Chapter 10 #3
"Make me."
I covered his mouth with my hand. His tongue came out and licked my palm, and he laughed against it. I bit his shoulder, but he only laughed harder. I drove into him and felt my own release easing the way and lost what was left of my mind.
"Touch yourself."
He wrapped a hand around his cock and started stroking in rhythm with my thrusts, and I watched his fist work over his shoulder, watched pre-cum bead at the tip and slick the head and run down over his knuckles.
I took my hand off his mouth and brought it down to join his, and he let me.
Our fingers tangled around him. He was hard again, fully hard, and slick, and the sounds coming out of him were past words now.
"Gonna —"
"Yeah."
"Where —"
"On your stomach. On the sheets. Anywhere. I don't care."
He came again, and it was less than the first time, but it was more for being earned.
His whole body shook through it, and his ass clenched around me, and I followed him over, the second orgasm building from somewhere I didn't know I had it.
I drove in deep and held there and emptied into him a second time and bit the back of his neck through it.
After, we collapsed.
I didn't pull out. I lay there with my chest against his back and my arm around him and my softening cock still in him, and he reached back and put his hand on the back of my thigh and held me there.
Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke.
The lamp threw long shadows. The cat scratched once at the door and gave up.
After a long time, I pulled out. Slowly. He hissed. I pressed my hand against the small of his back and apologized without saying anything.
I should have gotten up. I should have found a towel, cleaned us both off, put some distance between his body and mine before the heat faded and the thinking started. That was what I did. That was how it worked. You fucked, and you cleaned up and you went back to being separate people.
I rolled onto my back beside him instead.
The bed was too small for two men our size. His shoulder and hip were pressed against mine. The sheets were a mess, and the room smelled like sex and sweat.
"You got a crack in your ceiling," Winston said, eventually.
"I know."
"Looks like it's getting worse."
"Probably is."
"You gonna patch it?"
"Been meaning to for two years."
"That's a long time to mean to do something."
"It's a small crack."
He let it go. The cat came out from under the bed, jumped up, walked across both of us, and curled up against the back of Winston's knees. He laughed softly.
After a while, he turned his head on the pillow. I kept my eyes on the ceiling.
"Tell me about your brother," he said.
The warmth in my chest went cold.
I should have expected it. Winston was a man who found the soft spots and pressed on them, and he'd been circling Chance since the first day, since the shack, since he'd asked how long's it been and I'd given him eyes instead of an answer.
"You read his file," I said.
"I read a file." His voice had stripped of the Ranger authority and the folksy misdirection both, just the way a man sounded when he was lying in someone else's bed and asking something real. "A file says lightning strike, ten years, UNM Hospital. A file doesn't say anything that matters."
I stared at the crack in the ceiling.
"Chance is my brother," I said. "He's in a bed in Albuquerque.
He's been in that bed since I was eighteen.
A machine breathes for him and a tube feeds him, and once a month I drive up and sit in a chair next to him and talk to him about the ranch because the doctors say he might be able to hear me.
" My throat ached. "That's what matters. "
Winston was quiet for a long time.
"What was he like?" he asked.
The photo on the nightstand was face down where it had fallen when I'd shoved Winston into the wall. Chance's grin pressed against the wood, invisible, but I could see it anyway. I could always see it.
"Loud," I said. "He was loud. Laughed too much. Talked too much. Picked fights with people twice his size because he thought it was funny." My throat ached. "He would've liked you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. He had a thing for men who ran their mouths."
Winston laughed once, quietly. His shoulder pressed warm against mine.
"What happened the night of the lightning?" he asked.
I closed my eyes.
I remembered the rain. The man we worked for had told us to stay out in it. Chance had grinned at me and told me to stop worrying.
Then the flash came. The sound followed. The air smelled like something burnt.
And my brother was on the ground, not moving, not breathing. His heart stopped for six minutes. I spent every one of them on my knees in the mud with my hands on his chest, screaming at him to come back.
"I don't want to talk about it," I said.
The word sat heavy in the dark room.
Winston didn't push. He just lay there beside me, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and let the silence hold what I'd given him and what I wouldn't.
Then he reached over and picked up the photo from the nightstand. He turned it face up and set it back, careful, propping it against the flowers.
I reached over and turned off the lamp.
The dark settled around us. Winston's breathing slowed, deepened, and went heavy against my shoulder. He fell asleep easily. He rested his hand on my chest. His weight shifted toward me in the narrow bed, warm and solid and trusting in a way that made me want to shove him onto the floor.
I didn't shove him onto the floor.
I lay there in the dark with his hand on my chest and his breath on my shoulder and the photo of my brother propped against stolen flowers and I thought about the shack. About the ridge. About my finger on the trigger and the long time I'd spent not pulling it.
I'd kept him alive because I'd wanted to keep him alive.
The rest had been Rafe's words coming out of my own head.
Winston's hand rose and fell on my chest with each breath I took.
I put my hand over his and left it there.
Mine, I thought.
I waited for the part of me that always pulled back from the word to pull back from it now.
It didn't.
I closed my hand around his and held on.