Work for it, p.13
Work for It, page 13
His hand cradles my jaw, and the touch is so gentle it shocks all my sharp thoughts away.
“Keynes,” he murmurs, and just like the first night I met him, I feel his breath against my cheek. But this time, nothing in me shudders with disgust.
This time, everything in me wants.
“Tell me you’re okay,” he whispers.
I can’t speak. I can’t do anything but stand there and feel him—so real, so close, so Griff. The heavy planes of his body make my cock swell against my thigh. The urge to roll my hips against his is so irresistible, I almost do it. Refraining takes everything I have. I’m biting my tongue to stop this, tasting my own blood.
“Keynes,” he says, his voice a growl now, one that rumbles through my veins. “Talk to me.”
“Fine,” I manage. “I’m fine.” I’m not, though; I’m teetering on the edge of possibility, my voice a tortured rasp. My fingers are tangled in his shirt, holding tight as if the fabric is my control. And Griff—he’s still, so still that I know he heard the desire in my voice.
I don’t think he knows what to do about it. But I do.
“Monday,” I say for what feels like the thousandth time. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
There’s a slight pause before he agrees. “Okay.”
“Goodbye.”
Slowly, slowly, he lets go of me. Eases away, leaving me weak with the need I denied. It’s not that I don’t want to rip his clothes off; it’s that I’m suspicious of the urge. How do I know this isn’t a fluke?
I had no idea I could care enough to be so cautious, before now.
“Look after yourself,” he tells me, and makes his way down the stairs.
When he’s gone, I strip myself naked and lie on the bed, press my face into the pillow he used all day and smell him: spice and faint citrus. Then I squeeze my aching cock with the hand that held his, and I do exactly as he told me. I look after myself.
The next day, Sunday, drags something awful. By the time evening rolls around, I have thought of Griffin countless times and fucked my own hand twice. I have cursed myself at least once an hour for not making him stay last night. I have promised myself that the next time he touches me, as long as I still want it, I will eat him alive. And I’m certain that he will touch me again.
I don’t know why I’m certain, but I am.
Glittering energy cascades through my blood, and I find myself in the strange position of wanting to share my constant smiles with someone, so I go downstairs to see if Maria is free.
She answers the door with a smirk and says, “Did my eyes deceive me, yesterday—”
I sigh. “Maria.”
“Or did I spy our lovely Griffin—”
“Maria.”
“Skulking out of the flat at an unholy hour, looking rather pleased with himself?”
“Maria!” But I’m grinning.
She slaps my shoulder with a tea towel and says, “It’s only been a bloody week. A week, and there’s romance!”
“It’s not romance.”
“Get inside, you slut, and tell me all about it.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I protest, but by the time my arse meets her kitchen chair I’m already babbling, “He liked my cooking,” like a fool.
I am a happy fool.
10
Griff
On Monday morning, the sun rises like it’s shy. When I don’t see Keynes roaming around the farm, I begin to wonder if maybe he’s shy, too. All morning, the need to see him again rolls over my skin like thunder, but the longer he stays away, the more it occurs to me that he might not feel the same.
I assumed that he sent me away on Saturday night because he wasn’t ready, not because he didn’t want me. I decided that we’d had the most amazing fucking day of my life, and that something was growing between us, as gorgeous and temperamental as my indoor azaleas. But with every minute that passes, I’m starting to doubt myself. What if he’s prickly and distant again, overcompensating for Saturday’s ease? What if I’m reading too deep into everything that happened, misreading the way his pulse beat at his throat, misunderstanding the cadence of his breaths when we touched in the dark? It’s possible. After all, he’s not in Fernley to stay. My life is a holiday to him; I doubt he’s getting attached. The thought has fangs that won’t let go.
My job today is simple, but I pour all my focus into it. I’m handing out collection bags to the support staff, telling them how to distribute the plastic sacks between groups of volunteers. Once that’s dealt with, I make sure everyone left behind in the offices knows exactly what to do and where to direct people. Then I head to my section, concentrating on work instead of worries.
Everyone assigned to the main plantation arrows after me, like a group of baby ducks. There’s a mix of villagers and strangers from the closest small town, here for fun or to earn some spare change. More than a few have children, giggling and chattering about the fact they’ll be hunting flowers all day. I know Emily has given all parents a strict talking to and their own special plant identification sheets, because some flora can be eaten by cheeky little adventurers, but others definitely cannot.
As if to prove my point, a tall, tattooed guy calls to his son, “Josh. Josh, kiddo. Don’t eat that.”
I look behind me to make sure Josh isn’t poisoning himself. No; apparently this kid just enjoys chewing on grass. The group chuckles together as we trudge toward the plantation—not via the shortcut through the woods, but along the official, grassy path.
“Josh,” the man tries again, more firmly now. But a quick glance over my shoulder shows me one grinning boy with a mouthful of grass and no remorse, swapping looks with a girl who might be his sister.
Then the pretty black woman holding the man’s hand shakes out her long, white dress and calls, “Joshua.”
Grass falls out of that tiny mouth as if the kid tasted a worm.
I laugh quietly to myself and keep walking. The amusement lasts for thirty busy minutes as I get first timers settled into the task and greet the regulars who come to help us out every harvest. But once that’s done, my empty mind slides right back to the topic of Keynes. The longer I shove elderflower heads into a bin bag without his drawling company by my side, the longer I curse myself for not seeing him yesterday, after I was done with Rebecca. She told me to play it cool, and that knocking on his door at 8 p.m. would be the opposite of cool, but now I think I should’ve ignored her. Keynes is cool enough for the both of us; my job is to keep him warm. I should’ve stormed down regardless, and if he clammed up and refused to let me in, I should’ve camped out by Mrs. Hartley’s garage—her kids are barely scared of me, anyway—and held my position until I caught those winter fir eyes with mine.
But he would’ve let me in, wouldn’t he? Saturday was good, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was good, and I have no reason to worry like this. Me and him, we’re… something, now. There’s a current between us I’ve never felt before, and I know exactly what my mum would say about it: There are things you have to reach for with both hands, and fuck the doubts. I’m mumbling under my breath, telling myself to relax, when a shadow spills over me.
“Have I ever told you,” Keynes asks, “that you think rather ferociously?”
My heart throws a fit. I squint up from my position at the base of an elderflower bush, and there he is. He’s blocking out the pale, nervous sun, his lips tilting at one corner, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’ve told me that.” I think I might remember everything he’s ever said to me. The last time those words came out of his mouth, I assumed he was calling me stupid. Rising slowly to my feet, I ask him, “What does it mean?”
There’s a short silence, the happy shouts of countless kids a faint drumbeat in the background. I watch Keynes swallow, his gaze drifting over me from head to toe before he meets my eyes again. And the spark of electricity I see in his expression tells me: Saturday wasn’t one-sided. Saturday wasn’t imagined. Saturday was real.
I somehow manage not to pass out with relief.
“It means,” he says finally, “that you’re intense.”
This, coming from a man who got me monumentally hard just by standing close to me in the dark. I think he’s trying to sound neutral with me today, but instinct tells me he absolutely isn’t. Some devil possesses me, and I raise my eyebrows. “Intense. Do you like that?”
His smile is a surprise and a relief, teasing with an edge that I’m willing to swear is flirtatious. “Don’t talk dirty to me at work, Griffin. There are children present.”
Definitely flirtatious. Fucking bingo. I laugh, and everything between us is easy. Natural. Good. He winks at me and crouches down, shaking out a screwed-up ball of plastic from his pocket: he has a bin bag, too. He’s here and he’s picking elderflower next to me, or he will be if I get my arse into gear and get to work.
Shoving down all the giddy fizziness in my chest, I kneel beside him and go back to picking. “You want me to show you what makes this elderflower?” I ask. “So you know when we go into the wild sections?”
He flicks a faintly interested look at me as he snags a head of blooms. “We’re going into the wild sections?”
“I spend some time on all the land we own today, everywhere pickers might be sent. Just to make sure it’s running smoothly.”
“And I’m coming with you?”
The way he says it, light but satisfied, makes me realise what I assumed. “Well,” I hedge, then cut myself off. Grab with both hands. “Yes. You’re coming with me.”
“My, my, Mr. Everett. Look how firm we’ve gotten.”
“Shut up.”
He smirks. “Thank you for the offer, but I don’t need a masterclass on elderflower. Pete explained this to me on my first day.”
I raise my eyebrows, let myself look at him. It’s like sneaking a sip of ambrosia. “Yeah?”
“Oh, yes.” He plucks a head and taps me on the nose with it, his voice crisp but not clipped, cool but not distant. Like he’s a teacher. Or an especially good student. “The flowers grow on bushes that may become big enough to resemble trees, but they never have a trunk. Blooms burst from their stems in a spray and are pale yellow or pure cream in colour. The leaves have serrated edges and are commonly found in groups of five. Not to be confused with cow parsley, which is whiter and tends not to have the accompanying leaves, or prycantha, which are paler, larger, and packed more closely together.” He finishes his speech and puts his elderflower in the bag.
I swallow. Hard. I knew I loved plants, but Jesus Christ, hearing him reel off information like that was hot. For a moment, all I can do is stare down at my hands and imagine them on him, making him moan plant specifications in my ear.
Eventually, I manage to say, “You have a good memory.”
“You should teach me things too, so I can remember them for you.”
I look up sharply to find him focused on the bush, a sly little smile curving his mouth. That smile says he noticed the heat in my skin and the speed of my breaths. He knows that speech got to me. Which is kind of embarrassing, kind of useful. If he knows, maybe he’ll do it again.
“I’ll teach you whatever you want,” I say, my voice low.
“Promises, promises.”
If we keep talking like this, and he keeps smiling like that, I’m going to jump him in front of everyone. I don’t even think he’d mind. But I have a feeling the woman in the white dress will stomp me into the ground if I traumatise her kids, so I better change the subject.
“You were late.” It’s a clumsy shift in topic, I know, but I’m curious. I just hope he doesn’t realise how curious and decide I’m a weirdo clinger.
“Overslept,” he tells me with a little huff of laughter. “Maria and I got carried away last night.”
“Ah,” I nod. That’s not exactly what I expected to hear, but from the look on his face, I think they’re friends. And I like that idea a lot.
While we work, we talk the way we did on Saturday: easy and eager, which I usually don’t have the energy for. But Keynes is energy, and he makes conversation even simpler than Rebecca does. Our chatter doesn’t feel like a weight or a landmine. It feels like being caught in the current of a lazy, winding stream, floating along under the sun, turning this way and that with every thoughtless word. It feels like nothing is—has ever been—could ever be—wrong.
I barely notice the slow path of the sun across the sky; it’s only when my bag bulges half full that I realise the time.
“We should move on,” I tell him, and he nods seriously and steps back, ready to follow. Because he takes me seriously—at work, anyway. I’ve noticed that. When it comes to my job, he doesn’t tease or toy with me like I know he wants to. He just listens.
Except, of course, for the time when he talked back—when he told me that my work, my time, my skill, was important. Something soft and bruised inside me flinches at the memory, because according to Henry, he was wrong about that. But maybe Keynes really believed it. In fact, I know he did.
So, after we wave goodbye to those still picking here, I lead him to the shortcut through the copse, and I find myself mumbling: “Henry said no. About the recipes and that.”
Keynes looks at me as we break through the first row of trees. “No? Just… no?”
I grunt and keep walking, satisfied when my booted foot snaps a twig in two.
“Wait.” A hand on my arm, getting hotter and hotter with each moment the touch continues. So hot that by the time I turn to face him, I feel as if he’s burning through my clothes. I actually sneak a look down, just to check he isn’t, and then I’m frozen, locked in place by what I see: that elegant, long-fingered hand splayed over my biceps, digging in just a little like he won’t let me get away. Something thrills through me, right down the middle, until my skin seems to crackle and my blood rushes in stormy waves.
I let my eyes wander over his hand, his thick wrist, the crisp golden hairs on his forearms. The mint green of his shirt’s rolled-up sleeves, and his broad shoulders. His hard jaw and soft, open mouth. His eyes.
“Stop that,” he murmurs, almost breathless.
“Stop what?” I don’t wait for an answer, since I already know. It’s a heady, drunken feeling, this knowing. “How are your ribs?” I raise a slow hand toward his side, and when he doesn’t flinch or stiffen or go cold in front of me, I touch him. Press my palm against his body and wait patiently for an answer. That’s me: patient.
I’ll be so fucking patient for you.
“They’re fine,” he says softly. I can hear cheerful shouts in the distance, cooing wood pigeons above us, possibility between us.
I slide my hand down, from his ribs to his hips, and he doesn’t stop me. Still, I have to ask, “Is this okay?”
“Yes.” Immediate.
“Tell me how it feels.” I’m worried he’ll say Fine or I can handle it or something else that shows he’s still shaking on the inside.
Instead, he whispers, “Good. It feels really fucking good.”
Those words, the hint of wonder in his voice as he says them, knock the breath clean out of me. I’m still trying to recover when he changes the subject even more clumsily than I would.
“What did Henry say?” he blurts, sounding a little drunk. His perfectly-formed words are all wonky right now, his pretty face something other than serene. But he’s not afraid. So I keep my hand in place, don’t take it further, don’t take it away. And the hand he put on my arm a minute ago? That’s not moving either. He’s burning me down to the bone. They’ll find the scar of him on my remains.
But he asked me a question, and I want to answer. Problem is, even the memory of Henry’s laughter seems gentle now, fuzzy and distant through the hazy screen of this moment. “He said…” I take a breath, focus on my thoughts instead of Keynes’s mouth—and realise that Henry didn’t say much at all. “I’m not sure what he said,” I finish with a frown. For some reason, I don’t worry about Keynes hearing that and deciding I’m stupid. He’s good at some things, I’m good at others. People are not one of my things. He knows it, and he doesn’t care, just like I don’t care that, according to Pete, Keynes tried to eat catnip last week because he thought it was wild mint.
“I see.” The words are sharp and almost deadly. He goes from handsome to shark-like and back again, a flicker of an expression, there and gone. “Let me guess: he acted incredulous that you’d dare to ask and laughed you out of his office.”
I nod. “I don’t think he even looked at my spreadsheets, not really.”
Keynes’s gaze has been narrowed on something in the distance, like he was trying to blow up a tree behind me with nothing but his mind. Now his expression softens and he focuses on me, laugh lines cradling his eyes. “You made spreadsheets?”
“I made all sorts. I wasn’t going in there to talk out my arse. I had numbers.”
“You’re very good at your job, aren’t you, Griffin?”
I shrug, suddenly feeling warm. “Well, thanks.”
“And his job, really,” Keynes adds, all thoughtful. “The lazy little shit.”
I’m shocked and secretly happy, because I never thought… The thing is, Keynes and Henry…
Let me start again.
The way I see it, Keynes and Henry are the same. I mean, not in looks or dress sense or general goodness, but, you know—they’re the same. They speak the same and went to the same ridiculous schools, and I bet Keynes’s family lives in the same sort of massive, old house Henry’s family always has. So even though Henry’s a prick and Keynes isn’t, I suppose it never occurred to me that Keynes would agree. That he’d look at a man who’s just like himself, and look at me, and say, I choose you.
In any way. Ever.
But I think he just did. And now he’s blabbering about ways to make Henry listen to me, moving on from that moment as if it meant nothing.
I wish I could act natural and do the same, but I can’t. I can’t. I’m full of him, that’s how it feels, and as I watch him rant in my defence, the sensation only gets worse. Suddenly I’m grabbed by this demanding, gut-clenching need, as real as the air in my lungs. My skin is flushed with it, my blood is hot with it, my teeth ache with it, and my dick, which has been hyperactive since I met Keynes, is waking up to say hello.
