“Pretty cheap of me, right? Serving you leftovers I didn’t even make myself.” As if the date was really about food. As if she didn’t know that.
“Nah, I’m looking forward to it.” Her cheeks were pinked up by the chill, and she smoothed back the strands of hair that had escaped her barrette. She looked luscious, and smelled like some sort of perfume that made him picture her naked in a soapy bath.
She surprised him by leaning across and kissing him on the mouth. Then she smiled, bringing out a dimple he hadn’t noticed before. “There. Don’t you hate when you’re wondering if you’re supposed to kiss or not? Now we don’t have to wonder.”
“I like how you think.” He gazed mesmerized at her another few seconds before remembering to turn the truck back on.
Small talk about jobs and neighbors and weather carried them for the short drive out to the island. Soon the truck was rattling down the gravel driveway between the stands of trees, and his brown cabin with its slanted roof came into view.
“Here’s home.” He turned off the truck and pulled the parking brake.
Livy peered out through the windshield. “Even more sculptures! I didn’t know these were back here. You can’t see them from the road.”
Nearly everyone in Bellwater had walked across the bridge and around the loop road of the island at some point. It was a scenic way to get exercise, if you didn’t want to bother hauling out a boat to row.
“Yep. I work on them here sometimes.” He hopped out and came around the cab to her door. She had opened it by the time he got there, but he took her hand as she jumped down.
She shouldered the grocery bag and walked through the gap in the split-rail fence. Heedless of the drizzle, she strolled between his projects, studying them. “Wow, check you out,” Livy said, touching a gear on one of his metal-junk creations. “Is this the Statue of Liberty?”
“You recognize it. I’m glad.”
She laughed, admiring the goofy thing: a bunch of pipes and gears and washers and other bits, all welded together into an approximate Lady Liberty shape, six feet tall. Livy tipped back her head to look at the orange taillight the statue held aloft. “Does the torch light up?”
“Of course.” With the toe of his boot, Kit knocked a switch at the base. The light came on.
“Awesome. Why don’t you take this into town? You could sell it.”
“Eh, she’s heavy. I don’t know, I’ve gotten kind of attached to her. Some of these I’m used to now, and I don’t want to sell them, even though I should. So instead I’ve got junk cluttering up the yard. The neighbors really love me.”
“It’s not junk.” Livy wandered a few steps and set a wind-spinner rotating with a touch of her finger. “It started out that way, but you turned it into art. What inspires you to do it? A way to escape the monotony of work?”
“A way to escape a lot of things. Well, and it pays, too. When I actually bring myself to sell them.”
She lowered her chin at him in respect. “True, but this isn’t the work of someone doing it just for money. You dig it, and you have talent. Anyone can see that.”
“Thanks.” Kit smiled, more touched than he expected to be. “Well, come on inside. No point standing around in the rain.”
Having kicked off with that kiss in the car, Livy had thought she could carry on the bold seduction act through the whole date, like she had in her sporadic other instances of casual sex: acting sassy, being alluringly direct in her physical desires, keeping the doors to her inner life firmly shut.
But it was too late for that last part already, wasn’t it? Tormented by worry about Skye, she’d told Kit her problems during their first two dates, effectively erasing any possibility that he hadn’t glimpsed her vulnerable, messy, true self. He’d even reciprocated, sharing tragic details about his parents. This was a physical attraction and they had laid those ground rules about not promising more, but nonetheless, it was also a friendship. Stranger still, he was a neighbor, or close enough, which was a first for her as dating went. All taken into account, this wasn’t quite like any other hook-up of Livy’s.
Maybe this was how Kit operated every time, though. Could someone just be that open a person?
Inside the cabin, he took her coat and hung it on a hook by the door, along with his leather jacket. His main floor was all one room, except for the bathroom tucked away against the south wall. The kitchen transitioned into the living room, and in front of the fireplace the sofa bed lay open, with folded clothes stuffed under it and hastily-smoothed blankets spread on the mattress. “Grady’s lair?” she asked, nodding at it.
“Yep.” Kit waved toward the interior balcony that spanned half the room. “Loft’s mine.”
“Cool. I love it.” She set the bag of fruit and cookies on the island counter in the kitchen, and ran her fingers over one of the barstools. Their polished wood surfaces gleamed in a wild swirl of grain colors: reds, pinks, and browns. “Madrone?”
“Indeed.” He came up beside her, close enough that their arms touched. “Nice ID skills.”
“Guess all those forestry courses paid off. So did you make these?”
“Yeah, topped a set of old stools with them when I had some wood left over from a statue.”
“They look great.” Livy hopped onto one and let her feet dangle.
Kit hung out beside the counter, appraising her with patient brown eyes and a smile. “So, you want to see the array of wonders Grady left us for lunch?”
“Maybe not just yet.” With one of her dangling feet, she hooked his leg and gave it a tug. Seriously, playing footsie? She was acting like a teenaged virgin.
Lucky thing her date was a smooth enough operator to make up for her clumsiness. He rested his hands on the counter, one on each side of her. His thighs leaned against her knees. “Yeah, I could wait on food.” He sounded a little bashful, like he wasn’t sure how she’d respond.
With him this near, she could smell him, fresh air and leather jacket and the indescribable scent of guy, the same scent that had surrounded her in those kisses in the car last night, and her diffidence began melting away. She met his beautiful eyes, finding not only desire in them but what looked to be a sea of loneliness; and she thought of how he didn’t really have anyone except maybe his cousin, just like she didn’t really have anyone except Skye. Everyone else, her friends and ex-lovers and family, had all drifted away from Livy’s life.
Now she didn’t even have Skye like she used to. Maybe Kit Sylvain, of all people, got how she felt.
Then he kissed her, and she closed her eyes and let go of those dark thoughts to make way for warmer ones.
Half her lunch break later, Livy stretched across his bed, sated and pleasantly limp. Every scrap of her clothes now lay in a heap on the floor of his loft bedroom. Kit, returning from disposing of the condom, climbed onto the bed on his knees and ran his gaze down her legs.
He caught one of her heels to examine the tattoos on her ankles. “Ooh. What are these?”
“Earth. Air.” She pointed to the two on her right ankle. Then, on her left: “Fire. Water.”