Chapter 6 Josie
six
Josie
The Hill Country in Spring is something you have to see.
We ride out past the south gate into a long valley, and the whole thing is running wild.
Bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush flowers going on for acres, the kind of color you assume is exaggerated in photographs until you're looking at it in person and it isn't. Blue-purple-red against the limestone, against the live oak green, against a sky that goes on forever and makes you understand how people got religion out here.
I'm riding.
Not gripping. Not enduring. Riding. Weight in my heels, hands light, letting Bonnie pick her way down the trail with her own judgment.
I've learned to trust her judgment over four days and she's earned it.
I feel her gait under me like something I've been trying to translate since I am eight years old and have finally figured out the language of.
"You're smiling," Carson says.
"I'm aware."
"Looks good on you."
I turn to look at him riding beside me, easy in the saddle, the way he is easy in most things, the Hill Country behind him. The jaw I've had my hands on last night.
We follow a creek trail through a stand of live oaks and find a place where the water runs over limestone, and the shade is deep, and the whole world is this: water sound, the horses dropping their heads to drink at the bank, light coming through the canopy in pieces.
I think: I want to remember this exactly. The smell of cedar and horse and creek water. The way the light moves on the limestone. The man beside me has never once made me feel stupid for being afraid.
Carson dismounts and comes to my stirrup and puts his hands up, and I come down into them with a confidence I wouldn't have recognized in myself four days ago.
His hands are on my waist, steady, and then I am on the ground, and we are very close and neither of us moves.
I am aware of every point of contact, his palms through my shirt, the warmth coming off him, the way he is looking at me — not at my face, but at me, all the way through the professional composure and the careful management and three decades of keeping myself at arm's length from anything powerful enough to knock me sideways, and he isn't the least bit put off by what is underneath.
That is the thing about Carson. He sees the fear and the fury and the stubbornness holding it all together, and he's never once looked like he wants something simpler.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." His thumbs move against my waist. Just slightly.
He pulls a folded blanket from the saddlebag. He spreads it in the shade near the creek and turns back to me.
Last night in the cabin, he is deliberate, careful, taking his time like I am something worth being slow about.
He gives me everything and watches my face the whole time, and I come apart in ways I haven't known I am capable of.
This morning I wake up in his bed with the spring light on the ceiling and his arm across my ribs, and I lie there for a long time not moving, not managing, not planning anything at all.
Right now, I'm done being patient. I kiss him.
He makes a low sound of surprise and then his hands are in my hair and we are pulling each other close and fast and the urgency of it catches me off guard even though I am the one who's started it.
He walks me backward toward the blanket and we go down together, his body braced over mine, and I get his shirt open and push it off his shoulders and take a moment to just look at him.
He lets me, which is its own thing, a man who can hold still under that kind of attention without performing anything.
His chest is broad and warm, the muscles of his stomach tightening slightly under my hands, a scatter of dark hair tapering to the waist of his jeans, calloused hands resting on my waist. A body shaped by years of physical work, capable and unhurried in exactly the same way his mind is, and I want all of it without reservation, which is new for me.
I've spent years treating want like a liability.
Somewhere between the mounting block and this blanket by the creek, I've stopped doing that.
"You're beautiful," he says. Not a line. Just a fact he's decided to say out loud.
I kiss him instead of answering, and he meets me and deepens it immediately, his hand sliding to the back of my neck, and I feel the shift from patient to urgent, from careful to something that just wants.
He gets my shirt over my head. His calloused hands moving over my bare back make me shiver and he notices, he notices everything, his mouth curving against my throat. He unclasps my bra and his mouth finds the curve of my breast and I stop thinking about much of anything.
"Carson." His name comes out with more breath than I've meant to give it.
He looks up at me. Waiting.
"Tell me what you want," he says.
Something the old Josie would never have survived.
She'd have deflected, found a way to be in her head about it.
But she is gone. This Josie has gotten on a horse.
This Josie quits her job on a Tuesday afternoon from a blanket by a creek in the Texas Hill Country because she is done doing things that feel like waiting.
"I want your mouth on me," I say. "Everywhere. And I want you to take your time."
The look that crosses his face does something to my spine.
"Yes, ma'am," he says, and gets to work.
He takes his time the way he takes his time with everything.
His mouth works down my ribs, my stomach, and when he gets his hands on the waist of my jeans and looks up at me I lift my hips and let him take them off.
He pulls back to look at me, bare in the dappled light, and his expression is that focused, intent look I've seen him use with the young horse in the round pen.
The look of a man who understands that some things require his complete attention.
"Every morning this week," he says, low, "I watch you walk into that barn and work so hard at something that scares you." He presses his mouth to the inside of my knee. "I've wanted this since the first day." Lower. "Wanted to hear every sound you've been keeping quiet."
He gets his mouth between my legs, and I make a sound that carries all the way to the ridge and I do not care even a little.
He is devastatingly, ruthlessly patient about it.
When I say faster, he says not yet against my skin.
When I say please, he says I know and keeps the exact same unhurried pace, his hands flat on my thighs holding me where he wants me, and I am going completely out of my mind.
The canopy above me, the creek ten feet away, the sun coming through the leaves in warm patches on my bare skin, and this man taking me apart with the same quiet deliberateness he brings to everything.
"Carson. Carson."
"Yeah." Still not faster. "I hear you."
"I swear!"
"Ask me nicely," he says.
"Please. Carson. Please."
He gives me what I've been asking for, and I stop being able to form sentences.
My back comes off the blanket. His hands grip my thighs and hold on.
I grab a fistful of grass and another of the blanket and when I come it is with my heels in the dirt and my whole body arching and his name on my lips, completely unmanaged, completely real.
Nothing held back. Nothing managed. Just this.
He stays with me through every second of it. Then, he comes up and I push him back and he goes, settling onto the blanket. His hands find my hips immediately. I work at his belt, get his jeans off, and swing my leg over him and sit up and look down at him.
That jaw. Those dark eyes, blown wide. The full weight of his attention on me, which I've stopped trying to manage and start just accepting as the extraordinary thing it is.
I think about what he says in the barn, the first day. You figure it out, or you don't. Four days of learning to sit up straight and keep my weight in my heels and let the horse move under me instead of bracing against it. Trust the thing that's powerful enough to throw you.
I reach between us and guide him and sink down slowly and watch his face change entirely.
His head drops back. Both hands grip my hips hard, his knuckles going white. A sound tears out of him, low and involuntary and wanting, and I feel it in my chest like something struck.
I start to move.
Finding the rhythm the way I find it with Bonnie.
Not forcing it, not fighting it. Learning what draws the sounds out of him, what makes his breath go ragged, what makes his hands tighten and his jaw set and his careful composure strip away completely.
He is watching me with his expression gone open in a way I've never seen on him, all that patience worn through to what is underneath it.
His throat moves. His hands on my hips aren't guiding. Just holding. Letting me have this.
I set the pace.
"Josie." Rough. Broken at the edges.
He says something that isn't words and his grip tightens hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow and I want that. I want the evidence of this on my skin. I want to press my fingers to the bruises in a few days and remember the exact look on his face right now.
"You feel so good," he says, his voice completely wrecked. “Fuck.” He groans.
I don't stop.
He gets a hand between us, his thumb finding exactly the right place on my clit, and I gasp and my rhythm stutters.
"Keep going," he says, low and aimed just at me. "Let me feel you."
I move faster. His thumb works steadily, and I am not quiet about any of it.
The whole Hill Country can hear me, and I do not care.
Not a managed piece of me left to care. The creek and the canopy and the warmth of the sun and his hands on me and the look on his face and him, this patient impossible man who has left the door open and stood back and waited while I found my way through it.
"Carson!"
"I've got you," he says. "Come on."
When I come, I drop forward onto his chest, both hands grabbing his shoulders, my face in his neck, and he catches me and rolls us in one smooth motion. I am on my back, he is over me, and his mouth finds my ear.
"My turn," he says.
He is not careful about it.
He moves, thrusting as he comes, and I stop thinking and stop managing and let it happen.
All of it. The creek and the sun and the weight of him and his voice low at my ear saying there she is when I gasp, and that's it when my nails find his back, and stay with me when I lose my breath entirely.
I wrap my legs around him and hold on and the knowledge settles somewhere permanent and certain: I am not the same person who white-knuckles her way down this highway four days ago.
That woman is gone. This one doesn't brace for impact.
He says my name one more time, and I feel him go.
For a while neither of us moves, just breathes, his forehead against my shoulder and my hands doing slow lazy circuits up and down his back because I can and there is nowhere I need to be.
"I'm not going back to who I was before this," I say eventually, to the canopy, to him, to the general Texas afternoon.
I turn my head to look at him. He is watching the canopy, jaw set. A man bracing for disappointment. I recognize it because I've been doing it for thirty years: pre-managing the fall so it can't surprise you.
I reach over and put my hand flat on his chest, over his heart.
He looks down at my hand. Then at me.
My phone buzzes in the saddlebag. Then again. Then three times fast. My boss. Work email. Some kind of crisis, there is always a crisis, the architecture of my old life reassembling itself at exactly the wrong moment.
I watch the saddlebag.
I put my hand back on his chest.
"I need to make a call," I say. "When we get back."
Something shutters in his face. I watch him build the wall, brick by brick, the way a person does when they've been left enough times to get good at the construction.
"Okay," he says. Flat. Controlled.
"Carson."
"Ready?" He is already up, moving to the horses with that economic efficiency that can look like nothing is wrong.
I want to tell him right there. But I need to do it right.