by Leslie North
Nat’s warning about wood rot returned to her. His practicality, his fear of the unknown, denied him moments that he would circle back to in his old age. Breathtaking moments, like the one when she settled onto that roof Clem had built with his hands and joined the sky with the vantage of a bird. In moonlight, she added three pages—sketches of the trees growing spindly with the chill, poetry that made zero sense, Nat’s name scrolled in different ways because it brought her comfort.
When the first fingers of orange gripped their side of the world, Nat joined her. Being Southern, he asked permission, as if the cabin were a ship and she its captain, as if he had already made it hers. His generosity, his selflessness, sharpened her regret at leaving.
She shared the quilt. He sat close. She rammed her pen through the messy bun atop her head so it wouldn’t roll off the roof.
“Mae is good. She’ll be fine.” His voice was quiet, low, relaxed. Like they had all the time in the world when she knew they didn’t. This place was good for him. She never wanted him to lose the part of himself that craved the stillness.
January nodded.
“J, I—”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “I understand.”
She held out her palm for his. He took her hand and wrapped the ratty quilt tighter around them. Head tipped against his shoulder, she found she no longer held anxiety in her stomach at being honest with him. They were past that, right where they had always been.
“Want to know the real reason I’m going to Nepal?”
“Prayer flags and rickshaws?”
January smiled. “Someone once told me if I went to the right place, just high enough, I could see the curvature of the earth from there. Then, and only then, would I know my place in it.”
“Sounds like some advanced bullshit.”
A warm giggle originated in her chest. She let it out. It felt amazing. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“All you have to do is squint at the horizon to see it curve.”
She squinted. He squinted. Like a pair of octogenarians who had lost their glasses. Sure enough, Nat was right. Just high enough, in the right place, the world curved, and she felt her place in it.
“This epiphany calls for a celebration.” January wiggled off her right boot and sock then handed Nat the pen she had stuck in her hair.
His gaze settled on the path of tiny tattoos that circled her ankle bone and wrapped her foot.
“What are those?”
“One symbol for every place these feet have carried me that taught me a life lesson.”
He grasped her leg. She twisted position to give him a better look.
His close inspection sketched his brow into a scowl. “I wish it was lighter so I could see them better.”
“They’re simple. Nothing special but to me.” She pointed to the spot at the base of her shin. “This is the most recent—from Norway.”
“What is it?”
“A willow flute. One evening, I was headed back to the inn where I had a room, and I heard its sound from a distance. A shepherd in a distant field, a fisherman on shore, someone I couldn’t see. The notes were like messages from an angel—simple, enduring, unwavering, the purest form of human expression. True art. I stood there for the longest time, unable to move. The sound transported me in a way that I never wanted to end. Then it stopped, and I realized how precious it had been.” She brushed a fingertip over the tattoo. “It was a lesson to appreciate music—all music—because it’s a fleeting gift.”
“Where is Close Call on here?”
“It isn’t. Not yet.”
“You want me to draw your next symbol?”
She bit her bottom lip, positive that she wanted something from him on her forever, unsure if he would accept such a challenge. When he did and the ballpoint tip tickled her skin, she smiled and closed her eyes, relieved such a gesture ensured she would remember this moment.
As he finished, he drew circles around it with his thumb, an unmistakable caress.
“What did you draw?” She shifted beside him to get a closer look.
“It’s an eye with really long lashes.”
She laughed, the full-bodied, soul-emptying kind of release.
“Because Mae brought us to this moment. And there’s a heart inside the pupil because I love you, more now than I ever have. And I want you to take that with you.”
“I love it,” she whispered. “Thank you. You know, eyes are a symbol for enlightenment.”
“See? Sometimes enlightenment comes in the most unexpected places.”
January opened her journal to a fresh page, placed it in his grasp, and nestled her head on his thigh. “It sure does, Hugo.”
Nat didn’t seem to hate the name so much anymore. He put pen to paper and wrote.
She yawned and drifted asleep, content.
* * *
“I can’t do this,” said Nat.
His insides felt like a python had been let loose, alternately squeezing and releasing internal organs. They had doused the stove, shuttered the window, remembered to grab Riders of the Purple Sage because he wanted to reread it for inspiration. Their coats were donned, her pack weighed his shoulders, their pointy boots already aimed toward the door.
Still, he couldn’t leave.
January glanced around at the cabin’s interior, her expression as vacant as the space. “Do what?”
“I can’t leave here without…ah, Jesus.” The only speech his brain rehearsed made him sound like a pervert. Or a greeting card.
“For someone so gifted at words, Nat, you’re losing me.”
He set down the pack and paced the stripes of orange light that dawn pushed through the cabin slats.
“Be careful,” she said in a half-joking, half-genuine tone. “Floor might have wood rot.”
“I don’t care.”
“Nat, what’s wrong?”
“That’s just it—nothing’s wrong. Everything’s right. For once in a goddamned decade, everything is right. This morning, I crawled up on a wet roof after a rainstorm, and I watched a sunrise with the most important person in the world to me, and I wrote. God Almighty, the scene that had been giving me problems for eight months poured out of me like…like every sentence I’d written up to that point led to right here, right now. It was spontaneous and brilliant, and it was all because of you.”
“What are you saying, Nat?”
“I want more. More spontaneous. More brilliant. I want the taste of you to be more than a memory. I want us to make up for lost time and stop dancing around each other like we don’t know what the other wants because we do—we’re just too damned afraid of what comes next. And I’m okay with that. If you can gather moments and ink them into your skin, I can gather moments with you and ink them into my heart. At least they’d be there, which is more than I can say for being stubborn and letting you walk away without showing you how much you mean to me.” He was breathless, spent, but regret wasn’t an option. Before he lost his courage, he pushed forward. “I’m saying that I intend to make love to you, right here, right now, all over this cabin, so if you have any objection, you’re just going to have to stop me.”
7
January’s full bottom lip went slack. Totally fucking kissable.
Nat shed his jacket to the floor and strode toward her.
Not one to be outdone in the spontaneity department—or in the nudist camp—January matched him one jacket tossed to the floor and raised the stakes two boots, one over shirt, and the fastest shedding of second-skin jeans he had ever witnessed. By the time their lips met and she began to scale him with a well-placed knee around his hip, she wore lace panties and a sheer under shirt that was more a figment of imagination than actual cloth.
His cock jerked in anticipation.
Nat wanted to match her, skin for skin, but the longer he remained in clothes, the longer he held off ten years of pent-up desire. The absolute last thing he wanted was to leave the heat of her mouth, but the insistent, scorching
way her tongue jockeyed with his threatened to make him come before he followed through on his promise—to make love to her, all over this cabin. Nat never reneged on a promise.
“We gotta slow this down, J.” He backed out of the kiss until his lips were a whisper against hers. “It took us ten years to get here. It shouldn’t last ten minutes.”
She bit her bottom lip, now swollen and ripe with color, and nodded. Hair swept across her hungry eyes in disheveled waves. Never had she looked more exquisite.
He glanced around for a place—something, any soft spot where he could explore her in the way she deserved, in a way that would cement this memory for them both, but the cabin was stark and empty. A blank page. Creativity beckoned him.
“Put on your boots,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Had competitively retrieving a saddle with a mammoth hard-on been a rodeo event, Nat would have taken the golden buckle, twice over. When he cleared the door again, January Rose stood at cabin’s center dressed in her boots.
Only her boots.
Nat nearly dropped the forty-pound, two-toned custom leather armful at his feet. She was heart-stopping.
“You said to put on my boots.”
The taut muscles of her stomach shook on a chuckle. Breasts he had seen at the water’s surface the other night now hung with more gravity, more symmetry, more perfection. Her feet were planted wide, welcoming, the spread of her legs revealing the lips of her pussy glorious relief to the pink folds between.
A rope of lust thrashed him, gut to groin. He was as hard as a saddle horn.
Fuck him, she was a handful. In more ways than one. If they never left these four walls, he would die the happiest man who ever drew breath.
He retrieved the empty crate he had cast aside the night before, useless no more, and set the saddle atop it at her feet.
“Are you sure you want to use your saddle?” Her smirk was mind-blowingly adorable; her voice held a hint of twang in their newfound intimacy. “You saved up forever for that.”
He closed in on her earlobe, nibbled it once for good measure, then whispered, “I’ve saved up forever for you, too.”
Her lashes floated closed.
“I remember when you wouldn’t even let me touch it.”
“Now?” He clenched his jaw, aching to take advantage of her confident stance. He began a slow crawl south, first with his eyes, then with his lips along her collarbone, as he kissed punctuation through the truest sentence he had ever uttered. “I want you…all…over…it.”
A tiny shudder of arousal slipped past her lips before they stretched into a wicked smile. “Not until we even up the skin, cowboy.”
She tugged up his shirt hem. He helped free himself from the cotton, all while his heart stampeded clear out of his chest.
Her index finger traced the contours of his abdominal muscles then found a much more enticing subject—the head of his engorged cock, straining past the waistband of his boxers, past the lip of his jeans. With her index finger, she meandered a barely-there path along its throbbing, purple head.
Nat sucked in a breath, more determined than ever to keep his jeans on, to prolong every slick, unguarded, adventurous moment with her.
She leaned over and flicked her tongue across his tip’s slit.
A brutal hit of lust careened through his cock. His thighs shook. He nearly ripped his buttons free.
“That’s better.” January wrangled him close then lowered herself, side-saddle. With the rawhide end of a saddle string, she grazed her left nipple until it peaked. The moment her hot, eager gaze met his, she trailed the string past her navel to the light spray of golden brown hair between her legs.
“I’ll never look at that saddle the same way again.” A shuddering gallop of humor slipped past his smile.
“I’m just getting started. ‘All over it’ is quite a task.”
Instead of swinging her leg to the other side of the saddle, she slid her ass down slow, slow, slow enough that he forgot to breathe, down toward the seat jockey. She arched her spine along the seat, the length of her in a full-on back bend. Her breasts flowed liquid, stretched wide, their dusky centers pebbled at the tips. She spread her boots in a delicious bite of exhibitionist freedom, so January, so very ball-wrenching in every way, he didn’t know what to devour first.
“This is amazing,” she said, her voice thick with satisfaction.
Had he a functioning brain cell left, that would have been his exact thought. One of her postcards had been of a silhouetted woman practicing yoga on a cliff in India. On the back, she had written one word: Namaste. January had left an awkward teenager and returned a poised woman in total command of her body.
He circled to where her upper body draped from the seat and began a trail ride of kisses from her lips, up her sleek neckline to the peaked offerings riding high in the saddle. The scent of her desire filled his nostrils, told him she was more than ready. Her downy nipples made him instantly mindful of his callouses. He swapped his fingers for his mouth and sucked the tight nubs, mounting pressure against the roof of his mouth until her peach-like backside bucked against the leather and her hands groped for a hold.
She found one at the top button of his fly.
First button, gone.
Second button, ripped.
Somewhere, metal plinked against the hard floor.
Had it not been for the thin cotton of his underwear, his shaft would have toppled free. Which was, apparently, what she hoped would happen, because she wrestled his briefs down to his thighs until she had positioned him in perfect alignment with her mouth. She licked his length, balls to spade.
Fresh needles of arousal blazed through his groin like a wildfire. A groan emerged from deep in his throat.
She tugged his belt loops and accepted him fully into the silky warmth of her mouth. His ridge met resistance at the back of her throat, his knees buckled, and his sack clenched a warning jolt.
To ice himself, he slid free of her expert mouth, removed the remainder of his clothes, tugged her to a sitting position, and circled the saddle to kneel between her legs as if she were a guru.
And he was her most devout disciple.
Rigid-ass boot soles pressed against both his shoulders, crimping her legs and spreading her folds wide, so fucking wide his mouth watered. She propped up on her elbows, eying him from a front-row seat at the show. He kissed a leisurely, alternating crawl from the delicate, inner creases of each knee to her core, stopping to savor the moment he tasted her dampness. Mixed with the aged-leather scent from her boots, her sweet, musky wetness caused a detonation between past and present, memory and a complete sensory overdrive of epic proportion. He nearly wept from the nostalgia of it all. She was honey and cream and rivaled every decadent confection he had ever eaten. But as with all things January, once wasn’t enough. His appetite for her companionship, her spirit, her body, was insatiable.
“You taste like heaven, J,” he whispered against her sublime, syrupy flesh then flicked his tongue across her clit.
She jolted like a wild bronc. Her fingertips drove through his hair. With a soft tug of his strands, she repositioned him for a repeat performance. Her knees spread wide like a butterfly’s wings.
He smiled and accommodated her request with an exploration, mouth and fingers plundering and tender by turns, of her terrain. With every ravenous taste of her velvety flesh, every nuanced sampling of her sensitive folds, her pleasured moans pitched higher, louder, more breathless. She repeated his name more times than he could count, and he felt grateful for the one-syllable moniker. Riding high on her lusty exhales, she branded him hers. His name had never sounded so good.
She sat up, kissed her juices from his lips, and panted, “Wait for me on the saddle.”
Immediately, he felt the loss of her heat. He rose to his feet and braced himself against the cantle, thoroughly enjoying the sight of her spent body lose its grace while walking. She gave up, crawled the remaining distance to her pack, and p
ulled out an accordion strip of condoms. Her tiny birthmark, roughly the shape of Ohio, riding high on her left cheek, revealed her secret identity as his fantasy heroine. When she saw him watching, she spread her sex to his hungry gaze and wiggled her ass playfully.
But playful was not how it hit him. How could he have done this, started this, without thinking through protection? He hadn’t carried condoms in his wallet for years. His jaunt into spontaneity made him feel like he’d charged straight into a barbed wire fence without a stitch of clothing.
He stood. “I’m so sorry, J. I wasn’t thinking—”
January rushed back to him and silenced him with a kiss. “That’s part of what makes this so special. For once, I get to see you impulsive. And you wear impulsive so well.”
She reached between them and took him in hand until he forgot all about being the responsible one of the two. Together, they rolled the condom into place.
Twisting in his arms, she raised up on tiptoes so that his cock nestled along the ridge in her ass. She splayed her hands, rather dramatically, at the saddle’s horn and cantle and flexed her back greedily, nearly knocking him backward for all the burrowing and begging her soaked crux demanded of him.
He was a branding iron, as straight a column as had ever existed. His sheathed tip found her opening without guidance. With languid penetration, aiming to bring her to climax if it was the last deed he accomplished on earth, he teased an inch, then two, then backed out until she practically belly-crawled onto the saddle, tipping herself nearly vertical, begging, pleading for him to enter her at length.
“Now, Nat!” Her demand came hot and hard. “Please…”
Nat smiled. Gladly, he complied, first, in infinitely painstaking strokes that lasted a blissful eternity and threatened to unravel command over his release, then increasingly demanding the more she arched, the more she cursed for him to stay the course, the more his forceful thrusts rippled the creamy expanse of her parted cheeks, the more her internal muscles rippled against his dick. He reached between them and alternated tugs and pinches of her clit with his searing, parting, all-in feel, until her languid body stiffened against the leather and she clamped down, unmercifully, 360 degrees of searing climax.