Chapter 11
Holt
I made it two days.
Two days of working beside him with my mouth knowing how he tasted. Two days of telling myself the same true things that had held me my whole life and didn't hold anymore.
On the second night I lay in bed in the dark of the house I'd given everything to, listening to the wind come down off the peaks, and I gave up. I'd been losing for three weeks and I quit pretending I hadn't already lost.
I got up, pulled my jeans on, and went out across the cold yard with my heart going like a green colt's. There was a light under his door. He hadn't been sleeping either.
He opened it before I knocked twice, barefoot, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his hair wrecked from a bed he hadn't been resting in. He looked at me standing there in the cold with no coat and no excuse and no work to hide behind, and he let out a breath like he'd been holding it since the barn.
"Holt," he said.
"Don't talk." My voice came out ragged. "If you talk I'll think, and if I think I'll leave, and I have done enough leaving."
He pulled me in by the front of my shirt and kicked the door shut. I had him up against it before it latched, my mouth on his, and he made a sound I felt in my teeth.
There was nothing careful left in me. I'd been careful my whole life and I'd left every bit of it out in the yard.
I kissed him like I could get back the time I'd wasted not doing it, deep and rough, my hands already up under the hem of his shirt and onto the hot skin of his back.
He arched into them, gasped my name against my mouth, and I swallowed it.
"Off," I said, and dragged the shirt up over his head.
Then I just looked at him. The long lean line of him in the light from the lamp near his bed, the hands, the sunburn line at his collar, the scabbed-over places on his knuckles, all of it mine.
He let me look. A man who charged money for that, stood there letting me do it for nothing. Just me. He was looking at me like I was the only camera that had ever mattered and it had finally swung around.
I got him to the bed walking backward and he went down and pulled me with him. I covered him with my whole body. He was hard against my hip through the sweatpants and I ground down into it without meaning to. He made a broken sound and grabbed my ass with both hands and pulled me harder.
He got my shirt off me somewhere in there. I don't know when. I know his hands were shaking on the buttons and that he swore at them. When he got it open he put both palms flat on my chest and held them there a second like a man warming them at a stove.
Nobody had had their hands on me in years. I'd have told you I didn't miss it. I'd have been lying, and he found that out about a half second before I did.
We got a rhythm going, both of us still half-dressed, and it was almost enough on its own.
He got his knees up and his heels hooked over the backs of my thighs and used them to pull me down into him.
I gave him my whole weight and he took it.
His cock was hard through the sweatpants and dragging against mine through my jeans every time I rolled my hips.
The drag of it was almost too much and nothing like enough, but neither of us could stop doing it.
I had one hand spread on his lower back holding him where I wanted him and the other in his hair. I couldn't decide which I wanted more, so I kept both.
"Holt," he said, his lips against my jaw. "Holt, I've been thinking about this since the storm."
"I know it."
"Every night. In that bed. Watching your window." He got a hand down between us and pressed the heel of it against me through the denim and I groaned into his hair. "You knew. You had to know."
"I knew."
I wanted to take my time but there was no time left in me.
Three weeks of wanting him had burned it all off.
He was the same, because every time I tried to slow down and do it right he hauled me back into fast and greedy.
His hips worked up against mine, both of us making sounds straight into each other's mouths.
I got his sweatpants off him. I had to get up to do it and I hated the second of cold air it put between us.
Then he was bare under me, his cock flushed dark and curved up against his belly and leaking.
I took it in my hand and he swore, bucking up into my fist, and I about lost it right there in my jeans like a kid.
"Holt. Holt, please—"
"I know."
It came out rough and certain, and it broke something loose in both of us.
I went down his body slow, mouth on his chest and then his stomach, and he got a hand in my hair before I got there and I let him think he was steering. Then I took him in.
He said something that wasn't a word. I went down on him until my nose was in the crease of his hip and held there with him thick in my throat and his thigh shaking against my ear. Then I came off him slow, all the way to the head, and used my tongue, and did it again.
"Oh." His voice was gone. "Holt."
The third time I did it his hips came up off the bed and I put my forearm across them and held him down.
He swore at me and pushed against it but couldn't move an inch, and I felt him give up on that and go loose and take what I gave him.
I got a hand around the base of him and worked it with my mouth, no rhythm to speak of, wet and greedy, chasing every noise he made.
The sounds were nothing I'd ever heard out of him. Nothing rehearsed. I could have stayed down there all night just to keep hearing it.
"Stop, stop, I'm gonna—" He hauled me up by the hair before he came, breathing like he'd been drowning. "Not like that. I want—" His voice cracked. "I want you in me. I've wanted it since the storm. Tell me you've got something."
I had something. I'd put it in my pocket before I left the house, which was the closest I'd come to admitting where I was going, and knowing how long I'd wanted this went through me hot as the rest of it.
I got my jeans off, finally, both of us bare, and the first slide of his skin against the whole length of mine punched the air out of me. I'd forgotten. It had been years and I'd told myself I didn't need it and I'd forgotten what it was to have a warm body against mine.
I slicked my fingers and went slow. I wanted to go fast. One finger and then two. He was tight and hot and I made myself stay slow until he swore at me for it.
"Christ, Holt. I am not made of glass. Will you please."
"Am I hurting you?"
"No. Nowhere close. More."
So I gave him three, and gentled him through it the way I'd gentle anything. Somewhere in there his mouth fell open and stayed that way. I found the place that made his whole body jolt and I did it again. He rocked back onto my hand and begged me.
Actually begged. The man who I was sure had never had to ask anybody for anything in his life.
"Holt. Please fuck me. Now, please, I'm done waiting."
I rolled the condom on with hands that weren't steady and slicked myself up.
Then got a hand under his knee and pushed it up toward his chest. I lined up and pressed in.
He took the head of me and stopped me there, tight enough that I had to breathe through it.
Then he let out a long breath and let me have the rest. I felt every inch of it happen.
He made one low sound at about halfway and another one when I was flush against him.
"Fuck, Morgan."
I held still when I was all the way in, shaking with it, dropping my forehead to his. He was so hot around me it had gone past feeling good and into feeling like something being done to me.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked at him and he nodded.
I started to move. It was not graceful. I'd always figured that if I ever did this I'd do it controlled, the way I did everything.
There was no control in it. I couldn't control myself around him.
The first few thrusts were shallow because I was afraid of him.
Then he got a heel into the small of my back and pulled hard.
"Holt. Give me all of it."
After that I quit being careful. Every time I fucked back into him he made a noise like it had been knocked out of him, and I started working for those, learning where they came from and changing the angle until I found the one that took his whole body away from him and then staying there.
"There," he said. "Right there. Don't you dare move off that."
So I stayed on it. Slow and deep and all the way, watching what it did to him.
His legs came up around me and locked. One hand fisted in the sheet and the other gripped my shoulder hard enough to leave marks I'd find in the morning and be happy about.
His mouth stayed open. He'd quit making words.
Sweat ran down the side of his neck and I put my mouth on it, tasting salt and him.
He turned his head to give me more of it without seeming to know he'd done it.
The bed was old and it complained about all of it. I got a hand between us and stroked him in time, and the movie-star face I'd resented for three weeks went to pieces under me. Mouth open. Eyes wet. Nobody watching but me and nothing left of him but the truth.
"Faster," he said. "Please. I don't need you gentle, I need you to—"
So I put a forearm down by his head and gave it to him hard, no slower than he'd asked and no gentler, until the headboard found the wall and stayed there. He got both hands on my ass and hauled me in on every stroke like he could get me deeper than I already was.
"Holt—" He was close. He was tightening around me. "Holt, I'm close, don't stop, don't you dare stop—"
"Come on," I said into his throat. "Let me see it."
And he did. He moved a hand to the back of my neck and came in my fist with his whole body bowing up off the bed, wet and hot across my knuckles and his own stomach, mumbling my name over and over into my jaw like it was the only word he had left.
He clenched down around me when he came and that was the end of me. Three more thrusts and I came too, hard enough that I went blind for a second, my face buried in his neck and a sound coming out of me I didn't recognize.
For a while neither of us could do anything but breathe.
The sweat cooled on my back. His heart was slamming against my chest and his hand kept moving in absent circles between my shoulders like he didn't know he was doing it.
He kept the other one on the back of my neck, not stroking it, just keeping it there, and I let him.
I made myself ease out, careful, and dealt with the practical things. Tied off the condom. Found a clean corner of his discarded shirt and cleaned us both up, my hands gentle on him in a way my mouth would never have allowed. He watched me do it with a soft wrecked look I had to glance away from.
I'd figured it would be a simple animal thing. Scratch the itch and be done. It was not simple. It was his eyes. He kept opening them and looking at me, and by about the third time I knew once wasn't going to be enough.
I'd pulled out something load-bearing and I'd done it on purpose. There was no putting that back.
Then the after came, the same as it always did. The cold edge of the thing creeping back in under the warm.
I'd let myself have the one thing, and in three weeks there'd be a car going back down that road, and now I'd have to live the rest of my life knowing exactly what I was going to be missing. I felt the wall start back up out of old habit, brick by brick, and my body went still beside him.
He felt it. Of course he felt it. He read rooms for a living and there was no room he read closer than me now.
"Don't," he said quietly, into the dark, his hand flattening warm on my chest. "Whatever you're already telling yourself. Not tonight. Just stay till morning. You can start being scared again at sunup, I won't stop you. Just give me till then."
So I stayed.
I pulled him into me instead of pulling away, which was the bravest and the stupidest thing I'd done in years.
He tucked his head under my jaw and went heavy and warm against me.
His breathing evened out against my collarbone and his hand stilled on my chest. I pulled the blanket up over both of us in the bed we both barely fit in.
I felt his heart wind down to match the quiet, and I memorized it on purpose. The weight and the smell of him and the way he fit under my jaw. The thing had an end date stamped on it, and I'd learned young to take everything a good thing had in it while I still had my hands on it.
I lay in that narrow iron bed in the bunkhouse I'd been meaning to fix the door of for nine years, holding a man I couldn't keep, and I did not start being scared again. Not yet. I gave us both till morning, and morning could have the rest.