Chapter 23
LUKE
Nobody knows about this place but me. I have never had a reason to change that until right now.
The trail is barely a trail. Deer track, maybe. A line through the willows that I have walked enough times to find without thinking, and I am not thinking now.
Mags follows close. Her sandals are somewhere back at the picnic and her bare feet find the stones I step over without me telling her where they are.
The river noise builds as we come down through the cottonwoods, the water deeper here where the bank curves and the current slows into something that doesn't sound like the rest of the river. Quieter. Private.
"Where are we going?" she asks.
"You'll see."
"That's not an answer."
"It's accurate."
I hold a branch back for her. She ducks under it and her hair catches the light coming through the canopy. I look at the ground for a second. I have been looking at her for six straight hours and none of it has helped.
The bend opens.
A curve in the river where the water pools deep and green over smooth stones.
A flat rock on the bank, big enough for two.
Cottonwoods on three sides, old ones, their trunks silver and scarred, the canopy so thick the light comes through in shifting coins on the surface.
You can't see the ranch from here. You can't see anything except water and stone and the mountains going violet above the tree line.
Mags stops. She looks at the water, at the rock, at the light, and then she looks at me.
"Luke."
"Yeah?"
"How long have you been coming to this place?"
"Since I was nine. My dad brought me down here on a morning when I was supposed to be stacking hay. Sat me on that rock and said this is the part of the land you only show to people who matter."
Her eyes change. Something behind them moves and settles and I watch her understand exactly what I am doing, bringing her here, and I watch her not look away from it.
"Have you brought anyone else?"
"No."
The word sits between us over the sound of the river.
Mags is on me before I finish the silence.
Her hands find the hem of my shirt and her mouth finds mine and the kiss is not soft, not careful, not anything that belongs in a place this quiet.
She pulls my shirt up and puts both hands flat on my chest. Then she drags them down, slow, over my stomach, her fingers tracing every ridge of muscle like she is memorizing the topography.
Her breath changes against my mouth when she reaches my belt line.
"Sit down," she says against my mouth.
"Where?"
"The rock."
I sit. She follows me down, her knees on either side of my hips, the sundress riding up her thighs, and she is warm everywhere and the pressure of her against me is the thing I have been waiting for since I walked out of the river and saw her watching me with her lemonade going forgotten in her hand.
"You've been staring at me," she says. Her fingers are in my hair. She tugs once and my breath goes short.
"I told you I was."
"You weren't subtle."
"Wasn't trying to be."
She rocks forward once, slow, and my hands tighten on her thighs hard enough that she makes a sound that rewires something behind my sternum.
I pull her hips down against me and let her feel how subtle I haven't been. Her forehead drops to mine. Her fingers tighten in my hair.
"Someone could come looking."
"They won't."
"You sound very sure."
"Mason watched us walk into the willows together. He's not going to follow up."
"Because he's polite?"
"Because Lucy will physically restrain him."
She pulls back far enough to look at me, and her eyes are that green I can't get used to, moss and gold, darker than they were at the picnic.
"You planned this."
"I planned the location. You're the one who told me to sit down and then climbed into my lap."
"You looked like you needed direction."
"I needed something. Direction is one word for it."
She bites her lower lip and I am done talking.
I pull the sundress over her head. Thin straps, arms up, gone. She is bare everywhere. I have known since noon. I had to talk to Cal about irrigation for ten minutes to recover.
"Jesus Christ, Mags."
"You knew."
"I suspected. Suspecting and confirming are different experiences."
I put my mouth on her collarbone and work down.
She arches into me, her hands gripping my shoulders, and the sound she makes is low and private and belongs to this river.
I take my time with her breasts, my thumbs first, then my mouth, and she retaliates by dragging her nails down my back hard enough to leave marks I'll feel tomorrow in the saddle.
She is rocking against me in a rhythm that has my hands shaking on her skin, which hasn't happened since the first time.
"Luke." Her voice has dropped into the register that means I am doing something right. "Luke, I need you to stop being patient."
"I've been patient all day."
"I know. I watched. It was very impressive. Stop."
I laugh against her skin, and the laugh surprises me because I am not a man who laughs during this. But her hands are already on my belt and the metal sound of the buckle in this quiet place does something to the back of my brain that I will not be recovering from.
"You wear too many layers for a man in July," she says.
"I'll take notes."
She gets my jeans open. Her hand wraps around me and my hips jerk up and I say her name in a voice I don't recognize.
"Tell me," she says, her mouth against my ear.
"Tell you what?"
"You know what. You always know. The running commentary. I want it here."
I grip the back of her neck. Pull her close enough that my mouth is at her ear and my voice is low enough to live under the river.
"You sat on that blanket for six hours in a sundress with nothing under it, knowing what that would do to me.
Every time I caught you looking, you held my eyes and you didn't stop, and I have been hard since noon, Mags.
Since noon. And I am going to remember the way you look right now, on this rock, on my father's river, for the rest of my goddamn life. "
"Prove it," she says, and sinks onto me.
The sound we both make is not quiet. It hits the water and the cottonwoods and the mountain above us and I don't care. I don't care about anything except her heat and the way her nails dig into my shoulders when she takes all of me and holds still for one breath.
"Move," I tell her.
She moves.
Her rhythm is fast and graceless and exactly right. Six hours of watching compressed into contact, and I meet her on every stroke, my hands on her hips bruising tight, the flat rock solid under us and the river running three feet away and the sky going gold through the leaves above her head.
Her hair is everywhere. In her face, across my hands, catching the light in that copper I tracked through the rodeo crowd, and I pull it back with one fist so I can see her eyes when she gets close.
"Look at me," I say. "Right here."
She does. Her mouth is open and her eyes are locked on mine, and I feel her start to go.
"Come for me, Red. Right here on this river. Let me hear you."
She comes with my name in her mouth and the sound of the water under both of us, and her body draws tight around me in a way that whites out my peripheral vision, and I follow her with my face buried against her neck.
I breathe into her soft hair. "This place. You. This whole damn day. You ruined me."
She catches every word.
We stay like that. Her breath against my collarbone, my hands still on her hips, the river three feet away running the same direction it's been running since my grandfather first put cattle on this ground. Her heartbeat is so close to the surface I can feel it in my palms.
"Your father was right about this place," she says.
"He was right about most things."
She kisses me, slow, and I let the kiss be what it is.
Not heat this time. Something underneath it that I am not going to name on a riverbank in July because naming it means knowing what it costs, and right now, with her mouth on mine and the cottonwoods holding both of us, I am not ready to be that honest.
We get dressed. She finds a leaf in her hair and holds it up as evidence. I straighten the sundress where it twisted and she watches my hands on the fabric.
The walk back is quiet. Not empty quiet.
Full quiet. My hand on her lower back, her shoulder against my arm, the trail climbing through the willows as the voices from the picnic resolve into distinct conversations.
Mason and Viv tangled together on a blanket, not caring who sees.
Lucy telling Nora that sleep is not optional. Cal asking who moved the ice.
Lucy spots us coming through the willows. Her gaze drops to my hand on Mags's back and she doesn't say a word. She just looks at the sky, shakes her head, and mutters, "Two down," to no one in particular.
I look at the woman beside me. The red hair still tangled from my hands, the bare feet on the stone path, the small smile she doesn't know she's wearing.
Three weeks. She hasn't mentioned Missoula in three weeks. I've been listening for it the way you listen for a sound that means something's wrong, and it hasn't come.
The south pasture rises above us in the last light. McAllister land since 1947. My grandfather ran cattle on it, my father bled for it, and I held it alone for three years when there was no one else to.
The Cutter family has a long memory. Every fence post, every easement, every handshake agreement my dad made in forty years of ranching this ground. They remember the south pasture boundary like a debt.
But I am looking at Mags walking barefoot through the willows with cottonwood leaves in her hair, and for the first time in five years, the thing I'm afraid of losing is not the land.