11. Zack
11
ZACK
H annah did not spend the night at Lodestar Ranch. She fed me some line about needing to be up early to get to the library on time, and she’d rather do the hard part now instead of getting up even earlier tomorrow. It made sense, and I should have been relieved because it had been a long day.
But I wasn’t.
Mom used to say I had a brain like a two-year-old. I thrived on physical movement, but it was easy for me to become overstimulated by too much emotion, regardless of whether that emotion came from myself or others, and when that happened, my brain threw a tantrum. Like an overtired toddler, it refused to do the one thing it needed and shut the fuck down.
So I wasn’t relieved when Hannah didn’t spend the night, because all I wanted was to roll her sweet body beneath me and fuck her until I couldn’t feel a damn thing anymore. Instead, I lay there wide awake, my body itching like a molting snake, my brain replaying the events of the past forty-eight hours like a movie.
I was married at fourteen.
Are you sure?
Grappling with my brothers.
Pink bunny slippers.
Hannah squeezing my hand.
Hannah squeezing my hand.
Hannah squeezing my hand.
Hannah texted me mid-morning and asked me to meet her at Jo’s for lunch. By then I’d already been up for five hours taking care of the animals, and I was fucking tired. I’d managed to fall asleep somewhere around three a.m., an hour and a half before my alarm went off at 4:30. Before I got her text, I’d had lofty goals of sneaking back to my cabin and stealing a nap.
And then she texted, and my priorities shifted.
She was already at Jo’s when I arrived, occupying a corner booth in the back. I wasn’t late, but she was early. Watching Hannah was becoming one of my favorite things, so I allowed myself a moment to do that. She had her embroidery project with her. I had the feeling she didn’t go anywhere without either a book or sewing. Like me, she needed to keep her hands busy to let her brain sort itself out.
Then she looked up, caught sight of me, and she…well, she didn’t smile. Her expression did something funny, like she was girding her loins. Steeling herself for a hard conversation. It made my stomach tumble a bit, but I sauntered on over with a smirk.
“Hey, there, duchess. Did you order yet?” I asked.
She looked up at me and I swore she gulped. She shook her head. “Not yet.”
“What are you having? I’ll take care of it.”
I put in our order at the counter with Chloe—a grilled cheese sandwich for Hannah, a grilled chicken salad for me, because the last thing I needed was clogged arteries that led to open-heart surgery and then germs would invade my bloodstream and my spleenless body wouldn’t be able to fight them off and I’d die, pathetic and weak, in a hospital bed.
A better option would be to find that cliff.
I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I felt like an asshole for even thinking about it, but I wasn’t going to do it. Except even now, when I told myself I wasn’t going to do it, when I knew I wasn’t going to do it, something whispered in the back of my brain. Maybe .
No, of course I wasn’t going to do it. Instead, I ordered the salad.
I waited at the counter for our orders because Jo’s wasn’t the kind of establishment that brought food to your table, and while I waited, I watched Hannah some more. She tucked her embroidery into her slouchy bag, stared out the window for a moment, then sighed and took her embroidery back out.
Something was definitely up.
Was it Hurricane Red? Had her brother managed to find him, and now she had to give me the bad news? Shit.
Do not cry.
Do not put a hole in the wall.
Do not break that stack of plates.
I carried our tray of food to our table with the same smirk I walked in here with. “Here we go,” I said as I slid into the booth across from her.
“Thank you.” She put her embroidery away again, then pulled her plate closer to her.
I waited for her to say something else, something bad, but she picked up her sandwich, took a bite, and chewed silently. Say it. Let’s get this over with . I speared a tomato wedge with my fork and angrily shoved it into my mouth. Fucking salad. This is what I had been reduced to, and somewhere Hurricane Red had paid an even worse price.
And then she set her sandwich down, folded her hands in front of her, and said, “Zack, I would like to discuss the nature of our relationship.”
Suddenly I didn’t want to hear another damn word come out of that rosebud mouth. This wasn’t about Hurricane Red.
I leaned back and wiped my mouth on my napkin. “Are you breaking up with me, duchess?” I teased, but I forgot to smile.
Her head tilted as she studied me, and when I remembered to push my lips up, she sighed. “No, I’m not breaking up with you. That wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, would it? We’re not dating.”
“We’re fucking,” I said bluntly.
I said it to get a reaction from her, make her mad, maybe, because I was feeling a little mad myself. But instead her eyes lit up like I had said something right.
“Yes! Exactly. We’re fucking.”
I stared at her. I couldn’t recall ever hearing Hannah curse before, and my dick made it known that it had very strong feelings about my prim little librarian, with her tidy bun and excessive sweaters, saying those words without a hint of shyness about her. I subtly adjusted myself under the table and wondered if I could somehow convince her to whisper that exact phrase in my ear. Preferably when we were, in fact, fucking.
“And you want to discuss that?” I asked.
For the life of me, I could not wrap my brain around this conversation. Normally, I didn’t have this problem with women. Of course, most of my conversations with women had more inuendo than substance. The only thing we really discussed was her room or mine. A nice babbling brook of a conversation, never too slow or too deep.
With Hannah, that babbling brook had a tendency to plunge straight into a waterfall I never saw coming.
“I think it’s going pretty well. Do you?” she asked. Hopefully . And the crazy thing was, she looked at me like she wasn’t sure how I would answer.
I leaned forward. “I think it’s going so well that if you asked me to join you here in the bathroom, I’d do it.”
Her eyes darted to the bathroom door like she was actually considering it. Then she shook her head. “Chloe’s only pretending to read her psych book. She’s watching us.”
I glanced to where Chloe stood leaned over her book that lay open on the counter. Jo’s didn’t tend to be very busy on weekday afternoons, so there was nothing keeping her from getting some studying done. As I watched, she looked me dead in the eyes and flipped a page, not even trying to hide the fact that she was spying on us. I smirked back at her.
“All right,” I said. “Your place, then?”
She shook her head. “There isn’t time. I have to be back at the library in forty minutes. That would give us only fifteen minutes for…stuff.”
“Plenty of time. You’d be amazed at the stuff I can accomplish in fifteen minutes.”
“I am amazed. That’s the thing.” She gave me a perplexed smile, then took another bite of her sandwich. “How is this so easy for you? And how do you make it so easy for me?”
“How is what so easy?” I asked, honestly baffled.
“Sex.”
“Because it is easy.”
“Not for me, it isn’t. And usually not for my partners, either.” She paused. “When they’re with me, I mean,” she corrected herself softly. “Sex isn’t easy for people when they’re with me.”
Here came that waterfall.
I wasn’t cut out for this, for heady waters tossing me about so I couldn’t get my footing. I wasn’t the person people came to for deep feelings. I was the person they came to so they wouldn’t have to feel those deep feelings. But I couldn’t walk away from her just because I was swimming out of my depth. I had to white-knuckle my way through it.
“Hannah,” I said in all seriousness, because if she kept looking all sad like that I was going to have to find her ex-boyfriends and ruin their lives one by one, “I really like fucking you, and I think we should do more of that.”
She stopped looking sad. “Well, good. Because I’ve been thinking about why it’s so different with you. Do you know what it is?”
“Yes.” I nodded firmly. “It’s my magic dick.”
She snorted. “It’s a very nice dick, but no. If it were actually magic, it would have made me come, and it didn’t.”
I reeled back against the booth, clutching my chest like she had shot me there. “Goddamn, Hannah. You can’t just say things like that.”
She pushed up her glasses with a little frown and blinked at me. “Why not? You already knew it was true.”
“Duchess, truth has no place in a civilized world.”
She squinted at me like she was trying to decide whether to take me seriously. “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t have made me touch myself in front of you.”
I grinned. “Touché.”
She gave me that perplexed look again. “I think it’s this, right here. This is why sex is different with you. It’s because we’re friends. That’s why it’s easy.”
That knocked me back a bit. “Friends?” I repeated. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Had I ever been friends with a woman? Essie. And James. But they were both paired up with my brothers, so maybe they didn’t count. Not that I had anything against being friends with a woman. It just hadn’t happened before.
She nodded. “We’re friends. That’s why we can talk like this, and why talking like this doesn’t end in disaster.” She pulled off a bit of crust and popped it into her mouth. “I was never friends first with anyone I dated. A classmate would ask me out, or a co-worker, or what have you. We’d go out on a couple dates, decide to be exclusive, and then we’d have sex. My therapist told me to be honest, and I tried that, I really did, but talking about sex only ever made things worse. Because it meant I couldn’t fake it anymore.”
I nodded slowly. “I could see how that would happen, if he’s an insecure dillweed.”
She blinked like she hadn’t considered that. “I didn’t know how to reassure them, I guess. My inability to orgasm became this whole thing . They took it personally. Or they’d get mad, like I was doing it on purpose, or I was being unfair to them somehow. Sex became a fight, or a chore. They resented me. They always resented me for ruining it.”
“Insecure dillweeds,” I said again, and I meant it.
“Maybe.” She fiddled with the edge of her plate. “But I was the common denominator, and that made me feel…broken. Hopeless. I tried a one-night stand once, just to see if I could break the pattern. Maybe I could orgasm if it wasn’t all so fraught . If the stakes weren’t so high, and I never had to see him again.”
“Did it work?” I asked, even though I suspected I knew the answer.
“No, of course not.” She grimaced. “Since then, through talking to other women and reading a lot, I’ve come to realize that the female orgasm is elusive during one-night stands. Which makes sense. Alcohol is often involved, and men tend to do better when they actually know the woman’s body.”
I paused, considering that. I’d had a lot of one-night stands.
She suddenly seemed to remember that. “I’m sure you’re the exception,” she said diplomatically.
I laughed. “Obviously.” But I wondered. Hell, there had been a few times when I’d been too drunk to finish myself.
She frowned down at her sandwich. But when she looked up at me again, she wasn’t frowning. “But you don’t resent me. And I think that’s because we’re friends. It makes hard conversations easier. I actually like you, and I think you like me, too.”
Was that what friendship was? Liking someone? I could handle that. Hell, I liked everyone. It felt a little different with Hannah, though. A little more , somehow. Maybe it was all the talking. That was new. There had to be a word for that, when you wanted to listen to every last thought in their head, but you also wanted to do unspeakable things to their ankles.
A conundrum, that’s what it was.
“I like you, Hannah,” I said. “I like you a hell of a lot.”
“Good,” she said briskly. “Because I think you could be my breakthrough.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” She clasped her hands together, squared her shoulders, and looked me dead in the eyeballs. “I want you to teach me how to orgasm with a man.”