Chapter 24
Morgan
The valley didn't clear out till near dark, and they made me part of the clearing. Men I'd never met clapped me on the shoulder on their way past me. One old boy in a Cenex cap held my hand in both of his and didn't say anything at all but wouldn't let go for a while.
Somewhere between the television and this muddy yard I had stopped being Morgan Masterson to these people and started being one of Gus's boys. I'd spent thirty-five years being recognized by strangers. I had never once been claimed by one.
It turned out to be a different thing entirely, and it went down into a place the other had never reached.
Gus held court till he couldn't. Lane took him in to bed over furious objections. Dez loaded the last of the grange tables.
Flynn was the final one to go.
He stopped his truck by where I stood at the rail and leaned across the seat, looking at me through the open window for a long moment. He was the kid who'd called Holt at six in the morning to tell him to look up my name.
"You hurt him again," he said, conversationally, "and they'll never find the body. We've got a lot of ground."
"Understood."
"I'm not joking with you."
"I know you're not."
Then he almost smiled, which on Flynn was a parade.
"Welcome home, movie star."
He drove off into the dark, and then it was just the two of us and the house and the three black peaks holding up more stars than a man ever sees in a city.
Holt didn't say anything. He just took my hand, the same as he had in his own kitchen the day they brought Gus home, and led me up the porch steps. I followed him into the house and down the hall. He didn't stop at the foot of the stairs. He took me straight up them.
I'd spent weeks learning that those stairs were the line between the help and the family, and he walked me over it again without a word.
His room. Our room, I was going to have to learn to call it. The plain room with the window full of mountains.
He shut the door and turned around, looking at me. I made myself stand there and be looked at, which I was getting better at, and I looked back.
Nothing was in the way this time. No clock, no deal in my pocket, and no voice in the back of my head telling me how I was coming across. That had gone quiet, finally. What was left was a tired man, standing in a warm room with the person he'd burned his life down to get back to.
"I don't have anything," I said. I needed it said before anything else, the same as I'd needed to say it in the yard.
"I want you to know that going in. I've got money you don't want.
I've got a job I'm going back to on Monday.
Past that I've got nothing you'd want. Hollywood thinks I've lost my mind.
I'm sure there's lawyers in my future. You won't let me fix your ranch.
So all I've got are two hands that are finally good for something and however many years I've got left. "
"I got tested," I said. "In April, and again three days ago." I had to stop. "It's on my phone."
"Leave it on the dresser. I trust you."
So I did. I put the phone face up on his dresser with the email results on it and neither of us said one more word about it.
He crossed the room. He took my face in both his hands, those big rough careful hands, and the look on him wasn't the scared one from the barn anymore and it wasn't the cold one from the yard the morning it ended. It was relaxed and open.
"I didn't ask you to stay because you could fix something," he said. "I've got a whole valley for that. Took me thirty-six years and Gus's heart quitting on him in a meadow to learn it, but I learned it."
His thumb moved on my cheekbone.
"I asked because the place was full of people this morning and you were the only one not in it. I've done everything on my own since I was eleven years old and I'm done with it."
He didn't say anything else for a second.
"There's work here. More than the two of us can do. Stay and do it for real this time, not for a part. That's all I want. You. With your hands empty. I never wanted them full."
And then he kissed me, and it wasn't like any of the times before. None of the desperate ones. None of the careful ones.
He was smiling when he did it. I felt it against my mouth, this big stoic man smiling into a kiss, and it startled a laugh up out of me, and he caught that too.
Pretty soon we were two grown men half laughing into each other's mouths in a quiet bedroom, kissing badly because neither of us could stop grinning.
It was the most erotic thing that had ever happened to me. We could be terrible at it. Nobody was going to see, and there was nothing riding on it, and it only made me want him more.
We got each other out of our clothes slow and clumsy, snagging on buttons, and knocking foreheads. Every bit of it was funny and none of it broke the heat. There was no rush in either of us. For once there was no clock anywhere on the whole earth.
I got him down onto that bed, which had two pillows on it now. I don't know when he did that. I don't know that he'd have admitted to it if I'd asked, so I didn't ask.
I went down his body with my mouth and took the same route I'd taken the first time in that room, because I'd thought about it for two weeks in a house with a wall of glass and I wanted it exactly the way I'd had it.
The scar he still wouldn't explain. The pale line at his hip. All of it where I'd left it.
Then I took his cock in my mouth and he let his head go back, saying my name on a long breath, like a man setting something heavy down.
He was thick and hot and already wet at the tip. I worked him slowly, all the way down and all the way off, using my hand on what I couldn't take. Every time I came off him he groaned.
"Morgan."
"Mm."
"Come up here."
"No."
He laughed at that, or started to, and it turned into something else halfway when I took him back in my mouth.
He let me have about a minute more of it. Then he got a fist in my hair and hauled me up and around. We ended up head to hip, the both of us on our sides, and I got my mouth back on his cock as he closed his lips around mine.
There was nothing dignified about it and I had never cared less about anything in my life.
He had one hand spread on my ass holding me where he wanted me and the other working the base of me while he sucked.
He'd figured out in a few weeks what people I'd been with for years never cared to learn, which was exactly where and exactly how hard.
I had to keep stopping. That was the humiliating part. He'd get me close and I'd have to pull off him to press my forehead against his thigh and breathe. He'd just wait, and when I got my mouth back on him he'd start again like nothing had happened.
At some point he laughed around me, low, at the sheer greedy ridiculous joy of it, and the feel of that nearly finished me on the spot.
"You're going to kill me," I said into his hip.
"All right," he said, rough and amused, and rolled me off him onto my back. Neither of us went for a condom. We were past that.
I climbed up over him and liked what it put on his face. This big careful man on his back in his own bed, his hands coming up to my thighs like he wasn't sure he was allowed them.
"You can hold on," I said. "You're allowed."
He held on.
He got the lube out of the drawer and reached around behind me, working one finger into me from underneath. It was a bad angle for him, but he didn't care. He got the second one in and crooked them. I dropped my chin and groaned, losing my grip on his chest. "More."
"You've got two."
"I know what I've got."
So he gave me three, and my whole body went forward over him with my hands braced either side of his head.
"There we go," he said, right up under my ear.
He kept at it. Slow and deep, taking his time, working me open on his hand while I hung over him shaking and trying to get enough air. Every time I got close, he'd stop and hold still, waiting until I could see straight again.
"You're doing that on purpose."
"I am."
He watched every second of it. I had never in my life let anybody watch me the way I let him.
"That's it," he said, his voice a low growl.
When I couldn't stand another second of it I took hold of his cock and lined myself up, sinking down on it in one slow move. He went still under me. His hands gripped my hips and his head pushed back into the pillow like it had gotten to be too much to hold.
Then I started to move, and I quit being able to think about anything at all.
I rode him slow and deep, setting the pace myself, close enough that neither of us could look at anything but the other one's face.
His hands came up to my hips and stayed there.
They didn't push. He let me have it however I wanted it.
I gave him all of it. Every sound, every undignified honest thing, nothing held back to keep for later.
When he got a hand around my cock and worked me in time with the roll of me, I went off so hard and so loud I'd have been mortified in any other moment. He came deep inside me a few strokes later.
I collapsed on top of him completely while we both caught our breath.
He didn't reach for a rag and his composure the way he had the very first time.
Instead, he lifted me off him and pulled me up off the bed by the hand, walking us both into the little bathroom.
He turned the shower on and got in with me under the hot water.
We washed each other. He found a bruise on my hip he'd put there and pressed his thumb on it just to watch me jump. I splashed water in his face and he laughed.
His laugh was something I knew I could get addicted to. He laughed out loud in the steam with his head tipped back, and I thought I'd have given up the career and the money a hundred times over just to be the one standing there every time he did that.
He washed my hair after, too rough and too thorough, a man used to scrubbing down horses and not much gentler about it.
"You'll be up at five," he said, deadpan, with the water running off his jaw. "Famous don't get to sleep in on a working outfit."
"Yes sir."
I found that I meant it down to the floor. He went still a second at that.
Then he kissed me, wet and grinning, under the spray.
Later, after we dried off, we lay in the dark in his bed that was ours now, wrung out and tangled up, the window full of those impossible stars.
I could hear a horse shift somewhere out in the barn.
Somebody's boot on the porch boards, one of them checking something one last time.
The whole sleeping weight of the ranch we'd nearly lost.
He had one arm heavy across me and his breath was going slow against the back of my neck. He shifted in his sleep and pulled me in tighter without waking up.
He'd done that the first night too. I remembered it from the bunkhouse and I'd thought then that it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I'd been right, and I hadn't known the half of it.