Chapter 18
Morgan
We came down off the mountain the next afternoon with the whole thing still in my pocket, and nobody took the day away from me.
That kept happening. I'd been waiting for one of them to look up and work out that I'd been let in by accident, but every day nobody did, and I kept getting to stay. So I let it be.
We did the evening chores together with the sun going down behind the Chapel, and then we ate. Gus looked the two of us over and said we both looked like we'd been dragged through a fence, and left it there.
"Fence needed splicing," Holt said.
"Mm."
"In three places."
"I bet it did."
Dez put his fork down so he could laugh properly. Lane made a sound in the corner. Holt went back to his plate with his ears going red and did not say another word for five minutes.
Flynn came in at the end of the meal, late and still filthy. He ate standing up at the counter out of the pan. He'd been fighting Kane's headgate all day and he wanted everybody to know it.
"He's put a lock on it now. A lock, Gus. On water."
"On his own headgate."
"On water."
"He can lock his own headgate."
"Whose side are you on?"
"I'm seventy-three years old and I'm on the side of my supper," Gus said, and Dez laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the table.
"That loader's going to run you eight hundred before you're done," Dez said.
"It is not."
"Parts and my time."
"Your time." Gus put his fork down. "I have been fixing that loader since before you were a rumor."
"And look at it."
Lane got up without a word, went out, and came back with a pie.
"Who made that?" Flynn asked.
"Ruby."
Flynn looked at it a while. "The good Ruby or the one that puts the raisins in?"
"It's the same Ruby, Flynn."
"It is not the same woman who made that thing at Christmas."
"Cut the pie," Gus said.
Nobody explained any of it to me. That was the part I kept noticing.
Three weeks ago somebody would have leaned over and told me who Kane was, who'd sold Gus the loader, why the pie was a matter of some controversy.
But nobody did. They just talked across me and around me and through me, the way you do with somebody who's supposed to be at the table.
For an hour the kitchen was full. Full of the people I had come to think of as mine without anybody saying I was allowed to. I sat in the middle of it with hay still in my hair and a man's hand finding my knee under the table.
This, I thought. This was the thing I was coming back to.
Then Holt took my hand in front of the old man and his brothers, and led me up the stairs.
"Don't keep me up with the carrying-on," Gus said to his plate.
"Goodnight, Gus," I said with a smile over my shoulder.
"Mm."
Holt's neck went red all the way to the collar but he didn't stop walking.
He shut the door behind us and turned the lamp down, and kissed me slow and deep. I reached for him the way I had the night before, ready to give.
He stopped my hands and held my wrists gently. He looked at me with his jaw set in the hard line it took before he did something that scared him.
"I want you to," he said, a low and rough whisper.
I didn't understand at first. I'm ashamed of how long it took me.
"I want you to." His ears were red and his eyes didn't leave mine. "I want you in me. I never have. I want it to be you."
The first thing I felt was frightened.
Asking was the one thing the world had broken out of him before Gus ever got hold of him. He'd carry a thing till it killed him rather than ask to have it lifted. I'd watched him do it for weeks. And here he was with his ears burning, asking me to fuck him. He'd decided it was going to be me.
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. Okay."
Neither of us reached for the other one. We got out of our own clothes standing three feet apart like two men getting ready for work. I have no idea why it happened that way, except that we'd have been slower at it any other way and neither of us could stand slow right then.
He got his boots off and set them side by side under the bed the way he did every night of his life. Then he lay back on that bed, this enormous frightened man, and put his hand out.
"Come here."
So I went.
I gave myself a second to be worthy of it. Then I laid him down and I took my time. Slower than he'd been with me. He'd only get one first time and I was not going to let him remember it as something that wasn't good.
I got my mouth on the scarred shoulder first and bit it, not hard, just enough that he made a noise.
Then I moved down. I licked at the flat of his chest and closed my teeth on his nipple until his hand came up into my hair.
I kissed my way down the trail of hair on his belly and stopped at the tan line on his hips where the sun quit, because I'd wanted to put my mouth on that pale part since the first time I saw it.
I took my time about it while he swore at the ceiling.
Then I took his cock in my mouth and felt the groan go through his whole body and his hand fist in the quilt. I worked him slowly with my tongue until he was leaking and his hips had stopped being able to hold still.
Then I moved down even further.
I eased his thighs apart, big and trembling, and kissed the inside of one and then the other. He knew where I was going before I got there. I felt him work it out, felt everything in him tighten up at once.
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't. I want to. I want to make you feel good."
I waited. I stayed right where I was with my mouth an inch off him and let him decide, because if he said no I was going to stop and never bring it up again.
He didn't say no. He got a fist in the sheet and put his head back.
"Morgan."
That was all. That was the only permission I was ever going to get out of him and I knew it, so I took it.
I got my mouth on his hole and the sound that came out of him was past anything he'd let out yet before.
He sounded shocked. Like it was being done to him rather than for him.
His whole body went rigid and then let go all at once, and then he was swearing at the ceiling in a voice I had never heard him use, one hand clamped in my hair holding me down there.
I licked into him and took my time about it, listening to the man who did his best to never make noise let go.
I could have stayed down there an hour. I wanted him to understand it wasn't a step on the way to somewhere else, that I was doing it because I wanted my mouth on him, so I stayed until his thighs were shaking on either side of my head.
I had to stop and pull myself up. "Lube?"
"Left drawer."
I opened it. There was a bottle in there and nothing else. No books, no watch, no spare change, just the one thing in an empty drawer.
I worked him open with my fingers, one and then another, watching his face the entire time.
"That's it. Breathe out for me."
He breathed out.
"Good. That's all of it. You've got nothing left to do."
When he tensed I waited. When he swore at me, I slowed down. And when I crooked my fingers and found the place that made his big body buck and his cock jerk up against his belly,
"Please," he moaned, and I did it again just to hear it twice.
By the time he was loose and open and shaking, I was half undone myself from being trusted so much. I'd been to bed with people whose names I had to check in the morning. People who knew every trick there was. Not one of them ever gave me anything.
Holt wouldn't let me buy him a cup of coffee, and he put himself in my hands and shut his eyes.
"You're doing perfect." His hands were fists in the quilt. I put my free hand flat on his chest and left it there. "Holt. Look at me. You're doing perfect and I've got you. I'll make you feel good."
He looked at me. Something went out of his shoulders that had been in them the whole time I'd known him, and he let his hands open. That was the moment. Not any of the rest of it. The moment he unclenched his fists and relaxed under me.
"You want anything," I said. "Anything at all. You say it and it's yours."
"I don't want anything between us."
"You're sure? I'm clean, I promise."
"I'm sure. I want to feel you." He got a hand on my wrist. "Going forward."
That was how he said it, and I had to put my face in his neck a second so he wouldn't see what it did to me. Then I slicked myself up and lined up, pushing into him with nothing between us at all. The heat of him closing around me with nothing to dull it punched the breath clean out of my chest.
I had to stop partway in and put my forehead down on his and breathe. It was too much. Hot and tight. It was his first and mine too, just in a different way. I hadn't known it was that different and I would never be able to forget it.
Then I eased the rest of the way in and he made a sound I felt in my chest more than heard.
I held still, all the way in him and shaking with how good it was, and watched the last of it go out of his eyes until there was nothing left looking up at me but Holt. Just Holt. And then he talked.
"Morgan. Morgan, don't. Don't stop."
"I'm not. I won't."
"It's too much." He reached up to hold my face, his hands shaking. "It's too much, don't stop."
"I've got you."
"I know." And then, so quiet I nearly missed it, said into the side of my face like he was hiding it there, "I love you."
"I love you," I said back without hesitation. "Love you so much."
Then I started to move, all the way out and all the way back, watching what each press did to his face.
He couldn't hold still for it. That was the thing that got me, the great stillness of him gone entirely, his hips coming up to meet me, his heels going flat on the bed for leverage he didn't know he was hunting for.
"Like that." His hands were still on my face. "Morgan. Just like that."
I gave him just like that, for a long time, until he was past words again and the bed was making a racket underneath us and there was sweat beading on his chest.
"Harder, Morgan."