He looks up at me. Waiting.
"Tell me what you want," he says.
Something the old Josie would never have survived. She'd have deflected, found a way to be in her head about it. But she is gone. This Josie has gotten on a horse. This Josie quits her job on a Tuesday afternoon from a blanket by a creek in the Texas Hill Country because she is done doing things that feel like waiting.
"I want your mouth on me," I say. "Everywhere. And I want you to take your time."
The look that crosses his face does something to my spine.
"Yes, ma'am," he says, and gets to work.
He takes his time the way he takes his time with everything. His mouth works down my ribs, my stomach, and when he gets his hands on the waist of my jeans and looks up at me I lift my hips and let him take them off. He pulls back to look at me, bare in the dappled light, and his expression is that focused, intent look I've seen him use with the young horse in the round pen. The look of a man who understands that some things require his complete attention.
"Every morning this week," he says, low, "I watch you walk into that barn and work so hard at something that scares you." He presses his mouth to the inside of my knee. "I've wanted this since the first day." Lower. "Wanted to hear every sound you've been keeping quiet."
He gets his mouth between my legs, and I make a sound that carries all the way to the ridge and I do not care even a little.
He is devastatingly, ruthlessly patient about it. When I say faster, he says not yet against my skin. When I say please, he saysI know and keeps the exact same unhurried pace, his hands flat on my thighs holding me where he wants me, and I am going completely out of my mind. The canopy above me, the creek ten feet away, the sun coming through the leaves in warm patches on my bare skin, and this man taking me apart with the same quiet deliberateness he brings to everything.
"Carson. Carson."
"Yeah." Still not faster. "I hear you."
"I swear!"
"Ask me nicely," he says.
"Please. Carson. Please."
He gives me what I've been asking for, and I stop being able to form sentences. My back comes off the blanket. His hands grip my thighs and hold on. I grab a fistful of grass and another of the blanket and when I come it is with my heels in the dirt and my whole body arching and his name on my lips, completely unmanaged, completely real. Nothing held back. Nothing managed. Just this.
He stays with me through every second of it. Then, he comes up and I push him back and he goes, settling onto the blanket. His hands find my hips immediately. I work at his belt, get his jeans off, and swing my leg over him and sit up and look down at him.
That jaw. Those dark eyes, blown wide. The full weight of his attention on me, which I've stopped trying to manage and start just accepting as the extraordinary thing it is.
I think about what he says in the barn, the first day.You figure it out, or you don't.Four days of learning to sit up straight and keep my weight in my heels and let the horse move under me instead of bracing against it. Trust the thing that's powerful enough to throw you.
I reach between us and guide him and sink down slowly and watch his face change entirely.
His head drops back. Both hands grip my hips hard, his knuckles going white. A sound tears out of him, low and involuntary and wanting, and I feel it in my chest like something struck.
I start to move.
Finding the rhythm the way I find it with Bonnie. Not forcing it, not fighting it. Learning what draws the sounds out of him, what makes his breath go ragged, what makes his hands tighten and his jaw set and his careful composure strip away completely. He is watching me with his expression gone open in a way I've never seen on him, all that patience worn through to what is underneath it. His throat moves. His hands on my hips aren't guiding. Just holding. Letting me have this.
I set the pace.
"Josie." Rough. Broken at the edges.
He says something that isn't words and his grip tightens hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow and I want that. I want the evidence of this on my skin. I want to press my fingers to the bruises in a few days and remember the exact look on his face right now.
"You feel so good," he says, his voice completely wrecked. “Fuck.” He groans.
I don't stop.
He gets a hand between us, his thumb finding exactly the right place on my clit, and I gasp and my rhythm stutters.
"Keep going," he says, low and aimed just at me. "Let me feel you."
