Epilogue
Three Years Later
Three hundred women in a Bellagio ballroom are losing their minds over my wife. I'm against the back wall with a bourbon, watching.
Billie at a signing table is a different animal than Billie at home. The line wraps around the room and she's making every person in it feel like the only one. Same thing she does to me.
A woman in the line elbows her friend and points at me. They whisper. I tip my hat and they both turn the color of the Strawberry Margaritas they're holding.
Billie's readers know I'm the inspiration.
Who is HE, they always ask online. Her grandfather, someone will answer.
Step-grandfather, someone else will correct.
And then a thousand comments about how they'd call me Pawpaw too.
Billie thinks that's hilarious. I think it's nobody's goddamn business, but I show up anyway.
There isn't much I won't do for that woman.
The family knows now. Has for two years.
Rudolph didn't speak to me for three months. My daughter just sighed and told me if I was happy, she'd support me and help Rudolph come around.
He did. He shook my hand at the wedding. Didn't have to say much. Her friends got drunk at the reception and told everyone I was the hottest grandfather in Montana.
The line thins out. Billie signs the last book, takes the last photo, and finds me across the room. She's wearing a black dress that cost more than my first truck and heels that put her chin at my chest instead of my stomach. She crosses the ballroom like she's coming home.
She leans into my arm. "Hey, Pawpaw. Ready to go upstairs?"
"Been ready for two hours."
She grins and takes my arm and we walk through the lobby. Marble and perfume and slot machines pinging somewhere past the atrium. The elevator doors close and she turns to me with that look.
"You know," she says, smoothing my shirt collar, "you've been on your feet all day. Long flight. Three-hour signing. You sure you don't need a little blue pill to get through the evening? I won't judge. You're sixty. It's natural."
I hit the emergency stop.
The elevator jolts and she stumbles and I catch her by the throat.
"Say that again."
She swallows against my palm. "I said—"
I press my hips into her so she can feel exactly how hard I am. Have been since she put that dress on four hours ago. "Does that feel like a man who needs help?"
"No, sir," she whispers, and the flush is already climbing her neck.
I release the stop. The elevator hums back to life.
Our room is on the thirty-second floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Past midnight, the strip is nothing but neon bleeding into the dark.
I don't turn on the lights. The city does it for me, neon sliding across the bed and the carpet and her skin as she walks to the window.
She presses her palms to the glass. The strip is thirty-two floors straight down, headlights and taxi cabs the size of cigarette embers. I come up behind her and unzip her dress in one slow pull. It drops and pools at her heels. Nothing underneath just like I ordered.
"Hands on the glass."
She spreads her fingers against the window. Tits pressed to the glass, my hands already on her hips.
I pull my knife from my belt. She hears the sheath and her shoulders tighten.
I drag the flat of the blade down her spine, one vertebra at a time. She shivers and her breath fogs the glass.
"Every woman in that ballroom tonight wanted to know what I do to you." I bring the knife around to her front, tracing the edge along the underside of her breast. "They read your books. They think they know."
"They don't," she breathes.
"No, they don't."
I press the tip into the soft skin below her navel. Her stomach hollows.
"They don't know that my little girl gets wet the second Pawpaw pulls this knife.
" I slide the flat down to her pussy and press it against her clit.
She moans, forehead dropping to the glass.
"They don't know you beg for it. They don't know what you sound like when I make you come with a blade against your throat. "
"Rhett—"
"That's not what you call me."
"Pawpaw." She barely gets it out. "Please."
I set the knife on the windowsill where she can see it. Then I drop my pants to my knees, grip my cock and her hip, and push into her soaking hole in one long stroke.
She cries out and the glass fogs around her open mouth. Vegas pulses below us.
I fuck her with my mouth against her ear.
I thrust hard enough to press her chest flat to the glass. "Made me famous. Every reader in the world knows what Pawpaw does to his girl." I pull out slow, push back in slower. "But they'll never know what it sounds like when you say you love me with my cock in my granddaughter's cunt."
"I love you." She's close already, her walls flutter and pulse. Her knuckles are white on the glass. "God, I love you."
"Come for Pawpaw. Right here. Let the whole city see what family is all about."
She does. Her whole body seizes and the sound echoes off the window and comes back to us doubled.
I follow her over, pressed between her shoulder blades, my hands covering hers on the glass. The lights of the strip swim and I hold onto her until my hearing comes back.
We stay panting and sweat-covered for a long moment. Staring out at the lights, feeling how perfectly we fit together no matter the numbers between us.
She turns and looks up at me, reaching up to trace the sun lines beside my eyes.
"Best signing yet," she giggles.
I kiss her forehead. "You say that every time."
"I mean it every time."
I pick her up and carry her to the bed because I'm sixty years old and I don't need a goddamn pill and there isn't a version of my life where I stop showing this woman what she does to me.
Babies haven't happened for us. Yet. But we've been so blissfully happy trying, neither of us has decided to do anything about it. But, soon.
Montana's waiting. The ranch, the horses, the quiet mornings with coffee and manuscript pages.
But tonight, Vegas gets to watch.