by Ruthie Knox
No fish deliveries or abandoned mattresses on the sidewalks. This was a family place, like the park, and it was easy to envision herself living somewhere like it, if she’d been a city woman. Taking the subway to work every morning, coming home to her pretty little brownstone to find her husband sautéing something that smelled delicious, presiding over the kids doing their homework at the table. She’d lean around his shoulder to see what he was making, kiss the side of his neck, and he’d turn to grasp her waist and kiss her properly.
She had to admit, she was dying for him to kiss her properly. Slow and long and deep, or hard like he had last time, with all that heat and urgency. She wanted his body against hers, his hands all over her, and why hadn’t he kissed her in the park?
Maybe because the last time he kissed you, you started crying on a curb, you space cadet.
There was that. Or maybe he’d somehow intuited she was having marriage fantasies about him. She kind of felt like apologizing for them preemptively, but she wasn’t sure she could quit if she tried. A woman with a brain like hers, hanging around a man like Ben, talking about life and disappointments and babies—what was she supposed to do?
Change your brain to another channel.
“This looks like The Cosby Show,” she said.
“Yeah, it was set in Brooklyn. But I think they actually filmed the exterior shots in Manhattan somewhere.”
“How on earth do you know that?”
“I know a lot of random crap like that. I told you I’d be a good tour guide.”
No one answered when he rang the bell, but he had a key to the building. He led her through the house to the fenced-in backyard, where two stacked white wooden boxes sat in a corner, buzzing.
“There they are.”
“Cool. So what are you going to do?”
“Just a general check. I’ll pull out the screen and look for mites, look to see if there’s enough honey to harvest yet. With winter coming, I want to make sure there are enough bees here to get through the cold months, and that they have enough to eat.”
“Where’s your, you know …” She waved her arm around her head. “Bee hat.”
“I don’t usually wear one. If you know what you’re doing, they’re not that dangerous.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Ben grinned and stepped closer to the box. “You ever been in the kitchen of a busy restaurant during the service?”
“I was a waitress once.”
“Where?”
“Olive Garden.”
“Okay, well, what I’m talking about is a little different. Much smaller, for one thing, because in New York the kitchens have to be as small as possible to make room for more tables in the front. Crammed with people—executive chef, sous chef, pasta guy, grill guy, sauté guy—more than that, really, but the point is, it’s crowded, it’s small, and there’s open flame and boiling water, plus hot oil. It’s fucking dangerous.” He pointed at the innocent-looking humming box. “This is a piece of cake.”
He walked around the side of the box, and May craned to see better. “You want to come closer and look?” he asked. “I think Natalie has a suit you can wear.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll admire you from afar.”
“All right, Guinevere.” He lifted a putty-knife-looking tool from a case he’d retrieved inside the house and slid it slowly around the edges of the lid. “The bees glue everything down. If you leave the hive long enough, they’ll seal the top on.” He pried it off and lifted it slowly, setting it next to the hive. Inside, there were dozens of bees crawling on top of what looked like a set of parallel slats. More landed and flew away as Ben retrieved another tool from the table.
“This is a frame,” he said, pointing to one of the wooden slats. “You put it in with a sheet of wax, and they make the comb and put the honey in it.” He used tongs to lift it out of the hive while a bee landed on his hand. As May watched, the bee seemed to push up in front, and its stinger end pressed against Ben’s hand.
“Did you just get stung?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Didn’t it hurt?”
“A little. I always thought picking raspberries hurt a hell of a lot worse. Can you grab this for a second?” He flicked his eyes at the tongs holding the frame.
May moved close enough to take them. The frame was heavier than she’d expected. Ben used the fingers of his free hand to do something to the bee that freed it. It flew off. “Didn’t want it to die for no reason. Here, I’ll take that.”
She gave it back. “It’s heavy.”
“Yeah, it’s full of honey. You can tell by looking at it, the bees have capped off most of the cells. They do that when the honey’s ready. It starts out as nectar, right? Which is just sugary water. And then they reduce it down to a specific moisture level, around seventeen, eighteen percent, and cap it off.”
“How do they reduce it?”
“First they use their mouths. The forager bees will pass it along to other bees, who move it around their mouth parts to expose it to air. Then later they put it in the cells, and they beat air over them with their wings.”
“I can’t decide if that’s disgusting or amazing.”
He smiled. “That’s life for you. Disgusting and amazing.”
Was that true? It certainly had the ring of truth. She thought of childbirth and sex. The taste of the ocean. The view of New York from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Disgusting and amazing.
Maybe her problem was that the disgusting parts came as a shock. Her life was so sanitized, so predictable, she hadn’t learned to expect them—to accept that she couldn’t have everything clean and pretty, and that she shouldn’t even want it that way. You had to accept the highs and lows, the beautiful and the mundane all mixed together.
“Where’d you go?” he asked.
She looked at his mouth, forming one of his quizzical half-smiles.
Such a great mouth. If he’d kissed her tasting of mint toothpaste, to the strains of slow jazz, it might have been more classically romantic, but it certainly wouldn’t have been half so memorable. At least their moment had been real.
She wanted more of that, she decided. More life. More Ben.
“Down the rabbit hole in my head.”
“We’re not doing rabbits right now, we’re doing bees.”
“I know. So tour-guide me. What are you looking for?”
“I’m just checking how much honey I’ve got. I’ll need to come back and harvest sometime in the next couple weeks. I have to ask Natalie when, because she wants to help.”
May tried to ignore her distaste for that image—the unknown Natalie as Ben’s helper, rather than herself. She wouldn’t be here a week from now.
And you’re supposed to be living in the moment.
“Why do you have bees in her backyard?”
“Actually, they were in her house. They’d gotten into the woodwork of one of the windows and built a hive in the wall. She called me to come and get them out.”
“You do that?”
“Yeah. You can call an exterminator, but they’ll kill the bees. I’ll get them out. And if you think they’re really interesting, like Natalie did, I’ll help you set up a hive in your yard.”
“How do people know to call you? Are you in the phone book? Ben the Bee Guy?” It hardly seemed credible.
He raised one cynical eyebrow. “Do I strike you as the kind of guy who has an ad in the Yellow Pages?”
“Not even a tiny bit.”
“There’s a club for New York beekeepers, with a hotline. I get some of the calls.”
“What, is there, like, a rotation? Are you on call right now? Ready for any bee emergencies that come down the pike?”
Ben grinned at her and lifted the lid to the hive. “Yes, there’s a rotation. But no, I’m not on call.”
She sat down on the back step and let him do his thing in peace. The bees gave him an unexpected snake-charmer appeal. They kept landing on his
hair or his T-shirt. He would ignore them, and they’d fly away. She knew there was no magic to it, and yet she was in awe of him, impressed by his lack of fear, smitten with his bee-geekery. He moved around the hive the way he moved in front of a stove, with a smooth surety that came from competence and repetition.
But it was more than that—there was a serenity to his movements, a distinct contrast to the edgy disturbance she’d picked up on when he’d been in the kitchen at Figs. He’d told her he liked the bees because they were calm. It seemed they had a calming effect on him, too.
“I wish you were on call,” she said. “I’d like to see you wrassling a swarm of bees into submission.”
“You don’t wrassle, you coax.”
“Too bad. I bet you’re a good wrassler.”
“Anytime you want to wrassle, let me know. I’m available.”
She couldn’t see his face, because he was busy easing the lid back into place, but his voice had dropped into a rough, suggestive register. The thrill of it made the hair on her arms prickle.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I might take some coaxing.”
That brought his head up, his burnished eyes full of heat. “I can be persuasive.”
Her cheeks warmed. A lot of other places did, too. She tried to think of something coy to say, but nothing came to mind, and her obvious discombobulation made Ben grin.
A different grin than she’d seen before, full of sexual deviance. “You still have that rain check.”
“Actually, I have two.”
“You want to hear my dirty thoughts now?”
“You’re supposed to be concentrating on the bees.”
He put down the tool he was holding and started moving in her direction.
“Lest you get stung to death,” she said. There were still a few bees hovering around him. “I wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”
“I’m not going to get stung.” He was just a foot away from her seat on the back steps now. The sun behind him gave him a golden glow around the edges. He dropped down beside her, hip to hip.
“You did already,” she said.
He held out his hand. She could see a small red dot where the stinger had gone in, but his skin didn’t appear swollen. “I’m still kicking.”
May inhaled. Clean air and quiet bee sounds and Ben.
“Your sweater looks soft. I’ve been thinking about what it would feel like to put my hands on your waist.”
His eyes were so intense, they drew her closer. Her thigh pressed along the length of his. She leaned back slightly, flattening her palm against the warm, rough concrete of the stoop. “Tell me that’s not as dirty as your thoughts get.”
“Are you kidding? That wasn’t even a dirty thought. That was just a segue. Things don’t get dirty until I slide my hands up to your breasts.”
“Oh.”
He lifted his hand and cupped her face, rubbing his thumb over her cheekbone. “And they’re soft. So fucking soft.”
She tried to inhale, but her breath got caught, and her thoughts got tangled in it and tripped. They hadn’t even made it to the dirty bits yet. She had a word cloud in her head composed of boldfaced declarations—nipples and cock and wet—plus a lot of smaller ones like touch and suck and lick and kiss. Words she couldn’t ever say aloud, but there they were. Occupying sexual space in her brain.
She couldn’t stop staring at his mouth. It was way too good a mouth for a guy to have. When he wasn’t scowling, his lips looked soft and red, the furrow beneath his nose deeply grooved, his top lip arched in a way that would have been pretty on a girl.
His head kept getting closer, and when she dared to look at his eyes, he’d turned into the snake charmer, and she’d become the snake.
“Do you want to hear more?”
She shook her head and said, “Yes.”
Then she tried again, nodding as she said, “No.”
The lips found that amusing. “I’m not sure you’re ready for my dirty thoughts. You can keep your rain check.” His head dipped. “But I’m collecting on that other one.”
His mouth met hers at a whisper. He’d said she was soft, but she wasn’t the one who could kiss like this. Like light, like air—important in some invisible, vital way to her well-being. His nearness and heat sent her into a state of heightened anticipation, a cellular excitement that wasn’t quite pleasure but was certainly pleasurable in the same way that lying awake waiting for Christmas to arrive had been when she was a child, or sitting in the front car of a roller coaster, poised just before the drop.
She closed her eyes and breathed him in. When she opened them, he was bathed in light. The golden tips of his eyelashes. The red-gold strands in his dark hair. Some accidental marriage of sunbeam and angle.
This is our first kiss, she realized, and then his hand slid down her neck. Over her shoulder. He skimmed his palm along her breast and muttered, “So soft.” Suddenly there was more pressure. More heat. His hand clamped down at her waist, gentle and firm at the same time. His mouth angled over hers, hot and urgent, so necessary that she moaned.
Ben smiled with his eyes, and then he dipped his head and licked her bottom lip. He sucked it into his mouth. Bit it. He bit her. She was still trying to decide whether she’d liked it or not when she realized she’d more or less crawled onto his lap, her thigh splayed across his legs, her whole torso draped against him like a blanket. He was leaning back, bracing himself against the concrete on one hand to combat her assault.
Ease up, there, tiger, she thought, and backed away, but when she did he came after her, gripped her by the hips, and pulled her the rest of the way to straddling him. His hands covered her ass, his tongue stroking into her mouth as he settled hot between her legs.
Oh God, that felt good. The pulse of heat hit her so fast, so much, she thought it might have shorted something out, because she lost the ability to speak or breathe for a second. If she could breathe, she might have said something, like his name, or Holy hell, but all she could do was make a kind of moaning mmpfh noise, which made him grunt and tug her closer.
It wasn’t a refined kiss. It was messy and needy and so, so hot. The slippery moisture between her thighs seemed to be connected to the movements of his tongue in her mouth, his cock a solid zone of heat pressing into the seam of her jeans, his hands roaming all over her back, her hips and thighs, her butt. She rocked against him, breathed too hard, moaned and held his head in her grip, a tight lock in his frustratingly short hair because she couldn’t stand the thought of not doing this.
His palm slipped beneath her sweater, seeking bare skin, but her camisole top was tight and stretchy, and he couldn’t seem to figure it out. He gave up and cupped her breast through three layers of material, rubbing his thumb over her nipple.
May tore her mouth away to gasp.
“You like that, huh?” He seemed to be addressing the question to her cleavage, which he investigated with his mouth, planting a string of kisses down to the scooped neckline of her sweater.
He thumbed her nipple again, and she ground her hips against him, shamelessly needy.
“I want my mouth right there,” he said, pressing with his thumb.
She wanted that, too. His mouth on her everywhere, all at once. When he pushed her sweater down, his lips found a path across the top of her breast and down, down, moving her camisole aside, shoving the cup of her bra out of the way to reach her nipple. She didn’t even consider stopping him. She closed her eyes and floated away at the light pressure of his lips, the hot, wet trail of his tongue, until he sucked her nipple into his mouth and the shock of it brought her voice back.
If that was even her voice. She’d made a noise that wasn’t a word, like an Oh! crossed with a gurgle, and if she had any sense she’d be embarrassed, but she didn’t have any sense. She had Ben’s tongue on her breast, the pressure of his erection between her thighs, his hand at the middle of her back, holding her up, keeping her still.
Disgusting and amazing, she
thought, hazily, and she started to smile.
Ben lifted his head. “Did I do something funny?”
“No. I’m sorry. Don’t stop, I’m just … happy.”
He did stop, but his fingers closed over her wet nipple as he kissed her mouth again and said, “Happy is good.”
She was going to say something clever—once she thought of it—but he was smiling, and he kissed her for real with a little bump of teeth, their tongues stroking over each other. The moist intimacy of it was like mainlining sex straight into her veins, fogging up her head. His hand still cupped her breast, his thumb pressing, tweaking, sending one racing pulse after another to crash into her clit.
Perfect. Exactly enough. And then, suddenly, too much, because if he kept doing that and she kept rubbing the seam of her jeans against her clit, the pressure of his cock—God, even the word cock—would be enough to make her come.
She wasn’t quite out of it enough to think it was a good idea to ride Ben to climax in a fenced backyard in Brooklyn, half exposed to the elements, making God knew what kind of sounds.
She made a noise like “nuh,” denial mixed with pleasure, and pushed his hand away. But she couldn’t seem to stop kissing him, even as she yanked up on her bra and camisole to cover herself. She kissed his scratchy jaw. His chin. His mouth. The spot where his hairline almost met his ear.
Passion, she thought. This is passion. Stupid-looking from the outside, but awesome when it caught you and dragged you along for the ride.
Or maybe it was more than that. More than lust that made her feel so giddy about the shape of his ears and the faint line where his cheeks creased in those dimples so deep, they weren’t even dimples.
More than a primitive, instinct-driven sexual impulse that zinged down through her when their eyes met and he smiled at her, all lopsided.
When he looked at her that way, it was like his regard brought her alive, every time. She felt her body. The way the jeans hugged her calves almost all the way down to the ankle—a new sensation for her, since she was used to boot-cut jeans that flared below the knee.
Back home, she wore ordinary pants from Kohl’s and solid, practical tops that didn’t cling too tight or swoop too low on her chest. Ask anybody in the family what her favorite food was, and they’d tell you May loved mashed potatoes with salt and pepper and a lot of butter on top. She didn’t wear much makeup or take risks.