Epilogue #2
West’s got his camera out, same as always, and produces actual photographic proof mid argument between Finn and Cora over who won last year’s calf roping, settling it decisively in Finn’s favor and ruining Cora’s whole evening in one swipe of a screen.
“I want a recount.”
“There’s no recount. West has a timestamp.”
Knox and Wyatt are wedged in at the end, Wyatt already through half of Nell’s huckleberry pie before anybody else has ordered.
Nell circles the table twice with plates nobody requested, sets them down anyway, and doesn’t ask a single question about what anyone wants, because at Nell’s you eat what she’s decided you need.
Then she climbs up on the same folding chair she used for the wedding toast, wipes the chalkboard clean with her apron, and doesn’t write a new line on it at all.
“That’s it,” she announces, to the whole diner.
“Pool’s retired. Generations of this valley betting on who’d draw blood first, and both these families went and ruined the fun by being happy about it instead.
” She looks straight at me and Dawson. “I expect a little more trouble out of you two eventually. Purely for business reasons.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” Dawson smirks.
In the corner booth, Ashley’s husband sits alone over a cup of coffee gone cold, and nobody at our table says a word about it. I notice it anyway, like most things now, and let it sit where it is instead of picking it up. Not every thread needs pulling tonight.
Gideon and Declan hold down the far end, two men who spent thirty years hating each other on principle now splitting a bottle of good bourbon like old friends, though neither one will ever use that word out loud.
Kathleen sits between them, half refereeing and half enjoying it far too much.
Josephine’s tucked into the corner booth with Holt and Mackenzie, because Holt still won’t sit anywhere he can’t see every door in the room, and my mom looks entirely at home there, watching the whole table with the same quiet, missing-nothing attention she brings to everything, Holt’s eyes still doing their slow, automatic sweep of the diner even here, even now, Mackenzie’s hand resting easy on his knee like she’s long since stopped trying to talk him out of it.
“He said the rain wouldn’t hold off past Thursday,” Gideon says to Maren, quiet, like he thinks nobody’s close enough to hear it. “I told him Friday. Friday it is.”
“I heard that,” Declan says, not turning his head.
“You were meant to.”
Neither man will admit the other was right about a single thing. It’s the closest either of them knows how to come to peace.
Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, Dawson’s hand finds my knee under the table and doesn’t stay there, working slow up the inside of my thigh through denim while he answers a perfectly innocent question from his mother about our upcoming honeymoon, and by the time dessert shows up I’ve had to bite the inside of my own cheek twice to keep my face doing what a face is supposed to do at a family dinner.
The storm hits right on schedule, and by the time we’re home the whole western sky has gone the ominous grey of thunderheads lit from inside every few seconds by lightning already right on our heels, thunder chasing each flash close enough that there’s barely a beat between them.
We don’t make it up the porch steps dry. The first real sheet of rain catches us in the drive, and we’re both shrieking and soaked to the skin by the time Dawson gets the door open, and neither of us bothers with the lights.
“You’re drenched,” he says, dragging me in against him, water running off both of us onto the mudroom floor.
“So are you. I don’t hear you complaining.”
“I’m not complaining. I’m calculating how fast I can get you out of that shirt.”
“Show your work.”
He does. My shirt’s on the floor before we clear the kitchen, his right after, both of us peeling wet fabric off each other in a hurry that has nothing patient left in it at all.
He backs me up against the island and lifts me onto the cold marble like I weigh nothing, spreading my knees with both hands, and I’m bare and open to him before I’ve even caught my breath from the run.
“Dawson.”
“I need you right now. Not upstairs. Right here.” His voice has gone rough and wrecked already.
“I’ve been half out of my mind since diner, feeling how moist you were through your jeans and not able to do a single thing about it.
” He drops to his knees on our own kitchen floor like it’s the only place on earth he wants to be.
“You were the one torturing me,” I say, and my hips already give me away, squirming at the memory of his hand working slow under that table while his mother talked honeymoon plans two feet away. “You started it.”
“I know what I started.”
He puts his mouth on me the second I’m settled, no warm up, no teasing, just his tongue finding me slick and swollen and already desperate, and I cry out loud enough that Cricket bolts for the other room.
Lightning cracks somewhere close, close enough that the whole kitchen goes white, and I watch Broken Sky Mountain flare bright then vanish into black through the window over the sink, thunder rolling in right behind it, long and low and never quite finishing before the next roll starts.
“Fuck, Dawson, don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” He drags two fingers into me while his tongue stays right on the piercing he’s learned to use so well, curling deep, and my hips buck against the marble hard enough that I have to brace one hand flat behind me just to stay upright.
The storm keeps time with him. Every strike lights the kitchen gold white, every roll of thunder shakes the windows in their frames, and rain thrashes the glass.
I come fast and hard on his mouth with a scream that gets swallowed by thunder cracking directly overhead, my thighs locking around his head, and he doesn’t let up until I’m shaking too hard to hold myself upright anymore.
He rises, mouth wet, his eyes gone dark enough that I can’t find the grey in them at all, and I can already feel how hard he is against my thigh through his soaked jeans.
“My turn,” I say, breathless, reaching for his swollen cock.
“Later. I want you in our bed for what I’ve got planned tonight.”
“What you’ve got planned?”
“You’ll see.”
He scoops me up off the island, and I wrap my legs around him and let him carry me up the stairs, both of us dripping a trail behind us.
He sets me down in the middle of our bed, lightning strobing white through the gap in the curtains, thunder rolling long and patient somewhere out past the mountain.
“I want to try something,” he says, and there’s a current under his voice I haven’t heard before, wound tight from a whole dinner spent working me toward exactly this without either of us saying a word about it out loud, careful and hungry at once.
“Something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. ”
“How long is a while?”
“Long enough that I already know how I want it to go.” He reaches into the nightstand and pulls out a length of soft black silk, and my whole body goes tight with want before he’s said another word.
“Tell me if you don’t want this. I mean that.
We need a word first, something that stops everything the second you say it, no questions. ”
“Felony,” I say, immediately.
“The mule.”
“The mule. Guaranteed I’m never going to say his name in bed by accident, and you’ll never mistake it for anything else.
” I hold his eyes. “I want what you’ve dreamed up.
” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, heat already pooling low and insistent between my thighs at just the sight of the fabric in his hand. “I trust you, Dawson. Completely.”
His face goes raw and grateful at that before he leans in and ties the silk over my eyes, gentle, checking twice that it isn’t too tight before he does anything else.
The dark closes in soft and total, and every other sense sharpens at once.
The storm sounds louder now, rain hammering the roof, thunder rolling itself out into the plains, and I hear him move around the bed instead of seeing him, feel the mattress dip under his weight before he catches my wrists and guides them up over my head.
“Dawson.”
“Trust me.” Soft leather cuffs, not rope, loop around each wrist and secure to the headboard slats, snug but nowhere close to tight, and he checks the give twice with two fingers before he’s satisfied. “Too much?”
“Not even close.” My hips are already rocking against nothing, chasing friction that isn’t there yet, the anticipation alone enough to have me soaked and aching. “Please.” I lick my lips and swallow.
“Please what?” His voice drops to gravel, deliberate, right at the shell of my ear now though I never heard him move. “Say it, Sage. All of it. I want to hear what you want before I give it to you.”
“I want you inside me.” My breath comes fast, my whole body strung tight and blind and desperate. “I want your mouth on me again. I want to feel you everywhere at once and I can’t see you and it’s making me so wet I can feel it running down my thighs already.”
“Good girl.” His hand drags slow up the inside of my thigh, and I arch into it, chasing. “Tell me how bad you want it.”
“So bad. Dawson, please, I need you.”