The Cowboy Read online

  And the sound rippled up my spine, over all my skin. And I wanted him to touch me. My hands were suddenly not enough.

  Stunned by the realization, I froze. I should have seen this coming. This was the most Bea thing I could possibly do—take a good thing and ruin it by wanting more.

  But suddenly, with the sound of that groan, I wanted his hand on my body. The heavy calluses. The heat and heft of a man at my back. I arched my spine, imagining him behind me. I touched the flat, muscular planes of my stomach and imagined my hands were his. I gathered my shirt in rough fists and wished it was his rough touch on my body.

  I imagined him bending me over the railing, pushing my bare feet out wide his with boots. I imagined the scrape of his jeans against the bare skin of my legs. The feel of his erection behind that zipper pressed into the cleft of my ass.

  Fuck.

  This…fuck.

  I opened my eyes and stopped. Just…stopped. My hands dropped my shirt and I just stood there on the porch, letting the rain fall down on me. My shirt was soaked now and I had to figure he was standing down there getting pretty soaked, too.

  “You okay?” His voice floated up from behind those oak leaves. It was still shocking to hear him talk.

  Of course. Being okay, being better than okay, was kind of a way of life for me. A trick of the rain and a tiny wiggling worm of loneliness weren’t going to change that.

  “Yeah,” I said. My voice a little louder so he could hear me above the sound of the rain.

  “You’re getting soaked,” he said, like he cared.

  Oh, don’t do that, buddy. Whatever you do, don’t do that.

  I sat in the chair I had positioned exactly for this reason. And the rain made the leaves heavy so I could see a little more of him than I usually could. His hat was tipped down over his face. So I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could feel them. I could feel him watching me. His jeans were damp from the rain, molded to hard thighs.

  He was thin but strong, and standing there getting wet, his body was divine.

  He slipped one hand up the inside of his thigh to cup himself through that faded thin denim. And I went wet. Just totally wet. I couldn’t get my legs parted wide enough fast enough and flipped my wet shirt up.

  “Fuck,” he breathed, and I was so glad I’d decided no underwear. And I slipped my fingers between the fat wet lips of my pussy and found my clit, so hard. So ready.

  One touch and I was panting. My muscles bracing themselves.

  “You,” I said, and I hadn’t even finished the word before he had the button of his jeans popped and the zipper undone.

  I could see his cock. Most of it, anyway. It was big with a thick head. And I felt suddenly empty all the places where that cock would go.

  It was partly the rain, and partly my anger with myself for imagining him when I wasn’t supposed to be doing that, and almost entirely the sight of him with his heavy cock in his hand, but my touch was almost angry. I used myself hard because I liked it that way, too. And if his groans were anything to go by, so did he.

  My fingers blazed over my clit, a hard, fast rub that made me bend my head and close my eyes and wish, so hard in that unguarded moment right before the orgasm swept me up, that it was his touch making me crazy. That they were his fingers I was coming on.

  “Fuck!” I groaned through my teeth, and I clamped my legs together over my hand and rode my wrist until I was done. Used up. My legs fell open again and I lifted my hand, wincing at the inadvertent touch on my sensitive skin.

  Out in the backyard, my carpenter cowboy was still going, his hand a blur over the shaft of his cock, and for a second, watching his hand, I could imagine it was my hand. I wished it was my hand. And I closed my eyes and made a fist out of my palms and fingers, and if I concentrated there it was. The hard girth of him. The soft, silky heat. From there it was nothing to imagine his voice in my ear. Maybe his hand on the back of my head, urging me down until my lips touched the crown of his dick.

  “Take it,” he might whisper. “Suck me.”

  And I’d be on my knees in a second. A heartbeat.

  Oh, fuck, my fingers eased back between my legs and my orgasm, when I came again, was harder and longer. A deep wave from inside my body, the slow excruciating push up and the ecstatic wild pulse down.

  And I never closed my eyes. I kept them open, watching him finish. He curled over himself as if hiding or protecting this vulnerable minute. Both his hands were between his legs and I didn’t know what he was doing but I imagined plenty.

  And wanted even more.

  Then it was over. Both of us sat there, panting. Sweating in the rain. I sucked the water off my lips and tasted my own sweat.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded, my voice shot. He couldn’t see me. Or see me nod.

  “Yeah,” I croaked.

  The rain was speeding up. And it was growing cool. Goose bumps rose up over my skin and I pushed my shirt down over my legs.

  He zipped up his pants and braced his hands on his knees like he needed to gather himself for a second. And how badly I wanted him to come upstairs was terrifying. How much I wanted him, even after those two orgasms, was problematic.

  “Hey,” I called out. “You could come up.”

  There. The words were out. He didn’t move and I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me over the rain. But then he shook his head, a hard shake. No.

  And as if that was the push he needed, he walked away. Out of sight.

  5

  CODY

  On Friday night the knock on the door could only be Jack, and you could always count on Jack to have beer. Even before he owned a bar, he would show up with a six-pack. Even in that juvie camp we got sent to, where we met as kids, the one that was more prison than the prisons I’d been in, Jack had managed to smuggle in a six-pack of Bud.

  The guy was goddamn magic.

  I made my way to the door as quick as I could, but the knee was stiff in the evening and the paid radiated all the way up my side so my walk was more of a hop, but I threw open the door.

  “Took you long enough,” Jack said, standing under the porch light with the moths buzzing around his head.

  “Fuck you.”

  Jack smiled at me, and I smiled back and stepped aside so he could come in with his beer and the to-go box he had with him. Wings from the smell of it.

  Fuck. I was starving. The smell of those wings made my mouth water.

  Jack set the to-go container on the table along with the six-pack of Shiner. We both looked down at it.

  “This is a shitty date,” Jack said, and I laughed.

  “Especially since neither one of us is getting lucky.”

  Jack looked at me sideways, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “I’m not your type and we both know it,” I said with another laugh.

  “It’s true.” He sighed heavily.

  “Have you heard from her?” I asked, watching him out of the corner of my eyes. This wasn’t something we talked about much. Used to be he never shut up about her. But it had been years since he’d mentioned her name.

  “Cody?” Jack sighed. “Can we…not.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Gladly, I left the subject of Natalie alone.

  I led him into my grandmother’s old dining room that had all her fancy plates on the walls and the smell of her pies somehow still in the air. The tiny one-story house was practically made of Gran’s favorite colors—green and yellow. If the walls weren’t green, they were yellow, and the few that were neither were covered in pictures of daises and daffodils and green meadows. Even those old plates on the wall were green and yellow.

  It was manically cheerful. Kind of like Gran.

  She’d died about six months ago, just before the accident.

  A few people in my life had called it lucky, my gran dying right about the time I needed a place to live.

  Those people were no longer in my life.

  “You just never really get used to it, do you?” Jack ask
ed, looking around the dining room.

  “Not really,” I said, easing into a chair at the long pine dining table. I ate about a million cherry pies at this table. Roast beef after Sunday church. Grilled cheese for Saturday-night dinners. Gran poured me my first whiskey at this table one Sunday night when I was fifteen and got released from that camp. The whiskey was supposed to help the news that my mom wouldn’t be coming to pick me up go down a little easier.

  I’d shot back the whiskey and told Gran I was happy to stay with her.

  Six months ago—crazy with grief—I’d wanted to bury the table with her. Like a demented cowboy berserker I’d demanded Howie at the funeral home figure out how to do it.

  I’d been so fucking out of my head.

  Jack had talked me down arranged to have the corner next to her old spot at the head of the table shaved off and set in her casket.

  “So,” he said, cracking open a beer and handing it to me. I opened the wings and we dug in. “How is progress?”

  “All the walls are down. The electrical is a wreck—”

  “Can you fix it?”

  I put down the chicken wing. “I really don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I’m trained—”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Great.” Jack took a bite of a wing and waggled his eyebrows at me like he’d tricked me into something. I knew the basics of construction from my early years working odd jobs on the regional rodeo circuit, and on the threadbare value of my name I’d gotten a quarter-time job sanding drywall for literally pennies on a new build south of town.

  Jack gestured with his bottle toward my knee. “How is rehab?”

  “You are some kind of old lady with this shit—”

  “Are you not doing the exercises?”

  “Yeah. I’m doing the fucking exercises.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m ready for the ballet.” I held out my arms. “Wanna see?”

  “Cody,” Jack sighed. And if it was anyone else sighing at me like that I’d put my fist in their face, but from my oldest friend and one of my current bosses and the guy buying me dinner—I’d let a few sighs go.

  “I’m walking. I’m doing demo. Hurts like hell at night, but I can handle it.” I shrugged. “It’s more than they thought I’d do five months ago.”

  “The meds?”

  I shook my head. I’d gotten off that poison as fast as I could.

  “And Bonnie?”

  I glanced away at the mention of her name.

  “Also walking.” I nodded carefully, trying to be cool in the face of all the complicated shit just saying that made me feel. The cost of rehab for the two of us was eating up every penny my jobs were paying me. But it was worth it.

  Jack touched the edge of his bottle to the edge of mine. “To both of you walking,” he said. He took a sip and I set down my beer. I wanted to ask him about the girl. The woman on the deck.

  My Morning Girl. Stupid name, I know.

  No one ever accused me of being the smartest guy and I didn’t have a single word for what we were doing. She left me speechless.

  She left me so damn hungry.

  There’d been a period of time in the rodeo, after I’d nearly blown it all first time, when I’d lived impossibly clean. No beer. No booze. Healthy food. I ran most mornings. Avoided the women whose arms I usually rushed right into. And Charlie…fuck, Charlie. I hadn’t thought of him in so long…had told me denying myself everything only meant that sooner or later I’d break in a big way.

  Give yourself something, he’d said. A little something sweet.

  At first I hadn’t listened. I’d scoffed at him. And I’d lived in this slim little slice of my life. So sanctimonious. Healthy as fuck, but barely holding on.

  And what do you know, Charlie was right. After a big loss, I’d swan dived off every single wagon I’d been living on in a week-long bender of beer and drugs and burgers. And then spent another week regretting it. Hungover and sick to my stomach. Later, there were prescription antibiotics for the STD I’d gotten.

  It had been a good lesson that I’d learned by heart.

  And my Morning Girl was supposed to be that something sweet to get me through these bleak weeks while I figured out who I was without rodeo. A gift I gave myself so I didn’t go screaming into the abyss.

  But this morning it had looked like she’d been dipped in sugar and water, and I’d had to physically stop myself from going up there. From climbing the tree and jumping her wrought-iron railing and licking the water from her pink skin. Nudging that T-shirt up above that round ass…

  What. The. Hell.

  No talking. No names. No seeing each other’s faces.

  And those rules were there for a good goddamn reason. And I nearly broke every last one of them. I nearly broke my own hands keeping myself in that backyard.

  Away from her. I didn’t need to ask. I didn’t really want to know. Because there was seriously nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t take her out to dinner. Or for a drink. I didn’t even have condoms right now and they weren’t in the budget for next week, either.

  But somehow—I couldn’t stop myself. “Hey, Jack, the woman—”

  “I need you to quit that other job of yours,” he said at the same time.

  “The Bruns build?”

  “Yeah. You’ve gotta quit.” He leaned back in his chair, crossing his hands over the Dr. Who shirt he wore.

  I laughed. This was why I liked Jack. Had always liked Jack. When we met I was so mad I was taking swings at everything that moved. And he’d made me laugh.

  “And do what?” I asked, picking my beer back up.

  “Work for me. To get the bar built. Be my general contractor. Full time.”

  “Are you high?”

  “Not for too many years,” he said sadly.

  I stretched my leg out straight and looked at my big toe sticking out of my good pair of socks. I was wearing my good jeans, too. And one of my five T-shirts. These clothes, a warm coat, and my boots were all I had.

  “Can you pay me?” I asked, wiggling my toe at myself.

  “With love?”

  “Jack?”

  “Of course I can fucking pay you. Pay you better than that crap job you’re working out there. Give you better experience. Build your resume. Introduce you to my architect and maybe you’ve got a chance at a full-time job as a part of her crew.”

  “That’s nice of you, Jack. Real nice. But what do you get out of it?”

  “What are you talking about?” he cried.

  “Oh my God, you need me to spell it out for you?” I asked.

  He took a drink and nodded at me. “Spell it out, friend.”

  “I’m an injured rodeo cowboy with limited construction experience.”

  “You know, for such a hotshot, you’re real good at selling yourself short, Cody. I trust you and I just need someone to keep it all together. I just need…”

  Don’t say a friend. Don’t. Please. God. I might fucking cry.

  “Someone I can trust,” he finished and I relaxed into my chair. Trust I could handle. “Two weeks Cody. Help me out for two weeks.”

  This feeling…what was happening in my chest? In my brain? I hadn’t felt it in months.

  Pride. In myself. Purpose. A thing to wake up for.

  God. Thank you, Jack.

  “Cody?” He tilted his head at me. “Tell me you’ll stick around.”

  “I’ll need a raise.”

  He laughed. He laughed in that old Jack way and I lifted the beer to cover my smile. “Thanks, buddy. I knew I could count on you.”

  Yeah. In this wide world the two of us could count on each other.

  “You know,” Jack said, looking around. “It’s not that I don’t like hanging out in your grandmother’s house as, like, an immersive 1970s experience—”

  “Hey, now!” I said, feigning outrage. It was a bit of a time warp in this place between the shag carpet and the
macramé, but I hadn’t had the money or the inclination to change anything.

  “You know I have a bar. With beer. And wings. And people. Actual people…girl people, too.”

  “I don’t like bars,” I said, digging into another wing.

  “You used to love them.”

  Oh, I loved bars. The taste of whiskey in the back of my throat. A cold beer in my hand. The feel of a pretty stranger pressed up against my chest. The smell of sweat and possible sex and the unrelenting ease of it all.

  Fuck. I loved bars.

  It was a wonder I hadn’t stepped back into one.

  And maybe I could have bars back in moderation. Maybe I could have part of my life back. In moderation.

  “Listen,” Jack said, clapping me on the back. “Tomorrow. It’s Saturday. You’re not working. Come in for lunch.”

  “You’ve already done so much. No way am I letting you buy me lunch, too.”

  “Excellent. Come in and pay for your own lunch.”

  “Jack—”

  “You can meet Bea. If she doesn’t put a smile on your face, nothing will.”

  “Don’t do that to the girl.” I bristled up hard.

  “What?”

  “Try to fix her up with me.”

  “You should be so lucky to have her look your way, cowboy, but she’s off men or some shit.”

  “Then why—?”

  “She’s the bartender,” Jack said. “She’ll pour you a beer. Tell you some bullshit story about something. Put a smile on your face. That’s all. You remember how bars work, right?”

  I could feel Jack looking at me, waiting for me to say no. To find an excuse.

  He’d been good to me. The job. The beer. The friendship when everyone else had left. Or I’d pushed them away.

  “Okay,” I said, tossing bones into the nearly empty container. “But I hope you serve something better than these shitty wings.”

  He put his hand over heart like I’d deeply offended him.

  “Hey,” I said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Depends.”

  “The girl who lives upstairs from the construction site?”