by Hamel, B. B.
James comes up behind me. “You ready?” he asks me.
I nod, kissing him over my shoulder. “Definitely.”
“Good. You’re going to kill it today.”
“I know.”
He laughs and kisses me again. I join them at the table eventually, and we fall into laughing and joking.
After a half hour of that, I send the guys off to get dressed. I wander over to the windows, looking out over the forest. We got rid of my old apartment after a few months, just in case I wanted to stay in there, but I found I never needed it. The twins turned the apartment into an office for me, which I’ve been using to plan the museum. Henry turned the project over to me entirely, and although there was a learning curve at first, I managed to pull it all together.
It helped that Henry already had a huge art collection. We built three galleries, one main space with the main collection, and we put Ryan’s work in one of the galleries for the opening. I managed to get two other amazing local artists to fill the two final spaces, and now all that’s left is to open the doors.
Henry joins me, not long later, not saying anything. We stand in silence like that for a bit.
“You ever thought you’d do this?” he asks finally.
“No,” I admit, laughing. “Never imagined having five boyfriends.”
He grins, nudging me. “I meant the museum.”
I look at him, smiling, and I kiss him softly. “I know.”
We hold hands, standing there together, until the other guys join. I kiss the twins and Ryan, and finally we all head out to the museum, right in the middle of downtown Leadwood.
My parents are in the crowd. So are people I went to high school with, teachers and principals and coaches, family friends and neighbors. I recognize so many faces, and they’re all the people I used to hate, used to despise. But as I stand there in front of the ribbon, the tickets for entrance completely sold out, the crowd shockingly large, I realize that I don’t hate them anymore. I don’t even pity them or despise them or anything.
I love them. Well, maybe not love exactly, but I want to help them. I want to make this place better. There aren’t any whispers as I open the museum up with my five boyfriends. Mostly everyone’s accepted it, although it’s really weird. My mom gives me a kiss on the cheek, and my dad gives me a hug, and I know that it’s going to be okay.
I’m home now. These are my people, and I’m running this museum. That’s not all, though. I’m helping to build Leadwood into a town worth living in, a place people want to come visit. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, but so what? We’ll make this place a destination, because we can do that. Me and my five mountain daddies, we have that power. We’ll make this our home, create the paradise we’ve always wanted, and we’ll do it as one big group.
I hold their hands and smile at what we’ve built together, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
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Big Stranger’s Baby
1
Amelia
I changed out of my black dress, but I still feel like I’m standing back in that cemetery, watching them bury my father.
I toss back the shot and cringe. I don’t normally drink that much, but being back in Wheelville makes me feel like getting drunk. It’s not just my dad’s funeral, although it’s that, too. But it’s also the way this place makes me feel, like I’m some little girl all over again. Staying in my father’s big house all alone isn’t really helping anything, but still, it’s the only place I have here.
I lean up against the bar and sigh, letting my blonde hair fall down around me. The bar is surprisingly packed with rough-looking guys, probably the same guys that work in my father’s mine. When my father was alive, he was the owner of the biggest coal mine in western Virginia, and Wheelville practically exists because of him.
Fortunately, nobody recognizes me. I grew up in Wheelville, at least until I was old enough for my dad to send me off to boarding school. From there, it was an elite private college up north, and then on to the city to join his friend’s law practice.
I figured I was set, living in New York, not even thinking about Wheelville. At least until I got the call that changed my life forever.
The bartender smiles and pours me another drink. “You okay, honey?” she asks me, a nice-looking older woman with kinky dark hair.
“I’m okay,” I say to her and manage to smile.
“You here alone?”
I nod. “Just having a few drinks.”
“Well, you be careful, you hear.”
I cock my head. “Why?”
Someone looms up behind me, and before I can turn to look at him, I hear this deep, booming laugh. “You warning this poor girl about me, Marn?”
“Of course I am,” she says, winking. I turn and get a look at the guy standing behind me, and I have to do a double take.
He’s enormous. It’s the first thing I notice. Big, broad shoulders, stubble on his chin, cocky grin, handsome face. His eyes are a deep sea-foam green, and his hands are easily bigger than my head. He looks down at me with that same cocky grin, and I feel some chills run down my spine.
As soon as he sits in the stool next to mine, and Marn the bartender hands him a beer without asking, I know I’m in trouble. I’m drinking in The Shaft, which is the miner’s bar in town. It’s really the only bar that I know, since my father employs pretty much the whole clientele.
He doesn’t employ them anymore, I mentally correct myself.
“What’s your name?” the big man asks me.
He’s probably my age, I realize with a start. I assumed he was a lot older, but there’s no age in that face, although there seems to be a lot of experience. His clothes are simple but clean, although his hands look like any coal miner’s, with soot under the fingernails embedded so deep that he’d have to tear off his fingers to get rid of it.
“Amelia,” I say without thinking. I cringe, realizing that he might put two and two together, but fortunately he just nods.
“I’m Samuel,” he says.
“He’s trouble,” Marn interjects as she passes.
“Don’t listen to old Marn there,” Samuel says, winking at me. “She’s just jealous. Got a thing for me, you see.”
“Please,” Marn says, rolling her eyes. “And enough of that ‘old’ bullshit, you asshole.”
He booms another laugh, and I find myself smiling. It’s incredibly infectious, and I notice a few other guys glancing over at him like they’re in on the joke.
“What brings you here, Amelia?” he asks me.
I shrug a little. “Business,” I say.
He gives me a look and smirks. “Business, huh? What kind of business?”
“Personal business.”
He laughs and I smile right along with him. “Sounds confusing to me.” He takes a long drink of his beer, practically finishing half of it. I have to admit, this guy is absolutely obnoxious, but he’s also shockingly attractive. Big and tall and muscular with the sort of hands that know what they’re doing, I haven’t been around a man like him in a long time. I’m used to the intellectual type, smart rich boys from good families, but this Samuel guy is the opposite of that. He’s hard, a little rough, but also completely at ease in his own skin.
“Do you work in the mine?” I find myself asking him without thinking.
“How could you tell?”
I nod at his hands. “Fingers.”
“Ah.” He holds them up. “The hands of a worker.” He eyes me for a second. “Let me guess. You’re a lawyer?”
I stare at him, surprised. “How’d you know?”
He booms another laugh. “I guessed,” he admits.
I shake my head, looking away. I can’t stop smiling around this guy. Maybe it’s the alcohol, but suddenly I’m forgetting about my problems, about my dead father, about the fate of his company. They’re reading the will tomorrow, and I know my life’s about to change even more than it already has, and I feel so desperate to cling on to the way things were. I know that’s all gone, though.
Really though, I think it’s just this man, just this Samuel.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Here, originally,” I tell him. “But I haven’t lived here in a while.”
“Moved away?” He nods, approving. “Smart girl.”
“Why?”
“There’s nothing here in Shitsville,” he says. “Just a mine that’s deeper than hell and a bunch of guys that wish they could leave it.”
“That’s not how I remember Wheelville.”
He leans forward against the bar, eyes locked on mine. “How do you remember it, Amelia?”
I find myself staring into those eyes, his stormy-sea green irises so surprisingly deep and expressive. “It was free, back then,” I say softly. “Lots of trees and streams and eating out in the grass. I had dogs back then, and they’d chase me through the tall grass until I’d fall down and they’d lick my face.”
“That sounds nice,” he says, smiling softly.
I sit back and bite my lip, coming out of the memory. He’s a total stranger, and yet I’m opening up to him like I never have before. I haven’t talked about my childhood in a long time, probably because my childhood died when I was shipped away. For a long time, I’ve had some serious resentment about that. I didn’t want to go to boarding school. I had my friends and my dogs and my life here, but my father wouldn’t listen. I know he had my best interests at heart, and maybe in the long run, he was right. But back then, I hated him so much.
Now he’s gone, along with those dogs.
“There has to be something you like about this town,” I say to him. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have stayed. Not a guy like you.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Guy like me?”
“Yeah, you know,” I say, stumbling over myself, suddenly embarrassed. “An, uh, outgoing guy.”
“You mean big and handsome, don’t you?” He smirks at me and I blush.
“Anyway, there has to be something,” I say, not answering him.
He chuckles and sips his beer again, this time at a more human pace. “There’s something,” he admits finally. “But you’ll think it’s pathetic.”
“Tell me,” I say, drawn toward him.
“It’s the people.” He meets my gaze and shrugs a little. “Good people live here, just doing whatever they can do to get by. My father worked the mine, and his father before him, but it’s all these people that keep me here, rooted in place. I want to help them.”
He speaks so softly that I have to lean toward him to hear it. I’m completely taken aback by that last comment, and I almost think I misheard him. But he smiles at me, almost a little shy, completely the opposite of the big, bold guy he was just a second ago.
But that shy smile is quickly gone. “Anyway, that’s why I’m stuck in this shithole,” he says to me, grinning huge.
We fall into conversation, and I tell him about my life in the city. He asks questions, seems genuinely interested, and as the night progresses, I forget about getting drunk. I planned on blacking out, just to forget the day, but with Samuel I don’t feel it as acutely anymore. Sure, there’s still an ache in my chest every time my father pops into my brain, but I quickly push it away when Samuel smiles at me.
He moves closer and closer to me, and when it’s late and he puts his hand on my thigh, I don’t push it away. I know what he’s thinking when he looks me in the eye, and I’m not surprised to find him waiting for me outside of the women’s room after I excuse myself. He presses himself up against me, pushing me into a dark corner against the wall, and I let him kiss me, his hands on my hips.
It feels good, his stubble a little rough, but his taste is incredible. It’s sweat and work and leather, hard to explain really, but it’s so uniquely Samuel. He kisses me with passion, real passion, not like the prep school guys I’m so used to. His big hands roam my body, exploring my skin, and when he pulls back and asks if I want to come back to his place, I accept.
I know I shouldn’t. But I find myself in his truck, listening to him talk about the town and all the people in it, and I know I’m going to fuck him. I can’t help myself. I know I shouldn’t, but the grief and the anger and the desire and yes, the alcohol just a little bit, all mix inside of me to make me a little bit reckless.
But in the end, I’m drawn to him. Samuel is so attractive, big and brawny and shockingly intelligent. When he gets inside his little house, there are stacks of books all over the place, along with half-built clocks, but I don’t have time to check them out. I only have eyes for him, his big body, his cocky grin.
He doesn’t waste a single second. He pulls me back into his bedroom and undresses me slowly, rough fingers lingering in my skin.
And when I finally take him, barely fitting him inside of me, I know I’m making the most blissful mistake of my entire life. My teeth find his shoulder as he presses me down, my legs straddling him. I ride his thick, hard cock, hair thrown back and wild. His big hands cup my full, firm breasts, and he slaps my ass hard. He fucks me rough, not at all treating me like he might break me, and I like it. I want him to be rough, to take me like a man should.
He pushes me aside, makes me spread my legs. He sucks and licks my pussy from behind before fucking me deep and slow at first, teasing my pussy, getting me all riled up. By the time he’s thrusting hard, I’m begging for more, saying his name, completely losing myself. I’ve never been so sweaty, never felt such intense pleasure, but Samuel knows what he’s doing. His ripped body controls me utterly and perfectly as his thick cock fucks me deep and hard.
I don’t think twice when I beg him to come inside of me, and he doesn’t even hesitate to do it. He fills me up with his heat, driving it deep between my legs, making me scream with pure, absolute bliss. I experience the most intense orgasm of my life, and the release is exactly what I needed.
It’s only later, after I’ve dressed and snuck out of his place and called a cab, that I realize he wasn’t wearing a condom, and I’m not on birth control.
2
Samuel
No pressure, son, but we’re all counting on you.”
Roy looks at me with that serious expression of his, and I smile back at him. “No pressure at all,” I say, grinning at him.
He laughs softly. “I know, it’s a bitch, right?”
“Right,” I say.
Roy’s a small guy, well, I guess everyone’s small compared to me. He’s over six foot and a bear of a guy, but he’s in his fifties and getting soft with every passing year. I’m twenty-eight, and could possibly be his son, and yet for all intents and purposes, I’m his boss.
Not exactly, of course. The coal mining company is his real boss, they’re all our fucking boss. The head of the company, this crazy guy named Tommy Evans, died in a freak skydiving accident. Apparently his chute didn’t deploy properly, and he hadn’t packed a backup. He smashed down into the Appalachian Mountains, and they scraped what was left of him off the side of a boulder.
He wasn’t such a bad guy, all things considered. He treated us fairly, more or less. We were paid on time, got decent benefits, though bonuses were cut years back, and there are more and more layoffs these days. I guess that can’t be helped, considering the state of this damn country these days. We all know we’re in a dying, backward industry, but
we can’t do much about it. We’re a coal-mining town, and will be until it all falls apart.
I take a breath and Roy smacks me on the back. “Come on, son,” he says. “Get it together. We’ll go make a good impression, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say, steeling myself.
We head into the offices of Evans Energy, the company that owns the Wheeler mine. A young, smiling girl with brown eyes leads the way through the offices, and I can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. I wish I could work in a damn office like this, but I know I stand out. I know I’d never fit in here.
For starters, I’m a big man. I’m six-foot-five and more muscular than all the men here combined. I’ve been working with my hands all my life, and I’m more at home underground than I am above it. I know the mine better than anything else in the world, since my daddy brought me up to mine it. He’s gone now, died years ago in a collapse. My mom followed a couple years after, cancer from smoking all her life, leaving me the house and not much else.
I’m a miner through and through. Maybe there’s no dust to breathe up here in the offices, no worries about collapses or gas pockets, nobody dying just to make a dollar. But down there, I feel more alive, and I suspect I wouldn’t last long up here.
We follow the girl back to a conference room. It’s empty and she gestures for us to sit. “They’ll be in shortly,” she says, and leaves a moment later.
I look around the room without sitting. Roy glances at me and slowly sits with a grunt. “Come on, get comfortable,” he says. “You’re the union head now, you gotta act like it.”
I glance at him. I never asked to be made head, but nobody else wanted the job. I’m the youngest union head in the miner’s union history, and I’m not sure how I feel about the distinction. We have contract negotiations coming up, and the old head conveniently retired, leaving that shit-show for his successor. Nobody else stepped up, so I fucking did, and here I am. Roy’s my second, mainly I think because he feels bad for me, since I have no clue what the fuck I’m getting myself into.