There is a sound a tavern makes when it's done pretending.
All evening the Gilded Tankard had been performing — mugs thumping, the regulars' low talk, the fire doing its best to sound cozy — and then the last drunk got poured out the door by his own brother, the door bolted, and the whole building exhaled. The beams stopped creaking. The fire burned lower, like it was finally allowed to sit down.
Diane stood behind the bar in the lamplight, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair coming loose from its knot, and looked at me across the empty room the way a woman looks at something she's been politely not touching all night.
"Well," she said. "Last call was an hour ago."
Chapter Six had happened in the storeroom, quick and hungry and against a flour barrel, and I'd been telling myself all evening that we'd gotten it out of our systems like adults. This was a lie I had chosen to believe because the alternative was looking across a crowded tavern at a woman in her late thirties with flour on her neck and not being able to form words.
Diane Foster was, by the standards of Aldermere, an object of tragedy. Big bust, wide hips, a laugh you could hear through two walls. The town pitied her the way you'd pity a dog with three legs — loudly, and where she could hear it. I had been in this world for maybe a week and I had already watched three different men leave her tavern and apologize to the air for drinking there.
To me she was the single most attractive woman I had ever seen in my life, and I had stopped pretending otherwise two days ago.
"You keep looking at me like that, Ethan, and I'm going to start charging you for the view," she said, and started wiping down the bar with a rag, which did nothing except give her hands something to do that wasn't reaching for me.
"Put it on my tab," I said. "I'll be paying it off for years."
"You're behind on your tab."
"I'll pay in labor."
She laughed — that huge, unguarded laugh, the one the town thought was another tragedy — and then she stopped laughing all at once, and the room went quiet, and it was just her and me and the low fire.
That was the thing about Diane. With Paula there had been the oath and the duel, the whole knight's-honor machinery that made everything feel like a siege you won together. With Diane it was different. She'd spent the whole night being warm for other people — warm for the regulars, warm for me, the eternal hostess, the woman who feeds everyone and asks nothing — and now the warmth was still there, but something underneath it was starting to show through, like coals under a thin layer of ash.
"Ethan," she said. "Do you know how long it's been since a man looked at me the way you're looking at me right now?"
"I don't want to answer that," I said. "It's a trap. Any number I pick will make you sad or make me a liar."
"Thirteen years." She said it matter-of-factly, the way you'd say the roof needs mending. "Thirteen years since my husband died, and in thirteen years not one man in Millbrook has looked at me like he wanted me. They look at me like they want to fix me. Or feed me. Or find me a nice flat-chested girl to — " She stopped. "Sorry. I don't usually say that out loud."
"Say it out loud to me," I said.
She came around the bar. I stayed where I was, on my stool, because moving toward her felt like it would spook something, and I didn't want to spook anything. She stopped about a foot away, close enough that I could smell ale and flour and the rosemary soap she used, and she put both hands on my knees like she needed them there to keep from falling over.
"You're a strange man, Ethan Parker," she said. "Paula told me about you. She said you're the only person in this town who looks at her like she's worth looking at. And I thought, that's nice for Paula. Paula's young. Paula's — " She shook her head. "And then you started working here, and you kept looking at *me* that way, and I thought, he can't possibly mean it. Nobody means it."
"I mean it."
"That's the problem," she whispered. "I believe you."
And then she kissed me, and the warmth cracked.
I don't know how else to describe it. It wasn't like the kiss in the storeroom — that had been frantic, both of us startled by how much we wanted it. This was something else. This was a woman who had been holding a door shut for thirteen years with her whole body weight, and she'd just decided to stop pushing and let it blow open. Visit novelping(.)com for the full chapter.
Her hands came up into my hair and she pulled me down off the stool, and her mouth was hot and certain, and I heard the bar rag hit the floor somewhere, and I understood — really understood for the first time — what the town had been sitting on. They hadn't just been pitying an ugly woman. They'd been sitting on top of a volcano and calling it a hill.
"Diane — " I got out, when she came up for air.
"Shut up," she said, and there was laughter in it, and hunger under the laughter, and she was already pulling me toward the stairs. "I've been shutting up for thirteen years, Ethan. Tonight I'm done shutting up."
We didn't make it to the stairs. We made it to the rug in front of the fire, which was apparently the traditional landing zone for the Gilded Tankard's after-hours operations, because she pushed me down onto it with both hands flat on my chest and then stood over me for a moment, breathing hard, looking down at me like she'd been waiting her whole life to be the one looking down.
The firelight did things to her that I will be describing to myself for the rest of my life. She'd worn a dress all evening with a neckline that this town considered a public health emergency, and now she stood there and started unlacing it, slowly, watching my face, and every inch of skin she uncovered was — I don't have a deadpan observation for this. I had nothing. My entire vocabulary had filed for early retirement.
"You know what the worst part is?" she said, conversational, like she wasn't undressing in front of me. "The worst part of thirteen years isn't the loneliness. It's that you start to believe them. You start looking in the mirror and seeing what they see. You start thinking, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I'm the thing that's wrong."
"You're not wrong," I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "Diane, you're the least wrong thing in this town."
The dress came off. She stood in front of the fire in her shift, and the fire was behind her, and I could see the shape of her through the thin fabric, and she was magnificent, and she was terrified, and the terror was what broke my heart and the magnificence was what was making it physically impossible to think.
"Don't pity me," she said suddenly, fiercely. "That's the one thing I can't — if you're doing this because you feel sorry for me — "
"I'm not," I said, and stood up, because I couldn't have this conversation sitting down. "Diane. Look at me. I'm not a kind man doing a good deed. I'm a man who has wanted you since the first night I walked in here and you laughed at my joke about the soup."
"The soup was terrible," she said.
"The soup was terrible and you were beautiful," I said. "Still are. Say the word and I'll stop."
She looked at me for a long moment. The fire popped. Somewhere upstairs a shutter knocked.
Then she pulled the shift over her head and dropped it on the rug, and said, "The word is *more*."
What happened next I am going to describe as honestly as I can, because Diane deserves honesty, and because anyone who reads this and thinks the women of this world are tragedies should have to sit with what actually happened in front of that fire.
She was lush. That's the word. Not delicate, not graceful, not any of the words this town worshipped — lush, abundant, a woman built like plenty itself, and when she knelt over me on that rug and lowered herself down, skin to skin, I made a sound I had never made before in my life and she laughed into my neck and bit me, lightly, on the collarbone, like she was tasting something she'd been denied for years.
She took her time. That was the thing. Thirteen years of nothing had taught her patience, or maybe it had just built up a reservoir, because she moved over me slow and deliberate, watching my face the whole time, her hands braced on my chest, her hair fallen completely loose now and hanging around us like a curtain. The firelight moved across her skin. Her breasts swayed with every movement, heavy and full, and I couldn't stop touching them — couldn't stop running my hands up her sides, over her hips, everywhere, like I was trying to memorize a country.
"God," she breathed, when I took one nipple into my mouth. "God, Ethan. Nobody's — it's been so long since anyone — "
She didn't finish. She didn't need to. I understood. I rolled her — gently, because for all her size she felt suddenly fragile in that moment, like the wanting had made her breakable — and settled between her thighs, and she opened for me like she'd been waiting thirteen years to be opened, and when I pushed into her she arched off the rug with a cry that started as a gasp and turned into my name.
And then the hunger took over completely, and it took me with it.
She was not delicate about it. Thank God. She wrapped her legs around my waist and moved with me, hard, meeting every thrust, her nails digging into my back, and the sounds she made — low and raw and utterly unselfconscious — were the sounds of a woman who had stopped performing and started *feeling*, and I had never wanted anyone the way I wanted her in that moment, not just her body but the sheer furious joy of her finally, finally letting herself have something.
"More," she kept saying, breathless, laughing, crying a little, I think, though she'd have denied it. "Don't you dare stop. Don't you dare be gentle with me, Ethan Parker. I've had gentle. I've had thirteen years of gentle." This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
So I wasn't gentle. I drove into her the way she asked, and she took it and asked for more, and the rug bunched under us, and the fire threw our shadows huge against the tavern wall, and at some point she flipped us — I still don't know how, the woman had leverage I hadn't accounted for — and rode me with her head thrown back and her hands gripping my shoulders, and I watched her, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I told her so, out loud, with no deadpan and no jokes, and she cried out and came apart above me, shaking, and I followed her a moment later, buried deep, her name in my mouth.
We lay there on the rug in front of the dying fire, tangled and sweating and breathing like we'd run a race, and she laughed — quietly this time, wonderingly — into my chest.
"Well," she said. "That was not on the menu."
"It should be," I said. "You'd make a fortune."
She hit me, weakly, on the shoulder. "Don't be crude."
"You started it."
"I did start it," she admitted, and propped herself up on one elbow to look at me, and in the low firelight her face was soft in a way I hadn't seen before — not the hostess's practiced warmth, not the town's tragedy, just a woman, thirty-eight years old, looking at a man like he was a gift she hadn't expected. "Ethan. Whatever this is — whatever you are — don't you let them talk you out of it. The town. The Temple. Whoever comes asking. Don't let them make you see me the way they do."
"I couldn't if I tried," I said. "Trust me. I've tried. My eyes won't cooperate."
She smiled, and kissed me, slow and sweet, nothing hungry in it now — just tenderness, the warmth come back, settled, whole. We lay there until the fire went to embers, and then she pulled a blanket off the settle and threw it over us, and we slept on the rug in front of the hearth like two teenagers, and it was the best sleep I'd had since arriving in this world.
I woke some time before dawn to the sound of howling.
Not one voice. Several. Far off, from the direction of the treeline beyond the mill — long, rising cries that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck and set every dog in Millbrook barking in answer.
Diane was already awake, sitting up in the blanket, listening. Her face had gone still.
"Wolves?" I asked.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "Not wolves." She looked at me, and there was something in her expression I couldn't read. "Ethan. That's the wild hunt's call. The wolfkin are moving tonight."
"The wolfkin," I repeated.
"There's a huntress," Diane said slowly. "Runs the woods north of here. The town calls her a beast and a menace and about six other things I won't repeat. She's been stealing chickens and scaring travelers for a month." She paused, and her hand found mine under the blanket, and squeezed. "Ethan, if you go up into those woods — and I know that look, so don't tell me you won't — you be careful. She doesn't talk first. She bites first."
"Noted," I said. "Biting. I'll add it to the list."
"I'm serious."
"So am I. Mostly." I kissed the top of her head. "I'll bring her chicken. Everyone's reasonable after chicken."
Diane made a sound that was half laugh, half despair, and I decided to take the laugh.
The howling rose again, closer this time, and then faded into the dark.
Diane lay back down and pulled the blanket up, but I could feel the tension in her, and I stayed awake long after she drifted off, listening to the silence where the howls had been, and thinking about teeth.