Chapter 14
Morgan
We didn't know for two days whether Gus would live. Nobody in that family said the worst word out loud, not once, not even at three in the morning.
Holt didn't sleep. He sat in the plastic chair with his hat in his hands and answered the doctors in single words, holding the whole shaking family up by letting them lean on him. I held him up by being the one thing he'd let lean back.
On the third morning the cardiologist came out into the hall with a different face on, and Gus did not die.
It was a heart attack, not a scare. The kind that earns a man a stent and a cardiologist who says the word sodium twelve times in five minutes.
They let us in to see him. He was sitting up in a gown that offended him deeply, gray and shrunk and furious about the food.
Flynn had to go stand in the corner and look out the window.
Dez started talking and could not stop. I stood at the back because I hadn't earned a place at the front, and watched four grown men try not to cry in front of a sick old rancher who would have taken it as an insult.
"Stop looking at me like that," Gus said to all of us. "I'm not dead, I'm bored. Holt, the cattle?"
And Holt told him about the cattle. Every head, in a voice that shook only a little.
Gus closed his eyes and listened to his ranch the way another man might listen to his own children breathing.
I understood that this was how they said the things they couldn't say, in the language of stock and weather and the roof on the barn.
Somehow I'd been let in close enough to hear it.
I made myself useful in the ways I'd learned.
I ran the casserole logistics, which turned out to be a real and complicated business in a valley that grieved and celebrated in identical nine-by-thirteen pans.
I kept the coffee going. I drove Lane's truck down to Kremmling for the pamphlets and a week's pill organizer, because Lane wouldn't leave the room and Holt couldn't. Flynn would have driven it into a ditch out of pure feeling.
They were small things. The kind of small things a person did for people who were his. Nobody thanked me for a single one of them, which was how I knew I'd been promoted somewhere in those long hospital hours, from guest to family. I would have paid every dollar I had to keep the job.
They sent me out for coffee nobody wanted so the boys could have a minute, and in the hallway I took out my phone and saw the texts.
There were six of them from Renata, stacked up over two days while I'd been forgetting the outside world existed. The first ones were logistics.
The last two were an idea.
So Bauer's people have been talking.
The authenticity thing is testing through the roof in early buzz. Real-cowboy-immersion. Morgan Masterson vanishes into the Colorado wilderness, comes home a cowboy. Marketing wants to lean all the way in.
Thinking featurette. Maybe a spread, transformation, before/after.
And possibly, don't spiral, a few days of a small crew on the property. Tasteful. Controlled. We'd get every approval.
It's tasteful, it's huge, it puts a frame around the whole comeback.
And honestly? Kismet. You stumbled into the exact story we've been trying to sell for two years.
I'd stumbled into the exact story we'd been trying to sell.
I stood in the hallway with the coffee going cold in my other hand and felt two things at once. They did not fit in the same body.
The first was reflex. Fast and automatic, the part of me that had been doing this for thirty-one years doing the math before I could stop it.
It was a good angle. It was a great angle.
It was the kind of thing that won a quiet prestige picture the goodwill it needed and turned it into a thing people lined up for.
A colder version of me was already composing the yes.
The second thing was that I wanted to throw the phone down the hall.
Because it was not a story. It was Gus in a gown being brave and Holt's voice shaking through the cattle count.
It was a fire built without asking, a calf named Trouble, and a man on the edge of my bed losing a fight with a boot.
The thought of any of it through a lens, framed and lit and sold, before and after, made me feel like I was going to be sick on the floor.
I texted her back.
Hospital with the family, friend's grandfather, talk later.
Then I turned the phone face down in my pocket like it was something I'd done wrong and went to deliver coffee no one would drink.
I did not tell Holt.
That was the part I'd think about after. I had two days to say it and I didn't. I told myself it was because there was nothing to tell. I was going to say no. The idea was already dead. I was very good at telling myself things. I'd had the training.
The real reason was worse. Telling him would have meant saying the words crew and featurette and content out loud in a house where an old man was sleeping off a heart attack. I knew what would happen if those two worlds got into the same room. One of them was not going to walk out.
So I kept them in separate rooms. I was good at keeping things in separate rooms. I'd been raised in a house with a great many of them.
We brought Gus home two days later, the seventh close enough now to taste, and the house filled up with the boys and a casserole brigade from half the valley.
In the middle of it Holt took my hand in the kitchen, in front of Dez and a dish of somebody's scalloped potatoes, and pulled me down the hall and up the stairs, shutting the door of his own room behind us.
I'd never been past the kitchen in the house.
Five weeks I'd lived a hundred yards off it, fed at the long table and warmed at the stove, but not once been let up those stairs.
I understood it in my body before my head caught up.
The bunkhouse was where they kept the help. This was where they kept themselves.
I'd half expected him to go cold on me again. After the scare, after the hospital, I'd braced for careful, for him to decide that almost losing Gus was proof of everything he'd ever believed about what it cost to let himself need a thing.
But he didn't. There was a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, and one photograph face down on top of it.
The window was full of the Three Saints going pink.
He put his hands on the sides of my face and looked at me for a long time, until I had to fight the lifelong urge to do something with my face.
Give it an expression. Sell it a feeling.
I made myself let him look instead. Let him have whatever he found.
"There you are," he said like he'd been hunting for me and finally cut my track.
"I've never been up here."
"I know." He didn't take his hands off my face. "I've been meaning to do something about that for a while."
We didn't rush it. The first time had been three weeks of starving spent in one night, all teeth and need. This was the opposite of starving. This was a man who had almost watched his world end and wanted, instead, to take one slow inventory of a living thing.
He undressed me like he had all the time we didn't have.
Shirt first, stopping to put his mouth on my shoulder, and then he took his time with my belt while I stood there and let him.
When he got my jeans open and got a hand around my cock I made a noise into his neck that I would have been embarrassed about anywhere else on earth.
"You sound good," he said, and kept his hand moving, slow, watching my face while he did it.
He laid me down on a bed that had one pillow on it.
He started at my throat and worked down to my collarbone.
He pressed his lips to the flat of my chest, stopping there a while with his scruff scraping my nipple and one hand holding my hip down when I came up off the bed.
Then his teeth grazed over my ribs and the soft place under them.
His eyes came up to find mine at every turn, and by the time he got to my stomach I had quit being able to look away.
When he took my cock in his mouth, he kept his eyes on my face while he did it.
There was nowhere to go. No good angle to give him, nothing to do but lie in the dark of his room with his mouth on me and let him watch what he was doing.
I had been touched by people who were very good at it. I had never once been touched by one who was paying attention the way Holt was.
He figured me out in a few quick minutes.
He learned that I couldn't take it slow when he had me all the way down and that if he used his hand at the same time I'd say anything he wanted.
And he learned exactly how close was too close, because the first time I got near it he pulled off me and put a hand flat on my stomach and held me there.
"Holt. Holt, please, I can't—"
"You can."
"I can't."
"You've been doing things you can't do for three weeks." He was breathing hard himself, his mouth wet, his hand still on my stomach. "Look at me."
Then he went back down and sucked me until I was right at the edge again. When he pulled off he kept his fist working me, slow, right at the edge, taking me down off it a half inch at a time while he watched my face. When I quit fighting him he put his mouth back on my cock and started over.
The third time I got a hand in his hair and tried to hold him down on me but he took my wrist and pinned it to the mattress without any trouble at all. He kept sucking me and looked up at me the whole time he did it.
By then I was shaking, and there was a wet stripe on my stomach that was half him and half me, and I was saying things I have never said to a living soul.
When he finally let me have it he took me all the way down and got two fingers pressed up behind my balls.
I came in his mouth so hard I lost about a second of my life.
He stayed down there through the whole thing before swallowing. He came back up wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist, and looked at me.
It was the most exposed I had ever been and the safest, at the very same time.
I got my hands in his hair and pulled him up, rolling us over.
He let me and that felt like a huge thing. He was a man who rarely let anybody do a thing for him, but he lay back on that quilt and put his arms up over his head and let me have him.
I got his shirt open one button at a time and he let me do that too, which took longer than it should have, because I stopped every time I got a new piece of him.
The scar on his ribs. I asked about it but he wouldn't say.
The place on his throat that made his breath catch, which I stayed on until he swore at me.
He was sunburned to a line at the collar and pale as milk below it.
I put my mouth on the pale part and he made a noise like it hurt.
When I got his jeans off him his cock was thick and dark and already leaking. The sound he made when the air hit it was one I intended to remember on my deathbed.
Then I went down on him.
I was good at giving head. It was one thing I could do that nobody had taught me and nobody had ever sold.
I was a natural and I put every bit of it on him.
I used my hand and my mouth together the way he'd done to me, and I made him watch.
Every time his eyes closed, I stopped until they opened again.
It didn't take long. The gruffest man in the valley got both hands fisted in that quilt and pressed his head back, saying my name up at the ceiling.
"Morgan."
And then again, wrecked, barely a word at all.
"Morgan."
There was a power in it that I'd never felt before. Every kind I'd ever had came from being wanted by people who wanted something. This one came from handing a man a thing he didn't believe he was allowed to have.
He got a hand on my shoulder before he came and pulled me up alongside him. I finished him with my hand instead, on our sides, face to face, close enough that I could feel every breath he took go in and come out.
"Look at me," I said, because he'd said it to me and I had learned it from him.
He did. He looked at me the entire time, and when he went over, he didn't shut his eyes or turn his face away. He came all over my hand and his own stomach with his forehead pressed against mine.
Then he kissed me.
He hadn't yet. Not that whole night. He'd had his mouth on every other part of me and not once on my mouth, and I hadn't noticed until he did it. It felt like he'd been saving it, the way he saved everything, and that he'd only spend it after.
It was slow and it went on a long time and there was nothing left in either of us to put behind it. It was just his mouth on mine in the dark of his own room, both of us worn out, neither of us going anywhere.
After, he didn't get up.
I held onto that. The first time I'd had to ask him. I'd felt him start to leave without moving an inch, and I'd put a hand flat on his chest and told him not to. He'd stayed because I'd asked him to.
I didn't ask this time. Instead, he wiped my hand off on the corner of his own quilt, then he pulled it over both of us and tucked me into the curve of him, resting his chin on the top of my head.
He breathed slow, his heart going steady under my ear, his hand moving on my back absently, like he was gentling something.
"Stay up here tonight."
It wasn't a question and I didn't answer it, because we both knew I would.
Somewhere downstairs a screen door slapped and Dez laughed at something. The house went on being a house full of people who had nearly lost the man at the center of it but hadn't. Up in the dark Holt held onto me like I was one of the things he'd decided to keep.
And I lay there in the dark with my phone face down in my jeans on the floor, and I did not think about it once, which took some doing.