Chapter 10
Owen
The cut was quiet in the way that meant someone else was counting it.
We walked the west line until the light went.
Hillsford tracks on the far ridge, not on our dirt.
Old prints from my own eight that Landers scouts had already found.
No crossing. Joss wanted to push farther and I said no because I had signed a watch, not a raid.
Melanie watched my face every time the bond jerked toward the hall.
It jerked more after midmorning. A lie. I felt Reilly say no about me in a room with other people in it, and then I felt the heat that lie made, and I spent the next hour looking at fence wire with a hard-on I could not explain to the men.
Meat came at noon by runner. Not her. A boy who would not meet my eyes. We ate on our feet. I sent the eight to the west bench before dark and told them the cabin was mine for the term and not a second hall.
Melanie walked me as far as the path split.
“If she comes to that door tonight,” she said, “you are a fool if you open it.”
“She won’t come.”
“She lied about you in council today. You think I need a spy for that. You went still on the cut like you’d been mounted.” She stepped closer, not kind. “You open that door and put your mouth on her, this company becomes her scandal. Hillsford doesn’t have to invent one.”
“I’m sleeping where the contract says.”
“Sleeping.” She looked at my belt. “Sure.”
She went to the bench. I went to the cabin.
The room still smelled like last night. Like her paper and my spend and the old heat in the boards.
I barred the door. I took off the coat. I sat on the bench and pulled my boots off and the bond was already loud, uphill, a locked room and a woman who had spent the day saying no with her mouth and yes with her hand.
I could feel her.
Not a picture. A pressure. The shape of her fingers where I wanted my cock.
The short way she came when it was only her.
She had done it more than once. The lie had made it worse.
I sat there and got hard without putting a hand on myself, just from the echo of her on a floor or a bed or a wall I could not see.
“Don’t,” I said to the empty room.
The empty room did not care.
I stood up and paced the length of the cabin, which was nothing, table to wall to bench.
My cock lifted in my pants until the cloth was wet at the head.
I thought about going to the west bench and sleeping in the dirt with eight wolves so I would not do what I was about to do.
I thought about walking up the hill and knocking on a hall door and ruining the arithmetic she had sold that morning.
I opened my belt instead.
I took my cock out over the table, over her contract line, and I didn’t stroke yet.
I just held it and breathed. Thick. Wet.
The swell at the base already there because the bond did not care that we were in different buildings.
I could feel her pause, up the hill, like she felt me take it out.
The echo sharpened. Her knees opening. Heat.
I spat in my palm and stroked once, slow, root to head, and let her feel it.
That was the filthy part. Not the fist. The fact that she would know.
The fact that I wanted her to know. I twisted over the head and my hips pushed into my hand and I thought of her in that council chair saying no while she soaked the wood under her.
I worked myself standing, looking at the door she was not going to knock on.
I could feel her hand moving now, matching me without meaning to, that frantic circle she used when she was trying to get it over with.
I slowed down on purpose. Let her feel the lag.
Let her chase. My fist went loose and tight and loose and I smeared the wet down the shaft and over the swell and squeezed there until my knees bent.
Melanie’s warning sat in my head and did not stop my hand.
I sat down hard on the bench and shoved my pants to mid-thigh and spread my knees and spat again.
Both hands. One around the swell, one stroking.
I thought about her mouth under the table in that hall.
Impossible. I thought it anyway. Reilly on her knees during arithmetic, my cock on her tongue while she tried to sell a watch, my hand in her hair, coming down her throat with elders in the room. I grunted and stroked faster.
Uphill she got close. I felt the thin rise of it.
I felt her shove fingers into herself because a clit wasn’t enough.
I pushed two fingers of my free hand against the underside of the swell like I could pretend it was her.
It wasn’t. I fucked my fist and let the bond carry the rhythm both ways, lonely and exact.
She came first.
Short. Mean. My name in it. I felt the clench and my cock jumped in my hand and I had to grip the base to keep from following her immediately.
I wanted her still in it when I went over.
I wanted her to feel mine land on hers. I stroked hard, ugly, no patience left, hips off the bench, and came across my fist and my stomach with a sound I bit off too late.
Pulse after pulse. It hit my shirt. It hit my wrist. I kept squeezing through it while her aftershocks ran down the bond like someone plucking a wire.
It wasn’t together. It just happened in the same stretch of dark.
I sat there panting with my cock still twitching and come cooling on my skin. The lamp made the mess look worse. I did not clean it up yet. I wanted her to feel me sitting in it. That was small. I was small. I stayed there anyway.
The second wave came from her side a while after.
Not a full scene. Restless. She couldn’t sleep.
Her hand again, slower, angry. I was sensitive and I still wrapped my fingers around myself and dragged the foreskin over the wet head in time with her until it hurt.
I didn’t come again. I got close enough that my thighs shook and then I stopped and let her feel the stop.
She chased on her end and got another one of those unfinished clenches.
I put my head back on the wall and stared at the ceiling and hated both of us.
A knock.
Not her. Wrong weight. I wiped my stomach with the shirt, pulled my pants up over a cock that was not done, and cracked the door.
Melanie. Night air. Her mouth already flat.
“I could smell that from the turn,” she said.
“Then stand farther off.”
“Joss has first watch on the cut. Hillsford lights moved south. Not a crossing. A look.” She glanced at my shirt. “You need to be up at gray looking like you slept.”
“I’ll be up.”
She didn’t leave. “She didn’t come down.”
“I know.”
“You wanted her to.”
“I know that too.”
Melanie put her hand on the door so I couldn’t shut it.
“Owen. Listen to me in a way you didn’t at the split.
This—” she tipped her chin at my body, at the room, at the hill “—is not a watch. It’s the cabin night with a mile of path in it.
If Gareth Hills puts men on that path you are going to be slow because your blood is in your dick. I need you not slow.”
“I signed the cut.”
“Then keep your spend on your own time and your eyes on their line.” She let go of the door. “I’m walking the bench. If that bar lifts before dawn I will assume it’s her or Hillsford. One of those I will stop. Guess which.”
She went.
I barred the door. I took the shirt off and used the basin. Cold water on my stomach, on my cock, on my hands. The cold helped for a minute. The bond didn’t. Reilly was still awake. Not touching now. Lying there with it. I lay on the bench in the damp air and put my arm over my eyes.
I thought about opening the door anyway.
Not to the hall. To the path. Standing there in the dark until she felt me standing there and made a choice. That was the fool Melanie meant. I stayed on the bench.
Sleep came in pieces. In one of them I had her on this bench with her pants at one ankle and my face between her legs, her hand in my hair, the contract on the floor.
In another she was saying the rite again while I was inside her and I was still thrusting, knot caught, making her say it with her tits against my chest. I woke from that one with my hips moving and my cock in my fist before I knew I had reached for it.
I stroked in the dark, half-asleep, mean, and came on my own stomach a second time with her name in my mouth and no one to put it on.
I cleaned up again. There was no clean left in the shirt. I burned it in the stove rather than wear it on the cut at dawn. The smoke was brief and ugly. I sat in the chair at the table after and read the quartering line by the last of the coals.
No claim. No bite. No rite reversal implied.
I had just come twice to the feeling of her hand and sent it back down the wire. Implied was doing a lot of work.
Gray finally showed under the door. I put on the coat over a bare chest because I had burned the shirt like an idiot. I unbarred the door. The path was empty. The hall sat on the ridge with one lamp dead and one lamp on. Her rooms. Of course.
I did not walk up.
I went west to the bench. Joss handed me a spare shirt without comment. Melanie handed me coffee that tasted like burnt water and looked at my face like she was counting whether I had opened the door.
“I didn’t,” I said.
“I know. I walked your path twice.” She drank. “Cut. Now. And if the bond spikes like it did yesterday morning, you tell me before you go still in front of Hillsford tracks.”
“It will spike.”
“I know that too.”
We walked the line in the thin light. I kept my hands on the work. My body stayed half in the cabin and half in a room up the hill I had never been invited into. I could still feel her, worn out and awake, the lie from her council sitting between us like a third person.
I did not go through her door.
I was still a fool. I had just been a fool with a barred door and a dirty bench and a company that could smell what I had done from the turn.
I put my teeth in the scar on the inside of my cheek and I watched the far ridge for Hillsford, and every time the bond tugged I let it tug, and I did not follow it up the path.