The orgasm rips through me like a detonation.
My whole body locks—spine arched, legs clamped, my mouth open against his shoulder in a soundless scream that becomes a sob because the release is physical and emotional and five and a half years of grief and want and guilt all letting go at once.
I break against him in waves and he holds me through it—holds me up, holds me together, and his arms and his body and the wall the only things keeping me from falling.
He follows me over the ledge seconds later.
His hips stutter, lose rhythm, drive deep one final time.
He buries his face in my neck and the sound he makes—God, the sound—is my name.
Just my name. Broken open.
Spilled against my skin like a confession.
His body shudders against mine and I feel him let go—feel the tension that has lived in him for years release in one shattering pulse, and the intimacy of it—of feeling this man come apart inside me, of holding him while the walls he built crumble—is the most devastating thing I’ve ever experienced.
We stay there, against the wall, breathing and shaking.
His face in my neck, his arms around me, my fingers in his hair.
Slowly, he lifts his head and looks at me.
His face.
Not self-loathing.
Not the horror I braced for.
Something rawer. Stripped.
The face of a man who just felt something he’d convinced himself he’d never feel again and is still processing the fact that he survived it.
I touch his jaw as he closes his eyes and turns his face into my palm.
We don’t speak.
There’s nothing to say that our bodies haven’t already said.
Lockhart comes back on Saturday.
I’m at Earl’s, in the barn, because the barn is the only place I’m useful and I need to be useful right now because useful is the opposite of falling apart.
I hear the silver truck and my hands go still on the hoof knife and something cold settles in my stomach.
By the time I get to the porch, he’s already talking to Earl.
Same posture. Same smile. Same expensive Stetson.
But the casserole is gone and the tone has shifted—still polite, still smooth, but the warmth has a thinner quality.
Stretched. Like patience wearing to its end.
“The market’s shifting, Earl. What I offered three weeks ago was generous. What I’m offering now is fair. In six months, it might be half that.”
Earl is in his rocker.
He looks worse today—the chemo hit hard midweek and he hasn’t bounced back yet.
