The most interesting sight, however, was where their bodies joined. She wasn’t quite flush with his pubic bone. His shaft disappeared inside her. She had the urge to watch as she rose and fell to see what it looked like, and began to move, bracing her hands on his chest but curving her neck to watch. He was slick from her juices, reddened—ridged with heavy veins she could feel as she pushed down, up, then down again.
His hands clutched her hips and tightened, but she shook her head. “I wanna see.”
“Then watch this,” he whispered. A hand pressed against her lower tummy, his thumb rubbed on her clit, then lifted the thin hood covering it. It was red, bulbous and glistening.
The cooler air felt like a caress, and she gave a little moan.
Jackson raised his other hand and licked two fingertips, then touched her clit. It was a gentle caress, but the callus on his fingertip scraped, and she let out a shaky gasp.
“Too much?”
With her breaths shortening and her whole body trembling, she placed a hand over his and pressed his fingers harder against the nub. Then she renewed her movements, climbing up his shaft, then shoving downward, swirling when she hit the base, then rising again to repeat the process.
Her eyelids drifted downward and she concentrated on every sensation: the girth stretching her channel, the hot moisture lubricating her walls, the chafe of his pubic hair, and the tantalizing rub of his fingertips. She moved faster, breasts bouncing, her moans chopped apart as she landed harder and harder against him.
When her orgasm hit, it was better than anything her own hand had ever delivered. She ground to a halt, hot and cold waves washing over her shivering skin. Pleasure exploded, blinding her. “Ohgodohgod!”
Swaying, she welcomed the strength in the hands soothing her breasts, her belly. When it passed, she opened her eyes.
Jackson’s gaze locked with hers. His features were tight, his eyes glittered with moisture. “Baby, that was beautiful.”
She gave him a tired smile then slowly melted toward his chest. His arms enclosed her, hugging her tightly. A kiss landed on her temple. “Rest a while.”
“But…you?”
“I’ve waited this long. Another little while won’t kill me.”
Sammi Jo nuzzled into the corner of his neck. “I’m glad I waited.”
Jackson rubbed her bottom as she nestled closer. A gust of hot breath ruffled the hair stuck to her cheek. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
Her bottom pushed up against his hand. “What’s it gonna be?” she said with a lazy drawl. “A lick for every hour I made you wait?”
He tapped her butt, then rubbed the spot hard. “Let’s make it two.”
SHE DON’T STAY THE NIGHT
Anna Meadows
She should have known the first time she saw him, but he was too quiet and still. More than that, he was respectful. Boys with that kind of wildness usually ran their mouths. But if she had seen the set to the muscles around his eyes, she might have caught the first hint of the recklessness that would make him ride off on los pasos de la muerte years later. He did not have the look of a boy who would laugh at death, but one who might look it in the eye, waiting for it to flinch.
Adabella was fifteen the day Buckley Carver wandered onto her family’s land. He was the same age, mas o menos. She couldn’t know for sure. He never would tell anyone his birthday. He didn’t want Adabella’s mother stringing la piñata estrella up the ash tree, and he sure as hell didn’t want the men singing “Las Mañanitas,” so off-key the cows would groan.
He’d been small and dirty that first day, too proud to look hungry. Adabella had brought him inside like a stray cat. Her mother said it was because that was the first time Adabella had seen a blond boy, a real one. Everyone in the Rocíos’ piece of the llano was dark-haired, except for the few women who combed peroxide through their coarse hair each Sunday. Las rubias de bote, her mother called them, bottle blondes. But Buckley Carver had come that way, and to Adabella it was as strange as the pink horses her cousins swore roamed some far corner of the plain, although they knew of no one who had seen one himself.
Adabella made the boy higaditos de fandango with the eggs from her mother’s chickens. Some were blue-shelled, others green; Adabella’s cousins would eat neither. She warmed tortillas left from breakfast while the boy found a screwdriver in a kitchen drawer and reattached a brass knob that had come loose from a cabinet, like he lived there and it was his job to see to the repairs.
“What are you doing?” Adabella asked him.
“It needs fixing,” he said. “I know how to fix it.”
She didn’t stop him. She kept her eye on the stove. It was the first time she’d turned tortillas on the open flame with her fingers instead of warming them on the comal.
Her mother didn’t startle when she saw Buckley Carver at the kitchen table. She only nodded at him once, like she’d been expecting him.
“And what can you do, chico blanco?” her mother asked him.
“Anything anybody can teach me,” he said.
Her mother gave another nod, curt this time, one of respect. She didn’t want much out of men but that they were willing to work. She didn’t ask where he’d run from, or how he’d come by the halo of blue around his right eye, like the nebulae Adabella’s father found through the telescope. When Adabella lifted her hand to point at the bruise, her mother slapped her fingers like they were moths flitting around a skein of huacaya wool.
Her mother took to him because he cleaned up nice, her cousins because they could teach him to say pendejo and gabacho. They called him el caballo blanco, the white horse, from one of the corridos they sang as they passed around the mescal on Sunday nights. Buckley Carver would come to a happier end than the horse in the song, they said, but he would die on the llano, like they would, like el caballo had, because they could see he was already falling in love with how the raw turquoise of the sky met the gold of the earth.
They liked him too because he never passed them. However long he’d been hungry must’ve killed a growth spurt, because he never got taller than the men in Adabella’s family. They liked him better for that, because the only thing worse than a gringo was one who had to look down at everybody else. But he looked taller for how straight he stood, like he was staring the whole desert right in the eye, no matter how that unburnished gold seemed to spread to the far hems of the world, no matter how big the clouds that unfurled in the blue.
Adabella did not worry about her mother turning the boy out, because her mother knew that Buckley Carver would not survive on another hacienda. Not because he was too soft for the work—even at fifteen, calluses had already made his hands rough as a cat’s tongue—but because he was a gentle soul, un tierno. Watching how roughly the men of other families handled los broncos and the cattle would have broken him, as though he were one of those wild horses.
But the Rocío men were not that way. Their Aztec blood made them want to do things quickly. It was not that they treated the bulls with soft hands, but that they offered them the respect they would show a rival. They looked los toros in their eyes, assuring them that they would win, but that they also understood the fight to come. For over fifty years, they had branded not with hot iron but with hielo seco, dry ice brought by a man in a green truck. The children watched for the green truck because they could snatch little pieces off their fathers’ blocks. The boys dared each other to hold them in their palms, and the girls liked watching cats chase the bits as they skittered across the floor.
Adabella had watched Buckley the first time the men showed him how to cold-brand cattle. He froze the brand on the dry ice, wisps of vapor rising off the block like mist from a pond, and he pressed the chilled copper against a shaved patch on the animal’s thigh. The cow didn’t like it, but neither did it cry out like it would have at the heat. Instead it huffed as though stung by a horsefly. The cow sulked away, and Adabella’s cousins slapped Buckley on the back and told him he was a good vaquerito.
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Within a couple of weeks, the cow’s coat had grown back, and the outline of the Rocío brand showed in pale hair. “It kills the hair cells that make the color,” Adabella’s father had told Buckley when he came to inspect the boy’s work. “The color doesn’t come, so the hair grows back white.” He patted the cow above its brand, and the animal grazed out into the sun. “We’ll make a vaquero of you yet,” he said. “You may be pálido, como los conquistadores, but you are more like the vaqueros of the mission, I think.”
Adabella wanted to tell Buckley that it was her father’s highest compliment, especially to a gringo, but that would have meant stepping out from behind the ash tree and admitting she had been listening.
“Everything the northern cowboys are, it came from us,” her father told Buckley. “When los españoles could not keep track of their own cows, they used us.”
Wind threaded through the ash tree’s leaves, shifting the light, and Adabella noticed that el caballo blanco was barefoot. It surprised her every time she saw his toes, brown with dust, at the hem of his jeans, even though he was that way half the year. That was something else that earned her father’s admiration, because it was how vaqueros worked the land hundreds of years ago. No one would have blamed Buckley for wearing shoes year-round—half of Adabella’s cousins did—but the one time she asked him, Buckley said he liked having nothing between him and the ground. By now the soles of his feet had learned to take the heat and coarse earth, so he only wore boots from late fall, when the trees held only a few fire-colored leaves, to the first week the desert amethysts burst into bloom in the spring. Sometimes, he’d even go barefoot far enough into fall that he’d be surprised to feel the crunch of iced-over leaves under his feet, and Adabella’s mother would yell out the window, “¡Dios mío!” and tell him to get his boots on.
Buckley watched the cow, its body turning to show the pale shape of the family brand. “What do you do about a white horse?” he asked Adabella’s father.
“You’d have to hold the brand on a little longer, and it’d kill the hair cells, también, so the brand would stay clear,” her father said. “But it doesn’t matter. No white horses ’round here.”
Adabella caught Buckley’s wince. She wanted to tell him it didn’t mean anything. Her father didn’t know the nickname her cousins had tied to Buckley Carver within his first month on the cortijo. But the shadows between the barn and the ash tree were her hiding place, and even when her father left to check on the half-acre of blue corn, she did not slip out into the light. It was where she watched el caballo blanco in the wintertime as he wrapped the red faja around his waist and tied it in place. She stayed quiet as he pulled on his jean jacket or, in colder weather, a heavier chaqueta, and set his espuelas, the stars of metal on his heels glinting like ice in the riverbed. In summer, she made out the muscles in his back through his shirt and the shadow of his hair as it fell in his face. She always wondered how he kept his fingernails clean even when the dirt weighed down the hems of his jeans.
She was almost eighteen when her mother told her she was to go and live with her aunt up north at the end of the summer. That was about the time Buckley tried his first paso de la muerte, a death ride on a wild horse, bareback. Only a handful of the men on the cortijo were crazy enough to try it, and more than a few of them had needed a bone or two set after.
Adabella’s mother had seen that wildness in Buckley’s eyes before anyone else had. She saw him thinking of the stories of los pasos de la muerte. “Don’t do it,” she said. “You’re a fine vaquero as you are. You don’t need a broken arm to prove it.”
But el caballo blanco took his favorite mount from the remuda and rode out onto the llano until he got close enough to a mesteño, a wild mare, to throw himself on its back. His favorite horse grazed its way back to the stable, and he rode out toward where the blue met the ground, his thighs gripping the back of a creature as wild and sleepless as he was.
A man could die that way. Men had. If he misjudged on the moving mount, or the tame horse startled, he could be trampled. If he got on, the mesteño could still buck and throw him. It was for that reason Adabella did not say goodbye to el caballo blanco. She did not want to see him wrapping the faja around his waist and think it might be the last time.
El caballo blanco did not write to her, and she did not write to him, although her aunt made her pen letters at least twice a week. “The girls your age, they all use the telephone now,” her aunt said as she watched over the desk where her niece wrote, tapping a pencil on any words Adabella had not written neatly enough.
So Adabella wrote to her mother, asking about the chickens with the blue eggs, to her father, wondering had he seen los meteoritos through the brass telescope. She wrote to her cousins, asking after the man in the green truck who delivered el hielo seco, or telling their wives how happy she was for the latest picture of their children. But she did not write to the silence that was el caballo blanco, and she did not ask about him or his pasos de la muerte.
Her aunt taught her to grow out her nails; bitter melon oil on the tips kept her from biting. She taught her not to click her teeth like her cousins did, to set her shoulders straight instead of slouching like a little girl, to wear un brasier under her blouses. She taught her to chop onions so finely that Adabella wanted to fling them into the night sky to see if the pieces would stick in the dark in the shape of constellations.
At night, Adabella imagined el caballo, his callus-thickened fingers fastening the bright faja. The wind would brush his hair off his face like wheat stalks, and his hands would be on the back of some wild horse who might not buck him off because it recognized they were similar creatures.
She thought of his hands on a mare’s mane, and felt a jealousy like the sting of dry ice spread inside her ribcage and then down through her body. She thought of the tension in his thighs as he fought to stay on the mesteño, his feet bare-sand rough in the summer, winking with the silver of spurs in the winter.
Some nights, if she was not careful, she thought of him hardening against the button-fly of his jeans. She thought of her thighs gripping his body as tightly as his held onto the backs of wild horses. She imagined unfastening each of those buttons, so slow he groaned with waiting, while he cupped her breasts through the shell-colored lace of the lingerie she now wore even to bed. Those were nights she did not sleep, and in the morning her aunt told her not to read so much at night, not even la Biblia, because all those words wouldn’t let her rest.
Adabella came back taller, though still not tall; she was the first woman in three generations to break five feet, and her aunt swore it was good posture and the corn silk tea she made the girl drink three times a day. Adabella could now turn tortillas on the stove without shifting her weight from one bare foot to another or humming her cousins’ corridos. She had learned patience, and could listen without fidgeting to the men who visited her father, because her aunt’s church had a priest who repeated himself so often the homilies lasted twice as long.
Her mother clasped her hands and took a look at the girl who might now pass for a woman. “Yes,” her mother said. “Good.” She was happiest to see that Adabella’s hair now gleamed down her back; she had learned to comb it each night and each morning, so it was never the full cloud of tangles it had been when she left.
Adabella did not ask about el caballo blanco or if los pasos de la muerte had killed him. She did not see him until a little before dawn, when she woke to a horse’s soft whinny just outside her window. At first, she thought its color was a trick of the light, that the pale coat was catching the glow off a strawberry moon. But when she ran out into the night air she saw it was true; its coat was a blend of soft brown, white, and auburn that looked rose-colored from a distance.
The horse wandered out of range of the house’s light. She ran after it, the wind billowing her nightgown behind her. The grass was cool under her bare feet, and it let off its green scent so the whole world smelled like lemons by the time the horse st
opped near the ash tree.
Buckley Carver came out from the tree’s shadow. He was a little taller, the muscles of his thighs a little more visible inside his jeans, even in the dark. His hair had grown out long enough he had to toss his head like a colt to get it off his face. His forearms were sun-darkened enough that they did not shine under the moon.
He stroked the horse’s side. “Pretty, isn’t she?”
“It’s real?” Adabella asked. The mare had no brand or harness, and she had heard of pink horses only in her family’s stories.
“I’m surprised as anybody,” he said. “She’s a strawberry roan. La ruana. Lightest one I ever heard of.”
His Spanish had always made her crazy. It was awful, even for as many words as he knew, but hearing it in his northerner’s accent drew wetness from her until she could feel it on the lace between her thighs. “You didn’t write to me.”
“Your mother sent you away to become a lady,” he said. “Not to become a lady for me.”
It had never been about that. Adabella’s mother was unconcerned with her finding a husband; she would soon enough, her mother thought, and if she didn’t, there was no harm in her staying to help care for the cortijo.
Adabella’s mother had sent her to her aunt because she was learning her manners from the men on the land. No daughter of Teresa Rocío would run through the apple trees with her hair uncombed and her breasts free beneath her nightgown.
Adabella raked a few cautious fingers over la ruana’s coat. “Do my cousins know about her?”
“You kidding? She scares easy. I’m not getting her around them.” He offered Adabella his hand. “You want to take her out?”
“You’ve ridden her?”
Cowboy Lust: Erotic Romance for Women Page 19