16. Hunter
Hunter
The truck was still running when the yellow square in her second-floor window came on, held thirty seconds, and went out. I sat behind the wheel with the engine idling and my hands at ten and two and the taste of her still on my tongue.
I pressed the flat of my hand against the center of my chest where she’d fisted my shirt.
My lips ached from the force of our kiss.
My skin buzzed with the ghost of her touch.
I couldn’t think. Could hardly breathe. My cock was hard against my thigh, persistent and demanding.
Her sound — the half-swallowed gasp when my teeth had grazed her lip — was running on a loop, and every time it came around again, my hips shifted in the seat without my permission.
I sat there until my breathing evened out, and my jaw unlocked, and the tremor in my fingers dulled to something I could drive with. Then I put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb, and the sixteen minutes between her apartment and the ranch felt like sixteen hours.
The next Sunday after dinner, the family started thinning out the way they always did — trucks pulling away down the drive, screen doors banging in the warm dark, the crickets coming up loud once the engines had gone — and Jessica and I ended up on the porch swing the way we had been ending up on the porch swing since we were twelve years old.
The porch light put its gold circle on the boards.
The chains creaked when she settled into the seat beside me.
We were talking about Sully getting into the leftover potatoes on the kitchen counter when we weren’t looking, and Mom losing it, when Jessica's voice went soft. Then softer. Then stopped.
I looked down. Her head was on my shoulder.
Her eyes were closed. Her breathing had changed — slow and deep, her ribs expanding against my arm in long, even pulls — and her hand was on my forearm, her fingers curled loosely around it, her whole body gone heavy against my side.
Her jaw was slack. Her lips were parted a fraction.
Her eyelashes were resting against her cheeks, dark and still, the flutter of them gone.
The line between her brows — the small vertical crease she wore from morning until night, the one she carried into committee meetings and arguments and laughter and sleep — was smooth.
It had let go. Her mouth had let go. The set of her jaw and the brightness in her eyes and the readiness in her whole body had let go all at once, and the woman left in their place was somebody I hadn’t seen since she was twelve years old and asleep against the door of my Dad's truck on the way home from the county fair.
My arm was going numb. The blood was being cut off where her head pressed into the muscle, and pins and needles were spreading from my shoulder down to my fingertips, and I didn't move.
Somewhere out past the paddock fence, a coyote called once and then quit.
The porch light hummed. Her hand twitched on my forearm in a sleep reflex, her fingers tightening for half a second and then loosening again.
It pulled her body a half inch closer, and her breast pressed warm against my ribs through the cotton of her dress.
My breath caught in my throat, and I held perfectly still until her grip eased.
Forty minutes. The numb arm held. The crickets sang. Her breath kept heating the base of my throat in slow, even pulls.
The screen door creaked.
Mom was standing inside the screen with a tea towel in her hand.
She had come out to call us in, but when she saw us, she stopped short.
Her eyes had moved from Jessica's face to mine and back to Jessica's face.
Her chin trembled. She pressed her fingers against her lips, and her eyes were wet, and she nodded at me — once, small, the smallest movement of her head — and she stepped back through the screen and let the door settle without a sound.
I sat on the swing with a sleeping woman against my shoulder and a numb arm and the warmth of her breath at the base of my throat, and I didn't move for another twenty minutes, because moving wasn't a thing I was prepared to do.
Dad came down to the workshop the next morning while I was on the creeper under the F-100, halfway through a brake line that didn't need checking, looking for a bolt to tighten that didn't need tightening.
I heard him coming before I saw him. The walk had been the same since I was small enough to recognize a man by his footfall.
The boots stopped in the doorway and didn't come in.
I could see them from under the truck. Worn brown leather, the left sole splitting at the toe, the laces double-knotted the way he had been double-knotting them for thirty years.
He let the silence sit. So did I. The wrench in my hand turned on a bolt that had been tight for ten minutes.
"Son."
"Yeah, Dad."
"That the brake line you working on?"
"Yeah."
"Looked at it last week. Seemed fine then."
I didn't answer.
"Saw you fixed the barn door."
"Hinge was sticking."
"It's been sticking since January." A pause. "Swings nice now."
"Thanks."
His weight shifted against the doorframe. I heard the wood creak and his shoulder settling into it.
"New fence post on the east boundary looks good."
My eyes darted over the undercarriage, wondering where this was going. "Old one was rotten."
"It was. Had been for about three months." Another pause, longer. His boots shifted on the concrete. "You've been busy this week, Hunter."
"There's a lot that needs doing."
"There's always a lot that needs doing." His voice had gone quieter. "Question is whether you’re doing it to do it or doing it to avoid something else."
The wrench stopped.
I lay still under the truck. The undercarriage was six inches above my face. My knuckles were white on the wrench, and the grease was slick under them, and I didn't know what to say.
His boots shifted on the concrete again. He cleared his throat once. "Mind if we have a talk, son?"
I lay still under the truck for a second longer, took a deep breath, and pushed against the workshop floor with my heel so the creeper rolled out from under the chassis.
The morning light from the open door hit my eyes, and I had to squint against it.
I sat up. The concrete was cold through the seat of my jeans.
I set the wrench down on the floor beside my hip, wiped the back of my wrist across my forehead, and looked up at him.
"Yes, sir."
His knees cracked as he lowered himself down to crouch in front of me.
He took his time getting there. When his face came level with mine, I could see the lines at the corners of his eyes and the brown eyes I had inherited along with his jaw and his silence, and he rested his forearms on his knees, and he looked at me for a long moment before he spoke.
"I wouldn't normally interfere, son. You know that.
Your life is your life and your momma and I have always respected that.
" He rubbed his jaw with the back of his hand.
"But I've been watching you this week. The irrigation.
The fence. The barn door. The brake line that was fine when I checked it six days ago.
" His eyes held mine. "And I've been watching you for longer than this week. "
My breathing had gone shallow.
"You hold everything together for this family, Hunter.
You always have. Since you were old enough to pick up a wrench, you have been the one who fixes things — the fences, the trucks, the people.
You carry it all, and you never say a word about the carrying.
Your momma and I have watched you do it for twenty-seven years, and we are proud of the man you have grown into.
" He paused. His jaw moved once. "But I need to ask you something, and I need you to hear it. "
The grease on my hand was slick on the wrench. My eyes had begun to sting.
"When was the last time, Hunter, that you put your hand up and said this is what I want? Not what the ranch needs. Not what your momma or I need. Not what your brothers and sister need. Not even what that sweet girl needs. But what you want, son. Just for yourself."
Something gave way along the line of my sternum.
The pressure I had been carrying behind my ribs for a week — for longer than a week, for longer than I was prepared to count — found a fault line and went through it.
My throat closed. A tear slipped free, and I pressed the back of my wrist against my eyes, and the grease left a cold smear across my eyelids.
"I don't know," I said. My voice came out scraped raw. "I don't know when, Dad."
He nodded. His jaw worked once, the muscle bunching and releasing under the skin.
He reached out and gripped the back of my neck — his hand large and warm and rough, his fingers pressing into the muscle on either side of my spine — and he held me there.
The grip he had used on all his boys. The one that said I'm here and I love you and I see what you're carrying.
The pressure of his hand steadied something in me that had been shaking for months.
"She's not going to wait forever, son." His voice was low. His hand stayed on my neck, his eyes on mine. "She shouldn't have to. And neither should you. You deserve happiness, Hunter. You hear me?"
"Yes, sir."
He squeezed once and let go. He stood. His knees cracked.
He looked down at me sitting on the workshop floor with the wrench in my hand and grease on my face and wet eyes, and he didn't say another word, because he had said what he came to say.
His boots crossed the concrete. The door creaked on the hinge, and his footsteps faded across the gravel toward the main house.
I sat on the workshop floor for a long time. The wrench was in my lap. The grease smear was drying on my eyelids. The back of my neck was still warm where his hand had been, and the warmth was the only thing in me that wasn't shaking.
That night, I lay on my back on top of the sheet in the dark of the apartment with my hands behind my head.
The ceiling was a flat white nothing above me, and the sixteen minutes between this room and Jessica’s were sitting on the nightstand beside my keys.
My skin prickled against the cotton. My hands couldn’t settle — fingers lacing and unlacing and gripping the pillow and letting go again — and my cock was thick against my thigh, and the memory of her mouth was running underneath every other thought I tried to have.
The taste. The pull of her fist in my shirt.
The arch of her back. The gasp against my lips.
My hips shifted on the mattress, but the friction wasn’t enough.
There was only one thing — one person — who could get rid of this ache inside me, and she was sixteen minutes away.
I turned on my side and pressed my face into the pillow.
What do you want, Hunter?
I rolled onto my back again. The ceiling didn't have an answer. My eyes drifted across the dark of the room. They stopped on the shelf.
It was on the wall opposite the foot of the bed, the way it had been on every wall opposite the foot of every bed I had slept in since I was nineteen.
The moonlight from the window caught the spines.
I knew them in the dark the way a man knows the shape of his own hand.
The Dolomites. The Alta Via trails along the ridge lines of the Italian Alps.
Paris. London on a grey day. The Great Ocean Road.
Tokyo. Reykjavik. Lisbon, the newest one, still stiff in the binding.
Pages I had turned so many times, the corners had gone soft.
I hadn’t bought the books for anyone. I had never told anyone I had them.
Wyatt had been in this apartment once a week for three years and had never asked about the shelf, because Wyatt was Wyatt, and Wyatt didn't ask about a thing if you didn't bring it up first. Liam hadn't been up here since I had moved the shelf to the wall opposite the bed. Maggie had teased me about a single book on my bedside table once and I had told her it was for sleep, which was true and wasn’t.
Mom had asked me about the shelf, exactly once, eight years ago — honey, those are pretty books, where are you going?
— and I had said nowhere, Mom, just like to read about it, and she had nodded and hadn't asked again.
I had been living in those books for ten years.
I had stood on a ridge line in the Dolomites at first light a hundred times.
I had walked through the Marais at six in the morning.
I had driven the Great Ocean Road with the windows down and the sea on my left.
I had done all of it in this room, with my back to the wall and the lamp on, while my body had stayed on this ranch and my hands had fixed other people's problems and my boots had never crossed the county line.
Jessica had said that at the Silver Spur.
The county line. Aimed for the place she had known it would land.
It had landed because she had been right.
I had never left. I had never booked a flight.
I had never stood on any of those ridge lines or walked any of those streets, and I had never told anybody, not even her, that I had wanted to.
The wanting had lived in me quietly the way all my wanting had lived in me — held, carried, never spoken out loud, locked behind a door I hadn't opened in years because opening the door had felt like betraying the people I loved most.
What do you want, Hunter?
I sat up.
I crossed the room in the dark and stood in front of the shelf with my hand at my side, and then I lifted the hand and laid it flat against the spines the way a man lays his hand on a horse he is about to ride.
The bindings were warm under my palm where the lamp had been on earlier.
I let my fingers run along them. Italy. France.
England. Australia. I stopped at Australia and pulled the book down.
The cover was a road and a coastline and a stretch of empty sky. I held it in both hands.
I wanted the Dolomites. I wanted Paris at dawn. I wanted the Great Ocean Road with the windows down.
And I wanted her beside me for all of it.
I sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed with the book open across my knees, and the moonlight came across the carpet, and I turned a page.
My hand was steady for the first time in a week.