Chapter 28 #2
The whole booth erupts, Finn nearly off his stool, Cora wiping her eyes, and Sage laughs with them, real and fizzing, tucked against my side, and something in me loosens that hasn’t loosened all week, not at the dinner, not at the hedge line, not once since Erin’s name started meaning something other than coffee and trail runs.
I catch myself wanting to freeze the whole room exactly as it is, garlic smell and bad jokes and nobody currently plotting against anybody in it.
It doesn’t last, because nothing does, but for thirty minutes it’s close enough.
The Prairie Star’s marquee reads CONGRATULATIONS DAWSON & SAGE in letters somebody clearly ran out of and had to borrow from a different sign, the A’s mismatched, the N tilted, and Sage laughs so hard at it she has to lean on the truck.
“Old Mrs. Barrett’s decided we’re the event of the summer.”
“We are the event of the summer, Dawson. Try to keep up.”
“We were the event of the summer,” Maren complains, arriving with Knox and two bags of popcorn, “right up until somebody’s welcome dinner and drive-in double feature stole our whole news cycle. I’m aware and I’m bitter about it.” She winks at Sage and me.
West sets the pizza boxes out on his tailgate like a buffet nobody asked him to run, and the projector flickers to life against a sky gone indigo that means full dark isn’t far behind it.
Top Gun. Somebody at this drive-in decided the whole valley needed fighter jets and Kenny Loggins tonight, and judging by the crowd nobody’s arguing.
I back my truck into the second row, tailgate down, and Sage climbs up into the bed before I can offer a hand, boots kicked off, blanket over both our laps. Two spots over, Finn’s already doing the voices.
Sage tips her head back against my shoulder, the highway to the danger zone crackling tinny through the truck’s speakers, and for the first time all night I stop counting exits.
“We never got to do this,” she says just for me. “The two of us. In front of everybody. Not sneaking around a cove or a tack room.”
“No.”
“How’s it feel?”
I look down at her, moonlight and movie light both catching the line of her jaw.
“Terrifying,” I say. “In the good way.”
I kiss her right there, in front of every last one of the people who watched us grow up and half of Rimrock’s truck beds, slow and deep and entirely unbothered by an audience, the exact kiss I wasn’t allowed at twenty-four on a porch I made myself forget.
She kisses me back like she’s been waiting on it just as long, and the world blots out for a minute.
“Get a room!” Finn hollers, and Cora’s laugh carries clean across the lot.
“We have a room,” I call back, without breaking away from her mouth. “We’re using the truck bed instead. Cheaper on gas.”
“That’s the least romantic thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Sage murmurs against my lips.
“I’ll workshop it.”
I couldn’t tell you a single line of the movie past the volleyball scene. I’m too busy learning the exact way she laughs when Finn does the voices wrong, too busy being a man at a drive-in with his wife instead of a man running threat models on my family’s yard twenty miles behind us.
The house is dark when we finally pull in, porch light left on like we always leave it, and Sage has my shirt half unbuttoned before we clear the mudroom.
She makes it four steps up.
Then she turns around, one hand on my chest, and pushes, and I sit down hard on the stairs, because apparently that’s what I do now when my wife pushes.
She drops to her knees two steps below me, porch light spilling through the glass in the front door and catching gold in her eyes, and gets my belt open with the same efficiency she uses on a bad contract.
“Sage.”
“You kissed me in front of half of Rimrock.” She pulls me free and wraps her hand around me, slow and firm, watching my face while she does it. “Best thing anybody’s ever done to me in a truck bed. My turn.”
Then her mouth is on me and I stop being capable of arguing anything.
She takes her time. She learned me again that first night, and she’s clearly been studying since, and she uses every bit of it, her tongue dragging up the length of me, then swirling around the head until a groan tears out of me and I’m gripping the stair rail hard enough to make the old wood complain.
When she takes me deep, I hiss through my teeth and her name comes out of me in a voice I don’t recognize.
She hums around me, pleased, and the vibration nearly finishes me on the spot.
I get one hand in her hair. I don’t pull. I don’t dare.
She pulls off just long enough to look up at me, lips swollen, eyes gone dark. “Don’t you dare hold back on me now. Fuck my mouth, Dawson.”
Whatever was left of my control snaps clean in half.
My fingers tighten in her hair and my hips come up off the step, and she takes every thrust and asks for more with her nails digging into my thighs, and the sounds coming out of me aren’t words anymore, just broken curses and her name, over and over, bouncing off the stairwell walls.
I warn her. She doesn’t stop. She looks up at me through her lashes, deliberate, and takes me deeper, and I come apart on the stairs of our own house with a groan that’s half her name, my head knocking back against the wall and nothing controlled left in me at all.
She sits back on her heels, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and smiles like she just won a hearing.
Then she laces her fingers through mine, twines them tight, stands, and pulls me up after her. I let her lead me the rest of the way to our bedroom and I’ve got no complaints about where I’m going.
“Window,” she says, pulling me through the bedroom door. “Leave it open. I want to hear the crickets.”
“You want the whole valley to hear you.”
“I want the crickets, Dawson. Don’t overthink it.”
I don’t overthink it. Her back hits the mattress and she’s already pulling me down with her, laughing when my knee catches the edge of the nightstand and knocks her water glass sideways, neither of us stopping long enough to right it.
I peel the sundress off her in one motion, no patience left for buttons or zippers, and she arches up to help me remove the purple lace panties, her hands already working my belt loose before the dress clears the floor.
“Careful,” she says, breathless, when I finally get her bare beneath me. “You’re supposed to be a controlled man.”
“I control plenty.” I drag my mouth down her throat, her collarbone, feel her pulse jump under my lips. “Not this. Never this.”
“Tell me what you want,” I say against her throat, moving south. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Dawson.” My name breaks apart in her mouth, half moan, half laugh, when my mouth finds the spot that makes her back bow off the mattress. “Please. Fuck me hard.” She’s panting hard. “Like you can’t get enough of me.”
“Look at you, laid out for me, pussy dripping and eager for more. You’re as needy as I am.” My tongue is caressing the jade jewel, rolling and sucking it.
“I need you inside me now.” She’s desperate, hips writhing.
I slam into her in one brutal thrust to the root.
The window stays cracked like she asked, cool night air moving across her skin every time she arches to meet me, crickets loud enough outside that neither of us bothers keeping quiet.
A breath later, wrecked. “Don’t stop.”
I don’t stop.
She wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me deeper, her nails scoring down my back hard enough to leave marks I’ll feel tomorrow, and I don’t slow down for a second of it, driving into her fast and setting a punishing pace in a way that has nothing to do with grief or fury or any of the heavier registers we’ve already spent on each other this month.
I set a rhythm that has her fisting the sheets in one hand and my hair in the other, her whole body drawing tight under mine, and when she comes it’s loud enough that the coyotes join in.
I don’t stop. I’ve already been wrecked once tonight on the stairs, and it buys me all the time in the world, and I spend every second of it on her until she comes again, harder, clenching around me so tight she drags me over with her.
“Sage, fuuuuck.” My orgasm coming in waves that don’t seem to ever stop. We hold on tight through it, letting it wash over us and laughing again before either of us has fully caught our breath.
Afterward she sprawls across my chest, breath still uneven, her fingers tracing lazy circles down my happy trail. I’m almost ready to start again.
“Best welcome dinner I’ve ever snuck away from early,” she says.
“High bar. I’ve only thrown you the one.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.”