Chapter 10 Julian
We’re both dripping.
The tile’s soaked under our feet, the mat bunched where we kicked it. He’s shaking and not from cold. I wrap a towel around him, around me, around both of us, and half-carry him out of the bathroom, and his hand fists in the hem of the towel at my hip like he’s worried I’ll put him down.
I’m not putting him down.
“Your room,” I say against his wet hair.
He nods. The hall is cold after the steam.
It’s an old house with old floorboards, there are drafts under the doors.
He leans into me the three steps it takes.
I nudge his door open with my shoulder because my hands are full of him, and he pushes off me just enough to get us through it, and then he’s leaning again, forehead against my collarbone, breath hot on my skin.
I’ve never been in this room.
The window over the bed is west-facing with a view over the hills and there’s a folded quilt at the foot, old and much-mended.
A photograph on the dresser I don’t look at.
Boots against the wall. A plaid shirt on the back of a chair.
It’s a bedroom. It’s his bedroom. I take it in in pieces because I’m not looking at the room. I’m looking at him.
I kick the door shut behind us.
He makes a sound when it closes. It might be relief. Or it could be the fact that I’ve just dropped the towels, both of them, and I’m backing him toward the bed with my hands on his hips.
“Julian.”
“I’ve got you.”
The backs of his knees hit the mattress and he sits, and I go with him, and we end up with him on his back and me over him, one hand braced beside his head, the other still gripping his hip like I’m worried he’s going to disappear if I let go.
He looks up at me.
His eyes are wrecked, his pupils huge. The gray of them has gone to a rim. His hair is plastered to his forehead in dark points and there’s still water running down his throat in a line I want to follow with my mouth.
I follow the instinct, dipping my head to his skin.
He makes a sound I haven’t heard from him before.
I kiss under his jaw, along the long muscle of his neck, down to the notch at the base of his throat where the water’s pooled, and when I put my tongue there and press he bucks up against me, hard, a whole-body thing, and his hand flies to the back of my head and holds.
“Keep going.”
“I am.”
“Keep—”
I keep going.
I work down. His collarbone. The hollow under it. The flat of his chest, muscle corded from ranch work, skin still shower-damp and hot under my mouth. He’s breathing through his teeth. When I get my mouth on one of his nipples he swears, loud, and his other hand fists in the sheet.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh—”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I do it again. I use my teeth a little. His hips come up off the bed and I put my hand flat on his stomach to press him down and he makes a sound like I’ve killed him.
“Julian.”
“Still here.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.”
He can. I move lower. His stomach jumps under my mouth. His thighs are shaking before I’ve touched them, and when I put my hand on his hip and my mouth on the crease of his thigh, he says, low and broken, “please,” and it’s the first please he’s ever given me and it almost undoes me.
I take him in my mouth.
He shouts. Actually shouts, heels digging into the mattress, back off the bed, one hand scrabbling for something to hold and finding my shoulder, gripping hard enough I’ll have bruises and I don’t care.
He’s hot and he’s leaking and he tastes of skin and salt and the green note of him, the Wyatt note, so sharp this close I have to breathe through my nose.
I set a rhythm. Nothing fancy. He’s not going to last. I don’t want him to.
He’s making a continuous sound now. Wordless. Climbing. His hand moves from my shoulder to my hair and grips and I let him pull me where he wants, and he wants deeper, and I give him deeper, and his thighs clamp around my ribs.
“Julian—” A warning. Polite, even now. “Julian, I’m—”
I go down on him and hum and he comes into my mouth.
It goes on. Longer than I expect. His whole body locks, shakes, locks again. I work him through it, swallow, keep my hand on his hip because he’s moving in ways that could throw us both off the bed if I let him.
When it’s over, he’s limp.
I come up his body slowly. Kiss his stomach.
Kiss his sternum. Kiss the hollow of his throat where he’s slick with sweat now, not water.
His eyes are closed. His chest is heaving.
I brace over him and look at him and he’s beautiful like this, wrecked, mouth open, and I have to put my forehead against his for a second just to get my own breathing under control.
He opens his eyes.
“You,” he says. His voice is gone.
“Me.”
“Come here.”
“I am here.”
“Closer.”
I go closer. I press the whole length of myself down onto him, skin to skin, and he makes a sound in his throat that’s pure relief, and his arms come up around my back and he holds me there, tight, the way you hold something you think you might lose.
We lie like that.
His heart is hammering under mine. His breathing slows. The room is still gray at the window. Outside, somewhere, a cow is complaining about something and neither of us cares.
He turns his head.
It’s not a big movement. His face is against the side of my neck and he turns it a fraction, an inch at most, and his mouth is suddenly on the skin over my pulse and his nose is pressed to my jaw and he breathes in, deep, and holds it.
My hand goes still on his ribs.
He’s scenting me.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe, for a second.
He takes another slow breath with his face in my neck and lets it out against my skin and I feel it, the thing I didn’t understand was coming — every muscle in his body lets go at once.
His shoulders drop. His jaw, which has been set since I walked into his kitchen, goes soft under my ear.
His hand on my back uncurls and lies flat.
He says, very quietly, “You smell — “
“I know.”
“You smell like — “
“I know, Wyatt.”
He turns his face into my neck further. Takes another breath. Takes another.
I lie over him and let him breathe me in and I do not think about anything else.
I make myself not think about anything else.
The laptop in the next room. The project list. The firm.
None of it. There is a man under me who hasn’t let anyone this close in his life, and he is scenting me, and I am not going to put anything else in this room right now.
After a while he says, “I want — “
“Tell me.”
“You.” He breathes it. “In me. I want — “
My body answers before I do. He feels it against his hip and makes a small pleased sound and gets a hand between us, low, and wraps it around me and squeezes once, learning, and I have to put my forehead down against his shoulder and grit my teeth.
“Wyatt.”
“Is this — “
“Yes.”
“You’ll tell me if I — “
“You’re fine. You’re perfect.”
He makes that sound again. The small pleased one. His hand gets bolder.
I let him learn. I let him run his hand up the length of me, slow, and then back down, and I let him put his thumb to the head and feel the slickness there, and I let him go still for a second while he works out what to do with his fingers, and when he gets it I kiss the corner of his mouth because he’s frowning with concentration and it’s the sweetest thing I have ever seen.
“Good,” I manage. “God, yes. Like that.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah.”
He does it until I have to stop him. I catch his wrist. Kiss his palm. Put his hand up by his head.
“Turn over for me?”
He goes still. For half a second I think I’ve moved too fast — then I see it isn’t that, it’s nerves, it’s the specific nerves of a man who has never done this before, and I get my mouth to his ear and say, low, “Whatever you want. We don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“Sure?”
“Julian.” A breath. “Yes.”
He turns.
The quilt’s rucked under his hip. The gray light from the window catches the long line of his back, the dip of his waist, the muscle of him. I put my hand on the small of his back and he shivers under it. I lean down and kiss the nape of his neck and he makes a low sound.
“Tell me if anything — “
“I will.”
I take my time.
He’s slick for me. His body knows what it wants even if his head is tripping on the newness of it.
I work him open slowly, one finger then two, and he pushes back against my hand after the first minute and says, “more,” and I give him more, and I watch the muscle in his back go tight and then loose, tight and then loose, and listen to the sounds he makes, small bitten-off sounds he’s trying to keep in and can’t.
“Stop trying to be quiet.”
“I’m not — “
“You are. Don’t. There’s no one to hear.”
He stops trying. The sound he makes when I curl my fingers is not quiet at all and it goes straight through me.
When he’s ready he says so. Just the word. “Now.”
I line up. I push in slow, the way he needs, watching his face in the pillow. His mouth falls open. His eyes close. He takes me in long, even breaths, and when I’m fully in he exhales against the pillow like he’s been holding that breath for years.
“Oh,” he says. Just that.
“Yeah.”
“Move.”
I move.
Slow at first. Careful, because this is his first time and because he is my match and because the chemistry is so loud in this room I can barely think.
He rocks back to meet me after the second stroke.
The third. By the fifth he’s taking what he wants, one hand braced on the headboard, and the care goes out of me because he doesn’t need it.
I get a hand under his hip and haul him up. He groans. I find the angle and he shouts — properly this time, into the pillow, one clean syllable — and after that I’m not thinking about anything.
The bed creaks. The old frame of it. I have one hand at his hip and the other spread across his shoulder blade and I can feel his whole body working with mine. His breathing is ragged. His skin is hot under my palms. The scent of him, of us, thick enough to drink.
“Julian.”
“Here.”
“I’m going to — “
“Yes. Go.”
He goes. He comes with his face in the pillow and a sound I’ll hear for the rest of my life, and the clench of him around me drags me with him, and I fold down over his back with my mouth against his nape and let go.
After, I don’t let him go.
I ease out carefully and pull him back against my chest and he lets me.
This I hadn’t expected. A man who has held every person in his life at arm’s length, who fought me for a week on every small thing, and now he tucks himself against me under my arm and puts his hand flat on my sternum over my heart and breathes.
“Okay?” I say.
“Mm.”
“Wyatt.”
“Mm.”
I kiss the top of his head.
We lie there for a long time. Long enough that his breathing goes even and I think he’s asleep, and then his hand on my chest flexes once and I know he isn’t. The light at the window’s turned. Still gray, but a brighter gray, the kind that happens before the sun finds a gap in the cloud.
He shifts.
Turns his head on my shoulder. Tilts his chin up. Offers me the side of his throat again, the way he did before, deliberate this time, knowing what it does.
I put my mouth there.
He breathes out long and slow. I feel it leave him.
Whatever he’d been carrying when he walked into the bathroom — the thirty hours before it, the year before it, whatever else — goes out on that breath.
His hand on my chest goes heavier. His body against mine is, for the first time since I met him, not braced against anything.
I hold him.
“Don’t,” he says, into the quiet.
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Good.”
The sun finds its gap. A square of it comes in through the window and lands on the quilt, and I see properly for the first time what the quilt is — worked squares of different fabrics, one a faded plaid that I recognize from a shirt on the back of the chair, another a soft washed yellow that looks like it used to be a baby blanket, the stitching on one square crooked where someone’s learned on the job.
He feels me looking.
“My mother made it,” he says.
I make a listening noise, not wanting to interrupt. He’s actually talking to me. I don’t want to risk breaking the spell.
“She didn’t sew. She had a friend in town teach her one winter. This was the only one she finished. She used to say it was the only one she was ever going to finish and she was going to get her money’s worth out of it.”
“It’s a good quilt.”
“Mm.”
There’s a beat.
“She grew up here,” he says.
“In this house?”
“On this land. The house is newer. She was born in the one that used to stand where the barn is. She used to walk me out to the west pasture when I was a kid and tell me which cottonwoods were there when she was small. There’s one with a split in it from lightning and she used to hide in the split when she was six. ”
I don’t say anything. I turn my head a little so my cheek is against the top of his hair.
“She took on a second mortgage,” he says. “When she got sick. I didn’t know. She didn’t want me to. She thought she’d pay it down once she was back on her feet. She didn’t get back on her feet.”
“Wyatt.”
“It’s okay. I’m — this isn’t — I’m telling you.”
“Tell me.”
He breathes. His hand on my chest goes still and settles.
“I’ve been running at the edge since I took it over,” he says. “Cattle. The boys. The payments. I can make the payments when things are normal. I was making them. Last winter was bad but I was making them.” He pauses. “Then the water.”
“The water.”
“Our aquifer runs under the ridge and south under the pasture. We have a right to draw on it. Everyone out here does. If Linden’s project goes in, the drawdown from the development radius is going to pull the water table low enough that our well goes intermittent in the dry months.
I won’t be able to run cattle on the south pasture.
I won’t be able to make the payments. And I’ll lose the place. ”
I’ve gone very still.
The last thing I want to hear in this room is the word Linden. It’s not my fault who I work for. I don’t even think it’s my fault that Wyatt doesn’t know. What possible reason would I have to tell him? Not when I’m leaving in a week.
Right now, I don’t want to leave. I feel perfect just where I am and suddenly, keeping this secret feels like a betrayal.
I have the span of a breath to say so.
I don’t.