“Yeah,” he panted. “Fuck, yes.”
I jerked us both, my palm slick from sweat, using the other hand to pin him at the hip. He rocked into me, every movementmore frantic, until he buried his face in my shoulder and bit down to keep from screaming.
He came first, body spasming, and I felt the heat of it splash my hand, my belly. I followed a second later, teeth clenched, vision whiting out. We stood there, locked together, until my knees almost gave.
When the shaking stopped, I let go and staggered back, both of us half out of breath, shirts twisted and stained. I looked at Floyd—his hair a mess, face streaked with sweat, lips bleeding—and wanted to do it all over again.
He looked down at himself, then at me, and for a long second I thought he’d punch me just to reset the balance. Instead, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, tucked himself away, and bent to pick up his badge.
He turned it over in his hands, then fixed it back on his chest, careful and slow. “Jesus, McKenzie,” he said, voice low.
I grinned. “Next time, you can be on top.”
He gave me a look that said a thousand things and none of them safe for daylight. Then he straightened his uniform, buttoned up with trembling fingers, and left the tack room without another word.
I stayed there, watching the outline of his body through the frosted barn window, listening to the crunch of boots and the slam of the patrol car door. The engine coughed to life, then faded out down the lane.
I sank to the floor, leaning back against the wall where his shadow still lingered. It wasn’t love—not yet. But it was close enough to keep me up at night.
And that was more than enough.
Chapter Six
~ Ransom ~
The morning after kissing a man who’s spent a decade pretending he doesn’t want to, you expect the world to change. Maybe the sun comes up a few degrees to the left. Maybe the coffee tastes different, or you stop caring about the finer points of statutory vandalism.
I’d settled for a half-degree shift in the angle of the window light at Inked Rebellion, which was probably just the result of last night’s weather front pushing east, but let a man have his illusions.
I made a ritual of sanitizing every station before I started tattooing, even on slow days. Maybe it was leftover Catholic guilt, or maybe I just liked the way isopropyl stung my knuckles if they were already raw from overwork.
Today, the gloves were off—literally. I cleaned every inch of surface with bare hands, letting the sting keep me present, while my brain replayed the tack room in Technicolor: Floyd’s mouth, angry and desperate; his body, hard enough to leave bruises; the sound he made when I took control and made him like it.
The shop was empty except for the ghosts of last night and the smell of lemon cleaner. Even the diffuser had given up, no match for the chemical assault. I stacked my needles with military precision, then rearranged the pigment bottles from light to dark, then by frequency of use, then by likelihood of causing an allergic reaction.
None of it stuck.
I could have alphabetized the autoclave wipes and still had mental bandwidth left to imagine Floyd in uniform, then out of it, then kneeling on the rough barn floor with his badge around his neck.
The clock above the register ticked toward ten. My first client—some trust-fund city type wanting a “meaningful” quote in sans serif—texted to cancel for a “spiritual emergency.” Good. I’d rather lick an ampersand off a urinal cake than needle that much banality into human skin.
Instead, I pulled out a battered spiral notebook and a stub of charcoal, which I used only when the sketch mattered. I let my hand go loose, half-watching the front window for the inevitable walk-in, half-focused on the shape of last night’s man in my head.
It started as a joke—how to cartoon a small-town sheriff who fucks like he’s resisting arrest—but then the lines got sharper, the shading more careful, and I realized I was actually trying to get it right.
I drew the jaw first, square and mean. Not the jaw of a hero, but the jaw of someone who could bite through fence wire if it got in the way. Then the line of the neck, all those hidden cords of muscle, tense even in supposed relaxation. I sketched the mouth last, because I was scared of getting it wrong. Last night, that mouth had gone from rigid line to open desperation in about three seconds flat. I’d never seen anything as honest.
For the eyes, I had to start over three times. The first pair looked too cold. The second, too sad. But the third try caught something—an edge of fear, maybe, or the longing that hung behind it. I didn’t draw the badge. That was for him to bring, next time.
I leaned back, let the paper drop, and tried to breathe through the ache in my chest.
The bell over the door jangled, and I snapped up so fast I smeared black across my wrist. There are maybe six people in McKenzie River who could walk into my shop at 10:15 on a Thursday and throw me off my axis. Floyd Hardesty was at the top of that list.
He didn’t wear the uniform. Today it was jeans—dark, clean, clearly ironed—and a button-down shirt in some faint blue that made his eyes look like sky after a rain. His hair was still regulation-short, but it looked like he’d run his hands through it a hundred times before coming in. He paused in the doorway, like he needed to memorize his exit route, then came in fast and closed the door behind him.
He looked at me, then at the shop, then at the door again. “Anyone else coming in?”
“Nope,” I said, and let my voice go soft. “You’re safe.”
