in place, a calm look across his face.
“What?” I asked, surprised that he had stopped. “Do you want to change positions?”
“This is perfect,” he breathed. “I just like looking at you.”
I felt a little self-conscious about that until I stared into his dark eyes and saw how genuine his smile was. “This is perfect, you’re right.”
“Yeah.” He paused. “What were you asking me about before?”
“What you were thinking. You said it was whether we could have sex again without getting caught.”
“Right. That’s not what I was actually thinking about.”
He shifted around inside me and for a moment I lost the ability to speak. Eames laughed and leaned down, licking around my breasts in concentric circles till he got to my nipples before he kneaded each one in turn in between his teeth, setting fire to my entire body. I was sweating already.
“I was saying,” Eames continued when I’d opened my eyes again and my mouth worked. “That I was thinking about Meridian.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“What it’s like being from there.”
“How so?”
Eames laughed. “Think we should have this conversation while we’re having sex?”
I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
“I mean, I’m from there, and I grew up there, but it seems like such a foreign place to me now.”
“Because you haven’t lived there in almost a decade.”
“Exactly. And it got me thinking about what it meant to have a hometown.”
“That’s a pretty deep subject for a random morning in bed.”
Eames smiled, and my heart fluttered involuntarily. His face was a map of a man who’d seen so much. “Yeah, it is, but at the same time, when you’ve got a storm like that going on outside, thinking is definitely something you’ve got time for.”
“Well, I can tell you right now, you’re in the middle of something else you’ve been making time for lately.”
Eames laughed and lowered his head; I lifted my own to meet his in another long kiss. We stopped talking for a bit as Eames lazily and relaxedly pushed and pulled himself in and out of me. It was the kind of sex without any urgency; sex between two people who had gotten comfortable with each other and just wanted to feel good. It didn’t take much concentration.
It was perfect.
After we were done, we both lay intertwined in bed, feeling the slow come down after exerting
ourselves. Eames fell back asleep almost immediately, and I lay there watching him, the curve of his thick and corded muscles, built from working all over the world, contrasted with the innocence and experience of his face.
He was a mass of contradictions to me - I couldn’t square what he’d done with how he looked, and the man I’d met a few days ago in the snow was so different from the man who’s bed I now shared that if they didn’t look identical I wouldn’t have believed they were the same person.
But now here we were, and I watched him sleep. We barely knew each other, I knew that, but at the same time, I felt a connection to Eames Beckett that I didn’t know was possible.
Of course, I wasn’t naive enough to think that the pretty-much nonstop sex we’d had over the last couple days had no effect on how I felt about him. Of course it did — probably a huge effect.
At the same time, though, I was intrigued by him. Not just the sex part, which was fantastic and I couldn’t get enough of it, but it was more than that. I wanted to know what drove Eames Beckett.
I’d never heard of someone turning their back on a prominent family like that. I mean, I didn’t pay much attention to the local business news in Meridian, but even I knew who the Beckett family was, and all they’d done for the city. But Eames had decided as a teenager that all that wasn’t for him, and had walked away from it.
I needed to understand how that worked, what could drive someone to do that.
And not only because it was kinda sorta similar to what I was trying to work up the courage to do myself.
I looked over Eames’ slumbering shoulder out the window along the wall. It was almost completely white out — the storm showed little signs of stopping, even though I knew that it had to end eventually.
Just like this? I looked Eames up and down, from the tip of his head to where his muscular torso covered in tattoos disappeared into the blankets.
This would end too. I knew that. We were pulled by different forces, in opposite directions. There was no way we could make it work.
In the rush of everything getting so hot and heavy so quickly I hadn’t taken time to think that part through, the whole temporary nature of what was for now, our ‘relationship,’ even though no one could really call it that.
I found myself oddly cool with that temporary aspect of things - I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love while on winter break - I momentarily flashed to a scene of trying to explain that to Professor Stevens, and I giggled so hard and so loud that Eames stirred from his sleep before I piped down.
No, love hadn’t been in the plans for me right now, so I was…alright with it not happening now.
Of course that didn’t mean I had to hold back from enjoying whatever this was while it lasted.
I had big plans — finishing school, grad school, a career — and I wasn’t about to let something like love or romance get in the way of that — not now when I’d put so much work into getting this far. This was all a game, no matter what it felt like — a game of house between adults. I didn’t want to stop playing, but I knew that I’d have to soon.
And yet…as I lay in bed next to Eames, watching him sleep while the world outside us did a pretty convincing impression of another Ice Age, I started to see the simple…pleasure in it all. The feeling I got when I just relaxed and…stopped thinking about things, stopped wondering where Eames and I were, and what it all meant.
There was a peace in not asking or trying to answer those questions. And for now, I could live in that peace and relax in it. It was certainly a change of pace for me.
Was this what people who’d found the love of their lives felt? That peace, that stability?
I’d never been in love, so I really had no way of knowing.
Whatever this was, though, I was going to enjoy it as long as the storm outside would let me.
CHAPTER 18 - EAMES
“What’s that now?” Marty cocked his head to the side and watched me.
“I’m feeling better now, and I want to help out.”
Marty stared at me without saying anything for a long pause, then broke out laughing. “I’ll bet you feel better.” He clapped me on the shoulder, and it took me a moment to realize what he meant by that, and then I joined him in laughing.
Marty and Clara were no strangers to having guests in their inn, and they also knew that when two of them were only found for mealtimes and then disappeared, there was probably a lot of sex going on behind closed doors. I had to admire their discretion for not saying anything about it for days, though.
The truth was I was feeling much better after my ordeal in the snow, and a lot of it was because Avery took really good care of me, even when we weren’t having sex, despite how rare that was. My strength had come back in waves after a couple nights’ rest and a lot of Clara’s amazing cooking.
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “You caught us.”
“Good for you, my boy,” Marty said, wiping the tears from his old eyes on the sleeve of his long jacket. “But go easy on the beds, they’re not as young as they used to be.” And then he started laughing again, this time banging his hand against his knee as he howled.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying this,” I said, a smile on my face. “But I really am feeling better and I want to help out. We good on the firewood?”
Marty finally collected himself, wiping away more tears before standing straight up. “Yessir, we’ve got enough firewood for another week or so, all chopped up and ready to go.”
“Great. Is there anything else I can do?” I shrugged. “You and Clara have been so good to us, I just want to make sure we’re not freeloading.”
I knew that Avery was in the kitchen having the same conversation with Clara. With any luck, she could help out with the cooking or something else. Anything to make sure we were carrying our own weight around here. I didn’t know how much business Marty and Clara did when the world wasn’t freezing over, but from the looks of things around here, any little bit of help would, uh, help.
Marty rubbed his eyes again, and glanced at the ceiling. “Well,” he started, clearly thinking through a list of projects around the inn. “There is the shed out back that I’ve been meaning to reorganize and clean out. Think you could give that a look?”
That didn’t seem like it was necessary in the middle of a storm, but I decided to humor the guy. “Sure, Marty,” I answered. “I’ll take care of it, just point me in the right direction.”
“Near where you did the firewood chopping? It’s just around the corner, flush against the building.” He smiled, a toothy grin. “Bit of a weird setup around here. Didn’t really have any experience with this stuff when Clara and I decided to start up an inn.”
“I know the feeling,” I said. “I’m gonna head out to the shed now and take a look around, see what I can clean up.”
“You do that, Sonny,” Marty said, before a twinkle appeared in his eyes. “Don’t tire yourself out too much, now, or your lady’s gonna be mad.” And then he collapsed in laughter again.
I laughed too, because hey, the secret was out and it was pretty funny that I was getting teased for having too much sex by the 70-something year old owner of an inn in the middle of a blizzard. “I’ll see you around, Marty,” I said, waving as I walked past him toward the shed.