10. Wren
WREN
Rowe’s trailer is smaller than I expected.
“It's not much,” he says behind me.
“It's nice.”
“It’s tiny.”
“It's tidy.” I look at him and smile. “Do you know what my apartment looks like? There's a laundry chair. The laundry chair has achieved sentience.”
The corner of his mouth quirks up. He edges past me—careful, a full body's width of distance—and opens the mini fridge, pulling out two bottles. He pops the caps on the counter edge with a practiced knock of his palm and holds one out at arm's length.
Our fingers don't touch when I take it. He makes sure of that.
“Sit wherever,” he says.
Wherever is a padded bench along one wall and a single chair by the fold-down table.
I take the bench. He takes the chair, and there's maybe four feet between us, and the door is shut, and it occurs to me all at once that I am alone in a trailer with a man I've been thinking about for two days straight.
I take a long pull of the beer.
When you’re the good girl from a small town, you spend your whole life assuming men like this exist in a separate ecosystem.
Men with forearms like his, with ink disappearing under rolled sleeves, with cheekbones that belong on a movie poster.
They date yoga instructors. They date women who look effortless in cutoffs.
They do not invite midsize veterinarians with laundry chairs into their trailers for a beer.
And yet… here I am.
“You're quiet,” he says.
“I'm always quiet,” I assure him.
He lifts one brown eyebrow. “You talked for two hours while we did the chores.”
I cut the air with my free hand. “That was about hay logistics. Hay logistics are safe.”
Rowe’s eyes settle on me. In the low light of the single lamp, they look darker, and the way he’s looking at me makes my neck feel warm.
“And this isn't safe,” he murmurs.
I peel at the corner of the beer label. “You're leaving in two weeks.”
“Twelve days.”
“Twelve days.” I laugh, and it comes out thin. “See, you're not even arguing.”
“Arguing what?”
About how I don't know what I'm doing here. How men like you don't want girls like me. How you can't be touched, and I don't know what that leaves us, and I came anyway, because apparently, I'd rather have twelve days of whatever this is than zero.
“Nothing,” I say. “Forget it.”
He doesn't push. He drinks his beer, and I drink mine, and the silence should be awkward, but instead it's charged, humming like the air before a storm rolls over the county.
He's changed out of the performance vest into a gray henley, and it pulls across his shoulders when he leans back, and I make myself look around his trailer instead.
It doesn't help. Because when I glance back, his eyes are on me.
Not my face.
Lower.
The blouse I wore tonight has a cleavage my work shirts don't, and I watched myself button it in my bathroom mirror and thought, this is fine, this is a normal amount of collarbone, and now his gaze drags across it like a struck match and I realize I miscalculated by about three buttons.
He catches himself. Looks at the wall. His jaw works.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
“It's okay.”
“It's not—” He exhales through his nose. “I'm not used to having anyone in here.”
“Anyone?”
“Logan. Sometimes.” He picks at the label on his own bottle, mirroring me perhaps subconsciously. “You're the second person to sit on that bench in six years.”
His voice has gone gravelly and it does things to me. I press my knees together and shift on the cushion, and his eyes flick to the movement and away. I look him over in response, and that’s when I notice how tight the front of his jeans is.
I look at my beer like it contains the secrets of the universe.
He's hard. He's sitting four feet from me, keeping his careful distance, apologizing for looking at my cleavage, and he's hard, and my whole body goes hot and liquid so fast it makes me dizzy.
“Can I ask you something?” My voice comes out lower than I planned.
“Yeah.”
“You can tell me to shove it,” I assure him.
“Ask.”
I turn the bottle in my hands. Once. Twice.
“How do you—” I stop. Start over. “The touching thing. If you can't—if people can't touch you. How do you do…” I gesture vaguely with the bottle, at him, at the trailer, at the concept. “Relationships. Any of it.”
The lamp hums. Outside, not far off, someone laughs.
“You don't have to—” I start.
“I've never had one,” he says. “A relationship.”
“Oh.”
“Not the way you mean.” His thumb moves along the bottle's neck, slowly, and I watch it because I can't watch his face right now. “It's not that I don't—” He stops and seems to hunt for words. “The want is there. It's always been there. My skin just doesn't cooperate.”
“So you…” I prompt.
“So I found other ways.”
Is it me or is the trailer suddenly even smaller?
“My brothers,” he says, and his voice is careful now, measured. “They know. About the touch thing. When one of them finds a woman who's, ah, open to it, they invite me. To watch.”
My brain whites out for a second.
“To watch,” I repeat dumbly.
“I sit to the side. In the dark, usually. They—” His jaw tightens. “They don't perform for me. They just don't shut me out. And I take care of myself. No one touches me. Everyone gets what they need.”
I have a sudden, vivid, unstoppable image of it: Rowe in a chair in a dim corner, that beautiful face half in shadow, watching. His hand moving. Those sorrowful eyes dark and hungry.
My thighs press together before I can stop them.
He sees it.
I know he sees it because his breath changes and he suddenly goes very still.
“And when there's no one,” he continues, quieter now, rougher, “there are websites. Cam things. You find someone. You watch each other. Both of you, at the same time, on screens. Nobody's skin ever gets involved.”
“Mutual—” My voice cracks. I clear it. “You watch each other.”
“Yeah.”
“While you both—”
“Yeah.”
I'm breathing too fast. I can hear it, shallow and high, and I can't fix it, because I'm picturing that too—Rowe lit by a laptop screen, henley off, hand wrapped around himself, watching a woman touch herself for him—and every one of those imaginary women has my face.
The bulge in his jeans is unmistakable now. He's not hiding it. Maybe he can't. His knuckles are white around the bottle, and his chest is rising faster than it was a minute ago, and the four feet between us has stopped being distance and started being an inferno.
I set my beer on the floor because my hands aren't trustworthy anymore. I’m shaking too hard.
“You could do that now.”
The words leave me before my courage can file an objection.
His head comes up.
“I mean—” Blood roars in my ears. My face is on fire, I can feel it, cheeks and throat and the tips of my ears.
“Only if you wanted to. Obviously. I'm not—I just—no screens.
I'm right here. I wouldn't touch you. I wouldn't move from this bench. You could just…” I make myself hold his eyes even though it costs me everything I have. “And I could watch.”
Rowe doesn't move.
For five seconds. Ten. The lamp hums and my pulse slams and I start composing the apology, the forget I said anything, the graceful exit where I collect my bag and drive home and change my name—
“You'd want that?” His voice has dropped to the pitch of crumbling gravel. “That's not—you're not offering because you feel sorry for—”
“I've thought about you every hour since we met.” It comes out in a rush, honest and mortifying. “I couldn't sleep. Paige thinks I've lost my mind. I am not offering out of pity, Rowe.”
Something crosses his face that I've only ever seen on animals—that moment when a wary creature decides, against all its history, to come closer.
He sets his beer on the table.
His hands go to his belt.
I stop breathing entirely.
He works the buckle loose, and I watch his fingers—those careful, scarred, capable fingers that hold monkeys like glass—pop the button of his jeans. He pauses there, eyes lifting to mine, giving me one last off-ramp.
I don't take it.
He drags the zipper down, lifts his hips, pushes denim and black boxer briefs down his thighs, and his cock springs free, heavy and flushed and hard, curving up toward his stomach.
The sound that comes out of me is not dignified. It's a moan, small and involuntary, and I clap my hand over my mouth a second too late.
Because it's beautiful. That's the only word my scrambled brain can produce.
Thick, long, and covered in ink. An intricate gothic design climbs the shaft, black filigree and thorned lines wrapping the length of him like ivy on a column, the artistry so fine and deliberate it steals whatever air I had left.
“You—” I have to swallow. “You got it tattooed.”
“I tattooed it.”
I blink. “Yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Did… Did it hurt?”
His eyes hold mine, steady and burning.
“That's why I did it.”
The sentence lands somewhere deep in my chest and cracks it open.
The pain he chose. Pain with his own hand, on his own terms, on skin no one else would ever be allowed to reach.
Wondering what drove him to it makes me want to cry, and I want to crawl across the floor to him, and I can't do either, so I sit on my hands and watch as his fingers wrap around the base.
He strokes up. Slowly.
His breath shudders out. His head tips back an inch, throat working, and the lamplight catches the ink moving under his fist, and I have never seen anything—in twenty-nine years of life, in any movie, in any fevered fantasy—like Rowe Holloway touching himself while he looks at me.
“You're staring,” he rasps.
“You want me to stop?”
“No.” His fist drags up again, thumb sweeping the crown, spreading the wetness gathering there. “God. No.”
My underwear is soaked. I'm squirming on the bench and I've given up pretending otherwise, my thighs flexing together with every slow pull of his hand, and his eyes track it, and each time they do, his grip tightens and his breathing frays a little more.
“Rowe.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anything—” My voice has gone breathy and strange, someone else's voice, some braver woman's. “Anything I can do? To make it better for you?”
The groan that tears out of him is low and wrecked, like the question alone is halfway to finishing him.
His hand stills at the base, squeezing, holding himself back, and his eyes drag over me—my face, my throat, the neckline I second-guessed in the mirror—dark and starving and asking permission all at once.
“Your blouse,” he says roughly. “Unbutton it.”
My hands are already moving.
“And your bra—” His voice cracks. “Pull it down. Let me see you. And do you…” He hesitates, his grip visibly tightening on that beautiful cock. “Do you want to touch yourself too?”
My heart stops at his question, my clit pulsing once, hard.
Do I want to touch myself too?