Chapter 18 #2
I gave him harder, and the sounds coming out of him stopped being anything he was choosing to make. His big scarred hands stayed on my face the whole time. His eyes stayed open.
He came without a hand on him. That was the part I hadn't expected. I'd been fucking him about ten minutes and he went off untouched, all over his own stomach, with his hands still on my face.
He clamped down around me while it went through him and that finished me.
I got as deep into him as I could and stayed there and came, my hips stuttering against him.
Then I collapsed on top of him. He wrapped both arms and both legs around me and held me there.
He wouldn't let me pull out, wouldn't let me go anywhere.
Nobody had ever held onto me afterward. Not one time in my life. There was always a bathroom, or a phone, or a car coming at six. He held on until I stopped shaking. Then he kept holding on.
For a long while after, the two of us tangled and breathing in the dark, I was happier and more whole than I had ever been or known a person could be.
***
Lying there with his heartbeat under my ear and his hand moving slow in my hair, I decided I was going to kill the deal. All of it.
In the morning I was going to call Renata and tell her no.
No featurette, no crew, no spread, no cameras anywhere near this place or this man.
Then I was going to come back up these stairs and tell Holt the truth.
I was going to tell him that I knew about the ranch and that I had money.
We were going to figure out a way that didn't cost him his pride and do it together.
Because I was still leaving on the seventh.
I had a contract and twelve weeks of work.
There was no version where I didn't get on that plane.
But I was coming back. That was the part I had not let myself have until that minute.
Twelve weeks and then the gap in August, and I'd sat in enough negotiations to know that a man who says I need four days in Colorado often enough eventually gets four days in Colorado.
It was going to be miles and airports and bad phone service with a man who would rather chew glass than call anybody. It was going to be hard in a way I had no practice at. But I was going to do it anyway.
I had it all worked out. I was so sure.
I fell asleep on his chest the happiest I'd ever been, with the whole rest of our life laid out clean in my head.
I woke a few hours later to my phone lighting the dark.
I'd had no signal since we rode out, and now it had found a bar in the deep of the night. Everything I'd missed came in at once, a long buzzing cascade of it. I eased out from under Holt's heavy arm and picked it up to silence it before it woke him.
I saw the screen and my stomach dropped through the floor.
I scrolled with a thumb that didn't feel like mine. Renata's texts were a tidy little timeline of my own undoing.
Locked it!!
Trades have it, going wide in the AM
You're welcome btw, this is THE one
And then the last one, an hour old.
Call me, the ranch people are asking about access and we're telling them it's handled.
In some glass office two states away my silence had been read as a yes. Filed and approved. The machine I'd fed my whole life had reached all the way up a mountain I believed was out of its reach and laid its hand on the one thing I'd tried to keep from it.
Six missed calls. A column of texts.
And at the top, a link, and a headline, already live, already out in the world where I couldn't call it back. A trade announcement, the studio's logo, the words MASTERSON GOES METHOD and AUTHENTIC and EXCLUSIVE RANCH FEATURETTE. With a date.
They'd called it a transformation. Somebody in a room had looked at the last few weeks of my life and decided that was the word. It wasn't wrong exactly, which was the worst part. It just wasn't mine anymore.
There was a photo too.
A real photograph, taken without my knowledge by somebody at the airfield or the feed store or anywhere at all, of me on a horse in Holt's borrowed coat with the Three Saints standing up behind me.
Under it, the caption had the valley's name in it, and Holt's brand for anybody who cared to go looking.
They hadn't waited for my yes. They'd never needed it. The non-answer had been answer enough, and the machine had done what the machine did.
It was out. It was public. It was coming.
Down the hall the old man was sleeping. Beside me the man I loved was sleeping with all of his walls down. On a screen in the dark his home and his name and his face were already being sold.
I lay back down in the wreckage of the best night of my life.
He slept on. His hand was still open on the sheet where it had been holding me, trusting the dark and the quiet and me, all three of us.
I lay there not sleeping, holding my phone that had ruined it all. There was no version of the morning left where I got to be the one who told him. I had maybe four hours until the valley woke up and the calls started and his face changed for good. I didn't wake him up or call Renata back.
I put the phone face down on the floor and got back under his arm, putting my face against his chest where I'd fallen asleep two hours before, and held onto him. He shifted in his sleep and pulled me in without waking up.
I took it. Every minute of it, right up until the light came.