10. Perry
Perry
I’ve become a menace to myself.
It’s been four days since the library, and I haven’t had one clean thought in a single one of them.
I’ll be out on the porch doing my knee exercises, counting reps like a good boy, and then I’m back in that reading chair with her skirt shoved up to her waist and her fist in my hair and the sound she made carrying down the empty stacks, and I lose the count entirely and have to start over at one.
Ruth would tell me arousal isn’t part of the rehab protocol. Ruth can mind her own business.
Here’s my trouble, and it’s a good trouble, the best I’ve had in years. I’ve had her once and now I’m an addict about it, and I spend an embarrassing share of my day drawing up ways to get her alone again.
The library’s no good in daylight. Too many blue-haired ladies finding sudden urgent business.
Her place has thin walls and a landlady wired straight into my mother’s prayer chain.
My truck’s got the range of a phone booth with my leg like this.
I’ve mapped this whole county for one private hour with Kylie Barnes like a man planning a heist, and I regret not one minute of it.
And it isn’t only that I want her under me again, though I do, in every room in this county and a few we haven’t got.
It’s that I catch myself grinning at nothing.
Fixing two coffees out of pure habit. Reading a paperback and folding down a corner to show her a line she’d like.
Twelve years I traveled light on purpose, and somewhere in the last month I started carrying a woman around in my chest like she took up residence there.
And then there’s the idea I can’t set down.
I’m at the barn most mornings now, doing my walking, and I stand at the rail and watch the horses and think about her up on that mare at the trail ride. How easy she sat. How she gathered the reins one-handed like she came out of the womb doing it.
My mind, being the gutter that it is, takes that somewhere it has no business going.
I think about her in the saddle in front of me.
Her back to my chest, my arm banded low across her, the long roll of the horse under us doing half the work for me.
Her skirt rucked up and my hand under it and nothing out there but open pasture and not a soul for a mile.
I think about what a slow walk would do to her, to the both of us, her biting down on every sound with the horizon going gold, my mouth at the side of her neck telling her exactly what I want to do next.
I don’t know if it’s even possible with this knee. I’ve decided it’s a goal.
It’s gotten so I can’t look at one thing on this ranch without it turning filthy on me. The hayloft. The tack room with the door that latches from the inside. The tailgate of my truck at the top of the north pasture. A man in love and benched with nothing but time is a dangerous, creative animal.
So I engineer it. I tell her the fundraiser needs a walk-through of the ranch, since we’re hosting half the thing out here now. It’s even true. I leave out the part where I’ve picked the longest trail on Sterling land and the most private bend of the creek at the far end of it.
She turns up in those work boots and a skirt, takes one look at me holding two sets of reins, and says, “This is a work meeting.”
“It’s a working trail ride. Very professional. You can bring your clipboard.”
We ride out with the sun still low and the dew burning off the grass, and I keep Old Roan close enough to her mare that my knee complains, and I don’t care. She’s got her hair down today. I’ve decided she did that on purpose, and I’ve decided I’m right about it.
Twice I watch her ride and near say the fantasy out loud. Once I catch a flash of her from the library, the arch of her over my mouth, and have to look at the tree line and breathe.
“You’re quiet,” she says.
“I’m concentrating.”
“On what.”
“Not telling you what I’m concentrating on.”
She laughs, and the sound of it out here in the open does something to me that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the trouble I’m truly in.
I could tell her the fantasy. I come a hair from it, twice. Instead I ride beside her in the gold light with my whole chest full and my head full of filth, and I think, this. I want this. Mornings like this one, a thousand of them, and to hell with every other place I ever swore I had to be.
We stop where the creek bends and the willows make a room out of the light. I get down off Old Roan graceless as a dropped sack of feed, and she’s there before my boots settle, hands on me, steadying, laughing at me a little.
“Smooth,” she says.
“I’m saving my grace for later.”
“For what?”
I kiss her instead of answering.
It goes from a kiss to a good deal more than a kiss in a hurry, since four days is a long stretch when you’ve had a taste.
I get us down onto the saddle blanket in the grass, me on my back with the bad leg stretched out straight, and she comes down after me and settles over my hips like she’s been thinking on this as hard as I have.
“Your knee,” she says, hands flat on my chest.
“Is fine. Doc’s orders were about bulls.” I run my hands up under that skirt, up the warm smooth of her thighs, and she shivers over me. “Nothing in there about you.”
She works my belt open, then my jeans, and frees me, and the first press of her against me, hot and slick and ready, near takes the top of my head clean off.
Then she sinks down slow, taking me inch by inch, and we both go still and stunned right there in the middle of it.
I forget the fantasy on the horse entirely, because the real thing, her over me with the sun caught in her hair and her mouth falling open on a sound she can’t hold back, beats anything my gutter mind ever built.
“There she is,” I manage. “Ride me, Barnes. Take what you want off me.”
And she does. She finds the rhythm slow and then not slow, rolling her hips, riding me with her palms braced on my chest and her head tipped back and her throat bare to the light.
I hold her hips and move up into her and watch her take her pleasure out of me like she’s making up for lost time, and God knows she is, and I want to hand her every second of it.
I get a hand up under her shirt, up the soft weight of her breast, thumb dragging over her nipple, and she gasps and rides me harder, and I file it away with every other thing I’m learning about her, greedy for all of it.
“All this time,” I tell her, hoarse, “you were right here, and I never once looked. I’m looking now, Barnes. I’m not gonna quit.” She makes a broken sound and takes me deeper, and I don’t know I’ve just said the truest and the cruelest thing a man could hand her.
I get my thumb between us and find her clit, slick and swollen, and work it in circles in time with her, and she cries out and grinds down harder onto me.
“That’s it,” I tell her, wrecked. “Just like that. Feel how good you take me.” She’s close.
I feel her going tight around me, fluttering, and I hold on by my fingernails, because I’m not going anywhere until she’s had hers.
She comes apart on top of me with my name in her mouth and her whole body clenching down around mine, and it drags me right over the edge behind her. I pull her down onto my chest and hold her there while we both come back from a long way off, her heart slamming against mine.
For a while neither of us says a word. The creek runs. A horse blows and stamps in the shade. Her fingers trace slow idle circles on my chest, and I lie there staring up into the willow light and feel a thing I’ve been too busy for twelve years to feel.
It takes me a second to put a name to it, and when I do it stops me cold. I’m happy. Flat-out, no-asterisk happy, in the grass, with her, and I can’t remember the last time I stood still long enough to catch it.
That’s when the crack runs through the middle of it.
Happy is a thing a man can lose. There’s a contract from Dale sitting in my inbox with a Dallas address on it and a clock already running.
Out west somewhere my best friend is riding pickup in a dirt arena and trusting me with his whole heart, and here I am in the grass with his little sister’s heartbeat going against my ribs, and I haven’t told her a word of any of it.
Not the offer. Not the leaving. Not the promise I made him, or the one I break every time I put my hands on her.
She lifts her head and looks at me, loose and soft and happier than I have ever once seen her, and asks, “Where’d you go?”
I look at that face. And I do the thing I do better than anything else on this earth. I lie to her with a smile.
“Nowhere,” I say, and pull her back down to me, and kiss her until the question is gone.