Nowhere Ranch

by Heidi Cullinan

  When he took me down, it was abrupt, but he was urgent, so I held still and tried to follow what he wanted me to do. He cut me free at my hands, but my legs he kept tied down. He adjusted the slack on them, though, and I held on to the bench, keeping still as he worked. When he took off his shirt, my heart quickened. I held still as he draped it over my shoulder. I watched as he took off his boots and his jeans.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck as he put my hands on his shoulders, kicked the bench aside, and pushed me backward and down into the hay.

  But on the way down, he grabbed that shirt and draped it around my ass, taking a second to make sure the flaming, wounded flesh was protected. I could still feel the hay poking through the cotton fabric as he pressed me down, but the gesture touched me so deeply that I didn't care.

  I held still as he trussed my legs up again, opening me wide, reattaching the rope to a bolt on the side of the stall. I watched as he pulled a condom over himself and slicked himself with lube. I moaned as he pulled the dildo out of me and tossed it off to the side.

  I raised my arms and looped them around his neck as he pushed inside my body and rode me again.

  I forgot I still had the bit in my mouth until I tried to kiss him, and when I realized it was there, my eyes widened in surprise. He just grinned at me and pulled it out, then took hold of my jaw.

  “Open,” he told me.

  I did. And I moaned as he came inside, fucking me with his tongue as he fucked me with his cock. When he reached down and stroked me, I came with three tugs, I was so turned-on. He, God bless him, took his time, riding me until I was squirming, until I was whining like a dog beneath him. Then he pumped into me with four hard strokes, and he came too.

  I wished he were coming inside me for real. I'd never let anybody do that, but I wanted it then, and I wanted it bad. I wanted to feel his spunk leaking out of me. I wanted to feel it fill me. I wanted him to come inside me and plug me up to make me hold it for him. The thought shook me, but it made me go soft in his arms too, made me melt against his sweaty, hairy chest and kiss his neck.

  He grabbed the hat, which had fallen off, and slapped it back on my head as he pulled out. “That's your present,” he told me. “Happy birthday.”

  That made me laugh, and my smile lingered. It was still there when I tipped the hat rakishly on my head and lay back on the hay as I looked up at him, sated and satisfied. I smiled until he bent down and kissed my mouth again, soft at first, and then hard. I shifted against his shirt, letting him swallow my quiet moan of pain as the hay poked at my welts and as he settled back between my thighs, rubbing his sticky cock against mine as his fingers sought my hole.

  I wasn't able to go to work at all the next day, and I couldn't ride a horse for a solid week.

  It was pretty much the best fucking birthday ever.

  I cooked for him the next day and a lot of days after that.

  We had my roast for dinner the day after my birthday, cooked in his oven. He went up to my place to get the stuff, because I really was a sore motherfucker after he was through with me. What I liked was that he never got bent out of shape about that. He just asked if I was hurt, and when I said yes, he tried to apologize, but after I shook my head, he just nipped my shoulder and quietly took care of me.

  Honestly, we almost went too far that night, and it's to his credit that he felt bad about it. Technically in that scenario, it was his job to make sure it didn't go too far, but the thing was, it wasn't really too far. But as he took care of me later that night and the next day, I watched him carefully, and I figured out why it upset him so much.

  “I don't mind a little soreness now and again,” I told him as I lay on the floor on my stomach, propped up on my elbows as I sipped the coffee he'd brought me. “Nothing chases the monkeys out of your head like a sore backside.” I paused, adding because I wanted it to be clear, “I ain't lying about it like whoever used to lie to you.”

  He sat down on the floor in front of me and grimaced into his mug. “Riley—the student who came here with me. He did that. Would tell me he was okay when he wasn't.” He traced his finger around the rim. “In and out of bed.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Student?”

  He gave me a sly, not-very-apologetic grin. “He was a grad student. He wasn't in any of my courses, but he was still off-limits. Not that this mattered.” He shook his head, smiling in memory. “All he had to do was say, ‘Yes, Dr. Loving,’ and I was lost.” He reached out and stroked my cheek. “That was his bench. We made it together. But he was shorter than you are, so I had to make some modifications.”

  I liked how he was touching me so gentle. It made my body hum. “But he didn't like it out here, you said.”

  Travis shook his head. “He lied to himself as much as he lied to me. I was angry when he left, but in hindsight, I think it was all he could do. We said we were all about commitment and honesty, and in the end we were both lying. He didn't want to be here. Didn't want to build a ranch with me. A life, yes—but he wanted the life we'd had in Omaha, the life I'd hated. He wanted a nice house and parties. People coming over. Snuggling on the couch.” He frowned. “Well, it's not that I don't like those things. I just—” He sighed and ran his thumb along my lip, looking sad. “He wanted the relationship, wanted the cuddling and soft words and flowers. And just like he didn't tell me he wasn't happy, I didn't tell him either. The only difference is I faked it longer than he did.”

  I held still while he stroked me. I wanted to look him in the eye and promise I wouldn't lie to him, but I wasn't sure that wouldn't be a lie itself, so I kept quiet and let him stroke me. It felt good, lying there with my ass burning so bad I couldn't stand anything but ointment on it, warming my hands with a mug of coffee as Travis stroked my lip. Quiet. I loved the calm and the quiet and the easy.

  After a few minutes, though, I broke the silence myself. “I got to get back to making dinner.”

  That had made him smile, and he watched me as I cooked wearing nothing but a dish towel for an apron. He sat at the table, sipping coffee and watching me. Watching mostly my ass.

  “Jesus, but I whipped the shit out of you, didn't I?” he said.

  “Yep.” I slid the onion I'd been cutting into chunks into the roaster I'd sent him into town to pick up. He'd fussed, wanting to get me a fancy one, but once I'd heard they had the cheap, black, tinny thing with white speckles like my mom had, I wouldn't let him come home with anything else.

  “It hurting you still?”

  I shrugged and reached for the bowl of mushrooms I'd washed. “A bit.” I glanced over my shoulder and give him a dark grin. “Kind of like it.”

  The look on his face made me shiver. “Goddamn, Roe, but the shit I want to do to you makes my balls ache just thinking about it.”

  I turned back to the roast, trying to keep my cool, but my cock was getting hard. “Give me a few days, and you can help yourself.”

  I knew he was coming over to me, because I heard him pushing his chair back. I still jumped, though, when he put his hand on my shoulder.

  “If you run...” he said, then let the sentence hang unfinished.

  I shook my head and stared down at the roast. “I ain't gonna run.”

  His hand tightened against my bare skin. “You do, I'll make the tanning I gave you last night feel like a little kitten licking your toe.”

  That would probably kill me, so I knew he was exaggerating, but it made me feel soft inside. Nervous too, but soft. It's hard to explain. It was kind of like hope, but with jagged edges. When his hand tightened further, I realized I hadn't responded, so I nodded, then with some effort, I turned and nuzzled his jaw to show him I liked him saying that. Then I went back to cooking dinner.

  And I didn't run. I don't know what exactly had changed, but something had, and it made me feel easier than I remembered feeling for a long time. I think it was probably knowing he didn't want a relationship either, that this really was just a convenient fuck. We were friends of a kind too, b
ut that was okay. I'm not so good at that sort of thing, but it was friendlier than I'd ever been with anybody since...well, since ever, I guess. But it was okay, because we were just fucking.

  Not so much that first week, though, with the fucking. We sucked each other off a few times, but we didn't fuck proper until four days later, and even then for the next week it was pretty vanilla stuff. I could tell he was watching me careful, wanting me to heal, yeah, but also not quite believing that I wasn't going to freak out. I didn't, though. Not even a little.

  I cooked for him quite a bit. First the roast, and then I did him some pork chops and some steak. But I found out by accident the way to the man's heart was a casserole. Who the hell would have thought that, but it was. Scalloped potatoes about made the man come in his pants. He was a real pleasure to feed, I'll tell you that. Pretty soon I was cooking for him every night.

  Pretty soon too, despite us both being careful, other people were starting to notice how often I was hanging out in the boss's house. And I was pretty sure several of them knew there was more than just cooking going on.

  The other hands didn't say anything, but I felt like they watched us more carefully when we were together, especially at the end of the day when I asked him what he felt like for supper. Paul, the hand who had been with Nowhere almost as long as Tory, watched me extra close whenever Travis was around. He never said anything, and I had thought I was careful, but I started to think he knew.

  Haley knew, obviously, and she clearly approved. She took to coming over for dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays and hung around to give me my GED prep. I asked if her mom minded, but she just snorted and said her mom thought cooking was unwrapping a pizza or emptying a can.

  I know she didn't say anything to her dad, but Tory seemed to have picked up on us as well. Probably what tipped him off was the way every time he came in at the end of the day to give Travis his report, I was in the kitchen. It took him a few days, but eventually he came in and asked what was cooking. That day it was meatloaf, because I was having a yen for it. Meatloaf and baked potatoes and candied carrots. Tory gave me a look that threw me for a second, and then I laughed, because damn if please-let-me-eat-your-dinner didn't look a lot like please-let-me-fuck-you. Not something I needed to see in my ranch manager, but what the hell. I invited him to stay for supper, and I hadn't even finished the invitation before he'd whipped out his cell phone to text his wife that he'd be home late.

  In bed that night, I told Travis about it, and it made him laugh.

  Now, don't go getting ideas—I hadn't moved in or anything, but a lot of times I stayed after for a fuck. Not every night, and sometimes I left to be in my own place for a while before I came back for some fucking. That night I stayed, though, largely because Tory lingered after dinner. We sat around the table and drank beer and talked about cattle and sheep. They sidetracked into politics, at which point I went to do the dishes. They're both Libertarians, and they get all worked up over “government intervention.” Never mind the subsidies they sign on for every year. Though I see their point about the regulations that were supposed to help the small farmer but just pad the wallets of the big agricultural corporations. I don't care for most politics. In my mind they're all messed-up, but I don't see how giving the big companies more freedom would help anything. I don't say a word because Travis is a fucking doctor and I didn't even finish high school. I figure I don't have much right to say anything.

  I made the mistake of saying this to Haley.

  “Why the hell wouldn't you have a right?” She closed her fist over the laptop and pursed her lips. “Did they say that to you?”

  “What? No!” I held up my hands. Jesus. “I just meant that I ain't educated like they are.”

  That only made things worse. “There are plenty of complete idiots walking around with postgraduate degrees. There are plenty of really smart people who don't get half as far as you are right now.”

  That I doubted, but there was no way I was winding her up more than she already was. “Well, I ain't arguing with them, because it's a waste of air.”

  She laughed. “See? I told you that you were smart.”

  Thing was, Haley kind of made me feel smart. She really was going to be one hell of a teacher. It was like she was some sort of mirror of Kayla: instead of making me feel shitty about myself and making everything worse, she made it all better. Once she figured out how hard reading really was for me, she had me doing everything in audio, and when she could, she did demos. My favorite was when she explained molecular structure. She had this kit that reminded me of Tinkertoys, and she had me build molecules. My test was that I had to label them and show them to Travis. I felt kind of silly about that, but he turned out to be a good teacher too. He listened carefully, and he gave good praise. He didn't make me feel like I was some dummy he was patting on the head.

  I wouldn't let him teach me math, though. Haley said I should, but I wasn't having any of it. It was bad enough that I was such a fuck-off compared to him. I didn't want him to have to see how bad I was at what he went to school for.

  The essays were hard, and at first I figured they were going to be what broke me. But Haley wouldn't give up. Her computer had a built-in microphone, and she made me talk them out before she had me write anything. She said we were going to work up to writing them down, but for now I was talking them out. She gave me all these key phrases she said I could use over and over again. She also put outlines for my essays on cards and had me arrange them in pieces across the kitchen table, building paragraphs out of squares and rectangles of different colors, and damn if all of a sudden I didn't understand how to put an essay together.

  Best, though, was that list of key phrases. They were like anchors. There were “starting words” and “connecting words” and “list words.” It was almost like a puzzle. Between them and the outlines on rectangles I just had to plug in the bits and there it was: an essay.

  Also, she kept doing this thing with a hamburger. Something about how the essay was like a burger, with a bun that was the same at the beginning and the end, but the meat and the good stuff was in the middle. The bun just held it together. She had me map out my essays on the burger—my first one was on sheep—and then I'd look at the burger while I talked. It was a good strategy, and it got me over my nerves. By the end of October, she had me writing short ones down. It really was not that hard. And I got cocky and decided to play with Travis a bit.

  One night, after I knew he was in bed, I came back over to the house. He looked so good sitting in bed with his shirt off and his glasses on while he read a book that I just about gave up and jumped him, but I had worked for an hour on this, so I cleared my throat, held up my paper, and I read what I had written down.

  Why Travis Loving Should Fuck Me

  by Monroe Davis

  I think that Travis Loving should strip me naked, tie me up, and fuck me until both of us are crazy nuts and come our brains out. The reasons I think this should happen is because sex is fun, because we both enjoy it with each other, and because there are several things we haven't done yet.

  Sex is considered very fun by many people. Sex can relieve stress and lower blood pressure, even though at first it raises it a little. Tension is also relieved by sex. Having sex can make someone less irritable and can make conflicts seem less important. Sex can help people be more creative too. There are many different ways to have sex, and finding all those ways out can be very fun.

  I personally enjoy sex very much, and I know Mr. Loving does too, because I have had sex with him many times. He should have sex with me again because we are actually really amazing at it together. I have had sex with many other men, but never as long as I have had sex with Mr. Loving, and I keep having sex with him because he is just that good. Also, maybe it is bragging, but I think if he says somebody else gives him better head, I think he is lying.

  The final reason Mr. Loving should have sex with me is because we have left a lot of territory unexplored. For example,
I know he has some wicked spreaders in the basement, because I found the key to his locked room, but he hasn't used them on me yet. Also, I have frequently wished he would fuck me while we watched some of the porn I found in his cupboard. Thirdly, he made all this noise about fisting me and then never did anything about it.

  As you can see, there are many reasons Travis Loving should fuck me. Sex is fun, we enjoy it with each other, and there is a lot more sex we could be trying. I hope you have learned a lot from this essay, and I hope once I stop reading that Travis Loving will bend me over and fuck the shit out of me.

  Halfway through reading the thing I started to feel silly, and my face got really red. At first I had felt all clever, and to be honest, I was proud, because this was longer than anything I'd written for Haley. But what had seemed so clever when I was punching it out on the laptop she'd loaned me seemed dumb when I was reading it to Travis. I mean, I was using all her phrases, and I had the hamburger thing down and the thesis statement things, but it seemed like a fourth grader had written it. I kept on reading because I figured it would be less stupid than quitting midstream, but instead of leering and winking at him when I was finished like I'd planned, I just stood there, chest hurting, waiting in agony for judgment.

  I thought maybe he'd laugh or smile or tell me I was nuts. I was hoping for that, actually. But he didn't do any of that, and he didn't look at me like I was strange, either. If anything, he looked strange. He stared at me for a long time, and just about the point when I was ready to bolt, he took off his glasses, set them on his nightstand, and motioned to me.