15. Wren
WREN
Something is off about him.
I notice it before I've even shut my car door. Rowe Holloway stands in the gravel with his hands jammed in his pockets, and his weight keeps shifting like the ground is moving under him. He's smiling—actually smiling—but there's something tense beneath it.
I came out here to watch him. That was the plan I made at the clinic sink with the water running over my clean hands. Watch his face. Watch for a flicker when the town comes up. Reconcile the gentlest man I've ever met with sprayed words on a stranger's door.
Except now that I'm standing in front of him, my careful investigative plan is having trouble competing with the fact that he's lit up. Not guilty-lit. Not caught-lit. Something else.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah. Good.” He clears his throat. “You?”
“Good.”
We stand there being good for a second too long. Then I notice sawdust on his shirt, more trapped in the wavy strands of his hair.
“You have sawdust in your hair.”
His whole face goes crimson.
“Project,” he says.
“A project.”
“Repairs.” He rakes a hand through his hair, which does nothing except redistribute the evidence. “Enrichment. Thing. For the—it's not important.”
“Uh-huh.”
He turns toward the tents so fast that I have to lengthen my stride to keep up, and I file the blush away next to everything else I don't understand about today. It doesn't read like a man hiding vandalism. It reads like a man hiding a birthday present. Which makes no sense.
Peanut is thrilled to see me, which is to say he chirps once and holds out a grape in what I choose to interpret as a gift and is probably a bribe.
“Look at that grip.” I take the grape so he doesn't feel rejected. His small fingers close and release around my thumb, strong and even, no guarding, no favoring. The swelling is nearly gone. The bruise has faded to a yellow-green smudge.
He does not, medically speaking, need me anymore.
A responsible vet would say so. A responsible vet would say one more visit to close the chart and we're done here, and save the practice the drive time, and give Dr. Vance one less thing to detonate about.
“Same time tomorrow,” I say instead, capping the syringe. “And I'd like to recheck the range of motion Thursday.”
Rowe nods like this is reasonable, and I busy myself with the sharps container so he can’t see my face.
While I repack the kit, I watch him the way I promised myself I would. He's holding Peanut against his chest, murmuring something too low to catch, and the capuchin has melted into him, boneless and trusting, and I really try to see if I can draw some parallels with what happened to Sam Harlan.
“Wren.”
I glance up. He's set Peanut back in the fleece-lined basket and he's standing by the tent flap, shifting his weight again, and his jaw is doing something complicated.
“Do you want—” He stops. Starts over. “There's beer. In my trailer. If you—I mean, if you don't have to be back.”
The words come out in the wrong order and all at once, like he rehearsed them and the rehearsal made it worse.
And my entire body answers before my brain has finished translating.
Because I know what beer in my trailer means now.
It means the bench and the lamp and four feet of charged air.
It means his voice dropping low with arousal.
It means the single hottest experience of my twenty-nine years, and my pussy remembers it faster than my head does—heat rolling through me so hard and sudden I have to press my knees together right there in the monkey tent.
I should go back to work. I have afternoon appointments. I have a boss doing his impression of an unexploded shell behind an office door. I have a list of perfectly good reasons typed neatly in my head.
“Yes,” I say instead.
The list bursts into flame. I don't mourn it.
His trailer is exactly as I left it last night—tidy, small, the bench, the chair, the lamp—except for one thing, and I see it the second the door clicks shut behind us.
A board leans against the far wall. Big. Heavy poplar, four feet wide and taller than me, its upper third scarred with pale knife strikes.
And in the center, at a very specific, very deliberate height: a hole. Round. Its rim sanded so smooth it gleams.
The sawdust in his hair.
Oh.
The heat that goes through me is instant and total, scalp to soles, a flush so violent I feel it behind my ears. I hear my own words from last night, blurted out on that bench with my hand between my thighs—I could kneel on the other side and you could just—
I said it half out of my mind, and I've replayed it forty times since with my face in my pillow, certain I'd shocked him.
He built it.
He went out and got a board and cut a hole in it and sanded it because I said one reckless, wanting thing, and he took me seriously.
Nobody has ever taken my wanting seriously in my life.
“Wren.” His voice comes out rough behind me. “You don't have to. I can put it away. I shouldn't have—Cole helped, and it seemed—we don't have to—”
“Rowe.”
“Yeah.”
I turn around. He's got his back nearly against the door, hands white-knuckled at his sides, watching me the way Brutus watches him—pretending he’s indifferent, tracking everything, braced for the answer to matter more than it's supposed to.
“Cole helped,” I repeat.
The blush comes back. “He was very professional about it.” A pause. “Okay, he was not at all professional about it.”
I giggle and look at the board again. At the hole placed at the height of his crotch. At the smooth rim I already know he sanded himself, because of course he did, because this is a man who cares.
The ache between my legs turns urgent enough to make me shift my stance.
“I want to,” I say.
His breath punches out of him.
“Now,” I add, in case there was ambiguity.
“Now,” he echoes hoarsely, and then he moves.
He hauls the board away from the wall and sets it upright in the middle of the trailer, bracing the base against the bench frame and the table leg.
Then he opens the little closet and pulls out a cushion, and he sets it down on my side of the board, positioned exactly beneath the hole, and adjusts it twice.
I kneel on it. Test the height. The hole sits level with my face, and through it I can see his belt buckle, the shake in his hands as they hover there.
“Wren.” His voice comes over the top of the board, low and frayed. “You can stop this whenever. Say anything and I stop. Knock on the wood. Anything.”
“Same to you.”
Silence for a beat. Then, softer: “Nobody's ever offered me that before.”
I press my palm flat against my own side of the board, right below the hole, because I can't press it against him.
“Get used to it,” I say.
I hear his belt come loose. The button. The zipper, loud in the small space. Denim shifting down. And then he steps forward and feeds himself through the opening—thick and flushed and already fully hard, the black filigree ink stark against his skin.
“God,” I whisper, awed.
“You can still—”
I lean in and kiss the tip of his cock, and whatever he was going to say dies with a sound I feel through the board.
He's hot against my lips. Velvet over steel, a bead of slickness already at the tip, and I taste salt when I part my lips and take him in, slow, careful, learning the weight of him on my tongue.
Above the wood, his breath goes ragged. The board creaks—his hands, I realize, gripping the top edge, holding on.
“Wren—” My name never sounded like a prayer before. “Wren.”
I keep my hands fisted on my own thighs.
That was the promise. No hands. Just this—my mouth, his cock—and I pour everything into it, taking him deeper on each pass, hollowing my cheeks, letting him hear me, small humming sounds I don't fake because I don't have to.
I'm so turned on I'm dizzy. My soaked pussy is aching with its own pulse.
“Touch yourself.”
The words come down over the board, wrecked and raw.
“Please. I can't see you, but I need to know. Touch yourself while you—” His hips flex, careful, shallow, the barest push into my mouth. “I want you getting something. Not just giving. Tell me you are.”
I moan around him, and the board shudders with whatever that does to him.
My hand dives under my waistband, no teasing, no ceremony, fingers finding myself soaked and swollen, and the first press against my clit nearly breaks me. I set a rhythm that matches my mouth, and the two sensations braid together until I can't tell which one is driving me toward my climax faster.
“Are you?” he demands, gravelly and desperate.
I pull off him just long enough to gasp, “Yes—God, yes—” and take him back in deeper than before.
The sound he makes is a raw growl.
His rhythm picks up, though he’s still careful, so I press forward and take as much of him as I can.
“Wren—I'm—it's close, I'm close, if you don't want—”
I moan around his cock and dig my fingers harder into myself, and my own climax starts gathering low in my belly, and I stay exactly where I am.
He erupts.
His weight hits the board, and he pulses against my tongue with a groan that comes out strangled, my name tangled through it, Wren, Wren, Wren, like yesterday, like a prayer, and the sound of him coming undone tips me over with him.
I moan around him through my own orgasm, shaking on the cushion, my hand trapped between my thighs, taking everything he gives me and swallowing it down.
I keep him in my mouth until he starts softening.
For a long moment, the only sound in the trailer is two people breathing hard on opposite sides of a knife board.
Then, from above me, hoarse and dazed, I hear Rowe’s voice. “Hi.”
A laugh bubbles out of me. I press my cheek against the smooth wood.
“Hi,” I whisper back.