WREN
The new town is called Cedar Bluff, and the water tower has a rusted hole in the B, so from the highway it welcomes you to CEDAR LUFF.
We rolled in three days ago, and I'm shocked at how fast my body learned the rhythm.
Convoy at dawn. Rome in his trailer with Lucy at the wheel and me in the truck behind, watching his ventilation gauge like a hawk.
Setup. Chores. Show. Chores again. Sleep in the big bed with a careful two feet of air between me and the man I love, which shrinks to one foot by morning because he drifts toward me in his sleep and never once flinches.
Deke saves me the last cinnamon roll every morning.
Jules texts me wedding fabric swatches at midnight.
Nova has started calling me for pregnancy questions because “you deliver foals, how different can it be,” which is a sentence Teddy overheard once and had to sit down for.
Marek walks Beau past the menagerie every afternoon, and the Labrador has decided Brutus is his best friend, which Brutus pretends to hate.
I have a family. It came with a lion.
This morning, I'm elbow-deep in Rome's foot bucket, filing a crack on his left front pad while he leans his weight politely away from me, and Rowe is forking hay two enclosures over, and we're arguing about the peacocks.
“They screamed at four-fifteen,” I say. “Four. Fifteen.”
“They scream at dawn. Dawn's their whole job.”
“Dawn was at six-forty. I checked. They screamed at a time that has no dawn in it, Rowe. They screamed at the concept of dawn.”
“Take it up with Silas.” I can hear the grin in his voice.
“Silas said, and I quote, 'every morning should start with screams.' Your brother is not a well man.” Rome shifts his trunk and pats the top of my head like I'm the one who needs comforting.
“One of the hens is shadowing Cleopatra now.
She has a zebra-shaped crush. I'm going to have to write it in her chart. Patient exhibits parasocial attachment to equid.”
Rowe laughs. Out loud, easy, hay dust in the air around him, and even after weeks of collecting that sound, it still lands in my chest like a coin in a jar.
“Deke made you two breakfasts today,” he says.
“He did not.”
“He did. The plate and then the 'leftover' biscuits that were not leftover. I watched him make them fresh and lie about it.”
“He's fattening me up.” I pat Rome's leg and straighten, wiping my hands on my jeans, and it comes out of me on autopilot, the old reflex, worn smooth from thirty years of use.
“Not that I need help. Some miracle already happened when a man who looks like you decided he liked all this.” I gesture at myself with the hoof file, breezy, moving on. “Anyway, Cleopatra's admirer—”
“That's not true.”
I glance up. He's stopped forking. He's leaning on the handle, and his gray eyes are on me with that show-night focus, and I realize the joke didn't slide past him the way jokes about myself are supposed to slide past people.
“Rowe. It was a joke.”
“It wasn't.” He doesn't say it unkindly. He says it like he's reading an animal limp—that's not the joke you think it is, that's an old injury. Then his eyes narrow, just slightly, like he's doing math. Like he's measuring a board.
“You're making a face,” I accuse.
“I don't make faces. Now tell me more about Cleopatra's admirer,” he says, and goes back to the hay, and the subject closes like a door.
I forget about it by lunch. That's my mistake.
That night, the show runs long. Saturday crowd, two encores for Brutus, a kid in the third row who Rome decides deserves personal attention, and by the time chores are done, I'm sweaty and hay-flecked, and my ponytail has given up its life's purpose.
I shower in our tiny bathroom, taking my time, and when I come out with a towel wrapped around me, steam following me like a cape, Rowe is standing in the middle of the trailer.
“Take the towel off,” he says. “Sit on the edge of the bed.”
My stomach does something acrobatic. His voice has the low register in it, the one that bypasses my brain entirely and speaks directly to my pussy.
“Are we—”
“Sit.”
I drop the towel. His eyes travel down me and back up, slow, and no matter how many times he does it, my skin heats like the first time.
I cross to the big bed he built—the bed that eats a third of the trailer—and sit on the edge, knees together, hands folded like I'm waiting for a bus. Naked at a bus stop.
Then he pulls out his phone and starts texting.
“Oh my god.” I laugh. “Who are you texting? Are you asking Silas for more chains? We have chains, Rowe. We have so many chains. There's a drawer. The drawer clanks when we drive.”
“Not chains.”
“Then what—”
Someone knocks on the door.
Every muscle in my body activates at once. Rowe crosses the trailer, and I hiss “Rowe—Rowe—” and he opens the door, and Logan steps inside.
I squeal. Actually squeal, a sound I have never once made in my adult life, and my arms fly up to cover my chest while I scramble to fold my legs, my knees, my everything.
“Don't you dare.” Logan's voice rolls through the trailer, warm and dark and utterly unbothered, and when I look up, his gray eyes—Rowe's eyes, one shade hotter—are moving over me like I'm the headline act. “Don't you dare cover that delectable body. I've been promised a show.”
“Promised—” I whip my head to Rowe. “You texted him—”
“Chair,” Rowe says.
Logan drops into the chair by the wall with the glee of a man being handed front-row seats, boots planted wide, forearms on his thighs, and grins at me like Christmas came early. “Evening, Doc.”
“I'm going to die,” I inform the ceiling.
“Not tonight.” Rowe crosses to me. And then he kneels.
He kneels on the floor in front of me, between my feet, and his hands come up and touch me—the lightest contact in the world, fingertips only, at the insides of my knees.
His choice. His hands, moving on his terms, and even through my mortification, the miracle of it registers: Rowe Holloway, touching, unprompted, unafraid.
He spreads my legs.
“Rowe—” My voice comes out as air. “Your brother is—”
“I know exactly where my brother is.” His thumbs stroke once along my inner thighs, feather-light, and he looks up at me from the floor with those sorrowful eyes gone completely dark.
“This morning, you called yourself a miracle case. Like wanting you requires divine intervention.” His jaw sets.
“I don't argue well. I never learned how.
So I'm going to show you instead, and Logan's going to say the parts I can't say with my mouth full.”
From the chair comes a low groan, and my head snaps up, and my mouth falls open.
Logan has his belt open. His jeans. His hand is drawing himself out—already hard, thick, no ink, and it's the strangest vertigo of my life, the almost of him, the nearly-Rowe of him—and he catches me staring and doesn't even blink.
“What,” he says. “He gets a feast, and I get nothing? Eyes forward, gorgeous. Actually—no. Eyes wherever you want. That's the whole point of me.”
“Oh my god—”
Rowe buries his face in my pussy.
The word for what he does is not kiss, and it is not lick.
The word is feast. He seals his mouth over me like a starving man over the first meal of his life, and the sound I make is embarrassing, and my hands fly to the blanket and fist there because they know the rules, they have always known the rules—grip the bed, never him—and his tongue drags up through me, broad and greedy, and my elbows nearly buckle.
“There it is,” Logan murmurs from the chair.
His fist moves slow. Lazy. A man pacing himself.
“Look at you. You know what he looked like this afternoon?
Like a man planning a heist. Came and found me at the fuel truck and said, 'She doesn't believe she's beautiful.
' Like it was a crime he was reporting.”
“Logan—” I gasp, because Rowe's tongue has found my clit and is circling it with the same terrible patience he uses on knots in Cleopatra's mane.
“So here's my testimony.” His voice drops, rough velvet, filling the trailer while his twin devours me.
“Those tits, Wren. Christ. The way they move when you breathe hard.
Half the crew walks into tent poles when you cross the lot, and you've never noticed once, and that's the tragedy of you.” His hand tightens on himself.
I hear the change in his breath. “That soft belly. Those hips. And those thighs—” He exhales through his teeth.
“My brother has your thighs on either side of his head right now, and I have never envied a man more in my life.”
My thighs. They've closed against Rowe's ears without my permission, soft and trembling, and I start to pull them open—sorry, sorry—and Rowe's hands clamp over them and hold them exactly where they are. Against him. His choice. A moan tears out of me at the meaning of it as much as the feel.
“He's got you,” Logan says. “Let go.”
I let go.
I fall back onto my elbows and stop performing composure, and Rowe growls into me—actually growls, the vibration lighting me up from the inside—and works me over like there's a clock running out.
Two fingers slide into me, curl, find the right spot with humiliating speed, and his mouth never leaves my clit, and Logan keeps talking, filth and worship braided together.
“That's it. God, listen to you. You hear that, brother? You did that. Wren—Wren, look at me.” I drag my eyes open. He's flushed, fist working faster now, staring at me like I'm on fire. “You're the hottest thing in this carnival and I eat fire.”
The laugh and the orgasm hit me at the same time.
I come with a broken sound, thighs shaking in Rowe's grip, my back arching off the bed, and it rolls through me long and shuddering while his mouth gentles but never stops, working me down and then—
Not stopping.
“Rowe—” I'm twitching. Oversensitive. “Rowe, I—”
He hums against me. A no. A not done. His fingers start moving again, slow and deep, and the too-much melts back into more within a dozen heartbeats, because his mouth knows me now, has studied me the way he studies everything he loves, and the second climb is steeper and faster and meaner.
“Again,” Logan rasps. His voice has frayed. His hand is a blur. “He's going to take everything you've got, gorgeous, that's how he does it, all or nothing, no half measures, look at him—look at him, he'd live down there—”
I look. Rowe's eyes are open, gray and burning like one of his twin's fires, watching my face over the curve of my own body, and his fingers curl and his tongue flicks and something behind my navel snaps.
I wail. There are tears at the corners of my eyes—pleasure and something bigger than pleasure, something that feels like being seen—leaking hot into my hairline, and through the roar in my ears, I hear Logan come apart in the chair.
Loudly. A shout he doesn't muffle, cursing, my name and his brother's name in the wreckage of it, and the sound of him finishing to the sight of me tips my orgasm into something endless.
I feel myself soaking Rowe's face, and I'm way too far gone to be embarrassed about it.
The trailer goes quiet except for three people breathing.
“Okay,” Logan pants from the chair, boneless. “Okay. Point proven. Point extremely proven.”
Rowe lifts his mouth from me an inch. His face is glazed. His voice comes out wrecked and muffled against my thigh. “Not yet.”
“Rowe—” I'm laughing and crying and shaking. “I can't—”
“You can. One more.” He presses a kiss, soft and deliberate, to the inside of my thigh, over the softness I've apologized for my whole life. “This one's mine.”
He starts again. Slower. Devastating. And I let my head fall back and give up steering anything, and somewhere in the honeyed blur of it, I realize what I need, and I need it more than air.
“Rowe.” My voice doesn't sound like me. “Touch yourself. Please. I want—come with me. I want you to come too. Please, please—”
The groan he makes into me nearly finishes the job by itself.
I hear his belt. His zipper. Then the rhythm changes—his mouth on me and his shoulder working, his fist on himself between my feet, and I prop myself up because I have to see it: Rowe Holloway on his knees at the edge of our bed, face buried in me, hand flying over the ink of his cock, completely undone.
“Fuck,” Logan says reverently from the chair. He's spent and softening, and he's leaning forward anyway, elbows on his knees, bottom lip caught between his teeth, watching his twin like he's witnessing a double rainbow.
“Together,” I gasp. “Rowe—together—”
He moans into me, and the vibration is the last straw, and the third one takes me apart at the seams. I come sobbing his name, thighs locked against his head where he holds them, and beneath me, against me, I feel the exact moment he follows—his rhythm shattering, his groan breaking open against my pussy, the splash of his release striping the floor and the bed frame while his mouth rides me through every last wave.
We end in a heap. Him with his cheek resting on my thigh, breathing like he ran here from Thistlewood. Me flat on my back, one arm over my eyes, tears drying at my temples, my whole body humming like a struck bell.
“Hi,” Rowe rasps against my leg.
“Hi,” I whisper back, and we both start laughing, helpless, stupid with it.
Logan tucks himself away and stands, stretching until his spine pops, looking between the two of us with an expression that's ninety percent smug and ten percent something softer he'd likely deny under torture.
“For the record,” he says, sauntering to the door, “that was the best show this outfit has ever produced, and I've seen Elias fuck Jules in front of everyone in the Big Top and then the whole thing devolved into an orgy.” He pauses with his hand on the latch and points at me.
“Miracle, my ass. He's the lucky one. Whole lot knows it.” The grin goes wolfish.
“Invite me back sometime. I'll bring notes.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
Rowe lifts his head from my thigh. His hair is a disaster. His mouth is swollen. He looks up the length of my body—all of it, every soft inch he just spent an hour worshipping—and raises one eyebrow.
“Argument settled?”
I reach down and, careful as a feather, brush a strand of hair off his forehead with one fingertip. He lets me.
“Settled,” I say.