It also worked. He shifted the angle, a small deliberate adjustment, enough to make my argument fall apart, and then went back to the pace that was going to be the end of me.
I made a sound that communicated my opinion on this development.
He laughed. Real, warm, unheld — the same laugh he’d had at the fence post Friday afternoon, the one I’d been trying not to think about since I was lying in my tent that night, and I laughed too, helplessly, against his shoulder.
“That’s mean,” I said.
“That’s patience,” he said. “I have a lot of it.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “It’s extremely annoying.”
“Mm,” he said, and moved again, and I stopped being able to form complaints.
He lifted me away from the wall (I was not going to examine the arm-strength implications in real time) and brought us down onto a hay bale near the workbench, the shirt finally going with it. I ended up straddling him with my hands on his shoulders and his hands loose at my hips. The angle was better. The leverage was mine. I found the rhythm and ran it.
“There you go,” he said, low, watching my face. “Take it.”
I took it.
He kept his hands light at my hips, not directing, just there the way he was always just there. “You’re taking me apart,” he said. “You have been since Friday. Every goddamn time you moved. You have no idea. Don’t stop.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “You could stop narrating and do something about it.”
He gripped my hips briefly, a statement of position. I laughed, and he looked at me laughing on top of him with a look that went warm past amusement, and his hands finally gripped.
I pushed down and he pushed up; I found the angle and saidthere— the samethereI’d said the night before, apparently a consistent preference. He stayed there and I stayed with him, his thumb working against my clit in time with the rhythm, his other hand pulling me in at the hip. The barn and the hay and all of it. None of it. I was done arguing with anything.
I came the second time with his hands hard at my hips and his face pressed to my throat and both of us making sounds that weren’t available for public review. He followed me in somewhere under thirty seconds, his grip tightening and then releasing, and a sound against my shoulder that I was keeping.
We stayed there a while.
The slanted light had moved up the barn wall. Somewhere across the property the cleanup crew was still at it, completely unaware they had been ambient narrative tension the entire time.
“Hay,” I said eventually.
“Yeah,” he said.
“There is hay. In places.”
“It’s a barn,” he said.
“I’m aware of that. I’m going to be finding hay for the rest of the day in places hay has no business being.”
“That’s the authentic Texas ranch experience,” he said, completely serious. “People pay for that.”
“They absolutely do not.”
“Some of them might,” he said, and helped me off the hay bale.
HE FOUND THE DRESSshirt and held it out. I put my arms through it.
He buttoned it for me. Bottom to top, steadily, the same slow attention he’d given everything this weekend. He got to the collar button and left it open, smoothed the fabric at my shoulders, and stepped back.
“Better?” he said.
“Functional,” I said. “Which is the best this shirt was ever going to achieve in a barn.”
He smiled and turned to pick up the halter from the workbench.
