4. Nora
— ? —
Nora
The storm had rolled in just after midnight, the kind of spring thunderstorm that makes you feel like the world is ending in the best possible way.
We’d been at the Mercer farm since ten, a foaling call that had gone wrong and then right and then wrong again before finally, miraculously, resolving into a healthy mare and a gangly chestnut filly who’d stood on her own legs within twenty minutes of being born.
Hunt and I’d worked in perfect sync the whole time, his hands anticipating mine, our movements choreographed by three years of practice and a trust that didn’t need words.
By the time we’d cleaned up and said our goodbyes, the rain was coming down in sheets.
We ran to the truck, both of us soaked through before we’d made it ten feet, laughing like idiots at the absurdity of it.
Hunt’s hair was plastered to his forehead.
My scrubs were clinging to my body in ways that made me very aware of the fact that I was wearing scrubs and nothing else underneath them.
We tumbled into the cab and sat there dripping, the heater blasting, the radio playing soft country, and I looked at my husband in the glow of the dashboard lights and felt so in love with him that it hurt.
“Your turn to make breakfast,” I said.
Hunt grinned. He was always more relaxed after a successful call, the tension in his shoulders loosening, his face opening up in ways that made him look younger. Softer. Like the man he might’ve been if life hadn’t taught him to be careful with his expressions.
“Eggs or biscuits?”
“Both. With bacon. And that thing you do with the potatoes, the crispy thing.”
“Demanding.” But he was still grinning as he put the truck in drive, and his free hand found my thigh like it belonged there.
The drive home took forty minutes through the rain, both of us riding the high of a save that had gone well, trading stories about the Mercer’s other animals, about calls we’d taken together in weather worse than this, about the filly’s ridiculous legs and the way she’d looked at her mother like she was discovering the whole concept of family.
Hunt talked more than usual, his voice low and warm in the dark cab, and I watched the rain streak across the windshield and thought about how lucky I was.
We stumbled through the back door at dawn, still wet, still giddy, still buzzing with the particular energy that follows a night of hard work and success.
And Hunt, who barely spoke in rooms with more than three people in them, who answered questions with nods and let silences stretch because he preferred them to small talk, backed me into the kitchen counter and put his hands on either side of my body and looked at me with eyes so blue they were almost silver in the early light.
“Nora.” His voice was hoarse. Wrecked. Like he’d been holding a sentence back all night and couldn’t hold it anymore.
“Yeah? Then tell me.”
“I need to say this out loud.”
My heart stuttered. “Okay.”
“Watching you work.” He shook his head, swallowed, started again.
“Watching you work is the best thing I know. Do you understand that? The way your hands move. The way you talk to the animals, the way you make them trust you, the way you just know where to be and what to do without anyone telling you. I think about it all the time. I think about your hands.”
I blinked at him, my back pressed against the counter, my wet clothes dripping onto the floor. “Hunt.”
“I know I don’t say things.” His jaw worked. His eyes were fixed on mine, intense in a way that made my stomach flip. “I know I’m not good at this part, the talking part, the telling you what you mean to me part. But I need you to know. I need you to hear me say it.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re the only person on earth I’ve never once run out of words for.
” He leaned closer, his forehead almost touching mine.
“Everyone else, I hit a wall. I get tired. I run out of things to say and I just want to stop talking and go be quiet somewhere. But with you, Nora, with you I always have more. There’s always more I want to tell you.
I could talk to you forever and never hit the end of it. ”
I kissed him.
I grabbed the front of his wet shirt and pulled him down to me and kissed him with everything I had, tasting rain and coffee and the particular flavor of my husband after a long night and a successful save.
He made a sound against my mouth, low and desperate, and his hands found my hips and lifted me onto the counter like I weighed nothing.
“I love you.” I said it against his lips, between kisses, needing him to hear it back. “I love you so much.”
“I know.” His mouth found my jaw, my neck, the spot below my ear that always made me gasp. “I know you do. I love you too. More than I know how to say.”
“Then show me.”
His laugh was warm against my throat. “Here? In the kitchen?”
“I don’t care where. I just need you. Right now.”
Hunt drew back to look at me, his eyes dark, his breath coming hard. Then he sank to his knees on the kitchen floor.
“Hunt.” My voice came out strangled. “What are you doing?”
“Showing you.” His hands slid up my thighs, pushing my scrub pants down with a deliberate slowness that made every nerve in my body light up. “You said to show you. I’m showing you.”
The scrubs hit the floor. His mouth pressed against my inner thigh, hot and open, and I grabbed the edge of the counter with both hands because I was going to fall apart and I needed a grip on the world.
“Spread your legs for me.” His voice was low and commanding, nothing like the quiet man who couldn’t speak in meetings. “That’s it. Good girl. Just like that.”
He hooked one of my legs over his shoulder and looked up at me, his blue eyes holding mine, and then his mouth found me and I stopped thinking about anything at all.
Hunt went down on me like he went into surgery: focused, precise, devastating in his attention to detail.
His tongue found every spot that made me shake, learned and relearned the particular map of what I needed, and he didn’t rush.
He built it slowly, layer by layer, until I was panting and gripping the counter so hard my knuckles went white and begging him with words I couldn’t remember saying.
“Please.” I was shaking, my whole body tight with need. “Hunt, please, I’m so close, I need to come.”
He pulled back just enough to speak, his lips still brushing against me. “Not yet. I want to feel you fall apart when I’m inside you.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I never said I was fair.” But he was smiling, that rare full smile that transformed his whole face, and before I could argue he was standing up, his hands under my thighs, lifting me against his chest.
We made it to the kitchen table.
He laid me down on it, swept a stack of mail off the surface with a careless arm, and then he was over me, still fully clothed while I was completely bare, and the contrast made me feel powerful and exposed and desperate all at once.
“Tell me what you want.” His voice was rough, his hands working at his own clothes. “I want to hear you say it.”
“You. I need you inside me, right now.”
“So demanding.” He was naked now, his cock hard and flushed against his stomach, and he settled between my legs with a groan I felt in my teeth. “So beautiful. Look at you, soaked for me already.”
He pushed inside me in one long slow stroke, and I arched off the table, my hands finding his shoulders, pulling him closer.
“Stay with me.” He held my face in his hands, his hips moving in a rhythm that was making me see stars. “Keep your eyes open. I want to see you.”
“I can’t.” I was already close again, the wave building, my whole body tightening around him. “It’s too much, I’m going to come.”
“Then come. But keep looking at me. I want to see it happen.”
I kept my eyes on his. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, holding that gaze while I flew to pieces, watching his face while he watched mine, nothing hidden, nothing held back.
The orgasm rolled through me in waves, and Hunt’s rhythm stuttered, his jaw clenching, his own control starting to slip.
“That’s it.” He was moving harder now, deeper, the muscles in his back going tight under my hands. “You feel like nothing else on earth. So good for me. So fucking good.”
“Come with me.” I pulled him down, wrapped my legs around his waist, held him as close as two people could be. “I want to feel it.”
He came with my name on his lips.
We lay there afterward, tangled together on the kitchen table, both of us breathing hard. The rain was still pounding the roof. The sun was coming up outside the window. And lying there, I was certain no two people had ever been more of a team.
Hunt pressed a kiss to my forehead, my cheek, the corner of my mouth.
“Back to back,” he murmured.
“Always.”
I believed it with every cell in my body, lying there with my husband in our kitchen, the aftershocks still rippling through me. We would always be like this, always find our way back to each other, always have more words and more love and more of whatever this was.
I believed him.
Then the memory let go of me, and the steering wheel was cold against my forehead.
The hospital parking lot had gone dark around me, the sun long gone wherever suns go when they’re done watching women fall apart in their cars. My phone had buzzed six times in the last hour. I hadn’t looked. I already knew the name on it.
It buzzed a seventh time, and this time I looked.
Hunt. Where are you?
Two words, typed in his own thumbs, which was more than I’d gotten from him directly in longer than I could remember.
My hand was already moving before I caught it, already reaching to type I’m here, I’m coming up, I’m sorry, the way I’d typed it a hundred times, the way I’d trained myself to be the one who bent first.
I turned the phone face-down on the seat. Then I turned it off, so I couldn’t sit here and watch myself cave.
I drove home to a dark house and lay down on the cold side of the bed with my makeup still on, and I did not cry, and the not-crying frightened me more than crying would’ve. Somewhere across town my husband was finally awake and asking where I was.
For the first time in seven years, I didn’t want him to find out.