Weekends in Carolina

by Jennifer Lohmann

  The warmth of his lips against her cold skin sent shivers down her spine. The silliness she’d enjoyed in him while watching basketball was evident as he kissed patterns in her freckles around her chest and stomach, naming each one. A butterfly. A baseball bat. A crocodile. Like finding constellations in the sky, he said. She’d be irritated that he was so focused on her freckles except the expectations building in her blood made it hard to concentrate on any feeling other than desire.

  When Trey stopped kissing the freckles on her stomach and started tracing lines with his tongue, her hips bucked. While he was licking his constellations into her freckles, he moved his hands to the fly of her jeans. A pop of the button and a rasp of the zipper and his hands were lifting the elastic of her panties.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but all that came out was a sigh. It had been a long time....

  He looked up at her. His lips were moist and his eyes hot. “Was that a good sigh or a do-something-else sigh?”

  One finger was under the elastic, the edge of his nail resting at the bend of her leg. When she moistened her lips to respond, the finger edged a little closer to her folds. A little closer to where she wanted it. Wanted him. She coughed. “It was a good sigh.”

  He pushed a second finger under the elastic and walked them up her hip until he hooked his fingers around the fabric and pulled her panties down a little. “More?”

  Max nodded, happy to have him read her mind. Not that she had much of a mind left to read. Like the rest of her body, her brain was a pulsating mush of “I want” and “right there” and “a little to the left would be perfect.”

  She lifted her hips so that he could slide her underwear and jeans over her butt. His hands were warm as they guided her jeans down her legs and off her feet. As he walked his hands back up her calves, his grip was strong enough she could feel it in her toes. He paused at her knees and started kissing the inside line of her legs. He slowed midthigh, the tingles of his mouth shooting up and down her body.

  “I love the strength of your legs.” His breath was hot on her skin and her heels dug into the mattress, lifting her butt a little off the sheets.

  He ran both his hands first up one of her legs and then up another. “Seeing you in a skirt was one of the bright spots of the funeral.” Then he ran his tongue up the lines of her muscles until his mouth was on her sex.

  She clutched the sheets so hard that her fingers hurt. He pulled away a little and she scooted closer to him. He chuckled. “Tell me what you want.”

  She lifted her chin and looked up at the ceiling. The words I want you inside me were on her lips but she couldn’t utter them. This should be easier than asking for the farm, and she’d said that repeatedly. Trey wanted to do this. Just open your mouth, Max.

  “Here?” A warm puff of air hit her sex as he blew gently, running his finger along the crease where the inside of her thigh met the skin of her labia.

  No. Oral sex was nice and she might want his mouth there later, but she wanted to feel the weight of him on top of her. To have the hair on his chest tickle her nipples and the length of him push into her. She wanted the feeling of fullness and warmth that his fingers couldn’t give her.

  What was she worried about! This was sex; she couldn’t make a mistake. Everything was going to be good. Him on top and inside her would be better....

  Instead, she nodded.

  Even in the dim light of her lamp she could see the pleasure flood his eyes at her assent. He sucked and nibbled and licked and she moaned, but she wanted him to grasp on to her waist as he pushed into her while she invoked the heavens.

  She’d stopped feeling and started thinking and, after that, the sex just went south for her.

  When he pulled away to take his jeans off, she dug in her nightstand for a condom, but it was too late. When he finally pushed into her, the moment was gone. She could feel the pleasure of him sliding in and out, but the tingles had disappeared. Nothing but frustration was about to burst out of her. He cried out, bucked and then pulled out.

  While he looked for a trash can to dispose of the condom, she banged her head against the pillow. She was pissed as all hell at herself. This should have been easier than asking for a farm, Maxine.

  He lifted the covers and they both slid under them, though she didn’t scoot over to snuggle against him and he didn’t reach out for her. In the instant before he turned off the lamp, she saw the confused concern on his face. Just as well the light was off; she wouldn’t know what to say to him. You were okay, but you could’ve been better and it was my fault. Maybe I’ll ask you for the farm again. I managed to talk myself into that.

  * * *

  MAX’S BACK WAS probably as freckled as the rest of her and Trey might never get to enjoy it. Sometime between him stripping off her pants and his orgasm, something had gone seriously wrong. He didn’t know what it was, and her back to him wasn’t helping. Lothario he wasn’t, but he knew enough to ask what a woman wanted and act on it. He’d asked, she’d nodded and fireworks hadn’t gone off.

  Perhaps he was expecting too much out of both of them. Maybe he was expecting too much out of sex. Which meant the joke was on him and his fear that Max would have expectations.

  He ran his hand over his face, pulling his skin taut. The room was dark. There was no reason to hide his frustration. The part of him that had always found his father’s jokes about women distasteful wondered if he’d missed a “no, get off me.”

  He replayed the evening in his head. Max hadn’t been scratching her nails down his back and biting his shoulder in pleasure, but she hadn’t been beating against him in pain, either. If she hadn’t been an enthusiastic participant, she’d at least been an active participant up to the end. He’d prefer enthusiastic.

  The whole episode had turned into a buzz kill that made him want to slide out of bed and go...go where? Was he going to get out of her bed and walk upstairs to the bed he’d slept in when he was a teenager and sex involved his hand? Sex with his tenant in the farmhouse had been a mistake. Lying in bed wondering where he’d fucked up the fucking was his punishment.

  When the sun came up tomorrow, they would wake up landlord and tenant. Seller and buyer. He either let the darkness bind the awkwardness to them or he defused it now. He turned onto his side so that he faced her back. “Whatever we did seemed to only work for one of us.”

  She took so long to respond that he didn’t think she was going to. Finally, as his eyes were adjusting to the spare bits of moonlight streaming in through her window, he saw her pale back muscles shift. She sighed, then turned to face him. The moonlight wasn’t bright enough for him to read her expression, especially since her hair was wild about her face.

  “I’m willing to try again,” he said. “I’m pretty open to ideas. It’s the house I grew up in, so pretty much any sex we have here is going to feel dirty to me.”

  Moisture off her teeth sparkled when she smiled. It wasn’t a wide smile, but it was better than talking to her back. “It was fine.”

  Fine? His dick shrank by half. Apparently, neither it nor he was going to get another chance to do better than fine. Being the worst lay of her life at least would have meant he was memorable.

  He may have trouble reading her expression, but his must have been crystal clear because she backtracked. “I mean, it was great, really. I didn’t, well, you know, but I could’ve and...”

  But I could’ve. It was a good thing shrinking by half meant there would always be some left, because otherwise his dick would have disappeared completely.

  He snaked a hand through the sheets until he could rest it on her waist. Her skin was soft, and he wished his hand wasn’t their only point of connection. He liked the feel of her soft skin covering her hard muscles. Feeling the contrast between the two against the length of his body once wasn’t enough. He wanted to do it again. “Do you want to
continue talking about this?”

  “No.” Her tone left no room for argument, which was fine because he didn’t want to argue with her.

  “Are you tired?” he asked.

  She sighed and he could feel her start to roll over under his hand. He tightened and released his grip. “I’m not asking so I can be fine again.” Next time he was going to be better than fine, though he couldn’t believe he wanted to try for a next time after this conversation. He blamed his continued desire on freckles he still hadn’t seen. “Maybe we can talk about something else.”

  She stayed where she was. “No, I’m not tired.”

  “Why Max’s Vegetable Patch? Why not Max’s Vegetable Farm or Vegetable Garden?”

  It had seemed a safe topic until she responded with a sigh and her hair blew away from her mouth in the shadows of the night. “My name is Maxine Patch Backstrom.”

  Ah. It wasn’t a bad name, though a little cutesy for the Max he knew. “A family name?”

  “No.” She rolled onto her back and he took the opportunity to slide closer to her, wrapping one arm around her. Just because the sex was fine didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy lying in each other’s arms afterward. His body was warm, his face was cold and she was soft. Their fine could be a lot worse.

  “My dad met my mom while he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. She was living in the mountains at the time and had been out hiking with friends.” She tilted her head closer to him, her hair tickling his neck and chin. As an experiment, he draped one leg over her, keeping the weight off and waiting for her to push it away. When she didn’t, he relaxed and felt her legs sink a little.

  If he wanted to keep his mind off sex, it was a stupid move. Her wild hair was tickling his face and he knew there was a patch of copper just above his leg that had tickled his chin when he’d tasted her.

  He could do better than fine.

  “...Harmon’s Den.” Though if he wanted a chance at doing better than fine, he needed to pay attention when she was talking. “Mom was so sure I was going to be a boy that she didn’t even think of another name for me. Apparently, Max Patch is close enough on the trail to Harmon’s Den and Maxine was close enough to Max to satisfy her whim. Though they did name my brother Harmon.”

  Trey slipped her hair off his chin while his mind caught up with what she was saying. “The name suits you.” He’d hiked Max Patch once and the view had been awe-inspiring enough to silence a bunch of college students and their black-bear jokes.

  “I guess it does. As a kid I hated it—but mostly because teachers insisted on calling me Maxine and at least once a year some boy would think it was funny to call me Patchwork.”

  “Probably because he had the hots for you.” If she had pigtails, he’d pull them right now.

  When she laughed, the side of her breasts bounced against his chest. In the battle between his wounded ego and his libido, his libido was winning. Her hand touched his leg and gave it a gentle squeeze. His ego didn’t stand a chance.

  “My mom said the same thing, but it didn’t make the name Patchwork any less irritating.”

  “My aunt calls you Maxine.”

  “Yes, and trying to correct her is like trying to dig through lava rock with a plastic spoon.”

  Her perfect description of his aunt made him laugh. He tightened the arm he had around her a little, pulling her closer. However mediocre—fine—the coital part of the night had been, the postcoital cuddle had been so pleasurable Trey fell asleep forgetting that he was in the farmhouse.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TREY WOKE UP in the morning hard and ready to be anything other than fine. Only the sun streaming through the windows wasn’t an early-morning sun and he was the only one in the bed. The chickens were up and so was Farmer Max.

  He found his clothes and padded through the living room and dining room into the kitchen for some coffee. The worn wooden floors weren’t so bad, but the linoleum in the kitchen was cold, even through his socks. His entire life the kitchen had been the wrong temperature. In the summer it was too hot. In the winter, too cold. Like the rest of the farmhouse, the kitchen was heated—it just wasn’t heated well, and the fireplace had been a death trap even when he’d been a kid. Surrounded by outside walls or unheated rooms, the kitchen was hopeless. Between the peeling linoleum floors and the cracking laminate counters, it was also ugly.

  There were no mugs in the cabinet he opened. Max had rearranged the kitchen. He blinked a couple times and looked around. It was the same ugly kitchen—and yet it was different. She’d engineered some sort of planters on the wall that were filled with herbs. The trestle table against one wall was the same trestle table that had been in the kitchen for as long as he could remember, only now it was painted a bright white. And the peas he’d shoved in its cracks as a kid were probably gone. There was a clock above the sink with songbirds at the numbers. And Max had removed the dingy tractor-pattern curtains his mother had made when he’d been five and replaced them with a cheery check pattern. The same kitchen, only brighter. More alive.

  Had it been like this when he’d come here to search for the will?

  Trey spotted the mugs on a mug tree near the coffeemaker. He poured himself a cup of coffee. Sitting down at the table with the mug in his hands, the coffee didn’t look good. It was thin, with an oily black color and smelled like coffee dust. Next time I come down, I’m bringing my own coffeepot and stopping at that small grocery store for a bag of good coffee. Right now, all he wanted was breakfast.

  After one sip, he considered himself fortified by the caffeine; he wasn’t about to take another drink of the foul brew. Trey cleared papers off the table so he would have a place to eat the cereal he’d found. One of the papers fluttered to the floor and it wasn’t until he was setting it on top of the pile that he realized it was a bank statement. And that Max had thousands of dollars more than she’d let on. Maybe even enough for her to get a mortgage for the farm. Definitely enough that she didn’t need another three years to save.

  He took a large gulp of the coffee and grimaced, the sour coffee and his anger burning a channel down his esophagus. Was she playing him? No. He shook his head in answer to his own question. She had no reason to play him and every reason to buy the farm. So why did she insist that she didn’t have enough money?

  No answer came to him as he sat at the table, not quite awake. He was angry, but the more he sat contemplating the bank statement and his soggy cereal, the more confusion overrode the anger. Max was a forthright person who wanted to buy this rotten piece of land and he wanted to sell it to her. Why wasn’t she dumping all of her money into the purchase and be done with it?

  His coffee was cold and cereal warm when Max walked into the kitchen, trailed by a panting Ashes. “Oh. You got yourself breakfast. I was thinking of making omelets. Would you still want one?”

  He looked down into his bowl of cereal, where the flakes were disintegrating and becoming one with the milk. The whole mess would have to be tossed. He hated wasting food. And wasting time, which is what this entire I-don’t-have-enough-money act was—a waste of his time.

  “I saw your bank statement,” he said to her back as she was pouring herself a cup of her disgusting coffee.

  “What?”

  He waited until she’d turned back to face him before he spoke again. “Why did you lie about how much money you have?”

  “I didn’t lie.” Her face puckered with confusion.

  “I. Saw. Your. Bank. Statement,” he repeated. “I know how much money you have saved.” He had to take a deep breath to keep from yelling. “It may be enough for a down payment.”

  “Why were you going through my stuff?”

  Trey squelched the temptation to say, “I asked you first,” saying instead, “The bank statement was on the kitchen table, right out in the open for anyone to see.”

 
She blinked, but still didn’t answer his original question, so he repeated it. “Why did you lie?”

  “I didn’t lie.” Though she held her coffee cup over her mouth, he could see the nervousness on her face. “That money’s not for buying the land.”

  He ran his hand over his face, pressing hard into his cheekbones and hoping the pressure would override his irritation. “Max, what’s more important than buying the land?”

  * * *

  “WELL, I...” WORDS STALLED. Max coughed. The movement cleared the way for speech, but still the words wouldn’t come.

  “What’s the money for?”

  She cleared her throat again. “I’m saving some of it to renovate the other tobacco barn, so I can provide housing for two interns.”

  She knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth, because she had the same argument with herself every time she checked her bank account. Coming out the winner of those arguments didn’t mean she’d come out the winner of this one.

  “If you aren’t able to buy the farm, you won’t have a barn to renovate. Nor interns to hire.” The air in the kitchen collapsed around her as he shifted in his seat.

  His argument made perfect sense. Without a farm, the money was useless and she’d only have to use it to try to buy another farm. Pick up her life, leave her soil behind and go somewhere else. The very thought made her soul hurt.

  “If I put all the money into buying the farm, I’ll have nothing left if something goes wrong.” She put her mug down on the counter before her sweat made it slippery. Then she wiped her palms on her pants. “It’s putting all my eggs into one basket. It’s dangerous.”

  That sounded reasonable. Sensible. Unlike pouring all of her money into the farm and being left with nothing if disaster struck. Like her mother moving halfway across the country for a man, only to end up divorced and far from all her friends and family.