Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“She’s been shut up in that house goin’ on three days now, Joel,” Tommy says as the two brothers make their way across the lawn. 

The ride had been long and hard, and Joel is tired—he levels a dark look at him. “Just sayin’. Nothin’ you find in there’s gonna be pretty to look at.” He raises his hands in surrender at the brooding glare, that non-confrontational shrug that’s set Joel on edge since they were boys. 

“One of you’s should’a gone in there. Made sure she’s okay.”

“The housekeepers’ve been keepin’ an eye. And Frank tried to go in there and check on her himself, but she’s angry as a barn cat. Hissin’ ‘nd yowlin’, and just bein’ downright scary as hell, to be honest. You should be prepared is all I’m tryin’ to say.”

“Her father just died, Tommy. I’m not expectin’ pretty sights right now,” Joel gruffs, trying to swallow the panic that flutters in his throat as they crest the final hill up to the big house. 

The beautiful stone, oak, glass monstrosity that’s stood as monument to this place, this home that is not truly his, for over a decade now. The Kelly Ranch. The sky above is still a sultry, yawning blue, deep and tired, basking in the throes of dawn as the sun just now makes its way over the crest of the Tetons in the distance so that the house sits for just a moment longer in its pool of shadowed blues. 

Joel pauses on the border of that somber darkness, afraid suddenly of what awaits him inside; boots glued to the ground with the gum of cowardice. He doesn’t want to see her broken. He doesn’t want to see her hurting. But there’s no other recourse, he knows this. The death of the estranged father she’d fought with all her life, the inheritance of this world that seems suddenly too big for just one orphaned girl, all alone now. 

He’s afraid that he’ll walk into that house he’s always seen as other and home all wrapped into one—that Olympus that was so far removed and out of reach even when he walked through it’s halls to the man who’d given him sanctuary and salvation, to the man he knew mistreated her sometimes, didn’t love her enough—and not have the capacity to recognize her, this girl who’d always been familiar and stranger all in one also. 

Joel Miller suddenly feels afraid of the memory she exists as in his mind, in the face of the woman he knows she is now. 

When he lets himself in the back kitchen door, it’s still nighttime within. The cool dryness of the AC cranked up to inhuman temperatures makes him shiver once while sprouting a damp sweat along his nape. He should’ve showered before coming, should’ve washed the ride and the days of camp off his skin before walking into her presence, but all he’d managed were his hands and face. There’d been panic to make sure she was well, if not then alive, at least. But he should be more presentable for her. 

Hell, he should’ve been here for her when she came home for the first time in two years to the house where her father had died. He should’ve been here when the man died. 

But the herd had needed moving. He hadn’t thought it’d all happen so quickly, thought he had more time, that they all had more time. He’d hoped she wouldn’t return at all, if he was being honest. There was nothing here for her. Nothing except memories of a gilded and loveless, already motherless childhood. The reality of all she was set to inherit. The truth of an aloneness Joel didn’t know if she was prepared for. 

He moves through the house slowly, afraid to disturb the ghosts and the silence. The interior, immaculate and beautiful and solemn. Something out of a movie picture or the gloss of a magazine. Something covered not in dust but in sadness. The stairs are silent as his spinning mind makes up for the creak, the boots she’d sent him on his last birthday hit the richly piled rug at the top, and the hallway to the bedrooms yawns long and frightening in front of him. Two grand a pop, the boots—Lucchese, he’d looked them up on the iPhone she’d sent him the year before. A gift giver, generous to a fault, kind to a detriment. She sent something to all the ranch hands that’d worked for her father since she was a girl. Something for the entire ranch at Christmas. And all he managed each time was a perfunctory thank you card, like he did every year because he remembered, years ago, in her little voice, polite people send thank you notes, Joel, my grandmother told me so. Last year he’d written that they were too much, that she shouldn’t have, that he was grateful. There wasn’t much else to say. 

That was the extent of their communication, familiar and stranger in one, the far removed golden child of the Kelly. They’d all called him that, the Kelly, for as long as he’d known the man. As if he was some Scottish laird of old, ruling over his clan and half the world. Egotistical, was what it really was. He’d thought himself a god among men, in the face of his only child. Ridiculous was what Joel saw it all for, a put on play, a farce.

And wonder of wonders, she was entirely unlike him because of course she would be. Of course a man ruled by nothing more than ego and narcissism had been sent his polar opposite in the form of his only child. Kind hearted, was what she was—sending him a birthday gift every year. Remembering them all here always no matter how far she’d gone. He sent her a thank you note for each benevolence in return, a word of respectful gratitude for the fact that a person like her could ever remember a dog like him. 

Sometimes, Joel had wanted to go to him, the old man, Oswald Kelly, and ask him where his daughter was, why he wasn’t looking for her, keeping her closer, caring for her. He wasn’t the sort of man that could’ve ever understood such callous behavior towards one’s child.

The last time she’d been here, over two years ago: less than forty eight hours that had ended in screaming so terrible they’d all heard it down from the barn, sitting in uncomfortable, swollen silence, the spinning of tires ringing as she yelled at her father that he was never going to see her again, the man’s echoing laugh as she’d fled him. 

Joel hadn’t seen her on that visit, it’d been so quick and angry. Flying down on the jet from New Haven for her father’s seventieth birthday and not even making it long enough for the festivities. This was what her life was, as he’d observed it from a distance for all these years, the singular daughter of this great house, coming to her father, attempting joy and finding nothing but disappointment at the end of him. 

She’d been right, a knowing streak running through her. Kelly had never seen her again, and Joel didn’t know if the old man had regretted it or not, the anger and the estrangement and the lack of love. But the last time he’d spoken to him, hours before setting off on their move, the herd always came before everything else, the ranch was all that mattered is what the man had always said, with death scratching at the window, his frail and withered body licked down to almost nothing from the austere and imposing figure Joel had always known him as, he’d asked for her. His only child. Do you think she’ll come, Joel? The dying man had asked him. My girl, do you think she’ll come see me? Joel had lied a lie he hadn’t known was one, said she would, that he’d call her as soon as he was back. 

In the end, he hadn’t even afforded her that decency, a personal call.

He comes to her open bedroom door now, pitch dark as grief within, and the stench of sorrow and liquor seeping from the living grave. He looks down the long and empty hall for a brief second, wishing it didn’t have to be him, that again, he didn't have to see her any way other than okay. And he realizes that there’s something about her, as she will exist now, that makes him cowardly. Something about this house without the man who’d granted him the absolution of a hiding place all those years ago, who’d understood and sheltered Joel in the midst of his own past grief, that makes him cowardly. The house feels wrong without Kelly within it, wrong with only her as its holder now. 

Joel steps into her dark, and it’s a battleground—

—You are silent and motionless in the blue room. 

Nothing of the gleaming splendor that dresses the rest of the home sleeps in here. There are clothes everywhere, an exploded suitcase lies open and massacred in the middle of the plush white rug, a turned over bottle of red wine bleeding into your clothes. Shredded pages with scratched on writing slashed across them, the dusted white mounds of crushed pills, as if you’d smashed each one individually beneath the thumb of your grief. The sight makes him more afraid, the scent of weed and cigarettes heavy in the air, as he takes the final step towards the wrecked bed, and a single small foot hangs limply from the edge.

He stares at it long and hard for a second, afraid, afraid again, still, of what he’ll find. He says your name once, short and gruff like a dog’s bark. It’s what he feels like. Animal, bestial, lacking any sort of cognizance amidst this minefield. His heart beats against his spine, and he thinks he should do something else, shake you, check for a pulse, his bones throb inside his skin. He needs to fucking move, but the smell of smoke is so cloying he’s choking on his own tongue. 

Your ankle twitches.

And Joel sucks in a sigh of relieved air without panic, saying your name again. His voice is level now, maybe gentle, no more barking dog. His eyes move up the length of one pretty leg, and then quickly, he averts his gaze when he gets high up enough he’s met with soft-creased asscheek covered in silk. Swallowing his tongue, his eyes roll in their sockets, looking for anything else to look at besides the sight of panty clad ass. He steps closer again, gripping the edge of the sheet to pull it over your scantily clad body, eyes flitting to the silver spun clock on the nightstand, the warm glow of the hall light shows that they have two hours to get you sober and presentable before the funeral. 

Joel should have been here. He does not feel that he is even here now. And the guilt eats at him like acid. The fear too. 

“Darlin’, you’ve gotta get up now,” he says softly, taking hold of your shoulder, scalded by the feel of fragile skin, realizing with the suddenness of a gunshot that you’ll be the Kelly now. He gives you a gentle shake, “We’ve gotta get you ready,” and his heart pumps blood like a machine. The sight of the dry liquor bottle toppled on the nightstand, the shattered glass glittering the floor in crystal, the empty pill bottles, it all taunts him. His guilt is a cacophony in his mind. He knows he’s going to have to stick his fingers down your throat, make you spit it all up, that you’ll hate him for all of this afterwards, but when his gaze meets streaked rust, dark and shocking against the white sheets, he’s kicked into terrified action. 

He turns you over, your head lolling sickeningly in unconscious stupor, hair a tangled mess strewn about your face so that he has to dig for your eyes, parting the curtains of your fringe to uncover you. He focuses on your closed eyes, the too long lashes clumped together, lips cracked and parched. 

He should’ve fucking been here. 

Smoothing his fingers along the lengths of your arms, he keeps his eyes on your face and averted from all the skin that keeps peeking out below, searching the divots and slopes of your arms for hurts. When he gets to your right hand, battleground of a long ago broken hurt, he finds the drying crust of blood, the ragged split in the soft, small palm, thankfully shallow.

 His eyes smart, looking down at the broken glass, feeling the tear in you. 

Gripping you gently below the elbows he pulls you into his arms, cradled like a child, light as loss. Your head lolls again, neck crooked at an unnatural angle as he carries you into the restroom, careful of your head, knocking the lights on and putting you down in front of the toilet bowl. He pulls your camisole to rights, making sure everything is covered, and gathers your mess of hair as carefully as he can, trying his best to not snag the fragile strands in his too rough hands, but gripping you firmly in position. And ignoring the sound of your awakening cry, he sticks two fingers into your slack jawed mouth and down your throat until he feels the hot rush of vomit. 

Crouching behind you, his thighs bracket you, keeping your form from slumping over as you empty the poison from your belly, flushing the alcohol soaked bile as you struggle. He wipes his messy hand on the leg of his jeans and rubs soothing circles on your back, his fingers woven through the soft silk of your hair to keep your head in place and your face clear. His heart thumps in rhythm with your heaves, your too quick, panicked breathing. There seems to be not enough oxygen for the two of you and your grief in the too small room of the commode, and Joel gasps like a dying fish, trying to swallow calm breaths. 

When you finally stop your heaving, you rest your arms at the edge of the gleaming porcelain, head hung low, defeated, wracked with shivers or silent sobs, he isn’t sure, a strange and horrible keening noise, so small he barely catches it, held in your throat. There’s the finest down of peach fuzz that covers the tender slope of your vulnerable nape, and it makes Joel feel suddenly, just as vulnerable, just as unprotected. At a complete loss for how to help you. 

“Finally decided to show your face,” you croak, voice ragged with your sick. 

His fingers tighten once around your shoulder, a panicked tick of reminder that he’s here now, that he’s him. “I was moving the herd. It had to be done. Your father, he—” he stutters, trying explain, tripping over his own guilt ridden words. “I didn’t think it’d happen now, so fast, that you’d get here so soon. I thought we had more time.” 

We. 

Your skin seems to cool by the second beneath his fingertips, and then you’re shrugging his touch away, huddling closer to the porcelain bowl, further away from him. 

“Get out.”

“Let me explain. I—” And he’s begging now. He can hear the note of it in his voice. Begging for forgiveness. For a chance. 

“I don’t want to see you.” You don’t say his name. “Get out.” It feels worse than anything. 

“I’m here now. I didn’t know— I didn’t think.” He reaches to grab for you again, but you turn to face him suddenly. Wiping the back of your hand against your mouth, pushing your heels at his shins to kick him away. Your eyes are red rimmed, the hollows beneath bruised with lack of sleep. But fire spits from the deep color, all anger and hurt. 

“Go deal with your fucking ranch,” you fling the words at him. “It’s all you care about anyways.” And they weren’t shivers, he sees now, they’re tears tracked as proof of all his guilt, all his lacking, along the slopes of your fine grained cheeks. 

Your, you say. As if this place and anything in it has ever been his. He’s never wanted any of it like that, only ever seen a thing that needed taking care of, and him, with the ability to care for it. 

“I needed you,” you whisper as if the thought comes along on a second wind of anger, a realization that sends your voice breaking, hitching, your chest caving in on itself as the tears come faster and faster now. “He’s dead, and I needed you.”

“I’m sorry,” he begs. “I’m so sorry.” His voice breaks now too. He thinks he’ll cry now too, for the man who he also lost, who despite it all meant something to him, as well. For you, who’s lost even more. For Joel’s own guilt. 

But he doesn’t think you see any of that, not his apology, not his regret, not his own grief. You turn away from him again, laying your temple down again on your forearm. “Get out. I’ll be ready soon.”

And so he goes.

Your father is made small and withered in death. 

One of the wealthiest men in the entire world. A stranger, a titan, a nightmare of a man. 

It wasn’t something you’d ever considered, that a human body could look so colorless and frigid and not alive. Like a shock or a ringing bell, it’s a realization that you’re an orphan now. That you’re all alone. 

You feel something like a memory of regret. Or something that’s like the idea that you should feel regret, that you should feel guilt for how it was between the two of you. But all that is overshadowed by the reality of what you weren’t. All you feel even more, or in actual reality, is the old loss of what you’d never been to each other. That, you realize, is the seed of your grief. That long ago wound, that child’s understanding that he wasn’t like all the other fathers, that he’d never care for you the way other children were cared for. 

Looking down at the frozen face that looks nothing like the one he’d worn the last time you’d seen him, the wispy thatch of hair that hadn’t been so jarringly white before sickness had ravaged his body, you realize that this is no new loss, it is only a continuation, a reopening of a very old one. 

The cavernous cathedral at your back is silent, vacated by the sea of people that had congregated here earlier. And with sickening curiosity, you uncoil an arm from where you’ve got it wrapped around yourself, reaching out to press a finger against the ice cold back of his hand. Shockingly not alive; he feels made of rubber. 

Everyone that’d been here to bid farewell to this behemoth turned slip of a man, to catch a glimpse of you, packed like teeth into Jackson’s grandest cathedral; business men and heads of state from around the world, the oldest family names in the country, figures of the highest echelons of wealth and society, vipers circling the barrel—half the world here to see this person who was supposed to have been your father but was really only a stranger. 

You take your hand back, and you don’t say goodbye as you turn away from his body. There’s no farewell to really tell. 

And at the back of the church, hiding in a bright ream of sunlight, Joel stands propped against the face of a saint. Dark and silent and maybe even more far removed than your dead dad. Watching sentinel. Oswald Kelly’s hovering man—come to watch over him one last time. 

The silk of your stockings slide against each other at the junction of your thighs, the hiss of your skirt around your calves as your reed thin heels click against the stone, and you pull your armor as tightly around yourself as you can. There’s a hollow echo inside of everywhere and everything, your mind like a gong, reverberating, and his gaze is so steady, hazel bright, deeply shaded by the lip of his dark hat, beckoning you towards him from beneath the brim. 

Large and strong and steadfast, your heart gives a painful, longing thump—stupid, writhing thing—and you can only bear to look him in the eye for a second, and if you were to really think about saying goodbye to that father that never really was, lying behind you, slipping further and further away, you’d say it to the man that always stood as his shadow before the world, before you ever said it to the man himself. 

The drive back home is cast in frigid silence and made all the more uncomfortable because you can practically hear Joel’s brain clicking and ticking away with worry. 

He’d sent your car and driver away with a harsh word while you collected your final goodbyes and words of respect from the last smattering of people congregated and waiting for the newly birthed heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. 

Hovering over your shoulder, he’d kept anyone from stepping too close or getting too friendly, so close you could feel the heat of his chest through the silk of your blouse, and then going suddenly full on aggressive when a reporter from the New York Times had approached, fishing for a quote on the future of the Kelly empire. Ushering you away with a hovering hand at the small of your back before the man could get half a question out, he’s opening the truck’s door for you as a haze descends over your eyes, the distant shutter and flash of cameras bursting in your peripherals, a latent hangover and sleep deprivation and not enough to eat in the last forty eight hours causing you to sag in his hold. Then it’s only his big fist wrapping around the span of your wrist as he lifts you into the truck, your eyes downcast and unable to take in sight or sound, vision all a blur. You murmur a barely there thank you with his hand fitting at the dip of your waist, big body blocking yours entirely from prying eyes trying to catch a glimpse or a stumble, and for a single second, your entire weight is suspended in his hold, allowing you to bypass the struggle of balancing your high heel on the step up, and then you’re sliding onto the leather of the seat, the whisper of your cashmere and silk rustling around you as he handles you like a child being spirited away from the scene of a crime. 

The door shuts gently behind you, face turned away from the flashing lights, the watchful eyes of the whole world, and worst of all, the assessment of his concerned gaze. All you’re afforded are thirty seconds of privacy to let out a single gasping sob. 

And now, an hour and a half of silent purgatory. 

You slip your heels off, flexing your smarting toes against the damp of your stockings and tuck your folded legs beneath you on the seat. Paying the frantic energy of his anxiety and lodged words no mind, you consider instead: your new reality. The burden of it all means very little to you now. The last of your worries is being readied for entombing as the two of you speed down the eighty nine, zinging past the bright Wyoming green. The thrum of his truck drowns out your thoughts, brand new, probably over a hundred grand, only the best for your father’s right hand man, and the Kelly Ranch insignia emblazoned proudly on the sides. A brand for the whole world to see just who exactly is being whisked away to her old home turned brand spanking new grave. 

You might be feeling a little bit dramatic. But then again— you’d just put your last remaining parent in an actual grave, surely that provides you some allowances. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his big paw gripping the leathered steering wheel in a death clutch, knuckles white with his frustration at the dilemma you pose, his own discomfort. You’re sure if he thought you wouldn’t catch him, he’d be squirming in his seat. 

You do something to him sometimes, you know this. Not in any way you’d like, not in any interesting way, that of a woman affecting a man, but something respectfully harrowing. Maybe something a little bit like fear. 

There has existed between the two of you, always, that strange intimacy of two people who’ve known each other for a very long time, and yet, have always remained at a far removed, arms length distance from one another. 

A professional intimacy of sorts. Your father’s foreman, shadow, fixer. The man who guarded that treasure trove you’d inherit one day, today; the thing your father loved most in the world. Two people who’ve known each other a long time, and yet, don’t really know each other at all. 

There has always been, however, the fact of the birthday. 

The birthday. Your birthday.

The way you’d latched onto that small, immense, detail when you’d first discovered it at fourteen, when he’d newly arrived at the ranch and the true weight of your first real crush had really hit you, it was probably not entirely healthy. But you’d thought yourself in love with your father’s man, the first figure of the male species who’d ever drawn your attention in such a way. 

He’d never paid you any mind; you were the boss's daughter, a figurehead or a responsibility, maybe a nuisance, although he’d never ever treated you as one. But the day someone had let slip it was his birthday, on the same day as yours, your teenage heart had swelled with the naive hope of fate. It was meant to be, the two of you were connected, so on and so forth, swallowed by girlish innocence and made buoyant by fantasy. 

But you’d had something to share with someone, which was what really mattered. Something tangible, even if only in your inexperienced little mind, something to wield as comfort so that the first time your father had forgotten your special day, fifteen, and what a tender age it had been, you’d had something to cling to. That's when your gifts to him had started. It was your way of making sure there was at least one person in the whole world who’d remember that was your day too. That you were alive, that you mattered. A reminder of yourself. And as the years and birthdays passed, sometimes, when he sent those coldly gracious notes of his, you’d wished you could’ve written back with honesty. Said something like, I’m so lonely, wish you were here, wherever it was in the world you’d found yourself at the time. 

And of course, he was gorgeous and older, strong and patient and capable, entirely unattainable. Impossible to forget. You’d gone so far, traveled wide, gotten yourself an overpriced education that would probably serve you for nothing, had lovers and parties and splendor, and always, you remembered your gifts for him, you remembered him. It was the single most important detail of your birthday every year. 

The leather creaks beneath his fist again, chapped knuckles set to burst before he flexes his fingers out, long and straight. Thickly built hands, strong, made for working or hurting, on a man who you’ve never seen be anything but stoically patient. 

He was strange in that way, neither wholly impulsive nor precisely intentional in his mannerisms. More so, it was that there was something extremely neutral about him, a middle buoyancy of personality. Strict with the cowboys, exacting, wielding his title as ranch foreman with an iron fist and your father’s blessing, and yet still, quiet, serious, with that patient gentleness about him. You’d seen it in the way he’d handled Ellie when she’d first come to the ranch, young and skinny with that hollow look of trauma kids who’d seen things they shouldn’t have shamed adults with. She’d been a little older than you, and with an air you’d not understood, a sort of lived past you’d been naive to the existence of, frightened when confronted by it, and yet inevitably, the two of you’d become fast friends eventually.

You’d even experienced it yourself, on two treasured occasions, that gentleness that you’d held onto for years. Nurturing the memory of him in your mind like a delusional bloom. 

He stretches his hand again, wheel caught between his thumb and forefinger, cinching it there, back and forth. His nails are meticulously clean, cut to the quick, and you imagine he must spend a great deal of time cleaning himself up when he works so hard at getting himself so dirty most days. 

You can see him sneaking glances at you, and he coughs once, a clearing of his nervous throat. Averting your gaze, you turn your face away so that you’ll be able to watch him through the reflection in the window. He monopolizes the space in the cabin of the truck, broad shoulders and hulking form, all the fine leather smell washed away in the scent of him. That bay rum aftershave he’s always worn, the one with the distinctive notes of bay leaf, cloves and citrus. An old fashioned scent, masculine and crisp. 

You’d snuck into the bunk once with Ellie, before he’d moved into the foreman’s cabin, before Switzerland, when the two of you were still girls running rampant and free through the ranch, clutching desperately at the last vestiges of any sort of happy childhood you could scrounge up for one another. You’d peeked in his things, found a whole world of Joel shaped curiosities. The glass etched bottle of aftershave, a hole spotted t-shirt with a burnt orange longhorn across the front, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories— something you found comforting, knowing he could read about the small, the freakish, real life; thinking that perhaps he was homesick for the comfort of the South, hungering for a taste of the life he’d had then, through books. And then, in a spine cracked copy of Suttree, the pages almost falling apart beneath your fingertips, dog eared and well loved, her picture tucked between the pages.

It had been the first time you’d done something you knew you shouldn’t have and actually regretted it, looking down at that green eyed photograph. 

You’d run back to your room after that, ashamed and something a little bit like jealous, desperate to know who she was, desperate for someone to keep a picture of you like that—as if they loved you. And years later, you’d found the scent for yourself. The little molasses glass bottle you still have and pull out on occasion, when you’re feeling extra bad, extra lonesome, extra far away from the whole world, just for a reminding of home. 

Beside you, he sighs again, coughs again, brings you back to himself and the present. Just spit it out already, you think exasperatedly, say something, anything else besides how sorry you are. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he starts, and you roll your eyes, scoffing quietly. 

“You already said that.” Sullen. Mullish. You wish you were a child who could still throw a tantrum and get away with it. Letting your eyes go unfocused from his reflection in the window, you brood at the sight of everything that’s yours now as he turns off the highway, passing below the iron eave of the Kelly Ranch entrance. Eight hundred thousand acres of pristine Wyoming land nestled into the deep valley surrounded by the Grand Tetons mountain range. 

“Well, I’m sayin’ it again.” He’s driving too fast, and you refuse to turn and look at his face. Your heart beats blood in your ears, and you screw your eyes shut to the dizzying blur of green legacy, not wanting to see any of it— him. 

Your belly swoops, going slightly nauseous and gurgling. 

“I didn’t think you’d get here so quick.” He swallows, “Hell, I didn’t think it’d all happen so damn fast.”

“I was already in New York,” you tell him, voice clipped with breathlessness. “I left Paris last week.”

“What? I didn’t know— I—”

“Why would you?”

“I would’ve called you. I would’ve gotten you out here quicker.”

“Ellie called. It’s better like this, Joel.” Finally letting yourself say his name out loud, it feels wrong and molten on your tongue, a heaviness being spit up from the depths of your stomach. “We don’t have to pretend anymore. He’s dead now.”

“There’s no pretending. He wanted to see you—”

“Please, stop.”

But he urges on unheeded: “He told me so before I left. Told me—”

“Stop,” you snap. Finally turning to look at him and hating him for it. For how gorgeous he is, for all the things he’s always made you feel for as long as you can remember what it was to feel something for a man, for all he did or did not have with your father when you had none of it or so much of an entirely different thing. “Stop. I don’t want to hear any of it. It doesn't matter anymore, Joel.”

“But you should know. You deserve to know that—”

“What?" Because that one hurts. “I deserve to know what?” That he actually had loved you but had just never been able to show it? That now it was too late? That the only person the great Oswald Kelly had ever been able to speak to of the supposed care he had for his only daughter was the hired help? You’d read once that one should never let their parents anywhere near their real humiliations. You’d tried your damndest to follow that as soon as you’d grown up. “It’s not your place,” you seethe with teeth bared, an animal shoved into a corner and made to fight for its life, deciding you won’t ever let Joel near them either.  

He spits a cursing, growled sound of frustration, but doesn’t continue. The two of you find yourselves at an impasse, and you turn back to your windowed mirror of him, eyes pinching hot, filling with tears. One of the things your father disliked most about you, your easy tears, and a single salt marred inadequacy tracks down the slope of your cheek, dripping off the edge of your jaw into the bandaged cup of your palm, and you breathe slow and measured through your open mouth, watching the fog cloud grow and shrink against the glass obscuring your vision of him. 

The last time you’d missed your mother, the one you’d never known, in any sort of real and true way, you’d been eighteen. Returning to an empty house after celebrating your high school graduation in a far off school, alone. 

In the midst of your sophomore year, you’d been sent away to a Swiss boarding school. It had been something worse than devastating, losing your life in Wyoming, the only home you’d ever know, Ellie, the other people on the ranch… But it was far removed enough that you couldn’t bother, where you couldn’t ask for things like attention or consideration. The education had been excellent, the upbringing desperately lonely ending on a whimpering sigh despite your many accomplishments. You’d wanted her very badly then indeed, your mother. To have been there, to have helped you pick your dress, kissed your cheek after watching you walk across the stage. To have wiped your tears when she told you that your father wasn’t there because he was busy managing the whole world, but that he was proud of you, that he’d have been there if he could. You’d wished she could’ve been there to lie to you so that you wouldn’t have needed to lie to yourself. 

Peering down from your balanced perch atop the deck’s bannister, you survey the deep bed of Lily of the Valley, destroyed beneath the vindictive soles of your bare feet. He’d planted them for her all around the house after she’d died, her favorite flower. 

You’d always hated them. 

And that was the thing of it all, which you’d learned when you grew old enough to recognize such things like disdain. He couldn't stand you because you reminded him of her. Clichéd and old and tired. An excuse for being a neglectful father. The daughter who was too much like her dead mother, and thus did not deserve to be loved. 

You tip your head back, nursing at the lip of fine aged Macallan, and the sky is a glass mirror of blackened silver streaks. You’re almost positive that all the stars in the Milky Way are visible from right here at this very spot in the heart of Wyoming. The sight makes your broken heart feel full and falsely mended. 

You’re certain you’re painting a pretty picture right now: tipsy on a bottle of your dead dad’s sacredly hoarded whiskey that probably cost as much as someone’s house, staring up at the stars in your newly inherited home with a whole unappreciated life full of possibilities ahead of you. Basking in the title of your newly minted— orphan-hood? Orphan-ness? A peer of the orphans. 

You snort softly, sucking on the bottle again, letting the heat of it settle in your belly, smolder in your heart. Your head feels full of bubbles and sugar and sad. 

There’s a part of you that feels a little ridiculous, despite the circumstances. You’re good at compartmentalizing, good at being objective of your realities. Obviously: sad because your father is now dead, and it’d been nine months and eleven days since you’d last spoken to him. Sad because he’d never given a shit about you. Sad because you’re alone, dumped by the stupid French jockey boyfriend who you’d not even liked very much, just a few days before this whole pathetic ordeal of acquiring your orphan-hood, yeah, that’s what you’re sticking with, had occurred. Not to mention the army of looming lawyers and financial advisors and various heads of business vying for your attention, waiting for the what next?

And Joel.

A one man army of looming Joel. 

So you’re feeling morose, blue, maybe a little spoiled, but brought low and cut short. Depressed and unsatisfied with your life thus far. 

Poor little rich girl. Poor little orphan. Poor little me.

What you want? 

Someone to care. 

Someone to love you. 

Hard to come by. Impossible to buy. 

The stars gleam purple silver, winking at you. The bracketing black so dark it swallows the eye. Another taste of the nutty bouquet of smoked apple oranges, and soon you’ll be tipsy enough you won’t be able to balance your butt on the bannister’s ledge anymore. Maybe you’ll go humpty dumpty over the edge and crack your skull against your mother’s valley of destroyed Lily’s. 

You laugh again with sound now, not crazy, only an orphan, ha, but you think that it’s only that it feels shockingly as if you’ve fallen through the surface of your life. As if you are still falling with nothing and no one to grab on to, to help stabilize you. A really terrible, shit-out-of-luck feeling. 

Your eyes continue their infernal leaking, and you blow your nose loudly on the inside of your sweater. You’ve given yourself three days to do whatever the hell you want, be as disgusting as you may. When the three days are up you’ll plan to get your act together, take responsibility and hold of your life and become the woman you should be. 

Who that is? Still being decided. 

You think that maybe you’ll buy another jet before that time’s up. Or an island. Something ridiculous. Maybe you’ll sell the goddamn ranch. 

You eye the dark rolling hills of the valley with seething suspicion. Let’s see what Joel says about that. You, marching up to the highway entrance and spearing a For Sale sign in the dirt of the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the continental United States. Way more than that God forsaken surly frown is what you’d get. 

So long, Joel, it’s been swell. I’m done with this place. It’s time to pack it up and find some new hunk of land to care about more than you care about me or anything else. 

Maybe you’ll be real funny and put up a Craigslist ad. 

And it isn’t that you don’t love this place, the only home you’ve ever known. You do. In a way that is passionate and consuming and irreconcilable. Everything about it, the serenity, the guarding mountains and the deep woods, the home you’d been born in, that both your parents had died in. You do love it in your way. 

It’s only that every man you’ve ever loved—loved—had always cared more about the place than he’d ever cared about you. 

For the longest time, most of your youth until you’d decided that you officially felt an adult, you’d thought you’d hated your father. There was just so much anger and resentment and the resound of his ever furious words and insults and endless disappointment. The echo of no mother ringing so loudly in your ears that the confounding feelings had all been mistaken for hatred. But with age and distance and life, you’d realized you didn't hate him. You never had. You thought, actually, and this was a very good and mature thought of yours, that you were the only person in the whole world that had ever seen him as only a man and not a god. 

He was only a man, full of greed and grief and missing the mother of the child he’d probably never wanted. Nothing more or less. 

Maybe it was that you felt sorry for him. Not in the way of pity, but in the way of one person feeling empathy for another in a clinical and helpless sort of manner. And a numb, detached sort of sadness. A longing for something that you’d never had and had always wanted but eventually learned to live without. 

Ultimately, his disappointment had turned on him, and now it was all you felt you had for him at the end of it all. 

But, for some reason, and an annoying one at that, you do think that, if you try very, very hard, you could bring yourself to hate Joel Miller. There’s satisfaction in that possibility, vindication—resentment that even now, as practically strangers, you know he’d be able to pull that sort of feeling out of you which could result in hatred. Something strong and overwhelming and not easily escaped. 

Your stomach rumbles, and you smile blithely at all your inherited legacy, filling the hollow with more drink. Three days to behave very badly, as badly as you can. The whiskey is so good, and swishing it around in your mouth, you tip your head back further, gurgling it loudly at the back of your throat. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

You jerk, scrambling to keep your balance, choking a little on smokey apples and your own spit. A trickle of the golden amber liquor drips out of the corner of your mouth as you find him hiding in the dark across the deck. Accustomed to drooling over him, you wipe it away with the back of your hand. 

“Having a party. Would you like to join?”

“Are you drunk again?”

Tough crowd. Ugh. “Never mind. You’re not invited. Go away.”

“You need to go inside and go to bed.”

You tip your chin at him, putting on doe eyes. “Alright. And are you going to be my new daddy also?” You say in a baby voice.

Fucking Christ, you hear him whisper under his breath, turning away to run an exasperated palm over his mouth. Frustration seethes off of him like sulfur. He’s tired. Of you maybe. Of the whole circus this place has become in the past few days—and rightfully so. 

“What do you want? I’m extremely busy, if you can’t tell.”

“Just thought I’d check on ya.” Courteous, always the gentleman, bullshit. You roll your eyes at him. 

“I don’t need you to check on me.” And you, ever the child. One day you swear you’ll grow up. 

But it can’t be said that you’re entirely selfish either. You have considered the fact of Joel’s own grief at the loss of your father. After all, they’d been much closer than you’d ever been to him for many years. And maybe, in his own cold and removed and superior way, your father had seen this man who you’ve thought yourself in love with since you were a teenager, as something like a son. 

Probably, that’s just your own wishful thinking: that Oswald Kelly had ever been capable of such tender feelings.

Maybe the fact of Joel’s own grief is the thorn beneath your nail bed that’s making you so angry with him, so needing of his attention. Maybe it’s that he’d failed to fulfill your silly and girlish fantasy that upon receiving the news of your only remaining parents death, he’d have been here waiting for you, at this home he’d guarded for you for so long, ready to take you into his arms and console and care for you. 

When instead, he’d been off doing what he’d always done for as long as you’d known him. Protecting your father’s interests, his legacy. 

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“How?”

“You, being difficult.” Driving me fuckin’ crazy— he adds again under his breath. 

“I’m an orphan now, Joel.” You’re becoming quickly addicted to the word. “I think I should be afforded a tiny bit of leeway to drive people fuckin’ crazy,” you mock his Southern drawl. Enough of your time had been spent in Europe over the past two years, kissing Europeans, that you’d sloughed off the last of your American twang; something of a vaguely European lilt peppering your words every now and then that Ellie likes to tease you for whenever the two of you speak on occasion. 

A muscle under his left eye twitches at the jab, and you take another deep swig of the bottle, provoking him with your gaze. Wishing you had whatever it is a woman needs to entice this man. Like the fucking vet. Fucking world renowned, brilliant, highly coveted, beautiful veterinarian. You know about her. You’re sure he thinks he’s been discreet over the years with their whatever they’ve had, Tess, but you know. 

Maybe you’ll be insane and irrational and possessive, taking advantage of your three crazy days, and fire her with your new found power. See what he has to say about that. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. 

Obviously not. 

Despite your current hysteria, your goal is not to send the ranch head over heels into a tailspin.

But the imagining is soothing. 

“Want some?” You hold the heavy crystal out towards him in a peace offering, held precariously between two sweaty knuckles. “It’s probably worth as much as your truck. Would be a waste for me to finish on my own.” You eye what’s left of it, about half, and give him a sheepish grin. It really is very good. 

He looks at you for one long, solemn moment, always so silent and pensive, this strange enigma of a man. You get to watch in real time as he loses whatever fight it is he’s trying to fight against you, victorious when he shrugs and comes over slowly, resting his butt against the bannister—a carefully respectful distance away from you. 

When he takes the bottle from your swinging clutch, gripped from the base, careful not to touch you in any way, you see the real sad in his eyes. The dim lights bleeding out through the big windows of the family room without a family shine on his face in strips and bursts. A shadow here, golden warmth there. He’s got more lines around his eyes than you remember from the last time you’d been this close to him. Smile lines made bright white in the center and gold burnished at the edges from too much sun. There’s little bursts of silver threaded at his temples now too, a gleam here and there in his dark beard. Forty four years old, he’d turned on your last birthday. 

You dig your nails into the soft meat of your palms, and your belly smolders as he brings the bottle to his lips, tasting the exact place your own mouth had just been moments ago. You press your knees together as hard as you can, head a little woozy with the color of his eyes; the most gorgeous green, caramel hazel. 

You’d graduated two years ago with a degree in art history and had done absolutely nothing with it since. It was just that everything appeared boring and pointless and shallow. Your whole life had one day suddenly seemed just a little silly. Useless, overpriced degree, nothing to be done with extensive knowledge in color theory when your world is expecting such different things from you now. 

But you sure as hell can appreciate the color of his eyes in extensive and meticulous detail. There is that. 

Watching the slow slide of the amber liquor down the bottle-neck, the long pull of his lush mouth, the ripple of his strong throat, and the way his eyes go a little wider, shocked at how good it is. You laugh soft: “I know, right.”

He takes another pull, another swallow. That’s what you want to be—swallowed just like that. “Damn, that’s good.” His mouth is a little wet, bottom lip shiny with thousands of dollars worth of your father’s favorite whiskey, and his eyes are sad. 

You’d said you were going to be bad, but you don’t want to be bad to him. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.

He swallows again, tipping his head towards you, trying to catch your too soft words—he’s got a bad ear, you know why—and turns to peer at you from beneath his low pulled brow, the tip of his tongue peeking out to swipe at the drop of liquor you wish you could suck off his tongue. 

“You’ve got nothin’ to be sorry for.”

The first time he’d shown you that gentleness of his: You’d fallen from your horse at school in your junior year. Something had frightened the beast, and she’d bucked you, sent you flying ten feet in the air, ragdoll-like, before you’d landed badly on your right arm, a comminuted fracture in your radius that you’d needed surgery to fix. At your insistence, and with only a few weeks left to spare, you’d been sent home for the remainder of the semester. Your father had been incensed but eventually allowed it. He’d been away from the ranch on business, after all, at no risk of being truly disturbed by you. But when you’d been readying to return to Switzerland at the end of the summer, arm healed, courage not, you’d not been able to get back on a horse no matter what you tried. Joel had helped you, before they’d shipped you off again. Trotted the corral with you for hours and hours before you’d finally been able to relax and sit on your own without tears and vertigo. No questions or admonishments, nothing but the quiet burr of his deep voice, guiding you and the mare along. 

It had been a kindness unlike any you’d experienced in maybe your whole life. 

“I’ve been bad.”

“Nah. You couldn’t ever be.”

The second time: “Did today make you think of Sarah?” Years after you’d found that green eyed photograph, he’d shared her with you. 

His gaze turns suddenly sharp, but you’re not worried you’ve stepped in unbreachable territory. “Yeah.” The echo of her name rings around the two of you. 

“In a bad way or a good way?” He takes another long swig, a low whistle through his teeth and a shake of his head before he’s handing the bottle back to you—again, carefully. 

“Both.”

You take your own swallow, slicking your tongue all around where his just was, and you’re drunk for real now. Drunk on a man. 

“Do you ever regret telling me about her?”

“Nah.” He tips his head back, looking up at the thick beams of the deck’s awning. He’s got the longest lashes you’ve ever seen on a man, thick and curling. The deepest voice you’ve ever heard too, sultry, a bedroom voice. A voice for fucking. Your belly swirls and dips, and you want so much you’re dizzy with it. 

Heart beating like it’s about to burst, out of breath on the verge of hyperventilating, you can taste his mouth in your mouth, the imagination flavor of it. This is what it must feel like to die. This is what your father must have felt like three days ago, this agony. 

His Adam’s apple bobs, and it’s so pronounced, the skin of his throat sun pebbled. There isn’t an inch of him that isn’t all rough-hewn man. “You needed to hear about her then, I s’pose.” 

Yes. “You told me when I needed you to.” After that lonely graduation, the last time you’d missed her really very badly, longed for a mother. Alone, alone, alone little girl. 

“You were missin’ your momma somethin’ fierce. Needed to know you weren’t the only one that felt like that sometimes.”

You laugh a not-laugh, butt scraping against the railing, slipping off your perch, socked-feet thudding beside his gifted boots. The pleasure you feel whenever you see him use one of the things you’ve given him is indescribable. 

“Silly,” you say with barely any sound, his bad ear reaches for your voice again. “At the time it felt like I was the only person in the whole world that had ever felt like that.”

“We all feel like that at one point or another, I reckon.”

“Will you miss him a lot?” You ask looking up at him, the beautiful profile, the strong jaw. You’ve always wondered how he sees you. If he’s ever thought you were beautiful. Other men do, it’s a common thing, a nothing sort of thing. There are always men, there will always be men. But this singular man— this one is not like the rest. 

“Maybe. Can’t tell yet, don’t think. But it felt wrong earlier, walking through his house without him in it.” His house, not yours. 

“Do you wish he’d been your father?” And he turns to look down at you at that, gaze snapping, and you can tell you’ve shocked him with the question. But you’d always wondered. 

“No. Never,” he says with such assuredness, an uncompromising shake of his head. 

And the answer doesn't necessarily shock you in turn. You don't think anyone could have ever wanted a father like that. But it also doesn't help you understand what it was that lived between them either. 

He sighs, perhaps reading the confusion in your gaze. “He helped me at a time when I needed it real bad. Gave me a place and a purpose and a thing to do and take care of. You get me? It was gratitude—maybe. He saved me in a way, after Sarah. Nothing more.” He thinks for a moment, and then, “Perhaps it was that we understood each other about certain things.”

You gaze across the sprawl of dark land as far as the eye reaches, that point of no return where the earth shoots up into the sky, purple blue behemoths in the shape of mountains. 

From this spot, rooted to the deck of your family home, it seems like the whole world is yours to keep. Also, like you’ll never be able to touch any of it with fingers or taste or meaning. 

Your love for this place is complicated—tied up in the people, the memories, the could’ves and should’ves, the whole dreamscape idea of the monument of childhood and all it’d really never been. The time away had felt eternal, like you’d never really been here to begin with, like the young girl who’d grown up on this land had never really existed. But you’d not forgotten them, this, despite your distance. Your home, the father that wouldn’t want you, Wyoming and all its splendor, the people you’d left behind, Joel and Ellie and shared birthdays that meant a secret world to you. Morsels of small happinesses interloped amidst a largely lonely and sad childhood. That’s what it was at its core. 

“Would you be angry with me if I gave it all away?”

He thinks for a moment, maybe you’re making him sadder, but then finally says with a swallow, “No. It’s yours to do with as you please.”

You eye the quarter of whiskey left, but your belly isn’t hungry for its warmth anymore. You want something heavier now. 

“Could you even do that—legally—sell it or somethin’?”

“Probably not. He probably tied it to my fucking life. Sell and die.” You mime your name in an imitation of your fathers deep voice, frowning at yourself the way he’d always frowned when he looked at you, but it pulls a laugh from him, and the painful memory is worth it. “But I have a billion dollars to spend now. More?” You tap your chin—you want to make him laugh again. “Gotta think of something interesting to do with it all.”

His mouth slides into an easy half grin. Like the moon—that beautiful. And he turns to face you fully. “You’re gonna be just fine. You know that, right?”

You turn to face him too, gripping the bannister for dear life. “What? Will you make sure of it?”

“That’s my plan.”

“How’re you gonna do that, d’you reckon?” The American twang bleeds back into your voice, and you’re all swollen lush on the inside, heart a beating fist in your chest. 

“Haven’t gotten that far, if I’m bein’ honest with you.” God. His eyes, the strong bridge of his nose, his mouth. He’s so tall your head has to crook back to look up at him. “I’ll figure something out.” And after another pensive second, and still with that soft, sloped eye smile, he asks, and nicely, “Will you stop drinking now—for me?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” you say with the same sort of smile in return. 

And then suddenly, like vomit again but maybe more humiliating this time: “Did you respect him?” Because you don’t know all the things about him that there are to know, but you do know that Joel Miller’s respect is a thing hard earned. 

He clicks his tongue, and you hear the pop of his jaw as he shifts it like he’s chewing on an honesty. His eyes, his eyes, they’re serious, mercurial, warm and deep also. You worry he won’t answer, that he wouldn’t want to disappoint you or something, but then: “No,” said real simple like.

“Why not?”

And the way he looks down at you, you know already, and it makes that falling through the surface of your own life feeling rise up inside you again, makes your ears pop with embarrassment. Ah. “He never did a very good job of hiding the way he treated you, sweetheart. I couldn’t ever respect a man like that.” 

This is reality right here, this is you falling through your life, this is the realization that it wasn’t only you imposing yourself, your existence, on someone with gifts they didn’t want or ask for. Joel had seen. Joel had understood. 

Someone else had noticed that you exist, and it had been him. 

What else had you ever wanted?

And in the blink of a desperate, yearning eye, drunk on a man still, you’re throwing yourself at him, pressing your mouth hot and heavy to his, kissing him full on the way you’d dreamt of since you knew to dream of such things.

Chapter Text

They appear at the break of dawn, the young man and the boy. 

“How many heads’ve you got total?” 

Joel appraises him, the fresh-faced look, a boy just crossed over into the cusp of manhood—though he’s large and strong and earnest in the eyes. He’d be a good hire, if not for—

He glances over at the young boy sitting on the bunk’s couch, snickering quietly with Ellie as his brother tries to barter a place for the two of them. 

“Near to thirty large about now. We’re fixin’ to breed, but we’re pushin’ our limitations.”

“So you need hands,” he says eagerly. 

“We do,” Joel returns slowly, chewing on the mint he’d plucked from out front. His stomach is in knots, has been since—days and days and days ago, last night, and so much worse now. There’s a sick heat settled deep that he doesn’t know how he’ll scourge out and quick. 

“Listen, I know it’s unconventional, but—”

“Where’s his parents?” He tips his chin at the boy, and Ellie peers slyly over her shoulder at him. He’ll get hell for this later, he knows, she knows. 

“Our momma’s down south—by way of Odessa. She cowboys during the summer too, and—”

Joel sits up in his seat. “Texas?”

“Come on, Texas,” Tommy slinks behind him, sneaking an arm over his shoulder to thump Joel roughly on the chest. “Just say yes.” He lets out a gruff sound masking a cough, fucking Tommy, and leans forward, bracing his elbows on his knees.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ellie rise from the sofa and leave the bunk quietly with a parting pat on the boy's head. 

“You’re from Texas, too?” The young man asks brightly, that look of hope in his eyes that Joel’s about to quash. 

“We’re from Austin,” Tommy says from the coffee pot, his mustache spreading wide over a shit-eating grin. “Southerners way up here, we gotta stay united amongst all these Yanks’,” his brother puts on the drawl heavy, and Joel rolls his eyes. Clown. 

“Listen, Henry,” he says, trying to turn the conversation back to business. He looks at the boy again, the back of the small head bent and silent and something that could, perhaps, be thought of as guilt pulses through him, but to be honest, there’s so much of that moving about Joel’s system right about now, that it’s just one more drop of poison filling his cup. It doesn’t matter. He needs to do what’s right.

For who? He can’t very well tell yet.  

“I’m sure you’re a hard worker, son, and I’d not hesitate to give you a place were we in different circumstances, but I just don’t see how this would work—”

Henry leans forward in his chair too, ready to plead his case, fight for his brother and the generously paying jobs the Kelly’s are famous for. There’s something about the boy newly turned man that reminds Joel of himself. Perhaps during that young and fragile youth of his twenties, when he’d been alone with a newborn baby, trying to figure out the whole world and himself. 

“I know it’s unconventional, but he’s a good kid. He’s quiet and keeps to himself, and it’d only be for the summer, sir. We head back down for the start of the school year. It’s difficult, but it’s harder for my momma to get work with a kid than it is for me.” He trips over his words with the speed at which he’s spitting them at Joel, trying to convince him, and he knows that the fair thing would be to take them in. To give this man a chance the way Joel had been given one so many years ago, the mercy of safe harbor. But he’s got a finite amount of goodness in him now, he’s got to save it all for only one person. There’s none left for anyone else. And Joel doesn't want trouble, he’s got enough of that around here right about now. “He’s got his books and his summer worksheets, and he knows how to manage on his own while I work. I swear, he won’t be in any sort of way. You can—”

And then, amidst the young strangers' rambling plea, Joel's heart falls through his stomach. Here comes that trouble anyways. 

“What’s going on here?” In that soft, lovely voice that haunted his dreams last night. 

All the cowboys rise from their seats at the sound of your presence. 

From over your shoulder, Joel sees Ellie’s face twisted in a grimace at him, the flash of her middle finger and then her tongue. 

“Goddamnit, Ellie,” he growls low. 

You look exhausted, eyes red rimmed and swollen—as if you’d been crying all night, and Joel’s tongue is a swollen, poisoned thing in his mouth—a husk of guilt is all he is. He swallows convulsively, trying to find his words, trying to not scream at the thought of being what’s made you cry, trying not to look down the length of you and failing. Silky sleep shorts end way too high up on the long length of those too pretty thighs, an oversized pullover with Yale emblazoned across the front, a little hole at the neck and a large dark stain marr the front of it. You’ve got on a too big robe, dark and plaid, draped over your shoulders with your hair all a mess. He can see Ellie’s trying to pull it into some semblance of a braid behind your back discreetly while you stare at him with those eyes that, and he’s being damn honest now, fucking terrify him. Those puffy, ridiculous tan boots women wear, the impractical ones that become a sogging mess in the snow or wet despite the fact he understands they’re supposed to be worn in winter, are on your feet, two mismatched socks peek out above the tops. 

He’s pretty sure one of them has bombs with a capital ‘F’ in the tiny centers printed over it. The other, some sort of Easter bunny carrot print. Absolutely ridiculous, and he can’t help it, he notices it all. 

And worst of all, in your grip is that World’s Best Dad mug you’d sent the old fucker for Christmas several years ago, a little holiday fuck you from his best daughter. It’d been one of the years he hadn’t let you come home for the winter break, forced you to spend the holiday alone at that boarding school of yours. The whole ranch had known and whispered about it, and he’d felt embarrassed and offended on your behalf, that they’d all gossiped about the girl you were behind your back when they should’ve respected you for the woman you’d become one day, the one that’d eventually pay all of their earnings. 

And the jackass had the audacity to use the mug all the time afterwards. Joel was pretty sure it’d been his favorite. 

“We were just wrapping up,” Joel says, clearing his throat, finally finding his voice. It’s almost physically painful to look at you directly in the eyes, and the heat of shame and regret claws its way up his throat at the hollow look he sees there. You’re so angry at him, and he deserves it. 

“This is the new Kelly,” Ellie tells Henry, cutting him off, pressing you forward with her hands wrapped around your shoulders. Your shorts are way too short to be in here right now, and Joel feels something else, even hotter than shame, stirring inside him. “If you want work here, this is who you need to talk to. The big boss.”

“Miss Kelly,” Henry says reverently, pulling his cap off to press against his chest. “It’s a mighty fine honor gettin’ to meet you. I was just telling your foreman here,” he motions the cap towards Joel, and he feels like a bear who’s about to rip it out of his grip and stuff it down his throat. Fucking Ellie going and snitching on him. “How me and my brother Henry travel for the summer. I’ve got letters here, I’ve worked at the King before, and have a number your man can call if he needs more references. I’ve got lots of experience and—”

“What will you do with him?” Your gaze is on the little boy, has been the entire time. Joel steps forward and over the back of the couch he sees the kid, Sam, has a comic book in his lap he’s been reading this whole time, while adults who should have no bearing on his life decide what will and will not be for him. “While you work—”

Joel looks back at you, and he knows already what it’ll be. 

Henry’s smile is wide and gleaming, putting on the charm. What he doesn’t see, what Joel does, is that bleak sadness in your gaze that he’d put there himself last night. He needs to speak with you, to explain, to make it right between the two of you. 

“He’s good at entertaining himself. I promise he won’t be in the way or nothin’. He’s got books and summer work, and he’s learning to play the guitar. He won’t be in the way,” Henry says again. 

“What about school?”

“We only travel during the summer. We’re back in Texas for the school year.” And at that, you finally look back at Joel, and his heart shoots from his belly to his throat, ready to be spit up at your feet. 

You watch him for a long searing moment, and there's such sadness there. He doesn’t know what would have been better, what would have been the correct recourse, how to make that look go away. To give you what you want? To do what he thinks is right or what should be right? He’d never thought, never considered anything like this. It’s all too much too fast, and he feels suddenly lost and childlike in the face of you and all you stand for. 

“They stay,” you say only for Joel. 

Henry lets out a whoop of victory, rushing forward to thank you profusely, but Jesse, who’s standing by the door, blocks his rush forward with a hand to his chest before he can get too close to the new boss. You’re for protecting now, above all else, it’s the unspoken word they all suddenly understand keenly. 

You stare solemnly at Joel for only a second longer, those sleep sloped doe eyes, before you’re turning without another word. 

“He never did a very good job of hiding the way he treated you, sweetheart. I couldn’t ever respect a man like that.” 

The cricket song is a symphony of sound around the two of you, and you’re suspended for a second, he sees it come on—a rose hued haze, and then blink-of-an-eye donning a look that spells nothing but disaster. He’s thrown off course by it for a single second, that girl fantasy glow, before you’re launching yourself at him, and then it’s nothing but a soft wet mouth, smoked fruit and fired oak, the slick of your tongue against his bottom lip as you kiss him.

You’re kissing him. 

He’s a frozen solid husk, eyes wide open as he stares down at the look on your face—something like agony. The tiny frown between your eyebrows, concentration, and a single diamond tear caught in the web of your lashes, and he can’t help but notice the soft press of your breasts against his chest, you’re not wearing a bra, before he’s shoving you back by the shoulders, scrambling to get as far away from you as quickly as he can.

His back hits the railing before he can get far enough. “What the fuck are you doing?” He spits, but can’t help but lick his tongue along his bottom lip, tasting where you’ve just been. 

His stomach is suddenly hot.

You swallow convulsively, bleary eyed look turning to hurt, pressing your palm to your belly, twisting your fingers in the fabric of your sweater there. “I don’t— I didn’t—” Your eyelashes flutter shut, closing the hurt, confused look away from him for one blessed second. You press your other palm to your forehead, gripping yourself as if you’re trying to hold your very skin together. 

What do you think you’re doing? He enunciates each word like the lash of a whip, and then licks his lips again to soften those same blows for himself. 

Something is about to go inexplicably wrong here. Something already has. A tragedy worse than the death of a father

“I just thought that—” You blink your eyes open and they’re wet, and he’s about to bark at you to not fucking cry or he’ll lose it completely, but he swallows it or loses the thought to madness. He feels incomprehensibly insane, inconceivably triggered. 

This is like nothing he’d ever imagined, and it tilts him on his axis, skews his vision, headlights blinding you in a dead-on collision. 

What are you doing—thinking?

“I— I watched you grow up. I watched you—” You take an anxious step towards him, some word on your lips he can’t even make out because his hearing has gone out, and now he’s all of a sudden deaf in both ears instead of just one. He hardens his voice further. He makes sure you understand. “This is fucking wrong, and you need to get away from me right now,” reversing his movements, taking a threatening step forward, stomping his heavy boot against the floorboards beneath so that you’re jumping, skittering backwards like a frightened little rabbit. 

And Joel, the beast, crushing her beneath his foot. 

You wrap both of your hands around the delicate column of your throat; he imagines you’re holding in your hurt sounds, and it makes him even angrier. 

“Listen to me—” he starts again. 

But you cut him off, shaking your head, the confused sleep-look being blinked away so that now it’s spitting fire that is awake and angry in your gaze. “But you didn’t,” you say. “You barely know me. We’re almost strangers.” A scoff, and then switching again to soft, to girl-like, to hurt: “And I’m all grown up now, Joel.”

“I don’t know what you reckon is happenin’ here between us. Or what you think— what you—” He looks away, can’t bear the sight of it, you, fuck, he spits, again, fuck. “If I gave you the wrong impression, I’m sorry, but—”

Then in a broken little voice grasping for straws, “But we were born on the same day,” and you say it like a question. Like it should mean more. Like, and he realizes it now, like it means the world. 

He turns back to look at you, and he feels full of everything but mercy—too much regret. “And what? What do you think that means? That we’re connected— meant to be?” His voice sounds full of cruelty. “Don’t be delusional. It’s also the day my daughter died. D’you know that?”

A blink. “What?”

“She died on my thirty-fourth birthday.” 

Again. “But… Wh—at?” Broken up word, and your chin does a little wobbling dance, jutting this way and that, and you have a dimple in your cheek that comes out when you’re happy, but also when you’re sad. When you’re about to cry. He sees it now, and starkly. 

He’s ruining something sacred. 

Joel steels himself. “Whatever it is you’ve made up in your mind about us, it’s a fantasy. Something not real that you need to let go of. Are you hearin’ me?”

“I— I think…” You won’t stop blinking, your hands look like they’re about to strangle you, and he steps forward as if to stop you or save you from yourself. “Why didn’t you ever say?”

But instead of saving, “Why would I? Why would I ever tell you that?” He does not want to hurt you, and yet he cannot help it, and Joel wonders if this is how your father felt every time he failed you—like a lesser man. “Wasn’t for you to know—it doesn’t mean the same thing to us.” That day. He makes himself clear: “Whatever child’s fantasy you’re still holding onto, you need to let it go.” 

He rushes out of the bunk after you, a growled, you little shit, at Ellie as he passes her. 

“Man, what’d you fuckin’ do?” She calls after him in that tone that tells him that of course she knows what’s happened. You two’ve never been able to keep a single thing from each other. Asshole! She shouts at his back as he catches up to your slowly retreating form. Your movements are sluggish, exhausted. 

He calls your name and tries to moderate his tone from being as aggressive as he feels right now. “We gotta talk.” He follows after you, hot on your heels and then jumping back like a scared mut when you spin around on your ridiculous boot to face him. 

“Speak.” It’s a high-handed tone, that one. One that says he’s the grunt here, and you the queen, that you’d both forgotten it last night, but the battlelines are clearly drawn now. There’ll be no more forgetting. 

And it’s all his fault. 

“You can’t—” His heart thumps and thumps and thumps like a pitiful thing. “You can’t undermine me in front of the boys like that. There’s a reason I was saying no.”

“Which is?”

“That the kid’ll be in the way.”

And you flinch and Joel prays for a gun to the back of the skull. Fucking Christ, but this is difficult.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he gruffs. “You know what I mean. This is hard work we do here. I don’t want the kid gettin’ hurt, I don’t want to be responsible for that. What goes on here is on me. The people who get hurt, it’s all on me, and I take that responsibility damn serious.”

You tilt your head at him in that queer, inspecting way of yours. The one he’d watched you pull like a weapon against your father so many times. He finds he hates it now, detests it, being wielded against himself. You ignore his words, “What was your arrangement here—with him? How did this work with the ranch?”

There has been that thought always, and obviously, of you as something higher, that symbol of the family or the safe haven this place has been for Joel. The not-respect he had for your father, but surely the understanding—you've always been all wrapped up in that. He's at times felt grateful for your existence, perhaps, in ways. That something as good, as better, as you could exist in the same world Joel exists in. Perhaps he’d admired you in ways, even as a young girl, for your goodness, your sincerity. But he finds now, at this look of disdain you’re wearing against him, that he hates the feeling of being less than you, of not being good enough to even stand in your presence. 

He’s done wrong, marred it all in ugliness. He’s put himself in this position somehow, by hurting you, by confusing you, by wanting—

“I do what I need to, what the ranch needs. Whatever decision I need to make, I call it and it’s on me. Monthly reports to him and that was it. He understood that what happens out here is different to what can be told and sometimes you can’t plan for certain shit. He focused on the business, I focus on the ranch.”

By wanting what?

Bringing the mug to your lips, you take a long sip, humming. It’s all a taunt. Joel realizes, suddenly, and with painful clarity, that this has all been a grave miscalculation on his part.

As uncomfortable as it is for even him to admit, you are, and undeservedly, a person used to not being wanted, used to rejection. Joel understands this with the quick fire blink of an eye. And he has, in his shock, or— or… he doesn't know—instantaneous awakening—unintentionally alienated you, made an enemy. 

I see, you murmur quietly coupled with a bitter cough of laughter that doesn’t sound anything like the sweet sound he’s used to hearing from you. Yes, a very bad mistake has been made indeed. “Well, you’re practically king here, aren’t you then? Quite the partnership the two of you had.” You smile wide, all bright teeth. 

The coffee sloshes in the mug held in your unsteady hand, and he worries there’s something stronger in there too. 

“Not at all. I’m just good at what I do.” He shoves fisted hands into his pockets, trying to keep patient. Trying not to throttle you, check your drink for himself. 

“And is this how you’d like to continue going forward? I mind my own business, and you do as you please?”

He shakes his head slow, grinds the pulverized mint between his molars, “I want whatever you think’s best. You’re the Kelly now, after all.” You get a look on your face like you don’t like the sound of that at all, and he turns to spit the greens between his teeth, coughing roughly. 

“Yeah, I’m sure of that,” you say with teeth bared, and then whipping your head away from him as if you can’t bear the sight of him a second longer. The coffee sloshes the other way, splashing against your wrist. He hopes it’s not burning you. “You know, you’ve got some fucking nerve, Joel. You—” 

The robe—all of a sudden, saturated by the dark liquid, it grabs his attention. It’s in a plaid print, expensive looking, like something you’d see an older man wearing. A man’s robe? He cocks his head, “Whose robe is that?” Cutting your tirade short. 

What? You spit, all sass, his stomach burns, turning to look back at him as if he’s gone idiotic, grown a second head.  He feels a little bit like he’s in the process of doing so—wracked with growing pains. “It’s my ex-boyfriend’s. Can you focus, please? I’m trying to have a fight with you right now.” And you scrunch your nose too adorably for him to find anything besides endearing. Certainly not intimidating. 

He grunts, displeased. 

“I know you don’t want to hear it—”

“Then keep it to yourself.” You turn, continuing on your way up to the house, coffee flies with your spin, boyfriend’s robe whipping out in your wake as he follows like a dog with its tail tucked between its legs. 

A little desperately, like a dog, too. A begging for scraps imitation game he hadn’t intended to play but feels obligated to now, and by his own doing. 

“But I want to say—about last night…”

You turn on your heel out of nowhere again, and he stumbles to not rush head first into you, to not touch you. 

The look on your face is all heartbreak. “Do you remember—when I was away at school—and I fell off the horse? When I came home with that broken arm and couldn’t get back on and you helped me? Do you remember that, Joel? How you reminded me how I was supposed to do it—”

He coughs, uncomfortable, shifting like that same scared dog. “You remember these things different than I do.” The words feel cowardly spilling from his tongue, but he should be honest. Shouldn’t he?

This is what he should be doing, isn’t it ?

“I remember that you were kind. That you cared. That’s what I remember.” Your eyes are glossed again, and now it’s Joel that has to look away. 

“I didn’t care. It was my job to serve your father. To do as he’d want me to. It was a responsibility.”

It’s happening again. A tale like any other you’ve too often heard. You know he’s not lying, and yet everything he says feels precariously close to it. 

“Why are you being like this?” And you ask it very practically, like you really want to know, like you’ve asked the same sort of question to the same sort of figure before, and so now you’re extremely well practiced, an expert even. 

“You remember these things differently. Wrong—That’s not how I meant any of it—whatever you’re thinkin’. It was just a kindness.”

“No, but I— but you…” That’s the point, you want to say, a kindness, but the words stick. You look away again, colored in shame, can’t bear the sight of him. “Maybe you’re right,” you whisper with that very remembered kindness of your lonely childhood thrown back in your face now. “Maybe I do.”

“Listen to me—I’d like for things between us to be— I’m not… I don’t now what to fuckin’ say to you.”

“Honey—” Dina calls from the porch, your father’s assistant, now yours by inheritance, you suppose. “We gotta go soon—gotta get you ready.”

“I have things to do with Dina. I don’t have time for you—for this. Do what you want, run it how you like,” the ranch, “But the kid stays. That’s final.”

You won’t look at him again, you decide. You’ll learn to want a new thing. You’ll learn to love a new thing. 

If you had it in you, you’d laugh in his face.

Have you been in love with him? Probably not in any way that could’ve been called mature, it was the girl-fantasy of a neglected child latching on to a man who’d always seemed nothing but steady and kind.

So you’ll learn to grow up now, no choice left in the matter, let the fantasy go.  

Despite your desire for debauchery and the three days of bad behavior you’d promised yourself, you’ve got shit to do. 

An hour after your ridiculous non-conversation with the ridiculous man, you and Dina are stepping back  out into the summer sunshine when your phone rings with a call from another ridiculous man for what promises to surely be another even more ridiculous conversation. 

Jacopo.

You’d met through the friend of a friend at the party of someone or another in Monaco. Come from an Italian mother and a French father, you should’ve known he was going to be an arrogant asshole from the get go, but he’d been beautiful and momentarily distracting—things you knew you didn’t really want but told yourself would suffice. Really, all he was, was boring, the same as everyone else, wanting something from you without having to truly return anything in full. 

Jacopo the jockey—sounds like a goddamn cartoon. 

You liked to call him Jack, like he were the same sort of plebeian he saw all Americans as, and which he absolutely loathed with the sort of passion only an uppity French man could possess. 

In the distance, you can see Joel, Frank and Bill propped up against the corral watching as Jesse runs Ellie atop a gorgeous chestnut Quarter. Sometimes she likes to compete, when she can get Joel to stop complaining about it for a second. 

Dina makes her way towards them, “Tell them we’ll take the Ghibli,” you call after her to which she throws a thumbs up. At the sound of your voice he peers over his shoulder, finding your eyes immediately, catching there—fish on a burning hook. And then turns full around, leaning back to rest his elbows on the iron grate as you take French boys call, settling in to watch you. 

“Hi, Jack, sweetie. How’s it hangin’?”

“I do not know what this means.”

Bore. “What do you want, Jacopo? I’m busy.”

“My love, we must speak. I have heard of your father. You should have call me, I will come to be with you now. Tell me where you are.”

“Why the hell would I want you to come be with me? We broke up. Remember?”

Joel watches you as the French idiot prattles on about how he loves you and how you need him and how the two of you belong together, blah blah. Odious man, you don’t know how you ever let him inside of you. 

Across the lawn, he isn’t looking away, and his gaze burns where it touches. You feel—humiliated, hurt, rejected, so angry it’s a physical ache. 

Not surprised. 

Perhaps in some way, his rejection was what you’d wanted, had been looking for. Perhaps, it was your subconscious search for the easy way out. Because, and really, what else had you thought would happen when you’d thrown yourself at him half drunk? That he’d suddenly stop seeing you as the child he’d known you for always, take you as a woman, want you, fuck you right there on your newly dead father’s front deck?

Ridiculous.

You can’t even think about the birthday—about her. It’s a snipped lifeline, a crushed tether. 

“Cherie, I must tell you I am feeling very neglected now by you. You don’t call. You do not love me no longer, or what is the problem?” More nonsense and really, this fuckin’ guy needs a boot in his ass pronto. 

And the one still watching you—something even worse. He’s got his mangy brown cowboy hat pulled low over his brow, the one for the ranch, not the lovely dark one for escorting orphans to the funerals of dead fathers, and his jaw works the mint leaves you know he’s got between his teeth, slow and steady. You should hiss at him. Instead, your tummy smolders with heat and butterflies.

Stop looking at me, you horrible man, you want to shout. 

Humming and hawing at the annoying voice coming through the phone, you smooth your palm over the silk of your dress. You’d wanted to look nice today, your first Kelly meeting. You wanted to look better than you feel, which is like shit, quite frankly. 

There are tiny green paisleys patterned over the deep blue of the dress, a shock of dark red maroon for the cashmere knit of the cardigan tied over your shoulders, and a little silken kerchief wrapped around your throat, something from your mother’s things you’d gone through last night after Joel had ordered you to bed with your tail tucked between your legs and tears in your throat. 

Twenty four years later, and your father still had all her things preserved in their bedroom as if she’d only stepped out for the afternoon. A veritable mausoleum right there in your house-not-home. 

You’d never even stood a chance. 

He watches you begin to pace across the deck, but the look on your face tells him you aren’t quite listening to whatever it is the person on the phone’s saying to you. 

The gold and silver bangles that slide around your fine boned wrists jingle a song of temptation. Siren song, bird song, death march, something he’d follow with blind eyes, recognize deaf. And heavy gold and jeweled rings along your fingers that shine almost as bright as the spilled silk of your hair. Swathed in shades of jewel, you’re all woman, done up and ready to go out and devastate. 

He doesn’t know how any man could ever look at you and not want you. 

He doesn’t know how he’ll ever be the same from here on out. 

“Who’s she talkin’ to?” He asks Dina, tipping his chin over at you. He can hear you raising your voice, something about you fucking French moron, and he doesn’t like the hunch he’s got about who it is.

“Boyfriend,” Dina says while she watches Ellie work the horse with hearts in her eyes. 

“Thought he was an ex.”

She peers up at him suspiciously at that, a queer little smile tipping the corners of her mouth upwards. “Well maybe now that he knows how much she’s worth he’ll be coming back, huh?”

Joel swears all these fuckin’ women are conspiring against him, trying to send him to an early grave. “He steps foot on this ranch, and I’ll shoot him in the goddamn ass.”

She laughs, throwing her head back which inevitably draws Ellie’s attention. “You are literally so dramatic.”

“What’s he bein’ dramatic about now?” Ellie calls from behind, trotting up to the corral edge. 

“Ohhh, nothin’. Just Joel being Joel. Right, old man?” Dina bumps her hip against his and he grunts, refusing to be goaded. He’s not being dramatic, it’s his responsibility to take care of you now, to watch over you. 

That’s all.

“I’m never dramatic,” he tells them very seriously. 

On the porch, the spat reaches a crescendo and they all turn to watch the show. 

Why don’t you shove the whole Eiffel Tower up your ass, you fucking dipshit. And don’t you ever call me again!

“Little girl’s got a mouth on her,” Bill murmurs. 

Ellie lets out a long whistle. Deserved, Dina adds. On the porch, you let out a strangled little screech, stomping the high heel of your boot as if you’ve got half a mind to throw a fit. 

Joel feels hypnotized, speared through the gut.

He wants to know what the ex-boyfriend said. What his name is. Where he’s from and who he is and what he does and how he is and every single thing about him and how it was between the two of you. 

He is suddenly desperate to know everything there is to know about you in a way that makes his throat feel swollen with guilt. In a way he didn’t ever think he’d want from you. 

All the things you keep close, all the small intimacies that make you this person you are now, that’s what he wants. 

You stomp down the steps, making your way towards them, eyes directly on his, and you’re too fucking beautiful for his own good, watching you feels like a sin. 

Makes him feel in danger, like prey. 

“All men should die,” you yell over. 

See. 

“I agree,” Dina says cheerfully.

“You know you can have a baby with the junk in your bones from another woman now,” Ellie adds helpfully.

“The junk in your bones?” Joel says. 

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Yeah, like really we don’t even need you for shit anymore.”

“They should all be put in a hole in the ground in the middle of Nebraska and only be let out when a girl wants to bone.”

“To bone— Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Ellie.”

“I love that idea,” you say, finally coming to stand right before Joel. He swallows hard, stays silent—feels like the cat’s finally caught his tongue. 

“Why Nebraska?” Franks asks, puzzled.

He’s got to stop looking at you, he’s got to get away from the sight of your eyes, feels like the colors of you seem to pulse brighter, and he feels it all like a touch against his skin. He turns to look at Ellie over his shoulder and with a huge, shit-eating grin she says, “Cause who the fuck knows where fuckin’ Nebraska is, huh?” Her eyes flash to you and then quickly back to Joel, winking, cheeky, knowing. He feels the noose tighten.

They’re definitely conspiring against him. 

The three of you cackle—at his expense. 

“Where’re you two headed?” Bill asks with a frown when the three little hyenas settle. 

“She’s got a meeting in Jackson,” Dina tells him. “First part’ll be quick—she’s just gotta kick some pushy jackass to the curb and tell him we’re not leasing mineral rights to him no matter how hard he begs or how much money he throws at us. Then…” she trails off, throwing you a worried glance, but your eyes are on the far off mountains now, and Joel watches a shaky swallow pass through your throat.

“Then we’ve got the will reading,” you say. 

A sharp ache starts up behind Joel’s left eye, all the easygoing laughter of a few moments ago sucked away with a few words and a single reminder. That you’re not the girl you used to be, laughing and playing with Ellie, that your father is dead, that you have a world of responsibility to face now. 

“You shouldn’t have to go all the way into town. They should be comin’ to you here.”

“I want to get out—see his office.”

“S’only been a few days, honey,” Frank says gently. “You should take it easy.”

“Thanks, Frank,” you reach out to squeeze his arm, flush of emotion across the bridge of your nose. “I’m okay, promise.”

Joel takes you in, in full. You’ve got something shimmery swept across the highs of your cheekbones and glossy lips, the fine grain of your skin—pristine like you're made of sugar and everything good in the world. The silky wisps of baby hair at your temples that look softer than anything he’s probably ever touched in his whole life. And you’re so beautiful it almost hurts the eye to look at you, beautiful in a way that makes men cower at the sight, like you’d be the strongest thing in the whole world. But he sees all the rest too. The delicate curves of your shoulders, the fine swoop of your collarbone and the quick-fire beat of your pulse beneath the fragile skin of your throat. There’s fear all around you in a way, a desperate sort of sadness. 

He wishes there was more he could do for you, that he could bear the burden of all this entirely in your stead, that he could be all you need and want him to be without having to sacrifice his soul to give it to you. 

Your eyes flash back to his, and he worries for a second that you can read his mind. 

Behind you, Jesse pulls up with the sleek black of your father’s favorite car. Of course you’d choose this for today, bets you’ll find a way to turn it into a pretzel before the days end. 

“Take Jesse with you,” he says low at your back as you turn for the car. 

You look over your shoulder at him and his spine throbs. “No.”

Following you around the front of the car, he pulls the door open for you. “You’re not moving around alone anymore. He’s going. Jesse—” he whistles, “You’re going into town with Miss Kelly.”

“Yezzir,” he smiles with the sunny easiness only he possesses.  

“Excuse me,” you turn to frown up at him, stomping your foot again, and you’re a little bit of a brat, he’s realizing. “There’s no room in the car for him. He can’t come.”

“He’ll take a truck,” he says, leaving no room for discussion, but then gentles his voice again, “Things are gonna be different now. You’re the Kelly, you can’t go on all gung ho about your new reality. You need taking care of. Can you not fight me on this, please?”

“What I need —”

“Is to be protected.”

You give a delicate little huff through your nose that he finds to be just about the cutest damn thing he’s ever seen in his whole life. “Then it’ll be my choice how and who.”

“It’s easier if you just do as I say.” Grasping, grasping, praying for patience. 

“You overbearing d—”

“You’ll be okay meeting this jackoff? Don’t need me to come with you?”

You glower at him.

“I’m bein’ serious with you. I know you’re capable,” he puts his hands out, palms up in a conceding gesture, “But this is new, and there’s no shame in asking for support.”

At that, you get a confused little pinch between your brows, softest rose shaped mouth he’s ever seen— felt— all pursed up, and he thinks it’s wrong now, trying to be sweet to you after last night, looking at you this way and seeing the things he’s seeing. He should stay away, go away forever, find a hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere to bury himself in like you’d said, but he worries now, and quite desperately really, that he won’t ever be able to leave your side again after all this. 

“I have Dina.”

“I know, but—”

“Can you please just… not. I think— I think it’s better if we just steer clear of each other. If I need something,” you look away now, hazy look from last night back in your gaze again, like you’re remembering, like you’re wanting something else he’s not willing, not capable of giving, “I’ll ask for it. Otherwise you can focus on what’s important to you.” 

Gut punch. 

He soldiers on, can’t help it.

“You feelin’ alright?” 

Your eyes flit back to him for a fleeting second and there’s honesty in your gaze now, maybe something extremely vulnerable too, and then shuttering again, looking away again. He’d demand your gaze if he had the right, insist you tell him everything there is to know with just your eyes if you were his. 

But really, he’s got no right to ask anything. 

So instead, “Tell me what’s wrong,” he begs, praying you don’t say him.

What’s wrong? A laugh and—nothing. Like your father isn’t dead, like he hadn’t hurt you as he had last night, like you’re looking for answers etched into the mountains or the sky. You bring your thumb to your right temple and his own aches in response, digging there for some unseen pain to be gouged out. “Tired—was having bad dreams.” Your voice sounds full of air, and you’ve got a huge emerald on your ring finger, an even larger turquoise stone beside it, other hand is covered in a row of opals—you’re a treasure of a girl, all the way inside and out, and it’s like he’s staring at a work of art, knowing that if he were to touch, it’d all be ruined. Your voice full of air floats in his bad ear and booms out the good one full of forlorn want.

It feels like you’re the only two people left in the whole of Wyoming, standing here together under the sweet sun, maybe the whole world, and he’s ridden in guilt, wants to tell you he’s sorry again, beg or something, and thinks that God should give you the chance to rewind time when you’ve made someone feel this bad without meaning to. 

You whisper at the Tetons, and he’s all but forgotten, “I feel a little bit like I’m the real nightmare.”

“You couldn’t ever be, sweetheart,” he tells you and means it with his whole heart. 

It’s all agony swimming in your eyes, and if you don’t stop him, he’s going to take you into his arms right here in front of everyone. You need more than protecting, it’s clear, you need caring for, you need loving—the sort of something he can tell you’ve never had in your whole life. 

“Ready to go, honey?” Dina calls from the other side of the car, her canoodling with Ellie finally come to a pause. 

You’re snapped out of your reverie, looking down at your feet, impractical boots again, these ones sexy and tall and not for his admiring, blinking away the wash of heat that’s bloomed across the bridge of your freckled little nose. 

“Did she eat?” He asks Dina over your head.

“Ehhhhh, but I brought a smoothie,” she pulls out a thermos from her large bag and smiles all beaming and large. 

“A smoothie ain’t food. Get something else in town."

“You're so prepared,” Ellie sighs dreamily beside her. 

“You’re annoying me,” you grouch at him, tossing your bag into the backseat, sliding into the luxuriously leathered interior as he shuts the door gently behind you, bending down to brace his palms against the open window. 

“Drive careful. Call me if you need anything.”

“You’re kinda a helicopter mom. You know that, Joel?” Dina tells him with that sweet smile of hers. 

“Do not entertain his nonsense,” you snap. 

“She’s just grumpy because Vogue France posted a piece on her and the funeral— the heiress to watch, they’ve called her.”

“I don’t know who they think I am—Kendall fucking Roy? This isn’t HBO, it’s my goddamn life.”

“It’s fine, drink your smoothie, here,” Dina soothes. 

“I don’t got a clue what any of that means,” Joel says. “And do up your belt,” frowning at you and pulling away just in time when you speed off with half the admonishment still on his tongue 

The bar is loud and sweaty and crowded enough there’s room for your spite, which he knows, is all this night out is. 

The day had gone from terrible to horrible to heinous, and he’s officially reached his limit now. You’d returned from your late morning in Jackson toting a gray cloud that’d settled over the entire ranch and everyone in it. All work had come to a slow and grinding halt, the mood morose, knowing that the lady of the manor was grieving and angry. 

And then a few hours into the evening, you, Ellie, and Dina had spun into the bunk, already giggling on drinks he was certain were too sugary and way too strong to end in anything good. Looking to rile up the boys into heading back to Jackson and finding a bar to terrorize. 

And so here he now finds himself, stepping through the door of The Mushroom, ridiculous name for a bar if anyone asked him, eyes searching for the gleam of your hair, that tiny fucking outfit you’d draped yourself in. You were hunting for trouble, to aggravate him, trying to hurt him with your, you’re not invited, Joel—no one wants you to come.

Angry, angry as a spitting fire. 

He’d felt like shit about himself and your upset for a second, and then had thought: Well, are you going to cowboy up, Joel? Or just lay here and bleed?

Now, there’s something sick in him that wants more of it, to take everything you’ve got to give, to see how far you can go, to push you just a little bit further too.

A masochist, is what he reckons he might actually be.

He finds Ellie’s bent head whispering into Dina’s ear, giggling and dragging her fingertips up the other girls bare arm, and he feels a thump of fondness for the two—happier than he can say that they’ve finally worked it all out after months of their will-they-won’t-they struggle.

Making his way over to them, he catches Frank in the distance, dancing to the countryfied Abba cover of Chiquitita the local band’s currently playing while Bill stands nearby, serious and menacing, keeping anyone from getting too close to his partner. 

No sign of you, and the backs of his knees itch and burn. 

“Where is she?” He demands when he reaches Ellie at their place against the bar. 

“Oh, dude. She’s gonna be soooo pissed.”

“Where, Ellie?”

Get you anything to drink, sugar? The bartender calls and Joel shakes her away, panic thumping in his gut the longer he doesn’t have eyes on you.

Dina knocks her head towards the end of the L-shaped bar, closest to the throng of dancing patrons, and there in the last seat and partially obscured by someone’s shoulder and ridiculously feathered hat, you sit. 

“Who the fuck is that?” 

“Can you please just leave her alone. She needs to blow some steam off.”

“Yeah, Joel, we’re watching her,” Dina adds, always the peacekeeper.

Or blow someone, Ellie adds in a snicker, and he gives her a death glare. “You need to quit the asshole act,” she tells him, purposefully thunking her beer hard enough on the bartop that some of it sloshes over the lip of the bottle onto his hand braced against the edge. 

Real mature.  

“Changed my mind,” he tells the bartender when she heads back their way, “Shot of Jameson.” 

Beside him, Jesse appears, beer in hand as he leans against the bar to watch you also. “That might just be the most beautiful girl I’ve seen in my whole life, honest to God,” he sighs wistfully. 

Joel sees red—this is just too much . “Quit fuckin’ lookin’ at her,” he snaps. 

Ellie snickers knowingly, and Frank and Bill join the group, picking up on the topic of conversation. 

“That little girl can drink a grown man under the goddamn table,” Bill says. 

“And looks good as hell doing it too—”

“Eyes off, you little shit,” Joel sends a threatening glance at Jesse again. 

Ellie ignores them both. “He’s a finance bro or some shit—from New York—here to play cowboy dress up with the group he’s with. Nothing I can’t handle, and you need to cool it and leave or have a drink and let her have fun.”

“She’s vulnerable right now, Ellie—”

“Yeah, you would know.”

Joel’s turn to do the ignoring, “And she needs someone to watch her back.”

“I’m fuckin’ watching it, man. You’re so annoying, and I’ll have you know that—” The fucker’s got a thick lock of your long hair trapped between his probably manicured fucking fingers, smoothing it between his thumb and index and then looping it around and around, drawing you in closer.

Joel’s about to start howling.

You’ve done something to him, knocked something askew inside him, and he needs you to set it back to rights. Let him out of this saw trap he’s been caught in. 

The man says something that has you throwing your head back in an overly eager laugh, loud and melodic in the most hypnotizing sort of way, meant to draw the eye or seduce or send his gut to twisting and aching. 

Ellie’s saying something about how you need to have fun, how you need to find yourself, and all Joel can think is that he can be the one to give you that, to help you do all that while still making sure you’re alright, taken care of. 

Over the wannabe cowboy’s shoulder, he sees your eyes land on him, and you give him one of those serenely beautiful smiles he knows means he’s about to lose his fucking mind and cause a scene. 

A provocation of a smile is what it is. 

You cross one long leg over the other, a flash of hot pink his eyes can’t help but flash to beneath the obscene hem of your skirt and lean in to whisper something, glossy lips right at his ear, and a tick starts up below Joel’s left eye. The fuckwit pulls you in closer, and you tip into him, hand on his shoulder—your eyes never leave Joel’s, and then you’re pulling him off the barstool and leading him into the throng of dancing people. He’s desperate to know what the back of your hot pink underwear looks like—string of lace wedged between the cleft of your ass, or silk wrapping around the full cheek like a perfect present? The man pulls you into himself, spinning you around, and you’re made up of blues and purples and pinks, shimmering like something that shouldn’t exist here amongst all the rest of them. Slinky little top made of silk like water and sparkles, your cheeks, flushed with drink or heat, but he’ll tell himself it’s because of him, because you’re still angry at him, thinking of him, and it soothes the tempest that’s brewing in his gut.

He spins you towards himself, the man Joel’s about to beat senseless, shooting the Jameson without really tasting anything but the insane jealousy souring to irrational fury on his tongue, it pulses in his throat once, twice, and the fucker tugs you into himself again by a handful of your ass in that too short skirt and sticks his tongue in your mouth. Joel slams the glass on the bartop, not seeing red anymore, something like dark spots now, he’s so fucking pissed off. 

Ellie yelps his name, her and Jesse scrambling after him, but they’re too late and he’s there already, pulling you away, and gently because he might be feeling a little bit like a demon right now, but he knows what you are and how to handle you no matter what—and slams his fist into the fuckers nose, the satisfying crunch of broken bone and a pathetic cry sounds as he hits the sticky bar floor. The people around peer over in nothing more than mild curiosity, this is a cowboy bar after all. 

He watches the man for a second, making sure he stays down, and then turns to look at you and isn’t at all surprised when he finds that look of victory on your face. 

“Ready to go?” Voice all sweet innocence. 

You’re going to kill him. 

Spinning around on the toe of your boot, the hem of your little skirt flutters with your movements and he catches a flash of cheek, mystery of your panties still unsolved. 

“You’re a real dumbass, you know that?” Ellie snarks as they pass the group of them. 

He chooses to ignore that observation. “Don’t stay out too late. And let Bill drive back.”

Following you out into the night, he tries to take control of himself, to lie away the heat he feels sitting heavy in his stomach. 

He wishes he had a mint leaf to pulverize between his molars, he wishes he could pull you over his knee and spank your ass for being such a bad girl. And looming behind you, he knows you’re not even a little bit intimidated by his size as you dance and prance across the parking lot towards his truck.

“I know you’re ticked off because of last night and today, but you can’t lash out just because you’re angry with me.” 

All he gets in response is that head-thrown-back wind chime laughter—the real one, which is something. 

“You need to stop misbehaving,” he breathes down your neck.

“Hmm, I don’t think I will,” you singsong. 

“Are you drunk?” Refusing to be distracted, he’s going to stand strictly on business, he promises himself. 

You spin around again—always catching him off guard and pissing him off—hooking yourself on his shirtfront, pulling yourself into him like you’re trying to dance some fucked up dance he doesn’t know the steps to. 

“Not at all.”

“You need to not be touching me right now,” he warns, the threads of his control dangerously close to snapping, walking you backwards without putting his hands on you. Chest to chest, he feels like he could breathe fire if he really set his mind to it. 

“Yes, sir,” you say sweetly, dragging your palms down his chest and belly before letting him go, skipping ahead of him, humming an off-key rendition of whatever kitschy, poor excuse for a country song they’d been playing at the end in there. 

The even poorer excuse for a skirt bounces along the curve of your ass, driving him fucking mad—he’s goig to have a heart attack, he’s middle aged, he can’t handle this shit anymore— you.

Stop that, he growls.

“God, you don’t like anything— you’re no fun,” you pout. 

Coming to the truck, he yanks the door open for you. “Get in the damn truck.” And he makes sure to turn away and not ogle your ass as you hop in, his palm hovering in the vicinity of your elbow if you need him. 

The prospect of an hour and a half of the dark drive and the scent of your musky sweet perfume and sweat soaked skin has his heart pounding. When he pulls his door open, you’re turned in your seat expectantly waiting for him, folded knees up on the seat and pink triangle right there to taunt him. 

“Sit right—put on your seatbelt.”

“You’re so bossy.” An exaggerated sigh and your voice is so fucking sassy, a tiny bit of a needy whine threaded through it, he feels his patience snap. 

Grabbing hold of your damp cheeks he squeezes hard enough to force your full mouth into a pout and giving your head a little shake he says, “And you need managing, little girl. Put your fucking belt on, or I’ll put it on for you.”

Eyes all pupil and gone blurry, you lick your lips and he can smell the sweet fruit scent of your breath. He groans, pushing you back— mistake, mistake, putting his hands on you at all— and peels out of the parking lot, and he is not hard in his jeans for you. 

“Are you mad at me?” You ask after several moments of forced silence.

“No.”

“Not even for last night?”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Why not?”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it either.”

“Well, now I’ve changed my mind.”

Jesus, he mutters. “There’s nothing to discuss—already told you what I think and how it’s going to be and that’s final. You need to let it go, you hear me?”

You give a little groaning screech through your clenched teeth, turning away from him, still not wearing your goddamn seatbelt, never doing as he says. 

Toeing your boots off roughly, the little skirt hitches high enough on your thighs he catches a glimpse of the smooth glowing skin of your hip, eyes trying to watch the road and your thighs at the same time. 

“You’re horrible,” you say through a grimace, but your voice cracks a little bit at the end, and you’ve still got your face turned away so that he can’t tell if he’s made you cry or not now. 

“Are you cryin’?” He demands.

“No,” you sniffle, wiping your cheek on a lifted shoulder 

“Yes you are, liar.” Fuck—fuck, fuck.

“Well you’re bein’ mean,” you whine, finally turning to look at him again, and you’re all rose glow, cheeks flushed and eyes glossy, lips red as a cherry. 

No man should be tested like this. It’s wrong—unnatural.

He tries to gentle his voice and steady the pounding of his heart, pressing down on the gas, wishing the road would disappear from beneath the tires of the truck and that he could have you home and away from him already. “Not bein’ mean, sweetheart. Just—just…” He sighs, “Goddamnit, just don’t how how to handle you,” he curses, losing the grasp on his gentleness. 

“See— you are angry with me!” A tear slips down your cheek, and Joel’s mouth waters. 

His heart kicks up another notch, hypnotized, “You make me fuckin’ crazy—is that what you wanna hear?”

“Yes.” You turn full in the seat to face him, bent knees against the center console block his view of the apex of your thighs. Fucking Christ. 

“Sit right. You’re flashing your bits,” he tries and fails to focus on the road. 

“Yeah, that’s ‘cause I want you to see them, stupid.”

Jesus. “How much did you have to drink?” 

“Only one High Noon.”

“The hell is that? And quit lookin’ at me like that.”

“Like what?” Your knees shift against each other, and he’s gripping the steering wheel so tight he feels like he could rip it out of the dash. 

“You fuckin’ know like what.”

“Well if you hadn’t been such a cock block earlier, I’d be looking at someone else like this right now.”

And the teasing is too much. The bare legs and the tiny skirt and the hair and the lips and the sound of your voice, the kiss last night replaying in his mind over and over and over again like some lovesick taunt, the look of hurt he’d put on your face and the idea of you bare and slick, taking some other man that isn’t him. It’s too much. 

He jerks the truck roughly onto the road shoulder and into the grass, wheels spinning and gravel flying. Joel— you squeal, being jostled in your seat so that all he can see are soft thighs and pretty tits bouncing in his peripheral. He puts the truck in park, ripping his seat belt off, reaching over to tug you roughly forward by the nape, his fingers twisting in your hair in a hold he knows is too hard for something so delicate, his other hand grips below the bend of one knee squeezing hard. 

“If you think I’m gonna let you spread your legs for anyone fucking else—” he growls.

“Anyone else?” You laugh in his face, eyes spinning with something a little maniacal.

He thought he’d been worried for his soul, that taking you would be the undoing of everything he’d tried so hard to mend back together after Sarah. And really, he had tried so hard—to be good, to be better, to atone for all he’d not done before her, all he’d done after her. He’d tried to make himself into something that was respectful of her memory and the second chance Kelly had given him. 

But right here, and again because anytime he looks at you, is within a mile of your vicinity, it feels like you’re the only two people on the whole goddamn planet, he doesn’t think he really gives a fuck for being good or atoning or souls at all. Not even a little bit. 

He follows your lead from last night and kisses you, is sure to take your tongue this time. Forcing his thumb and forefinger between the line of your molars, he presses down hard enough to hurt the baby soft skin, spreading your jaw open wide so that he can lick into your mouth deep and wet. He wants to scare you, cow you, intimidate you into behaving with this hunger that seems to swallow him whole—remind you that he’s let you have your fun thus far, but the both of you know who’s playing games and who’s not. 

You let out a shocked little gasp onto his tongue, fingers twisting in the fabric over his shoulder, and he tightens his grip under your knee, tugging you just that little bit further forward, and when he pulls back to look at you, spit slick, swollen mouth and wide eyes, tits about to spill out of your top, you push his face away roughly, dragging your nails down the skin of his cheek with a tiny snarling growl. 

Spoiled little brat.

“Don’t be fuckin’ childish,” he snarls back, and pulls you roughly over the console and into his lap. 

“I can’t stand you,” you pant, settling above him, coming in to kiss him again, and he can’t deny it anymore. He’s hard as fuck for you. 

You moan into his mouth, high and throaty at the same time, girlish little sigh at the end that has him gripping your hip tightly, trying to stop himself from thrusting up against you

“Can you taste him?” You lick his tongue. “He kinda looked like you, didn’t he? That’s why I chose him.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

He’s going to stop this now, at any moment. He’s going to push you away and tell you this is wrong and that the two of you can’t do this. 

Instead, you wrap your arms around his neck, pressing your tits high against his chest and grinding your lace covered little cunt against his cock. 

He groans into your mouth, pushed straight over the edge and free falling, cupping your ass to lift you off of himself a little bit, he just needs a second, before he takes a breath and presses you back down harder, rolling your hips against his lap. Little animal sounds, an ah, ah, ah and an oh, coupled with his mewled name. Cupping the soft of your ass in the palms of his hands, his calluses scrape against silken skin, and you fit him as if he’d dreamt you up just for himself; perfectly lush curves he can squeeze as hard as he wants because you’re not getting away from him now that he’s caught you in his snare. He drags his fingertips up the roundness of your asscheeks, and the mystery’s solved, it’s a thong. Catching the lace between his fingers he pulls the flimsy string upwards and tight against your pussy, a pained moan when he pulls even harder, making sure the fabric digs against your skin.

He knows if he cups you there you’ll be wet for him, for him, no one else but him. Knows he could bend you face first over the console, pull the soaked lace aside and suck on your wet little clit, make you come in his mouth. 

“Fuck, baby,” he groans. 

Joel, Joel, Joel, you hum in a dream voice. 

He can feel two little dimples at the low of your back, imagines what they’d look like with his thumbs gripped there as your ass takes his cock. 

He can’t say it enough—he feels fucking insane. 

“Touch me,” you beg, sliding and pressing against him, long hair like water slipping all over and against him too. 

Oh my God, he whisper moans when you spread your knees as wide as the seat allows, rocking your hips in short little hitches against the ridge of his cockhead. He knows your little clit is right there, cunt a knot of indescribable heat against him, and you pull your mouth away from his, letting your head fall back, hair a tangled curtain. He drags his nails back down your ass hard enough he hopes he’s leaving marks, leaning forward to lick along the salt tracks of your tears, watching you use him. 

“Do not fucking come,” he orders. He can’t—he can’t watch you do it and not be inside you when it happens, and the two of you absolutely cannot take this that far. 

He pulls your hips up again, forcing your movements still and you huff at him, whining. 

“We gotta stop.”

Noooo. “No, Joel. Please, ” you cry, trying to pull yourself towards him—your mouth is so swollen—trying to escape his hold and get what you want for yourself. 

Grasping at the last vestiges of his sanity, “Fuck— No. No more.” He lifts you off his lap and back into your seat, sitting back to press himself against the door and adjusting the throbbing erection in his jeans, so hard it’s making him a little nauseous. If he doesn’t stop, he’s going to stuff his cock inside of you right here and now. He tucks the thick head up under his waistband, trying to find any sort of momentary relief. 

There isn’t enough oxygen in this truck. He needs air, space, to taste you. 

“Fine,” prim little nose in the air. You stretch one leg out across the console to dangle over his groin and let the other drop to the cab floor. “That’s fine—I’ll just take care of it myself then,” you tease provocatively, fingertips dragging up the inside of your thigh.

He shoots forward to stop your movement, gripping your wrist in a vice—baby bird bones beneath his fist, and you moan at his touch like the little wanton he’s coming to realize you are, writhing in your seat. “Don’t you fucking dare. I swear to God I’ll put you over my knee.”

“Jokes on you, I’d like that shit,” you sass back, ripping your wrist out of his hold, little socked foot kicking towards his face. He catches it, holding it in his grip and squeezing. “And I don’t really care if you’re not mad at me because I’m mad at you.”

“I know you are, sweetheart,” and the mood changes, smolders into something more serious, more honest.

“Why didn’t you go today? The lawyer asked you to—” You’d wanted to find him as soon as you’d gotten home earlier, demand he give you an explanation. Cowardice had won over that desire, and going out to find a drink and a replacement man had seemed the easier alternative. 

“Wasn’t my place.” Spreading his thighs wider in his seat to accommodate himself, he presses his hips forward, and you can make out the heft of his cock beneath his jeans—your belly twists all full of heat and bubbles. 

“Did you know he was leaving you something?”

He laughs a bitter bark of a laugh. “No—never thought—” the words die in his throat and he stares out the window, lost to the memory of your father. “No, I didn’t think he was leaving me anything before I got the call.”

“It’ll make a good nest egg.” 

“Don’t want it.”

He won’t turn to look at you now, and you know that this conversation in the aftermath of touching you shames him. 

“You’re taking it. You don’t have a choice.” His eyes flash fire at you and then flit away. “He had all your banking information, it’s probably already there.”

Fucking Christ, he spits the murmured curse, bracing his elbow against the curve of the steering wheel, cupping his palm over his mouth as if to keep his anger and frustration in. The bulge of his bicep beneath his dark hoodie distracts you for a moment. 

You’d spent enough time watching him over the years that you’d learned all the things you knew he tried to hide in plain sight. That gentleness, that patience, that heart—that he is an inconceivably good and honest man. Things that are ultimately impossible to hide. 

Your eyes flash to the temple where a gristle of scar tissues is slashed across his skin. The meaning behind a scar like that, coupled with his bad ear and his green eyed photograph—it’s hard to hide. People can always tell when you’ve tried to kill yourself, you know. 

Which all goes to say—and you’re quite certain of this—that yes, the two of you are strangers, in ways, but in others, or in your own way, you know this man. You understand his nature. You know he wouldn’t have ever wanted it—that he does not want it and never will. He isn’t the sort of man who’d ever look a million dollars in the eye and feel moved by them. 

His humanity means more to him than his life, you’d heard Tommy say about him once to your father when you’d been an eavesdropping little girl. You hadn’t understood at the time, but now you do. 

The dark pullover and jeans, incongruously boyish, the scuffed boots—he’s so himself and so fucking hot and you want him so, so badly, and looking at him sitting here now, gorgeous, hair mused by your fingers, and your slick smeared across his jeans—you look down at your own twisted fingers in your lap, a little ashamed now too—and you can’t fathom why or how he’d ever look at you and feel moved by the likes of you either. 

You’re ashamed that you’re even angry at him for it at all, resentful of this gift your father has given him when really it is not only resentment, maybe not even truly that at all. More so, it’s a complicated mixing pot of feelings that these two men seem to have always been twisted up into knots together inside of you. Resentful, not because you don’t want him to have it. You want him to have everything he deserves or could ever think to want and more, but perhaps, because this was the final nail in the coffin scrap of proof that your father had cared about him in a very real way that you’d never experienced—in a way that was entirely Oswald Kelly’s own choice and not because of dead mothers or obligation or legacy. 

“It’s good he left it for you,” you say gently and mean it. 

He looks at you out of the corner of his eyes, looks away, from under the cover of his palm says, “S’not fair to you.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with me. This is about you and you deserving this, and I’m glad he gave you your due. He should’ve left more.”

His eyes flutter shut, sighing deeply and shakes his head. “You’ve made me into something I’m not. You need to see that.”

“You’re not some sort of cautionary tale, Joel.”

“You don’t know a thing about it,” voice like he could he angry but is being very careful to remain not. “You don’t know the things I’ve done, the reasons why I came here. You should look at me and see nothin’ worthwhile.”

“My father saw something,” you argue. “You let my father see that something. And I do too, no matter what you say, no matter what you do or how hard you push me away; I’m used to it, and you won’t change my mind.”

He gives you a look like you’re hurting him, like your truths hurt him. “We’re goin’ home. This is enough,” he gruffs, pulling the truck into drive again and peeling out of the grassy knoll. 

Fight dying in your throat, you feel suddenly exhausted, shivering coldly, belly an ember of unsated lust, your orgasm is tight and wet between your legs and you don’t want to argue or impose yourself on him anymore. You don’t want to feel like you’re imposing yourself now when he’d never made you feel like that before. 

The night is a pitch dark blur falling away behind your glazed over eyes, and huddling into yourself against the door, you hide your face away in your shoulder, belly swooping with nausea. 

“You drive too fast, I’m dizzy,” you mumble, and he  immediately slows, foot easing off the gas.

“You gonna puke?”

“Yes, all over your face.”

“I’m serious, darlin’. Need me to stop?”

“No. I just want to be home,” said in as small a voice as you can manage, hoping he won’t catch your words, and soon he’s turning off into the long drive to the house. 

When he pulls to a stop, you scramble to grab your boots before he can say anything else, but he’s unnaturally quick for such a large man, out the door and around the nose of the truck, pulling your own door open before you can even get a single boot on. He pulls them from your grasp, and then tugs you bodily out of your seat, slinging you over his shoulder as if you were some sack of nuisance prone potatoes. You screech, flailing, trying to knee him in the gut, but he bands a strong arm across the backs of your thighs, pinning you in obedient place. “Quit.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” You howl, hitting him repeatedly on the ass, trying to wriggle and make his life as difficult as you possibly can. 

This man has absolutely no consideration or respect or sense of personal space!

Technically, neither do you—but that’s neither here nor there. 

You scream like a hyena, shrill and long and he pinches your ass hard, right at the inner crease of your thigh and ass cheek, too close to your still wet pussy for comfort. “I said quit. ”

“Everything alright out here?” You hear Jesse’s voice call from the direction of the bunk, they must’ve beat you two here while you’d been trying to seduce Joel into making you come. 

The snap of Joel’s fingers and then, “Mind your own fucking business.”

“You are so rude. ”

He bumps you on his shoulder, jostling you on the soft of your belly and making your cunt go even tighter. You hate him. “Quiet, you.” 

Letting himself in the dark of your house, he makes his way up the stairs while you hang quietly upside down now, a little astounded, a lot turned on by how strong he is, lugging you all the way upstairs without even a change in his breathing. 

But as soon as he steps foot into your bedroom, now set to rights from yesterday’s disaster, you feel the change come on him. The shift and deepening of his breaths, the expanse of his ribs going wide and winglike as he sucks in a big gulp of air. You press your palm flat to the center of his back, feeling the whistle of his breath go in and out of him until he’s slipping you off his shoulder to bounce gently backwards onto your soft bed. 

He stands above you for a quiet moment, and you take in the broad shape of him backlit by the moonlight of your open drapes. He’s huge and imposing cast in this darkness, something out of a dream.

Literally—out of your own teenage fantasy dreams. 

Has anyone in all the world ever wanted someone as badly as you want him?

You can feel the press of his left knee against the inside of your right one, and you wish he’d put it between your thighs, join you on the bed.

“Can I ask you something?” You reach your fingers out and he tangles his hand with yours and it’s a small victory. 

“Yeah.”

“Would you come to my funeral?”

His fingers jolt— “What?”

“If I died.”

“Don’t say shit like that.”

“Tell me that you would—” You tug him forward and he lets himself come, bending over your prone form, braced on one arm and still holding onto your fingers with the other. “—That I wouldn't be alone even there.”

“You’re not alone.”

“Would you?”

“Makes me angry when you say shit like this—as if you don’t believe I’m going to take care of you.” 

“Please tell me, Joel. Promise me—” and you reach up to gently touch the scar across his temple. 

He goes frozen and understanding. “I’d come,” and you know it costs him something to give in to such an imagining and it makes you all the more grateful for it. 

Fingers sliding back into the curls at his temple, silver speckled, you know, you pull him further towards you until he’s close enough to press a softly hot kiss to his mouth. The two of you hold there for a moment, another, another, you can feel the wash of his heavy breathing through his nose, the flutter of his long lashes tangling with yours—you hope he’s searching for you in the dark—and you lift your knee up onto the bed, bending to open yourself to him. 

He pulls back, hand shooting to your jaw to grip you tightly in place, breath ragged, animal being hunted. 

You smile.

“Not gonna fuck you,” he says low.

“Why not?” It’s what you want, you deserve to have what you want. He squeezes your face once, presses another hard, too quick kiss to your mouth and then flips you over onto your belly, turning your skirt up over your ass to expose you. He tugs once on the string of your thong, drawing his finger along the lace wedged between your ass cheeks and then pulls his hand away for a moment before he’s spanking you hard and quick. 

Owwww, you whine, hitching your rump towards him, wanting more despite the sting. He bends his head and bites you even harder at the inner corner of your asscheek, teeth digging hard and long enough to leave a mark. You whine again, high and mewling, trying to escape his meanness and he smacks you again on the other cheek. 

“Go to bed, little girl. I’ll see you in the mornin’.”

And he’s leaving you, broad shouldered form slipping out your bedroom door and leaving you aching and angry to scream into your pillow.

You’re pretty sure you hear his deep laugh before the slam of the door sounds below, and you’re slipping your greedy fingers into the ruined wet of your panties, petting away the ache he’s left. 

The late May night is cool, despite the daytime heat, and Ellie shivers in her Carhartt, watching as Joel slips out the back kitchen door of the big house. 

“The hell is going on with those two?” Jesse says beside her, pulling long on his beer. The litter of yellow cans around them speaks to his mullish whining that he’d not been able to pull tonight. Sometimes he annoys her, but in that sort of endearing little brother way that makes her want to kick his ass and protect him at the same time. 

“Nothin’, they’re fine—just gotta fuck it out.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Naw—just smarter than you, man.”

“They like each other?”

“God, Jesse, you wouldn’t see an obvious thing if it were a tipsy bison barrelin’ towards you full speed in the middle of the day.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he says a little pathetically. Moping men—Ellie really can’t be assed to deal with them all. 

“It’s fine. You don’t need to understand. I do—I see all, I know all. You mere mortals wouldn’t understand.”

“S’kinda weird, no? Them two—him bein’ so much older, her bein’…well, you know— her.”

“Nope. Makes perfect sense—they need each other, you see.”

He shrugs, I guess— “You’re fuckin’ weird, too. You know that?”

She takes a swig of her beer now also, hoping the two idiots she loves most in the world, after Dina of course, figure each other out before the whole ranch has to suffer for it too. 

“Wrong again, Jesse. Wrong again.”

Chapter Text

You pull your sticky fingers from the damp bed of your underwear, the not enough little orgasm you’d been able to rub out still pulsing hot and cold through your cunt. 

Horrible man—you’ve never wanted anyone or anything as badly as you want him to need you. And no, not a wanting sort of thing, not a wanting sort of desire—that’s not what you’d demand from him. It’s specific, this thing: it’s that you want him to have no choice in the matter, you want him to be forced, to see no other recourse but you because that’s just how necessary you feel to him. 

You want there to be no thought, no compunction in him—only you. 

Even more, because lies are worth nothing here in your own mind in your cold bed—

—You want him to love you. 

The way your father never did. The way no man ever has, not really. 

Face buried in the dark for a moment, you groan softly before sliding belly first off the silk bedding onto your knees, pushing yourself up off the floor unsteadily. You toe your boots off and then step tiptoe on the end of each sock to pull them from your feet. It’d not been a lie—you’re not drunk, limiting yourself to only one tonight, and no liquor, because you knew you needed to be able to focus on the taste of his tongue when you inevitably got your hooks in him, hoping, knowing he’d take your bait and follow, but now, it’s a wholly different sort of buzz zinging through you. 

All him. All man. All Joel.

He’d been flavored of smoked whiskey and mint, a hint of tobacco, and you wish you could’ve been more faithful in your pursuit of enjoying the chewing of the leaves he always has, you’d tried for years but couldn’t bear the texture, the green gnashed between your teeth, earthen and organic. It’s not for you, your tastes veering to something hotter and sweeter. But you’ve always wanted to be just like him anyway, and every endeavor at a connection, no matter how small, had always seemed like a valiant one. 

Stupid birthdays. Disgusting leaves of mint. Dead fathers and daughters and all the different ways we hurt each other. 

Stumbling coltish and uncoordinated, newly birthed down the staircase, you push your way out the back door. He’ll have gone to bed now, you know they’re going up the mountain early tomorrow morning to check on one of the herds, but you’re desperate for one more second of him, being spit out of the house of your dead parents, hunting for the last hint of his presence riding on the fresh air off the Tetons and all this land that’s all yours now. 

You veer left then right, a zigzagging dance across the green lawn until you’re far enough away from the house it’s like you can pretend to ignore the ghosts you’re readying to exorcize. One knee hits the ground hard and stinging, limbs loose and strengthless, you feel the stab of a little rock against the curve of round bone beneath easily broken skin, catching yourself on a palm, another too hard scrape and then you’re rolling over into the grass, settling on your back to look up at the stars. 

There are so many, an infinite number of lights winking like watchful eyes back at you, and you wonder at the sort of childhood that lends itself to laying in the grass like this beside a parent that loves you and wants you and carves space in their life for a child they'd forced into the world. It should be some sort of crime, you think, immediate execution sort of barbarity, to have a child and not love it the way it demands. 

Back of your hands open at your sides, palms to the watching sky, you close your eyes and imagine what it’d be like to have the hand of a father holding it, one that would want you—not a mother because what is she in reality to you but an imagination figure you can’t even truly conjure up? That much of a stranger is what she is—such an alien thing you can’t even bother to dream her. 

Drawing your knees up, you press your bare heels into the earth and the wet placket of your panties is ice cold and sticking uncomfortably now, breeze against it. You shouldn't be thinking about this shit, but you think you might cry anyway, sucking in too fast breaths, forcing them out in attemptedly slow little puffs through your nose. A wave of sudden grief, then a plateau, the nauseating up and down of it all. You should be thinking about him, about your victory tonight, about making him so angry he can’t help himself, about what’ll come next—his skin. But that’s the thing about him, Joel, isn’t it? Always has been—the incongruous, make-no-sense feelings he’s always pulled out of you since you’d first set eyes on him, fourteen years old and tender and so alone you didn’t even know there was another way to be but abandoned. 

A laugh then—huffing and sardonic and again, incongruous, because now you really are crying. Tears leaking back, hot and fat to pool in your ears and salt the earth beneath you—unloading your grief into the grass as if God were beside you. Nothing will grow here again because of you if you’re not careful, and that’s the next worry—

If he never needs you the way you’re demanding of him, you won’t be able to stay here. 

You won't be able to live here and love him and not have him, and you could force him, perhaps, in your own ways. But you’ve done so much of that your whole life—forcing unloving men to look at you and take you into their arms when they’d never really wanted to give you the thing you’d always wanted most. 

The tender truth: it would be so much better if Joel decided to need you because he wants to, because he can’t fathom another way than just that. 

And you don’t think you’ll ever be able to live with anything else besides such. 

Another forced out laugh again—just to feel the feeling of it, go through the motion, mountain air a roundabout gust in your lungs, then to your left:  “What’re you laughing at, weirdo?”

Ellie, long and loping and beautiful, come to your rescue. She throws herself down onto the ground beside you and doesn’t even have to ask a thing about it when she places her rough hand in your soft one. 

Working girl, mover of mountains, changer of lives. 

Ellie has always known how to know you, and it has always been an incredible comfort. 

The two of you lay there for a few quiet moments. Friendship as an entity has always been a strange thing to you who have never understood love in a non-transactional way. But the thing that Ellie has always given you, it has always been an incredibly straightforward sort of understanding, simple—that of one abandoned child to another, perhaps. 

“Are you drunk?”

“Why’s everyone always fucking asking me that?” Said with another laugh but of the real sort this time, despite the bite in your voice. 

“You’re a hazard. What can I say?”

Undeniable. “Oh, shut up.” You dig your nails into the back of her hand, trying to scratch her but probably ruining your manicure instead, she squeezes your knuckles in sideways, hurting you way more than you could manage her. A yelp, and you say, “You know what I’m excited for?”  

“What’s that?”

“Skijoring.”

“Fuck no, dude. I almost died last time.”

You snicker, “Yeah, that was the fun part for me.”

Elbow to the ribs, and, “Asshole,” she laughs. And then you’re quiet again together, still gripped by the hands, and it’s the sort of comfortable only two girls who’ve been together since they were truly girls can be. 

“You see Cassiopeia?” She points her finger way north. 

“Do you think I should stay?” You see it, and easily, and you know if you were somewhere not here, it wouldn’t be so simply found. Maybe that’s a good thing.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Because of Joel.” It isn’t a question. You’ve never said it with words to her, but she’s always known. 

You hum instead of answering, can’t say it out loud anyway just yet. “So you finally asked her.” Dina, she knows what you mean.

And Ellie hums now in turn too. The both of you are so fucked up. Can’t say a thing out loud. 

“And?” 

“It’s fine.”

“Just fine?”

“Good.”

“Just good?”

Ellie groans loud and long, baying goat, and you tell her so, which gets another knock to the ribs. “Turn around and don’t look at me so I can tell you.”

You roll over towards the mountains and feel her face the house where she doesn’t see ghosts like you do. 

“But you’re not allowed to say anything—just say okay. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I think—well, you know…,” she gruffs, voice dipping low and dropping off before she can say the words out loud again also. Everything’s a secret code here, even the stuff that shouldn’t be.

“You think?”

“You’re such a fucker. I know.”

You hum again but the good and happy sort, pressing your lips together to keep the misty eyed smile at bay. “Okay,” you say back just as low and just as gruff. 

“S’why I think you should stay,” she adds. “If I can find happy here, so can you.”

“I’ve never been able to before.”

“But you’re different now.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah—can see it, you know. And this place is different now too—will be different.” 

“I was afraid to come back for such a long time. It seemed like the worst thing in the world.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, before she says: “You’re not supposed to be afraid of your father.” A very obvious thing—or at least it should be. 

You feel her turn to look at the back of your neck, and you peer over your shoulder at her and when your eyes meet, she looks so sad, like she’s so sorry for you but without the pity, and you do understand what it is she’s saying despite never having had that fearless experience. 

“Aren’t you?” A shrug of your shoulder and a helpless laugh but also maybe with real humor accompanying it. Because yes, you’re not supposed to be. You always were anyway. It’s funny in an impossible to understand way. 

A beat and then, “Can I say something fucked up?”

“Yeah.”

“He isn’t here for you to be afraid of anymore.”

Funniest of all, you’re the most sad about this. And what you don’t say to her, perhaps for shame or that child’s feeling of having done something wrong but not necessarily understanding what that wrong is—sometimes it’s inevitable, missing the monster. 

“Maybe you needed him to die.” Yeah, fucked up. You’d already thought the same thing and were chock full of guilt for it. “Maybe it was like—like I don’t know. It was never going to be the way it should have between you, but now you can remember him, fuck, I don’t know—different. Not that you wanted him to die, but now the reality of him isn’t here for you to see, so you can just remember it all however you like or not.”

“So I should lie to myself?”

“Why not? There are worse things you could do. There are worse things you do do.”

You snort. “Is this what your method is?”

“Yeah. Like—like sometimes, when I’m so happy I can’t believe it’s me feeling it because she makes me that happy, Dina,” she says her name with love, “I pretend nothing from before was ever the way it was, and it’s only here and now and me and Dina and the ranch and there was no shitty, abandoning father and no dead mom and no nothing and only Joel is my dad and it’s all always been okay.”

Joel. 

At the center of everyone’s happy dream, why is it always him? 

“Okay,” you whisper. “I’ll try it.” She reaches behind her back then, pawing at your hip until you give her your hand again, and you were wrong. She’s changed too. She can say things now. She’s always had those too perceptive eyes and that too big heart, and she’s changed now in a way that makes her not afraid to let it out and use these things anymore. 

You tell this changed Ellie now: “You know that like— that like… I don’t know how to say it. When a person’s life seems like it should be perfect, and you have everything. Everything should be good, right—but it’s just not. Your parents should be kind, they should be loving. They should be attentive and give a shit what happens to you, and it probably seems that way to the whole rest of the world except for the people that have to witness the humiliation behind closed doors, but it’s really just not, and then they probably look at me and wonder how my life could be anything but rose colored, and it all just seems a little silly and empty. Doesn’t it?”

“Nah—don’t know. My life was always shit before I came here and found Joel and Dina and all of them and you. And I'd seen enough to recognize what you were and how it was. Nothing ever looked rose colored to me—just looked like more shit.” You laugh again out loud now and for real, squeezing more tears out over your hot cheeks when she joins you in the sad hilarity as well. 

When her voice is finally steady from the belly laughs again, she says, “It’s a grief pyramid, we’re all just going around hurting each other in the name of our ghosts and call it an excuse, an offering to their memory and act like it’s okay. But it’s fucked up. That’s why I decided to stop. I stopped pushing her away, I told her—well, you know. I told her.”

“Say it, loser.” You bump your butt into hers. 

“Not to you—leave me alone.”

Say it, say it, say it, you sing. 

“I love her, fuck off.” And a little clog of emotion sticks wetly in your throat.

That’s the real question, honestly: How do you make someone love you? How do you make yourself into someone people can love?

“It’s a grief pyramid,” she repeats. “You have to choose to stop adding to it.” And she’s quiet again for a long time, and you can’t fathom how it is one stops building onto something they’d been born into. You think on it so long the feel of her palm clutching yours starts losing itself to sleep in the grass and the breeze comes off the mountains like a blanket over the two girls who’d become women before them until she says again, “Anyway, that’s usually the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid.”

“Joel?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Nothin’.”

“Nope. You’re definitely doing something.” He angles the phone away from her prying eyes, trying to shield his shame with the palm of his hand. 

“Mind your own damn business, kid.”

“Is that an Instagram account? ” Ellie howls like a banshee, Tommy coming up behind him to reach over his shoulder to try and rip the phone out of his hand. He holds it out of his reach. 

It’s just that he couldn’t help himself. He’d heard the boys all talking about it on the ride back down after their long day of work—your Instagram page—as if he knew what the fuck that was. He’d had to search it up on the internet when he’d gotten a moment alone in the bunk, cracking open a beer, muscles exhausted from the hard ride and having to haul a heifer out of a bramble she’d gotten herself caught in, he’d realized it was a thing young people put photographs and such on, a social media thing. But when he’d gone to search your name, it’d told him he’d needed to make an account of his own. Growling in frustration, he’d slowly made his way through the process, too big fingers punching at the too tiny keys of the stupid phone you’d forced on him. 

“Can you shut up and just show me how to work this thing. And stop your goddamn howling—Dina’s gonna think she’s dating a hyena not a girl.” She slides into the seat next to him, taking the phone from his grip to finish setting up the account and type in your name, a deck of pictures loading up for him to hunt through like a vandal. Photographs of you in all sorts of different places, draped in fine clothes and jewels and your fucking perfect ass right there for everyone to see. 

Oh my God.

“How many people can see this shit?” He asks Ellie, angling the phone back towards her. 

“You’re so nosey, man,” she chastises. “Thirty-seven thousand followers.” And a long, impressed whistle from Tommy who he’s going to punch in the face after he’s done with this. 

He swallows hard. “What’s that mean?”

“That thirty-seven thousand people are following her and looking at her pictures, Joel,” his brother says. “Man, how fuckin’ old are you?”

“Yeah, you’re not that old, Joel. Come on.”

“Go away now. I’m busy,” he tells the both of them, going back to doom scrolling through your pictures. One’s of you in barely any clothes at all, an itty bitty orange bikini, hands on your ass and sand where his tongue should be.

Joel feels insane again. 

“Pervert.”

“Joel… I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think there’s steam comin’ out of your ears, man.”

“Fuck off.”

Blessedly, they leave him to suffer in peace after a while, and thank Christ for that because eventually, the ex-boyfriend shows up in the scroll of pictures too. There for everyone to see in posts dated several weeks back—even one of the two of you kissing, you on his lap, fuck that. Good looking, shiny-boy sort. Joel’s left eye twitches at the sight of the sort of man he has never been, could never be for you, someone of your caliber. 

The memory of your cunt grinding against him last night flashes through his mind and his cock throbs once and hungry. He stretches his long legs out in front of him, adjusting in the suddenly too tight seat of his jeans. 

A clusterfuck is what it is—this sudden melding of the memory of the girl-child you used to be, the one that up until only recently lived in his mind, good and golden, and the woman you are now. With both figures meeting together with all the characteristics he’d always admired in you, your kind heart, your honesty, your generosity. You’ve turned out to be an exceptional woman, and it’s difficult to let the distant perception from before meet the lust he feels for you now and grapple with it without feeling sick to his stomach about it all.

It’s all an inevitability though, anyway. He knows this just from the rewind memory play of last night, the taste of your mouth and the little sounds you'd made for him, because of him, the way your hips had rolled over his lap desperately seeking. 

You’re ending up on his cock one way or another—inevitable. 

He’s never claimed to be a good and honorable man—never played the part of one either. He’s not about to start now. 

Clicking on the picture of your sun bronzed ass in the tiny bikini again, he imagines himself biting and eating it, shifting his legs restlessly, taking another long pull of his beer. Tapping twice on the image, he tries to zoom in to the apex of your thighs—he’s going to hell, he’s so fucked up, doesn’t matter—when a little heart appears in the center of the image. He clicks it again and the heart appears once more, refusing to zoom into what he wants to see up close. Fucking piece of shit phone and fucking Instagram—frustrated and hard and pissed off at the fact he’s yet to see you all day, he locks the phone, slamming it face down on the kitchen table, and downs the rest of the can. 

If he doesn’t get a hold of himself soon he’s going to burst, gut all twisted up into a hot knot of coal. Sick with jealousy and anger and lust, aggressive, the taste of your sweetness ringing in his ears and the sound of your moans on his tongue—his head is not on straight and he better get it fixed quick or all this pent up frustration is going to come out with teeth to take a chunk of flesh out of you. 

Groaning loudly, he lets his head fall back, thumbs digging into the sockets of his eyes until he sees stars and not the sight of your slick swollen mouth made that way by himself. He wonders if you slept well last night, if you thought of him, if you’d made yourself come the way he’d ran home to the little foreman’s cabin Kelly had given him years ago, to do himself. Jumping in the shower to jack his leaking cock to the image of what it would’ve been like if he’d been brave enough to pull that flimsy little tease of a thong to the side, let his cock out and force it inside of you, make you take it until you were crying and coming so hard you’d never think to even look at another man again, much less kiss him. 

He should’ve hit that fucker harder. He should’ve kissed you longer. 

He needs to force you to take all of those goddamn half naked pictures down. No one should get to look at you like that except for him, and he doesn’t give a fuck how insane he sounds. 

Outside, he can hear the cowboys hooting and hollering at something, egging each other on louder and louder, the scuffle of them shoving each other and horsing around. He sighs once and long, too tired to deal with their shit right now. All he needs is an evening of peace to get his head on straight and relax and will his boner down for a few hours. He’s acting like a goddamn randy teenager, walking around hard and aching half the day. 

Heaving himself out of the chair, back hurts, he grabs another beer before he’s pushing the bunk door open to the sight of half the team huddled together and peering around the corner of the bunk towards the house. 

“The hell’s got y’all clucking like a bunch of hens?” He asks, coming around them to stop dead in his tracks when he lays eyes on what it is that’s got them all worked up. 

That same ass he’d just been trying to zoom in on, right there in the flesh for the whole ranch to ogle at. Stretched out on one of the sun loungers from the deck, dragged out into the center of the lawn with a little table set up next to you. You’d even gotten someone to scrounge up a huge umbrella, a misting fan spinning lazily, spitting a damp sheen of water every few minutes, a drink and a speaker playing some girly song, whole goddamn set up for all of these fuckers to stand here and take an eyeful of your perfect ass. 

Joel tries to take deep breaths, counting back from ten in his head—fails. He’s going to be calm and cool and collected—not. He isn’t going to lose his temper—sure. 

Fuck that. 

He’s going to spank your ass so hard you can’t sit for a week.

“If you all don’t find something to do in the next thirty seconds,” he growls at them all through clenched teeth, “I swear I’ll have you slingin’ shit for a month.” The can in his grip pops loudly between his fingers. 

They all take one peek at the look on his face and scatter like chicken shit until it’s only Ellie left smirking beside him.

“Take this,” he shoves the can at her and starts towards you. 

“Bro—” He ignores her. Hey! She calls after him, voice demanding now, stopping him in his tracks before he can go get exactly what he’s been denying himself from the moment you kissed him two nights ago. 

Giving him that look she gets when she needs to remind him she knows exactly who he is and that he can’t ever hide it from her, she chews on her cheek for a second before she says, and he doesn’t mistake it, it’s a warning: “She’s a real peach. You know that. Pretty and soft and sweet, but easily hurt. Needs gentle handling, even when she wants to pretend otherwise.”

It pisses him off. Bad. “You think I don’t fuckin’ know that? I understand her—” thumb to chest. Because he did—does. Because he thinks that he really always has. It’s undeniable that he has what you have, what Ellie has. Even what Oswald Kelly himself had had and what he’d seen in Joel when he’d decided to save the life of a no good man in a no good spot with a no good future in front of him—that sadness, that lost doggedness about you all that makes you so like one another, even despite your immeasurable differences.  

The two of them look at each other for another long moment, and Ellie knows, Ellie always understands. With a roll of her eyes she spins on her heel, muttering to herself, slugging back Joel’s discarded beer.

Slowly, he rounds back towards you, afraid as if he were looking down the barrel of a gun, just as dramatic, as well. Objectively, he knows you’re doing this on purpose, to piss him off and rile him up and get a blow out reaction out of him. He tries to remind himself of it as he marches towards you, and if he were smarter or less inclined to take your bait, he’d take a beat to finish that count to ten reversal in his head and calm the fuck down before he gets to you—but honestly, he just doesn’t feel like it. 

All he sees instead is the baby pink barely there string bikini you’ve got on, the slope of your back gleaming in the sun, slicked in something shiny, the damp from the mister, the lush curve of your ass and the shine of your hair resting face down on your folded arms. 

You’re all sunkissed everywhere, and he’d really rather just give you what you want already. 

“Get up,” he growls down at you. 

One eye winks open, peering up at him before you press up on your elbows to take in the sight of him scowling down at you, and he can’t help it when his eyes flit down to the sight of your breasts cupped precariously in the tiny bikini, skin all sun flushed red against the soft baby pink fabric. You look like you’re made of sugar and sweet fruit and like you’ve come here specifically to ruin him and his whole life and all his self control. 

Hmm? You smile up at him wide and teasing. Oh, he’s feeding right into your shit, and you piss him off so badly. 

He’s never been this hard in his entire life, he’s even made dizzy with it. 

The little wisps of hair at your temples are sweat soaked and curling, looking silky soft. A thousand little details about you and your body—the white of your smile and the flushed heat of your cheeks, sun burnished bridge of your nose starting to freckle—that he can’t help but notice. 

Get. Up, he grits through clenched teeth. No one in the whole world deserves to see you like this, looking so beautiful, especially not him. Shading your eyes with the palm of your hand, you scrunch your nose up at him, and he’s got half a mind to bark at you to not do that when he’s around or he’s really gonna lose it. Your smile beams brighter. 

“What’s wrong, Joel? Havin’ a rough day?”

“I swear to Christ, if you don’t get your ass up and in the house right this minute, I’m going to put you over my knee right here in front of your whole ranch to witness, little girl.”

You smile up at him again and a muscle at the corner of his jaw flutters madly, he’s about to crack a fucking molar. “Hmm, I don’t think so.” And you flop back down again so that the soft of your ass jiggles slightly, arching your back just a little so that he’s growling once, right before he’s gripping you by the elbow and pulling you upwards against his chest and dragging you all bare and slippery limbed to your feet. You smell like coconuts and sweet sweat and saliva pools heavy beneath his tongue. 

“If you wanna act like a brat, I’m gonna treat you like one. You get me?” He yanks you towards the house screeching like a banshee, let go of me, you fucking psycho, you howl. A too little fist swings towards his face, and he catches it in his palm, squeezing tight and feeling your thumb tucked inside your fist. 

“Stop that—you’re gonna hurt yourself.” More squawking and howling, skinny wrist slipping from his grip to take another swing at him. “Don’t even know how to throw a goddamn punch— Jesus fucking Christ. Don’t tuck your thumb.” He hauls you up higher against himself, getting a better grip around your waist so he can carry you bodily up the steps of the deck. 

You jam your heels into his shins, and he huffs and puffs, trying to keep his hold on you. I’m gonna kick your ass, you screech again, scratching and pinching at his forearms. 

Joel is too old and too goodman tired for this. 

“No, you’re not. And if you think I’m gonna let the whole goddamn ranch and all the boys stare at your bare ass all day, you’ve got another thing comin’ for you.”

“Well, I’ve gotta show it to someone, don’t I? ” You sass back, trying to elbow him in the throat while you’re at it. Blood boiling, catching you by the small joint, he pulls your arm bent behind your back, other forearm banding against your stomach so that his hand is splayed at your hip, feeling the satin soft skin, slippery in your suncream. 

And sure, he might be too old or too tired for this, but his cock is still hard as anything at the feel of you all against him like this. 

Pushing the door open with his hip, he shoves you inside. The late afternoon sun paints the cool interior in shades of gold and beaming white; everything is beautiful and pristine as always, and yet tinged with the red of his temper and lust. His temples beat in tune with his too fast, pumping heart. 

“Where’s Dina?” He’s still got you caught in his grip. He does not plan to let go. 

“Let me go, you mother ffff—” He gives you one hard shake, hearing your teeth click and rattle. Little doll caught in his grip. He can do anything to you—and you won’t be able to stop him. 

“Where is she?” He asks again, and something in his voice must snap you alert because you settle for a brief second, a little shiver skipping down the length of your spine that he follows to your full ass. He tugs you back, barely moving and slow, just that little bit further into himself so that the lush curve presses against the hard length of his cock—and there it is, the little knowing gasp, finally understanding what it is you’ve gotten yourself into.

“She—” Your belly is suddenly so hot and tight, heartbeat starting up behind your navel. Suddenly knowing what it is this is about to be, and yet now finally confronted with the reality of it for the first time, you can’t even begin to imagine what it’ll be like. “She—I don’t know. She went into town, I— I think,” you stutter, brain short-circuiting, desperate to feel that hardness again. “Waiting for Ellie—they’ve got plans there tonight.” His entire hand is wrapped around your forearm pressed against the small of your back, long, thick fingers overlapping against each other, and you roll up on your tiptoes, trying to arch your back further into him. 

He grunts once, exasperated, and then shoves you forward again, rough enough you’re stumbling over your own two feet, full on aggressive panting bull at your back. 

That’s good, he says so low you barely catch it before he’s pushing you up against the wall by the front door, cheek smushed against the silk printed wallpaper. 

Your mother decorated this room years ago, melding the masculine taste of your father and her love for European decor. The walls, wrapped in hand painted English wallpaper on the top half, and paneled at the bottom with a mahogany so fine it gleams an amber golden glow when the afternoon sun shines in through the windows just so. 

Everything beautiful; still, even after all this time. 

He holds you there for a long moment, his breathing quick and shallow, bellows of hot air at the nape of your neck, disturbing the escaped hair from your claw clip curling there. 

“Joel?” You ask once, voice wavering just a little bit because he suddenly feels so large and imposing behind you that something like trepidation beats behind the soft of your kneecaps. You know he worked all day, and his big body is a steaming blaze of heat, waves rolling off of him to burn the naked length of your back and limbs. 

He pulls your arm trapped between his forearm and your stomach to the small of your back to join the other, holding you there in a lock pinned against the wall, reaching up slowly to let your hair down, long and swinging. You listen to the clatter of your clip against the hardwood floor, and then he’s circling the side of your neck, the tiny beating pulse held in the cup of his palm so that it feels as if it’s reverberating back into your head, a staccato rhythm, and echoing all through your body. A chiming bell, ringing and ringing and ringing, telling you that it’s time now. His hand smooths down the slope of your throat to your shoulder, and you listen to the rumbling half humming moan he lets out at the feel of your sweat sticky skin, then down the flat wing of your scapula, thumb nail scraping against the edge of your jutting bone for the way he’s got your arms trapped behind you. 

You let out a high pitched whine, almost a scream, another puff of sound in the assimilation of his name, pleading now, rolling up onto your tiptoes again to push your ass back against the hard of his cock. Everything is so, so sensitive. 

Quit, he snaps once and mean. Ordering. In a tone that says he’s in charge, and finally. 

It’s such a relief. 

You whine again, higher, needier, like you’ve never felt before, and there’s a nauseating thrum of electrified butterflies in your tummy, sticky sweet and cloying for attention. Joel, please, again and the wings beat faster. You’re sure he’ll enjoy the sound of your begging, it’s just something you know. Tiptoes straining higher so that the soles of your feet ache, he smooths that work roughened palm down the slope of your spine, thumb against your vertebrae, feeling the round little notches of bone beneath sensitive skin until he’s reached the twin dimples at the low of your back right above your ass, and presses there and hard—mean—so it hurts. Keening loudly, you crush your cheek harder, harder against your mother’s wallpaper until the bone aches, until there’ll surely be an indent of your shape left in the wall, and his thumb digs even harder anyway, gripping you tight enough to bruise. 

This is how it’ll be—surprising, but also not. In all your years of imagining, you still don’t know what it is you expected.

“You’re carved so fine,” whispered against your skin and gooseflesh spreads like wildfire, nipples going tight and aching. His nose skims the slope of your nape, smelling you. “S’like you’re made of sugar. Is that what you’ll taste like too?” And his words are slurred, drunk-like and you feel the same way also, legs on the verge of giving out.

You press your hips back again, desperate for any sort of pressure, and he jostles you once, hard enough you bite your tongue. Quit moving, he snaps, shoving his knee between your legs and spreading you wide and immobile, thigh hooked over his own so that the toes of that leg barely skim the ground and now you’re precariously balanced on one foot, held up and pinned entirely by him. 

Caughtcha, he murmurs.

You couldn’t move even if you wanted to. 

The palm at the low of your back splays wide, his long fingers reaching from side to side and pressing hard against your skin and then all of a sudden he’s gone, and only for a second, before he’s back and slapping you hard and painfully stinging on the ass. A downward swipe of his thick fingers so that it really fucking hurts, and then the palm is back at the small of your waist, hooked thigh over his leg, unable to move, unable to do anything except take it. 

He presses your belly into the wall, and the pressure is so intense and so deep—his breathing is so rough behind you. You know he worked the mountain all day, he should be exhausted, but the strength he’s trapping you with belies the possibility. 

His hand goes away from your back again, and he’s spanking you once more, and you can’t tell if it’s harder or not this time, if it hurts worse than the previous, but the fire pain of it snaps all the way down from your thigh to your calve, pooling there in a knot of painful ache. An animal baying noise warbles in your throat, he tuts once, a cooing click of his tongue and cups your ass right at the rose of pain he’s left, kneading the skin gently, palpating the hurt like he’s looking for the physical imprint of it beneath your skin. 

“Yeah, baby? Like that?” You sing the little animal song for him again. “S’what you needed, right?” His voice now is not the Joel-voice you’ve always known, but it is the one you’ve always dreamed of. The kneading fingers slide whisper soft down the back of your thigh, up again, down again, callused skin scraping. On the up again, his thumb catches at the edge of your bathing suit wedged between the cleft of your ass.

And lest he thinks he’s bested you, you say, “Yes, that’s what I needed,” and he laughs a rough laugh that makes him sound like he’s been gutted. 

He squeezes the thick of your ass between his thumb and forefinger, an almost pinch and then smoothes his thumb beneath the pink edge along the curve, precariously close to danger. The sound of his name loses meaning, you’re praying it in a litany almost, over and over, begging. Hush now, he gentles, more in a sort of voice you recognize while your heart beats so hard against the wall it must surely sound like someone’s knocking on the front door for entry, like it must surely send echoes all through the ghost-house. 

His smoothing thumb continues its journey until it’s between your thighs, pulling the wet lycra wide away from your skin so that he can tuck the rest of his fingers flat against your cunt, and now he’s there. 

One of you says the word fuck another lets out a whimpering sort of noise—you’re not sure which is who, it’s all only a cunt-throbbing need you know he’s feeling leak and pulse against his hand. 

“You’re so wet for me,” he murmurs all reverence like. Joel—touching your cunt and sounding like he can’t believe it. His hand slides back along the curve of your sex, and you really are so wet the sound of it is slick and lewd, his fingertips at your entrance, a gentle probing and then forward again, a circling not touch around your clit, like he’s learning for himself this new little place that belongs to him now. Your mouth falls open on a spit-full moan, your eyes closed because you don’t even have strength now to keep them open and watchful. You’re so wet for me, he says again and again like he can’t believe it all either. 

He drags his finger flats against you once more and then another time and then taps twice with all four of them, two little almost slaps to your clit that make a sticky wet splashing sound. Good girl, and you don’t know which part of you he’s talking to. You’re practically leaking onto the floor, trying to widen your hips, arch your ass back further and present your cunt to him for fucking. And then his fingers side to side in a swiping motion and fast. 

Oh God. Oh God. Inside, inside, you need him inside. He needs to go inside. 

“Please, pleeease, Joel. Oh, please.” Delirious.

“Please?” His fingers move fast and your vision goes entirely away. “Please what? Please what? You, please.” He switches front and backwards again, and then two fingers draw a little ghost circle at your entrance. You, please, he says again. His hand flips over, palm facing downwards, and he starts to slowly, slowly press a single tip of one inside. “Please behave. Please don’t— don’t— fuck— please gimme a second to breathe, to think, to catch up. God, fucking tight little cunt. I’ll never fit in here, baby.” 

Your vision whites, then blacks, then goes blinding bright and colorless—zero frequency. Up to the first knuckle, and he wiggles the tip inside, making you cry and squirm, pulls out and then two fingers are pressing inside and downwards. “We’re gonna have to take it so slow in this little cunt.” Shit—shit.

“Oh my God, yes.”  

Your hips shiver and shake as he penetrates you, his forehead tucked against your shoulder so he can look down at what he’s doing, and drool slides along your mother’s wallpaper from the corner of your mouth as he pushes his fingers in and out of you so slowly, the slick slide, the pressure against your front wall so heavy, and spread so wide like this but held so immobile—it all makes you feel like you’ll wet yourself with such little control over your body. A few slides in and out again, “Good girl, just a little more,” before he’s wedging a third into the mix, trying to put it inside of you as well. A little more? The stretch is too much, burning, and you wail and cry, arching again but this time to get away instead of steal more. 

“Okay, okay. It’s alright,” he soothes. Hush. “It’s okay.” He pulls his fingers entirely out and covers the slick mess of your mound with his entire palm possessively. Rubbing soothingly at your wet, his fingers slide over the satiny smooth skin of your lips. 

“You’re all bare,” he whispers, shocked.

You swallow hard once, shoulders and neck starting to ache. “I— I got lasered.”

“Lasers?” Voice confused. 

“Yeah.” You swallow again, can’t catch your breath. “Yes.”

“Gotta see.”

He pulls you from the wall, shuffling you like gambling cards in his hands, that’s what this is, a gamble, so that you’re facing him as he walks you backwards, bikini bottoms askew and cunt bare to your parents living room; your dead father’s best man about to fuck it raw. 

Pressing up on your tiptoes at the same time that you’re tugging him low by the collar and the slightly too long hair that curls over it to press an open mouthed kiss to his lips with eyes kept open. You need to see his face, his reaction, that even though he’s all rough, he’s still Joel and he’ll still take care of you now. 

One strong forearm bands around your back, pressing you up high and close to his chest, fingers tangling in the bikini string at your back so that it pulls tight and bites into your skin, the other reaching around the back of your thighs to take a squeezing handful of you ass as he lifts you clean off the ground, lumbering slowly towards the couch while the two of you stare at each other with something that smells suspiciously of wonder. 

On the high ground now, you stare down at him, held as you are and kiss him again, for real this time, with tongue, an eating of his mouth. Trying to taste him as deep as you can go, digging your manicured fingernails into the rough whiskered planes of his cheeks until he grunts roughly.

Showing him that you can hurt him too. 

His knees hit the edge of the couch, one palm going to the back to hold himself steady as he sets you down, following your path to fold over you nose to nose. Watching each other for a blink, predator, predator, lashes tangling and then his mouth is sliding wetly over your burning cheekbone, drawn out groan like dying. Down to the hinge of your jaw where he sucks sharp once and his tongue flutters down the column of your throat, tasting your pulse, his palms everywhere at the same time too. Over your shoulders and down your goosefleshed arms, cinching at the nip of your waist to slide around your hips and to your ass, pulling you forward and open when he goes to his knees on the floor at the edge of the sofa between your spread thighs, with you draped diagonally across the cool leather that sticks to your sweaty, coconut flavored skin. 

One palm slides down your chest, dragging over your breast, the other catching at your nipple with this thumb, nail scraping and pulling the wet fabric along with him, baring you to the first glance of his eyes. A sound that’s a little like a whimper precedes his latching mouth, sucking hard and with teeth so you’re arching and crying and when your head rolls to the side, eyes bleary and barely seeing, he’s got your small breast in his mouth, jaw hinged wide and hungry. His teeth scrape, one wide palm sliding over your thigh to the back, pushing your knee up high and open to your shoulder, lips skim over your belly, smell so fucking good, sharp edge over your hip bone and the lave of his tongue, taste so fucking good.

“I’m gonna eat your cunt.” Bikini askew, one little tit bared to the cold AC, nipples hard enough to hurt, he pinches it once and mean and stretches the soaking wet center gusset of your bottoms wider.

He looks and looks and grins and everything inside of you pulses. 

Boyish smirk and a cocky glance up at you, oh, pretty, “Perfect little princess pussy, huh? I see now.” He sticks his thumb into his mouth, pulls it out with a pop to rub it spit slick against your clit. Yeah, yeah, like that, and you can’t help the whining cry. 

Pushing your other thigh up high, the grin turns to something a little more menacing before he bends to your cunt, whole mouth covering you there like he’d swallowed your breast. His thumbs dig painfully into the backs of your thighs like they’d dug in your back, leaving little spots of hurt all over your body is what he’s doing, spreading you wide open.  

Every touch is possessive, full of ownership. 

“What are you doing to me?” He groans as he eats your cunt, doing exactly as he said he would, flat of his tongue licking all over you, dipping inside. Purse of his lips then and he’s sucking hard and pulsing in quick successions, and there’s your first one—little gush of slick and your belly so tight it hurts, you need something inside of you so bad—your first orgasm forced from you and onto his tongue, swallowed down into his stomach. He groans like an animal—doubles his efforts, tongue spearing inside, pulling away to press two fingers in— fuck, fuck, and you grab hold of your own thigh to keep yourself open for him, knees trembling beside your ribs. 

The hand not inside slides across you, smearing slick over your belly, it’s everywhere, and presses down as he crooks those two fingers forward. His hair’s all fucked up, eyes glazed a maniacle shade of hazel that makes him more intimidating than you’ve ever seen him and also hotter than you could’ve ever dreamed, that boy’s smile again. 

His mustache is soaked in you. “Little pussy’s so small ‘nd wet, baby.” He wiggles his fingers, pets against the blindingly sensitive place inside of you. “Feel that?” Fingers twisting—almost too much, the stretch burns already and just like this. 

“Please, put it in,” you beg stupidly, a tear leaks and then another, not at all smart of self preserving. 

He clicks his tongue, and you can’t tell if it’s soothing or condescending or both, your eyes screwing shut at what he’s doing to you, trying to paw at his shoulders and pull him towards you at the same time. “Can’t—too small.”

No, no— His palm at your belly presses down, fingers petting forward, again, again, head bent once more to suck on your clit, licking it roughly if a tongue can be rough because it’s heavy and strong and intentional— I can take it. There’s your next one, obeying the come here order of his fingers. Mid-come and he’s forcing that painful third one from before inside, and now it’s split open and sloshing wetly—your cunt— hiccupping into another left over shaky orgasm, fucking hurts a little bit. More tears and his soft chuckle—you’re really in it now. 

When he slurps at your leaking again, fingers leaving you to gape empty and wanting, your hips shiver, trying to shake him away and rock against him at the same time. He says something you can’t make out, can’t even open your eyes, you just need a second, you swear, and then the clink of his belt, the shuffle of clothes, and he’s pulled his shirt over his head—you’ve enough mind left to open your eyes for this. 

He’s so strong, built for fucking and working and heaving. You knew this already, you hadn’t needed to see him without clothes to know. 

And all yours now, too. 

Your fingertips paw greedy at his chest, muscular, the thickly corded arms and shoulders. One hand wraps around the slim of your ankle, manacling you while he undoes his fly, your heart skips with the split of the zipper’s teeth and pulls his cock out, letting it fall heavy on your stomach—a threatening, aggressive thing. It drags against your cunt, so big it doesn’t stand up straight and jutting like the others you’ve been used to, but bobs low and hanging.

Reaching forward you flit the tips of your fingers over the wide head—barely there butterfly touch—and your hand looks comically small next to the thing as you pet at the dark head swelling out of the thick skin around it, soft and burning hot—he growls like a wolf at your touch.

 “I’ve never— I’ve never… with one like…”

He pulls your hand forward, wrapping it tightly around the thick length with his fist over yours. “Nah, baby. You’ve never had one like this. It’s alright—I’ll show you how to take it.” 

You’ve half a mind to roll your eyes at him, but he distracts you with the soft touch at the split indentation in your knee from your romp in the grass last night. “What happened here, little thing?” His words and his touch are so soft, eyes warm and caring, as if he weren’t threatening at all, as if that thing that’s about to split you in half and make you cry hasn’t started to slick itself back and forth between your legs, parting the lips of your cunt, sticky sound on every pass with his fist wrapped around himself—too many things happening to you all at once by his hand. 

“A rock hiding in the grass last night.” You start to roll your hips minutely against him, presenting your similarly torn palm for his appraisal, no, no, my poor baby, he kisses the little hurt while the fat head swipes over your clit, pressing against your hole—a little gasp and you circle his wrist at your knee, anchoring yourself. 

He frowns. “Last night when?”

“After you left me.” Pouting back. 

Cooing once and low, “You shouldn’t go out alone at night, anything could happen,” pressing again at the mouth of your cunt. Fuck, now—  

“Wasn’t alone—”

The head notches and stays, “Without me then— Deep breath now, baby.” He grunts on the first push inside, and your back arches tight as a bowstring, hand splaying wide at the center of his belly and his long fingers wrap around your breast tight, holding you in place, deep breath, he says again. 

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God.”

He pitches his hips forward once, just a little, just a small shove, and you tense, sharp whine hiccuping through you. “Oh, it’s too big,” pressing harder at his belly as he edges deeper again, an inch and then another, literally splitting your cunt open for himself, thumb swiping slow and gentle over your clit, forcing little shudders of pleasure out of you amidst the pain. 

“See, told ya.” It’s slow, slow until he makes it fit, watching himself sink inside of you the entire time, until you’re rooted on his cock, breath coming is quick, sucking pants, puffs out through your nose, body flushing hot and then even hotter. He folds over you, groaning loud and long, deep grinds and small shoves, and then it’s so much, too much until there’s no room left inside of you at all, that dull ache pain of his tip pressing against your cervix. 

You’re going to be so sore tomorrow, it hurts, it hurts, but he plays with that place anyways, covering you with his body to press his face against your breasts, mouthing wet and hot at your nipples, biting hard to distract you from the pain inside. Your fingers twist in his hair, hot and damp at the roots, sweaty musk smell of a hard day's work, masculine, making you wetter for him. “It’s alright… it’s alright. You can take it. You’re such a good girl.” And then a fuck, and he’s mumbling your name, how good you are again, how well you’re taking your fucking. 

“This what you wanted, right? To get caught on my cock?” The palm cupping your ass tips you up and forwards, forcing him inside just that little bit more. Your knees are at your shoulders, folded entirely under him, and the tip of his cock is still there where it hurts the most while he pants and sweats on top of you. A cramp of heat moves like lightning down your back and something goes loose in your cunt, your womb contracting once, accepting its fate as you start to come around him, milking him deep inside of you. You start to cry for real now too, fingernails dragging against his naked back looking for blood—sobbing, actually, not just crying. 

He bites your breast hard, grinds further not letting the orgasm stop, “God—I’m so fuckin’ deep. No one’s ever been this deep, right? Tell me, baby,” he begs, sitting back and dragging you boneless, still coming, into his lap, little girl splayed wide over his knees on the floor. You sink further down onto his cock, and he kisses your hot cheeks, letting your cunt drip down him. His belt digs bruisingly into the back of your thighs and it all hurts—he really is so deep now, head tucked firmly at your cervix, and he feels like he’s getting thicker, harder, like he just needs to be sunk deep like this, as deep as he can get so that all your cunt needs to do is work him until it milks the come right out of him. 

Your head lolls back on your neck, supported at the edge of the sofa. “No more—” You don’t know if you mean it, but it is just on the verge of too much now. You’re so sensitive. 

“Yes more.” He starts to lift his hips again, pulling back and shoving, not a lot, but enough that it’s like a little punch inside of you each time. “As much as I say.”

Whining, “No—I can’t.” You roll your hips against him though, the both of you moving, straining against each other, his wide hands around your waist shifting you up and down like a doll on his cock. Your eyes finally open again, and the sunlight spears in through the windows in buttery blinding shafts, sparkling dust motes dancing above as he fucks you. The sound is all so wet, everything from his lower belly to the open front of his jeans is soaked. “I don’t like it anymore,” you lie. 

“I don’t care,” and he gives you the first really rough thrust, not a pounding but with enough strength behind it that you get that heat cramp again, feel like you’re going to wet yourself again, there’s so much pressure in your belly. 

You’re going to come again. You are coming again. It feels like you should say thank you. 

He laughs, little cock sleeve, and you can’t understand how it’s so intense when the fucking is so slow—so good anyways—who cares about anything. His name slips through your lips without them moving, and he’s laughing again, a little mean and you tell him so, but still tender, still endeared by you. 

You push his face away weakly, a mumbled, “Nasty old man.”

Nuh uh, he hums, taking both of your wrists in his grip and pressing them back to the leather edge on either side of your head, forcing you into an arch so that he can latch his teeth at your throat and suck. The rolling of his hips pick up speed, just that little bit, the heat coming off him boiling up to steaming and his sweat drips onto your skin and disappears inside of you—everywhere you’ve got him inside of you. 

“Birth control?” All broken up with pants and your jugular between his teeth. 

Flexing fingers, hands going away to numbness, he’s got you held so tightly, not being so careful of his strength anymore, his cock drags and it’s so wet and sensitive and swollen inside of you, it feels like he barely fits even more than it did before, like there’s definitely no more space inside of you for him at all.. “Yeah— ye—ah, ahh,” can’t get your voice to come out right with your clit grinding against his pelvic bone like that. “Implant right here.” You turn your face towards your left arm, tipping your nose the hidden little bump right beneath your skin. He clicks his tongue, kissing it softly.

“Poor baby. That’s good. That’s real good, baby. Just be good and lemme come in you now. It’s okay.” He spreads his thighs wider, pushing up with his knees into you now. Oh fuck— “But you gotta give me one more. I want it—it’s mine.” And the way he’s got you arched, the spot he hits inside is more intense than the others. He grunts rougher now, biting your throat so hard you’ll be left bruised all over and on the inside too. One palm lets go of your wrist to grip your bottom, long fingers slotting on either side of his impaling cock, pulling you to him so tightly the orgasm is squeezed out of you forcibly and hurts all the worse for it. You’re limp and boneless now, and he starts to pump his come into you in thick spurts, belly all suffused with heat and your name a groan in his throat.

His fingers, parted around his splitting cock rub at the slippery skin of your labia, back and forth to your asshole, holding and cupping the place he’s claimed, and he comes so long, hunched over and rutting into you, filling and filling until the wet squelch is even louder and you can feel the thick come being forced out of your stuffed full cunt. 

You want to say his name, trying to move your lips, but your tongue rolls uselessly inside your mouth, all you are is a shivering cunt, a muscle spasming and spasming around him. He nuzzles at your throat, finally unlatching his teeth, licking away the hurt, pressing a soft kiss to the sore spot. You can feel him playing in the leaking wet now, fingering at your puffy cunt, well fucked and filled. 

You want to tell him you didn’t think that the bikini was going to make this happen, pull this out of him. 

At least not like this. You don’t think you could’ve ever imagined it’d be like this. 

His mouth, hot on your jaw once more before he finally picks up his head to look at you, and his eyes make you want to cry, all that manic heat is gone now, replaced by some softly smoldering ember. You don’t think anyone in all the world has eyes the color of hazel he’s got. Something that should belong to some fiercely guarded precious stone, they glow, amber opal like, burnished in the setting sun’s golden glow.

“You okay?” His voice is very soft, and only for you.

You nod, chin tipping to your sternum, face flushed with so much unbearably pleased heat you’re unable to find your own. 

Tilting his head to get at your mouth, he kisses you long and soft and open mouthed, licking your tongue, tasting you completely. And when he pulls back he has that same look you feel on your own face—that same unbearable pleasure. Shocked wonder sprinkled into it.

Look at what we’ve done and together and how good it is—

A smile and then a laugh from both of you, giggling like school children into each other’s mouths, and you’ve always thought he has some strange effect of appearing all man one second and then smiling and boyish for the flash of a single moment the next. And you don’t think you understand how someone who’s been through so much can still laugh the way he does. You smooth your finger over the arch of his eyebrow, thumbing at the smile lines at the corners of his eyes. Gorgeously strong man, and you suppose, looking at the wider picture, his life here, Ellie and the boys and a whole full life, you understand it, just a little bit—all the ranch’d given him. He has so much here—centered by the land as its heart. 

You’ve always wanted to be just like him anyway, and finally, voice found—the feel of his heartbeat inside of you—it’s like finding a dream, “I’m okay,” you tell him. 

Chapter Text

The child sits outside her father’s office, waiting. 

Long curls drip frigid down her shivering back, white nightgown buttoned to the tip of her mother’s own chin—that likeness which will one day be the cause of all her troubles, though she does not yet know it—and the pink furry slippers which are her most favorite. They’re soft and they sparkle, and when she wears them, it’s like she’s a bunny. 

“He’ll be out soon, darling, and then we can put you to bed,” Nanny says from the seat beside her. She nods, pressing her small shoulders tightly to the back of the hard bench, wishing the woman silent so that she might better focus on the sound of the deep voice coming from behind the closed door. 

It is her father’s voice, and it is most familiar to her like this. 

From afar. 

The fingers she stares down at are still pink from the bath, and she twists them tightly in her lap, sitting very straight and very still, pressing her mouth together to keep all the sound and all the movement inside of herself silent and motionless so as to trick time into moving faster. She is young, only six years old, but she has learnt the strength of her own will already. How she might exert it with the right people to get what she wants—how with others, it means very little, if anything at all. 

Beside her, Nanny sighs a sound full of impatience, and this the child recognizes quite well. She doesn’t like it either, that they must always wait for him, that her whole life seems to be filled with waiting waiting waiting. She thinks that she hates waiting. She thinks that if she were a wild rabbit out in the purple mountains she wouldn’t ever have to wait for anyone or anything. And she knows that she would like to let it all out, the impatience, the yawn that trembles at her jaw as she clenches her teeth together until it hurts, the cry for him to hurry up because she doesn’t want to wait for him anymore. 

The door opens suddenly, and a man she doesn’t know strides out, papers tucked beneath his arm. The girl’s father is a businessman, and this is why he is so busy. He is also a rancher, this is why she does not come first.

 She is young, only six years old, but she has learnt the truth of this already.

Nanny has slid to the edge of the bench, her ankles crossed over one another, long fingered hands folded stiffly in her lap. She is breathing very slowly, her shoulders moving in up and down waves, and the girl knows she’s forcing herself to do this to stay calm. When the girl doesn’t do as she’s told, this is how Nanny breathes, too. 

Finally, her father’s heavy tread approaches the door, muffled by the thick rug in his office, the hard satin underside of the beautiful boots he wears. And then he’s there, after more than an hour of waiting past her bedtime, he moves past his daughter and the woman he pays to raise her as if they hardly exist—their wait inconsequential.

“Sir?” Nanny shoots up off the bench, voice soft but stern, like when she is ordering the child about in the school room. 

He is very frightening, her father. And the girl doesn’t think that she looks like him at all, which is why he doesn’t like her. If she was more like him, he would like her better. But she knows that if she is very quiet and very still that he can be nice, and so she waits without moving, until he looks at her. 

“We’ve come to say goodnight, Mr. Kelly.”

He sighs a long drawn out moment, a big breath as he’s a very big man with big nostrils that flare widely when he’s found the girl particularly annoying. 

Once, she’d tried to put her finger in his nose, to measure how much bigger it felt compared to when she put her finger in her own nostril. There was a great fuss after that, and a mighty spanking. She never tried to touch him like that ever again after.

She is a child who learns her lessons very well. 

“Yes, alright,” he says in his deep voice, and she does love the sound of it, even if it never sounds happy or laughing, even if it scares her, too, for she can always recognize when he’s come back home just by the sound of it rolling through the house. And when he comes to crouch before her, folding all the way down to look her right in the eyes, the little girl has to work hard as ever to make sure she remains very still and very quiet so as not to cry. 

“Have you been good for Nanny?”

“Yes, sir,” she nods. He never calls her Miss Maria as the girl is required to when they are in the school room, learning. Always simply, Nanny. 

“Bill tells me you’ve been doing well in your lessons. Soon you’ll be riding on your own. That will make me very pleased.”

“Yes, sir,” again. She wishes she could make her voice louder so that he might hear her better, but it will just not come. 

He sighs and his big nostrils flare again, and she knows he is displeased. She can never make herself sound in a way that will make him happy even though she tries as hard as she can. “I’m going away for a few weeks, but when I’m back, I’ll come watch you. How does that sound?”

And at this oh so terrible news, as hard as she tries to stifle the movement or the sound or the yawn or the cries or anything that might make him bothered in any way… well , she is still very young, only six years old, and she has not yet learnt how to control all the things he so intensely dislikes about her. 

“But you just came back, sir, and now you’re leaving again.” It comes out of her small child’s mouth a whine that grates, and yet, despite this, he is still kind for a moment longer.

“It’ll go by like that,” he snaps his big fingers, makes a big sound she has tried to replicate and cannot. 

“Please, don’t leave, daddy.” 

Now she will cry, now the kindness will start to go. 

“It won’t be that long, salamander.” 

A large hand wraps around her small shoulder, squeezing gently, she flinches and a fat tear rolls over her apple flushed cheek. It’s hard work, after all, holding yourself so still and so quiet when you are so little, and so finally, the stillness breaks, and she tucks her thumb into her warm mouth, sucking. 

He looks at her for another long moment, his hand falls away. She watches it carefully, steeling her small body for something bad. “That’s a filthy and disgusting habit. How many times do I have to tell you to knock it off?” He looks at Nanny with blame, and she says something low that the girl can no longer hear, she’s watching her slippers like a bunny again, thinking again how a bunny must surely never have to wait or cry over their fathers out there in the purple mountains. 

“Always with the goddamn sniveling, girl. Go to bed.” 

His voice is angry now. She sucks harder. She can no longer be still. He does not say goodbye.

You don’t see Joel for three whole days following your afternoon together.

It’s terrible.

On the lingering rays of the setting sun, a storm rolls in off the Tetons, and with it, trouble and interruptions. As the two of you help peel each other off the living room rug, damp and trembling and laughing like children, you stumble up the stairs together, the rain starting out soft and humid outside. A curtain of warm water falls from the skies as you step into the large, marbled shower stall in your bathroom, the rainfall spout pouring over your closely bent heads. 

You feel fragile and vulnerable in his hands, a turtle dove on a precarious ledge; like a girl again, watching him ramble about your father’s ranch, strong and far away and wholly untouchable, all while he washes soap from your hair. 

But now, the urgency of adulthood, of being a woman in his hands, not only a dove, rushes in, too. He touches you everywhere, fingers dragging through the soaked locks of your hair, braille mapped over the planes of your shoulders, down your sternum to palm the swell of your belly. So now, you’re woman and girl and dove, something fragile grown into its own strength, anchored here, yet still with the muscle memory of flight ready to take you away. If only because that’s what you’d always been used to before. The back of your eyes pinch with emotion, overwhelmed by the smolder of your heart, and you can’t believe it’s him, Joel, here, lifting your breast into his mouth to suckle at the peak, licking at the seam of your mouth and demanding entrance and the flavor of your tongue. 

His cock hangs heavy between his thick thighs, half hard, and if you weren’t fighting the silly knot of tears in your throat, you’d poke fun at the myth of middle aged men and unbelievable stamina. 

His wet lips slide across your burning cheek, your own moan trailing after him, chasing another kiss with the turn of your neck, all desperation, and his fingers catch over your bottom teeth, hooked Rainbow, pulling you open, pressing down on your tongue until you gag.  

“Gotta see if I’ll fit here too, baby,” he says against your ear, pressing you back to sit on the icy tiled bench. The steam of the water off his skin, the frigid hard beath your bottom and against your swollen cunt, you shiver all over until it hurts in your spine. His hand threads through the back of your hair, cupping and pulling, stretching you out so you’re wide open with his fingers still too thick and too deep in your mouth. You gag again, harder, thinking of before, when he forced his fingers far enough to make you vomit, eyes smarting at the memory of his rough helping. “Think it’ll do.” He’s teasing you with that half-cocked smirk like a boy’s. 

You’re sharing youth here, experience too. So much of one another being poured into the moment and so quickly that if you hadn’t known him for as long as you have, if you hadn’t been making your way to him with the hope of this for so long, it’d be entirely petrifying. 

He starts to stroke his length into full hardness, pulling your head forward, mouth open to take him onto your tongue. He’s heavy like he was in your cunt, but somehow even bigger, your jaw immediately prepares to ache with the stretch. Swiping it side to side on the flat and then sliding in, guiding you by your hair, showing you how he wants you to suck him. Close, he murmurs soft, good baby girl, when you purse your lips around his girth, holding at the back of your throat, instructing you to breathe long and slow through your nose, getting you used to him. 

He pulls back slowly, until you’ve only got the head to suckle on, your tongue sliding over it, the salty taste of his skin as his thumb brushes slowly along the edge of your jaw and then presses hard against the soft and giving underside of your chin, forcing you to open again, throat spasming convulsively. With his grip in your hair he tugs your head back again, and the two of you watch each other, his hazel bright eyes so intense it’s almost unbelievable that they hadn’t always looked at you like this. That you’d started all of this only a few nights ago with nothing but a half mad kiss you’d wished on for nearly half a life. 

You stick your tongue out flat and wide and begging, and he slides back in, holding you still as he pushes deep until his balls are pressed against your chin, rewarding himself with that first full bodied choking jerk from you, little tongue pressing against the base, throat cinching like a fist around the head.

He holds you there, letting you choke around him, and it’s still all so slow, so measured despite your racing heart and tears and spasming throat, wide wet eyes looking up at him—frightening, possessive want staring back down at you. Pulling back and pushing in again and again until you can’t take it anymore, jaw hinged too wide, little tits trembling with the puff of your breath until every other one is a gag and all you are is a wet, open throat. 

When he finally pulls back, and you’re still missing a belly full of come, you suck in a shaky breath, gagging frog sound in your throat, spit dripping off your chin that he smears down your throat, over your chest and nipples, pinching hard and stinging. You fall against his hip, swollen lips mouthing down to the fat head of his cock, still hungry for your treat, his fist slides down the spit slicked length, following you; a string of drool and pre-come keeping the two of you connected when you yank against the commanding grip in your hair, nuzzling like a puppy, whine at the back of your throat as he pushes it hot and heavy against your sticky cheek, smacks you with it a little. 

“Good girl. My good baby girl,” he laughs tenderly, and he’s so endeared by you, you can feel it in his eyes and hear it in his smile, that something hot and agonizing pulses through your heart.

When you step out of your shower cocoon together, the rain is a violent gust now, shaking the house on its foundation, windows rattling in their frames. He wraps you in a large fluffy white towel, twisting a second one in your hair, flushed sensitive skin trembling under his touch. His kiss is slow and lazy, all tongue and care as you fall together against the silk duvet, pulling you into himself as his heavy weight settles over you, drawing your thigh over his hip, nothing but cotton and damp dew separating the two of you. You need to make him come again, his fingers sneaking between your thighs to play in his leaking spend—when someone bangs urgently on the door downstairs. 

On his drive in from Jackson, Jesse had come across a large chunk of the northernmost fence that had been taken out by the strong winds and lashing rain. Cattle were already spilling out onto the highway when he’d passed, meandering into the adjoining land owned by the park. 

Ellie and Dina had been called back in from town, and they’d all had to ride up and over the mountain to herd the escaped cattle and make repairs to the fence—and had left you all alone and without him and all the rest of them, too.

It had been a long and quiet three days, just you and Dina, which had made you very worried in a very concerning way, this sudden and immediate melancholy that had fallen over you and the whole house without him. The reality that the ranch is wrong, the house is wrong, you are wrong in it, without Joel Miller here to roam and tend the land. That you may have traveled far and wide, tasted all the flavors and touched all the colors of the rainbow, done all the things your imagination might’ve conjured, but outside of this place there existed not even a fraction of what these people had built here together—a family born at the center of a green valley. 

And so there’s a part of you now, like a coward, trying to twist away from the reality that you’re still just that girl, in some ways so young, so unsure, sitting outside your father’s office with the desperate need to be paid attention to, to be remembered. 

Still that desperate child turned woman, asking yourself why you’d felt you needed Joel here that morning you’d arrived to meet your last dead parent. Asking yourself why you’d sent yourself into an anger fueled bender when you’d arrived to find him missing. 

He isn’t your kin. Never your confidant. In the past, there was not even that closeness of previously shared intimacy or comfort between the two of you. He’d been, for all intents and purposes, a stranger to you as a child in all the ways that counted save for those you’d conjured up in your imagination. 

But perhaps that’s the thing. In your own imaginary way, Joel is familiar, as part of the ranch as the rock of the mountain, the house in which your mother had birthed you, or even your father, who’d loved this place more than he’d ever loved anything except his wife, he who’d also died here; all of them a history of monuments that make up the miasma of what this place really is. The annals of their lives, so closely knit with the land itself that there can be no separating one from the other, and Joel is a part of it all.

Maybe it’s that, in some ways, you feel he has more of a right to be here than you do. That you need him here to remind you that you belong, too. 

That you’d needed the reassurance of his approval here when you’d come to claim the place as your own once and for all. 

And you need him now, now that he’d so made you a part of himself in much the same way, in nothing but a single afternoon. 

But most obvious of all, during their days away protecting and caring for your birthright, what becomes clear to you is that after all these years, they had all very much become your family, too: Ellie, Dina, Jesse, Frank and Bill and Tommy. 

Joel. 

It is almost a terrible moment of enlightenment, that realization of how much you truly have to lose now. 

On the third day of his absence, the sky blooms a clear and startling blue, and in the early afternoon, you hear the commotion of the team making their valiant return. The slamming of truck doors and trailer gates, shouted orders and horses sputtering at the indignation of being kept from home and at work for so many days. 

There’s a single bated-breath-moment of shy hesitancy, a will-he-won’t-he sort of doubt ( want to see me want to do it again want me) and then you’re chasing down the stairs and after more of that lightning in a bottle feeling, out the front door in search of him. 

Chaos bubbles in the yard, hands lifting and hauling supplies and tools from the beds of trucks and the backs of trailers, horses being led to and fro, Dina and Ellie having a shameless snog in the shadow of her open truck door. Your eyes flit from person to person, searching the mess of homesick excitement for his height and breadth. 

It’s only been two and a half days, really, after so many years dreaming of him, but anyways—you missed him. Really, truly missed him.

From the corner of your eye you finally catch sight of him stepping out of the dark shade of the barn, towering above everyone around him. He’s got that sweat stained brown hat pulled low over his brow, edges curled with overuse. His hair is long enough it curls slightly over the back of his collar, and his eyes are hidden from you in the hat’s protective shade, but by the swirl of your belly and the shiver across your skin, you think he finds you at the same time as you do him. Something magnetic. You don’t think you can even feel your foot still connected to your body when you take a step down off the front steps, stumbling over the gravel of the drive that digs uncomfortably into the soles of your feet through the house slippers you’d forgotten to change out of —when suddenly, you recognize the person standing next to him, smiling up at him as she glows bright and lovely. 

The veterinarian, Tess. 

You’re thankful for the absentminded hand trailing behind you, still anchoring you to the stability of the step’s railing, when you register the swollen round of her heavily pregnant belly, a careful hand cupped protectively around the underside, as she rests her other palm against Joel’s arm. 

Suddenly the gravel digging into your slippers becomes too painful to ignore, almost overwhelming, you take a frightened step back. 

He would never. But—

At one time, they were together, and her hand on his arm has now moved to his chest, a show of comfort and intimacy between them, and she’s laughing, her long hair woven back into a neat braid, swinging with the movement of her mirth. She looks really beautiful, and you’re again nothing more than the little girl in her slippers waiting for a man that will not come to you. 

He would never. Right?

Ellie calls your name—you take another retreating step up the stairs, indecision and insecurity sloshing in your belly—bull sprinting towards you, her lithe, strong body knocking your ribs painfully into the railing, her hands yanking on your hair, babbling excitedly and Dina’s voice from behind, telling her she’s worse than the wrangled cattle. Over Ellie’s shoulder and past Dina’s kind gaze, Joel bends low towards Tess, arm around her shoulders as he steers her towards the three of you congregated on the steps. You feel as you did on that bench outside his office for all those years, waiting for a man to find time to dole out your verdict: kindness or cruelty, a goodbye or worse. 

He’s saying something to her still, speaking close into her ear and guiding her buoyant form carefully through the busy yard full of cowboys and animals and danger, and you can see his eyes now as they flit to you, looking so cold and guarded. 

There’s no Nanny here to shield you from the worst of it now. 

When they finally reach you, Tess embraces both Dina and Ellie with all the warmth of people who’ve worked and laughed and grown together for years. You stand as still and as quiet as you can possibly make yourself. You have all the practice in the world waiting for your turn to be acknowledged, and this is a terrible and small feeling which no grown woman should have to subject herself to. And yet, still, you can’t seem to escape the child. 

He’s watching you, you can feel him, hungry or angry maybe—something else. But you can’t tell now—can’t focus on anything but your stillness and waiting your turn until Ellie finally turns to reintroduce Tess to the adult version of you. 

“The new Kelly,” Tess says with easy warmth and an even easier smile, offering you her palm for a strong handshake. Everything about her is so natural, earthen or real. Nothing at all put upon. This is a woman who, whatever the truth of it may actually be, gives every appearance of having always known herself, never had doubts, never had to claw in the grime and gutter for her truth or whatever scraps of self best fit her at the time. 

“Tess. It’s nice to see you again,” you say as cool and magnanimous as you can muster yourself to be. Ignoring the lurch of nausea being referred to as the Kelly brings on. 

“I was sorry to hear about your father. He gave me work for a long time, and I was always grateful for it.” Something you’d never understood about your father, how he collected gratitude easy as pennies. It was perhaps his greatest talent—getting all of them to eat out of the palm of his hand. 

“Thank you. I appreciate it, and I hope we’ll continue that work going forward. I wouldn’t like anything integral to change for the ranch now. Anything else, that is.” Your voice comes out robotic, businesslike, and she pauses, her head cocking to the side, that easy smile still plastered on her smooth, beautiful face. In your peripheral, you see Ellie move closer to Joel, whispering something in his ear, the click click of Dina chewing on her fingernails. 

“Actually,” Tess says, “If you have a minute, I’d like for us to talk.”

Your toes flex in your slippers, the three of them hold their breath, Tess oblivious to their doubt of you, and the imaginary ticking time bomb sound chips away at your mind, demeaning you further. What do they expect? For you to throw a fit? The lover (—ex lover?) of the man you’ve had sex with once, come here to test you with some potentially incriminating evidence smuggled beneath her t-shirt. And here they are, suddenly orbiting you as if you’ve ever been like him —that explosive anger, that rage, that ability to humiliate and cause fear and insult. 

You’ve never had a temper like that . It’s insulting they’d act otherwise. 

“Give us a second.” You turn to Dina, it isn’t a question. 

One moment to the next, you’re still in your slippers, but you’re not that waiting child any longer. You remember yourself, and you’re the head of the ranch and all that comes with it now. This is yours. And you aren’t your father. And they’ll pretend at respect, whether they feel it or not because it’s your due after the pound of flesh you’d offered up to this place in your childhood. 

How does one stay ambitious and brave and wild and still become a grown woman? 

How does a girl stand on her own two feet and become an adult when she’s never felt any of those things to begin with?

How does one grapple with the terror of their childhood and succeed at a normal and full life?

The girls go and you ponder your existential dread in the face of a woman who seems to have it all figured out. 

Joel clears his throat, shifting uncomfortably. “You know, I can—”

“We just gotta talk some shop, Texas . We’ll be okay—just a minute,” Tess tells him. Assertive, but with a wink, and she never loses that grin which, if she wasn’t so damn likable, would be annoying as hell. 

You struggle to swallow your cringe. It’s easy to picture the two of them together, how they’d look, how they’d be. Good looking and capable, strong, confident personalities. 

You finally meet his eyes, they offer you nothing, of course, and with a dip of your chin, you give him his leave. He only goes a few paces away from the bottom step of the deck, unwilling to stray too far from the two of you. 

“Oz was a difficult man. You’re not really anything like him, are you?”

Oz. It’s funny to hear the terror of your father referred to so casually. 

“The opposite has never been insinuated. But I can be pretty difficult when I want to be, too,” you say, still watching Joel watch you. 

If you were anything like your father, you’d take her assessment as an insult. 

Instead, you meet her appraising gaze as steady as you can.

“ Ah— ” she hums,“Sure, yeah,” then laughs. “Can see it in the way you carry yourself. If anything, he was… a force.” 

“He was that.”

You don’t feel now that you can give her too much. Like if you open your mouth, give her more words than necessary, she’ll know everything there is to know about you and what has gone on here. She’s got that sort of look about her, those sort of eyes. Already measured you against your father and found you lacking. 

Even if she didn’t mean it badly, the comparison stings.

“I’d like things to continue on as they’ve been so far, also,” she continues. “Anything you need around here, you call our team. We’ll be here. I’d like to say nothing will change,” and at this she looks down at her bulging belly, sweeping a loving hand over it, “But…” she clicks her tongue ruefully, smile changing to something softer, sincere in a more intimate way. “Things are about to get a little different for me here now pretty soon.” She looks back to you, “My husband’ll be taking over things, just for a few months. He trained at Davis, and I’ll send over his CV so you can take a look at it yourself. Talk to the boys and Joel, they know him well now. If you’d like, my assistant can get with Dina—the three of us can meet and talk over the next few months and what the ranch’ll need from us for the rest of the year up into calving season. I’d rather we have a solid plan before everything gets too crazy for us.”

There’s something like vertigo swooping between your ears, ship at sea sort of unmoored. You are so silly. It’s humiliating. So insecure in ways you have no business being. Husband, of course.

“Does that sound okay to you?” She presses.

“Sure— I mean… yes. Yes, that sounds great. I look forward to it. Just give Dina a call.”

“I hope the ranch won’t forget about me while I’m out of commission. The Kelly has always been a special place to me.” There’s so much genuine sincerity in her voice. You wonder if Joel is part of that sentiment. 

“We’ll be waiting for you, Tess. Don’t worry about that.” 

She flushes slightly, looking down at the hand on her stomach again. “Thank you. I appreciate that. This is difficult for me, as happy as I am about it all. Giving myself over to something that’s so out of my control.”

You nod in understanding. “I didn’t know you’d gotten married. Congratulations to you and your husband.” You flush deep and embarrassed in return, at your initial assumption, but she makes nothing of whatever fucked up expression you know you’ve got your face screwed into. You don’t want her to know how you feel about Joel, to suspect—this woman who’d had him in her own unique and mysterious way for such a long time. Who shares history and a friendship with him now, admiration and respect and laughter. 

“Yeah, well…” She chuckles ruefully at this, turning now to glance surreptitiously at the still brooding Joel pacing between Frank and Tommy as they talk at him.  “It happened quick. I wanted things I wasn’t going to find other places. Had to go out and get them for myself—you know?”

“Sure,” you blink once, “Of course.” But her words fill you with more of that nauseating vertigo. Afraid again, that you’re still that child waiting for something that will never come. That you too, are now looking for something in the same wrong place.

He watches your profile closely through your exchange with Tess. Since Ellie had approached you, really—always rough housing when she shouldn’t be, knocking you in the ribs. The way you grip the deck’s bannister, your knuckles white with strain and the flush in your throat and cheeks, the lift of your brow. You smile often, but not easily. He can tell they cost you something or that you have to remind yourself to respond the way you’re expected to. 

He’d seen it on your face, what you’d assumed about Tess. 

The sun is strong against the back of his neck, and there’s a line of sweat pouring down his spine, and he wants to go to you, make sure you’re okay and apologize for the three days and the doubt and not being here when he knows you need him. 

When it seems Tess is finally saying her goodbye’s, he’s unable to extricate himself from Tommy and Frank’s bitching about the work yet to be done for the rest of the afternoon without having to tell them outright to fuck off. Tess makes her slow way down the steps of the house, her swollen gait bobbing unsteadily from side to side, and he watches as you head around the opposite end of the house, gunning for the back door and avoiding him , he knows. He knows. 

“How’s it goin’, Texas?” Tess chirps brightly, He reaches beneath her elbow to lead her back to her truck, Frank there already, pulling the door open for her. 

“It’s goin’ well, Tess. You look good, honey. You feel good?”

“Great. Never better.”

“That’s good. I’m glad.” And he means it. He’d never been able to give her what she wanted, as hard as he’d tried, and he’d been damn happy for her when she’d found it anyways. “Remind me when she’s joinin’ us?” 

“Ah, end of August.” She’s happier now than she ever looked when she’d been fooling around with him, and it makes Joel glad to know it’d all ended up as it was meant to. He looks back up at the big house, second to last window on the far left end where he knows your room is. 

“Real soon now.”

“Not soon enough. Her daddy’s just as restless as she is for it to be time.”

“I’ll bet. I’m glad,” he says again, helping her up into the truck as she huffs and puffs. Frank says his goodbyes and Joel shuts her door for her, leaning against the open window. “Happy?” He asks his friend. 

The smile on her face tells him all he needs to know. “I am.”

“That’s good.” A look passes between them, that of two people who know too much about each other, but perhaps, not the most important things they should’ve known after it was all said and done. And yet there’s nothing bittersweet about what lives between them. It’s all as it should be.

“What about you? You happy?”

He has to force himself not to look at that window again. 

“Yeah, I’m happy.” She reaches for his cheek, clucking at him like she might not believe him. But how to tell her that this time it really is true, without giving away his too precious secret? 

“Good. You deserve it, Joel.” 

The curious part is, he thinks he might really believe her.

As Tess’s truck pulls slowly down the long drive, he looks back at that window, thinking of the other afternoon in the sun drenched family room. The wet stretched lycra tight across your sun burnished skin, all reds and pinks and a grotesque splatter of girl shaped desire that had him clawing at the brink of madness. Afraid he’d hurt you, lose his mind so entirely he’d forget how delicate you can be made in his hands—that scared look in your eyes, that step back when you’d seen Tess—but then he remembers the tilt of your hips taking him inside your body and the strength in your thighs grounding him, the steady look in your gaze telling him that you’re okay and reminding him of all your fire inside—that you have always been stronger and more resilient than he could ever even think to be. 

A woman full of strength.

You are a thing to be loved. 

He follows you, slipping through the unlocked back door, hunting through the cool, quiet shadows of the sun speared halls of your home. 

When he finds your sounds of movement at the back of the house, in your father’s study, he waits silent and still by the door, heart beating a thunder drum in his chest as he listens to your steps approach and pulling you blindly into himself when you cross the threshold. Banding his arms around your back, knees bent to get at your level and seal his mouth over yours. 

Three days is too long a time, and Joel is a starving man. 

You give one appalled squeak before your head is falling back on your neck, opening so sweetly for him, letting him lap at your tongue and sip at your flavor. 

“You were thinkin’ strange thoughts out there,” he says against your mouth, and you huff against him, opening to protest, but he kisses you again. Kisses you stupid, knees straightening to pull you up with him, leaving your feet dangling between his spread cowboy boots, the soft thump of a slipper sliding off your foot. 

“Don’t lie, little liar.” He licks at your jaw, reaches down to squeeze the full of your sweet ass. “Did you miss me?” A kiss to your pulse point now and you moan so pretty for him, all soft and breathy, like you want him to fuck you right here, take you into your father’s study and have you slick and full of come as quick as he can get you. 

“Yes,” you moan, tilting your head further back to give him more territory to kiss. 

He pulls back to look at your eyes, cheeks flushed and mouth swollen. He drags his hand gently over the spot of your Ellie-battered-ribs. There is nothing about you that Joel wouldn’t notice. Gorgeous fucking thing, he wants to ruin you. He’s going to ruin you for every other man ever. Squeezing your cheeks together, forcing your mouth into a pout, say it, he orders—feral, desperate, missing you, too. 

“I missed you, Joel.”

Joel. He groans at the sound of it, kisses you again—more, harder, so you know that he really means it.

Hours later, when the sun has set, he finally makes his way into the quiet of his cabin, wondering if it’s logistically more polite to bring his toothbrush over with him so that he can have fresh breath in the morning or simply pray on the effectiveness of toothpaste and a finger, worrying whether you’ll be asleep already, if you’ve had dinner or if he should plan for that, too. He’s pulled from his fretting by the sight of your coat—the worn brown suede one you love that hits just below your knees, light enough for the cool summer evenings—hung over the hook by his door. He knows it’s lined on the inside with cheetah printed silk, so like you, and that the label says Dolce & Gabbana. He’d peeked at it the other morning, draped over the breakfast bar in the big house, tested the weight of it. Made in Italy , it says on the label. A fancy thing. Details he has no business searching for or obsessing over, but that he searches for and obsesses over nonetheless. 

He blinks at the well worn coat, unable—only for a second—to understand what it is it’s doing here in his house. 

But in the kitchen, there’s a cupboard left slightly ajar, his books on the coffee table misaligned and out of the order in which he’d left them, his mail rifled through, a lone envelope spilled onto the rug beneath. His second set of boots kicked over to make space for a much smaller pair. He’s sure if he were to open his fridge, he’d find the contents of it picked over, as well. 

It would seem that a little intruder has come to make herself at home in his space. And when he peeks through the open door of his bedroom, the proof of it is in the shape of a small lump curled in on itself at the head of his bed. 

He clears his throat and two too large eyes peek out over the edge of his dark comforter, challenging, daring him to question your presence here.

There’s also something softly vulnerable there, which he takes careful note of. 

Crossing his arms over his still sweaty chest, he leans against the door appreciating the sight of you snuggled up in his bed. Something like giddiness eats away at his heart, and he chews on his cheek to keep a shit-eating grin from spreading across his face. The two of you stare each other down, waiting to see who breaks first. 

It’s him. 

Of course.

At the soft sound you let out, some croon that beckons him forward, he pushes away from the doorframe, crossing the room to loom over you as you wiggle deeper into his bed. Your scent fucks with his head. Makes him feel just this close to unhinged. His sheets will smell like you for days now. Sweet, sultry. God-like. He’s about to become a pious man. 

Bending over you, he holds himself anchored with one hand gripped around the wooden slat of his headboard and slowly pulls the edge of the blanket covering you, down. Revealing for himself the sweet little morsel of a gift that’s come to plant itself in his bed so nicely. You’ve wrapped yourself in something lacy and pale for him, some sort of spaghetti-strapped confection seemingly made out of sugar—his gut goes hot and heavy. 

And from below, you take him in, gaze roving over his face and arms while he holds himself up and on display. Your hand comes up to ghost soft as petal fingertips over the bulge of his bicep, and he growls some hungry sound that he scares himself with. 

You turn him into something he’s never been before. 

A flush creeps down your throat to flood your chest, and he wants to follow it to your breasts. See if he can make you go as red and hot all over as he’s learned your sweet little nipples can go. 

“Hi.”

He shakes his head down at such temptation. No man is this strong. “I gotta wash up before I touch you, darlin’. I’m filthy.”

You shake your head back at him, whining softly in your throat, writhing in his sheets, knee hitching higher to push the covers down and reveal more of yourself to him—matching panties and soft, bare thighs, Jesus —fucking siren girl all for him. His mouth waters. Your fingertips ghost down his chest, catching lightly at the hem of his t-shirt, tugging gently, making his stomach swoop. 

“No. Come, ” you order. It’s all a seduction.

But he’s been hauling and riding and sweating all day. He needs to scrub the two inch layer of filth from his skin before he can touch something this perfect. Clutching at the headboard he lets himself lean further over you, stretching the tense muscles of his back, sucking at your mouth once, long and hard, dragging his tongue wet and lewd across your cheek before he’s groaning, heaving himself up and pulling his shirt up over the back of his head to jump in the shower, strict about not turning back to look at you lest he lose himself to your call. 

In the steamed mirror once he’s done, he takes in the color of his eyes and doesn’t recognize the way they stare back at him. Like a boy discovering a woman for the first time in his life, he’s never felt like this before. It’s frightening, intoxicating.

When he steps back out into the bedroom, dragging a towel through his wet hair, over his chest and sensitive groin, you’ve flopped over, covers kicked down to the foot of the bed so he can see the sheer lace of your panties disappear between your cheeks. Scrolling on your phone with your feet kicked up in the air, swinging in a slow motion that hypnotizes. He’s going to wrap both fists around your ankles and hold you forcibly open, watch you get wetter and wetter and more swollen until neither one of you can take the waiting any longer. He’s going to drag it out until it’s mean. He’s going to make it count. 

His cock is so hard that a delicious heat has begun to pool in his abdomen, seeping down into his pelvis. He’s heavy between his legs. 

Dropping the towel to the floor, he catches a swinging ankle, tugging roughly to flip you over and yank you down towards himself. Bracing one knee to the edge of the bed, he leans over, reaching for your phone and tosses it over his shoulder carelessly. The frown you give him is mighty, and he laughs at you. He feels—he can’t say exactly. A little unhinged, perhaps. Out of control. Like he needs to exert some sort of force here. Expel that jittering energy he’s been filled with the past three days which distracted him from his ride and his work, from wrangling cattle  and leading his men. That feeling that made him desperate to run back here into your arms. 

You give him a peevish, suspicious look, tapping one perfectly manicured finger against the tip of your chin, and ask, “Are you JoelMiller81?” 

“Don’t know what that means,” he gruffs, running his hands over the silk and lace of the little scrap you’ve got on, feeling the hard peaks of your nipples against his palms. His callouses catch and snag, and he has the passing thought that he might be too rough, too nasty, to handle something so fine, but then settles on the reality that he doesn’t really give a fuck if he is. 

You want him.

You want him. And that’s all that matters, really, you getting what you want. The thought of being the one that gives it to you fills him with a feral sort of satisfaction.

“Liar. Liar liar pants on fire.”

“Don’t know what that means neither.” He bends to bite your pretty little tit through the lace. Hard. 

“ Ow! ” You try to shove him away. “Why’d you like my picture a bunch of times, huh?”

“Didn’t.” 

He pushes your knees up around his waist, taking your wrist and pinning it to the mattress by your hip, trapping it with his knee. His heavily hanging cock brushes wetly against the soft inside of your thigh, sending a shiver down his spine, unable to help the soft moan he lets out. He’s so fucking turned on for you. So hard. The head, red and swollen and throbbing a leak of precum with every beat of his heart. 

“Yes, you did. One of my ass. Like a hundred times.” 

He pulls back to glare at you, and you laugh in his face, lovely and bright as a firefly. 

“Got no idea what you’re talkin’ ‘bout. But if I did , I’d say you got no business showin’ what’s mine to the whole internet.” Thirty-seven thousand fuckin’ people, he grumbles under his breath, fuckin’ ridiculous. 

You gasp, affronted, “ Yours?” Glaring back just as hotly. 

You push yourself up on your elbows, catching him by the mouth with your palm to shove his big head away. He nips at the soft flesh, grunting an affirmative. 

“Excuse me!” You drag the vowels out all sassy, all provoking. It makes him leak. Makes him want to pick a hundred fights just to enjoy the making up afterwards. 

“You heard me.” He kneels back between your legs and pulls your little panties down your long legs. 

“I do what I want.”

“Sure, baby.” 

He listens to the click of your teeth, a whine in the back of your throat. Upset ‘cause he’s not taking your bait. “Are you gonna be mean?” You pout. 

Joel pauses, as if to consider. “Yeah,” he says eventually with mock regret and a sigh.

You heave a big, long breath. “ Oh , alright,” and let yourself flop back onto the mattress, arms stretching back up over your head. 

He can’t help his chuckle. You really do charm his socks off. 

“How was the rest of your day?” You ask as he settles between your thighs. 

“Bad.”

First, he presses a soft kiss to the fleshy uppermost part of your mons, dipping his tongue out just a tiny bit to taste the salty sweet skin there, but not far out enough to taste you where you really want him. 

“Oh?” —A little moan— “Why’s that?”

“Because.”

“Because what ?” Your tone dips into a whine. 

He leans up on his elbows to get a good look at your face. “Because I can’t seem to stop thinking about this ,” he hisses, “And it’s damn difficult to tend horses and wrangle cowboys when you’ve got half an erection. That’s why. Any more questions?”

“No. That’s it. You can continue.” Voice all fucking prim and proper. 

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” you sass back, digging your heel into his shoulder. 

“Fucking brat.” Now, he kisses you full on, tongue dipping shallowly between your slit for a better taste. He takes a drop of your dew into his mouth and rubs it against his palate, savoring the taste.

“Yes. And ?” It’s all a moaning, fluttery sigh now. 

His hands splay wide, sliding up the underside of your thighs to push you open by the back of the knees, listening to the sticky pop of your lips spreading. 

“Oh my God, ” you moan. “So embarrassing.” Covering your hot face with your arms. 

“Fucking hot,” he groans, going in again, licking into your soft, wet cunt. He comes to the crest of your sex, your clit hot and slippery, suckling at it in quick pulses. Keeping the force of it light enough to not overwhelm you too quickly. He turns his head to deepen his angle, his tongue pulsing against your opening, lapping and lapping, coaxing the little hole to soften for him. Prepping it to take him. He spends a long time there, ignoring your clit, licking around the soft folds, everywhere but where you really need him.

His stomach is hot, his cock full, and he lets himself settle more heavily against the bed, pressing his aching length roughly into the edge of the mattress to relieve the pressure, rutting there slowly. You let out a twisting sob when he finally goes back to focus on your clit, circling his tongue lightly, round and round, and then opening his mouth wide to drag his bottom teeth ever so gently over the swollen nub, watching your reaction intently the entire time. Your face scrunches, a sheen of sweat blooming, all the fine muscles spasming frantically, and all at once, he can feel your cunt pulsing, readying for orgasm against his tongue, as you try to twist away, back of your knee sliding over his face. 

He holds you down more firmly, pressing a large palm low to your belly, his fingers on your clit, and spears his tongue into your sex, giving you something to bear down on. This is agony, watching you come for him. He needs to fuck you.  

God. “Thought about this all fuckin’ day, baby.” He slurps loudly, lewdly. “Your sweet little pussy, it’s fucking perfect. Made for me.”

You sob into the bunched sheets, hiding your face while you grind against his face. 

Pressing kisses along the slick curve of your soaked sex once you’ve finished, you hiccup above his head, carding your fingers through his hair compulsively, scratching at his scalp, tugging him upwards. 

“You’re too good at that,” you sniffle. “It’s annoying.”

He grunts, kissing his way over your belly, scraping his teeth along easily torn skin, tasting your smeared come there. He settles at your breasts, and takes his sweet time giving them both his teeth and attention until they’re swollen and painful. Rubbing the grey scruff of his beard against the small mounds, abrading your sensitive skin. Flushed little nipples like dark, overripe raspberries for him to suck on even harder, chafed and raw from his rough handling. He pinches and tugs at them, letting his weight go heavy and melting over your frame, suffocated into the bed, his cock wedged between your swollen sex, letting you feel his solid heft there. Every so often it slides against you with his movements, when his mouth moves from breast to breast, but you’re so dripping wet that there’s hardly any friction, and it makes you cry. Which in turn, makes him pleased, and even harder. 

Curiously, you don’t beg him to fuck you while he tortures your poor tits. He thinks that you know that eventually, he’ll give you exactly what you need. That he has a certainty of the steps the two of you need to take here tonight, that he knows entirely what it is he needs to do to get you there, and how that stops you from rushing him. This thing, it’s a little something like trust. 

That unsettled feeling from before, the jittering energy, eventually it melts away. And Joel is left feeling so steady, so sure of what the two of you are doing here, how he has to handle you. It just feels so right. 

When he eventually lets your breasts rest, he kisses your mouth, slow and intimate and patient. Wet lips sliding against wet lips, sucking on the top one that’s just a little fuller than the bottom, licking the tears from your face, mouthing at your cheekbones, nipping at your chin.

“Why you cryin’, baby?”

“Don’t know,” you mumble. “I’m emotional. M’sorry.”

“Nothin’ to apologize for.” He brackets your skull between his palms, gently tracing the sensitive shells of your small ears with his thumbs and then smoothing over the soft skin of your under-jaw to tilt your chin up to get a good look at you. “You gorgeous thing, you don’t have anything to apologize to me for. Never. You cry if you need to.” 

You nod, turning your face into his palm to nuzzle there.

“You feel good, though? I’m makin’ you feel good?”

“Yes, Joel. Yes, I feel so good.” Your voice is soft, wispy. He imagines he can see the words leaving your parted lips like smoke, and your eyelids sit low and heavy, like you’re drunk on him. 

When he finally pulls back, you look at him with such deep and moving trust, kneeling between your thighs. He feels a little shaken by it. There’s a slight vacancy in your gaze, a haziness, like you’ve gone deep inside your mind with what he’s done to you, but it’s a comfortable, secure sort of thing. You trust him enough to let him make all the decisions here in this bed while you lay limp and boneless beneath him. 

“You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful,” he says, low. 

His hands smooth over your breasts, your sticky belly, gripping your hips to tug you closer. 

“Not as beautiful as you,” you say to him, and you’re like a heartbreak. The way you look, the way you speak to him. If it were possible, Joel thinks he’d be able to physically feel the motion of his heart splitting in two for you right now. 

He stops moving, hands resting on your spread knees, your body open and vulnerable to him. 

“It’s true,” you say again at the look on his face. His heart throbs in his chest like agony. 

“Stop.” His face goes hot with embarrassment.

“You are.” Your fingers smooth up your thighs, coming to rest on top of his own hands. “You're so beautiful to me. You always have been.”

His gaze falls, unable, for a moment, to bear the look of honest love in your eyes. It’s so much. He doesn’t know if he could ever deserve a thing like this. A man could work for a hundred years and never live up to a woman like you. Between your bodies, your sexes are flushed against each other. Your cunt, wet and puffy with his erection resting against it. It’s the most erotic sight Joel’s ever seen. 

And you’re telling him these things, being so honest, so vulnerable, while he sits between your thighs with this violent lust he wants to use against your body, and it makes him feel guilty and starved and maybe even a little bit in love with you, too. Maybe he’s losing his mind. How could you ever look at him and not see the broken thing? How will he ever be able to keep you when he wants to do so much to you? How will he ever convince you to let him? What could a thing like him ever give to the girl who already has everything?

“I’m old,” he says and feels it. 

“I like you like that.” 

“You’re crazy.”

“You like me like that, too.”

Your fingers flex over his own, and when he feels brave enough to look at you again, you’re still laughing, still looking at him with all that trust. Still choosing him. 

“I’m gonna fuck you now.”

You only nod, eyes fluttering shut, soft smile across your mouth. A tear slides back over your temple into your hairline, and he can almost see it turn to steam against your burning face. There’s a weighted hunger in Joel’s belly. Something that’s curious to see how far he can take the both of you. He wants that trust to strain, and then he wants to know both you and himself well enough to pull back before it snaps. 

When he turns you over this time, his movements are gentle, careful. He presses you down on your belly, keeping your elbows braced beneath you and kisses down your back, across the wings of your shoulders. He’s even more careful when he pulls your tank top away, his fingers brushing the softness of your raw breasts. 

Settling on widened knees, he pushes your thighs open, tugs your hips up, up, so that your spine is a curve, pressing your head down to rest your cheek against the sheets.

“Ready?” He asks low. 

You hum, that smile still spread across your mouth, and he can’t help but lean forward to kiss at it. When you arch deeper, chasing his lips to deepen the kiss, he can feel your slick cunt hot on his stomach, smearing there. His cock hangs long and heavy between your spread thighs, brushing your knee. 

“Easy. Easy,” he murmurs. “Don’t get too excited. Let me—” 

Petting the crown of your head, he leans backward, slowly dragging his palm from your head down your spine to grip your ass, spreading you apart. Taking himself in hand, he slicks his head against the little leaking hole, continuing his slow caress against the base of your spine, intermittently pressing his thumb against your tailbone to keep you present and aware. 

With an even greater care than he had the first time he fucked you three days ago, he works his cock into you. It’s slow, the wide head of his shaft easing inside little by little, deeper and deeper, with nothing but assurances from him, you can take it, you’re so pretty like this, while you gasp and fuss. At a certain point, his wait for you to adjust to the too large fit makes you forget yourself and you try to shove back onto him, trying to impale yourself forcefully, and he’s forced to spank you hard and stinging. 

He clicks his tongue at you, “Nuh-uh, no whining.”

Tucking his hand under your belly, soft and giving, he pulls you up a little, knees sliding wider, making room until he’s fully seated inside of you. He goes still then, holding himself deep and pulsing, feeling the walls of your cunt shiver and contract around him. 

He wonders how long it’d take for you to come around him, stuffed full of his unmoving cock like this. Reckons it’d be pretty quick by the way your desperate pussy’s already trying to milk the spend right out of him. 

“You feel me in your belly right here?” He coos gently, caressing your stomach. 

The sound you respond with then is more of a loud yowl when he presses down firmly to feel his cock tucked deep in there. 

Eventually, the wait gets to be too much for him, too. Getting you there in short shoves and grinds, he fucks you through it when you come for the first time, chasing the milking grip of your cunt with those same controlled shoves. But it’s so good, so wet and hot that his tightly leashed control slips. He spanks you again for that, several times, actually. Until your ass is pink and burning. 

His breathing’s gone rough, hot and bullish, and he can feel himself pouring sweat, his skin burning, too. 

“Gonna give it to you harder now.”

And you’re so good, his pretty little mess, that you do say, “Please, m’ready for it,” so confidently, if a little slurred. 

You’re deep down in there, he’s gotten you there, and he feels a sick burst of pride and pleasure to see how well you’re doing for him, how well you give over this perfect cunt for fucking. 

Through gritted teeth, he orders, “Say thank you, daddy.”

And again, because you’re perfect, “ Thank you, daddy ,” you obey.

He doesn’t even really know where it comes from, has never been a place he’s gone to before. But it’s perversely right in this moment with you. 

His hips gain momentum, nudging against your cervix again, again. He needs to move, to go hard and rough, but this is only the second time you’ve taken him, you’re not ready yet. He knows you won’t be able to take this much of him for long, can tell by the tensing of your stomach beneath his palm, the way you grip two of his fingers where he grips your hip, and the breathless whining gasp on every thrust inside. Your little cunt is just too tight to accommodate so much cock, your body simply doesn’t have room for it. 

Bracketing his hand around his impaling cock, his thumb and index finger make a warning point between your ass and his hip to keep himself from bottoming out. But anyways, he’s just on the edge of too rough, can see that warning line where your little body won’t be able to take much more, the slightly pained hiccupping sounds you’re making, but God, God…the way you’re milking at the cock buried deep inside, tightening around him while he watches himself part you, your walls clinging, the sticky shine of your come and the filmy white trail you leave behind every time he pulls out. His balls slap wetly against your clit he knows must be so swollen by now. The sounds the two of you make together. His big cock fucking in and out of your wet cunt, so soaked and open for him.

It’s all so fucking intoxicating.

He keeps shoving and shoving against that spot, and it’s so deep, your inner thighs are shaking from the strain of how widely he’s got you spread. And he doesn’t give you an inch or a second, just presses harder and harder until he feels a hot wash of wet heat gushing from your cunt, dripping down his thighs and wetting the sheets beneath. 

“Oh—fuck yes. Fuck yes. My good, pretty girl, that’s so good, yeah. I’m gonna come inside of you.”

When he does, it’s long and dizzying, throbbing through his whole body so that even his scalp pulses and his vision goes a little dark at the edges in a head rush. Your cunt around him is nothing more than a fluttering muscle. 

He shoves into you and pulls you back onto his cock by the wrists one last time, grinding deep. And when he pulls out, there’s a little white gurgle of semen that bubbles out as your cunt gapes. 

Your arched form sags, knees sliding, unable to hold your weight any longer. But he pinches the inside of your thigh, still wanting more. 

“Lemme see. Show me—” He can’t tell anymore, if he sounds like he’s ordering or begging or who has control of who here. He thinks he might really be that liar you said he is if he pretends it’s him. 

Presenting your cunt, clit a shiny red cherry, sensitive and dripping his come, you ask, “Did I do good?”

He can’t help the whining groan that pulls from him, slumping over your wrung out form.

“You’re only ever good, sweetheart. I told you before. Didn’t I? You were perfect.”

He kisses the tip of your snotty nose. 

Your eyes are closed and you nod, humming happy and soft. Blindly, you press forward, looking for his kiss which he gives gladly, gripping the back of your neck, pressing his fingers into the trembling muscles there. 

“I want you to look at me and think I’m good, too,” he admits, then. Your eyes open, that gorgeous and unique color he’s never seen in anyone else, and he realizes he feels like a boy again, full of the strength and potential of freshly minted youth. Like you’re giving him new life. “And then I want to actually be good for you.”

“You are. You are good for me.

Something like doubt flashes through Joel then. Memories of things you don’t know and he’s afraid to share. Terrible and painful memories Oswald Kelly saved him from once long ago and collected interest on until the day he died. Joel wonders if he might owe that debt to you now. Is a life debt a hereditary sort of thing?

“You couldn’t ever be bad, Joel.”

He laughs at the irony of that, disgusted by it, but pulls you closer, burying his face in your sweaty neck, dragging your scent into his lungs, certain he can feel the magic of it swirl through his body. 

You come out of that deep space in your mind he’d lead you into, slowly. Petting at his skin and twisting his chest hair around your fingers, poking at his belly button and ears. You ask him ridiculous questions he has no answers for, letting the strange rolodex of your mind shuffle and settle until your voice sounds steady and your own once more.

“How long were you with Tess?” You ask then, and not out-of-nowhere because he’d known, he’d been waiting for it. 

“Knew it.”

“You don’t know shit.” You dig your little claws into his chest, yanking meanly on the hair around his nipples. 

“That hurts, you little shit. Knew you were jealous,” he says smugly, squeezing a handful of your bottom. 

Ugh. “I am not jealous. What do I have to be jealous of?”

“Absolutely nothin’, sweetheart.” His tone sobers, trying to inflect the weight of that into his words. Trying to make you see that after this, there couldn’t possibly be any other woman for him but you. You roll your eyes, trying to turn your blushing face away from him, that softly vulnerable look in your eyes again. “You fucking me just to get all my secrets out of me, or what?” 

“Yes.” You try to turn your face away further, your chin wobbles just a smidge and Joel’s heart twists in his chest.

“ Baby . What’m I gonna do with you? Huh?” He says softly, threading his fingers through your tangled hair, trying to get you to look at him again. You’ve got the softest hair he’s ever felt, like the finery you wrap yourself in, but heavy and thick. Perfectly spun crown. 

Your eyes go all bashful, and you tuck your face up under his chin, hiding. “Dunno. Can’t play bridge, don’t play tennis well. Barely useful at all, I think.”

“I’m sure we can find somethin’,” he teases. 

Your head shoots up, clocking him in the chin carelessly, “Well, let’s see…” you hum, tapping your chin in a three fingered rhythm. He rubs the crown of your head, soothing the bump away, and you duck your head again, trying to bury your face in his stomach, glossy hair sliding over his chest. You’re trying to deflect, trying to be silly, but he can still see that wet, insecure glaze in your eyes. He won’t ignore it. 

“Look at me. You have nothing to worry about. Believe me when I tell you this.” He tugs on your chin, being as honest as he can. “Me and Tess…we were—no, no darn it, don’t pull away, look at me.” He holds you tight and steady. 

“I shouldn’t’ve asked,” you mumble between your squished cheeks, gaze slanted away from him. “I don’t want to know.”

“No matter what else there was between us, she wanted to be loved in a way I could never give her. Okay? You think I want you to know that about me? Fuck no. But if you need to know anything about how it was between us, that’s the most important thing. I…I couldn’t give her all she needed and maybe it was because I wasn’t able to or maybe it was simply ‘cause I didn’t want to. But we were friends and then we were physical, but all that’s done now. Alright? That’s it. Has been for a long while and neither one of us has ever looked back. And you have nothing to fret over.”

Your body goes tense and shivering for a moment, he can feel your muscles struggling to keep still before you're pushing away, wrenching your face from his grip. You sit back on your knees and he forces himself to lay still, giving you a moment of space. All the while, he watches you process what he’s said. You need reassurance, you need patience, this is fine with Joel. He’s got an abundance of both to give you. 

“What?” He says, “What’re you thinking?”

Your eyes flit around his face and then jump to the wall behind him, going unfocused. 

“So then that's how it’ll be with us, too.”

“No,” he says, without understanding entirely, but whatever it is you’re thinking, he can tell it’s wrong just by the look on your face. “What do you mean?”

He sits up slowly, his sticky, wet cock settling soft and heavy in the crease of his thigh. Your eyes flit to the sight of it briefly, face warming and then looking away again just as quickly. 

“It’ll be like that with us too. You won’t be able to give me what I want because you won’t want to, and then I’ll have to leave. I won’t be able to stay here and want you and only get half of you. I’ve wanted you for too long, I’ve waited for too long. I don’t care how it sounds, I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks.”

Joel takes hold of your face, tugging you in to kneel between his spread thighs, he wipes his thumbs against the wet skin of your cheeks. 

“No, baby. I don’t think it’ll be like anything else, this here thing between you and I. I think this between us…I think it’s going to be its own special sort of thing,” he says slow and smooth, like he’s talking to one of the spooked mares, trying to calm her need to flee, her racing heart. “I know you know it, too.”

“How? How can you know?”

“Just do—there’s no explaining it. S’just a feeling, is all.” You frown at him, huffing out a frustrated breath, still trying to pull away and he clicks his tongue at you, a spike of annoyance zipping through him. “Knock that off, be good. You trust me here, don’t you?” He asks, referring to his bed. “Then trust me a little bit out there too,” and he tips his chin at the door. 

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m asking you to. Because I’d rather die than ever hurt you.”

“Don't say that.”

“Then don’t you go around saying you’re leavin’ anywhere.”

“Would you miss me if I did?”

“Naw.”

“Fucking asshole. Let me g—” You try and yank yourself away again and he wrestles you to the bed, slotting himself between your thighs to pin you with his weight. 

“Want your belly stuffed full’a me again, little baby? Huh? That’s what all this fightin’ is, isn’t it?” He begins to rut his quickly hardening cock against you, one hand circling your throat, the other taking your wrists in hand to pin immobilized above your head. “Wouldn't miss ya ‘cause I wouldn’t give you the chance to go anywhere. I’d follow you, drag you back here and keep you just like this.” He pulls his hips back, prodding at your hole with his tip, wedging it there just so and then pushing inside. You hiss at the tender stretch, and he can’t help but chuff a low laugh. “That sting? Did I use that poor little pussy too rough?”

You tip your chin back, lashes fluttering and he smooths his hand up and down the sleek column of your stretched throat, feeling the thin muscles beneath fine skin, the fluttering pulse against the heart of his palm. 

“Tell me you’re mine,” you demand. 

“I’m yours.” It’s very much the truth. 

You shiver beneath him, cunt shivering, too. Moaning softly, saying his name in such a lovely way. He’s sure you’ve never been handled with such certainty in all your life. That it’s only a matter of a little getting used to, of him showing you he’s here for you to depend on in whatever way you need. 

It seems a little unbelievable that a few days ago he could’ve never even imagined this, having you like this—he works himself deeper, watches the way your face moves and changes in fascination—and that now he’s here, getting to do this with you. Feeling, sure, a little unprepared, but also, so certain that this is the right thing.

Bracing his knee against the mattress he flips the two of you suddenly, in a dizzying rush of muscles and limbs and movement. Your bodies sliding perfectly together, never losing that precious, intimate contact. Settling you across his lap he pulls you forward and close by the hips, grinding his cock as deep as he can inside of you with your clit trapped against the pressure of his pelvis. 

Ah— ah— ah— too much.

Giving you a moment to rest, he lets you slump against his chest and then pulls you taut again. One hand at your hip to pull your pelvis forward, the other at your shoulder to press you backwards. Palm dragging over your skin, squeezing each breast, feeling the pulse in your throat again. He spreads his hand over your stomach, drippy little girl splayed wide over his thighs, feeling the tense stretch of you, the way he fucks deep, maps the shape of himself beneath the fragile membrane of skin, forcing himself into a place there’s barely any room in. 

Joel grits his teeth, breath whistling, and starts to thrust up into you. Taking hold of one knee, he sets your foot flat on the mattress, opening your slick, flushed cunt wide for his viewing, taking no care this time for the way your little fingers press against his hip trying to keep him from going too deep. But you wanted him to be yours, didn’t you? Mine, you’d said. 

“I’m yours, baby. Gotta take all’a me now,” he hisses through his still clenched teeth. “There you go. That’a girl. Take your fucking.” Gripping your hair, he angles your head down, “Look how wide your little cunt stretches for me, nearly splitting it in half. Guess that means you’re mine, too, huh?”

Trying to push yourself away with the foot braced against the bed you try to slide back, away from where he’s fucking you, wailing. “Why—why. Don’t take it away from me, it’s mine,” he grunts. “Remember?” Head lolling back on your neck, slurring, s’too much, daddy, but then rolling your hips forward anyway, meeting him on the upthrust. 

Lifting you off of himself slightly so he can control the pace and strength of his thrusts, he leaves you helpless. Your cunt’s so wet and stretched the glide is smooth and unhindered. He fucks up into you, tip against the mouth of your womb until you’re coming with a cry, him, following you immediately after that first maddening clench of overwrought muscles. He watches the thick white of his spend seep out, dripping onto his stomach until he finishes spilling inside of you. And then letting you melt against his chest, finally tapped out. He cradles you against his heart, enjoying the feeling of your soft breaths against his throat as you fall immediately into sleep. 

He hadn’t needed to set an alarm in years. Waking with the dawn well before he needed to be out of the house, in the barn and ready to work, tending horses. Nature keeping him punctual. It’s the same this morning, even though everything else in the world seems to have changed. He’s awake in a second, eyes blinking open to find your soft, warm weight cuddled against his side. The sight of your small head tucked against his armpit is so tender, that for a moment, his eyes sting, overwhelmed with a feeling he hadn’t experienced in decades. 

The mountains watch the morning open above them, the dawn barely blueing the air, and he lays in bed for an unusually long time, enjoying the way it feels to wake up with you in his arms. He won’t fuck this up. He’ll keep you here anyway he can. 

When it’s been long enough he knows he’ll be late, that the boys’ll be up and out by now, wondering where he is, he starts to stir, trying to be careful not to wake you and failing anyway. 

“ Noooo, ” you whine, disturbed. He tries to shush you back to sleep, cooing gentle and soothing. “Don’t leave,” you mumble, a lock of hair caught in your mouth that he smooths back behind your ear. 

“Go back to sleep, darlin’,” he presses into your hair, soft kiss to the crown of your head. When you look up at him, the happy, sleep creased eyes, all deep and baleful, there are butterflies thrumming in his belly. And he feels a little bit ridiculous with how wrapped around your little finger you’ve already got him. 

Nuh-uh. “No, no,” you whine again. 

He can feel your little toes stretching in a splay against his shins, then clenching tightly, trying to grip and tug on his leg hair. “You can’t go yet. No.”

“The boys’ll be waitin’ already, baby. We got shit to do. And I gotta keep an eye on the new kid, make sure he’s learnin’ the ropes as he should. Don’t trust Tommy not to turn him into as big of’a dumbass as he is.” 

You snicker into his throat, your warm, sleepy scent enveloping him. This just won’t do. This is too good a way to wake up every morning. He’ll never be able to get anything done ever again. 

“No. You have to do what I say. I’m the boss. ‘Nd I say I need you here with me. You’re so warm,” you mumble against his pec, arm snaking over his shoulder to hug him more tightly to yourself.

His heart beats so hard in his chest he’s sure you can feel it knocking against your own. The soft brush of your mouth against his nipple makes him shiver and harden even more than his morning wood’s already got him. 

Little fucking witch is what you are. Casting spells over weak and malleable creatures that can’t defend themselves. 

He groans helplessly. “What’dya want, huh?” Running his palm down your back he palms your rump, squeezing the soft, supple flesh. 

You only hum and pout, laughing a little, soft ridiculous noises in the back of your throat that shouldn’t make him as wild and out of control as they do. Mouth practically salivating as you grind and pant against him, opening your knee over his hip so he can feel where you’re still wet from him last night. As the two of you push and pull against each other, soft groans and thready whines, he thinks that you’re a spoiled little brat that won’t be satisfied with anything less than exactly what she wants. Thinks that he’ll need to show you some discipline eventually. Give you the gentle but firm hand your father never took the time to. Thinks that it’ll be one of the most enjoyable things he’s ever had the pleasure of getting to do, teaching you some manners. 

“Does the princess need her fucking before she can start her day?” He rolls you over, taking himself in hand to press against your soft, damp hole. 

“Mhmm. Yes, please.”

“Please, what?”

“Please, daddy. I need it.” You pout so pretty. 

“You're fuckin’ spoiled. You know that?” He really does try to sound put out as he gives into what you want. The boys can wait, the ranch can wait. The whole world can wait. You are the boss, after all. 

“Don’t care,” you sigh, when he finally pushes inside. 

To be honest, Joel doesn’t think he cares all that much either. 

That evening, he comes home to find you in his restroom, perched on the counter with your toes pressed up against the porcelain rounded edge of the sink, painting them a deep purple color you’d stolen from Dina.

He walks with that cowboy swagger, hips swinging in a slow roll, like when he rides a horse. Everything about him is natural, confident, well practiced because he’s been the same sort of man all his life so he’s had decades to grow into himself and settle. It might be one of your favorite things about him, how himself Joel is.

In a way, you can recognize it’s the same thing you’d seen in Tess. That organic earthenness which told you they were fully themselves and comfortable in it. You can’t help the comparison, or the little pulse of savage insecure jealousy it inspires in you. 

“Hi’ya, cowboy.”

“Princess.” 

On his way to the shower, he presses a soft kiss to your forehead, cranking the water up to sweltering so that soon, the room is filled with hot steam, fogging the glass and curling the hair around your face, supplying an excuse for the heat in your face when he starts to take his clothes off. 

His body is so wonderful. 

You watch him through lowered lashes as he lathers soap between his thick palms once he’s stepped behind the glass door, tipping his head back to wet his hair, soaping his chest, under his arms, between his legs, the cock that’s still thick and long, even soft as it is, makes you burn all over. He catches your eyes as he takes himself in hand, his gaze dark and teasing, knowing , running his fist up and down the length, stretching it. You flush even hotter looking back down at your purple toes. 

This morning when he’d gotten out of bed after ceding to your demands, the sight of that cock as he’d lifted his arms high above his head, muscles stretching, his sweaty armpit hair, joints popping a hollow, tired sound, it’d hung long and sated between his legs, glistening with your come. And it’d left you shocked enough at the sight of it, wondering how something that big could fit between your legs, but also wet and hungry for more of the same thing all day long. 

It’d been all you’d been able to think about as you’d lazed around his house. Picking through more of his things like you’d done last night, trying on his clothes and smelling his shampoo, reading the titles of all his DVDs, rearranging the magnets on his fridge just to put him out of sorts, just to leave your mark. You’d felt like a girl again, rifling through his things to glean whatever piece of him you might be able to steal for yourself. 

And going through his little house—the woodworking projects, the old, faded picture of him and Sarah and Tommy, reading glasses on his nightstand, and a book on deep space that reminds you how much of a fucking nerd Ellie really is— you’d seen that there were little details of all the people he cares about in his home. Even you. Picking up the text on art history tucked beneath the one on space, your eyes had smarted. Even you were here.

When he shuts the water off, you look up at him again, and it’s obvious but not sudden because it’s been building for years and years: you love him. You love everything about him. You’d loved him as a girl, looking up at a man who was steady and dependable, even when he’d never looked at you. You love him now as a woman, while he looks back at you and finally sees you for who you are. 

It feels like such an ordinary moment for how life altering the thought is—to realize that this is a real deal sort of thing, what you feel for him. 

But you think that maybe that’s what you’d always been looking for, something lovely in its ordinariness, something to depend on. 

“You have a nice day?” He asks as he runs the towel over his wet hair. 

“Mhmm,” you hum. “Productive.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d you get up to all day, shut in my house?”

“Snooped through all your shit.”

“Find anything good?”

“No, you’re boring.”

“I did warn you about that.”

“Did you?”

“Sure did.”

Dropping the towel into the hamper, he pulls on a fresh pair of jeans from the closet, no underwear. This guy…

And comes over to you, skin all hot and damp, that big barrel chest, taking you by the jaw to press his mouth, all forceful and demanding, against yours. His possessiveness makes your toes curl. 

“Too bad you’re stuck with me now,” he says. 

Against his kiss, you say, “Will you do ‘em for me?” Holding up the little nail polish brush, if only to stop yourself from spilling all of your romance-addled-brained secrets. You watch him as he sits on the toilet lid and holds each of your toes in his big fingers, slowly and carefully finishing the purple paint job. Humming and hawing while trying to get it just right. 

When he’s done, his smile is so proudly pleased, admiring his work. “Damn, I’m good.”

“You wearin’ my underwear?” He says, taking in the sight of his blue plaid boxers sitting low on your hips when you finally hop off the counter, stretching up on your tiptoes to ease your cramped knees. 

“Doesn’t seem like you get much use out of them. Thought I’d break them in,” you tell him, looking down at his crotch. 

“Little shit,” he laughs, cocking his head to the side to give you a good once over.

“How do I look?” 

“Let’s see…gimme a twirl, gorgeous.”

You spin around, so silly you’re almost drunk with it, and his laugh is smooth and throaty and dark. When he gets up, the look in his eyes is so deliciously threatening, “Yeah, you look fuckin’ good.”

You spin away from his grasping hands, moving across the restroom while he circles you, reaching for the toothbrush you’ve moved in next to his and pointing it at him like a weapon. 

“Get away from me with that look. I’m sore and don’t have anything for you right now.”

You turn to face the sink, reaching for the toothpaste and running your brush under the water as he comes up behind you. 

“Poor little cunt got stretched out last night, didn’t she?” He rumbles into your neck, pressing a tiny kiss to the hinge of your jaw. You shiver against him, sticking your toothbrush in your mouth to keep from moaning at the feel of all that hot skin and hard muscle crowding up behind you. 

You think he’d be scared to know how much you want him. You think you’re a little scared yourself, knowing how much want can fit inside just one girl. 

His touch smoothes up your outer thighs, circling your waist and squeezing, slipping his fingers under the lacy edge of the bandeau bra you’ve got on. He softly grazes the undersides of your breasts with his calloused fingertips, and the sound he makes, like a softly chuffing horse, is so intensely erotic, like he can’t even help his reactions to you, that your pussy, which really is so sore and tender, clenches with a soft sting. 

He kisses your shoulder, turning you by the hips to face him. “Let me,” he says, voice deep and raspy. “Lemme do it.”

He takes your toothbrush from you, trapping you between his thighs against the counter, and takes hold of your jaw, forcing you to open. 

You flush, embarrassed at your sudsy mouth full of toothpaste, growling, trying to get away from him. 

“Yeah, c’mere. I wanna do it,” he demands. 

He brushes your teeth as slowly and precisely as he’d painted your now drying toenails. Pressing your jaw as wide open as it can go and gently scrubbing each and every tooth in your mouth. It is, undoubtedly, one of the most strangely intimate and erotic things you’ve ever done with a man.

 He touches you with such certainty it’s almost disorienting for how foreign it is. 

When he’s finished brushing, he holds the glass kept by the sink to your mouth, making you rinse and repeat twice before he’s satisfied. And when he’s done with that, he forces your jaw open again, appreciating his job well done. You can feel his erection hard and throbbing against your belly when he sticks his fingers deep into your mouth, feeling the smooth insides of your cheeks with his thumbs. Pressing his pointer and index fingers flat against your tongue, so far back he makes you gag. His other palm holds your head immobile so you can’t escape, can’t do anything but take his training. Your heart beats between your legs. A slow, stinging throb that tries to convince you you’re not really as sore as you’d thought you were, that you can definitely take him again right here and now. 

As he presses down on your tongue again with more pressure, your throat spasms, gagging violently, your abdomen clenching, then lurching. He pulls back, relieves the pressure for a moment, but still doesn’t pull out of your mouth. 

“No, no. Hold your breath. Good. Now breathe through your nose,” he orders. “Slow and deep. Good, yeah. Yeah, just like that.” He presses down on your tongue again, making you gag again, pulls back, gives you a second, and then does it again and again. Training your throat and your reflexes to do what he wants. 

When he finally decides you’ve had enough, you’re left panting and shaking. Your cunt leaking into the seat of his boxers. You cling to him weakly, and he pets your hair, soothing you with soft sounds in his throat. 

“You’re such a good girl,” he murmurs between kisses to your hair. 

Clawing at him, you press up on your toes, desperate for his kiss, licking at his mouth and then reaching for his hard cock, trying to tug his jeans open. 

Ah, ah. “Thought you said you were sore.”

“No, no. I—I lied.” 

You reach for his mouth again, pressing up on your toes, pulling his face towards yours as he laughs at your struggle, getting only a brief taste of his mouth, the tickle of his mustache against your lips, before he’s pulling out of your reach again. 

“Did you? Let’s see. Little fuckin’ liar.” 

He spins you around by the hips, fast and dizzy, bending you over the sink at the hips so your face is pressed right up against the mirror. Your hot breaths form little clouds of condensation against the glass, and you can’t help the ragged, humiliating moan you let out when he pulls his own boxers down over your ass, letting the cool air soothe the sting against your hot pussy as he crouches down behind you. 

He tuts and coos, clicking his tongue as he spreads your cheeks wide enough it worsens the already deep sting. Saying things like look how soaked she is, so fuckin’ red and pretty. “Naw, baby. Don’t think we can,” he tells you, peering around your hip to look at your face. 

“Oh, Joel, please. I swear—it’s…” He kisses you right over the tender ring of your hole, losing your train of thought as you moan at the feel of his mouth there. Then moves to smatter kisses over your thighs and ass, down your legs to the sensitive backs of your knees. 

While he’s distracted, you try to snake your hand between the counter’s edge and your hips, attempting to press your fingers against your needy clit. 

He smacks you, hard, right against your poor and tender sex. A mean hiss follows. 

“That’s mine. No touching.”

You do wail at that, trying to stomp your feet and kick back at him when he does nothing more than continue to kiss down the back of your legs and the cheeks of your bottom. What a horrible, nasty old man you’ve caught for yourself. 

“Not gonna hurt you worse when you’re already hurtin’. Sorry, baby, but that’s not how this works.”

He pulls his boxers back up your legs, giving your hip a condescending little pat and pulling you back by the hair to kiss your mouth while you pout and spit curses at him. 

“‘Sides we got somewhere to be. Don’t got time to fuck you proper right now.”

“You’re absolutely horrible,” you tell him, trying to stomp on his bare foot and missing. “Where are we going?”

“Thinkin’ we should go up to see Miss Leigh. How ‘bout it?”

The drive down the 89 towards Leigh Lake is dark and peaceful. Windows down, he goes way too fast, playing Bob Dylan off an old cassette player he’s got rigged into the 12-volt plug because he refuses to modernize his music collection. Every so often, you’re rewarded with the lovely sound of his voice humming along to Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. 

It’s a real strange thing, feeling like you’re getting everything you’ve ever wanted, like you’re finally in the right place at the right time. You feel so happy. 

You switch spots once you enter the park, taking the driver's side so that he can get out at the roadblocks to lift the bar gates for you to sneak the truck through, making your slow way up the mountain through the service roads until you make it to the lake. Your last name won’t stop you from getting arrested if you’re caught trespassing on federal property, and the idea of it is sort of thrilling. 

The two of you hike the short way left from where you park the truck, and the dark wilderness would be terrifying if not for the solid wall of muscled man you have showing you the way through. You love that he’s so dependable, so capable. That you can do something wild like this and remain carefree because you know he’s here to watch over you. 

The last name won’t stop you from getting eaten by a bear either, but you’ve got Joel for that. 

In the bright moonlight, the surface of the lake is like a silver quarter, shining so brightly it blinds. There isn’t a single cloud in the sky—all stars. The water’s glass face ripples intermittently, the movement of fish beneath the surface gives it life in the dark. And the butterfly flutter of the aspen trees sounds in the night time’s wind, while the mountains loom pitch black and menacing, rising up towards the sky.

“I love it here so much,” you tell him. “Maria used to bring me all the time when I was a girl. She was so young when she taught me, took care of me—all those years raising me. You never realize, when you’re a kid, how young the adults around you actually are. It was nice to hear she’d gotten with Tommy.”

“Saint of a woman. Puttin’ up with that idiot.”

You laugh softly, wrapping your arms around yourself at the chill coming off the water. “Don’t be mean to him.”

“Were you bad? When you were real little… misbehavin’ sort?”

“God, no. He would’ve killed me.”

The joke lands stilted and ugly. No one laughs. 

“No, I wouldn’t think you would’ve been. Not in your nature, I don’t suppose.”

“At least not then. But I promise, I can be real bad now.” You turn to give him a hot look over your shoulder, and his lopsided smirk is so, so sexy. Hands in his pockets and chin tipped back so you can see his face just right in the moonlight. 

“I remember you used to come up here with him sometimes, too.”

You scoff a bitter noise, turning back towards the water. “How could you possibly remember that? You weren’t here yet. And it hardly ever happened. Certainly not once I got older.”

“He told me.”

You have nothing to say to that. Nothing nice, at least. There’s something that bothers you about knowing your father shared things like that with Joel. Things that you’d always seen as sacredly intimate, infinitely painful. 

“Oh.”

“Oh?” He mimes back. 

“Let’s not talk about that. You’ll ruin it.”

“Ruin what?”

“This. I don’t know… Everything.”

You pace away from him, chewing on your fingernails. You catch the lifting edge of the gel manicure on your thumbnail, biting down and ripping off a huge chunk of it. It hurts. Your fingernail smarts from the vicious peel. Pointer finger next, catch and rip, spitting out the little flakes of polish into your other palm. It’s a filthy and disgusting habit. 

“I didn’t bring you here to fight, but we can if you’d like to,” he says provokingly. 

Rolling your eyes— “I don’t want to fight.”

“Alright… if you don’t wanna talk about it we don’t gotta. Think we should anyway, though.” 

You’ve drifted towards the water’s shore, and you hear his heavily booted footsteps come up slowly behind you. 

“I want us to be honest with each other.” He doesn’t reach for you and it makes your anger even hotter, that you can sense the intimation of his warmth but not actually enjoy it. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he whispers. 

“Nothing. I don’t know…” Finally, his palms come to your hips, the touch is so comforting, too comforting. He tucks his thumbs beneath the hem of your t-shirt, rubbing slow circles against your skin, resting his forehead against the top of your head. 

“Thought we decided you were trusting me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. You want to hear that I’m angry? I’m angry. There.” You take a deep breath, closing your eyes to really savor the feel of his hands on your skin, the taste of the clean, sweet air. You can smell the leaf rot and the chill of the water and that achingly specific mineral scent that comes off the mountain rock. A scent you could recall anytime, anywhere in the world when you were far away and especially missing home. “I’m sorry, too,” you tell him. “I should also say that.”

“For what?”

“That I’m angry at you, too. Or that I was.”

“Were you?”

You try to keep the broken crack out of your voice but it comes anyway. “He cared about you. And I was so jealous.”

He sighs, “I think you’ve got the wrong sort of idea about how we were or what he thought of me. At the end of the day, I was still just someone who worked for him.”

“I know there was more. I know he did something for you that no one’s ever talked about. I know there’s more here that you’re not saying, Joel. And it’s not fair that there are things you know about my own father that I don’t get to know, too. It’s not fair that you were with him in his last days and I wasn’t. It’s not fair that you got all that time with him and now I’m the one that’s left to miss him when I didn’t even really know him. When he didn’t even like me.”

“Darlin’...” You step away from him, away from his comfort. The water of the lake laps at your boots. 

“You know it’s true. How can I miss him when I didn’t even know him? When you, who knew him so much better than I did, won’t. You said that, remember? That you won’t miss him.”

“I did, yes.”

“Why not? I don’t understand.”

“‘Cause I didn’t give a fuck about him.” He laughs. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Oswald Kelly thought the earth began and ended with him, and ten years is too long a time to be the right hand of a man like that. Is that what you want to hear? Does that make you feel better?”

“I don’t— I feel like I need to understand what it was that was between you two. Why he left you the money. Can you…Do you even know how fucking despicable I felt, being angry that he’d left you something? Because it wasn’t about the money. I want you to have that. I want you to have everything . If you let me, I’ll share every single thing I have with you, but I can’t understand what it is, or what—what there was… I can’t understand why . If you say he didn’t see you as a son, then why? ”

He runs a palm flat over his mouth, hand on his hip, thinking, then the backs of his fingers against the edge of his jaw. 

“We were similar, in certain ways. We understood each other.”

“You are nothing like my father, Joel. Don’t ever say that again. He was cruel—he was terrible. A terrible father. He ran me off from this place. And it’s horrible, feeling like you can’t ever go home.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Better than you’d believe.”

He goes to sit against a log low on the ground, and you wander towards him as if led by a tether. 

“It’s complicated, ain’t it?” He says. “Business of bein’ a good man. No one’s all the same of a single thing forever. There are parts of us that aren’t so good, others that are better. There were pieces of your daddy that I think tried to make up for the rotten parts. He helped a man he knew jack shit about, backed by nothing but the grace of my brother’s good word. Gave me a place, saw something in me worth a damn. He saved my life. But… the way he was with you? That overshadowed any sort of good he might’ve ever tried to do. You get me? No one is perfect, and that’s fine. But I reckon it’s important where a man chooses to place that finite goodness afforded to him. That’s what you gotta remember.”

“It should’ve been me,” you tell him. “He should’ve given that little goodness he had, to me.”

“It should’ve been you,” he agrees.

“But you’re wrong. You’re nothing like him, Joel. You’re so full of goodness.” You go to him then, kneeling between his parted knees, and he takes your face in his palms, smoothing back your hair so lovingly. “I know it. I recognized it from the first moment I laid eyes on you. Trust me. You can tell, when you’ve seen a lot of bad, who’s good and who’s not.”

He shakes his head at you, still stroking your hair, your face, and the look in his eyes is unfathomable, heartbroken. 

“There’s something I never told you about Sarah. About how she died.”

You jolt at that. “What?”

“I was too young when I had her, only twenty-two. And it was hard for Tommy and I, harder than anything. He helped me, you see, Tommy’s always been there. God , we were basically kids, trying to take care of this tiny, defenseless thing, just the two of us. And what do you know at twenty-two about how to live? Basically nothin’. It was so fucking hard, but she was like a miracle anyway. Gummy smiles and milk breath and she didn’t like formula, had a hell of a time feeding her ‘cause she wanted a mother and I had none to give her. She struggled to put on weight, was constantly at the doctor which meant constant bills. It was the single most terrifying, most stressful thing I’ve ever lived through,” he says. 

“For a few years it was fine, or not so fine, but we managed. She was small, though, skinny and sickly. And things got progressively worse, harder. There was so much I wanted to give her, the whole world, and I just couldn’t. And I wanted Tommy to have a life too, I didn’t want to have to depend on him forever. My brother got involved with some real rough sorts—Sarah was three…maybe four at the time—they called themselves The Fireflies. At first it was muscle work on the weekends and such. Watch a door, drive ‘em here or there, fuck up some guy who owed money for God knows what, but it sure as shit wasn’t my business, right? I kept my head down, tried to look the other way. They were sellin’ shit. On the streets in Austin, college kids in bars with too much of daddy’s money.” You flush deep and ashamed. “Pills, oxys, that sorta crap. The muscle work turned into stuff I never, ever should’ve gotten involved in. It started small: a favor, an errand, drop this off, pick this up. And then I woke up one day, and I was so deep in filth I couldn’t see the way out.” He looks at you then, and his eyes are so wide and dry, so clear, you can see all of him right there in that moment. “But Sarah was fed, she was at a good school, new clothes and a dance class. I wanted to give her even more than just that. It felt easy, even when it was terrifying. Or it felt worth it. And I did it for longer than I should’ve. That’s the thing about doing what you shouldn’t. It’s hard to quit once you’ve started, it’s hard to get yourself out.”

“Tommy'd weaseled his way out a couple years before, smarter than I had the foresight to be. It’d gotten seedier the more time passed, and he’d spooked. He wasn’t good at dealing with the violence the way I was, couldn’t stomach it as easy as I did. They’d been fine with letting him go ‘cause they still had me doing their dirty work, hurting people when they needed me to, trained dog.”

When he leans down to press a small kiss against your mouth, your heart beats in adrenalized panic. 

“I knew it’d end badly eventually. So I said to myself, destroy the dog and be the man, but it’s hard putting the animal down.” He breathes one long chuff of rough air before he continues. “They came to our home one night, she was supposed to be asleep, safe in her room. The guy pulled a gun and I panicked, seeing a weapon in her house like that. She was supposed to be in bed, safe in her room. She was supposed to be safe .” His voice breaks, and you can see the silver line of old grief at his waterline. “If I’d died, it wouldn’t’ve mattered. Tommy would’ve taken her, been a better father than I ever could’ve been. She would’ve survived without me, but I was never going to survive without her.”

He takes your hand in his, pressing your fingers to his scarred-over temple. A violent, horrible little thing you’d always been suspicious of.

“Joel. Oh, Joel.”

“I was never going to survive without her. They were going to get me for involuntary manslaughter, possession and trafficking. Lock me up and throw away the key. But Tommy had come here when he’d gotten out of Austin. He told your father about me and Kelly came down to see me. I’ll never know why he chose to do that—we never discussed it after—what he might’ve seen in my brother’s face, in my own, that convinced him to save me. I’ll never forget that feeling, sittin’ in that orange jumpsuit in front of that man that didn’t even seem real. A little bit like a thing out of a nightmare. Coldest eyes I’d ever seen in a man, like there was a shadow around the edges, something not right. Reckon that was your mother in there, haunting him. And I think he must’ve seen the same shadow in my own eyes ‘cause he made some calls right then and there. I was out the next morning and on Kelly property that evening. Your father, he gave me my life back. He brought me here and he saved me. This place saved me.”

You’re crying uncontrollably, tears spilling down your face in a hot, sick rush. 

“So you think he was good to you. You’re saying it was your fault—Sarah. That’s what you think. And he saved you from it.” 

“I’m saying that there’s bad and good in all of us and that life is complicated and strange and people even worse. Look at what I did to my own child. I’m sayin’ sometimes you’re grateful to the monster, I’m saying sometimes you’re sad he’s dead. It’s okay, baby.”

“But you would never hurt me. I know that as well as I know my own name. And he hurt me. ”

“Never intentionally, I wouldn’t, no. But—”

“I met this woman,” you cut him off. “Uh… last year? Two years ago, maybe. I can’t remember anymore. In Sedona. It was a—well… they called it a spa,” you laugh humorlessly. “Wellness thing, that sort of bullshit, but really if you’re there, you know it’s just rehab. I was drinking too much, snorting all sorts of junk I shouldn’t have been. She recognized me.” 

You’re looking for some sort of recognition in his face, too.

“She said—from the photograph on my father’s desk. She knew all about me, she showed me pictures of the two of them. She’d been with him for twelve years, and I never even knew she existed. She knew all about me. She knew my mother, her name. She even mentioned you. You knew her.”

“I did.”

“You know who I’m talking about?”

“I do.”

“Twelve years, Joel. His partner or his—his—”

“Wouldn’t really call that mess a partnership,” he says with a small, ironic scoff.

“Don’t be annoying. Don’t joke.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry,” he says with a sigh. “I know what you’re try’na say, I get it.”

“I didn’t even know him. He was a complete stranger to me. And this woman…she was nice to me. She told me she’d always wanted to meet me and that he’d never let her, and then he just sent her away. Cut her off from one day to the next once he’d decided he was sick of her, a pile of cash and Dina’s well wishes. You know she tried to kill herself? She was in that place for a mental break.”

Joel’s face looks shaken. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“That’s what he did to the women in his life. He had a vision that stretched halfway across the world. And nothing ever stopped him. Especially not something as insignificant as a daughter or a woman that loved him. My mom died on him and he punished us for it for the rest of his miserable fucking life, and I hate him. I hate him, and I’m glad he’s dead.”

You really do sob then, after those spit words. A broken wail like an animal lost in the wilderness and left to die. Or like a child, forgotten and abandoned by her father. Joel holds you very tenderly while you finally let that old grief settle inside you.

“You can’t ever say you’re like him again. You can’t. It hurts me to even think about.”

“It’s alright. It’s okay, baby girl. Let it out. I’m sorry,” he soothes. “I think… I think that your father mistreated you because there was something fundamentally broken in him, and I think he thought he saw that same broken thing in me, and that maybe that comforted him somehow. That what he gave me wasn’t goodness, much as you might want to see it as such.”

“But he saved you. He never, ever saved me. He hurt me so much. He threw me to the dogs. He cared about you , Joel.”

“You’re not understanding me, sweetheart. I’m saying that I did bad before, that I was broken, and Kelly saw that. But you never stay the same way forever. I was able to let it go, to move on. We always change eventually. Growin’ or regressin’ or whatever direction it might be you choose to move in, but we always inevitably make another move. He saved my life, and I was grateful to him, and yet, when I watched him die, I felt nothing but relief for you. I’m sayin’ that I know you feel defined by this, by him, but eventually you’ll move past this moment of struggle, eventually you'll let him go and then it’ll be different, that next place you step into will be different.”

You surge up on your knees to hug him fiercely and you sob and sob onto his wide shoulder, giving him all of your grief because you know he’s strong enough to bear the weight of it.

“Maybe every man is destined to fail his daughter at some point. But you won’t be defined by his failure of you forever. I know that you’ll let it go eventually. You’re so strong, so resilient, my girl.”

“I don’t want to step into any other place. I want to stay here with you and the ranch forever,” you cry. 

“We’ll always be here, darlin’,” he says with a kiss to your temple, a soothing hand on your back. “I was a roamin’ dog, and I found my place to roost, here. Wyoming and the ranch will always be your home. I will always be here for you. You’ve never gotta worry about that changin’. What I’m saying is this, love is complicated and if you miss him or you’re glad he’s dead, it’s okay. It’s okay to be wrong and to change or to be right and go bad for a little bit. Tell me, what’s the point of livin’ and feelin’ so loveless? There ain’t none. Nothing is the same forever except for this, here , your home and the care you’ll always find here. You understand me?”

“I think so.”

“I can’t promise you that this’ll be a normal sort of life, you and I together, but I promise it’ll be a good one. I’m going to try my damndest, anyway.”

“My mother was buried under a holly bush the day I was born, this has never been a normal life.”

He presses another kiss against your mouth. “I don’t want you to carry this sadness around with you forever. If you let it, this land will heal you. It’ll fix whatever’s broken in your heart. It did mine. I need you to be happy here.” He presses a tiny kiss to your jaw, tucking his face into your shoulder. “Can’t you try to give me that?”

The water laps gently at the shore at your backs, and the presence of the mountains is so strong they feel almost sentient—watching the two of you bear your hearts at their feet. You’d felt, for so long, like you’d loved him. And even if it’d been only the idea of him, it’d served as such a comfort for you when you’d been young and lost and growing into yourself. And in some curious yet kismet touched way, it felt right, fated, that the two of you had been so changed by the man that was your father. 

You ask him the same question as before, hungry for the sound of it: “If I left, would you miss me?”

“I’d follow you. There’d be no missin’.”

“But you love this place.” Your heart throbs with the idea of that word, the potential.

“But I need you now.”

“Maybe I’ll run away, come back when you least expect it just to keep you on your toes.”

“You’d be a wild horse if you could, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe.” You muse his hair, tugging his face to yours, kissing him slow and deep and full of love.

“You’re a good girl. You be wild if you need to, I’ll be here for you when you’re ready. There’s always gonna be someone in the world that loves you, you know. Even when it feels like there isn’t, or you’re all by your lonesome. There’ll always be someone out there who thinks of you with love in their heart no matter how far you go. You just gotta remember that.”

“It’s hard.”

“Most good things are, sweetheart.”

The two of you hold each other for a long time, listening to the mountains grow, the water and the aspens.

“You know, I knew this was going to happen when I came back.”

“Oh, did you now?”

“Yes.”

“And how’s that?”

“I’d been seeing eleven-eleven every single day for weeks. So I knew something big was happening soon.”

“Darlin’, I don’t got a clue what the hell that means.”

“It’s a sign. It means something good is on its way, Joel. Something really, really worth it.”

The Tipsy Bison is loud and hot, and Ellie watches the girl she loves dance and laugh with her best friend, in the middle of the packed crowd. She prefers it here to The Mushroom, too many stupid Jackson tourists over there. The sight of them blinks in and out between the sweaty bodies, hands grasping each other close and then spinning out to twirl wildly in opposite directions. Their heads thrown back in loud laughter. 

“She really is something,” Joel comes up beside her to lean against the high top.

“Yeah,” Ellie says, “She really is.” Though she doesn’t think they’re talking about the same girl. 

“Ff-hat’re we talk’n ‘bout?” Jesse says, mouthful of pizza bulging his cheeks while he tries to chug his can of Natural Light at the same time. “What’re we lookin’ at?”

“Hey, chucklefuck.”

He swallows his too large bite, wincing, beer dribbling out the corner of his mouth. “I do have a name you know.”

“Sure, buddy,” she pats his head, slaps his cheek a little. “Whatever you say.”

Beside them, Joel is silent. A little hypnotized. The look on his face is so intense he looks like he’s about to pounce. Probably ready to get violent if anyone gets too close for his liking. 

Jesse looks between his face and the two girls dancing in the crowd. “Miss Kelly’s lookin’ mighty fine tonight, Joel. You old fuckin’ dog—good job, man.”

He tries to slap him chummy on the shoulder, but the glare Joel throws his way looks like it could quite literally kill. “Don’t look at her, dumbass. Who the fuck do you think you’re talkin’ to?” 

He pushes away from the table, sauntering towards the dance floor. Ellie sees the moment when your eyes catch sight of him, the way they brighten. Fucking heart-eyed love-sick look, ugh. And they say her and Dina are gross about it. Ellie still hasn’t recovered from what she’d seen in the barn the other day. Electroshock therapy or fucking church is what she’ll need to forget that shit. 

“He’s so mean to me,” Jesse whines, peeved, kicked-puppy look following Joel’s retreating form. 

“Oh, Jesse, Jesse, Jesse.”

“What? What now? Haven’t even done anything wrong today.” He’s so sulky, it makes Ellie laugh. 

“You have so much to learn,” she says absentmindedly, watching Joel meet you on the dance floor.

“That’s still so fuckin’ crazy to me,” Jesse says when Joel bends to kiss you. It’s passionate, too intimate, and Ellie has to look away. 

“It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else besides them.”

“I guess so.”

“Curiosity is a constant happiness. Go out and find something worthwhile, Jesse.” 

On the dance floor, Dina has separated from the horde, and she weaves in and out of the pack of crowded bodies making her way over to their table. Her cheeks are flushed, her curls wild and frizzy from dancing. Ellie feels her heart beat in her throat, this is what love is. She knows that now, is able to recognize it easy as day. 

This is what Wyoming, what this land had given her. A family, a home. Dina. 

“Don’t know what that means. Doesn’t even make any fuckin’ sense,” he mutters. “You’re so fucking weird sometimes.”

Ellie reaches over, yanking on his ear, hard, before walking away to meet her girl. 

“Nothing is cooler than being yourself, weatherboy. Remember that.”

Dina meets her at the edge of the dance floor, falling into her. Her arms are strong and lithe, her kiss tastes like cherries. She whispers that she loves her in her ear— I love you, Ellie, she says.  Over her shoulder, Joel looks like he’s happier than she’s ever seen him in all the years she’s known him, and she thinks that this is it, the real deal, what all those lonely people that’d grown up on the ranch together had been looking for all their lives. 

No lonely dogs left. 

Having Joel Miller fall in love with you turns out to be the easiest thing in the world. 

You watch as it happens day by day. Easy to read on his face, obvious as the man is—despite what he might think about himself. You watch the story of it play out on his face as the days turn to weeks turn to months. In the things he does, the ways he takes care of you, tending to the land and your legacy and your heart. The way he makes you the beating soul of the ranch in a way you’d always dreamt of being, but had never really thought possible. He makes the place a real home for you.

One evening, waiting for him to come to bed, he brings you a bowl of split figs. Dark purple skin, brilliant red center. Beautifully shaped. There are three of them he’s cut perfectly in half to make a circle of six pieces precisely arranged in the center of the bowl. Each one is perfectly formed, perfectly chosen and set for you.

He puts it in your outstretched hands and goes to his side of the bed, tucking his glasses tight against the bridge of his nose, lamp on with the shade turned towards his open book because he says his eyes are going bad. He’s reading Flannery O’Connor’s book of short stories again, and you know he’s missing home, hungering for a reminder of life in the South and memories of his daughter. You know he only picks this one up when he’s missing it all something desperate. 

You know so many things about him now, the way he knows them about you, too.

And looking down at the bowl of perfectly split figs, that’s when you know for sure, this isn’t your wishful heart, not a fable—only something normal, lovely in how ordinary it is. This is love.