“Make You Feel My Love” Adele
I can’t believe Trigg let it go. I’m shocked actually. So much in fact, that I’m driving to her place to find out if I somehow pissed her off. That’s usually when I get the silent treatment.
Crosby watches the road like he already knows the bends on the way to Trigg’s house, to my workshop. The way he bounds around in the snow and begs for treats at Trigg’s backdoor, it doesn’t surprise me.
But Trigg’s house is dark, not even the twinkle lights she likes to keep up year-round are warming the snow surrounding the windows. Which leaves me with the option of turning back toward my Camilla-filled house or trudging out to my workshop. The workshop and my pieces that have been going so horrifically.
I’d should be mad at Camilla for stealing my inspiration when she walked out, but I can’t. Someday, I’ll rebuild myself and the things I’ll create because of her will be infinitely more tragically beautiful. I’m going to treat them with wispy smoke, letting the tendrils hug the knots in homage to her.
She’s almost tangible as I pull open the barn door. The smell of wood hung on her skin, and the snow swirls around the door in visible plumes like her tattoo. Her essence is fixed forever in the boards along the wall, the boards I can’t help but run my hands along.
One by one I pull them down and lay them out on my workbench. Fuck if I know what they’ll become, but they’ll be mine. I’ll run my fingers over the grains I imagine shaped to her curves as her body bowed against them, content to feast on memories rather than food. If I ever share my house with another woman she’ll just never know…
No, I can’t think about that. I won’t. Maybe in another thirteen years.
I close my eyes and see Camilla. Even invisible, she bends me over the wood and I hold on for dear life as I remember what her body felt like, what it did underneath me. But more than that her whispered words and ringing giggle. That song she’d sung. Her devilish secrets. Her, every small piece of her, is what has me clinging to wood to stay upright.
Nothing makes me want to open my eyes and return to reality. It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m facing a year without that body, without those words and giggles and songs. Another year without her. Yapping behind me drags me from Camilla. Barely.
“Crosby, hush,” I call without turning toward where he’s running laps in the yard.
“It’s my fault.”
My world comes screeching to a halt.
It sounds like her, but then again, I hear her voice drifting on the wind and rustling against my ear every few hours. I’m desperate to turn and see her but I’m terrified of realizing she isn’t really there. Either way, if I let go of the wood, real or imagined, Camilla may flatten me.
“It’s all my fault, AJ. It was then. It is now. And I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say it enough…” The rambling is proof enough. I know real-life Camilla Collins is standing behind me. It doesn’t help me breathe. It doesn’t lessen the grip on my heart. I’m flipping through every sentence ever uttered, trying to find the right one. I’m hoping that when I do, my mouth will find a way to work. Maybe I’ll even be able to unlock my terrified skeleton.
“I brought you a rock,” she says, her voice desperate and edgy after my long and tense silence.
“You brought me a rock?” I can’t help but ask with hesitant laughter filtering in. She broke the spell of blinding fear holding me hostage.
Her feet crunch softly on the straw covering the floor of the shop and each semi-sturdy step says she’s circling me, circling the beams I’m clinging too until I sense her standing across the workbench from me. Gently, she sets down a round rock, coated in frost, directly between my hands and right about where I think her ass was when I kissed her against these planks.
“When Trigg explained it to me, it didn’t sound so…ridiculous.”
I pick up the rock and turn it over in my hands, noticing the layered stone, the streaks of crystal, and the way the snow melt colors them both. I still haven’t looked up at Camilla. I honestly don’t know if I can.
“What did Trigg say?” I almost choke on the words.
“That I’m your penguin,” she says so quietly, it barely reaches my ears. Mercifully it doesn’t need to, it’s hit my heart.
And so does she. The sight of her when my eyes snap up threatens to level me completely. As does her dark hair, perfectly straight and shiny where it frames the lipstick color lingering on my mirror. A giant houndstooth scarf is trying to swallow her neck and the rest of her body is wrapped in wool, but it’s the most beautiful she’s ever been. The most stripped bare, too.
“Hence the rock. Are you going to sing to me too?” I’m teasing her, rolling with the penguin thing, but I wouldn’t mind one bit if her beautiful voice filled the space between us.
“When did everyone learn the mating rituals of penguins? What was this memo that everyone got? The movie that everyone watched?” She throws her hands up in the air in the most adorable mini-outrage.
Of course, it throws her off balance. The tiny, teetering body I know and love is careening toward power tools and scraps of metal beside her, hands wheeling to catch on something. I shoot from my spot and reach for her, grabbing for that jacket, that scarf—anything. My fingers find wool and knit, cling to it and pull. Camilla wildly changes directions, her body now hurtling toward mine.
And I’m ready, so ready, to catch her.
Not just today either, but every day, in any city across the globe. Seeing her here, hearing her voice again, sealed my fate. She really is my penguin.
Her body crashes into mine and I easily slip my arms around her to take her weight from those Bambi feet. Just as easily, I bend so my lips can meet hers. But I don’t take them. Instead, my mouth brushes hers, my lip moving across the seam of hers, then even lighter as I trace across her cheek, toward her ear.
“Penguin works, but Lamb’s better.” I let my teeth graze her earlobe and she shivers in my arms. “Because my little Lamb is my soulmate, my other half, and she’s the one I’m not letting go again.”
Her fingers curl into my sides as she lets out the most dazzling little whimper. My nose starts the same barely-there trace back toward her lips.
“Jay,” she breathes.
“Don’t Jay me, Lamb. Just let me love you. Let me follow you to the ends of the earth. Let me be your fucking penguin.”
I don’t wait for an answer, I just kiss her. Hard. Dancing with her lips, tracing the seam between them, tasting the wood and warmth that lives there. But she’s not opening for me, not surrendering completely.
“Lamb, please,” I plead.
“I need to say something.” She grips me harder, pulls me closer, even as she arches away.
“Camilla, I know you think I belong here and that you can’t take me away but that’s not true. It’s you. I just belong with you.”
I’m about to barrel on but she holds up a single finger and presses it to my lips.
“I stand by what I said. You are Willow Creek, Willow Creek is you. I won’t pull you away from it.”
“Cam,” I say against her finger.
Her eyes go big as if she’d be scolding me if she didn’t have more to say.
“But maybe, I don’t have to. Maybe I’m a little Willow Creek, too. I’m certainly home when I’m with you.”
I’m not sure if my heart swells or bottoms out, but I rip her hand away from my lips and take hers. She doesn’t have a choice, she can’t stop me this time. No words—none—can.
Kisses, so many kisses, chaste, tender, demanding, against her lips, jaw, neck. And my hands. They’re just as wild against her jacket before I realize. I don’t stop them as they try to decimate her layers though. Neither does she. Jacket, scarf, sweater, shirt, bra.
God, her beautiful skin.
I splay her out on the wood that’s already marked by her. Goose bumps ripple across her torso and peak her nipples higher than the mountains surrounding us. For a moment, I’m awed at how violently her body reacts to me but then a frigid wind sweeps through the shop. I call Crosby and slam the door shut behind the pup, yanking off my jacket and shirt as I stride back to her.
“Of course you’re Willow Creek. You were my constant companion long before this Christmas. You’re even more permanent now. My house…” I bend down, pressing my chest to hers. “This wood…” I drag my hand along the beams beside her body. “My life…”
My lips find the tails of smoke that wraps around her breast and starts caressing. Nips, lips, and beautiful, beautiful kisses. All the way down to her waistband. And lower when I pull those pants down and shove them and her shoes off into the straw. I’m about to settle my mouth between her legs when the other half of us slaps me across the face.
“Wait.” My voice is agonized. “What about your life?” I ask even though she’s ready, waiting and trembling beneath my hands.
Her small little hand weaves into my hair and pulls me straight to the apex of her thighs. She moans loudly when I tentatively dart my tongue into her, but then she starts talking.
“Thirteen is expanding.” Her voice is breathy but warm. “Something with hints of coffee.” I swirl the nub of nerves between her legs with my tongue and she groans, “Sage,” dragging the word out. “Maybe the hint of a well-worked steel.”
Coffee, sage, steel? The three together, I know what flavor she’s creating, and I add my fingers to rub her G-spot in gratitude. Camilla’s jagged cries might unhinge my bones.
“I need someone to make pine barrels,” she says roughly. “I’ll need your help building an ice cave behind the house.”
No, just Camilla, just who she is, and what she is to me, is going to unhinge me.
“I’m going to call it Thirty-Eight.”
I can’t breathe. My lungs won’t expand. She’s done this for me. She’s making a bourbon for me. For a life with me. Here. In Colorado.
One kiss to her slick slit is all I make time for before I’m shoving my pants off and crawling up her. I slide in with something between a manly moan and whipped whimper. Over and over, I roll my hips. Her hands fly between my body and the wood below her. A very small and distant part of my brain is thrilled that this piece of furniture will have every fiber of us etched in. The rest is focused on pleasing her.
Because she’s setting down roots, she’s making plans, she’s embracing Willow Creek. She’s embracing me. And right now, with desperate hands and tense, long legs. I let my hand wander up her thigh as my lips go back to her tattoo.
Small little scratches are going to highlight my shoulders, and fuck me, but all I can think is that I want them there forever. I want this to be our dining room table where we serve Christmas dinner. I want to spend hours in this shop shaping barrels.
And honestly, fuck want. This is need.
“Marry me,” I ask as I thrust into her. “Marry me, Camilla?” I ask again as I bend down to kiss her neck. “I’ll get you a nicer rock, promise.”
My ears are ringing as the blood keeps thrumming through my veins. I swear it’s thumping in time with her heartbeats, not mine. Sensation is overpowering me. I don’t even notice that she doesn’t answer. I just taste the vanilla and smoke on her tits, then raw wood when I start to assault her shoulders.
She’s moaning, arching off the boards. More red tracks are appearing on my shoulders and arms. And when I kiss her, she consumes me, nibbles on my lips and all. Waves, unending, rolling waves is all we are besides heat and lust and love.
And then the waves break.
Camilla’s whimpering. Whimpering softly and clenching down on me. She bites into my shoulder, desperately clinging to me with everything she has. It’s that wild urgency that shoves me over the edge. I roar, rough and gritty, every muscle taut as I empty into her. She twitches and jerks beneath me.
But then we both still and I collapse down onto her. Her hands still rove across my skin but now they soothe rather than sting. Crosby rustles in the straw beneath us but otherwise, it’s the crazy beats of our hearts filling the shed, both jumpstarted by touching, loving one another.
“Yes, Jay. Yes,” she whispers. “But not a rock. Something forged in the fire like us, please.”
Camilla Collins has obliterated me a total of four times.
There are no words left. None can describe what she has done to my insides. What my wife has done to my insides.
The flash and bang of bright shimmering lights outside the shop snap me back to the moment. Each one rocks the quiet night sky then showers a beautiful hue on the snowy wonderland. I slide out of her and help her up before pulling her to my chest then finding a shop blanket. Though scruffy, it’s conveniently big enough for two and tangled in each other, we walk to the door and awkwardly yank it open. Crosby takes up post against our shins. As a mini family, we watch gold and silver rocket through the sky.
Then it hits me—that’s what my insides feel like. Fireworks. Big, beautiful, bright fireworks ringing in the New Year, and a new era. Those glimmering bursts are the mirror of my heart and soul. They’re magic. Just like Camilla Collins. Just like us together. Pure and perfect.