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They wanted to stop and make small talk, I did my best to nod and look interested, even though I wasn’t. It wasn’t nothing personal. I just had no use for people. They wore me out, was all. I didn’t crave company the way most folks seemed to, and it took a lot of work out of me to pretend I did.
Right like
I was about to turn around and head back down Main to do my diligence when off stepped a man that made my breath catch like I’d been shot.
No question I’d never seen a man so beautiful— in fact, I didn’t think they were intended to be made that way.
He looked about like every cowboy I’d ever seen in the newspapers. Except not at all. Because those flat, muddy pictures in the paper didn’t make my stomach flip around nearly the way that man did.
“You been acting up on the train, have you, boy?” Something he said made my belly jump, though I couldn’t say what. Just knew I felt hot and queasy and small under his gaze, even though he wasn’t fully speaking serious to me.
When he called me son, all warm and teasing, it didn’t feel anything like when old Overcoat called me that to disrespect me. Instead, it swept me up in some odd calm I didn’t quite recognize, made some far down part of me twist and turn, saying Go on, you need that, even if I wasn’t wholly sure what that was.
“I ain’t—” I started, but the cowboy squeezed my shoulder again, and I shut right up. Lord tell me why he had power over me nobody ever had before, because he sure did.
I thought again about picking up that wallet, him watching to see what I’d do, but not guessing, not shouting, not saying anything. Acting fair to me. Maybe that was what that far down part of me kept feeling tugged towards, that part that kept thinking it might be nice if he did speak for me. Seemed awful inviting to let someone like that take charge for awhile, though I never could remember having such a thought before. Someone not looking to do me over. Someone folks seemed to listen to. Who seemed to read me a little too well somehow.
His warm soft skin had sent heat up my arm like a burn, waking my blood up a way I hadn’t thought I could feel. Whatever it was that hit me that minute he stepped off the train near flattened me when I got up close. It put words in my mouth I never could have put there, acting wily to that fool in the heavy overcoat when I couldn’t hardly put two words together to talk to folks most times. Jesse Morgan, whoever he was, got my blood pumping and my tongue moving, and no matter how hard I tried to push it down, that odd feeling he gave me was as stubborn as I was, which didn’t hardly seem fair.
Damn hard not to let my eyes wander to his backside as he walked, wonder how firm it would bounce under my hand if I gave him a sharp smack to set his manners straight. Watching him, I could feel my palm itch a way it surely never had. Whatever it was he was doing to me, it wasn’t weak and it wasn’t subtle.
About every part of him was in need of repair, and if I had any weakness, I reckon it was strays.
And that’s what we’re here for😃
He pulled something out of me with his mix of gentleness and unruliness that made me want to be both stern and tender in return. And the way he responded, scowling, but then behaving, made my whole being flare up and kept me right on doing it. I wasn’t sure what appealed to me more— the satisfaction of helping put someone back together who seemed in such clear need of direction, or the surprised jolt of attraction when he did what I told him. And I wasn’t hardly sure why either appealed to me at all. But, together, they cut through me into places I hadn’t thought were real, and in some ways I
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Instead, I sat there looking back at him across the table, drinking in his even temper like it was whiskey and cold water, quenching me all the places I was dry, cooling me all the places I was hot. Except for the pit of my belly, which had caught fire the first minute I saw him and was smoldering still. Every time he gave me a look like the one he was giving me, it felt like another heavy log getting dropped on the fire, sparks flying up in that pretty, dangerous way sparks had.
“Leave him be, Jesse,” he told me quietly. I felt his breath on my neck when he said it, could feel him and smell him all over my body, and I felt like pieces were falling off me. Or into me. I couldn’t be sure which. One of his thighs brushed up against my rear end, and I almost choked on my whiskey coated tongue.
I didn’t normally have so much trouble keeping that part of me tucked away, the part of me that stared at handsome men, thought about their touch. But he cut through every defense I had, every belief I held, every truth I knew about myself and what I wanted and needed. He’d hacked me apart in just hours, and I never even saw what cut me.
I thought it was Captain whining at first when I went to get up, but it was him. Reaching out to clutch at me in the dark, so tired he was delirious. If I didn’t know that feeling plenty well, it might have terrified me. “Shh.” I reached out and ruffled his hair, not sure where his hat had disappeared to. “You’re okay. You’re home in bed,”
Couldn’t stop thinking how that thick blond hair had felt in between my fingers, how I might like to tug it and tilt his head back and kiss at those full lips of his.
Do it😈
Being near him disturbed me in a way I couldn’t put words to, and touching him, even simple touches, made me feel like my body was trying to tear itself apart. Still wasn’t any denying I would have liked to spend all night sitting out there soothing him, holding him close to me and putting a hand through his hair and listening to that low sound he made. Telling him he was safe and listening to him sigh with relief.
I was that chicken, I realized. Wanting attention, but ready to peck people away when I got it.
But even fighting didn’t stiffen me between the legs like being scolded by Will Kaplan did.
He came over and without asking, without giving me a split second to get used to the idea at all, he put a hand under my chin and lifted my head up. Looked so deep into my eyes I couldn’t breathe, could barely stand, was so sure he was going to kiss me that my lips parted, ready. Then his eyes moved to the side of my face. “Well, you took a good blow, that’s for sure. But you look sharp enough. You feeling hazy?” I didn’t dare shake my head, because I didn’t want him to let loose of me. “No.”
So stop questioning everything I tell you, and do what I say before that soap ends up in your mouth.”
🫡
Under the water, my body started to tingle and clench, like it was me he was getting rough with and not the clothes. Like he was using those arms to yank me close or pin me down or bend me over. Like he was ripping that very shirt off me. Christ. I couldn’t stop thinking again and again that it would be all sorts of bad ideas to stay here. Except, when Cap swam back up to me with a stick in her mouth and Will whipped my shirt about and laid it out on the rock next to his trousers, I couldn’t think of another way a person was supposed to be living. Not another way or place I’d rather be living.
So stay😃
Will had done up a whole sack of wash while I’d splashed around in the water, playing with his dog, and I should have felt guiltier over that, I guess, but instead, I felt… I didn’t know what. Calm? Warm? Looked after? The words his boy swam up on me again, and I tried to drown them back down in my gut. Whatever it was, it was a strange feeling.
There was just something in the idea of him letting go of his trouble and letting me lead him, giving that wicked part of himself over to me that made it a path I wanted to explore at night.
Being stubborn and reckless and ignoring good advice could get him a hell of a lot more trouble than a bump on the head, and that worried me in the fiercest way when I thought about it. Hardly seemed normal, since I had no claim to him, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I did.
I stood there drinking him in, his smiling face and his shaking shoulders and his thick, unruly hair, wondering why the hell he looked like he belonged there standing on my porch. Lord, I wanted to reach out and run my hands through that hair, push it back from his face, hold him there and kiss him right on that grinning mouth.
To hear him say Shut that mouth and listen, boy, before you find yourself sleeping on your belly. To feel the sparks that shot all through me when he said things like that and feel them again when I pulled the words back out and thought about them later. Turned them every which way without knowing for the life of me why they made me hard coming from his mouth.
Even though I couldn’t sort out the odd collection of feelings I had for him, I could believe he didn’t mean any harm, even when he was strict with me. In fact, that was oddly when I trusted him the most. When he said he did things for my own good, I believed him. Even if I didn’t like it. Even if I thought he had too many rules. I guess they did make me feel safer some ways. Sitting at the table for meals, or on the front stoop at night, with him just quietly nearby, I eased into a space I didn’t know. Where I could imagine what it was like to feel cared for, what it might have been like to
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Don’t you dare tell me you were thinking of getting in that pen.” It definitely did not seem like a good time to tell him I’d already been in the pen and fed Jack and then left. In fact, never seemed like the best time to tell him that.
Rip girl 💀
I didn’t know what on earth it was about him that made me want to pout and kick at the dirt when he spoke to me that way instead of take a swing at him like I would have done to anyone else. I couldn’t seem to get out from under the way it broke me down hard to be scolded by him. Worse, I liked it.
“What’d you say?”
Why am I the one scared 💀
Favoring men wasn’t hardly unheard of, even if it wasn’t something you were meant to share. But wanting one to take me to bed and also wanting to call him daddy while he paddled me… that I was fairly certain wasn’t a healthy thing to want.
Still, I sat there, wanting to behave for him, learn for him, make him proud more than I wanted to test him.
That bottom lip of his did powerful things to a man. Things that swung me from one end of my mind to the other, fast enough to make me dizzy.
Girl if u down bad jus say that
With It would goddamn kill me if something happened to you and Get your ass up, we’re going out to the woodshed both balancing on my tongue, it didn’t seem like there was much good reason to open my mouth just to say something I’d wish I hadn’t.
Say it
I wanted to keep him here longer, keep him safe, teach him how to handle himself all the ways he didn’t know yet.
Hadn’t taken me but a few days to understand it was more than his body I wanted. Not to say I didn’t still think plenty about that. Surely more than I ever had about another person. But what I really liked was just him.
Wasn’t too keen after she’d seen me kiss a boy name Charles in the woods one night when we were picking up kindling.
But as u should tho
And then, like some kind of a miracle, he did lean toward me, just a bit. And it startled me so bad I jumped, splashed whiskey down my shirt and scrambled to sit up straight, sure before my next heartbeat that I’d only imagined him moving, that I was just playing tricks on myself.
Bestie PLS don’t embarrass me rn 😭
Should have told him just how nervous it made me him going near that horse. How nervous it made me him doing anything that might end with him hurt. How the idea of him getting hurt or him up and leaving cut me places I’d never have guessed I was still alive.
A body didn’t get more patient than being still beside him when I wanted to reach for him as bad as I did. Say I know what you need, stay here and let me give it to you. Especially when he was sitting there looking so lazy and good, all but calling me Daddy. There were needs I hadn’t known I had until I met him, but now I did. Or at least, I was starting to.
Did I remember lying in the sun on the rocks by the stream, thinking about how beautiful he was? How good I felt around him when he smiled at me? I sure did.
Behave. Like I was a boy. Like I was his boy, getting taught how boys did when they had someone to teach them. I swallowed down the ideas I wasn’t trying to have, but they came bubbling right back up. Me staying here permanent. Him being patient and good to me, teaching me all the things I never learned how to do, letting me learn how I liked. Him making me behave when I got frustrated, scorching my backside when I lost my temper. I didn’t understand how I could crave things like that with two parts of me that were so different. How those ideas could comfort and excite me both at once. Seemed
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“Good boy.” Secret parts of me throbbed when he said that, and I closed my eyes until my breath slowed to normal. Then I raised the axe straight over my head and swung down, managing not the send it flying, and to bury the blade in the stump, somewhere in the center. I looked up for his approval, and got it, a simple nod from him enough to make me glow warm head to toe.
Mannn
Like he knew what I needed wasn’t wild adventure and danger and running but the flood of feeling I got just from being growled at to Stop that sass before I come over there and make you stop. Like he knew what I needed, whether I chose to admit it or not, were his rules, his law, was for him to tell me what to do and make me listen. Or else. What I needed was him.
No matter how much I might have liked to change, it still felt good to be bad. I still didn’t belong here with someone like Will, who had a habit of giving far too much, being far too patient, to folks who didn’t earn it. Even if I did think some part of him might want some part of me.
I had odd, angry feelings when I thought about his life in Chicago. Thought of a city and of people who had him near all those years and made him struggle. Folks who had a chance to help him and didn’t. Or did, and made him feel so bad about it he still hurt. Maybe it wasn’t anger I felt so much as jealousy. Or maybe something bigger. Possessiveness, even. Like no one or no place should ever have him but me.
It was being so close all the time to a man who looked like that. Who teased me and taught me and gave me the clothes off his back. Sat with me under the stars and made me say things I’d never said before because he made me feel safe and wanted and heard, just by being kind and quiet.
I didn’t deserve to have him or want him, but I could sense the waiting space inside me where I needed him to be. Not just in my body where I could feel how he would fill me hard and hot, but in my heart, my soul, my deep being where I was broken and he was already mending me with small, straight stitches. Where if I could have all I wanted of him, he could make me whole. Make me full. Make me good.
