Page 59 of Across Eternity

27

SARAH

Early in December, Henri and I take the truck out to the woods and chop down a fir. In truth, he deals with the tree and I stand by, worried it will fall on him. He laughs at me. “Is that what people worry about in your time?” he asks with a crooked smile.

No, it’s what I worry about. Now that I have him again, I can’t help but think about the ways I might one day lose him. But it’s not the time for my depressing thoughts, my anxiety. I return his grin. “Now I hope the tree falls on you just to teach you a lesson.”

“And if the tree breaks my back, how will you carry me to the truck?”

“What makes you think I’d bother?” I reply. “I’ll just take your keys and drive into town to see if Luc is free.”

He rises, pacing toward me with a light in his eyes, amused and dangerous at the same time. He pulls me against him. “Say that again,” he growls, his mouth an inch from mine. He takes my lower lip between his teeth and gives it a small nip.

It’s a dare, a challenge, and my heart thuds hard in my chest. “I said that I will drive into town,” I reply, meeting his gaze, “and go find Luc.”

His fingers go beneath my coat, to the button of my trousers. My mouth falls open. “You wouldn’t,” I say.

He pops the button, and his hand—cold, calloused—slides down the soft skin of my torso. “Tell me again how you’d seek out Luc,” he hisses against my mouth. His long fingers slide between my legs. “You’re so wet and warm here. For him or for me?”

I gasp as his fingers push inside me. “You.”

His mouth lands on mine. I arch toward him, toward his flickering fingers, wanting more and more from him, as excited by the unexpectedness of it as I am the ferocity of him right now, the way jealousy and possessiveness strip him of his normal civility. I come with a sudden, sharp gasp and he turns me around, pinning my hands to the trunk of the tree as he shoves my trousers down to my knees.

The air is so cold it bites into my skin, and I don’t care. With one arm he hooks my waist, pushing my ass toward him. With the other he frees himself from his pants and then he is there, pressing between my legs.

“This is mine,” he says against my ear as he shoves inside me. “Mine and no one else’s.”

His thrusts come sharp and fast, and my face is pressed to the trunk of the tree but I hardly notice it with him inside me, slick and hot and pulsing. He’s barely started and I can already feel that cord in my abdomen, the one that seems to pull tight just before I come.

“I dreamed of this when we were apart,” he rasps against my ears. “Every place I set foot that year, I pictured you. Bent over or on your back.”

“I’m coming,” I gasp, and he thrusts faster, the tendons of his arm pressed hard to the tree, taut with the strain, and the moment my shoulders settle he pushes me to my knees and I open my mouth for him.

“This,” he hisses. “I dreamt of this too.”

He flinches as he comes, crying out, holding my head in his hands. After a moment, his shoulders settle and his eyes open again, but at half-mast, as if drugged or in need of sleep. Slowly, his fingers unwind from my scalp and he helps me to my feet.

I have no regrets whatsoever, but something in the way he’s avoiding my eye makes me think he does. His fingers brush my cheek. “You’ve got a scrape there. Did I do that?”

I smile at him. “I think my cheek was pressed against the tree—it was well worth it.”

His shoulders sag. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice earnest, as if we’re discussing a broken bone or stab wound instead of something so minor I didn’t notice it until he brought it up. “I should have been more careful.”

“Stop,” I command. “You should have. Don’t ruin it by taking it all back.” I can tell he’s still troubled, however. “What’s wrong?”

His hands palm my face. “I was too rough, Sarah,” he says. “There are times when it hits me, how much I’ve missed you and how desperate I was, thinking I would never see you again and…”

“And what?”

“And that you’re keeping secrets from me, and I don’t know what those secrets mean. I don’t know if they mean I’ll lose you again.”

I grow still. “What are you talking about?”

“You’ll need to go back to your own time again soon,” he says, averting his gaze. We haven’t discussed it much, but I know he’s right. If I want to maintain my ability to travel to the future, I’ll need to return sometime in the next year. “And when you’re keeping things from me, I have to wonder if the secret is something there. Something that might mean you don’t come back.”

“Of course not,” I reply. “When I go, it will be for as short a time as possible, and I’ll come right back.”

“That’s not all,” he says quietly. “It bothers me...that you’ve never told me what happened when you were gone.”