The Cowboy

by Molly O'Keefe

“We’re moving Bonnie in.”

  “She settled?”

  “Yeah…it’s great. She’s real happy.”

  “Your horse is happy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wonderful.” Her sarcasm was so thick I could taste it. “You can leave.”

  “I want to talk.”

  “I don’t really care what you want.” She stood up and the skin of her chest was red and splotchy. She was furious, sending out sparks, and the air suddenly seemed really dry. Dangerously combustible.

  “What I said the other day about you…bending over for other men—”

  She looked away, her lips tight. “Fuck you for that.”

  “I’ve never talked to a woman like that in my life.”

  “Yeah, well, I lied to you. So…are we even?”

  I didn’t say anything. What would “even” look like between us? Like what we had a few days ago? Surely there was more we could have. More we could get.

  “You were right,” she said, running her hands along the bag she was holding. “We should have just stayed friends. Benefits always screws things up.”

  “Benefits didn’t screw us up. I did. With my shit. And you did. With the lie.”

  She went completely still. Her lips parted on her breath.

  Once, when I was in Oklahoma, there was this pond that froze over and Charlie dared me to go walk across it. I did, and about halfway I could hear the ice breaking beneath me. It didn’t sound the way I thought it would. It sounded like a monster groaning under my feet.

  This moment felt the same way.

  Like a monster was about to get us.

  “Then what do you want, Cody?” she asked carefully, like she was scared. Like she was on the ice with me, too.

  22

  “I want to kiss you,” I told her.

  “Sex?”

  “Yes. And don’t pretend you don’t want that, too. No more lying.”

  “Fine. No lying. And then what?”

  “I want to be inside you when you come.”

  She lifted a finger to wipe away the tear stuck to her eyelashes and then she sat there for a second, in her sister’s bedroom because I knew she couldn’t bear to go into her own room. In this house where she’d never been happy. I knew all of that about her. I knew so much. The lie aside, we’d been so honest with each other.

  She had every right to turn me down. In fact, it would be smart for her to do it. For both of us.

  But I wanted her yes. I wanted it so bad I could taste it. Taste her—salty and sweet in the back of my throat.

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We do that. I come with you inside me. And you let me touch you the way you never have. We fuck and then…do we draw straws to see who hurts the other one? Do we just take turns? You went last, so it’s my turn. As long as one of us pushes the other one away so we don’t have to deal with what we’ve done?”

  “No. We don’t do that.”

  She laughed, but it was bitter. “You sure? Because it kind of seems like our thing, Cody.”

  I sat down beside her, my feet stretched out until her dress touched my leg and I liked that. It might be all I ever get from her again.

  “Charlie…the guy you talked to about Bonnie. He was…” I exhaled. What was the best way to describe that stubborn force of nature? “He was the closest thing I had to a dad for a long time.” Dad. Yeah. That worked. That was the right word. “And after the accident I pushed him away, because I didn’t know what to do with myself and all my fucked-up feelings. Because he seemed to want me to feel them all the time and I wanted to feel nothing. And he…well, he just said that you wanted to love me but I make it hard.”

  She flinched, went back to putting things in bags until I reached forward and forced her to stop. Actually put my hands over hers. I could feel her shaking.

  “He said you were broken,” she said to me. “Someone broke you and you never got fixed right.”

  My skin crawled all along my back and it was hard to stay still. To be in this room. But this was the price of having her. And I wanted her.

  “Sounds like something Charlie would say,” I finally managed to get out.

  “Who broke you?”

  “Well,” I laughed, because my entire body was running hot and cold. “That’s kind of a toss-up. “

  She got to her feet and turned as if that was it. As if I’d blown it.

  “Hey.” It took me a second to get to my feet with my knee, but I managed to snag her arm, touching the inside of her elbow where the skin was so pink and soft. “I’m sorry. Jokes are kind of…well, it’s how I cope.”

  “Yeah and how is that working out for you?”

  “It’s not. But you know that, don’t you? You do the same thing.”

  We were a lot alike, this beautiful girl and me. I saw it more and more. And this risk I was feeling while I looked at her, standing so close. She was feeling it, too. I could see it in her eyes. The set of her shoulders. The goose bumps across her skin.

  “My mom,” I said, clumsy and blunt. “She…I mean, that’s what the shrinks all told me, that she was the one who broke me. I got arrested when I was a kid, sent to this camp—that’s where I met Jack.”

  “He told me.”

  I nodded because I figured. Jack wasn’t embarrassed about his past like I was. “We had to do all this talking, you know? To get to go home. And there was all this shit I forgot about my mom when I was little.”

  “Like what?”

  “She’d leave me alone, for days. She’d pick me up in the middle of the night and take me out to some party so I could drive her home. There was always some man she was trying to make love us and when they left it was somehow my fault. She’d show up drunk at my school, scream at me in front of my friends. And then the next day she’d do her hair and her makeup and she kiss me, and she’d be so beautiful, pretending like nothing ever happened. She’d send me to Gran’s and leave me there for…weeks.” I shook my head, the memories had an old brutality. They didn’t hurt like they used to but they weren’t exactly painless, either.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said.

  “Yeah. But I had Gran. And Jack. And Charlie, too. She came sniffing around once I started making money and I…” God, this was hard. Way harder even than I’d thought. I looked at the old dressing table in the corner. The mirror was covered with old stickers. Stars and hearts and unicorns with silver tails.

  She touched my chin, refocusing me. “What happened with your mom when you started making money?”

  “She came around again. Started showing up. About a year ago, when I was making real money. Acting…like a mom. And Charlie warned me, he totally warned me, but I ignored him. Because she was my mom and she was loving on me. And I…ate it up with a spoon. I forgot every time she hurt me and every time she disappointed me. And then I got hurt and she…vanished again.”

  “Wait. Your mom is still alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  I smiled at her fierceness, wondering where she’d been in those years. I could have used her kind of friendship. “You gonna track her down? Make her give a shit after all these years?”

  “I’m not kidding,” she said, all spitfire and sparks.

  Her defense of me. Her anger felt good. Like an icepack on an old injury. “Hey,” I said and touched her cheek. “It’s all over. I mean, as all over as things can get between a mother and a son. I still wade through the shit she left behind. But it’s not day-to-day anymore.”

  “You lost everything with that accident,” she whispered.

  “Nope. Not even close.”

  Her eyebrows lifted like she didn’t believe me.

  “I thought that was true,” I said. “And then one morning this woman stepped out on a balcony and rocked my fucking world.”

  “Don’t—” She tried to pull away, but I wouldn’t let her.

  “And then the next day another woman
started handing me parts of myself again, like it was shit she just found lying around. My pride and my sense of humor. My compassion. My friendship. You reminded me that I didn’t lose everything. And I’ll introduce you to Charlie and to Bonnie because I still have them, but only because of you, Bea. Who knows how long I would have pushed them away if it weren’t for you?”

  She kissed me. Up on tiptoes she grabbed hold of my shirt and kissed me. Dry. Hard. Close-mouthed. Nothing sexy about it, but all the blood in my body made a galloping run for my dick.

  I wrapped my arms around her back and she went soft against me, like she was made to melt against my body. I lifted her and she opened her mouth. Spread her legs and wrapped them around my waist. She hung on me like a vine and I got as inside her as I could in that moment.

  She tasted like something new in my life. Like something I wanted. Needed. And I could not, for the life of me, get enough. Bea was making an addict out of me.

  I stepped toward the bed and she jerked back. “Your knee,” she breathed through swollen lips. Fuck, what I was going to do with that mouth. It made me blush. It made me rock hard against the sweet, hot center of her body, and when I walked toward the bed, I rubbed her just right.

  “No.”

  That made me stop. That made me run ice cold. I let her down my body and stepped back. Unable to look at her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just keep getting it wrong with you. You want to talk some more. I can keep apologizing—”

  “I don’t want to do it in here,” she said. “This is a sad fucking room. I don’t want to fuck you in a sad fucking room.”

  “Well, quick, find a happy one,” I said.

  “It’s hard in this house.”

  “I can fuck you in every room until we make them happy.”

  Her face was still for a second and then she burst into laughter. “I know just where to start.”

  She led me down the hallway across pale carpet that felt too clean beneath my boots. I started to worry that I might mess something up. But then we were in a big open master bedroom. It smelled just a little of fresh paint and even fresher air.

  Inside the door she stopped, her mouth open in wonder.

  “It’s totally different,” she whispered. “It’s…brand new.”

  There was a pretty four-poster bed set against a wall, covered with a bright blue duvet. She turned to look at me and then hooked a finger in the front of my jeans, tugging me behind her as she walked backward to that bed.

  Everything about her, from that smile on her face to the look in her eye, told me we were about to have a real good time. And all that shit I felt, about dragging her down with me into my nonsense, it was gone. Totally gone.

  “I feel happy,” I said, the words and the feelings a revelation.

  “Me, too,” she said. But there was a lingering care, a distance I could sense in her. She wasn’t ready to believe she was totally safe. She expected to be hurt after this.

  I started to take off my clothes. All of them. Boots first, which took some doing. Then jeans. Shirt. Finally underwear. Until I was completely naked in front of her. My awful scars. My raging cock. Even the freckles. All there. I was skinnier than I’d ever been, but the muscle was coming back. It wasn’t the body I used to have, but it was what I’d survived with.

  And I would give it to her all day long.

  She watched, her pale pink lips parted and wet.

  “We’ve never been naked with each other before,” I said.

  She was on her feet, the dress pushed off her shoulders until she was standing in front of me with just a pair of blue cotton panties on.

  And then those were gone, too.

  “What’s this?” I asked, touching a scar on her shoulder.

  “Sabrina pushed me off a chair at dinner. I fell into the corner of the table. What’s this?” she asked, running a hand along a scar on my abdomen.

  “Caught the edge of a horn.”

  She winced.

  “You’re beautiful.” And she was. All the pieces of her that made up the whole. That trim waist. The breasts. That look in her eye with the shrinking distance. “That was always the truth.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” she said with a nice little lift to her lips that made me hope we might get out of this mess yet. “You want to be inside me when I come,” she said and the words made my cock jump.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I tell you what I want?”

  Anything. Anything at all. Everything I had. Whatever she wanted.

  Her hand curled around my cock and I groaned, my head falling back. The ceiling was twenty feet above me and I could have floated there when her fingers traced the flared head of my dick. The vein that ran down the top, that I’d always thought was kind of ugly, she seemed pretty interested in.

  “You didn’t let me touch you,” she said, her voice low and husky. “And I want to touch you.”

  She pressed her mouth to me, breathing warm damp air across my cock. I buried my hands in her hair and pressed my legs into the insides of her thighs just so I could feel as much of her as I could.

  “You gonna let me?” she asked, and I looked down only to find her watching me. Her eyes bright, her fingers toying with me. She was a vixen. A goddess.

  “I’m gonna let you do whatever you want,” I said.

  “Yeah, you are,” she sighed.

  “But then…” I tightened my hands in her hair and she gasped. “It’s my turn.”

  “What are you gonna do, cowboy?”

  “Turn you inside out, baby.”

  She moaned low and deep in her throat and the sound was so primal, so familiar to me, I felt it in my brain. My cock jumped against her touch and she stopped teasing me. She licked me, top to bottom, sucked the tip of my cock into her mouth and I cupped her skull in my hands, the curly ends of her hair tickling my fingers and fought myself to let her do her thing.

  And her thing was fucking amazing.

  Her mouth was hot and wet and perfect and every time I looked down to see my cock disappearing into her face I had to work not to come. I had to force myself to keep it together. She used her hand against me, took me as deep as she could until I couldn’t take anymore.

  “Bea,” I whispered, pushing her away.

  “No,” she said and cupped my ass with her hand.

  “I’m gonna come.”

  “That’s the idea.” She looked up at me again, no tease, no smile. Just her swollen lips and blissed-out eyes. “Come for me.”

  My hands clenched around her head, dragging her back to me. Pushing myself deep into her mouth and then easing myself back, and soon she and I had a rhythm going. “Yes. God, yes, Bea. Look at you. I can’t…fuck.”

  The orgasm rolled up my spine and exploded in my body. I jerked against her, probably pulling her hair, probably fucking her throat, and I couldn’t stop myself. I emptied myself into her until I was done.

  “I’m sorry,” I said releasing her hair. “Did I hurt you?”

  “Fuck no.” She breathed and lay back against the bed. For a second all I could do was stare. As a teenager when I imagined what sex would be like, what a woman would look like—this had been it. This was the moment. She was bliss and seduction.

  The most powerful thing I’d ever seen.

  “What are you looking at, cowboy?” she asked, running that hand up her leg to that sweet spot between her legs.

  The woman I’m falling for, I thought. The woman I could spend my life with.

  But I didn’t say any of that. She wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready.

  So instead, I said, “You wet?” She hummed and nodded, her bottom lip between her teeth. “Show me.”

  She spread her legs wider and I got down on my knees in front of her and pressed my mouth right up against her. Breathing her in. Tasting her.

  I licked her, sucked her until she was bowing up off the bed. Until my whole world was the scent and taste of her. I had my hand wrapped around my cock t
rying to keep myself from coming.

  “You got condoms in this house somewhere?” I asked when I couldn’t hold out any longer.

  “None that are from this decade.”

  I pressed a kiss against her thigh, trying not to be bummed. There were a thousand things we could do.

  “Hey.” She lifted my chin so I was looking right into her blue, blue eyes. “I’m on the pill and I haven’t had sex with anyone in a year.”

  “A year?”

  “Travis. And I was tested after I found out he lied.”

  “I was tested after the accident and I sure as hell haven’t been with anyone.”

  Her smile was slow and warm.

  “I’ve never…been in a woman without a condom.”

  “Well, then this is a big day for you, isn’t it?” she joked and I shook my head. Not interested in jokes. This felt big. It felt…important. She felt important.

  I got to my knees on the bed, spreading her legs out wide, and when I ran my hand up to her pussy, I found her drenched.

  “Jesus.”

  “Fuck me, Cody.”

  And that was it. I braced myself on my hand, notched the head of my dick to the opening of her body and slid into heaven.

  “Oh, my god.” She arched up into me, and when she lay back down I was deeper inside of her. She was hot, so hot. Blast furnace hot and I felt myself changed.

  “Move, please.” She lifted her hips again, fucking herself. Using me. And I liked that. I did. Because I liked everything this woman did. And would until the day I died. “Please, Cody.”

  “I like it when you beg,” I whispered into her ear.

  She moaned, twisting herself, lifting her leg up higher onto my back and I pushed deep inside of her. So deep her eyes popped wide and she opened her mouth to breathe like I was forcing out all the air from her lungs.

  “So deep,” she whispered. “You’re so deep.”

  And I was going to get deeper. And harder. And I was going to be the last cock to feel this heat. This divine, beautiful pussy.

  You’re mine. Mine.

  I stroked into her. Harder. Deeper.

  All mine.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Yes. Yours. I’m yours.”

  I’d said it out loud, revealing more than I’d intended, but the tidal wave was on us and I couldn’t take it back. Wouldn’t even if I could. Her chest was red above the dress and I pulled down the top until I had her breast in my hand. Her nipple in my mouth. I sucked on her and fucked her and soon we were gone. Nothing. Splintered into stardust. Together.