20. Finn #2
Her hips tell me where she wants me before she says anything, and for a little while I manage it. Slow. Deep. Her body moving with mine instead of me trying to drag us both toward the finish.
Then I find the angle she wants and her whole body changes beneath me. Her back tightens. Her breathing goes shallow. The laugh disappears completely.
I feel it before I understand it. She’s close.
My hand slides around her waist, across her stomach.
“Catt.”
“Don’t you dare stop.”
That voice. God.
I keep the rhythm.
She reaches farther across the counter, fingers locking around the edge. Her heels dig into the floor. Her thighs go tight, then tighter, and her back arches and she comes hard around me.
My name breaks out of her. Not spoken. Torn loose.
Her body contracts around my cock and whatever control I had left disappears.
“Fuck, Catt.”
I drive into her once. Twice.
She’s still coming, still gripping me, still saying my name like it means something I’m not ready to look at too closely.
That takes me over. I come with my forehead dropping between her shoulder blades, my whole body going rigid behind her.
For a second I don’t know where I am. Just her. The counter under my hand. Her body around mine. My heart trying to punch through my ribs.
Then everything starts coming back. The fan. The warm night. Her breathing. Mine.
Catt turns her head. “You alive?”
“No.”
“Tragic.”
“I died happy.”
“That’s inconvenient.”
I laugh against her shoulder. She laughs too.
Eventually I pull away, deal with the condom, tie it off, throw it away, and make it about three feet before both of us give up on functioning like adults.
We end up sitting on the kitchen floor with our backs against the cabinets. Her dress is pooled around her hips. Her head rests on my shoulder.
My heart is still going too fast. It always does. Her hand comes up and settles flat over it like she’s checking.
“Quédate,” she murmurs into my chest.
Stay. The word gets all the way in before I can stop it.
“Can’t.”
The men. Dawn. The truck. All still true.
“You know I can’t.”
“I know.”
Her hand doesn’t move. “Asking anyway.”
That one gets me. She knows I have to leave and asks, anyway.
I want to say yes more than I’ve ever wanted the ice, the win, eighteen thousand people screaming my number.
My heart kicks harder beneath her palm.
“Stop that,” she says.
“What?”
“Whatever you’re about to talk yourself out of.”
“I’m not talking.”
“You don’t have to. Your heart gives you away every time.”
I look down at her. Her eyes are open, fixed on mine. Half a smile against my neck. Her palm still flat over the proof.
I keep waiting for the catch. Every good thing I’ve ever had came stapled to a bill, and this one’s the best by a distance that isn’t close.
But she’s here. I’m here.
And for once I do what she’s been trying to teach me since I came through that gate. I stop doing the math.
I stay until the last second I can. I don’t count what it costs.
Happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t even have the decency to be scared of it yet.
Jason’s the one who almost gets it out of me.
We’re mucking the far stalls, Thursday, the day before his hearing, and he’s wound tight as I’ve ever seen him, doing what I taught him not to do, which is chew on the fear until it bleeds.
“I keep running it,” he says. “What I’m gonna say to the judge. And every version, I sound like a guy making excuses.”
“So don’t make excuses. Say you did it, say what you’re doing, so it never happens again, and shut up. Judges can smell a rehearsed speech.”
“Yeah.” He forks a load, quiet. Then: “How do you do it, man? You’re carrying more than any of us out here.
The felony, the games, the drive. And you walk around looking like a guy who won something.
” He looks at me, honest, wide open, the way he only gets when it’s just the two of us and the horses. “What’s your secret?”
“Sleep,” I tell him. “Excellent time management. Highly recommend it.”
He laughs. I hate the sound of my own joke.
Something’s sitting on her, and I catch it Friday night and I let it go, and I’ll think about that later.
She’s on the counter with the paperwork again, but she’s not going through it, she’s holding it, and there’s a stillness on her that isn’t her usual stillness. Hers is a lit thing, aware, three moves ahead. This one’s flatter. A woman keeping her face on purpose.
I know the look. I invented the look. I wore it the one morning I sat in front of a judge and got told the rest of my life.
“You good?” I ask.
“Long week.” She sets the pages down and reaches for me, and it’s real, but it’s also a hand closing a subject, and I feel the redirect the way I’d feel a stick lift on a pass, smooth, practiced, meant to move me along.
I could push it. Part of me clocks the whole shape of it and wants to.
I don’t push it. Because I’ve got eleven days of the best thing in my life and a woman who reads everyone and lets nobody read her, and I’ve decided, without deciding, that I’d rather have it unexamined than crack it open asking a question she’s already told me twice she’s not going to answer.
So I let her move me along. I let her keep whatever’s in her pocket in her pocket.
I’ll think about that later, when later comes, and what she was carrying had my name on it.
At the door, when I go to leave, I’ve got my arms around her and she’s letting me, and her phone lights on the counter behind us, a name, Sebastian, and she steps out of them without a word to take it in the other room.
She comes back a minute later with the wall an inch higher than it was, and she doesn’t tell me who, and I don’t ask, because I’ve got no standing to ask about a name that lights up her own kitchen at ten at night and gets answered on the first ring.
She kisses me goodnight after. Careful. A careful that wasn’t there an hour ago.
Playoffs are six games out, the whole season narrowing to a point.
There’s something in her pocket she won’t show me.
I lie down in a room that smells like other men’s boots with a bad feeling I can’t source and tell myself it’s exhaustion.
It’s not.
I’ve got too much to lose now, and I’m the last one on this ranch who knows the taking’s already started.