Chapter 5 #4
He doesn't start slow. The first thrust bottoms out with a force that jolts the lamp overhead, and the pace he sets after that is hard and driving, each stroke deep enough that the impact registers in my ribs.
I meet him, my hips rolling into every thrust because I refuse to let this be something that happens to me.
This is something I'm doing. My nails rake down his back hard enough to leave welts, and his response is raw enough to strip the finish off every pretense either of us has been maintaining.
"Harder."
He obliges. His hand closes around the back of my neck, tilting my face up to his, and the angle change drives him deeper, hitting a spot that makes my vision blur.
The desk hammers the wall in a steady rhythm, his maps falling from their pushpins in a slow cascade.
His breathing is ragged, punctuated by low sounds that he's not bothering to suppress, and the rawness of them feeds the tension coiling tighter through my hips and thighs.
I don't close my eyes. Neither does he. The eye contact is the most dangerous part, more intimate than his cock inside me, more exposing than the sounds I'm making. Two people watching each other lose control and refusing to look away.
His hand slides between us, his thumb finding my clit again, and the dual sensation of him thrusting deep while his thumb works me from the outside collapses the distance between the first orgasm and the second.
This one builds slower and hits harder, a tightening that starts in my thighs and coils inward until everything locks at once, my inner muscles clenching around him so hard that his rhythm breaks.
He swears, low and rough, and his thrusts turn ragged, losing their precision, his fingers digging into the flesh of my hip as he drives in deep and holds, his entire body going rigid against mine.
I feel him pulse inside me. The warmth spreads.
His forehead drops to my shoulder, his breath sawing against my collarbone.
His hands are shaking where they grip the desk edge on either side of my hips.
My legs are still locked around him. My pulse is slamming against the inside of my wrists.
The aftershocks roll through my lower body in slow, diminishing contractions that I can't stop and don't try to.
The silence afterward is total.
The room smells like sex and bourbon, and the manifests are scattered across the carpet three feet away, red ink still tracing the drug corridor we were arguing about ten minutes ago. Neither of us reaches for the other. Neither of us speaks.
I slide off the desk. Pull my underwear and jeans on. Hook my bra and tug my shirt down. His eyes track every movement with an expression I can't read and don't try to.
"This doesn't change things," I say.
I grab my phone from the floor where it landed in the paper avalanche. Power it on. While it boots, I gather the manifests and square them into the envelope.
Wade pulls his jeans up, collects his maps from the carpet without a word. The pushpin holes in the wall stare down at us like punctuation at the end of a sentence neither of us is willing to finish.
The screen lights up. Three notifications. Two missed calls from the Oklahoma numbers. One text message.
The text is from a number I don't recognize. No area code I can place. The message contains a single image attachment and nothing else.
I open it.
The photograph shows my veterinary truck parked at the fairground.
The angle is low, taken from inside another vehicle.
Through the passenger window of the shooting vehicle, the lettering on my truck's side panel is legible.
The fairground fence is visible in the background, along with the livestock pens where I treated the dun bronc this afternoon.
The image metadata shows today's date. The timestamp is late afternoon. I was inside the pens then, close enough to the camera's position that whoever took this photo could have read the name stitched on my work shirt.
Someone sat in a vehicle and photographed my truck while I worked, and then they sent the image to a phone number I've given to exactly four people on this circuit.
My hands don't shake. Fourteen months of practice at swallowing fear has made the composure automatic, the same way checking under my truck is automatic, the same way sleeping with my keys on the nightstand is automatic.
The body runs the protocol. The mind catches up later.
I set the phone face-down on the desk and look at Wade.
He reads it in my face before I say a word.
"Show me," he says.
I turn the phone over and hand it to him.
He studies the image for a long time. When he looks up, the man who poured bourbon into his coffee and leaned in doorframes is gone.
The man looking at me now is the one I saw when he grabbed the young rider's wrist behind the chutes, the version that sits beneath the practiced surface, watching everything, waiting for a reason.
"You're not walking back to your room alone," he says.
I should argue. I've survived fourteen months on this circuit by refusing to let anyone else decide where I go and when.
But the woman in that photograph wasn't expecting the camera. And the person behind it wasn't expecting her to see the picture tonight.
"Then walk with me," I say. "And don't make it a habit."