Chapter 5 Carson
five
Carson
I don't do this.
That's what I tell myself as she kisses me.
I don't believe it for a minute.
After our kiss, I take her to my cabin.
Her eyes move around the cabin once, not nervous, just taking stock, and then they come back to me. The professional composure is down. The woman underneath all of the fear is incredible and strong and beautiful.
"I'm not great at the prelude," she says.
"There doesn't have to be one."
"Okay."
I cross to her. My hands find her face, and she exhales when I tip her chin up, this long controlled breath going out of her like she's been holding it since the barn. I take my time with the first kiss. Slow enough that she makes a frustrated sound against my mouth, and her hands fist in my shirt.
"Carson."
"I know." I walk her back toward the bed. "I've got you."
She shivers when my hands find her waist, before I've done anything at all.
I pull her shirt over her head and just look at her for a moment.
The flush climbing her throat. Her chest is rising and falling quickly.
All that careful professional composure is completely stripped away, and underneath it, something I haven't expected: she is beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with what she looks like.
It is the look of someone who has finally stopped managing.
She reaches for my buttons, and I let her work them, watching her fingers move, watching her focus shift entirely inward.
I can't take my eyes off of her.
Her hands still on my shirt. She looks up.
"You've been driving me out of my mind," I tell her. "Every morning this week. Showing up in my barn and working so hard at something that terrified you, and never once asking me to make it easier." I hold her gaze. "I've wanted my hands on you since the first day."
Something in her face opens up like a door swinging wide. She reaches up and pulls me down to her mouth for another kiss.
I lay her back and take my time with it.
My mouth at her throat, her collarbone, the soft curve of her breast. Her skin is warm, and I learn the shape of her slowly, the way I learn a new horse: not rushing toward the end, paying attention to every response.
She makes sounds she is trying to keep contained, her hands moving through my hair.
"Carson." My name in her mouth, low.
"Yeah."
"Stop being careful with me."
I stop being careful.
I get my mouth on her and she stops trying to keep quiet. Her hands fist in my hair and pull and I let her, keep her hips where I want them with one hand flat on her stomach, and take my time until she is shaking.
"Right there." Her voice has gone ragged. "Don't you dare stop."
I ease off just enough to hear her say it again.
"Carson. Please."
I give her what she wants. She comes hard, thighs locking around my shoulders, my name loud in the dark cabin, and I stay with her all the way through it.
When I come back up she grabs my shoulder.
"I want your cock inside me," she says. "Right now."
Something hits me low and certain. "Say that again."
She does. Her hand slides down between us and wraps around me and I groan into her shoulder, the sound dragged out of me before I can stop it. I pull her hand away and settle my weight over her, and she wraps her legs around my hips and puts her mouth at my ear.
"I said stop being careful."
I push my cock inside her.
She is wet and tight and her whole body arches up into it, her nails finding my shoulders, and I hold still for one breath with my jaw clenched because if I move before I'm ready this is going to be over fast. She feels too good.
Five days of keeping my hands to myself and she feels exactly as good as I've known she would.
I move long and slow first, watching her face, her head tipped back and her lips parted and the flush spreading down her chest. Her pussy grips me every time I pull back and she makes a sound low in her throat that goes straight through me.
Harder.
Both hands on her, one gripping her hip to hold her where I need her, and she stops managing anything at all — no composure, no control, just her nails in my back and her heels against my thighs and her voice in my ear asking for more.
I give her more. She comes again with her back off the mattress and her whole body pulling tight around me.
I bury myself deep and come hard, hips jerking through it, jaw clenched, the kind that starts at the base of your spine and takes everything with it.
Her name comes out of me on the way down, and I don't try to stop it.
I stay inside her until it is done, both of us sweating and breathing hard and not talking.
Her fingers move slowly through my hair. Neither of us speaks for a while. The spring night comes through the open window. Creek and cedar and horse on the warm air, the sounds of the Hill Country settling toward midnight.
"I didn't know it could be like that," she says finally.
"Like what?"
"Like someone was actually paying attention."
I turn my head and press my mouth to her temple instead of answering, because I don't trust what I might say.
I trace a slow line down her shoulder. She lets her breath out in a way that means she is nowhere else in her head. That is something. She spends a lot of energy in her head. I've watched her all week, the constant internal management, the self-monitoring. Right now, there is none of it.
"I haven't slept well in years," she says.
"Okay."
"I think tonight might be different."
I kiss her hair. "Good."
She turns her head to look up at me. "You're not going to tell me this is complicated or that you don't usually do this?"
"No." I meet her eyes. "I don't usually. But that's not your problem."
She puts her head back on my shoulder.
Outside, the horses shift in the barn. The ordinary sounds of them settling for the night. I lie there, and I know two things with equal certainty: she is going to leave on Sunday, and I am not going to be all right with that.
I don't say either. Some things you let live in the dark for a while.
She reaches down and traces the scar on my knee. Doesn't flinch from it.
"Tell me," she says.
"Eight seconds on a bronc named Sidewinder. End of the round, I thought I had him." I look at the ceiling. "I didn't. Got pitched into the boards, knee caught wrong. Heard it before I felt it."
"What happened to Sidewinder?"
I almost laugh. "Nothing. He was fine. Horses usually are."
"Of course they are." A beat. "I was eight," she says. "My cousin's farm. A gelding got spooked by a tractor, and I was too close and too slow. The ground came up, and I remember the sky spinning and then just white." She touches her collarbone. "Broke this. Spent the summer in a sling."
"Scared you all the way to now."
"All the way to now." She says it plainly, without self-pity, and I pull her closer.
"You know what's strange? I spent twenty-two years building a whole life around not being that girl on the ground, and I didn't even realize it until I was sitting in my apartment at thirty with a perfectly fine life that felt like a waiting room. "
I look at her.
"That's what this week is," she says. "That's what you've been doing, in the barn, with the lessons. You haven't been teaching me to ride. You've been showing me the door."
"You did that," I say. "Not me."
She chuckles. "You left it open."
We trade scars in the dark after that. It is a long time since I've talked like that, the way you can in the dark when someone is already as close as they can get.
I can't remember the last time I wanted to.