Chapter 4
FOUR
Wyatt
We didn't talk about it for the rest of the day.
We ate lunch at my mother's table and Haven had two helpings of the soup and talked to Forrest about a course she was taking at UTSA.
She laughed at something Dakota said when he came in from the pasture smelling like horse.
I sat across from her and drank my coffee and watched her like a man losing an argument with himself.
Nobody knows.
That was the thing she'd said. The thing I kept turning over.
It was true. Nobody would have to know. Haven wasn't going to tell anyone—she'd been the one to suggest it, she was the one who'd framed it as simple and clean and contained, and she wasn't wrong that it could be those things. People made arrangements like this all the time.
Adults.
Which she was.
She was twenty-one years old and she knew what she wanted and she'd said so clearly, twice now. I was forty and I'd already had my hand down her jeans behind a bar.
The damage, as they said, was arguably done.
I watched her laugh at something my mother said.
This was a terrible idea…and she’d already mostly sold me on it.
After lunch we moved to the back pasture to check the water lines and she worked the way she always did—efficient, no wasted movement, knew what needed doing before I said it.
She'd been like that since she was fifteen.
It was one of the first things I'd noticed about her, back when noticing things about her was still uncomplicated.
That had stopped being uncomplicated a while ago.
I already hated myself. That was the other thing.
I'd spent two days feeling like the worst man alive for what had happened behind the Spur, and the self-hatred was familiar enough at this point that it almost felt like company.
I was used to carrying things I wasn't proud of. One more wasn't going to break me.
And if I said no—if I kept saying no—she was just going to keep showing up and looking at me like she knew exactly what I was thinking, which she apparently did, and I was going to spend the entire calving season in a slow kind of torture that helped nobody.
Haven crouched down to check a valve fitting and I looked away.
This was a terrible idea and I was going to do it anyway.
The day rolled on…the sun began to set. It was 4:30 by the time I’d made my decision, and I still didn’t know if it was the right one.
But she’d asked. Begged me for an answer.
So as we stood washing our hands at the utility sink at the end of the day…I leaned in close enough that she could hear me, close enough that I could smell her—a trace of perfume, the day’s sweat, hay and sweetness.
“Stay after,” I murmured.
She stilled.
Just for a second. Then she reached past me for the paper towels like I hadn't said anything.
"My place," I said, quieter. "When you're done."
She looked up at me. Hazel eyes, steady.
"Okay," she said.
I finished the evening checks on autopilot.
Fed the horses. Topped off the water. Noted the two cows closest to term and made sure they were settled. I'd done it ten thousand times and my hands knew what to do without my brain being involved, which was good because my brain was somewhere else entirely.
I was doing this.
I was actually doing this.
The logical part of me—the part that had spent two days constructing very reasonable arguments about age and employment and basic human decency—had apparently clocked out sometime around 4:30 and left the building.
What remained had been thinking about Haven Sinclair for longer than I was going to admit to anyone, including myself.
I latched the barn door and walked to my house.
Inside I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and looked at the place the way she was going to see it in about ten minutes.
Small. Clean. Sparse. One chair at the table.
A shelf of veterinary manuals and three books I'd read twice: The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Martian.
Nothing on the walls except a calendar from the feed store and a framed photo of Ethan that had been there so long I'd stopped seeing it.
I'd been twenty-three in that photo. Both of us had.
Ethan Nassar…he’d been one of the best men I’d ever met. Enlisted together when we were twenty-one, and we’d done the whole damn thing together—boot camp, deployment, the works. Neither of us had anything to lose. Or at least, it felt that way until you were dead.
I looked away.
Haven didn’t knock; I heard her footsteps out on the gravel, then the door cracking open. Maybe I should’ve changed, but this wasn’t a date. What we were doing here, tonight, was an arrangement.
Dirty, secret…all about to unfold.
I turned around, finding her at the door, twisting her hands nervously.
She was still dirty from the day’s work—a smudge of dirt on her cheek, hay in her hair.
She had her backpack slung over her shoulder, and all it took was one look for her to drop it by the door.
The room felt charged all of a sudden with things unspoken…
with desire I’d been holding back for a long time, even if that made me a fucking monster.
“We should shower,” I said, breaking the silence.
She blinked. “Um…together?”
I cocked my head at her. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
She swallowed hard. Pulled off her Carhart and dropped it on the floor, followed by the unbuttoned flannel.
Her hands went to her t-shirt next, and she pulled that off too, revealing a plain white sports bra.
It was tight enough to leave red marks on her stomach and ribs. I wanted to trace them with my tongue.
“Bathroom’s that way,” I said, tilting my head.
She went.
The place was small, just a bedroom, a kitchenette, and a small hallway to the bathroom. I followed Haven down the hall, into the bathroom…closed the door behind us.
She sucked in a breath.
My heart stuttered.
“You can still change your mind,” I started.
But she turned around and hooked her fingers into her bra to pull it over her head, baring her breasts to me.
“I’m not going to,” she said.
“Haven—”
“Wyatt.” She reached out and put her hand flat on my chest. “Take your shirt off.”
I looked at her for a second.
Then I reached back and pulled it over my head.
Her eyes moved across my chest, my stomach, back up. She saw the shrapnel wound on my chest, the skull tattooed on my left bicep.
She swallowed.
"Okay," she said, mostly to herself.
I reached past her to turn on the shower as she unbuttoned her jeans…slid them down her waist.
Then I did the same.