14. Sawyer
FOURTEEN
Sawyer
We took a few days off training after that and just stayed in bed.
We had enough food to get by— headed over to the house to scrounge up snacks a couple times in the middle of the night, careful not to wake Gage’s family.
One of those nights, I pushed Daniela up against the wall in the main house and fucked her hard and fast, only for Millie to come down right as I was zipping up my pants again.
She'd been giving us shit ever since.
I didn't care.
It was the first time I'd ever been in love and I wanted to enjoy every second of it.
Now, it was our last day before we would head out to location for the shoot…and we'd taken the horses out to the creek for one last ride.
And I was giving her one last ride.
The weather had warmed enough that we could lay out on the blanket, and Daniela was wearing nothing but an unbuttoned flannel as she rode my cock in the afternoon sun.
It was the fourth time we'd had sex in almost as many hours—my stamina seemed endless with her—and she was nice and relaxed, rocking her hips, her hands splayed across my chest. I was deep inside her, brow furrowed, breath harsh as she clenched me.
"Don't slow down," I said.
She slowed down.
"Daniela."
"Hmm?" Innocent. Completely not innocent, her hips rolling in that lazy figure eight she'd figured out drove me insane, her hands pressing into my chest like she needed the leverage.
Her flannel had slipped off one shoulder.
Her hair was loose and wild from the last three times and she hadn't done anything about it and I hadn't wanted her to.
"I will flip you over."
"You keep threatening that."
"I keep meaning it."
She rolled her hips again, slow, deliberate, and I felt my jaw tighten. She watched my face the way she watched everything she found interesting—sharp, cataloguing, entirely too pleased with herself.
"You're doing it on purpose," I said.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Daniela." I put both hands on her hips. Didn't guide her. Just held. "Move."
"I am moving."
"Move like you mean it."
She leaned forward, hands sliding up my chest to my shoulders, and looked down at me with those dark eyes and that mouth and four months of this and I was still not even slightly prepared for her.
"Make me," she said.
I flipped her over.
She yelped and grabbed my shoulders and then laughed—real, full, the one that took over her whole face—and I pressed her into the blanket and looked down at her and felt something so large and specific move through my chest that I had to breathe through it for a second.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi." I pushed her hair back from her face. "You done being a brat?"
"Absolutely not."
"Didn't think so." I shifted my hips and her laugh dissolved into something else entirely, her head tipping back, throat exposed to the February sun.
The creek moved below us, fast and cold. The horses stood quiet in the shade, completely indifferent to us by now. The sky was that thin winter blue, the same one she'd told me she'd never seen before, growing up an hour away and never looking at it right.
She was looking now. Eyes closed, face turned up to the light, both hands in my hair.
I watched her and moved and let myself have it—all of it, the way she felt and the sounds she made and the specific warmth of afternoon sun on her skin and the fact that tomorrow we'd be on a film set and everything would have structure and call sheets and other people, and right now there was none of that.
Just the creek and the horses and the blanket and her.
"Sawyer." My name in her mouth, that particular way she said it when she was close—not performing, not playing, just her. Just Daniela.
"I've got you," I said.
"I know." Her hands tightened in my hair. "I know you do."
I reached between us and her breath caught and her hips lifted to meet me and I felt her start to shake.
"Look at me," I said.
She opened her eyes.
"Stay with me."
"I'm here." Her hands slid to my face, held it. "I'm right here."
Something cracked open in my chest—the same thing that had cracked open at the picnic table three days ago when she'd said I thought about you the whole time into the cold morning air like it cost her something to admit.
It had cost her something. I knew that. I knew who she was before all this—the control she kept, the performance, the careful management of everything she let herself want.
She wasn't managing anything right now.
"I love you," I said. Quiet. Into her face.
Her eyes went bright.
"I love you," she said back. Immediate. Like she'd been waiting for the right moment to say it again and this was it—sun and creek water and a wool blanket and my weight over her and all of it.
I kissed her and she arched up into me and I drove deeper and she broke apart with her fingers twisted in my hair and my name on her mouth and her heels pulling me in like she wasn't ready to let go of a single second of this.
I followed her over with my face pressed to her throat, her name in my mouth, both hands gripped in the blanket on either side of her.
We lay there.
The creek kept moving. A bird called from the cedar on the far bank, sharp and once. Redbird lifted his head from the water trough and looked at us with the weary patience of an animal who had seen everything and had opinions about none of it.
Daniela's fingers were still in my hair. Moving, slow, the way she touched things she was paying attention to.
"Last day," she said. Quiet.
"Last day," I said.
Neither of us moved.
The sun was warm on my back. Underneath me she was warm everywhere. I propped up on one elbow and looked down at her—loose and sun-warm, the flannel half off her shoulder, the creek light catching in her eyes.
"It's not going away," I said. "Whatever this is. It doesn't stop when we're on set."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"No," she said. "It doesn't."
"I just wanted to say that."
"I know." Her hand moved to my jaw. Held it. "I know, Sawyer."
Bishop whinnied from the shade, impatient with the whole enterprise.
She laughed. I did too.
"We should head back," I said.
“Yeah.” She paused. Ran her thumb across my cheek…hummed when I turned my head to kiss her palm. “We should.”
My eyes met hers again. I wanted very, very badly to ask her something I shouldn't.
But she said it first.
“Marry me,” she whispered.
The breath went out of me.
She held my gaze. Chin slightly lifted, the way it always was when she'd said something bold and was committed to it.
"I know," she went on. "I know what that looks like.
My agent is going to lose his mind and the press is going to have a field day and I'm about to be on a billboard and none of that—" She stopped.
Swallowed. "None of that actually matters to me as much as I thought it did.
That's the thing I figured out in Austin.
" Her thumb moved against my jaw. "I was sitting in a five-star hotel room after the best table read of my career and all I wanted was to be in a two-hundred-square-foot trailer with you. "
I didn't say anything.
"I'm going to be impossible," she said. "I need you to know that going in. I'm going to travel and I'm going to have stretches where I'm Daphne for so long I lose the thread back to myself and I'm going to need—" She stopped. "I'm going to need someone who doesn't ask me to choose."
"I know," I said.
"You say that."
"I mean it." I held her face. "I've been watching you for eight months figure out how to be both things at once. I'm not asking you to stop." My thumb moved against her cheekbone. "That would be asking you to be someone you're not…and I would never, Daniela. Never.”
Her breath came out unsteady.
"That's a really good answer," she said.
"I've had time to think about it."
"Since when?"
"December," I said. "The field. When you walked out of Millie's back door in the dark and came straight to me like you already knew where you were going."
She closed her eyes.
Opened them.
"I did know," she said quietly. "That's been the problem the whole time."
I kissed her.
She kissed me back with her whole self in it—no performance, no management, just Daniela in the afternoon sun with creek water and cedar in the air around us and her hands in my hair and the flannel half off her shoulder and everything she was and everything she was going to be all present at once, all of it hers, none of it going anywhere.
When we finally broke apart she was smiling.
"Yes," I said, into it.
She laughed—surprised, like she'd forgotten she'd asked. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." I pushed her hair back. "Obviously yes. To letting you be whoever you are as long as I'm who you come home to.”
She kissed me again like she couldn't help herself—then she twined her fingers with mine.
“Sorry for the impromptu ask,” she mumbled. “I don't have a ring?—”
I was already propping myself on my elbow so I could reach up to take off my necklace. Daniela’s eyes widened and she went to sit up, but I was too fast, pressing the medal into her hand.
Closing her fingers over it.
“But Sawyer—” she said. “Your mom…”
“My mom would be thrilled for you to have it,” I said. “Marrying a good Catholic girl? She wouldn't believe it.”
She laughed. “I'm a horrible Catholic girl.”
I pulled her hand to my lips to brush a kiss to her knuckles. “You're perfect.”
She looked down at the medal in her palm.
The St. Christopher—patron of travelers.
My mother had worn it her whole life, and I'd worn it since the day Uncle Adam had pressed it into my hand at the funeral, thirteen years old and not understanding yet what keeping it meant.
I'd worn it through every job, every state, every long stretch of road between here and wherever the work was.
It had been around my neck in New Mexico when she'd first noticed it. I remembered her eyes on it at the bar, at the trailer, that first night.
She'd been paying attention even then.
"It's not a ring," I said.
"I don't care about a ring." Her fingers closed tighter around it. "I care about—" She stopped. Looked up at me. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah," I said. "I've never been more sure of anything."
She opened her hand and looked at it again, the little silver medal warm from my skin, the chain pooled around it. Then she held it out to me.
"Put it on me," she said.
I took it. She turned, gathering her hair up off her neck, holding it out of the way, and I reached around and fastened the clasp. She let her hair fall and touched the medal where it sat against her collarbone, just below the hollow of her throat.
She turned back around.
"I'm engaged,” she whispered.
"You are."
"To a horse trainer."
"Horse master," I said. "It's on the call sheet."
She laughed, surprised out of it, and the stillness broke into something warmer and she leaned forward and pressed her forehead to mine.
"To a horse master," she said. "On a ranch. In the Texas Hill Country."
"That okay with you?"
"It's more than okay with me." Her hand found my jaw. "It's everything I didn't know I was looking for…and everything I want to come home to.”