Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
MADDOX
When I get another notification that Austin had canceled her show for the third night in a row, I text her again.
Maddox
You gonna tell me you’re spending the night with Kenny again or are you gonna fess up to what’s wrong?
Her response comes quickly.
Tex
You know, it’s customary to include your name when you randomly text someone who doesn’t have your number. I would’ve responded this morning if I knew it was you.
I want to wring my own neck.
Maddox
Sorry. Why’d you cancel your show again?
Tex
Why’re you keeping tabs on me, Mustached Rancher? Thought you said you weren’t gonna watch anymore.
God, she’s such a brat. She can’t ever just answer me, she’s always gotta give me a hard time. I realize I’m smiling at my phone like Tyler does when my sister’s texting him and force it off my face out of principle. I’m thirty-goddamn-two.
Maddox
You’re being a brat again.
Tex
Part of my appeal.
A second later, a call comes through.
“I thought your generation hated phone calls,” I answer.
She huffs out a laugh that sounds unintentional and I can’t help it when the stupid grin comes back, just because I made her smile. “And I thought your generation was technologically incompetent, but you got yourself around a cam girl site easily enough.”
“I’m not that old, Tex.”
“Are you sure about that? You were trying awfully hard to convince me there was such a large age gap between us,” she reminds me, and I feel my face fall a bit.
I’m pretty sure I’d hurt her feelings when I said I wouldn’t sleep with her. I’ve replayed the moment in my head a million times since Saturday, and everything she said to me after that had lacked her flirty playfulness.
“Just so you know, I wasn’t trying to imply anything when I said I wasn’t gonna sleep with you,” I tell her and I swear I hear the smack of her mouth opening to get defensive, but I don’t give her a chance.
“I wasn’t turning you down to be mean. I just meant there are an awful lot of reasons it’s a bad idea. ”
I wanted to add that attractive was too tame of a word for how downright sexy I thought she was, but I figured it wasn’t really in the best interest. Or at least not in the best interest of my plan to keep us from knocking boots.
She’s quiet and I hate it because I have no clue what’s running through her mind right now, but I figure it’s probably not good. “Can we FaceTime?” I ask her.
“No,” she replies, a bit too quickly. “I don’t want to see your ugly mug tonight.”
I play along even though something about her quick response doesn’t feel right. “Damn. I wanted to show you how pale my upper lip is since I shaved off my mustache.”
She gasps as though I just told her that her bar went up in flames. “You’d better be joking, Maddox Clyde!” she says in her best impression of Mama.
“Guess you’d have to FaceTime me to see,” I reply, leaning back against the headboard. I put the call on speaker and my thumb hovers over the button that’ll add video to the call.
Austin doesn’t reply right away. “Not tonight,” she finally says. “I’ve already taken my makeup off.”
“You think I give a fuck if you’re wearing that shit?”
“And my clothes.”
I couldn’t really argue with that, considering that also didn’t bode well for my No Knocking Boots plan, but the idea of her naked was already waking my dick up.
“Why are your clothes off?” I ask, and my voice sounds ridiculously pouty for a 32-year-old man.
“I sleep naked.” Her flirty tone is back, the real one this time.
I groan and she giggles. I’ve never heard Austin giggle before. I wonder what it would look like in person. The sound of it alone makes me smile again.
“Then why’d you call me if you were trying to sleep?”
She hums. “I was in the middle of a little wind-down activity, actually. You and I do it the opposite. You jack off to keep yourself up. I play with myself to wind down.”
Fuck. “There’s no way doing that winds you down.”
“Sounds like you’re not having very good orgasms, Rancher. I get so boneless and melty when I come. It makes for the best sleep. There’s been a time or two I’ve fallen asleep before I even turned my vibrator off. It’s just laying there, dead as a doornail on my bed when I wake up.”
I have so many questions and none of them are appropriate to ask her.
I can’t think of a single time I came and was that exhausted by it.
Honestly, that sounds like a headache. Getting rid of morning wood just to want to fall right back to sleep?
But then, I imagine there’s a lot of difference between a hand and a vibrator in the orgasm department.
“Rest in peace, I broke him. At least he died doing what he loved: listening to his favorite cam girl talk about getting off.”
“I’m not dead,” I huff, clearing my throat to get rid of the rasp in my voice. Austin just laughs at me some more. “You never looked ‘boneless’ when you did it on the site.”
Austin snorts. “Half of those orgasms were fake, Maddox.”
I stay silent to avoid asking the question I really, really wanna fucking ask since it might just kill me if I don’t like the answer.
I think her eyes were sort of… glazed over and tired-looking the only time I saw her face through the camera, but I was pretty focused on the identity clusterfuck so I don’t remember all of the details perfectly.
“No, none of the ones with you were,” she answers, reading my mind anyway. My breath of relief must be audible to her because she snorts again, following it up with a mumbled, “Men, I swear.”
I can’t even get offended because she was right that I was wondering.
“It’s because you always chose the vibrators that have clit stimulation and the rest of them don’t. It’s not a testament to your voice or anything.”
I grin because it damn sure is a testament to my voice if she feels the need to get defensive. “Alright, Tex, whatever you say.”
“I’m finding it hard to believe you’ve never seen a woman looking sleepy after she comes,” she says, ignoring me so that she can continue on with her favorite pastime of poking fun instead.
“I don’t see many women come,” I admit, wracking my brain for when the last time I stayed past the orgasm was. I don’t fuck around a lot and when I do, it’s pretty point-blank.
Austin busts out laughing. “Damn, Rancher, I didn’t think you were that bad.”
I’m lost for a second until I mentally backtrack on the conversation and realize what I’d said while my mind was elsewhere. “Shut up. I meant I don’t have a lot of sex. When I have sex, they come, Tex,” I assure her, though now I’m kind of wondering.
“Sure, Maddie,” she teases.
“They do. Just not like… that. Which means they’re faking it like you did on your shows or you’re fucking with me about all of this.”
She hums. “Probably faking it,” she agrees with no sympathy at all, and I can’t tell if she’s joking or not. “But back to what’s important. What do you mean, you don’t have a lot of sex?”
“I don’t know how it could mean anything but what I said.”
“How often? When was the last time?”
“And you talk about me keeping tabs on you,” I joke, realizing too late that maybe telling the woman I’m into that I’m apparently not great in bed wasn’t the way to go. Though it benefits the plan, I guess. “I don’t know. A year or two ago.”
Austin gasps like I just told her I kill kittens in my spare time. “There’s no fucking way.”
“Sex really isn’t that great. I don’t get why you and Colt like it so much,” I say, then I realize that sounded harsh.
“I don’t mean that in a bad way. There’s nothing wrong with liking sex.
It’s more of a chore than anything to me—making sure you have a condom in your wallet, going to the bar, finding someone to take home, making sure you’re both on the same page about it all, the whole town gossip—”
“Wait,” she cuts me off and her voice sounds strange. “You’re telling me you don’t enjoy sex?”
“Sometimes I do, but most of the time, it’s just to relieve tension,” I say.
I haven’t talked about sex with someone this openly since locker room exaggerations in high school.
I know my sex drive is low, but I’ve never thought it was an issue before.
Now, I’m pretty sure it’s making Austin lose her attraction to me.
“Are you gonna say something?” I finally ask when the silence gets too to be too much.
“I’m thinking,” she says.
“About what?”
“If I’ve ever seen you picking up a woman at Quitter’s.”
“You haven’t. The last time I did was before you were old enough to work there.” I don’t dwell on that for very long.
“There’s no way,” she decides with conviction. “Men need sex. Trust me, I make half my living off of it.”
“Some men, maybe, but—”
“But not all men?” she asks, and her tone is dripping with venom I recognize from my sisters and Mama.
“But not me,” I reply gently, not wanting her to think I stand with any of the ideals that phrase is usually tied to.
The silence is heavy for a little too long, but then she finally says, “I guess it makes sense that you’ve never witnessed it then, because it’s sort of a… full body experience.”
It takes me a second to realize she’s returned to the orgasm discussion we were having before I derailed it with my terrible sex life.
“Most of a woman’s orgasm is in her mind, so if you're just having super transactional sex without any sort of intimacy, she’s probably coming, but she’s definitely not having those types of orgasms. They really only happen when a woman’s comfortable enough to let go completely, and without intimacy, it’d feel too vulnerable. ”
“So I’m bad at sex,” I deadpan. Not a huge fan of the way she said ‘probably’ before ‘coming.’
“No, just at intimacy,” she diagnoses cheerfully.
We stay up a bit longer and she tries to talk me into phone sex, but despite how rock solid my cock is, I turn her down. She hangs up soon after, a little extra bratty about it like I knew she would be.
I sit there for a long time after, staring out the window but not really seeing much, my mind whirling. Tonight made me sure of something that I’d wondered about for a bit now.
Austin Taylor uses sex like a weapon.
I’m not judging her for it, but it does make me mad as hell, because that sort of thing doesn’t usually just come from nowhere. A person doesn’t just start having sex and immediately decide to use it against people.
I get the feeling that she’s been hurt. Badly.
And the way she made a point to bring up how unimpressed she is by men multiple times during our conversation, like she was begging me to get defensive and prove her right, has me thinking the worst.