Tanner chuckled. “River’s in his element down there. He may not emerge for a while.”
I hung my head and shook out my hair, struggling to sit cross-legged.
“Hold on a sec.” Tanner screwed on the bottle’s cap, dropped it on the grass, and positioned himself on his knees in front of me. “You’ve got an assortment of…” he began, eyeing my hair.
“Don’t tell me what’s in there.” I held up my palm, pressed my fingertips to his chin. “Just get it out. Please.”
He laughed softly. “I thought you earth witches loved dirt and crawly things.”
“I do love dirt. And I love the crawly things most when they stay in the dirt and out of my hair.”
Tanner breathed steadily through his nose, tugging at strands of my hair and proceeding methodically, section by section, all over my scalp. The soothing rhythm of his fingers wove a wordless familiarity between us. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had touched me in such an oddly intimate way.
When he finished, he brushed off his hands and sat back on his heels, tipping my chin up with two fingers. When had his eyes gone from golden brown to a startling topaz? “I think I got them all,” he said. “See anything interesting down there?”
I nodded, still enamored with the gem-like quality of his eye color. “I was mostly fine. Then I heard these odd noises, and when I went to touch these little things that had sprouted out of the roots, I heard a voice. All it said was, ‘Mine,’ which completely spooked me, and that’s when my fear of tight, dark places took over.”
While I was talking, a halo-like light suffused the air around his head and shimmered off the hairs on his forearms. The cord looped around his neck pulsed in time with the beating of his heart, which made my heart rate ramp up again.
Leaning in, I imagined stroking the shadowed patch of skin revealed by the undone buttons of his shirt. Instead, I reached for the woven leather cord and pulled.
Tanner grabbed my wrist, his thumb sliding into my palm, applying pressure to my smaller bones. He didn’t move my hand away and the compression didn’t hurt, not a lot, but the message in the gesture was clear.
“I’m not ready to share that with you,” he whispered.
“What are you ready to share?” I kept pulling, prodded into bold behavior by the impatient layers of accumulated desire rumbling in the rich earth below. But the mine on the tip of my tongue and the laughter burbling deep in my chest were coming from me, not some ghostly entity that liked to inhabit tunnels and apple trees.
Tanner brought his face close enough I could see his individual eyelashes, the pulse at the base of his throat, and the sharply edged curve of his full lower lip—the one that looked wine-stained. Or bruised. I stared at that lip, pulled harder on the cord in my hand, until he lowered me onto a hillock of grass.
His upper body followed the arc of my descent and his mouth came into high relief. He slid one, strong hand to the back my neck and lifted, exposing my throat. “I want to share a kiss with you.”
The ground below me lifted in response, forcing my back to arch until my breasts met his chest. I unfurled my legs and nodded consent, never loosening my grip on the cord.
Tanner angled his head and kissed one corner of my mouth, and the other corner, and when the crush of his lips met mine, dark cherries ripened to perfection burst open and flooded my tongue. Bottled water slaked one kind of thirst. Tanner’s kiss invoked a wholly new need to drink and get drunk and never get up.
I invited his juiciness to pour into me and through me and feed the land at my back.
He hovered the full length of his body over mine, supporting himself on elbows and forearms planted to either side of my shoulders. His hands cupped the sides of my face, and his thumbs explored the contours of my cheekbones and eye sockets while his lips continued to conquer and cajole, offering bribes by way of an endless supply of over-ripe cherry and hints of mint.
Tanner released my lips and bit my chin, trailing his tongue from the edge of a collarbone as he followed the taut edge of a tendon, over my jaw and back to my mouth. The line he left burned below my skin, melting any residual resistance.
I bent my knees and pressed my heels into the backs of Tanner’s thighs, urging him to give me more of his weight, insisting he meld his body with mine.
When he broke the extended entanglement of our mouths, arousal connected the landscapes of our chests and bellies, leaving little room for discerning who ended where. Even the tree branches, furiously weaving a protective canopy overhead, seemed invested in us continuing to kiss.
Until Tanner suddenly peeled himself away, leaving the front of my body bandage-ripped raw. He stood like a toppled tree springing back into place.
A tremor, rising from behind me, pushed at my back. I took the hand Tanner offered and joined him, unsteady in the double whammy delivered by the unexpected kissing and the end of the unexpected kissing. He brushed the dirt and dried grass off my back, and when he finished, he grabbed my elbows and faced me.
Despite the strength of the afternoon sun, the earlier glints of golden light that radiated off his body had disappeared. A cloud settled across his eyes, the gem-like clarity disappeared, and a denseness claimed his body. He pulled me into a hug and spoke into my hair, sounding more like a government agent delivering a summons and less like a man who’d initiated and followed through on a series of succulent kisses.
“I should not have done that, Calliope. I won’t do it again, I
