by Emilia Loft
He could taste a few salty beads on his tongue, feel the skin get thin and tight as Cas grew even harder, so close. The preacher was shifting beneath him now, moaning and Evan tried to hold back but it’s getting real difficult with all those pretty sounds he’s making. He thinks he’s gonna succeed when the covers are ripped off and Cas is staring down at him with wide shocked eyes.
“D-Evan?!”
He’s panting, throwing his head back then propping up again to try and figure out how this got so far without his notice. Evan smirks as best he can around the girth in his mouth and sets about to finish Cas off as hard and fast as he can. He pins the man’s hips to the mattress with half his weight and proceeds to suck hard and wet. Cas nearly screams, arching back, one hand accidentally punching the wall behind his head.
“Wait! Evan let me go I’m gonna….Evan ughn UHH- you shouldn’t…”
But Evan’s having none of that modesty, that man’s come belongs to him and he’s gonna take it. His fingers wrap tighter around Casper’s hips and he can feel the muscles trembling beneath them. He fucks impossibly harder with his mouth down onto Casper, who’s both bucking up into him and trying to twist away. And then with a sound that will haunt Evan for the rest of his days Casper comes down his throat and he sucks it down greedy, licking up every spare drop.
Casper is panting with a look that’s both fucked out and scandalized and Evan decides the expression makes perfect use of his features and he should look like that every day.
“You…you…I didn’t think….”
He can’t fucking handle what Casper does to him, looking up like at him like the act of Evan swallowing him down merits the same wonder as finding a lost chapter of the Good Book. There isn’t exactly a rational, human thought that directs Evan to shift up over Casper, to grab his own needy dick and start pumping it furiously as he stares down into piercing blues eyes. He’s been on edge for what feels like hours so there’s no time for either of them to consider much before Evan is painting white stripes across Casper’s chest and stomach, crying out Cas’ name and gripping himself in the last twitching throws to rub the head in the mess he’s made and feel enormously pleased with how that looks. Cas lays there gasping as if he’s just come again, and when Evan flops down beside him, he twists his fingers in Evan’s hair and pulls his head up for a filthy kiss.
Evan gets lost in it for a moment before planting a hand on Casper’s stomach and rubbing his spend into the man’s skin. God he’s never done anything like this before but he can’t seem to help himself, wanting to mark up the preacher in every way he can, lay down invisible claims in the man’s skin like he’s some kind of animal. Casper moans like he’s tried, and failed, to pretend he doesn’t like it, and that has Evan sitting up quick, hauling Cas into his lap and wrapping him up tight in his arms.
“Gonna stay here another day Cas, gonna have them send up all our meals and a bath and I’m not letting you leave this bed till we ride out tomorrow morning.”
Cas grumbles his pleasure into Evan’s mouth and begins to lick his way down his neck. And Evan decides he can have one more day, just one more. He’ll tell Cas tomorrow.
Everything can wait till tomorrow.
* * *
Travel was delayed a few hours when Casper took over the general store and pulled together an odd assortment of goods. Evan didn’t want to mention that they already had most of what he was buying, but it all made more sense when the preacher called a halt to the coach a few hours down the road. There was a strip of black cloth tied to a tree branch that Casper took down before marching off into the woods with his bundle and not a syllable of explanation.
Jesus the man was infuriating. Evan followed after him shouting but had a pretty good idea of what was up, confirming his suspicions when they ran into the young native again. This time Evan was allowed to follow. Casper handed off the supplies, slipping a few sticks of candy into the hand of a young girl who eyed them like they might be full of poison. There were a few words with an ancient looking woman, but the prognosis seemed the new mother and child were doing well and they were prepared to follow after their tribe in a few days’ time.
Evan was flush with both irritation and respect for the preacher, and grumbled about it as he dragged Casper back through the trees. Casper just cooed on about the baby and offered his knowing little half smile at Evan’s ire, so the sheriff was forced to prop him up against a tree and kiss him breathless. Get him all worked up and whimpering then toss him into the coach with a devilish wink at the preacher’s pained, needy look.
* * *
Had they stayed the original course, it would have taken them roughly three more weeks to reach Lawrence. As it stood now it had been a month and a half and there were still a few days yet until they arrived. No one said a word and the accepted reasoning was that stopping in towns for a day or more whenever feasible kept Miss Meg happy. The reality, however, could be found in the confines of the preacher’s bed each night. It was impossible to get up to much on the road, they were limited to a handful of moments when one or the other would use the excuse of bathing or taking a piss to steal a frenzied kiss among the trees or behind a tall enough cluster of rocks.
There was one line, however, that Evan refused to cross. No matter how much he wanted it, how much Casper seemed to beg him with the unspoken language of his body, he refused to let them actually fuck. They could grope and suck and come until they each pleaded mercy but it was all done in the roundabout ways. He knew what Casper was thinking, that Evan was acting out of some sort of respect for the preacher’s virginity, and Evan had found out first thing that Casper was a virgin in every respect. And he was fine adding this falsehood onto the pile and letting Cas believe what he wanted. Truth was Evan was already head over heels and as much as he wanted to fuck that beautiful man open on his cock in every conceivable way, he knew it would only hurt the preacher worse in the end and he just couldn’t do it.
The closer they got, the more he hated himself. And he couldn’t even bother with the look of question Garth gave him when he ordered that they should pull over at the last town before Lawrence, not even a full day’s ride away, and spend the night.
“Do everyone good to make our appearances refreshed.” He offered lamely, but he couldn’t find it in himself to give a fuck.
Evan spent that whole night on his knees, crawling up the ladder of the man’s spine, stretched over the preacher as he writhed and bucked, wringing out all those sounds he loved, making Cas come again and again with his fingers and mouth and tongue. Worshiping his whole body until it was dawn and the ruse of taking a night to refresh would be clearly a lie. He didn’t care. This might be it, last time, gotta get his fill so that he can look back and remember.
And when they arrived in Lawrence the next morning, he blanched at the small crowd gathered there from Garth’s telegraph, everyone he cared about, his family and friends and community and Evan thought he was going to be sick.
Cas smiled at everyone and everyone smiled back and there were voices clambering over one another and handshakes from all angles and it was chaos, but Evan still saw with cutting clarity the way Casper’s smile died when one slim hand in particular clasped the preacher’s.
“It’s so good to meet you Reverend Turner! I’m Sheriff Parker’s wife Lisa.”
* * *
“Reverend Turner? Are you home?”Parkerweet voice carried across his threshold. Casper had been standing with the hammer in his hands for a solid ten minutes without being able to recall just what it was he’d walked over here to fix. It was happening too often nowadays, minutes of time lost, hours in the evening with no chores or demands to occupy his thoughts. It was pathetic. It had to stop. He blushed at the interruption, as if he’d been caught doing something illicit, but they couldn’t see him from here and he felt doubly silly at his rapidly beating heart.
“Hello Miss Milton, Miss Harvelle,” He nodded at them where they stood at his doorstep, arms intertwined and gi
ggling. Behind them he saw Jo’s mother Ellen and Anna’s mother Jody along with Missouri holding a basket of food and Jessica holding a stack of folded blankets against her swelling stomach. “I thought we were meeting later at the church.”
That must have been a good enough welcome for them since they all spilled into the front room of his home and set about preparing the space for lunch. Not that there was much to clear. His home was nearly empty.
The original tenant had built the homestead with an eye for a family, but when his wife and child had died during labor, he’d abandoned it. The previous preacher had been moved in as the community felt that it wouldn’t do to have such a flourishing town with a preacher that slept on a cot in a room off the church sanctuary. Reverend Glenn had been neither a careful nor clean man.
Aside from the few bits of furniture left behind, he’d added nothing but books and refuse, letting the rest of it rot around him.
There’d been some effort to tidy the place for Casper’s arrival, but no one had the time to see to the necessary maintenances. It fell to Casper, and a core of the church’s women felt sorry enough at the extra work they’d left him that they took it upon themselves to bring him food every other day, or spare supplies, flowers, gently used linens. And Casper had managed to pretend that the reason all of these things were left in piles at the corners of the rooms was that he had so very much to attend to with regards to basic repairs.
He didn’t like lying, and if he was being honest this was entirely a lie. The home itself was well built, strong bones and solid lines. There was very little that needed his attention. The real reason the rooms remained so bare and unlived in even a month after he’d arrived was entirely due to his helplessness to do anything else after spending hours a day forcing smiles and pretending that every minute didn’t feel like hot screws were boring into his chest. He would be furious with Evan if he wasn’t so busy being furious with himself.
How could he have been so stupid? So humiliatingly naïve as to think a man like Evan Parker wouldn’t be married. Or even if he wasn’t, what the hParker thought could come of their….time together? How could he have given himself over so freely with no questions asked?
And while he didn’t want to consider that Evan was such a man, he knew part of the reason was that if he’d known, he would have felt obligated to stop, and he hadn’t wanted to. Selfish, stupid, reckless behavior and now he was reaping the rewards. He shed tears over it, then bit back screams at his weakness.
Evan consumed his thoughts.
First it was snatches of memory through the fog of his grief. The patterns of callouses on his hands. The low drawl of his teasing voice. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes the sun had painted in sharp contrasting tan. It was as if his mind were trying to catalogue it all, now that he would have no more opportunity to experience these things as if they were somehow his. Then it moved on to fantasies. Dreams that their travel to Lawrence had never ended, that they’d traveled on alone forever in the wilderness. Dreams of Evan unattached in a world that didn’t care who you loved, of a church that felt the same. Then darker ones, of Lisa dying, of Evan dying, of Casper wasting away of a broken heart until Evan kicked down his door, hollow eyed and begging forgiveness.
“This place would come together much quicker if you had a woman about.” Jody smiled at him knowingly, Jo and Anna giggled.
“I have a number of women about,” Casper looked around at the group as they took over his home. They all laughed at the preacher’s apparent innocence. He just didn’t want to encourage them. Almost the day after he’d arrived Jody had shown up with her daughter Anna in tow and looked him over like she was already kitting out the bridal trousseau in her head.
“We should get some of the men out here,” Ellen mused while they ate. “Maybe Ash if he’s not too busy with the telegraph station, or one the of the Parker boys.” Casper choked on a bit of his food, coughing poliParkerhis napkin. Several of them gave him a sympathetic look. Somehow or other, they’d come to believe the preacher had a delicate disposition, refined, gentle. He was always too weary from the effort of feigning pleasantness to correct them.
“I don’t believe that’s necessary, I am quite capable of seeing to – “
“Sure you are sweetie,” Ellen waived a dismissive hand at him. “But you’d be doing me a favor. Anything to get Evan out of my saloon for an afternoon would be a Godsend. That boy’s had a bee in his bonnet he’s been trying to drown in my good stuff since he got back. I honestly don’t know how you made it all the way out here with your sanity intact.”
He doesn’t think they notice the bitterness of his laugh.
* * *
“I almost shot you!” Sam ran an aggravated hand through his long hair. Stupid long hair, he just wasn’t gonna to cut it, was he?
“You’re a- a- bitch who couldn’t hit th’ side of a barn!” Evan dissolved into giggles from where he sat on the floor after scaring Sam half to death sliding in through his kitchen window like a giant intoxicated raccoon.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk before.” Evan tips his hat with two fingers, falls over once before making it to standing.
“Special ‘ccasions only, Sammy. You should toast me, I think I’m in love! But, you know, Parker style….so it means I’m fucked all ta hell.”
It took Sam a feParkerto process this, enough time for Evan to crash into the table on his way to the bedroom. But Jess would kill him if Evan got his boots all over her clean sheets so he manages to run after his brother and steer him bodily into the guest room instead. It’ll be the nursery soon enough but he had been waiting for his brother to return before starting any projects that might keep him away from his duties as deputy.
“You’re in love? When did this happen?” Evan flopped down flat on the bed, groaned when the room started spinning and sat back up.
“Out there….on the road. Hell, probably ever since Boston, I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t
get my head straight Sammy, and I think I understand why you were such a whiny little brat the first time Jess turned you down.”
Sam covered his eyes with a palm. “Evan, please…please tell me you didn’t sleep with Bobby’s new wife out there. I can’t even think about that poor fucking woman having to….”
“Who Meg?! God Sammy, give me a little credit.”
“Well what are-?” He looks over the misery etched onto his brother’s face. “Oh no. Oh God no Evan, tell me you don’t mean…”
“Glory, glory Hallelujah Sam. So fucking fucked.”
“Reverend Turner?! You slept with the preacher?!”
“Well I didn’t…we didn’t….”
There are a number of vague hand gestures that Sam’s not sure he wants to interpret. “I mean we were…together…and such. A lot. But not all the way, Sam. I couldn’t…with Lisa and all….and I’m such a bastard.” Sam is shaking his head so furiously it might spin off from his shoulders.
“Don’t elaborate. Just…shit Evan I don’t even know what to tell you on this one.”
“Fucked right?” And his brother looks so miserable it breaks Sam’s heart.
“Yeah, a little fucked. But Evan, maybe this is an opportunity to look at you and Lisa. I mean you never do anything for yourself and it’s not as if we’d let something happen to her. You never should have married her when-“
“I can’t leave her Sam! You know that, I made a promise.”
“That you interpreted with that twisted logic of yours,” Sam is shouting now, “That says you have to give everything up for everyone! You don’t love her, Evan. So why the hell did you even need to marry her? You didn’t, you just don’t know how to function unless you’re –“
Even drunk and collapsed on the bed, Evan’s so quick Sam doesn’t see the punch coming. They spill to the floor, too uncoordinated in the small space to do much more than tumble about.
“Get off me you asshole!” Evan screams, Sam finally managing to pin him t
o the floor. Evan’s skilled but right now he’s got nothing against Sam’s weight.
“Then quit fucking fighting me you jerk!” Evan huffs then nods, Sam huffs then nods, and there’s no one else to witness how similar they look right now.
Sam sits back against the wall and Evan rolls up to lean against the bed and they sit there in silence as the fight leaks out of both of them.
“Even if I could…could leave her. It’s not like I can marry Cas or somethin’. They’d string us up and shoot us- and don’t look at me like that. You’re so fucking naïve sometimes. Why do you think you’re the only one I’ve told about my…my…condition?” Sam is touching his lip and checking his fingers for blood.
“Cause you’re an insufferable bastard with no actual friends?”
“Cause it’s evil Sam, I’m evil for wanting it. And he’s a man of the church, I seduced a holy… person. -HIC-The only-HIC- only thing worse woulda been if I fucked an actual angel of the Lord. -HIC-”
Sam’s laughing at him now, “You are a ridiculously theatrical drunk.”
“Shut up Sam! Tell me what to do!”
“Well, seeing as I can’t do both of those things at once…. I can’t speak for him Evan, I just know
you. And I know you have the most infuriating way of making it your duty to put family before yourself without letting us do the same for you.” Sam lifts a hand at Evan’s protest but Lisa is an old argument and he’s not in the mood to till barren ground. “But puttin’ that aside for a moment, this church thing, that’s real Evan. I could tell you to divorce Lisa, run off with this man you’re obviously tearing yourself up about and go live somewhere in the mountains in peace for the rest of your days. But someone who devotes themselves to a calling like that has a lot more to get through than just….the customary relations.” Sam chewed on this thoughts a moment, giving his brother a