Epilogue
LENNON
The Austin skyline drops away behind us and the strip malls thin out into dark pasture and cedar breaks, one gas station glowing alone on a hilltop like a lighthouse. Dripping Springs comes and goes, just a blink of a Main Street.
He turns off onto a ranch road I couldn’t find again if my life depended on it, gravel popping under the tires, his hand resting on my knee the whole way like he can’t stand not to be touching some part of me.
“A friend of a friend’s owns this land,” he says. “There’s no lights out here for miles. I checked.”
I checked. Like he sat down at some point this week and thought about light pollution on my behalf.
He parks in a clearing at the top of a rise and cuts the engine. When I climb out of the cab, the cold hits different out here—sharper and without the city’s exhaust-and-concrete smell underneath it. Just cedar and cold dirt and, faintly, cattle lowing somewhere off in the dark.
“Look up,” August whispers, coming around to my side.
I actually gasp, which is embarrassing, except August grins like that was exactly the reaction he was hoping for.
I’ve seen stars my whole life. I did not know I had never actually seen them until right now, out here, away from every streetlight and porch light and gas station sign, the sky is so thick with them it looks less like a night sky and more a spill of glitter.
“Okay, hang on,” he says, climbing into the truck bed, and I hear him wrestling with something back there, swearing softly.
When he says okay again, I turn around to find he’s turned the entire back of the truck bed into a cozy little space—a thick quilt laid out, two pillows from his own bed that I recognize, a second blanket and sleeping bag zipped open and already folded back like an invitation.
There’s also a battery lantern turned down low and warm instead of white, and a thermos I already know, without opening it, is going to be cocoa with too many marshmallows.
“August.”
“I might have gone a little overboard.” He rubs the back of his neck, and for just a second there’s something almost frantic underneath the grin, like he’s been turning this night over and over in his head all week. “I wanted— I don’t know. I wanted it to be right.”
“It’s already the best thing anyone’s ever done for me, and we haven’t even sat down yet.”
That seems to settle something in him. He reaches down and hauls me up into the truck bed. Then we burrow into the sleeping bag under the blanket side by side, my head finding the exact spot on his shoulder it’s apparently decided is its home now.
“Okay,” he says, pointing up. “See those three stars in a row, right there? Real tight together, real straight?”
I follow his finger, smiling. “You mean Orion’s belt?”
“Exactly. Once you’ve got the belt you can find basically everything else off it.
” He traces it out for me—the wide shoulders, the two feet planted apart, one hand raised.
“Bright red one up top, that’s Betelgeuse.
Guy’s dying, actually. Massive star, could go supernova any day now, cosmically speaking, which really means sometime in the next hundred thousand years, but still. ”
“That’s morbid.”
“That’s romantic. I brought you out here to watch a dying star with you.”
He grins over at me, and my stomach does the swooping thing it always does when he looks at me like I’m the whole reason for anything.
He continues on with what feels like an encyclopedic knowledge, pointing out one star after another, by name.
“And up above that,” he continues, “that little smudge that looks like somebody flicked a paintbrush—that’s the Pleiades. The Seven Sisters.”
“How do you know all this?”
He shrugs, and it’s the same shrug he does when I catch him being unexpectedly good at something.
“Owen’s obsessed with space right now. He likes to camp out in his backyard in a little tent I got him.
I point things out to him until he falls asleep on me.
” A pause. “I’ve just kind of been hoping I’d get to do it with somebody who’d stay awake. ”
I have to look away from him for a second, back up at the sky, because if I keep looking at his face I’m going to— I don’t know what.
Cry? Gush even more about how much he’s meant to me in the healing process of getting over the mind-fuckery Jake did to me and how August has helped me feel like a real, human person again?
He points out Sirius next, low near the horizon, and it’s doing this incredible thing where it flickers between colors—blue, then red, then a hot electric white—just from twinkling that close to the ground.
“That’s the brightest star in the whole sky,” he says. “Isn’t even close. Everything else is just doing its best.”
“Overachiever.”
“Definitely a show-off,” he agrees.
He walks me through the rest of the sky, unhurried, one hand tracing shapes against the dark while the other stays wrapped around mine under the blanket.
The twins of Gemini standing shoulder to shoulder above Orion’s head.
Low in the north, the Big Dipper is just starting to climb up out of the trees.
He tells me to watch it—that by the time we leave tonight it’ll be twice as high as it is now, that it spins around the pole star all night like a clock hand.
I think about all the nights I spent not looking up. Sitting in that house with Jake, migraine curtains drawn, the whole sky doing this every single night right outside a window I never opened.
“Hey.” August’s voice goes soft, and I realize I’ve gone somewhere else. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere bad. I promise.” I turn into him instead of answering the real question, burying my face against his throat and breathing him in—soap and warmth and something underneath that’s just him, that I could probably find blind in a crowded room by now.
“I’m just so happy I don’t know what to do with it. It keeps building up and I don’t have anywhere to put it.”
“You don’t have to put it anywhere.”
His arms come around me, and I can feel his heart going fast, faster than it should be for two people just lying still under a blanket. “You can just let it be big. I’ve got you.”
“I’ve spent my whole life being scared of feeling this much.” The words come out fast, my voice cracking a little in the middle. “Like if I let myself feel it all the way, something bad has to come balance it out. The other shoe has to drop, you know?”
“Lennon.” He pulls back just far enough to find my eyes in the lantern light, and there’s something wide open on his face. “I love you. I love you so much I drove you forty minutes out into a cow pasture to look at a dying star. I’ll love you for fucking ever, long after that star is burned out.”
“I love you too,” I say, and it comes out wrecked and certain at the same time. Because it’s just the truth. “I love you. I’ve loved you since you told me about the kiddie coaster and I didn’t even let myself know it yet.”
He makes a sound against my mouth that isn’t quite a laugh, and then he’s kissing me, both of us still smiling too hard to do it properly, cocoa forgotten and going lukewarm three feet away, Orion wheeling patient and enormous overhead like he’s got nowhere else to be tonight either.
The blankets are warm. His hands are careful and then not careful at all.
Look, this night has been romantic.
And also, this man makes me horny as shit.
He’s been working such long hours, sometimes he gets home so tired, he drops into bed and the other day, he literally fell asleep on my thigh after eating me out.
Come on.
This man. This man.
Guys aren’t supposed to come factory out of the box this genuine and this good. I guess, though, by August’s own account, he didn’t. He did serious work on himself to get here. I just get to reap all the benefits of this man working to become the magnificent person before me.
And tonight?
After making me feel more special than anyone has ever made me feel in my entire life and then professing his love?
He tries to pull his characteristic move and go down on me, but no. I’m not having it. And not because I’m three seconds from coming because my body is so goddamned attuned to this man’s touch it’s already weeping at the thought of his tongue.
Instead I climb on top of him and unbutton his jeans.
“Lennon, you don’t have to—”
“Oh you think you get to tell me what to do now, big man?”
“Big man?” I can hear his grin in his voice.
I reach down in his pants and wrap my hand around his girth, my pussy clenching when I feel his thickness. “You heard me,” I whisper, but it’s more of a hiss.
Because I’m finally gonna get my mouth around him. And I have never in my life wanted to give head before.
But tonight is a reclaiming of every part of my body, goddammit. It’s mine and I want it back. All of it.
So I bend over on all fours, drag his cock out of his pants and swallow it whole, one hand on his stomach so I can feel the clench of his hard abdomen in response to what I’m doing to him.
The groaning choke that comes from deep in his throat is a pretty damn good indicator, too, I’d say.
I deep throat him and then lift off, licking just the slit.
His hand dives into my hair, fisting at my scalp. God I love that. All I want is for him to lose control. But a second later, his fist releases.
It’s like he’s always trying to be so damn careful with me.
I pull off him and start working him rough with my hand instead. He lets out little pleasured grunts, and in the light of the small lantern, I see his nostrils flare.
“You see how I’m not taking it gentle with you?” I say, working him rougher, leaning over and spitting on his cock, using my fresh saliva as lube. “Stop taking it so damn soft with me all the time.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he manages to choke out.
I let up working his cock, but only so I can drag my shirt off over my head, followed quickly by my bra. And then my shorts and underwear.
I dip back down, but so my ass is towards him, giving his fat cock one more long lick before I look at him over my shoulder.
“Sometimes a lady likes it rough.”
I deep throat him again and wiggle my ass at him. Which he grabs and squeezes. God, I’ve always loved the way he squeezes my ass. The one thing he’s not always so gentle with.
I suck harder on his cock, pull off with a rough pop, then go low to take him in my throat.
“Fuck, Lennon.”
His hand comes to the back of my head again, and I bob several times encouragingly, loving the pressure of his hand at the back of my neck.
And then I pull of only long enough so that I can climb on him… backwards.
We are in Texas.
And frankly, there are spots that cowgirl hits just right, especially with a cock like August’s. The G spot. I’m talking about the G spot.
I sink down on his cock and my eyelids flutter.
His hands immediately come to my waist and Jesus God, I love it when he holds me there. It makes me feel petite and like a woman, especially when he grabs on with his full hands from my waist to my hips—
I lean over and goddamn, there it is. My legs start shaking and I can’t help a little squeak.
August intensifies the pace from below, because he knows what that squeak means. Oh no, not already. But he’s getting that spot that we’ve only gotten a few times with the usual sex we do in bed. It’s a whole other register of—
“August, oh my god, you’re hitting the—”
“I know where I’m hitting, baby.”
He swivels his hips from underneath so even though I’m on top, he’s driving this train.
So confidently, and so competently, and his cock is so thick, the tipping teasing as he thrusts and then circles, my hands scramble against the quilt he laid out and then frantically grasp at his shoulders for something to tether me down, because he takes me up so, so quickly.
He groans low, half grunting. It’s the manliest noise I’ve ever heard in my life, and I swear between that and how good he’s fucking me, and it just being August—
I squirt, and I haven’t even come yet.
This was supposed to be all about August’s pleasure tonight, but of course he’s already flipped it on me so I’m the one with my legs already shaking—
“Harder,” I beg, something I’ve never dared quite be brave enough to do before.
Oh God.
August has started fucking me harder.
All thoughts are gone. What is thought? No thoughts.
Pleasure. There’s only pleasure. Earth-shattering, body-shaking, deep down quaking pleasure.
“Aug-ust,” I moan from deep low in my throat. “I’m gonna—”
“I know what you’re gonna do,” he says in that low throaty voice he gets when we’re fucking.
And fucks me harder still, hands on my waist, giving me the brutal thrusts I’ve only ever read about before but never imagined could feel like in real life, dinging both my clit and my g-spot like bells for the prize at a fair—
I bury my face against August’s shoulder and scream out my orgasm.
Later that night, tucked against him in the sleeping bag, I feel his hand between my thighs, middle finger teasing at my clitoris to wake me up.
We have a clear, God yes, wake-me-up-with-sex policy in this relationship.
I groan and open my thighs to him, hefting one leg over his hips to pull him into me. He’s already gotten me wet by the time I’m fully awake.
And then, as if by magic, his finger is replaced by his cock, as I drowsily grown and nudge him deeper into me with my heel on his ass.
The burst of the first true bite of pleasure is so delicious my back arches almost painfully as my groin rolls, aching for more contact with his.
I think he feels it, too, because his arms slip beneath mine, elbows on the mattress, hands bracing themselves on my shoulder from behind for leverage as he really starts to move.
Not a hard, frantic energetic fucking like earlier.
But in the warmth of the sleeping bag with the brace of cold air at our faces, I feel more alive in the drowsy wake of pleasure as the man I love fucks me deep, face nuzzled in the crook of my neck than I ever knew was possible.
Oh!
So this is what they meant.
My back spasms, arching again at another wild spike of pleasure, tears erupting down my cheeks at the fabulous sensations I’d never even guessed at.
I get it now.
All of it.
What everyone was talking about that whole time.
Everything the poets meant about true love.
Eyes open to the constellations, hips rolling together in such natural, animal harmony, I understand the entire fucking universe.
Because it was all leading me right here.
Silent but for the sounds of our intimate lovemaking, we both come, and then fall back asleep, bodies entangled till morning and the start of a glorious brand-new day.