13. Twelve
Coyote had been circling me for days, and everything he'd asked me that morning had been the wrong question.
I sat on an upturned bucket in the equipment shed and restocked Sierra's field kit, because my ribs allowed the work and I needed something to do with my hands.
Gauze in the left compartment, tape and shears in the right, suture packets laid flush.
Outside, boots crossed the yard again, tracing a wide circle around the shed and coming no closer.
He'd started at the coffee pot before full light, asking whether the tape on my forearm had pulled in the night.
Over breakfast the questions came at intervals, one every few minutes.
Did the thigh ache before weather? Should he move the bedroll off the draft?
Was the coffee strong enough? Did the eggs need more salsa?
He wanted to know whether a man my size needed a third blanket in June, which even Cruz looked up from his phone for.
At supper he asked whether the well-water shower ran too cold at night for a man with fresh stitches.
The boots stopped outside the door.
"Why's your light still on?" Coyote said.
"Wrong question," I said, and fitted the last suture packet into its row and buckled the kit shut.
"You should sleep. Sierra says skin knits at night."
"Sierra's right."
He came in out of the dark with Nimue around his neck and crossed to the corner, lifted her down, and put her into the crate of clean rags, where she stacked herself into coils and settled.
Then he walked the shed once, the same circuit as last night, eyes over the patched place in the wall, the window latch, the gap under the door.
He unrolled his blanket an arm's length from mine and lay down on his back with his knife on his hip and his eyes on the door.
I turned off the light and hung my shirt on the nail above my boots, the map still in the pocket.
Keeping my hands off him since the cave had grown harder by the hour, harder still with him lying an arm's length away in the dark.
I wanted to scoot over to him, hold him, put my arm around him and kiss his hair, tell him everything was going to be all right.
But if I did that now, he might mistake it for forgiveness, and I wasn't sure I was ready for that.
I came out of the dream swinging.
Somewhere off to my right, a bucket tipped over. And from an arm's length away, somebody was saying my name, over and over.
Coyote?
The shed came back in pieces while my heart thumped hard in my chest. Cold sweat gathered on the back of my neck, and my hands had the fine tremor that I used to get after a rough shift without enough sleep.
My right hand was already out. Open, palm down, on the cold boards between our bedrolls, reaching across a mattress that was five years gone.
Coyote sat cross-legged an inch past my fingers.
Out of reach, exactly as he'd promised. His own blanket lay smooth behind him, untouched.
Nimue was up around his throat with her head raised, and there was enough moonlight to see his eyes, and I had no idea how long he'd been sitting there in the cold saying my name into the dark.
"You were reaching," he said. "For him."
I looked at my hand, still open on the boards between us.
"It starts out for him." I swallowed. "Lately it's been finishing on your side of the floor."
His expression didn't change. Nimue loosened at his throat and slid down into his lap.
Then he crossed the arm's length he'd been keeping since the porch, and he set his head down under my open hand, where it had stopped the night before.
My fingers combed through his hair. It was the first touch since the cave that wasn't about tape and gauze. He held still and let out a low, relieved sigh.
I'd told myself I wasn't ready to forgive him. I'd reached for him anyway.
"Why don't you ask me, little one?"
He was quiet. My thumb moved behind his ear, and he leaned into it.
"If I ask it, you'll answer it," he said.
"That's the general idea."
"That's the problem." He pressed his cheek harder into my palm. "Right now the question still has both answers in it. I spend it, and it only has one."
I took my hand out of his hair and rolled him over to face me. He looked up at me in the moonlight with his hair loose over his shoulders, and that was it. I was done holding out.
"Then don't ask," I said. "You don't have to ask. I'm done walking." I ran my thumb once across the inside of his wrist. "You get tomorrow, and every day after that. As many as I've got left, and I want them spent right here."
His pulse sped up under my thumb.
"And you should have the rest of it," I said. "I love you. I'm fifty-two years old, little one. I'm not rationing that out by the day like it's plasma."
He took my hand off his wrist, both of his around it, and pressed it flat to his own chest, over the shirt, over the scars I'd learned by dim light and never asked about. His heart hammered under my palm.
"I don't have it," he said. "The word."
"I know."
His hands tightened over mine, hard enough to feel the bones. "Mine is the word I've got. It'll have to hold."
"It holds," I said. "It's held since the river."
Then he let go of my hand, reached back into his blanket roll, and set a bottle of lube upright on the boards between us.
I arched an eyebrow. "How long has that been in there?"
"Since this afternoon. I stole it from Ransom."
He lifted Nimue out of his lap and set her back into her crate.
She slid down into the rags and stilled.
He unclipped the knife from his belt, sheath and all, and laid it up past the head of the bedrolls, well out of his reach.
Then he dragged his bedroll flush against mine and pulled his shirt over his head.
"Your way," he said. "Tonight."
He started to lie back.
"Not yet." I took his jaw in one hand, all of it, and kissed him first.
Every kiss between us so far, he'd taken.
This one arrived instead, and I felt the moment it confused him: his mouth opened to take over, teeth first, the old way, and I tilted his head back with my thumb under his chin and wouldn't let him rush it.
He growled into my mouth. Then he groaned, and that wasn't protest. His hands came up and took two fists of my beard, holding on, and by the time I let him breathe, he was panting.
I kissed the corner of his jaw. The hinge of it. The place at his throat where Nimue rode, and his pulse hit my lips going twice what mine was. He tipped his head back and gave me the whole throat, and I stayed there until he started swearing. "Fuck," he said to the ceiling. "Fuck. John."
Then his hands came back to me. His knuckles traveled down the tape on my ribs, light, checking his own work, then brushed the dressing on my thigh.
Only after he'd accounted for everything he'd wrapped did he open my jeans and pull the rest of my clothes off me.
Then he sat back on his heels and took his time looking, and his hand went flat against the front of his own jeans and stayed there.
He lay back on the joined blankets, and his hands settled flat at his sides. His eyes went to the door once, then the roofline, then came back to me and stayed.
So I took my time.
I took off his boots first, one and then the other, and set them where he could find them in the dark.
He didn't take his eyes off my hands, and something in his shoulders came down a notch.
Then the jeans, worked off without any hurry.
He lay bare on the blankets in the moonlight, small and scarred, every muscle ready to answer a threat that wasn't coming.
"Relax, little one."
I laid my palms on his collarbones and ran my hands down the scarred ladder of his ribs, over the bitten shoulder, the burn, the old knife scars, taking my time over each one, and everywhere my hands passed, gooseflesh came up behind them. He trembled, and it wasn't because of the cold.
"You've been through a lot," I said.
He squirmed when I kissed his chest, and I hushed him again. Against the knot of the burn I set my teeth lightly and felt his breath catch. Then I closed my lips around his left nipple and worked it with my tongue until he whined, dug his heel into the blanket, and pleaded, "John, please!"
"More or stop?" I said.
"More." His heel dug in again. "Más. Don't you dare stop."
His cock lay hard against his belly, already leaking a dark smear onto his stomach, and I hadn't touched him there yet.
By the time my lips reached his stomach, his hips were lifting off the blanket, trying to hurry me.
I put my hand flat below his navel and pressed him back down. "Easy. Let me take my time with you."
"I'm a patient man." He pushed up against my hand. "Not with you."
"I noticed." I kissed my way across his belly at my own speed until he quit trying to set one of his own.
He turned his face into the blanket and whined, biting down. I stopped and pulled the blanket free, offering my hand instead, and he clamped down on the meat under my pinky and held.
"There you go. Bite when you need. I'm right here and I'm not going anywhere."
I bent and took his cock in my mouth, and he released his teeth to cry out.
"John!"
I pulled off him and worked lower instead, and when I took his balls into my mouth and rolled them on my tongue, his heel skidded on the blanket and both his hands went into my hair to hold me there. They drew up tight under my tongue. He wasn't going to last if I kept at it, so I quit.
"You'll get it," I said against him. "When I say."
He dropped his head back. "Fuck," he told the roof. "Fuck. Puta madre." Then nothing in either language.
I slicked my fingers and worked him open, taking longer than he wanted, because I knew exactly what I was asking his body to make room for.
I stayed until the stretch quit making him tense and started making him push back onto my hand, and then I stayed past that, long past the point the swearing stopped being words.
When I crooked my fingers, he came up off the blanket like I'd run a current through him, so I did it again, and again, until his hands were fisted white in the blanket and his cock was leaking a steady thread onto his belly and a tremor ran through his thighs that he couldn't stop.
Then I sat back against the shed wall and stretched the bad leg out, where the ribs could rest and nothing would land on the thigh, and held out my hand.
"Your ribs," he said.
"This is me minding them. Come here."
He scrambled up and swung a leg over me, sitting right in my lap. Then he reached for the bottle, slicked me with a quick fist, lined me up, and started down.
"Go slow," I told him, knowing full well he wasn't planning to listen.
But his body didn't give him any other choice. He sank down an inch, panting, and had to stop to wait. While he did, I put my lips against his chest and kissed along one of the old knife scars there.
He worked himself down in stages, stopping and starting, until he sat flush in my lap with his palms flat on my chest and his mouth open on nothing. I held him there, full and still, both of us sweating.
"Breathe in," I said.
He breathed in, and I felt him take it all the way down to where I was in him.
Then I lifted him up, and his eyes widened.
When I pulled him back down onto my cock, his head fell back, his whole throat exposed, and the moan he let out ran straight through me.
I bent forward and bit him there, right over his Adam's apple.
I'd never bitten anybody in my life. He froze under my lips, and when I bit down harder, he grabbed the back of my head and held me there.
Then I kept lifting and lowering him on my cock.
Sweat ran down his neck and under my lips.
I brought his head down and kissed him, tasting salt and his own swearing, and he bit my bottom lip hard enough to make me quit.
He groaned and reached to put his hand on his cock but stopped just short, putting his hands on me instead.
His hand came up my chest, through the hair, and found a nipple, and he pinched it hard enough that my hips came off the boards under him.
His hair came down and stuck to his throat. "Faster." His nails dug into my chest. "And don't stop. Bite me. Mark me."
I nipped lightly at his throat. When I'd wanted it, biting him had been easy. Doing it because he told me to was harder.
"Harder." He fisted my hair. "You need to leave marks."
I closed my lips over the spot and sucked hard. He moaned and shook, and when his hand started for his cock again I caught his wrist and put it back on my chest.
"Not with your hand," I said against his ear. "You get it off me or you wait."
I started moving him faster, fucking him harder than I'd meant to when we got started, and the right side of my ribs sent up a bright wire of pain that stopped my breath halfway in. I kept going anyway.
Coyote stiffened and let out a long, low groan, and then he came with nothing on him at all, striping my chest and my belly, his thighs locked and shaking against my hips. He bent forward and bit into the meat of my shoulder, hard enough to bruise, and I cupped the back of his skull and held him.
That did it. I came inside him with my hand cradling his skull, holding him flush down on my cock through every pulse, and he stayed put and took all of it.
After, I held him on the blankets until our breathing evened out. He'd gone loose in a way I'd never seen before, every bit of the readiness out of his back.
I wet a rag from the canteen, cleaned him up, cleaned myself, and kissed him once at the corner of his lips before I pulled Sierra's kit over by the strap to clean out the bite he'd left behind.
The whole time he lay with his chin on my chest, unrepentant, checking my work the way he'd made me let him check it earlier.
He settled along my good side, sighed once against my ribs, and was asleep before I'd pulled the blanket up.
I stayed awake a long while in the dark, listening to his breathing turn long and deep.
Blue morning light seeped in through the patched wall, enough to inventory what I'd left on him: a bruise coming up over his Adam's apple, a second under his jaw, four finger marks on his hip.
He'd wear all of it out to the fence line in a couple of hours, and he'd want every man on this ranch to see it.
I was watching dawn come when the radio on the charging shelf crackled, spat, and found a voice.
"Big John," Linc said, breathing hard. "You awake? Over."
Coyote's eyes were open before the second word.
I reached for the radio and keyed it. "Go ahead."
"I'm at the east fence past the tank. I need you out here. Now."
"What's wrong?" I reached for Sierra's kit. Coyote reached for his knife.
Linc cursed. "Somebody dumped a body inside the fence."