I push my cock inside her.
She is wet and tight and her whole body arches up into it, her nails finding my shoulders, and I hold still for one breath with my jaw clenched because if I move before I'm ready this is going to be over fast. She feels too good. Five days of keeping my hands to myself and she feels exactly as good as I've known she would.
I move long and slow first, watching her face, her head tipped back and her lips parted and the flush spreading down her chest. Her pussy grips me every time I pull back and she makes a sound low in her throat that goes straight through me.
Harder.
Both hands on her, one gripping her hip to hold her where I need her, and she stops managing anything at all — no composure, no control, just her nails in my back and her heels against my thighs and her voice in my ear asking for more. I giveher more. She comes again with her back off the mattress and her whole body pulling tight around me.
I bury myself deep and come hard, hips jerking through it, jaw clenched, the kind that starts at the base of your spine and takes everything with it. Her name comes out of me on the way down, and I don't try to stop it. I stay inside her until it is done, both of us sweating and breathing hard and not talking.
Her fingers move slowly through my hair. Neither of us speaks for a while. The spring night comes through the open window. Creek and cedar and horse on the warm air, the sounds of the Hill Country settling toward midnight.
"I didn't know it could be like that," she says finally.
"Like what?"
"Like someone was actually paying attention."
I turn my head and press my mouth to her temple instead of answering, because I don't trust what I might say.
I trace a slow line down her shoulder. She lets her breath out in a way that means she is nowhere else in her head. That is something. She spends a lot of energy in her head. I've watched her all week, the constant internal management, the self-monitoring. Right now, there is none of it.
"I haven't slept well in years," she says.
"Okay."
"I think tonight might be different."
I kiss her hair. "Good."
She turns her head to look up at me. "You're not going to tell me this is complicated or that you don't usually do this?"
"No." I meet her eyes. "I don't usually. But that's not your problem."
She puts her head back on my shoulder.
Outside, the horses shift in the barn. The ordinary sounds of them settling for the night. I lie there, and I know two thingswith equal certainty: she is going to leave on Sunday, and I am not going to be all right with that.
I don't say either. Some things you let live in the dark for a while.
She reaches down and traces the scar on my knee. Doesn't flinch from it.
"Tell me," she says.
"Eight seconds on a bronc named Sidewinder. End of the round, I thought I had him." I look at the ceiling. "I didn't. Got pitched into the boards, knee caught wrong. Heard it before I felt it."
"What happened to Sidewinder?"
I almost laugh. "Nothing. He was fine. Horses usually are."
"Of course they are." A beat. "I was eight," she says. "My cousin's farm. A gelding got spooked by a tractor, and I was too close and too slow. The ground came up, and I remember the sky spinning and then just white." She touches her collarbone. "Broke this. Spent the summer in a sling."
"Scared you all the way to now."
"All the way to now." She says it plainly, without self-pity, and I pull her closer. "You know what's strange? I spent twenty-two years building a whole life around not being that girl on the ground, and I didn't even realize it until I was sitting in my apartment at thirty with a perfectly fine life that felt like a waiting room."
I look at her.
