Chapter 21 #3
“I like nice things, but I’m also happy to rough it out here. I’m used to living a pretty spare existence, so this doesn’t bother me one bit.”
He got into the back of the truck with her, and they were both bathed in the pink glow of the sunset.
And she just wanted him. Wildly. Desperately.
Wanted to make up for what she had done back then, wanted to solidify what she had discovered now, wanted to forge something entirely new right along with it. A braided rope of past, present, and future that felt so strong inside of her, but was also something she couldn’t quite understand.
The intensity of it.
But she wanted to be new, and different, braver and bolder.
She wanted to do things she never would have done before.
So with all that pink sun on her skin, she stripped her shirt off over her head. Let the outside air touch her bare breasts, which had never happened before.
Walker was frozen, looking at her with rapt attention.
“I haven’t been camping. Guess what else I haven’t done.”
He growled, large hand cupping her bare breast as he lowered his head and took her other nipple into his mouth. Not kissing her on the lips felt intentional. But it felt too good for her to care.
He lavished attention on her, right out there under the sky, as the sun slipped totally behind the mountain and bathed them now in twilight blue.
He teased her, tormented her, showed her that with just his mouth and her breasts he could bring her to the edge and back again and again.
He reached down and unbuttoned her shorts, pushing his hand beneath the waistband, finding her wet for him.
“You just want to do this out here? Where anybody could see?” he growled against her throat.
“Yes,” she whispered.
There were few things she had ever been so certain of. But this was one of them. Absolutely and completely.
She didn’t care if anyone saw, she didn’t think they would, but also, so what?
She wanted Walker, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. They were on his property.
She wanted him, and it was okay.
She had a sex drive, and that was fine.
She wanted him more than she wanted to be safe, pure, Good.
And those things were huge. Those were load-bearing belief systems shifting inside of her. It was painful, and it was beautiful all at once.
Just like his hands on her body, his mouth against her skin.
Just like the way he filled her when he thrust deep inside of her in the back of the truck, and she looked up at the stars, growing ever brighter while he took them both straight to heaven and over the edge.
As she lay there in the dark, letting him hold her afterward, she knew that she was going to be different after this. Forever. She was never going to be the same. And she wasn’t sure how she felt about that yet, but she did know that it was necessary.
She was scraping away layers of issues that were borrowed from other people. Expectations that she had taken on when she was too young to understand what she was doing.
She was shedding. And that was a profoundly painful experience. For your skin to be too tight for who you were becoming.
But it was also wonderful. Glorious.
And she was practicing being okay with the unknown.
When she woke again to the sound of hoofbeats right as the rose-gold sun was beginning to peek over the mountains, he was there, though she couldn’t tell if he’d slept beside her.
He was awake, sitting there, shirtless, looking out toward the horizon line.
She sat up with him, and gasped.
“The horses.”
“There they are.”
More than a hundred of them, she was sure. Standing all around the truck. White, black, and brown horses.
Beautiful. Free.
“Don’t you think they should be allowed to stay out here?”
She nodded slowly. “Getting rid of them is just trying to force the town to be all the things that you want, isn’t it?
Trying to maintain a facade. It’s like the way that people treated your family.
Like they didn’t want you around, because they didn’t want reminders of the fact that they had too much and other people didn’t have enough.
So they made you into enemies instead, just like these horses. ”
“Maybe that’s why I’ve always liked them,” he said.
She wrapped her arms around his arm, sat there for a long moment, staring at them. “Thank you for bringing me here. This is just the best experience I’ve ever had.”
She wanted to tell him then. That he had changed her. That this had changed her.
But it felt too exposing right then. It felt like she was going to have to dig deeper into things that she didn’t necessarily want to explore right now.
But she was going to have to get there. She was going to have to let herself get there.
But right now, all she did was sit in silence with him, and the mustangs.
And all of the new truths that were blooming inside of her, like a field of wildflowers, more beautiful and brilliant than what had been there before.
She had always been afraid of change.
Afraid that it would prove that she was actually someone flawed.
She closed her eyes, just for a moment.
She was flawed. Messy. Full of need and wonder and bad and good.
And maybe that wasn’t actually the scary thing that she had been led to believe.