Chapter Five #2
His hands moved down my sides and pushed the shirt up, his palms warm on my skin, and I’d stopped thinking about anything except this. We were a property away from a catering cleanup crew and I was aware of this the way you’re aware of weather — technically present, not the most urgent variable.
He moved down my body, hands sliding the shirt up as he went, and crouched at my feet. I felt his breath against my inner thigh and then his mouth on my pussy, and I said his name before I’d decided to.
He had both hands hooked at my hips and I had both hands in his hair and it was fast, faster than the night before, which had been slow and deliberate and attentive to the point of ruin.
This was morning and the barn and the slanted light and his mouth, and he knew by now exactly what he was doing and wasn’t wasting any time about it.
He found the right place with his tongue and settled in.
I pushed against his hold and said his name.
He said “Let go” against me and I stayed with him.
I was done in under two minutes, which I wasn’t ashamed of.
He worked me through every second of it and kept going past the point where I would have stopped, past the point where any composed version of me would have pulled it back.
I had no interest in being quieter. I said his name again and let it be what it was, and I came hard against the barn wall, fingers in his hair, heels against his shoulders, one breathless “fuck” that I stand by completely.
He stood up, unhurried, and looked at me against the wall with the expression of a man very pleased with the start of his Sunday, and transparent about it.
“You look—” he started.
“Don’t,” I said. “Come here.”
He came here.
I got his belt. I got his jeans. I got my hand around his cock and he exhaled with the careful control of someone for whom it had become an active project.
He was hard and warm and I stroked my thumb over the head of him and he put one forearm against the wall above my head and said my name in the low rough register that had been rearranging my priorities since the cocktail hour.
“Jules.”
“I know,” I said. “Wall.”
He looked at me. The warmth in his expression went focused, went direct and intent.
“You sure?” he said.
“I kissed you first today,” I said. “I’m fully sure.”
He put his hands on my hips and lifted me. I wrapped my legs around him and he pushed into me against the wall, and I made a sound that also lacked grammatical structure. He stilled, watching my face.
“Good?” he said.
“Don’t stop,” I said.
He didn’t stop. He moved slow at first, deep and steady, and I had the wall at my back, his hands at my hips, his mouth at my throat. “You feel incredible,” I said. “Since this morning.”
“You feel so fucking good,” he said, near my ear. “Since Friday. Since that van. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.” He moved, and moved again; I’d nothing left to hold back. I pressed my face into his shoulder. “Let me hear you,” he said. I let him hear me.
The wall was solid at my back and he was working a slow deep rhythm calculated to take me apart, and I wasn’t interested in control.
I had his shirt bunched in my fist at his shoulder and my mouth at the side of his neck, the barn quiet around us except for the cleanup crew, far enough away to be theoretical.
I rolled my hips forward and changed the angle myself and he said “Fuck—” against my hair.
I said there. He said yeah and stayed there and picked up the pace, and I could feel the weekend not mattering, could feel Manhattan not mattering, could feel nothing except Dutch and the barn and the morning and the wall at my back, and I was close when he slowed deliberately.
“Dutch—”
“Not yet,” he said, which was an extraordinary thing to say to a person.
It also worked. He shifted the angle, a small deliberate adjustment, enough to make my argument fall apart, and then went back to the pace that was going to be the end of me.
I made a sound that communicated my opinion on this development.
He laughed. Real, warm, unheld — the same laugh he’d had at the fence post Friday afternoon, the one I’d been trying not to think about since I was lying in my tent that night, and I laughed too, helplessly, against his shoulder.
“That’s mean,” I said.
“That’s patience,” he said. “I have a lot of it.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “It’s extremely annoying.”
“Mm,” he said, and moved again, and I stopped being able to form complaints.
He lifted me away from the wall (I was not going to examine the arm-strength implications in real time) and brought us down onto a hay bale near the workbench, the shirt finally going with it.
I ended up straddling him with my hands on his shoulders and his hands loose at my hips.
The angle was better. The leverage was mine. I found the rhythm and ran it.
“There you go,” he said, low, watching my face. “Take it.”
I took it.
He kept his hands light at my hips, not directing, just there the way he was always just there. “You’re taking me apart,” he said. “You have been since Friday. Every goddamn time you moved. You have no idea. Don’t stop.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “You could stop narrating and do something about it.”
He gripped my hips briefly, a statement of position. I laughed, and he looked at me laughing on top of him with a look that went warm past amusement, and his hands finally gripped.
I pushed down and he pushed up; I found the angle and said there — the same there I’d said the night before, apparently a consistent preference.
He stayed there and I stayed with him, his thumb working against my clit in time with the rhythm, his other hand pulling me in at the hip.
The barn and the hay and all of it. None of it. I was done arguing with anything.
I came the second time with his hands hard at my hips and his face pressed to my throat and both of us making sounds that weren’t available for public review.
He followed me in somewhere under thirty seconds, his grip tightening and then releasing, and a sound against my shoulder that I was keeping.
We stayed there a while.
The slanted light had moved up the barn wall. Somewhere across the property the cleanup crew was still at it, completely unaware they had been ambient narrative tension the entire time.
“Hay,” I said eventually.
“Yeah,” he said.
“There is hay. In places.”
“It’s a barn,” he said.
“I’m aware of that. I’m going to be finding hay for the rest of the day in places hay has no business being.”
“That’s the authentic Texas ranch experience,” he said, completely serious. “People pay for that.”
“They absolutely do not.”
“Some of them might,” he said, and helped me off the hay bale.
HE FOUND THE DRESS shirt and held it out. I put my arms through it.
He buttoned it for me. Bottom to top, steadily, the same slow attention he’d given everything this weekend. He got to the collar button and left it open, smoothed the fabric at my shoulders, and stepped back.
“Better?” he said.
“Functional,” I said. “Which is the best this shirt was ever going to achieve in a barn.”
He smiled and turned to pick up the halter from the workbench.
I lifted my camera.
The barn doorway was behind him, morning light coming through the open doors in full, the pasture lit and green beyond.
He was in the dark jeans and the chambray work shirt, the half-finished halter in both hands, tracing his thumb along the incomplete stitching with the care he gave to any half-finished piece of work.
Pancake had wandered up from the fence line and was visible just past Dutch’s left shoulder, regarding the barn with his flat professional assessment.
I got three frames before Dutch looked up.
“Pancake’s in it,” I said, before he could say anything.
He looked past his shoulder. Pancake looked back at him.
“He is,” Dutch allowed.
BACK AT THE MAIN HOUSE I went upstairs and changed.
The silk slip dress had survived the weekend in its garment bag, pale champagne, doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
Flat leather sandals. Pearl studs. The gold bracelet.
I looked at my hair in the bathroom mirror and made the only decision available, which was to stop making decisions about it.
I’d been fighting the Texas humidity since Friday afternoon and three days was long enough for a person to update their position.
The hair was doing what it was doing. The hair was fine.
I came downstairs and Dutch was in the kitchen in his Sunday clothes — dark-wash jeans, the pale blue pearl-snap shirt with the yoke stitching, the heirloom belt, the polished brown boots, and he looked at me in the doorway the same way he’d looked at me in the barn.
“Functional,” he said.
“That’s mine,” I said. “You don’t get that one.”
He held the back door open and I went through it.
THE brUNCH TERRACE was the flagstone off the back of the house, set with three long tables and what appeared to be the surviving forty percent of the prior night’s guest list. Pecan waffles.
A mimosa station with a quantity of champagne that communicated a clear position on Sunday mornings.
The May morning was warm enough for bare legs and cool enough to notice the difference from the day before, and the live oaks around the property edge were catching the morning breeze in all the right ways.
Bobbie-Jean appeared at the top of the porch steps in matching denim with Stoney, jacket and jeans and boots all in the same shade, which I was certain had been coordinated at some point between the ceremony and this morning.
She looked at me. She looked at Dutch, two steps behind me.
She looked at the two of us standing at the distance of people who had run out of reasons to pretend otherwise.
“Finally,” she said.
Stoney looked at Dutch with the expression of a man who’d been waiting since Friday and was being restrained about it on purpose. “Took you long enough, Lovett.”
From the far end of the terrace, from behind her coffee cup, without looking up: “I told y’all yesterday,” MeeMaw said.
I hadn’t known what I expected, some version of a composed response I’d planned.
There was no plan. There was a mimosa someone handed me, Dutch’s hand at the small of my back for approximately two seconds as he moved us both toward the general warm chaos of the table, Caprice appearing with her phone and what appeared to be a professional-grade ring light she’d sourced from somewhere between midnight and eight AM, Stoney saying something to Dutch that made Dutch laugh — all of it loud and overlapping and entirely beyond my jurisdiction.
I’d, over the course of the last forty-eight hours, decided this was probably fine.
BUTTERBEAN WAS ASLEEP on the remnants of the wedding cake.
This wasn’t a figure of speech. What remained of the multi-tier cake had been set on a side table during the cleanup, and Butterbean — enormous, orange, and without detectable shame — had selected it as his sleeping location, arranged himself with the full commitment of a cat who had reviewed all available surfaces and rendered a verdict, and was snoring. Faintly, but audibly.
My camera was out before I’d registered picking it up.
He was asleep in the posture of a Renaissance cherub who’d had a very long weekend and was declining further comment.
I got four frames before he stirred, opened one eye, clocked my presence, closed it, and resettled with the decisive finality of an animal who had weighed the situation and found it insufficient to interrupt his morning.
Cooper appeared at my elbow.
“Turbo wants a portrait too,” he said.
Cooper Ralls at six years old had the professional gravity of a boy who’d carried a ring in front of four hundred people and felt the weight of his own reputation. He said this as a statement of established fact, not a request for consideration.
I looked at him. I looked at Turbo, visible in his front pocket with just his nose showing.
“Tell Turbo I have a slot at ten-fifteen,” I said.
Cooper considered this with appropriate seriousness. “He can do ten-fifteen,” he said, and went back to inform Turbo of the scheduling decision.
Across the table, Pamela Hightower watched this exchange from over the rim of her mimosa glass.
She was quiet the way women are who’ve been watching their families make decisions for a long time and no longer required explanation.
She caught my eye. She smiled, the warm specific smile of someone who had noticed it and was glad, and looked back down at her waffle without saying a word.
The morning went the way the weekend had gone: loud and layered and not quite what I’d planned.
Caprice filmed Butterbean until Butterbean opened both eyes and delivered a look that ended the content session.
Big Jim and Houston Ralls shook Dutch’s hand at the far end of the table and departed in the direction of a waiting car.
My phone buzzed once in my camera bag — Olivia, probably, or Mrs. Whitestone making her case from a thousand miles north.
I left it where it was. MeeMaw ate a pecan waffle and declined to explain herself to anyone.
Judge Judy, from the porch she’d commandeered off the main house, provided periodic editorial commentary on proceedings that no one had requested and everyone had come to accept.
I photographed Turbo in Cooper’s cupped hands at ten-fifteen, as agreed. The light came in clean off the flagstone. Turbo held still.
TOWARD THE END OF brUNCH, Dutch’s hand found mine under the table.
Not for anyone else. Just his hand over mine, still and warm, not asking for anything except to be there.
I turned my hand over and he threaded his fingers through mine.
He didn’t ask me anything yet. He didn’t have to. The flight was tomorrow morning, and Frognot was a quarter-mile of live oaks I’d walked twice in three days, and I had no idea what I was going to do about either of those facts.