Lesbian Cowboys

by Sacchi Green

  “How are we getting out of here?” she asked me as we sat at the barn door looking at the prairie later that day.

  “I’m mulling that over, darlin’.” I’d walked plenty of miles on my cases, sometimes hopping trains with the hobos, but I didn’t reckon on a mother and baby getting far. Then again, if I turned myself in, I’d get my horse back, but I might not live long enough for the Agency to vouch for me. Not when I had information that the union boss masterminded the murders of half a dozen Irish while the marshal did nothing.

  Best I could hope for was everyone thought me dead and Caroline lost in the fire. And that meant, sooner-or-later, someone would come for the bodies. As I watched Caroline tend the baby, I couldn’t help but ask, “How’d a woman of such high-strung passions end up with a sorry case like Proster Dun?”

  She glanced away but then squared her shoulders and stared me dead in the eye. “He was a customer at the Mikado in Santa Fe, where I went by the name of Miss Pretty Delaney.”

  I was indeed familiar with the Mikado. The ladies who worked that fine parlor house were known to me because of my impersonating a brothel inspector for a case three years previous. To my most genuine surprise and appreciation, I had discovered that as long as a man was generous with his dollars, those decidedly prudent ladies didn’t mind if he was, in fact, a woman.

  Her defiant stare had me smiling. “Ever ride a cow?” I asked.

  “As you are likely aware by now, Mr. Cortland, I’ve ridden many things. But never a cow.”

  And that’s how we got halfway to Laramie before meeting up with a stage that took pity on a new mother (and kindly received the promissory note of a Pinkerton detective for eight dollars). We took a train to Kansas City, where I set up house with the new Mrs. Charlie Bluff and our baby girl.

  One month later, Bill “Jackjaw” Bivens entered a land stinking of brimstone after a sudden stop at the end of a sturdy rope. Mr. Bert Lloyd escaped into the New Mexico Territory and ended his terrors on this blessed earth as the victim of a bank holdup. My parsimonious boss kept the fifty-dollar bonus, but he did buy me a drink to toast my nuptials.

  PULLING

  Sacchi Green

  Don’t look. DON’T LOOK! Keep your eyes on the horses, the judges, anything else. Anything but the bad girl of your dreams in her fuck-me-if-you-dare outfit. Look, and you’ll never be able to look away.

  But she was here. She’d really come. And it hadn’t been just the garish lights of the midway last night; even in the noonday glare Carla smoldered, like an ember about to ignite dry leaves. The thought of stirring up that blaze made me sweat. Except it damn sure wasn’t all sweat.

  “She’s here!” Cal said urgently. “Over by the fence!”

  “Eyes front, or you’re dead meat!” I snarled, just low enough not to startle the horses. The loudspeaker announcing my team drowned out my voice.

  “…Ree Daniels out of Rexford, Vermont, driving Molly and Stark, with a combined weight of…”

  I backed them out smoothly enough and drove briskly down the drawing ring, grip on the lines steady, attention fixed strictly on the 4,200 pounds of horsepower surging ahead of me. Two great glossy black rumps pumped in unison, two muscular bodies slowed and began their turn—and Cal stumbled on my right, just managing not to drop the evener bearing half the weight of the two single trees.

  Ethan, craning to see, wavered on my left. He sped up—got into position—and the clang of the steel evener dropping onto the stoneboat’s hook sent the horses lurching forward with all their strength. The heavy sledge began to move. Shoulders bunched, hocks straining, hooves the size of pie plates chopping at the dirt, they pulled a load of twice their own weight across the ground, responding to my hollered commands without really needing them until the last few feet of the required distance. Training and heart were what mattered most, not driving skill, but I still wouldn’t let either of my brothers handle my team in competition.

  Not that Cal hadn’t given it his best shot last night. “C’mon, Ree,” he’d pleaded, “she said she might come on her lunch break! And I sorta let her think I’d be driving!”

  “You think she cares about anything besides the bulge in your britches?” I whapped his butt right across the wallet pocket. “You can strut your studly charms all you want tomorrow night. If you get lucky enough to have a chance at slipping something inside those tight panties of hers once the midway shuts down, you can even borrow my pickup. Tonight you get to bed all sober and early and solitary, ’cause tomorrow morning your ass is mine from dawn to whenever the pull is over and the horses rubbed down and stabled.”

  Cal couldn’t make up his mind whether to sulk or grin. He’d have looked even younger than his eighteen years if he hadn’t been six-foot-six, square-jawed, and built like somebody who’d grown up tossing around fifty-pound bales of hay. My “little” brother towered over me by four inches, which still left me six-two of height and plenty of bale-tossing capacity of my own.

  I almost felt guilty at letting him get his hopes up, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to tell him why.

  If any slipping inside Miss Carla-from-Boston’s panties was going to be done, I had a bet with myself that he wasn’t going to be the one doing it. Not Cal, nor any of the other young punks—and some not so young—who hovered around her booth and pretended to be interested in throwing darts at balloons for cheesy prizes, while they watched her working her ass and tits and dark, light-my-fire eyes.

  Cal and sixteen-year-old Ethan hadn’t been hard to locate last night when I’d cruised the fairgrounds. Both white-blond heads, streaked hot pink and green and purple by the midway lights, loomed above the crowd. I hung back for a while near the balloon-dart booth to get an idea of what they were up to, hardly able to see the carnie huckster through the wall of testosterone-pumping adolescents between us. I could hear her slick come-on, though, and the sly, seductive tone of her voice sent hot prickles across my skin. Just food for fantasy, of course, but damn, she was good.

  “C’mon folks, I’ll rack ‘em up again. See how Cal, here, got one right in there? Popped that cherry good? Here y’go, show us what y’got.” I caught just enough movement to know she was tossing her long dark hair and twitching her hips for emphasis. “Stick that ol’ dart right in! Ri-i-i-ght in there!”

  “Right in where?” asked a wise guy. “Show me again!”

  “If you can’t find the spot on your own, hot stuff,” she shot back, “maybe you better go home and practice some more on your favorite sheep.”

  Whoa. Considering the concentrated beer fumes in the area, she could be asking for trouble. I moved closer and squeezed in next to Cal just as the guy hurled his three darts too fast to be aiming much, and one balloon popped with a satisfying crack.

  “There y’go, I knew you could hit the spot,” she purred. “Prize from the first row, or wanna try again and get an upgrade?”

  “How many hits to go all the way?” His leer was unmistakable.

  “Sorry, Bud, my ass isn’t sittin’ up on the prize shelf tonight.” She tossed him a big purple plush snake and moved away. “Who’s next?” Her sultry gaze lit right on me, and maybe she figured it was safer not to pitch to another guy right then.

  “How about you, honey? I always like to see a lady show the fellas how it’s done.” She put one foot up on the low barrier across the front of the booth; leaned an elbow on a sleek, black-stockinged knee; and rested her chin on her hand. The top three buttons of her red satin shirt were unbuttoned, giving me a prime view of peach-tinted flesh barely held in check by a lacy black bra. Her miniskirt was hitched up so high I caught a glimpse of matching garters and tender thighs. “How about it, darlin’?”

  She sure as hell knows just how it’s done! Question is, does she mean anything by it?

  “Nobody here I’d call a lady,” I said, looking her straight in the eye, “but I’ll have a go at it anyway.” I shrugged off my denim jacket and handed it to Cal, shoving him back a bit to give me room. All
I wore underneath was an old white tank top smelling of sweat and horses. She handed me three darts, took my money, leaned a little farther forward, and tucked the bills loosely into her cleavage. The clueless males watching didn’t seem to have any doubt that her show was for their benefit.

  I raised my arm to pitch the first dart. The gaze of half the guys switched to the movement of my heavy tits—but her gaze was all that counted. And it was all I’d hoped for.

  My first throw hit a red balloon, just making it bob sideways. “A real teaser, huh?” Her tone was impersonal, but a sidelong glance at my face and then my big hand hinted at more. I threw again, with a better idea of the angle required, and this time the balloon snapped and shriveled into a limp dangle of rubber. My inner tension built. When I popped the next one, too, the pressure exploding out of it seemed to pump me up right where it mattered most.

  “Way to go, girl! Second shelf prize,” she said. “What’ll it be?”

  I stifled the impulse to ask if she was still so sure her ass wasn’t on that shelf. “Go on to the next guy and let me think on it a minute, okay?” I said, and she nodded, so I got down to business with my brothers. Not that I wasn’t thinking on my prize real hard.

  “You two go on ahead,” I muttered, hauling them away. “We have to get going early tomorrow morning. Tell you what, order us all some apple crisp with ice cream down the way at that church booth, and I’ll meet you there in a minute.”

  “Rather have some fried dough,” Cal grumbled.

  “Okay, whatever, anything but those damned fried onion sunburst deals!”

  Cal took the money I passed him, still looking longingly back at the balloon game. Ethan looked, too, but more shyly. “Her name’s Carla,” Cal said. “From Boston.” As if her accent, its nasal edge a notch beyond our own upcountry twang, hadn’t been a give-away. “Isn’t she hot? I told her about the horse pull tomorrow, and she said she likes to watch the big ones.”

  “I’ll bet she does,” I said. “Move your butts along now.” And they went. Every time they do what I say I figure it may be the last, but this time I was paying them well to help with the team, so they were less inclined to argue.

  When I turned back, a girl who’d been looking for her boyfriend was making a scene at the other end of the booth. Under cover of the distraction, Carla leaned close to me. “Your brothers?” she asked, jerking her head toward Cal and Ethan’s retreating asses.

  “’Fraid so,” I said. “You got a thing for big dumb farm boys?”

  She shrugged, clearly aware that the movement made her shirt gape farther open, and that I was enjoying the view. “Not when there’s a big farm girl around to distract me.”

  “You forgot the dumb part.”

  Carla looked me over slowly and thoroughly, her gaze moving down over my substantial midriff to rest on the crotch of my faded jeans.

  “I’m not noticing any dumb parts,” she drawled.

  Damn! But attention was swinging back toward us. “So how about my prize?” I asked. “You choose for me.”

  She reached for a cluster of long ropes of Mardi Gras beads, slung them over my head, then swished them back and forth across my chest. My nipples responded with visible enthusiasm. “Here’s a first installment,” she murmured. “You gonna be around later?”

  “Not tonight. Got an early wake-up call coming and a busy morning.” Which wouldn’t have held me back if I hadn’t known Cal would come looking when I didn’t show up at our RV to sleep. “Maybe tomorrow night.”

  “Will you be at that horse pull deal the boys were talking about?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.” I pulled the hank of beads off over my short pale hair and handed it back to her. “How about you hang onto these until I see you again.”

  A couple of customers were waving money at her by then, but Carla stuck with me for another few seconds. “Okay, but keep this one.” Before I could see what she was up to, my wrists were tightly bound together by a strand of purple plastic beads. “So you won’t forget.”

  Then she was playing to the crowd of men again, hips swaying, mouth sassing. I got my own mouth closed, stepped back into the shadows, and watched for a minute. What was it about her? She was good-looking but not gorgeous, and not really all that young. Which was fine with me. More than fine. What she was, was…knowing. “Hot” pretty well covered it. Hot, on the verge of bursting into flame. Something in the way she moved, as if the stroke of her clothes along her body kept her always turned on, hinted at sexual expertise country hicks at county fairs could only imagine.

  I looked down at my bound wrists and imagined plenty. Breaking the fragile string would have been easy, but I wriggled loose with care, just in time to hide the beads in my pocket before Cal and Ethan came back to find me.

  My imagination kept hard at work a good part of the night, too, which might have happened even if a strand of purple beads hadn’t been nestled deep into the warm, wet heat between my thighs. I wasn’t a dumb farm girl, not anymore, but whatever I’d got up to with girls at UMass and then in postgrad at UConn, it hadn’t been much like this. I don’t say that no femmes go for veterinary medicine degrees, but I sure hadn’t come across anybody like Carla. The way she flaunted her body, and teased mine with her eyes; the thrust of her breasts and sway of her hips, offering and daring both at the same time… Well before dawn I had to get out of the RV and find a place to do some serious solitary teasing and thrusting of my own, and even that only slowed me down to a simmer.

  In the morning the horses got me back on focus. Molly and Stark had been pulling in competitions all summer and knew what was what. They were about as psyched up as Percherons get, and maybe more than most. The huge black horses have been bred for double-muscling for centuries, but they have spirit and heart as well.

  By noon they’d come through the first few elimination rounds and hardly broken a sweat. This last load had been more of a challenge, but they’d handled it well. There were only four teams left in competition, and two of them I knew we couldn’t beat without straining hard enough to risk injury. My pair were relatively young, full-grown but without all the heft a few more years would give them, and Molly would never quite achieve the muscle mass her brother could. Letting a mare pull was, in fact, pretty rare. I got a lot of flak from old-timers for it, but she had the spirit, and I’d decided to give her one more year before breeding her and complicating her life with motherhood.

  I watched the loader piling another 1,500 pounds of concrete blocks on the stoneboat. So far I’d never set the team at a weight I wasn’t sure they could handle. Should I drop out at this stage and settle for an honorable fourth? Would I quit now, if I didn’t want so badly to impress somebody who was watching?

  Hell no! Molly nudged me hard with her big velvety nose and blew as though in agreement. I whacked her shoulder companionably, turning my head a few degrees—and there was Carla right in my line of sight. Her mouth hung open, and her eyes were wide with something that might have been fear. I grinned and nodded. Her usual cock-sure, seductive expression took over again right away, but she still eyed Molly warily.

  Then Cal waved and called to her, and I had to whack his shoulder to get him back on task. The first team of this round was trotting toward the loaded sledge. I was sure these huge Belgians were up to the weight, but their driver’s helpers didn’t get a secure hook before the horses bolted forward, and missed on the second try, too, so that by the time they did get a good hook the team was too flustered to pull together. I elbowed Cal meaningfully in the ribs.

  The second team gave it a good try, but stopped a few feet short in spite of all their driver’s yelling. Then we were up. I bent for one last feel of each horse’s hocks to be sure there was no tenderness, straightened from between enormous equine legs—and the quick flash of horrified awe in Carla’s eyes sent a jolt of power crackling through my cunt.

  Wow! But…no time for that now. No time for anything beyond keeping control of the eager horses while Cal and Et
han hustled to drop the evener onto the hook, and then the team’s surge of power when I sent the order through the lines. The loaded stoneboat moved, caught, moved again, slid a few feet, slowed—“Hup! Hup! Hup!” I hurled my voice at them like an extra ton of muscle, of breath, of heart, and they took it all and gave back more, struggling onward just because they refused to stop. And then the judge signaled that they’d made the distance, and the boys released the sled.

  My gorgeous pair of black, sweat-flecked treasures pranced back to the far end of the arena, proud, hyped by the applause, and, I knew from their gait, just slightly sore from the strain on their hocks.

  After the last team made its distance, I waved off the next round. Second place was fine for now. Molly and Stark would give me everything they had, but I didn’t need to make them find their limit at the risk of injury.

  When the event was over and the rosettes awarded, I drove them into the warm sunshine, keeping an eye out for Carla. Cal and Ethan had been headed off by a gaggle of cheerleader chicks, just the types that always give me flashbacks to the horrors of high school. The boys were welcome to ’em.

  There she was, keeping a safe distance. “That was…something.” Words uncharacteristically failed her.

  “Sure was,” I agreed. “I need to get them rubbed down now and tape their legs. Want to come along and make their closer acquaintance?”

  “I have to get back…I’m late already…but I close down tonight at 10.” Molly’s inquisitive black head swung toward her. Carla stepped back in a hurry.