“Fils de pute, merde, j’en ai ral de cul!” Adam exclaimed, throwing the hammer down.
“You really are terrible at this,” Belle remarked, walking over and taking his right hand in hers. He thought that every finger should end in an enormous swollen bruise, given the number of times he’d missed the nail, but she only made a soft tsk-tsk sound before she kissed each one lightly.
“That too. I’ve never heard such meticulous obscenity. All better now,” she said, still holding his hand, peering ahead. “What exactly was your plan?” she asked, taking in the maple tree and arrangement of planks and posts he’d managed to secure. A stiff breeze might make kindling of it all.
“I found your book,” he said. He’d imagined presenting the completed project to her as a grand surprise, the way she would fly into his arms and how starry her eyes would be. He’d envisioned the interior filled with plump, downy pillows and silk rugs, a hamper Mrs. Potts had filled with delicacies and handed over with a twinkle in her eye, the scent of cedar and sage and lavender from the wood and the sachets Plumette had given him to scatter in the corners.
“My book? Which one?” Belle replied, a reasonable question. There were the books she had brought from the house she had shared with her father, few and precious and much-leaved through, and those she had adopted as her own from his, their library. There were those newly ordered from Paris and Padua and Vienna, that smelled of the sawdust they came packed in, and the ones she had written herself, scientific journals, elaborate plans for adventures and contraptions, some sketches of various villagers and the first act of a tragedy she’d called “Rosaline and Valentine,” sadly abandoned Adam had thought though Belle had blushed when he read the lines aloud and batted the book out of his hand.
“One from when you were a child, with all the wonderful sketches,” he answered. They had not been as carefully labeled as her more recent work was, but there was the same precision and confidence in the lines, a certain whimsy which was her hallmark. “I wanted to make it real, you drew this the most and I knew you could never have had it before, not the way you and your father lived.”
“You built me a tree-house,” Belle said, moving closer to his side. Her silk dress was too fine to risk on the knotty rope ladder but he had a deep uncertainty about the structural stability of what he’d made thus far, so he was not that troubled that they could not climb up to enjoy the view from the largest maple in the grove.
“I did, I tried to,” he said. He wished he were as proud of the creation as he had been of the idea to build it for her, to make her girlhood dream come true with only the work of his own two hands.
“Oh, you darling man. You clever boy,” Belle exclaimed, dropping his injured hand quite near her waist and reaching up on tip-toe to kiss him, first on the cheek and then, softly but very seriously, on his lips. The image of her naked beneath him on the bare floor of the tree-house, her dark hair like scattered autumn leaves, was suddenly all he could think of and she caught the gasp he gave in her mouth before she drew back with a final nuzzle at his jaw.
“It’s not very good, I’m sorry,” he apologized.
“No, it’s not. And it’s not a tree-house either,” she said with a smile, startling him.
“Belle! What do you mean?” he blurted, confused and obscurely put out but still tasting her, feeling the dip of her waist where his hand rested.
“Oh dear, that was rude of me. It’s just, it isn’t quite…finished, is it? As a tree-house? It’s sort of a—a shack, yet, it seems to me and I don’t think the joists will hold. If you look there, it’s all out of plumb,” she explained, gesturing at the most obvious flaws of his creation. “And then, the drawing wasn’t a tree-house, but you couldn’t know that. Perhaps you might have, but you didn’t. Ah well, it was an early version, I think I was eleven when I made those sketches. Maybe ten,” she added.
“I don’t understand. If it wasn’t a tree-house, what was it?” Adam asked.
“It was a design for a Utopian cottage. When I was about eleven, I became very interested in architecture and Utopian societies and I worked on several plans for an ideal house, to be built in groups of twelve around a central green like the hours on a clock. The plumbing took ages to get right. I calculated the cost of the supplies to the penny—I thought I could convince the Comte to build it for his tenants but he never even came to the market day and I never had any luck with any other landowner. Until now,” she finished.
“I never thought of putting the cottages in trees, though. You are quite the innovator, Adam,” she grinned. “But, if I may make a suggestion, get someone to help with the execution. I don’t fancy you having any injuries I can’t take care of with a kiss—and I don’t want to worry about the whole thing collapsing when we spend the night.”
“You’d spend the night with me in a tree-house?” he said. He’d thought they might wile away a few hours on a sunny afternoon or that it would be her own private retreat, but what she described was far more enticing.
“I thought that was the point of building it, no? If you don’t want to, we needn’t,” she replied and he interrupted her, pulling her back into his arms, everything forgotten but her bright eyes, that sweet red mouth, how warm she felt against him and how eager she was for his touch.
“I want to, oh, I want to.”
