Page 46 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About

Twenty-Seven

“I ’m yours.” Even as Sadie breathed those words with confidence, her stomach flipped. And the words had activated something in Josh.

“Say that again.”

“I’m yours.”

He flashed a smile more devilish than she knew him capable of.

“That’s right,” he said.

She’d grown comfortable being in control with Josh.

Not only because it was fun, but because it felt so safe.

That feeling of control had been a stepping stone for her.

She had been eager to share pleasure with Josh, but always on her terms. She was out of practice at finding the pleasure in giving pleasure.

She’d prioritized finding her own pleasure and needed a lot of regulation—the ties, the commands—to accomplish it and feel secure.

She didn’t need those restraints anymore. She could turn her body over to Josh, safe in the knowledge that he could bring her pleasure himself. That he would enjoy that process. And that she could let go a little, for a change.

Like riding an elevator on a rapid descent, she was giddy and light on her feet, and the tiniest touch frightened. Trusting someone was scary. Loving them was downright terrifying, but here she was, giving it her best.

Josh tugged at the hem of her shirt and she raised her arms in response.

His knuckles skimmed over her as he lifted her shirt from her body, that brush like warm velvet, making her skin sing.

He wasted no time removing the rest of her clothing, which pooled on the floor like an ink stain.

His clothes, in the colors of an autumn leaf pile, joined hers.

“You’re a work of art,” he said.

Under his gaze, she felt like one. Precious and luminous, luxurious and rare.

“You’re, like, a beam of light,” she said. If she were capable of forging more coherent sentences, she would have told Josh he was a lighthouse. He could withstand tornadoes and feral hogs and Sadie’s own capricious nature without ever giving up his light.

“Tell me more about myself.” He ducked his head to kiss her neck, leaving her mouth free to speak. His hands roved over her, threatening to catch the words in her throat, but she was going to push through her reticence for him.

“You’re so fucking genuine and you give everyone more than they probably deserve.”

He hummed an interested approval into her shoulder while she ran her fingers over the planes of his back, strong from farmwork.

“You’re smart but you’re not obnoxious about it.” This elicited a chuckle and then a nip of his teeth on her neck. She gripped his waist and pulled him to her, hungry for more contact.

She continued praising him as he continued his ministrations, working his way to her breasts and her belly, by which time he was on his knees.

Eventually, she was lying on the bed, and he had continued his downward path, teasing her and tasting her.

As her thoughts became addled by her escalating need for him, her praise turned both breathless and carnal.

“You’ve got a great dick and you know what to do with it,” she said, hoping that might be the final word.

He dipped one finger into her pussy and pulled it out slowly, using her slickness to trace lazy circles around her clit. She was electrified by his touch, a live wire sending off sparks, and so desperately in need of him, specifically, inside her. She didn’t want to beg.

While he continued spiraling his fingers in that maddening way, he brought his mouth down on hers, and they kissed in that hungry, urgent way that can only lead to fucking.

With his lips to her ear, he whispered, “You’re all mine,” and he sank his cock into her in a long, smooth stroke.

Sadie’s eyelids fluttered and she gripped his shoulders.

The drag of his cock back out again brought the most delicious friction.

He’d unlocked the door to a room she’d never known about, a new place to go where everything was bright and sweet.

Then he established a rhythm, slow but deep, and she wanted nothing more in life.

Just him moving inside her with exactly this pace, exactly this depth, forever.

His eyes were open if hazy, and she was compelled to meet them. To be present here for him. It would be so easy to drift off on a wave of her own pleasure, to close her eyes against the intense intimacy of the moment, but she faced it instead.

“Tell me when you knew you were mine.”

She didn’t overthink it. She simply couldn’t. “When I fucked myself in front of you.”

“I see,” he said, increasing the speed of the circles on her clit, sweeping every thought from her brain except the one saying I need to come, I need to come .

“That’s when you knew you didn’t want to come without me.

When you knew this pussy was going to be mine.

But you took your sweet time. And now I’m going to give you what you need. ”

“Yes,” she said, knowing that what she needed was an orgasm.

“You are mine but I am yours,” he said, “and I won’t come until you do.”

“Yes,” she said again.

He strummed over her clit again and she broke, back bowed off the mattress, a long sigh escaping her lips.

Josh’s strong hands continued as her breath came back to her in gulps, as bright colors danced behind her eyelids.

The second orgasm surpassed the first in intensity, a roaring river against a babbling brook, making her thighs quake.

Josh pulled out and knelt upright. She opened her eyes to see him give the final flourishing strokes to his cock before bending over her and kissing her deeply. She felt his come hot on her stomach.

Josh leaned back and dragged his finger through the pearly pool and traced lines onto her round belly.

“You’re painting me again,” she said.

She looked at her stomach, the glistening trail his finger followed spelling out MINE .

And she was. She wanted to be painted by him, fucked by him, loved by him.

* * *

Time stretched and bent like taffy as they took their time with each other, touching, cuddling, napping, talking, until Sadie’s phone alarm broke the quiet with its insistence.

“I’m meeting up with Esther,” she told Josh. “We’re going foraging. We’re also going to be walking the property line. Stu’s dividing the property to give the wooded part to the Tulip Poplar Trust.”

Josh beamed. “Stu never thought he owned those woods anyway. Much as I hate to let you go, this sounds like a big deal.”

“I got free legal help from PJ at the library to see how dividing property works. So I guess I can thank the hogs for destroying my father’s pumpkins, which led you to PJ, which led me to PJ.”

“Should I thank the hogs for making you scream so loud I had to see if you were being murdered?”

Sadie kissed Josh. “Don’t know about that. I’ve gotta run, but maybe you can make me scream that loud again later.”

Having silenced Josh with that cheeky talk, she cleaned herself up, shimmied back into her clothing, and ran down the stairs.

The pumpkins behind her father’s house were still growing, and though they didn’t need to be in fighting trim as it were, Sadie still needed to put more work into them if they were going to yield good seeds to sell.

She’d call over to Josh after she and Esther were through.

He seemed a little adrift without pumpkins or Squash 2.

0 to dote on, and she could share a couple pointers.

Then she remembered she’d only beaten him by four pounds. Maybe she could keep some pumpkin secrets for the time being.

Esther wore her more tactical clothing for this foraging day, which was to say a batik romper tucked into the sock cuffs peeking out from her hiking boots, elbow-length leather gloves meant for rose gardeners, and an absurdly wide-brimmed hat in a fluorescent pink.

Sadie immediately felt calmed by her presence, as they crisscrossed through the land, once verdant and now mostly amber-colored, on deer paths and turkey runs.

“Ooh, here’s a nice little patch of ribwort plantain. Pick those stems.”

Sadie dutifully complied, dropping the stems into Esther’s basket backpack.

She only picked long ones that had dropped their seeds.

She had a flash of a memory of making cord out of these with her dad.

He had told her to break off the flower heads, but she declined, letting them be decorative sprigs emerging from her cord.

She did it her own way, and it was beautiful.

She searched her memory for the chiding that must have followed when she didn’t follow his instructions. But he’d complimented her creativity.

To justify her choice to keep him at arm’s length, she had paved over the sweet memories with the bad ones.

Granted, those bad ones were real. Her standoffishness kept her afloat through hard times; it also left her feeling unlovable.

All this time she thought she’d been keeping Stu at a distance for both of their sakes, but she’d been closing herself off from everyone.

“Esther, have you ever told yourself a story that you needed to believe was true, but it wasn’t?”

Esther’s gentle laugh fell among the crunching leaves.

“I told myself that no women like being married, it’s simply what we must do.

Didn’t get divorced until I was almost forty, and I had to start over.

I hadn’t been honest with myself or anyone else.

My ex-husband didn’t deserve that unhappy marriage any more than I did. ”

“How do you keep yourself honest now?”

“I spend time in nature, and I journal. It’s harder to trick myself when I can’t build the story after the fact. And I press flowers in my journal, which makes me want to find the blooms among those old entries. Literally and figuratively.”

Finally, after a long season of creative drought, Sadie’s next art project appeared before her like the most welcome rain cloud.

After she and Esther parted ways, Josh came to Stu’s pumpkin patch to help with watering and fertilizing. And as Sadie could have guessed, Josh scrutinized the pumpkins they’d managed to salvage from the hog-trodden plants with his scientific gaze.

“These are doing remarkably well despite the stress.”

“I know,” Sadie said. She’d been caring for them, after all.

He gave a gentle pat to one of the pumpkins, whose pale orange skin glowed in the autumnal sunlight. “I wish I knew how much they weighed.”

“I’m sure Stu showed you his method.”

“Right!” Josh said before jogging into the garage.

He came back with a ball of twine. He measured out three lengths of twine against various dimensions of the pumpkin.

Then he tied knots in each. “One knot for circumference, two knots for end to end, three knots for side to side. I’ve got his formula back at the house that I can plug the measurements into.

Rather, I’ve got the spreadsheet I made from the rumpled bar napkin Stu wrote the formula onto. ”

“Can I have the strings?” Sadie asked.

“Oh, you’ve got your own formula, do you?” Josh asked.

“Something like that,” she answered. He lifted the strings over her head and draped them around her neck like scarves.

“I want to know everything you know about pumpkins,” he said, tracing his thumb along her jaw. “I want to know everything going on inside that mind of yours, Sadie Fox.”

Sadie drank in this moment of tenderness, knowing he’d given her a perfect way to document it. “That’s a pretty tall order,” she said. “But we can start with pumpkins.”