Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Presley
Thunder didn't come to supper, and that's how I end up making the worst good decision of my life.
It's a bunkhouse night, the whole club and half the old ladies packed into the big room for Bex's chili and too much noise.
I only go because staying home alone in my cabin feels worse than being frozen out in a crowd.
I sit at the end of the table where Grace doesn't have to look at me and I eat what I can, and watch the door.
He never came through it.
Blaze said something to Spur, not meaning anything by it, just talk over the cornbread. "Thunder's holed up. Says his hip's got him laid out. Told him to eat and he told me where to put it."
A laugh.
"Raine's at Lou's with that little girl from her class, so he's ridin' the pain out alone, stubborn son of a bitch."
Ridin' the pain out alone.
I lasted about twenty minutes after hearing them talk about him.
I told myself it was nothing.
I told myself I check on hurt animals all the time, that a man who dumped a gate on himself two days ago needs someone to check on him.
I told myself a lot of things on the drive to the back of the property.
Not one of them was true, and some part of me knew it, because I put on lip balm at the stop sign that isn't there.
His truck's in the drive and the cabin lights are low.
He doesn't answer when I knock.
That's what does it.
That's what takes it from a bad idea to a locked-in one, because Thunder always answers.
Thunder's a man who knows where every person on this ranch is at all times, and a Thunder who doesn't answer his own door tells me something’s wrong.
"Thunder?"
I try the knob. It's unlocked.
"It's me. You didn't come to supper, I'm just?—"
"In here."
His voice comes from the back of the cabin, rough, and under the roughness there's something I've never heard in it before.
"Presley. Don't—" A pause. "Hell. Back here."
I follow it down the hall past Raine's room with the horse posters to the big bathroom at the end, the one he built out when he redid the cabin, and I stop in the doorway.
He's in the tub.
The big jetted one, sunk into the tile, full of steaming water gone still because the jets have shut off on their timer.
He's sitting in it up to his waist with his forearms braced on the sides and his jaw tight.
His face gone gray at the edges with pain, and he looks up at me with an expression I’ve never once seen on this man.
He's embarrassed.
"Ran a hot bath for the hip," he says flatly. "Heat's supposed to help the muscle. Seemed real smart about an hour ago."
His jaw works. "Can't get up out of it. Leg won't take the push and there's nothing to grab that'll hold my weight. Been sitting here in cooling water like a damn beached whale waitin' on the water to give me back some give."
I should laugh.
Any other night I might.
But there's nothing funny about the gray in his face or the careful way he's holding himself so the hip doesn't spasm.
There's nothing funny about how much it’s killing this man to tell me he can’t get up.
"Okay." I'm already rolling my sleeves. "Okay, we'll get you up. Let me?—"
"You don't have to look at me like?—"
"I'm not looking at you like anything." I crouch at the side of the tub. "You want to get decent first, or you want out? Because I can step out and you can wrap a towel, or we can skip the part where you pretend I've got delicate sensibilities."
His mouth twitches, the first crack in the gray. "It's nothin' you haven't seen before, rattlesnake. My place, my tub. I don't have a modest bone left in my body and you know it better than most."
Rattlesnake.
He hasn't called me that to my face in a while.
It goes down my spine warm and I hate that it does. I cover it by reaching for his arm.
"Fine. Give me your arm. On three you push with the good leg and I pull, and we do it slowly."
He gives me his arm.
His hand closes around my forearm, and mine around his. His skin's hot and wet from the water and his grip is still strong even now, even wrecked, and I brace my boots on the tile and set my weight back.
"One. Two?—"
My boot slides on the wet tile.
It's slick as glass where the water's splashed, and my heel goes out from under me on three.
Instead of hauling him up I pitch forward, and there's a half-second of pure stupid physics where I know exactly what's about to happen and can't do one thing to stop it.
I go into the tub.
Not gracefully.
One knee cracks the tile edge and the rest of me goes over the side and into the water and into him.
Right into his lap, a full-grown woman in jeans and boots landing in a bathtub on top of a wounded man.
Water sheets up over the side and soaks the floor and my shirt's instantly plastered to me and my hair's in my face.
And I laugh.
I can't help it.
It punches out of me, half a shriek and half a laugh, the absurdity of it, the two of us jammed in a tub with my boots still on and water everywhere.
For one second everything I've been white-knuckling since the hospital lets go at once.
It cracks right open.
I'm laughing with my forehead dropped against his wet shoulder and his chest is moving under me and I realize he's laughing too, low and rough, the first real laugh I've heard out of him since before the bunkhouse.
"You're supposed to be pulling me out," he says into my wet hair.
"Shut up, I slipped?—"
"Boots in the tub, Presley."
"I know where my boots are—" I lift my head to argue and his face is right there.
And neither one of us is laughing anymore.
The water's around us and my hands are flat on his chest.
His eyes have gone dark and dropped to my mouth, and the laugh dies in my throat and turns into something with a lot more weight, and I know.
I know, clear as anything—that if I kiss him right now I don't get to take it back.
I've spent a month building a wall out of every good reason.
My family.
The lie.
One more secret in a house already drowning in them.
All of it real, all of it still true, every brick of it stacked up between what I want and what I let myself have.
And the wall doesn’t survive his hand coming up out of the water to cup the back of my neck.
He doesn't pull me down. That's what undoes me.
He doesn't force it, he just holds the back of my neck in his big wet hand, warm and heavy, and he waits.
His thumb moving slowly along my jaw, giving me the half-inch of choice, letting me be the one who closes it or doesn't.
I close it.
God help me, I close it.
I lean down the last inch and I kiss him, and the second our mouths meet the two months goes up like dry grass.
He kisses me like a man who's been starving and just got told he's allowed.
One hand's fisted in my wet hair and the other bands around my lower back and drags me full against him, and I go.
I stop fighting all of it at once, I kiss him back just as hard with my hands sliding up onto his head, and the water sloshing between us.
He tastes the same.
He tastes like every night I told myself I was over him, and a sound comes out of me against his mouth that I couldn't stop if I tried.
"There she is," he growls against my lips. "There's my girl. Knew you were still in there."
"We shouldn't?—"
"Too late." He bites my bottom lip, not gently. "You're in the tub, rattlesnake. You made your choice when you put your boots in my water."
He gets my soaked shirt up and over my head and throws it somewhere with a wet slap.
His mouth is on my throat, my collarbone, working down, and his beard drags rough over my skin and I arch into it.
His hand comes up and closes around the side of my throat, thumb at the hinge of my jaw, the old familiar span of it, not squeezing, only holding, only owning, and my whole body remembers what that means and goes liquid.
"Still?" he asks, rough, checking, because even now, even wrecked and starving, he checks. "Two taps, same as always. You tell me."
"Still," I breathe.
"Yes. Don't you dare stop."
He gets my bra off and his mouth closes over my nipple and then his teeth.
I cry out and grab his head and he does it again, a rough graze that shoots straight down through me.
His hand still spanning my throat and his other hand working my jeans open under the water.
Wet denim does not want to come off.
I have to climb up out of his lap and peel them down and kick a boot off and lose my balance.
I grab the towel bar, and it's clumsy as hell.
He watches me the whole time with his eyes black and his chest heaving, one big hand wrapped around himself under the water.
When I finally get free of the last of it and turn back to him he says, low and dark, "Get back here and get on me."
"Your hip?—"
"Presley." His voice drops into the register that never once failed to move me. "I didn’t wait this long to have you climb back out of this tub. Get on me. I'll fuck you if I want to, and I want to, and my hip can take it up with management in the morning."
I get back in.
I straddle him carefully, both knees sinking into the water on either side of his thighs.
My hands on his shoulders. He's hard and thick against me and I have to stop and breathe for a second at the sheer overwhelm of it.
The fact that I'm here, that I let myself be here at all, that after all this time I've got my knees around this man in a bathtub and I want it so bad my hands are shaking.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
And his face has gone soft and fierce all at once.
Dark eyes locked on mine, and he brings his wet hand up and lays it along my cheek exactly the way he did in the dirt by the gate, and this time I don't pull back.
"You're mine," he says.
Not a question.
"You've been mine since the Chicken and you're mine right now and you're gonna be mine after. Say it."
"Thunder—"
His hand slides back to my throat.
Gentle.
A promise, not a threat.
"Say it."
"I'm yours." It comes out broken and true and it cracks something open in my chest even as I say it. "God help me, I'm yours, I never stopped?—"
And he lifts me by the hip with one strong arm and brings me down onto him and we both groan.
Whatever I was going to say next is gone.
He sets the pace even from under me.
That's how he's always been.
Even like this, even the one whose body failed him, he's the one controlling it.
One hand on my hip guiding me down onto him slowly and deep ,and the other back around my throat.
His eyes never leaving my face, telling me how to move, how to take him, how good I'm doing, filthy, low, and constant.
"That's it. That's my good girl. Take all of it."
The water sloshes over the sides in waves and neither of us cares.
I've got my hands braced on his shoulders and I'm riding him slow because slow is what his hip allows.
Slow turns out to be its own kind of unbearable, deep and grinding and endless.
He uses his hand on my throat to pull me down to his mouth.
Thunder bites my lip and licks me and pulls back just to watch my face.
"Missed this." His voice is wrecked. "Missed you. Missed this tight little—" He groans as I clench around him.
"You feel me? You feel what you do? Pretending you didn’t want me and you still come apart on me the second I get inside you."
And that's when I see it.
Up close.
His head tipped back against the tub, his throat bared under my hands, and there in the low light is the rattlesnake.
Dark and coiled on the side of his neck, still healing at the edges, and beneath it the script I read a lifetime ago in a bar and never said out loud.
He marked himself with me.
I put my mouth on it.
On the snake, on the ink he carved into himself while I was busy hating him.
He shudders underneath me, his hand tightening on my hip hard enough to bruise, and I understand all the way down what it must’ve felt like for this closed-off man to wear me where the whole world could see.
"Presley." My name comes out of him like it hurts. "Keep doin' that and I'm not gonna last, and I need you there first."
He gets his hand between us.
His thumb finds me and he works me exactly the way he's always known how, rough circles in time with the slow deep grind of him inside me.
His other hand leaving my throat to band around my back and hold me together, and the coil in me pulls tighter and tighter until it's almost too much.
"Let go." His mouth at my ear. "You've been holdin' on so tight for so long, rattlesnake. Let go. I've got you. I've got you."
And I do.
It breaks over me so hard my vision goes white at the edges and I clamp down around him and cry out into his shoulder.
He curses and grabs my hips with both hands and drives up into me through it, chasing it, and two, three strokes later he goes rigid underneath me and follows me over with my name in his teeth and his forehead pressed to my collarbone, his whole big body shaking.
For a long moment neither of us moves.
The water's gone lukewarm and there's more of it on the floor than in the tub.
My knees are going to have bruises and his hip is going to make him pay dearly for this and I don't care about a single thing.
Because his arms are around me and his heart’s slamming against my chest and I feel, for the first time in so long, like I'm not standing in the wreckage of my life alone.
Which is the fucking problem.
"Hey." He tips my chin up. His face has gone gentle in a way almost nobody on this earth gets to see. "Where'd you go just now?"
"I'm right here."
"You went somewhere. I felt it." His thumb strokes my jaw. "Talk to me."
And I want to lie.
I want to stay in this warm wrecked bathroom with this man and not say what's sitting cold in my chest even now, even wrapped around him with him still inside me.
But I've had enough lies to last me a lifetime.
"Nothing's changed," I whisper.
"That's where I went. We just—Thunder, I did the one thing I swore I wasn't going to do, and none of the reasons I swore went away.
My family's still broken. You still lied to me.
I'm still—" My voice catches. "I'm still going to have to walk out of here and go back to being a person who can't have this. "
His arms tighten around me.
"Or," he says, low, "you stop walkin' out."
I don't answer.
Because I don't have one, not a good one, not something that doesn't scare me worse than the wall I just knocked down, and he knows me well enough not to push it.
He gathers me against his chest in the cooling water, his chin on my wet hair, his heartbeat slowing under my ear.
He holds me like a man who waited and finally got his hands back on the one thing he wasn't willing to lose.
I let him.
One more minute, I tell myself.
One more minute and then I'll figure out what I've done.
But I already know, the way you know a storm's coming by the color of the sky, that I'm not going to figure it out tonight, and maybe not for a long time, and that whatever happens now I stopped being able to stay away from this man somewhere around the moment my boots hit his water.
The wall's down.
And God help me, standing in the rubble, all I feel is relief.