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netherfeildren · 6 months ago

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Busy, Dying. Part 1;

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

Summary: In an in-between place called his life, Joel Miller is alone. In search of a cure. In need of a miracle. In want of God.

Can I interest you in a cure for loneliness? She'd asked him in a language without words. Taking it is the easy part. Letting her go is impossible.

-OR-

an a/b/o soulmates AU

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: No Outbreak AU, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Soulmates AU, Infidelity, Cheating, HEA!!!!!, Angst, Fluff & Smut, Mating Bites, Knotting, Heat Sex, Breeding Kink, Group Therapy, Social Experiments, Basically puppy training for unsocialized Alphas, And by God that man will be house trained by the time she’s done with him!, Complicated family dynamics, Discussions of self harm, Depression, Existential Angst, Author returns not with a whimper but with a KNOT, I wrote this in a very unserious state of mind beware

A/N: Gray November, I've been down since July - but we're so back, baby. I’ve missed this so bad. I’ve missed you all, I won’t drone on and on. I hope you enjoy, and please talk to me in the comments. Update me on what I’ve missed, let me know how you’ve been and what’s happening in your life.

A great heartfelt thank you to all of my wonderful friends who so supportively cheered me on while I struggled to write this. Sincerely the best people I know.

Love you all madly.

Word Count: 6.5K

Read on AO3

Part 1;

The old linoleum tiles are the most peculiar shade of puce, and Joel has realized there is someone sitting at the back of the room who smells… strange.

More brown than purple—an ugly color. There’s something about it that fascinates him.

The woman that is currently speaking tells of her husband; it’s the only tale she has to tell. She’s been doing it for weeks, and they all know it well by now. Older, omega, the woman, and at the latter and less comely stage of life. Most of them here can say the same. They usually give their names, those that get up to share—although it’s never a requirement when you attend, it is highly encouraged—the sharing, he means—but he never pays much mind to them—the names, that is. That’s not what he’s here for after all—to make friends. Although, he does see how that’d be the initial assumption.

Joel Miller is here for something more specific.

Six weeks he’s been showing up to these things now, and he’s yet to take a turn. He tells himself he’s working up to it.

What that specific thing is…he hasn’t quite figured out. He’s listening for it, though, and intently, even if he does skip over the names. It’s the details of what they’re telling that matter to him. The hows and intricate whys of what it is that brought them here today.

Her youth had been spent on a drunk, the woman is saying—her husband—and he’d been cruel to her in those days when there was still currency to spend in the form of her vitality. Joel nods at the puce—yes, he thinks, that’s usually the way of it. But later, there’s more to the story she reminds her audience, he drank himself into a fit, and had never been right since. The cruelty had been taken away from the marriage after that, and she’d been put in charge.

“But I wonder,” she says, “If sometimes I don’t miss it, the way he’d been,” —if the reason she was here now, with all of the rest of them that were just like her in their own unique ways, was that she’d been left lonely after her cruel husband had been exchanged for a sick one.

Joel nods again and wonders what sort of face the woman wears as she confesses but doesn’t bother to check. No matter, he knows they’re alike. If not in designation, then in heart.

It’s easy, that thing, he does it too, to wish for the bad. To want to hold on to it, the thing that hurts. Addictive, even, in some cases. Missing it is easy.

It’s why he’s here.

And it’s what they promise you. In their flyers and pamphlets, when they stand on the corners of streets talking people up wearing that look in their eye and that slouch in their step, when they smell it on you—or in the lack there of—a mate or a purpose.

Welcome to our meeting. We’re here to find the cure for loneliness.

That’s what they promise you by coming here.

It’d been that word: loneliness, actually, that had caught him. L-O-N-E-liness. There was something attractive about it to him. Not a label but a state.

You see, it was like this: Joel had seen a therapist once, several years ago, against his will and at the behest of another, who’d said all the wrong things in all the wrong ways.

“You sound depressed, Joel,” the therapist had told him.

He’d worn horn rimmed glasses and had a shiny bald head he could see the reflection of the overhead lights in. And worse—the non-scent of a beta which told him they’d never understand each other in the ways Joel longed to be understood. He’d—not hated him, necessarily—but felt an immense apathy for the man; more so than the regular apathy he felt for most things in his life.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Very, very sad,” was the official diagnosis.

Joel hadn’t liked the sound of the word. The label. He did not like that a word so succinct could be ascribed to him and all that had happened in his life. There was no word for it. It just was.

But there was something different about a state of aloneness, which if attributed to himself, he could accept. He had been left alone, in ways. It was a tangible thing he could look around a room inside of himself and recognize.

They’re meetings, is what this place is—encounter groups this coalition offers where lonely demi humans can come to congregate, discuss their aloneness, what had led them to such a state; their lack of attachments, connections, mates—alpha, omega. Held in the basement of the Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Newbury street—halfway mark between his shop and house—though they never talk about religion, which he likes because he doesn’t believe in religion.

God’s still under review.

He wonders if the Catholics wouldn’t have them.

Sitting forward in his seat, the metal folding chair that always leaves his back aching something fierce, he presses his elbows into his knees to distract with alternative pressure. Focusing on his fingers woven together between his spread legs, he tries to pay attention to the man who’s stood up to speak now. Older than himself, late sixties, no children, no family, no nothin’; he’d run them all off.

But Joel is distracted.

The smell is stronger now. Stranger too. Something full bodied, but metallic like rust, astringent bleach, built in a way that forces saliva to pool heavy between his suddenly aching gums. A mask that sits atop something of a much different chemical architecture—that’s the strange part.

Or—no. The back of his neck itches, and Joel lifts a palm to cup his nape, quell the sting, feel the tender mark. No. The strange part is not the illusion of the smell. What it is, actually, is that he’s fairly certain what he’s smelling is someone else's blockers. Something which he’s positive he’s never consciously noticed on another person in the thirty plus years since he’d presented as an alpha.

He has, suddenly, the quite intense urge to peek over his shoulder, certain that he’ll be caught smelling things he has no business smelling. That there will be someone just there, breathing down the nape of his neck with accusation on their tongue—boo!

Silly. But he’d known today would not be a good day.

It’d started off wrong. The milk had gone sour overnight, the check engine light had come on in his truck, all his socks were suddenly mismatched with not a single pair to be found, and his usual route to work had been waylaid by some freak accident. A maple tree split in half, one side into a house, the other into the road. Not a sign of lightning in the sky all night long.

Perhaps he might be compelled to believe in God after all.

Joel does not like it when things are out of order or out of the ordinary. His life was organized in a way that never caused him strife or excess. And it was not that he was stuck in his ways, only that he enjoyed his routine and disliked when things were not as they should be. And this—whatever it is he’s smelling, whoever—is not as it should be.

The older gentleman, an Alpha too, is still speaking. He had a daughter—has—who no longer speaks to him. Won’t even take his money. He’d had a long career in government that’d filled him with greed and paranoia and a radical view of life that refused to align with the way young people saw the world now. Perhaps he’d tried to change at certain times, but he was old and set in his ways. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to change as badly as he should have when he still had the chance to. Happily stuck in the past. His wife had died, and his daughter had gone away from him. Too tired of his mediocrity as a father to give him another chance.

The man sounds like he feels sorry for himself. Like he thinks himself the victim, and this one, Joel does look up at. He looks old and worn down, heavy beer pouch and thinning hair and sagging jowls. A sad and lonely man. Joel wonders if that’s what he looks like to the other people in this room, as well.

“No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good.”

Joel blinks, looks at him more closely, tries very hard to find similarities between themselves. But no—not quite right, not the thing he’s looking for. Their plight is different. This man is not alone, he’s got his weakness to keep him company.

The one thing Joel had fought like hell to keep out of his repertoire of issues. He’d run from even the possibility of it as soon as she was dead, left Texas straight for the Northeast and from thereafter, everything he’d done, he’d done with a staunchness of character. If at the end of it, that staunchness was made up of apathy or numbness or dissociative fury, well, then at least he wasn’t still that man who’d been too weak to save his daughter.

That counted very much in Joel’s book.

An overabundance of cold numbness, little anger, everything a static haze—an abstinent winter. That was his whole life. But then, look at him now, he was here, wasn’t he? He’d taken that brochure handed to him on that last warm Tuesday afternoon weeks ago as he’d headed back to the shop from lunch.

Hello, sir. Could I interest you in a cure for loneliness? The young omega had said.

It’d started like anything—an experiment or a desperate ploy. The monotony had been steady going the past few years, getting older, colder. He’d grown hard and solitary around his wound, loneliness spread like a fungus, and he’d longed for any sort of change.

“A cure…how?” The terrible shrink had come to mind.

“Oh, nothing to fret over.” The young man had a nice smile, Joel remembers. Kind and straight toothed. Honest in the way that a stranger knocking on your door to sell you a Bible seems honest. “We call it an encounter group. People come, share, tell the tales of their designation and their lives. In the end, the result is different for different people. Some move on to a second step if they need… more. Others find what they’re looking for just through the connection of sharing. But no matter the result, you’ll see, you’ll be cured. Promise.” He’d winked, smile deepening, giving him an appreciative once over at the end of his spiel. Joel had blinked back, surprised, confused, but curiosity peaked enough he’d obsessed over it for three short days before he’d found himself stepping into the molted incense smell of the belly of a church so dimly lit he was sure not even God peaked in this sad space any longer.

“It’s that easy?” Joel had asked, childlike in his throat-strangled hope.

“That easy.”

It seemed the smile had been honest enough to sell him the Bible.

The scent insists upon itself as the older gentleman finishes up, and Joel’s nose tickles with whatever it is it’s whispering at him. He wants to get up and walk out, run away, but suddenly his gut is tight and hot, and he isn’t sure he can actually stand up without disgracing himself in front of all these people. A wash of agonized heat moves through him, confused at what’s suddenly happening to his body.

“We’ve got a newcomer today, sharing for the first time,” Maria, the woman who leads the group, says at the front of the room. “Everyone give her a warm welcome, it’s her first day and already she’s brave enough to jump on up here.”

There’s the shuffling of bodies in their seats, a cleared throat, the man sitting behind Joel breathes so loudly he thinks there’s gotta be some sort of medical condition going on there, the puce turns more hideous by the second, and his own heart is beating so hard in his ears the rush of blood is dizzying. He feels each thump of the thing against his breast bone in some sick imitation of a fist begging to be let out.

The new voice begins as nothing but a murmur.

An introduction—he misses the name. His breathing goes shallow, he’d tip over in his seat if he didn’t have both boots planted firmly against the puce. The voice gains strength and with it, Joel wishes he’d been paying attention from the start. He didn’t get to hear her name.

It’s a girl.

She’d run away from home in the spring of her sixteenth year to join the opera, she tells them. Had come upon the city in roaring spring and thought the rest of her life would be exactly like that, pure novelty in bloom, nothing like what she’d left behind. And was deeply disappointed when the reality was nothing such.

And Joel hears it, that disappointment in her voice at what she’d not been able to find after searching for it so religiously. This is what makes him look up at her. This, unlike all the others, he thinks he can relate to—just by the sound of her voice. The search for a thing lost which can never again be found. The fruitlessness of it all.

At that first vulnerable, terrified glance, she’s already staring at him, eyes catching like hooks.

He blinks once, twice—color—is sure he can hear the movement of his eyelashes passing through the air, the stick of his lids meeting—color—bright. This is it.

That wash of heat turns into a blaze, every single bead of sweat blooming on his brow is a tell evaporating into the ether. This is what he’d sensed from the start of the evening. Maybe even from the moment he’d seen that split maple.

“My mother always said I needed to be stronger, bolder, not so sensitive.” She looks away from him now. “I grew up in an angry house where you had to fight tooth and nail not to be overrun. Because of this, I left it at a very young age, and it was the greatest fight I could muster, abandoning that house of anger. I found myself something to bring me what I thought would be joy, a job and a city, and for a time, it was enough. But starting your lonely life so young…it’s hard.” After a pause of breath, “It’s been hard.”

“And it’s made me never want to have to—exert myself,” she says, searching for the right words, smiling when she finds them, and Joel has the urgency to smile back. “Now, I never want to have to be strong. I never want to have to try. I want to only be the way that I am. I don’t care. I don’t want to have to fight. I never want to be in an angry house again. I want someone who’ll see this in me and understand and never make me work for it, that they would give it to me willingly, easily, without me even having to ask. Do you understand?” She looks about the room, and he hopes her eyes will land on him again, and even though they don’t, he feels she’s speaking directly to him. He nods, the hook of her temptation cast beneath his chin. “This is a fantasy. And it makes for a lonely existence. This idea of how I need it to be for it to be right—love.” She looks down at her hands folded atop the podium where they go to stand at the front of the group and share, and Joel wills her gaze to find him amidst the crowd again. “It’s so difficult. And this might seem very bad to you, weak willed, but it’s not. It’s only very honest. Which can never be a bad way to be.”

Finally, she looks back at him, and it’s that loneliness of two people amidst a crowd, facing one another, knowing themselves mirrored against the other and yet still disembodied. There’s something indecent about the way she looks at him in front of all these people, the way he, in turn, looks back. A little bit like finding your own face on a stranger's body in a crowded room. Color rises to his face, and she gives him that same elusive smile from before.

He’s the one to look away first this time.

As the crowd disperses for coffee and pastries after the last of the speakers, he searches for her. He needs to ask her name, feels as if he’s some blighted creature without it, swears he’ll never forgo attention during a meeting again if he can fish it out of her.

He finds her at the dessert table, Maria at her side and a hand at her shoulder. Something of a thank you is being imparted between the two women. The girl is saying she’s grateful for the welcome, grateful that they’d found each other.

Joel has things to be grateful to Maria for, also. It’d been pure chance, really, that Joel had met her. That she happened to know Tommy. She’d met his brother on a summer trek to Wyoming where they’d become friends and had kept in touch afterwards. The woman has a thing about her that ingratiates people by sheer force of will. Perhaps it’s that she’s an alpha, too. Perhaps it’s just the charisma and wide smile. The fact she’s got a countenance about her that takes no shit from anyone, that makes demands of a person whether they’ve got any give or not. Whatever the case, she’d pulled the truth of his estranged brother from Joel’s mouth like teeth, made the connection to the man she’d met as a fly fishing guide in the Tetons. She was kind enough to keep Joel updated on his brother on the rare occasion he mustered up the courage to actually ask.

She always made him ask.

Watching the two women stand together and share that easy thanks that Joel so urgently owes, and yet which he cannot voice, he feels, suddenly, so angry. So awkward. So humiliatingly inexperienced. So unable to grapple with the pain of human contact, the fascination of it, the humiliating necessity.

That decade old anchor weighing him in place and the guilt of even thinking of it as such.

I feel decrepitly alone and odd, he thinks. And how strange, no? He’d been a normal man. He has a normal job. He lives in a normal house. Unexceptional in every sense of the word. Everything in his life had been ordinary up until that one great tragedy. And then, as if none of the before had ever existed, it was as if everything afterwards was one great landslide of wrongness. The filth of it slinging mud all over his life so that nothing had ever been right after her.

So that now he cannot even approach this girl whose name he needs to know, and Maria, to whom he owes the last surviving connection to his brother to.

As Maria turns to go, she gives him an encouraging nod, sending him into an agony of shyness, aware of his hovering.

The girl remains at the dessert table, perusing the pastries. He can see her fingertips dancing over the golden, sugared confections, before she settles on a plain, glazed donut. He watches the bend of her elbow, bringing it to her mouth and thirty seconds later, the empty hand reaching for a napkin. He can’t help the huff of laughter it draws from him.

Watching the unknown creature with her back turned, he peers down the length of himself. Wood stain marred t-shirt, old work jeans and scuffed boots, he’d come straight from the shop. Looking back at her, she seems perfectly packaged and neat. The two of them, different as chalk and cheese. He tells himself he shouldn’t do it, turn around and go, leave her alone, as he steps up beside her at the table.

Immediately, there’s the heat of her skin, the smell of her shampoo, and he realizes, and it’s silly because it should’ve been obvious from the get go, she’s an omega. The epiphany, not that she is one, but that he’d been too stupid and oblivious to notice, leaves him feeling vulnerable and angry.

Any sort of hello that’d been coming alive on his tongue immediately dies. And he’s about to make a run for it once again when she speaks up beside him, “Would you like a donut?” Her small fingers skip over the pastries, choosing once again. “I haven’t had one yet,” she lies, “I can’t decide which looks best.”

The dancing hand pauses over a golden brown puff pastry, seemingly coming to a decision, when she turns to look up at him. The scent of her isn’t just shampoo, not just the blockers he’d shockingly picked up on before—sharp, burning his nose—it’s her skin now, too. The dry sweat from hustling under her coat to make it to her first meeting on time salted along her limbs. Hot, sweet almonds. The shocking vermillion of the morning’s split maple comes to mind. He can smell her.

“Puff pastry?” She presses, quizzical crook to her brow at his silence and glower. “I think you really need something sweet. It’ll make you feel better.”

He wants to agree, to say he also thinks he needs something sweet. But all he can manage is a short grunt because she smells…indescribable. Honeyed musk, something heady, like she herself had just got done baking, straight out of the oven and full of sugar into his waiting mouth.

That earlier anger, it kicks up a notch. Why isn’t he fucking saying anything?

She shrugs, as she lifts the puff pastry to her mouth he finally manages sound.

“You stink.”

He doesn’t know when he became such a liar.

He does know when he became such an asshole.

A pause: mouth open, straight, white teeth ready to bite into the fluffy sweet bread. He can see her small, pink tongue, and it makes him go a little crazier.

He might be losing his mind.

She’s got elegant eyebrows that shoot straight up her smooth forehead. The look of her skin is glorious.

“Excuse me?”

Now, there seem to be too many words spilling out of his mouth. “You need better meds or somethin’. Need to sort your shit out. Can’t go gallivanting around smellin’ like that.”

Oh god, shut up.

“Excuse me!” She takes a huge bite of the pastry. “I do not gallivant,” she shoots back, mouth full of sugar and Joel goes hot everywhere. “What is wrong with you?” she demands, pursing that prim little mouth as she chews, eyeing him maliciously.

He hasn’t the damndest clue.

She is not wary of him in the slightest, which in turn tells him he needs to be wary of her.

Another large bite, inexplicably she extends her free hand towards him—potentially going into shock and entirely out of his depth when he takes it, the vulnerability of tendon and muscle soft beneath his strength—offering him a firm shake. She gives Joel her name.

In that moment, she has a look about her that tells him she’ll bite back if he isn’t careful, even if she hurts herself in the process.

And now he knows you.

“We might as well acquaint ourselves if you’re going to insult me. Don’t you think?”

Peering up at him, he’s tall, well over six feet, and broad shouldered. Older, distinguished, but in a rough way, hewn oak, gray.

“Are you typically this rude? Or is this a special occasion?”

Incredibly handsome.

“I’m being serious.”

“I do not stink. No one has ever said that to me, and my blockers are quality. It must be a you problem.” The puff pastry really is very good. And this man really is very handsome. Coming here today was a good idea.

One of the girls from the theater had suggested it, handing you a pamphlet with Looking for the Cure for Loneliness? emblazoned across the top, and even though she’d done it kindly, any other person would’ve taken the implication as an insult. Hey girl! No offense, but we all in the company think you’re super weird and have you heard about this support group for losers? Kind of like Omegas Anonymous!

Those hadn’t been her exact words, and you hadn’t taken offense. After the initial humiliation, you’d warmed to the idea. You’d heard of groups like these before. Congregations of demi humans where one could come to find community or connection. Be it socialization or support for people struggling with their designations and all that they implied, they served their purpose. And anyways, you weren’t in a position to be nitpicky.

It’s true, you’re alone.

So alone, in fact, that even the people around you could tell. Strangers, coworkers, your roommate and her girlfriend. Like some noxious cloud of loneliness following you around virtue signaling the desperate need for love and companionship and understanding you’re so in need of.

You increasingly saw yourself as a dancer on her toes, trembling delicately all over, vying desperately to survive to the end of the song. A monster with too many heads. A Cerberus of the most gruesome sort.

Two or three would’ve been acceptable—heads—but you'd long surpassed that and moved on to something unrecognizable and unpleasant. Desperately in need of a solution.

“Maybe you’re the one that stinks. Maybe it’s your upper lip.”

“My—” The rude alpha, obvious, that one, lets out a choked sound, a deeper wash of color immediately flooding his cheeks. You dip your head sideways, appraising him as you polish off your second pastry. He has pretty bone structure, masculine but beautiful, and after he’s done choking and spluttering, he can’t help but laugh a little bit. You see it.

Beneath a mouth that looks forbidding, perhaps even a little cruel, you can sense that he is not an unkind man. The laugh tells you so.

Yet you’re not so green that you can’t recognize the gnawing hunger of loneliness in others. That mimicking gleam. There’s always a reason people find themselves in places like these, after all. His face, edged with the weariness of age, makes this obvious. He has good reason for subjecting himself to this.

Reaching for the lovely eclair you’d been deciding between earlier, you take a large bite of it. Almond cream and a thick layer of icing on top, humming happily as you chew while he stares at you like the three headed dog.

You hold the dessert out towards him, offering. Palm up, he shakes his head no, slightly disgusted look on his face.

“So. You come here often?”

He blinks. “Really?” Patronizing look on his face now.

“Why not? I am actually interested to know if this is worth my time.”

He rolls his eyes. Oh, he’s fun. “Yes, I come here often. Every Friday, for the past two months, just about.”

“And you like it?”

“Is this the sort of place one likes?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You never know what you might find.” You think he watches your mouth as you finish chewing, swallowing hard. “Anyways, I think the world is kind of over out there. Don’t you? Might as well make the best of it in here.”

Thumb pressed against the edge of the table, he looks down, suddenly going shy again. A shy alpha, who’d of thought.

“What did you used to do?” He asks, motioning at the crowded room full of chatting alphas and omegas. You wonder how many of them will go home together for a fuck after this.

“When?”

“Before this place.”

“Before this place? Nothing.” You smile at him, certain he isn’t picking up on your teasing.

“Nothing?”

“Nope. I’ve always been here.”

“But— Don’t you…I thought...” He’s cute, shaking his head, frustrated frown slashed across his face. “You sing, right?” He pivots.

“Sing? Me? Whatever made you think such a thing?” The sly look on your face goes completely over his head and slides to the rest of the sweets. If he wasn’t watching, you’d have another.

“You said. You said you’re in the opera,” he gruffs back, looking visibly aggravated now.

Such fun.

“I’m a supernumerary,” you concede as you turn, making your way to an old relic of a pew along the far wall, tragically abandoning the desserts.

He follows as you go, sitting a respectful distance beside you.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“We’re the actors that fill the stage at the opera.”

“No singing?”

You shake your head. “I’m a wench, I’m a courtesan,” You bat your lashes, flirting with him, fingertips pressed coquettishly beneath your chin, “Part of a harem. I’m every woman you’ve never known. It depends on the opera.”

“I’ve never heard of that before.”

“I started as a stagehand when I first got to Boston. Worked my way up.”

“How’s it work? Lines or somethin’?”

“No lines. No anything. I’m a background actor—an extra, basically. If anything, I’m given some simple choreography direction, laugh, sigh, show fear, horror, heart break. Whatever. I’m playing pretend without actually having to do anything.”

“No working for it.”

Your smile melts to blandness. So he’d been listening, then.

“Did you want to sing?”

“No. I wanted to be a supernumerary.”

“Strange. I’ve never heard of that,” he repeats.

“You did say, yes.” Now, your smile turns auspicious. Everyone’s here for something. “What do you do?” Perhaps this is it for him.

Your gaze flits over the crowd, at the far exit, there’s a large alpha helping an omega into his coat.

“Got a shop, furniture, woodworking and such.”

“You make things?” He nods. “Ah, a man of creation.”

Sitting back to take him in, he’s got the beginning insinuations of silver speckling the dark hair at his temples, a well groomed beard, and large, intimidating hands.

His small huff of laughter is bashful, tinged with something disappointed. “No, nothin’ that grand.” And he’s got an accent heavy at the ends of his words, not Bostonian. Southern.

“But you know, I wanted to say…”

“Yes?” You press when he loses his courage, leaning towards him, inhaling deeply.

“Well, that I know what you meant earlier. Sometimes I can be the angry house.”

You blink once. Sit back. “I see.”

“It’s hard work. I have to try every day at it.”

Being the house, or not?

“How do you stop yourself?” You cast a line, fishing for his character.

“Don’t know. Keep myself cold, I think.”

“That’s no way to be.”

“No. It’s not.” He sounds amused. You want to bite him.

“Ah, well. Perhaps that’s what’s brought you here then,” you say, twisting the toe of your sneaker against a scuff on the old linoleum, leaning forward on your palms wrapped around the edge of the pew.

“Maybe,” he says, but a sort of pained, exasperated sound follows it. Your hanging head turns to peer at the handsome face. He stares back.

There’s something animal afoot. Perhaps in terms of designation, sure, of course, like the rest of the alphas and omegas here. Your designations weigh heavily in the air. But also intrinsic to your two personalities. You feel you know him. That the two of you might have the same sorts of problems, desires. And as you stare at him, you think you may be equally measuring each other’s character, finding that similarity in one another. Hook the line, hook the line, reeling each other in—

His eyes move quickly between yours, over your face, and you can tell that prolonged eye contact isn’t his norm.

He has the most surprising set of bright hazel eyes like river stones.

Suddenly, you feel desperate to pull out a flicker of sexuality in the man, hear it in his voice. Watch that serious stoicism crack. Have him say clearly what it is he’s come here looking for. At the exit, the alpha and omega are gone now. —Certain that, with him, the experience could be entirely different, exhilarating. Perhaps a challenge. He seems to be more quiet and more patient than any other man you’ve ever come across, but also more stern, maybe…angry?—taking in that wide mouth held so firmly. Far more remote too, by the far away look in his gaze. You want to see how he could be moved and what the sight of it would look like.

“Maybe not,” he finally continues. “I’m looking for something, I think.”

Yes, tell me. “Something like what?”

“Someone like me.”

“An alpha?”

That was something, you knew, some people were interested in. The experience of being with someone of their own designation—that power struggle.

“No,” he looks away, cringing. Strange, the word out loud seems a shock to him. “Did you listen to the woman at the start—missing the bad thing? I struggle…with that. Holding on, not letting go even when I know I should.”

You’re at an age now which sometimes makes it hard to realize or accept that what you’re living is your life. That it’s been time to grow up. That you have to remember to move forward when it’s your turn in line.

Which is to say, that you understand him—the difficulties of knowing when to hold on and when to let go.

“Sometimes you hurt yourself because you don’t have anything else to do. Sometimes, because the alternative is much worse.”

“Holding on ‘cause there’s nothing else to do?”

“Sure. Or you’re used to it.”

You’ll be gentle with him, you decide. He’s in need of gentle handling despite the stern face; not a puzzle so arbitrarily solved. And those eyes are still so bright, he doesn’t seem like he needs any more hardship.

“Don’t know why I’m tellin’ you this,” he says, accent heavy.

“Well you did come here for a reason. Didn’t you?”

Discreetly, you slide closer to him, but he doesn’t notice. Apparently lost in the realization that perhaps this was what he’d come here for, to talk to someone, to have someone listen and relate. You’re almost positive he’s never gotten up to share with the group before in all his time coming to the meetings; doesn’t look like the type.

“I came here because I’m going to take better care of myself,” you tell him. “I’m going to try harder.”

“Harder at what? Thought you didn’t want to try?” He blinks as if attempting to come out of a dream.

You shrug. “Everything—I don’t know. I don’t want to end up like my parents; drunk, angry, alone. I’m scared of it. I’ve avoided at least two of them.”

“I’m afraid of getting older.” The dream moves in his eyes. “That I’ll forget,” he says, but you don’t ask what.

All of a sudden, he seems very real. The swells of grief and loneliness moving through him so similarly, so close to the surface. It frightens you.

Springing up, you turn to face him and he follows to stand too. You can hear the crack of his knees unfolding, and when he lifts his left palm to stifle a gruff cough, the band of gold around his finger is paralyzing.

All of a sudden, he’d seemed like what you’d been looking for here too. There’s laughter coming from the church rafters.

“You’re a widower?” He wants to forget, he’d said he wants to let go.

Hadn’t he?

But instead, “What? No.” You stare pointedly at the ring, and he looks down at it also. “No,” he repeats.

“So’re you looking for a fuck, or what?” You try and hold back the bite it comes with, but you can’t. “A distraction?”

“No. No. That’s not what I’m looking for.”

You don’t understand, impaired by your youth, maybe you’re not supposed to understand. “Maybe it’s what you need,” you tell him, turning towards the exit before you can watch him cringe.

He follows at your heels, grabbing his coat from the hook by the doors before he’s stepping out after you into the fall blister. It’s cold and wet and glorious out.

“Don’t you have a coat?” He demands.

“Nope.” You start walking towards Arlington Street and the park.

“Did you walk here? It’s freezing out.”

“I did,” you turn back towards him, still moving, and he starts to follow.

“From where?”

“Downtown.”

“Where?” He scowls at your uncooperation, the married man. Alpha.

The truth is, he’d kind of stunk to you too. Maybe in a good way. Like no one ever had before. As glorious and shocking as the cold. Like if snow had a scent.

Disappointment churns in your gut alongside the excitement of watching him follow you.

“I don’t think you know it.”

Your backward walk is interrupted as a hurrying stranger bumps into you, sending you staggering. Watch it, the Boston snark spits. The alpha turns to scowl, heavy boot forward like he’s half a mind to follow after the person you’ve just inadvertently assaulted.

And it occurs to you, “You didn’t tell me your name.” How silly of you. You’d been so distracted you’d forgotten to ask, and what if you never see him again after this? What if you can’t muster the courage to come back again next week? What if he can’t?

“It’s Joel.”

You think it sounds right.

“I might—know it,” he insists—you smile at the dog with a bone. The disappointment pulses. “Is it far?” You shrug, looking over your shoulder. You’re going to lose yourself in the garden for a few hours, forget about him. “Why don’t you drive?”

“I like to walk,” you tell him, turning back.

He looks at you like he doesn’t like the things you say much less the way you say them. Perhaps he can see the disappointment and is disturbed by the sight of it, but the possibility seems too altruistic.

“You should try it sometime, Joel. You might like it too.”

His huge body seems to be shivering in the cold.

“I think…” The look on his face has turned suspicious now. He takes a step towards you. “You’re very strange. And you’re very young. I don’t think we should be friends.”

Your heart gives a demanding thump.

“We’re not going to be friends.”

When you’d first spotted him in the crowd, the strangest feeling had come over you. A tug behind your belly button, a scalding heat at the back of your neck, at your wrists. Perhaps it’s merely imagination, the look of disappointment you think you see on his face right before you turn away from him to continue on walking.

“And I’m not that young anymore.”

You’d known today was going to be a good day. Extra cinnamon in your latte, a late start to your morning, warm in bed, no rain in the sky despite the cloud cover. And your director, late for rehearsals after some freak accident had befallen the roof of his house.

“That’s what all young people say.”

Part 2;

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#busy dying fic #vic fic #joel miller fanficition #the last of us au #joel miller x you #joel miller

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netherfeildren · 26 days ago

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FABLE OF THE DOG : 4. Figs

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Joel Miller x FMC

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Cowboy/Heiress AU; Explicit Sexual Content; DD/lg Dynamics; Daddy Kink; Spanking; Sub Space; Breath Play; Intense Daddy Issues; Size Kink; Size Difference; Squirting; Brat Taming; Past Child Abuse/Neglect; Mentions of Drug and Alcohol Abuse/Addiction; Mentions of Suicide Attempt; Discussions of Grief; Jealousy; Self Esteem Issues;

A/N: Sorry for the ten month long wait, I’m a lazy, procrastinating cad. It’s really freaking long, I know. I wanted to make it up to you, I really missed them, I had a lot to say.

The tags really, really mean what they say, heed them carefully, please.

Word Count: 20.5K

Read on AO3

4. Figs

The child sits outside her father’s office, waiting.

Long curls drip frigid down her shivering back, white nightgown buttoned to the tip of her mother’s own chin—that likeness which will one day be the cause of all her troubles, though she does not yet know it—and the pink furry slippers which are her most favorite. They’re soft and they sparkle, and when she wears them, it’s like she’s a bunny.

“He’ll be out soon, darling, and then we can put you to bed,” Nanny says from the seat beside her. She nods, pressing her small shoulders tightly to the back of the hard bench, wishing the woman silent so that she might better focus on the sound of the deep voice coming from behind the closed door.

It is her father’s voice, and it is most familiar to her like this.

From afar.

The fingers she stares down at are still pink from the bath, and she twists them tightly in her lap, sitting very straight and very still, pressing her mouth together to keep all the sound and all the movement inside of herself silent and motionless so as to trick time into moving faster. She is young, only six years old, but she has learnt the strength of her own will already. How she might exert it with the right people to get what she wants—how with others, it means very little, if anything at all.

Beside her, Nanny sighs a sound full of impatience, and this the child recognizes quite well. She doesn’t like it either, that they must always wait for him, that her whole life seems to be filled with waiting waiting waiting. She thinks that she hates waiting. She thinks that if she were a wild rabbit out in the purple mountains she wouldn’t ever have to wait for anyone or anything. And she knows that she would like to let it all out, the impatience, the yawn that trembles at her jaw as she clenches her teeth together until it hurts, the cry for him to hurry up because she doesn’t want to wait for him anymore.

The door opens suddenly, and a man she doesn’t know strides out, papers tucked beneath his arm. The girl’s father is a businessman, and this is why he is so busy. He is also a rancher, this is why she does not come first.

She is young, only six years old, but she has learnt the truth of this already.

Nanny has slid to the edge of the bench, her ankles crossed over one another, long fingered hands folded stiffly in her lap. She is breathing very slowly, her shoulders moving in up and down waves, and the girl knows she’s forcing herself to do this to stay calm. When the girl doesn’t do as she’s told, this is how Nanny breathes, too.

Finally, her father’s heavy tread approaches the door, muffled by the thick rug in his office, the hard satin underside of the beautiful boots he wears. And then he’s there, after more than an hour of waiting past her bedtime, he moves past his daughter and the woman he pays to raise her as if they hardly exist—their wait inconsequential.

“Sir?” Nanny shoots up off the bench, voice soft but stern, like when she is ordering the child about in the school room.

He is very frightening, her father. And the girl doesn’t think that she looks like him at all, which is why he doesn’t like her. If she was more like him, he would like her better. But she knows that if she is very quiet and very still that he can be nice, and so she waits without moving, until he looks at her.

“We’ve come to say goodnight, Mr. Kelly.”

He sighs a long drawn out moment, a big breath as he’s a very big man with big nostrils that flare widely when he’s found the girl particularly annoying.

Once, she’d tried to put her finger in his nose, to measure how much bigger it felt compared to when she put her finger in her own nostril. There was a great fuss after that, and a mighty spanking. She never tried to touch him like that ever again after.

She is a child who learns her lessons very well.

“Yes, alright,” he says in his deep voice, and she does love the sound of it, even if it never sounds happy or laughing, even if it scares her, too, for she can always recognize when he’s come back home just by the sound of it rolling through the house. And when he comes to crouch before her, folding all the way down to look her right in the eyes, the little girl has to work hard as ever to make sure she remains very still and very quiet so as not to cry.

“Have you been good for Nanny?”

“Yes, sir,” she nods. He never calls her Miss Maria as the girl is required to when they are in the school room, learning. Always simply, Nanny.

“Bill tells me you’ve been doing well in your lessons. Soon you’ll be riding on your own. That will make me very pleased.”

“Yes, sir,” again. She wishes she could make her voice louder so that he might hear her better, but it will just not come.

He sighs and his big nostrils flare again, and she knows he is displeased. She can never make herself sound in a way that will make him happy even though she tries as hard as she can. “I’m going away for a few weeks, but when I’m back, I’ll come watch you. How does that sound?”

And at this oh so terrible news, as hard as she tries to stifle the movement or the sound or the yawn or the cries or anything that might make him bothered in any way…well, she is still very young, only six years old, and she has not yet learnt how to control all the things he so intensely dislikes about her.

“But you just came back, sir, and now you’re leaving again.” It comes out of her small child’s mouth a whine that grates, and yet, despite this, he is still kind for a moment longer.

“It’ll go by like that,” he snaps his big fingers, makes a big sound she has tried to replicate and cannot.

“Please, don’t leave, daddy.”

Now she will cry, now the kindness will start to go.

“It won’t be that long, salamander.”

A large hand wraps around her small shoulder, squeezing gently, she flinches and a fat tear rolls over her apple flushed cheek. It’s hard work, after all, holding yourself so still and so quiet when you are so little, and so finally, the stillness breaks, and she tucks her thumb into her warm mouth, sucking.

He looks at her for another long moment, his hand falls away. She watches it carefully, steeling her small body for something bad. “That’s a filthy and disgusting habit. How many times do I have to tell you to knock it off?” He looks at Nanny with blame, and she says something low that the girl can no longer hear, she’s watching her slippers like a bunny again, thinking again how a bunny must surely never have to wait or cry over their fathers out there in the purple mountains.

“Always with the goddamn sniveling, girl. Go to bed.”

His voice is angry now. She sucks harder. She can no longer be still. He does not say goodbye.

You don’t see Joel for three whole days following your afternoon together.

It’s terrible.

On the lingering rays of the setting sun, a storm rolls in off the Tetons, and with it, trouble and interruptions. As the two of you help peel each other off the living room rug, damp and trembling and laughing like children, you stumble up the stairs together, the rain starting out soft and humid outside. A curtain of warm water falls from the skies as you step into the large, marbled shower stall in your bathroom, the rainfall spout pouring over your closely bent heads.

You feel fragile and vulnerable in his hands, a turtle dove on a precarious ledge; like a girl again, watching him ramble about your father’s ranch, strong and far away and wholly untouchable, all while he washes soap from your hair.

But now, the urgency of adulthood, of being a woman in his hands, not only a dove, rushes in, too. He touches you everywhere, fingers dragging through the soaked locks of your hair, braille mapped over the planes of your shoulders, down your sternum to palm the swell of your belly. So now, you’re woman and girl and dove, something fragile grown into its own strength, anchored here, yet still with the muscle memory of flight ready to take you away. If only because that’s what you’d always been used to before. The back of your eyes pinch with emotion, overwhelmed by the smolder of your heart, and you can’t believe it’s him, Joel, here, lifting your breast into his mouth to suckle at the peak, licking at the seam of your mouth and demanding entrance and the flavor of your tongue.

His cock hangs heavy between his thick thighs, half hard, and if you weren’t fighting the silly knot of tears in your throat, you’d poke fun at the myth of middle aged men and unbelievable stamina.

His wet lips slide across your burning cheek, your own moan trailing after him, chasing another kiss with the turn of your neck, all desperation, and his fingers catch over your bottom teeth, hooked Rainbow, pulling you open, pressing down on your tongue until you gag.

“Gotta see if I’ll fit here too, baby,” he says against your ear, pressing you back to sit on the icy tiled bench. The steam of the water off his skin, the frigid hard beath your bottom and against your swollen cunt, you shiver all over until it hurts in your spine. His hand threads through the back of your hair, cupping and pulling, stretching you out so you’re wide open with his fingers still too thick and too deep in your mouth. You gag again, harder, thinking of before, when he forced his fingers far enough to make you vomit, eyes smarting at the memory of his rough helping. “Think it’ll do.” He’s teasing you with that half-cocked smirk like a boy’s.

You’re sharing youth here, experience too. So much of one another being poured into the moment and so quickly that if you hadn’t known him for as long as you have, if you hadn’t been making your way to him with the hope of this for so long, it’d be entirely petrifying.

He starts to stroke his length into full hardness, pulling your head forward, mouth open to take him onto your tongue. He’s heavy like he was in your cunt, but somehow even bigger, your jaw immediately prepares to ache with the stretch. Swiping it side to side on the flat and then sliding in, guiding you by your hair, showing you how he wants you to suck him. Close, he murmurs soft, good baby girl, when you purse your lips around his girth, holding at the back of your throat, instructing you to breathe long and slow through your nose, getting you used to him.

He pulls back slowly, until you’ve only got the head to suckle on, your tongue sliding over it, the salty taste of his skin as his thumb brushes slowly along the edge of your jaw and then presses hard against the soft and giving underside of your chin, forcing you to open again, throat spasming convulsively. With his grip in your hair he tugs your head back again, and the two of you watch each other, his hazel bright eyes so intense it’s almost unbelievable that they hadn’t always looked at you like this. That you’d started all of this only a few nights ago with nothing but a half mad kiss you’d wished on for nearly half a life.

You stick your tongue out flat and wide and begging, and he slides back in, holding you still as he pushes deep until his balls are pressed against your chin, rewarding himself with that first full bodied choking jerk from you, little tongue pressing against the base, throat cinching like a fist around the head.

He holds you there, letting you choke around him, and it’s still all so slow, so measured despite your racing heart and tears and spasming throat, wide wet eyes looking up at him—frightening, possessive want staring back down at you. Pulling back and pushing in again and again until you can’t take it anymore, jaw hinged too wide, little tits trembling with the puff of your breath until every other one is a gag and all you are is a wet, open throat.

When he finally pulls back, and you’re still missing a belly full of come, you suck in a shaky breath, gagging frog sound in your throat, spit dripping off your chin that he smears down your throat, over your chest and nipples, pinching hard and stinging. You fall against his hip, swollen lips mouthing down to the fat head of his cock, still hungry for your treat, his fist slides down the spit slicked length, following you; a string of drool and pre-come keeping the two of you connected when you yank against the commanding grip in your hair, nuzzling like a puppy, whine at the back of your throat as he pushes it hot and heavy against your sticky cheek, smacks you with it a little.

“Good girl. My good baby girl,” he laughs tenderly, and he’s so endeared by you, you can feel it in his eyes and hear it in his smile, that something hot and agonizing pulses through your heart.

When you step out of your shower cocoon together, the rain is a violent gust now, shaking the house on its foundation, windows rattling in their frames. He wraps you in a large fluffy white towel, twisting a second one in your hair, flushed sensitive skin trembling under his touch. His kiss is slow and lazy, all tongue and care as you fall together against the silk duvet, pulling you into himself as his heavy weight settles over you, drawing your thigh over his hip, nothing but cotton and damp dew separating the two of you. You need to make him come again, his fingers sneaking between your thighs to play in his leaking spend—when someone bangs urgently on the door downstairs.

On his drive in from Jackson, Jesse had come across a large chunk of the northernmost fence that had been taken out by the strong winds and lashing rain. Cattle were already spilling out onto the highway when he’d passed, meandering into the adjoining land owned by the park.

Ellie and Dina had been called back in from town, and they’d all had to ride up and over the mountain to herd the escaped cattle and make repairs to the fence—and had left you all alone and without him and all the rest of them, too.

It had been a long and quiet three days, just you and Dina, which had made you very worried in a very concerning way, this sudden and immediate melancholy that had fallen over you and the whole house without him. The reality that the ranch is wrong, the house is wrong, you are wrong in it, without Joel Miller here to roam and tend the land. That you may have traveled far and wide, tasted all the flavors and touched all the colors of the rainbow, done all the things your imagination might’ve conjured, but outside of this place there existed not even a fraction of what these people had built here together—a family born at the center of a green valley.

And so there’s a part of you now, like a coward, trying to twist away from the reality that you’re still just that girl, in some ways so young, so unsure, sitting outside your father’s office with the desperate need to be paid attention to, to be remembered.

Still that desperate child turned woman, asking yourself why you’d felt you needed Joel here that morning you’d arrived to meet your last dead parent. Asking yourself why you’d sent yourself into an anger fueled bender when you’d arrived to find him missing.

He isn’t your kin. Never your confidant. In the past, there was not even that closeness of previously shared intimacy or comfort between the two of you. He’d been, for all intents and purposes, a stranger to you as a child in all the ways that counted save for those you’d conjured up in your imagination.

But perhaps that’s the thing. In your own imaginary way, Joel is familiar, as part of the ranch as the rock of the mountain, the house in which your mother had birthed you, or even your father, who’d loved this place more than he’d ever loved anything except his wife, he who’d also died here; all of them a history of monuments that make up the miasma of what this place really is. The annals of their lives, so closely knit with the land itself that there can be no separating one from the other, and Joel is a part of it all.

Maybe it’s that, in some ways, you feel he has more of a right to be here than you do. That you need him here to remind you that you belong, too.

That you’d needed the reassurance of his approval here when you’d come to claim the place as your own once and for all.

And you need him now, now that he’d so made you a part of himself in much the same way, in nothing but a single afternoon.

But most obvious of all, during their days away protecting and caring for your birthright, what becomes clear to you is that after all these years, they had all very much become your family, too: Ellie, Dina, Jesse, Frank and Bill and Tommy.

Joel.

It is almost a terrible moment of enlightenment, that realization of how much you truly have to lose now.

On the third day of his absence, the sky blooms a clear and startling blue, and in the early afternoon, you hear the commotion of the team making their valiant return. The slamming of truck doors and trailer gates, shouted orders and horses sputtering at the indignation of being kept from home and at work for so many days.

There’s a single bated-breath-moment of shy hesitancy, a will-he-won’t-he sort of doubt (want to see me want to do it again want me) and then you’re chasing down the stairs and after more of that lightning in a bottle feeling, out the front door in search of him.

Chaos bubbles in the yard, hands lifting and hauling supplies and tools from the beds of trucks and the backs of trailers, horses being led to and fro, Dina and Ellie having a shameless snog in the shadow of her open truck door. Your eyes flit from person to person, searching the mess of homesick excitement for his height and breadth.

It’s only been two and a half days, really, after so many years dreaming of him, but anyways—you missed him. Really, truly missed him.

From the corner of your eye you finally catch sight of him stepping out of the dark shade of the barn, towering above everyone around him. He’s got that sweat stained brown hat pulled low over his brow, edges curled with overuse. His hair is long enough it curls slightly over the back of his collar, and his eyes are hidden from you in the hat’s protective shade, but by the swirl of your belly and the shiver across your skin, you think he finds you at the same time as you do him. Something magnetic. You don’t think you can even feel your foot still connected to your body when you take a step down off the front steps, stumbling over the gravel of the drive that digs uncomfortably into the soles of your feet through the house slippers you’d forgotten to change out of —when suddenly, you recognize the person standing next to him, smiling up at him as she glows bright and lovely.

The veterinarian, Tess.

You’re thankful for the absentminded hand trailing behind you, still anchoring you to the stability of the step’s railing, when you register the swollen round of her heavily pregnant belly, a careful hand cupped protectively around the underside, as she rests her other palm against Joel’s arm.

Suddenly the gravel digging into your slippers becomes too painful to ignore, almost overwhelming, you take a frightened step back.

He would never. But—

At one time, they were together, and her hand on his arm has now moved to his chest, a show of comfort and intimacy between them, and she’s laughing, her long hair woven back into a neat braid, swinging with the movement of her mirth. She looks really beautiful, and you’re again nothing more than the little girl in her slippers waiting for a man that will not come to you.

He would never. Right?

Ellie calls your name—you take another retreating step up the stairs, indecision and insecurity sloshing in your belly—bull sprinting towards you, her lithe, strong body knocking your ribs painfully into the railing, her hands yanking on your hair, babbling excitedly and Dina’s voice from behind, telling her she’s worse than the wrangled cattle. Over Ellie’s shoulder and past Dina’s kind gaze, Joel bends low towards Tess, arm around her shoulders as he steers her towards the three of you congregated on the steps. You feel as you did on that bench outside his office for all those years, waiting for a man to find time to dole out your verdict: kindness or cruelty, a goodbye or worse.

He’s saying something to her still, speaking close into her ear and guiding her buoyant form carefully through the busy yard full of cowboys and animals and danger, and you can see his eyes now as they flit to you, looking so cold and guarded.

There’s no Nanny here to shield you from the worst of it now.

When they finally reach you, Tess embraces both Dina and Ellie with all the warmth of people who’ve worked and laughed and grown together for years. You stand as still and as quiet as you can possibly make yourself. You have all the practice in the world waiting for your turn to be acknowledged, and this is a terrible and small feeling which no grown woman should have to subject herself to. And yet, still, you can’t seem to escape the child.

He’s watching you, you can feel him, hungry or angry maybe—something else. But you can’t tell now—can’t focus on anything but your stillness and waiting your turn until Ellie finally turns to reintroduce Tess to the adult version of you.

“The new Kelly,” Tess says with easy warmth and an even easier smile, offering you her palm for a strong handshake. Everything about her is so natural, earthen or real. Nothing at all put upon. This is a woman who, whatever the truth of it may actually be, gives every appearance of having always known herself, never had doubts, never had to claw in the grime and gutter for her truth or whatever scraps of self best fit her at the time.

“Tess. It’s nice to see you again,” you say as cool and magnanimous as you can muster yourself to be. Ignoring the lurch of nausea being referred to as the Kelly brings on.

“I was sorry to hear about your father. He gave me work for a long time, and I was always grateful for it.” Something you’d never understood about your father, how he collected gratitude easy as pennies. It was perhaps his greatest talent—getting all of them to eat out of the palm of his hand.

“Thank you. I appreciate it, and I hope we’ll continue that work going forward. I wouldn’t like anything integral to change for the ranch now. Anything else, that is.” Your voice comes out robotic, businesslike, and she pauses, her head cocking to the side, that easy smile still plastered on her smooth, beautiful face. In your peripheral, you see Ellie move closer to Joel, whispering something in his ear, the click click of Dina chewing on her fingernails.

“Actually,” Tess says, “If you have a minute, I’d like for us to talk.”

Your toes flex in your slippers, the three of them hold their breath, Tess oblivious to their doubt of you, and the imaginary ticking time bomb sound chips away at your mind, demeaning you further. What do they expect? For you to throw a fit? The lover (—ex lover?) of the man you’ve had sex with once, come here to test you with some potentially incriminating evidence smuggled beneath her t-shirt. And here they are, suddenly orbiting you as if you’ve ever been like him —that explosive anger, that rage, that ability to humiliate and cause fear and insult.

You’ve never had a temper like that. It’s insulting they’d act otherwise.

“Give us a second.” You turn to Dina, it isn’t a question.

One moment to the next, you’re still in your slippers, but you’re not that waiting child any longer. You remember yourself, and you’re the head of the ranch and all that comes with it now. This is yours. And you aren’t your father. And they’ll pretend at respect, whether they feel it or not because it’s your due after the pound of flesh you’d offered up to this place in your childhood.

How does one stay ambitious and brave and wild and still become a grown woman?

How does a girl stand on her own two feet and become an adult when she’s never felt any of those things to begin with?

How does one grapple with the terror of their childhood and succeed at a normal and full life?

The girls go and you ponder your existential dread in the face of a woman who seems to have it all figured out.

Joel clears his throat, shifting uncomfortably. “You know, I can—”

“We just gotta talk some shop, Texas. We’ll be okay—just a minute,” Tess tells him. Assertive, but with a wink, and she never loses that grin which, if she wasn’t so damn likable, would be annoying as hell.

You struggle to swallow your cringe. It’s easy to picture the two of them together, how they’d look, how they’d be. Good looking and capable, strong, confident personalities.

You finally meet his eyes, they offer you nothing, of course, and with a dip of your chin, you give him his leave. He only goes a few paces away from the bottom step of the deck, unwilling to stray too far from the two of you.

“Oz was a difficult man. You’re not really anything like him, are you?”

Oz. It’s funny to hear the terror of your father referred to so casually.

“The opposite has never been insinuated. But I can be pretty difficult when I want to be, too,” you say, still watching Joel watch you.

If you were anything like your father, you’d take her assessment as an insult.

Instead, you meet her appraising gaze as steady as you can.

“Ah—” she hums,“Sure, yeah,” then laughs. “Can see it in the way you carry yourself. If anything, he was… a force.”

“He was that.”

You don’t feel now that you can give her too much. Like if you open your mouth, give her more words than necessary, she’ll know everything there is to know about you and what has gone on here. She’s got that sort of look about her, those sort of eyes. Already measured you against your father and found you lacking.

Even if she didn’t mean it badly, the comparison stings.

“I’d like things to continue on as they’ve been so far, also,” she continues. “Anything you need around here, you call our team. We’ll be here. I’d like to say nothing will change,” and at this she looks down at her bulging belly, sweeping a loving hand over it, “But…” she clicks her tongue ruefully, smile changing to something softer, sincere in a more intimate way. “Things are about to get a little different for me here now pretty soon.” She looks back to you, “My husband’ll be taking over things, just for a few months. He trained at Davis, and I’ll send over his CV so you can take a look at it yourself. Talk to the boys and Joel, they know him well now. If you’d like, my assistant can get with Dina—the three of us can meet and talk over the next few months and what the ranch’ll need from us for the rest of the year up into calving season. I’d rather we have a solid plan before everything gets too crazy for us.”

There’s something like vertigo swooping between your ears, ship at sea sort of unmoored. You are so silly. It’s humiliating. So insecure in ways you have no business being. Husband, of course.

“Does that sound okay to you?” She presses.

“Sure— I mean… yes. Yes, that sounds great. I look forward to it. Just give Dina a call.”

“I hope the ranch won’t forget about me while I’m out of commission. The Kelly has always been a special place to me.” There’s so much genuine sincerity in her voice. You wonder if Joel is part of that sentiment.

“We’ll be waiting for you, Tess. Don’t worry about that.”

She flushes slightly, looking down at the hand on her stomach again. “Thank you. I appreciate that. This is difficult for me, as happy as I am about it all. Giving myself over to something that’s so out of my control.”

You nod in understanding. “I didn’t know you’d gotten married. Congratulations to you and your husband.” You flush deep and embarrassed in return, at your initial assumption, but she makes nothing of whatever fucked up expression you know you’ve got your face screwed into. You don’t want her to know how you feel about Joel, to suspect—this woman who’d had him in her own unique and mysterious way for such a long time. Who shares history and a friendship with him now, admiration and respect and laughter.

“Yeah, well…” She chuckles ruefully at this, turning now to glance surreptitiously at the still brooding Joel pacing between Frank and Tommy as they talk at him. “It happened quick. I wanted things I wasn’t going to find other places. Had to go out and get them for myself—you know?”

“Sure,” you blink once, “Of course.” But her words fill you with more of that nauseating vertigo. Afraid again, that you’re still that child waiting for something that will never come. That you too, are now looking for something in the same wrong place.

He watches your profile closely through your exchange with Tess. Since Ellie had approached you, really—always rough housing when she shouldn’t be, knocking you in the ribs. The way you grip the deck’s bannister, your knuckles white with strain and the flush in your throat and cheeks, the lift of your brow. You smile often, but not easily. He can tell they cost you something or that you have to remind yourself to respond the way you’re expected to.

He’d seen it on your face, what you’d assumed about Tess.

The sun is strong against the back of his neck, and there’s a line of sweat pouring down his spine, and he wants to go to you, make sure you’re okay and apologize for the three days and the doubt and not being here when he knows you need him.

When it seems Tess is finally saying her goodbye’s, he’s unable to extricate himself from Tommy and Frank’s bitching about the work yet to be done for the rest of the afternoon without having to tell them outright to fuck off. Tess makes her slow way down the steps of the house, her swollen gait bobbing unsteadily from side to side, and he watches as you head around the opposite end of the house, gunning for the back door and avoiding him, he knows. He knows.

“How’s it goin’, Texas?” Tess chirps brightly, He reaches beneath her elbow to lead her back to her truck, Frank there already, pulling the door open for her.

“It’s goin’ well, Tess. You look good, honey. You feel good?”

“Great. Never better.”

“That’s good. I’m glad.” And he means it. He’d never been able to give her what she wanted, as hard as he’d tried, and he’d been damn happy for her when she’d found it anyways. “Remind me when she’s joinin’ us?”

“Ah, end of August.” She’s happier now than she ever looked when she’d been fooling around with him, and it makes Joel glad to know it’d all ended up as it was meant to. He looks back up at the big house, second to last window on the far left end where he knows your room is.

“Real soon now.”

“Not soon enough. Her daddy’s just as restless as she is for it to be time.”

“I’ll bet. I’m glad,” he says again, helping her up into the truck as she huffs and puffs. Frank says his goodbyes and Joel shuts her door for her, leaning against the open window. “Happy?” He asks his friend.

The smile on her face tells him all he needs to know. “I am.”

“That’s good.” A look passes between them, that of two people who know too much about each other, but perhaps, not the most important things they should’ve known after it was all said and done. And yet there’s nothing bittersweet about what lives between them. It’s all as it should be.

“What about you? You happy?”

He has to force himself not to look at that window again.

“Yeah, I’m happy.” She reaches for his cheek, clucking at him like she might not believe him. But how to tell her that this time it really is true, without giving away his too precious secret?

“Good. You deserve it, Joel.”

The curious part is, he thinks he might really believe her.

As Tess’s truck pulls slowly down the long drive, he looks back at that window, thinking of the other afternoon in the sun drenched family room. The wet stretched lycra tight across your sun burnished skin, all reds and pinks and a grotesque splatter of girl shaped desire that had him clawing at the brink of madness. Afraid he’d hurt you, lose his mind so entirely he’d forget how delicate you can be made in his hands—that scared look in your eyes, that step back when you’d seen Tess—but then he remembers the tilt of your hips taking him inside your body and the strength in your thighs grounding him, the steady look in your gaze telling him that you’re okay and reminding him of all your fire inside—that you have always been stronger and more resilient than he could ever even think to be.

A woman full of strength.

You are a thing to be loved.

He follows you, slipping through the unlocked back door, hunting through the cool, quiet shadows of the sun speared halls of your home.

When he finds your sounds of movement at the back of the house, in your father’s study, he waits silent and still by the door, heart beating a thunder drum in his chest as he listens to your steps approach and pulling you blindly into himself when you cross the threshold. Banding his arms around your back, knees bent to get at your level and seal his mouth over yours.

Three days is too long a time, and Joel is a starving man.

You give one appalled squeak before your head is falling back on your neck, opening so sweetly for him, letting him lap at your tongue and sip at your flavor.

“You were thinkin’ strange thoughts out there,” he says against your mouth, and you huff against him, opening to protest, but he kisses you again. Kisses you stupid, knees straightening to pull you up with him, leaving your feet dangling between his spread cowboy boots, the soft thump of a slipper sliding off your foot.

“Don’t lie, little liar.” He licks at your jaw, reaches down to squeeze the full of your sweet ass. “Did you miss me?” A kiss to your pulse point now and you moan so pretty for him, all soft and breathy, like you want him to fuck you right here, take you into your father’s study and have you slick and full of come as quick as he can get you.

“Yes,” you moan, tilting your head further back to give him more territory to kiss.

He pulls back to look at your eyes, cheeks flushed and mouth swollen. He drags his hand gently over the spot of your Ellie-battered-ribs. There is nothing about you that Joel wouldn’t notice. Gorgeous fucking thing, he wants to ruin you. He’s going to ruin you for every other man ever. Squeezing your cheeks together, forcing your mouth into a pout, say it, he orders—feral, desperate, missing you, too.

“I missed you, Joel.”

Joel. He groans at the sound of it, kisses you again—more, harder, so you know that he really means it.

Hours later, when the sun has set, he finally makes his way into the quiet of his cabin, wondering if it’s logistically more polite to bring his toothbrush over with him so that he can have fresh breath in the morning or simply pray on the effectiveness of toothpaste and a finger, worrying whether you’ll be asleep already, if you’ve had dinner or if he should plan for that, too. He’s pulled from his fretting by the sight of your coat—the worn brown suede one you love that hits just below your knees, light enough for the cool summer evenings—hung over the hook by his door. He knows it’s lined on the inside with cheetah printed silk, so like you, and that the label says Dolce & Gabbana. He’d peeked at it the other morning, draped over the breakfast bar in the big house, tested the weight of it. Made in Italy, it says on the label. A fancy thing. Details he has no business searching for or obsessing over, but that he searches for and obsesses over nonetheless.

He blinks at the well worn coat, unable—only for a second—to understand what it is it’s doing here in his house.

But in the kitchen, there’s a cupboard left slightly ajar, his books on the coffee table misaligned and out of the order in which he’d left them, his mail rifled through, a lone envelope spilled onto the rug beneath. His second set of boots kicked over to make space for a much smaller pair. He’s sure if he were to open his fridge, he’d find the contents of it picked over, as well.

It would seem that a little intruder has come to make herself at home in his space. And when he peeks through the open door of his bedroom, the proof of it is in the shape of a small lump curled in on itself at the head of his bed.

He clears his throat and two too large eyes peek out over the edge of his dark comforter, challenging, daring him to question your presence here.

There’s also something softly vulnerable there, which he takes careful note of.

Crossing his arms over his still sweaty chest, he leans against the door appreciating the sight of you snuggled up in his bed. Something like giddiness eats away at his heart, and he chews on his cheek to keep a shit-eating grin from spreading across his face. The two of you stare each other down, waiting to see who breaks first.

It’s him.

Of course.

At the soft sound you let out, some croon that beckons him forward, he pushes away from the doorframe, crossing the room to loom over you as you wiggle deeper into his bed. Your scent fucks with his head. Makes him feel just this close to unhinged. His sheets will smell like you for days now. Sweet, sultry. God-like. He’s about to become a pious man.

Bending over you, he holds himself anchored with one hand gripped around the wooden slat of his headboard and slowly pulls the edge of the blanket covering you, down. Revealing for himself the sweet little morsel of a gift that’s come to plant itself in his bed so nicely. You’ve wrapped yourself in something lacy and pale for him, some sort of spaghetti-strapped confection seemingly made out of sugar—his gut goes hot and heavy.

And from below, you take him in, gaze roving over his face and arms while he holds himself up and on display. Your hand comes up to ghost soft as petal fingertips over the bulge of his bicep, and he growls some hungry sound that he scares himself with.

You turn him into something he’s never been before.

A flush creeps down your throat to flood your chest, and he wants to follow it to your breasts. See if he can make you go as red and hot all over as he’s learned your sweet little nipples can go.

“Hi.”

He shakes his head down at such temptation. No man is this strong. “I gotta wash up before I touch you, darlin’. I’m filthy.”

You shake your head back at him, whining softly in your throat, writhing in his sheets, knee hitching higher to push the covers down and reveal more of yourself to him—matching panties and soft, bare thighs, Jesus—fucking siren girl all for him. His mouth waters. Your fingertips ghost down his chest, catching lightly at the hem of his t-shirt, tugging gently, making his stomach swoop.

“No. Come,” you order. It’s all a seduction.

But he’s been hauling and riding and sweating all day. He needs to scrub the two inch layer of filth from his skin before he can touch something this perfect. Clutching at the headboard he lets himself lean further over you, stretching the tense muscles of his back, sucking at your mouth once, long and hard, dragging his tongue wet and lewd across your cheek before he’s groaning, heaving himself up and pulling his shirt up over the back of his head to jump in the shower, strict about not turning back to look at you lest he lose himself to your call.

In the steamed mirror once he’s done, he takes in the color of his eyes and doesn’t recognize the way they stare back at him. Like a boy discovering a woman for the first time in his life, he’s never felt like this before. It’s frightening, intoxicating.

When he steps back out into the bedroom, dragging a towel through his wet hair, over his chest and sensitive groin, you’ve flopped over, covers kicked down to the foot of the bed so he can see the sheer lace of your panties disappear between your cheeks. Scrolling on your phone with your feet kicked up in the air, swinging in a slow motion that hypnotizes. He’s going to wrap both fists around your ankles and hold you forcibly open, watch you get wetter and wetter and more swollen until neither one of you can take the waiting any longer. He’s going to drag it out until it’s mean. He’s going to make it count.

His cock is so hard that a delicious heat has begun to pool in his abdomen, seeping down into his pelvis. He’s heavy between his legs.

Dropping the towel to the floor, he catches a swinging ankle, tugging roughly to flip you over and yank you down towards himself. Bracing one knee to the edge of the bed, he leans over, reaching for your phone and tosses it over his shoulder carelessly. The frown you give him is mighty, and he laughs at you. He feels—he can’t say exactly. A little unhinged, perhaps. Out of control. Like he needs to exert some sort of force here. Expel that jittering energy he’s been filled with the past three days which distracted him from his ride and his work, from wrangling cattle and leading his men. That feeling that made him desperate to run back here into your arms.

You give him a peevish, suspicious look, tapping one perfectly manicured finger against the tip of your chin, and ask, “Are you JoelMiller81?”

“Don’t know what that means,” he gruffs, running his hands over the silk and lace of the little scrap you’ve got on, feeling the hard peaks of your nipples against his palms. His callouses catch and snag, and he has the passing thought that he might be too rough, too nasty, to handle something so fine, but then settles on the reality that he doesn’t really give a fuck if he is.

You want him.

You want him. And that’s all that matters, really, you getting what you want. The thought of being the one that gives it to you fills him with a feral sort of satisfaction.

“Liar. Liar liar pants on fire.”

“Don’t know what that means neither.” He bends to bite your pretty little tit through the lace. Hard.

“Ow!” You try to shove him away. “Why’d you like my picture a bunch of times, huh?”

“Didn’t.”

He pushes your knees up around his waist, taking your wrist and pinning it to the mattress by your hip, trapping it with his knee. His heavily hanging cock brushes wetly against the soft inside of your thigh, sending a shiver down his spine, unable to help the soft moan he lets out. He’s so fucking turned on for you. So hard. The head, red and swollen and throbbing a leak of precum with every beat of his heart.

“Yes, you did. One of my ass. Like a hundred times.”

He pulls back to glare at you, and you laugh in his face, lovely and bright as a firefly.

“Got no idea what you’re talkin’ ‘bout. But if I did, I’d say you got no business showin’ what’s mine to the whole internet.” Thirty-seven thousand fuckin’ people, he grumbles under his breath, fuckin’ ridiculous.

You gasp, affronted, “Yours?” Glaring back just as hotly.

You push yourself up on your elbows, catching him by the mouth with your palm to shove his big head away. He nips at the soft flesh, grunting an affirmative.

“Excuse me!” You drag the vowels out all sassy, all provoking. It makes him leak. Makes him want to pick a hundred fights just to enjoy the making up afterwards.

“You heard me.” He kneels back between your legs and pulls your little panties down your long legs.

“I do what I want.”

“Sure, baby.”

He listens to the click of your teeth, a whine in the back of your throat. Upset ‘cause he’s not taking your bait. “Are you gonna be mean?” You pout.

Joel pauses, as if to consider. “Yeah,” he says eventually with mock regret and a sigh.

You heave a big, long breath. “Oh, alright,” and let yourself flop back onto the mattress, arms stretching back up over your head.

He can’t help his chuckle. You really do charm his socks off.

“How was the rest of your day?” You ask as he settles between your thighs.

“Bad.”

First, he presses a soft kiss to the fleshy uppermost part of your mons, dipping his tongue out just a tiny bit to taste the salty sweet skin there, but not far out enough to taste you where you really want him.

“Oh?” —A little moan— “Why’s that?”

“Because.”

“Because what?” Your tone dips into a whine.

He leans up on his elbows to get a good look at your face. “Because I can’t seem to stop thinking about this,” he hisses, “And it’s damn difficult to tend horses and wrangle cowboys when you’ve got half an erection. That’s why. Any more questions?”

“No. That’s it. You can continue.” Voice all fucking prim and proper.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” you sass back, digging your heel into his shoulder.

“Fucking brat.” Now, he kisses you full on, tongue dipping shallowly between your slit for a better taste. He takes a drop of your dew into his mouth and rubs it against his palate, savoring the taste.

“Yes. And?” It’s all a moaning, fluttery sigh now.

His hands splay wide, sliding up the underside of your thighs to push you open by the back of the knees, listening to the sticky pop of your lips spreading.

“Oh my God,” you moan. “So embarrassing.” Covering your hot face with your arms.

“Fucking hot,” he groans, going in again, licking into your soft, wet cunt. He comes to the crest of your sex, your clit hot and slippery, suckling at it in quick pulses. Keeping the force of it light enough to not overwhelm you too quickly. He turns his head to deepen his angle, his tongue pulsing against your opening, lapping and lapping, coaxing the little hole to soften for him. Prepping it to take him. He spends a long time there, ignoring your clit, licking around the soft folds, everywhere but where you really need him.

His stomach is hot, his cock full, and he lets himself settle more heavily against the bed, pressing his aching length roughly into the edge of the mattress to relieve the pressure, rutting there slowly. You let out a twisting sob when he finally goes back to focus on your clit, circling his tongue lightly, round and round, and then opening his mouth wide to drag his bottom teeth ever so gently over the swollen nub, watching your reaction intently the entire time. Your face scrunches, a sheen of sweat blooming, all the fine muscles spasming frantically, and all at once, he can feel your cunt pulsing, readying for orgasm against his tongue, as you try to twist away, back of your knee sliding over his face.

He holds you down more firmly, pressing a large palm low to your belly, his fingers on your clit, and spears his tongue into your sex, giving you something to bear down on. This is agony, watching you come for him. He needs to fuck you.

God. “Thought about this all fuckin’ day, baby.” He slurps loudly, lewdly. “Your sweet little pussy, it’s fucking perfect. Made for me.”

You sob into the bunched sheets, hiding your face while you grind against his face.

Pressing kisses along the slick curve of your soaked sex once you’ve finished, you hiccup above his head, carding your fingers through his hair compulsively, scratching at his scalp, tugging him upwards.

“You’re too good at that,” you sniffle. “It’s annoying.”

He grunts, kissing his way over your belly, scraping his teeth along easily torn skin, tasting your smeared come there. He settles at your breasts, and takes his sweet time giving them both his teeth and attention until they’re swollen and painful. Rubbing the grey scruff of his beard against the small mounds, abrading your sensitive skin. Flushed little nipples like dark, overripe raspberries for him to suck on even harder, chafed and raw from his rough handling. He pinches and tugs at them, letting his weight go heavy and melting over your frame, suffocated into the bed, his cock wedged between your swollen sex, letting you feel his solid heft there. Every so often it slides against you with his movements, when his mouth moves from breast to breast, but you’re so dripping wet that there’s hardly any friction, and it makes you cry. Which in turn, makes him pleased, and even harder.

Curiously, you don’t beg him to fuck you while he tortures your poor tits. He thinks that you know that eventually, he’ll give you exactly what you need. That he has a certainty of the steps the two of you need to take here tonight, that he knows entirely what it is he needs to do to get you there, and how that stops you from rushing him. This thing, it’s a little something like trust.

That unsettled feeling from before, the jittering energy, eventually it melts away. And Joel is left feeling so steady, so sure of what the two of you are doing here, how he has to handle you. It just feels so right.

When he eventually lets your breasts rest, he kisses your mouth, slow and intimate and patient. Wet lips sliding against wet lips, sucking on the top one that’s just a little fuller than the bottom, licking the tears from your face, mouthing at your cheekbones, nipping at your chin.

“Why you cryin’, baby?”

“Don’t know,” you mumble. “I’m emotional. M’sorry.”

“Nothin’ to apologize for.” He brackets your skull between his palms, gently tracing the sensitive shells of your small ears with his thumbs and then smoothing over the soft skin of your under-jaw to tilt your chin up to get a good look at you. “You gorgeous thing, you don’t have anything to apologize to me for. Never. You cry if you need to.”

You nod, turning your face into his palm to nuzzle there.

“You feel good, though? I’m makin’ you feel good?”

“Yes, Joel. Yes, I feel so good.” Your voice is soft, wispy. He imagines he can see the words leaving your parted lips like smoke, and your eyelids sit low and heavy, like you’re drunk on him.

When he finally pulls back, you look at him with such deep and moving trust, kneeling between your thighs. He feels a little shaken by it. There’s a slight vacancy in your gaze, a haziness, like you’ve gone deep inside your mind with what he’s done to you, but it’s a comfortable, secure sort of thing. You trust him enough to let him make all the decisions here in this bed while you lay limp and boneless beneath him.

“You’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful,” he says, low.

His hands smooth over your breasts, your sticky belly, gripping your hips to tug you closer.

“Not as beautiful as you,” you say to him, and you’re like a heartbreak. The way you look, the way you speak to him. If it were possible, Joel thinks he’d be able to physically feel the motion of his heart splitting in two for you right now.

He stops moving, hands resting on your spread knees, your body open and vulnerable to him.

“It’s true,” you say again at the look on his face. His heart throbs in his chest like agony.

“Stop.” His face goes hot with embarrassment.

“You are.” Your fingers smooth up your thighs, coming to rest on top of his own hands. “You're so beautiful to me. You always have been.”

His gaze falls, unable, for a moment, to bear the look of honest love in your eyes. It’s so much. He doesn’t know if he could ever deserve a thing like this. A man could work for a hundred years and never live up to a woman like you. Between your bodies, your sexes are flushed against each other. Your cunt, wet and puffy with his erection resting against it. It’s the most erotic sight Joel’s ever seen.

And you’re telling him these things, being so honest, so vulnerable, while he sits between your thighs with this violent lust he wants to use against your body, and it makes him feel guilty and starved and maybe even a little bit in love with you, too. Maybe he’s losing his mind. How could you ever look at him and not see the broken thing? How will he ever be able to keep you when he wants to do so much to you? How will he ever convince you to let him? What could a thing like him ever give to the girl who already has everything?

“I’m old,” he says and feels it.

“I like you like that.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You like me like that, too.”

Your fingers flex over his own, and when he feels brave enough to look at you again, you’re still laughing, still looking at him with all that trust. Still choosing him.

“I’m gonna fuck you now.”

You only nod, eyes fluttering shut, soft smile across your mouth. A tear slides back over your temple into your hairline, and he can almost see it turn to steam against your burning face. There’s a weighted hunger in Joel’s belly. Something that’s curious to see how far he can take the both of you. He wants that trust to strain, and then he wants to know both you and himself well enough to pull back before it snaps.

When he turns you over this time, his movements are gentle, careful. He presses you down on your belly, keeping your elbows braced beneath you and kisses down your back, across the wings of your shoulders. He’s even more careful when he pulls your tank top away, his fingers brushing the softness of your raw breasts.

Settling on widened knees, he pushes your thighs open, tugs your hips up, up, so that your spine is a curve, pressing your head down to rest your cheek against the sheets.

“Ready?” He asks low.

You hum, that smile still spread across your mouth, and he can’t help but lean forward to kiss at it. When you arch deeper, chasing his lips to deepen the kiss, he can feel your slick cunt hot on his stomach, smearing there. His cock hangs long and heavy between your spread thighs, brushing your knee.

“Easy. Easy,” he murmurs. “Don’t get too excited. Let me—”

Petting the crown of your head, he leans backward, slowly dragging his palm from your head down your spine to grip your ass, spreading you apart. Taking himself in hand, he slicks his head against the little leaking hole, continuing his slow caress against the base of your spine, intermittently pressing his thumb against your tailbone to keep you present and aware.

With an even greater care than he had the first time he fucked you three days ago, he works his cock into you. It’s slow, the wide head of his shaft easing inside little by little, deeper and deeper, with nothing but assurances from him, you can take it, you’re so pretty like this, while you gasp and fuss. At a certain point, his wait for you to adjust to the too large fit makes you forget yourself and you try to shove back onto him, trying to impale yourself forcefully, and he’s forced to spank you hard and stinging.

He clicks his tongue at you, “Nuh-uh, no whining.”

Tucking his hand under your belly, soft and giving, he pulls you up a little, knees sliding wider, making room until he’s fully seated inside of you. He goes still then, holding himself deep and pulsing, feeling the walls of your cunt shiver and contract around him.

He wonders how long it’d take for you to come around him, stuffed full of his unmoving cock like this. Reckons it’d be pretty quick by the way your desperate pussy’s already trying to milk the spend right out of him.

“You feel me in your belly right here?” He coos gently, caressing your stomach.

The sound you respond with then is more of a loud yowl when he presses down firmly to feel his cock tucked deep in there.

Eventually, the wait gets to be too much for him, too. Getting you there in short shoves and grinds, he fucks you through it when you come for the first time, chasing the milking grip of your cunt with those same controlled shoves. But it’s so good, so wet and hot that his tightly leashed control slips. He spanks you again for that, several times, actually. Until your ass is pink and burning.

His breathing’s gone rough, hot and bullish, and he can feel himself pouring sweat, his skin burning, too.

“Gonna give it to you harder now.”

And you’re so good, his pretty little mess, that you do say, “Please, m’ready for it,” so confidently, if a little slurred.

You’re deep down in there, he’s gotten you there, and he feels a sick burst of pride and pleasure to see how well you’re doing for him, how well you give over this perfect cunt for fucking.

Through gritted teeth, he orders, “Say thank you, daddy.”

And again, because you’re perfect, “Thank you, daddy,” you obey.

He doesn’t even really know where it comes from, has never been a place he’s gone to before. But it’s perversely right in this moment with you.

His hips gain momentum, nudging against your cervix again, again. He needs to move, to go hard and rough, but this is only the second time you’ve taken him, you’re not ready yet. He knows you won’t be able to take this much of him for long, can tell by the tensing of your stomach beneath his palm, the way you grip two of his fingers where he grips your hip, and the breathless whining gasp on every thrust inside. Your little cunt is just too tight to accommodate so much cock, your body simply doesn’t have room for it.

Bracketing his hand around his impaling cock, his thumb and index finger make a warning point between your ass and his hip to keep himself from bottoming out. But anyways, he’s just on the edge of too rough, can see that warning line where your little body won’t be able to take much more, the slightly pained hiccupping sounds you’re making, but God, God…the way you’re milking at the cock buried deep inside, tightening around him while he watches himself part you, your walls clinging, the sticky shine of your come and the filmy white trail you leave behind every time he pulls out. His balls slap wetly against your clit he knows must be so swollen by now. The sounds the two of you make together. His big cock fucking in and out of your wet cunt, so soaked and open for him.

It’s all so fucking intoxicating.

He keeps shoving and shoving against that spot, and it’s so deep, your inner thighs are shaking from the strain of how widely he’s got you spread. And he doesn’t give you an inch or a second, just presses harder and harder until he feels a hot wash of wet heat gushing from your cunt, dripping down his thighs and wetting the sheets beneath.

“Oh—fuck yes. Fuck yes. My good, pretty girl, that’s so good, yeah. I’m gonna come inside of you.”

When he does, it’s long and dizzying, throbbing through his whole body so that even his scalp pulses and his vision goes a little dark at the edges in a head rush. Your cunt around him is nothing more than a fluttering muscle.

He shoves into you and pulls you back onto his cock by the wrists one last time, grinding deep. And when he pulls out, there’s a little white gurgle of semen that bubbles out as your cunt gapes.

Your arched form sags, knees sliding, unable to hold your weight any longer. But he pinches the inside of your thigh, still wanting more.

“Lemme see. Show me—” He can’t tell anymore, if he sounds like he’s ordering or begging or who has control of who here. He thinks he might really be that liar you said he is if he pretends it’s him.

Presenting your cunt, clit a shiny red cherry, sensitive and dripping his come, you ask, “Did I do good?”

He can’t help the whining groan that pulls from him, slumping over your wrung out form.

“You’re only ever good, sweetheart. I told you before. Didn’t I? You were perfect.”

He kisses the tip of your snotty nose.

Your eyes are closed and you nod, humming happy and soft. Blindly, you press forward, looking for his kiss which he gives gladly, gripping the back of your neck, pressing his fingers into the trembling muscles there.

“I want you to look at me and think I’m good, too,” he admits, then. Your eyes open, that gorgeous and unique color he’s never seen in anyone else, and he realizes he feels like a boy again, full of the strength and potential of freshly minted youth. Like you’re giving him new life. “And then I want to actually be good for you.”

“You are. You are good for me.”

Something like doubt flashes through Joel then. Memories of things you don’t know and he’s afraid to share. Terrible and painful memories Oswald Kelly saved him from once long ago and collected interest on until the day he died. Joel wonders if he might owe that debt to you now. Is a life debt a hereditary sort of thing?

“You couldn’t ever be bad, Joel.”

He laughs at the irony of that, disgusted by it, but pulls you closer, burying his face in your sweaty neck, dragging your scent into his lungs, certain he can feel the magic of it swirl through his body.

You come out of that deep space in your mind he’d lead you into, slowly. Petting at his skin and twisting his chest hair around your fingers, poking at his belly button and ears. You ask him ridiculous questions he has no answers for, letting the strange rolodex of your mind shuffle and settle until your voice sounds steady and your own once more.

“How long were you with Tess?” You ask then, and not out-of-nowhere because he’d known, he’d been waiting for it.

“Knew it.”

“You don’t know shit.” You dig your little claws into his chest, yanking meanly on the hair around his nipples.

“That hurts, you little shit. Knew you were jealous,” he says smugly, squeezing a handful of your bottom.

Ugh. “I am not jealous. What do I have to be jealous of?”

“Absolutely nothin’, sweetheart.” His tone sobers, trying to inflect the weight of that into his words. Trying to make you see that after this, there couldn’t possibly be any other woman for him but you. You roll your eyes, trying to turn your blushing face away from him, that softly vulnerable look in your eyes again. “You fuckin’ me just to get all my secrets out of me, or what?”

“Yes.” You try to turn your face away further, your chin wobbles just a smidge and Joel’s heart twists in his chest.

“Baby. What’m I gonna do with you? Huh?” He says softly, threading his fingers through your tangled hair, trying to get you to look at him again. You’ve got the softest hair he’s ever felt, like the finery you wrap yourself in, but heavy and thick. Perfectly spun crown.

Your eyes go all bashful, and you tuck your face up under his chin, hiding. “Dunno. Can’t play bridge, don’t play tennis well. Barely useful at all, I think.”

“I’m sure we can find somethin’,” he teases.

Your head shoots up, clocking him in the chin carelessly, “Well, let’s see…” you hum, tapping your chin in a three fingered rhythm. He rubs the crown of your head, soothing the bump away, and you duck your head again, trying to bury your face in his stomach, glossy hair sliding over his chest. You’re trying to deflect, trying to be silly, but he can still see that wet, insecure glaze in your eyes. He won’t ignore it.

“Look at me. You have nothing to worry about. Believe me when I tell you this.” He tugs on your chin, being as honest as he can. “Me and Tess…we were—no, no darn it, don’t pull away, look at me.” He holds you tight and steady.

“I shouldn’t’ve asked,” you mumble between your squished cheeks, gaze slanted away from him. “I don’t want to know.”

“No matter what else there was between us, she wanted to be loved in a way I could never give her. Okay? You think I want you to know that about me? Fuck no. But if you need to know anything about how it was between us, that’s the most important thing. I…I couldn’t give her all she needed and maybe it was because I wasn’t able to or maybe it was simply ‘cause I didn’t want to. But we were friends and then we were physical, but all that’s done now. Alright? That’s it. Has been for a long while and neither one of us has ever looked back. And you have nothing to fret over.”

Your body goes tense and shivering for a moment, he can feel your muscles struggling to keep still before you're pushing away, wrenching your face from his grip. You sit back on your knees and he forces himself to lay still, giving you a moment of space. All the while, he watches you process what he’s said. You need reassurance, you need patience, this is fine with Joel. He’s got an abundance of both to give you.

“What?” He says, “What’re you thinking?”

Your eyes flit around his face and then jump to the wall behind him, going unfocused.

“So then that's how it’ll be with us, too.”

“No,” he says, without understanding entirely, but whatever it is you’re thinking, he can tell it’s wrong just by the look on your face. “What do you mean?”

He sits up slowly, his sticky, wet cock settling soft and heavy in the crease of his thigh. Your eyes flit to the sight of it briefly, face warming and then looking away again just as quickly.

“It’ll be like that with us too. You won’t be able to give me what I want because you won’t want to, and then I’ll have to leave. I won’t be able to stay here and want you and only get half of you. I’ve wanted you for too long, I’ve waited for too long. I don’t care how it sounds, I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks.”

Joel takes hold of your face, tugging you in to kneel between his spread thighs, he wipes his thumbs against the wet skin of your cheeks.

“No, baby. I don’t think it’ll be like anything else, this here thing between you and I. I think this between us…I think it’s going to be its own special sort of thing,” he says slow and smooth, like he’s talking to one of the spooked mares, trying to calm her need to flee, her racing heart. “I know you know it, too.”

“How? How can you know?”

“Just do—there’s no explaining it. S’just a feeling, is all.” You frown at him, huffing out a frustrated breath, still trying to pull away and he clicks his tongue at you, a spike of annoyance zipping through him. “Knock that off, be good. You trust me here, don’t you?” He asks, referring to his bed. “Then trust me a little bit out there too,” and he tips his chin at the door.

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m asking you to. Because I’d rather die than ever hurt you.”

“Don't say that.”

“Then don’t you go around saying you’re leavin’ anywhere.”

“Would you miss me if I did?”

“Naw.”

“Fucking asshole. Let me g—” You try and yank yourself away again and he wrestles you to the bed, slotting himself between your thighs to pin you with his weight.

“Want your belly stuffed full’a me again, little baby? Huh? That’s what all this fightin’ is, isn’t it?” He begins to rut his quickly hardening cock against you, one hand circling your throat, the other taking your wrists in hand to pin immobilized above your head. “Wouldn't miss ya ‘cause I wouldn’t give you the chance to go anywhere. I’d follow you, drag you back here and keep you just like this.” He pulls his hips back, prodding at your hole with his tip, wedging it there just so and then pushing inside. You hiss at the tender stretch, and he can’t help but chuff a low laugh. “That sting? Did I use that poor little pussy too rough?”

You tip your chin back, lashes fluttering and he smooths his hand up and down the sleek column of your stretched throat, feeling the thin muscles beneath fine skin, the fluttering pulse against the heart of his palm.

“Tell me you’re mine,” you demand.

“I’m yours.” It’s very much the truth.

You shiver beneath him, cunt shivering, too. Moaning softly, saying his name in such a lovely way. He’s sure you’ve never been handled with such certainty in all your life. That it’s only a matter of a little getting used to, of him showing you he’s here for you to depend on in whatever way you need.

It seems a little unbelievable that a few days ago he could’ve never even imagined this, having you like this—he works himself deeper, watches the way your face moves and changes in fascination—and that now he’s here, getting to do this with you. Feeling, sure, a little unprepared, but also, so certain that this is the right thing.

Bracing his knee against the mattress he flips the two of you suddenly, in a dizzying rush of muscles and limbs and movement. Your bodies sliding perfectly together, never losing that precious, intimate contact. Settling you across his lap he pulls you forward and close by the hips, grinding his cock as deep as he can inside of you with your clit trapped against the pressure of his pelvis.

Ah— ah— ah— too much.

Giving you a moment to rest, he lets you slump against his chest and then pulls you taut again. One hand at your hip to pull your pelvis forward, the other at your shoulder to press you backwards. Palm dragging over your skin, squeezing each breast, feeling the pulse in your throat again. He spreads his hand over your stomach, drippy little girl splayed wide over his thighs, feeling the tense stretch of you, the way he fucks deep, maps the shape of himself beneath the fragile membrane of skin, forcing himself into a place there’s barely any room in.

Joel grits his teeth, breath whistling, and starts to thrust up into you. Taking hold of one knee, he sets your foot flat on the mattress, opening your slick, flushed cunt wide for his viewing, taking no care this time for the way your little fingers press against his hip trying to keep him from going too deep. But you wanted him to be yours, didn’t you? Mine, you’d said.

“I’m yours, baby. Gotta take all’a me now,” he hisses through his still clenched teeth. “There you go. That’a girl. Take your fucking.” Gripping your hair, he angles your head down, “Look how wide your little cunt stretches for me, nearly splitting it in half. Guess that means you’re mine, too, huh?”

Trying to push yourself away with the foot braced against the bed you try to slide back, away from where he’s fucking you, wailing. “Why—why. Don’t take it away from me, it’s mine,” he grunts. “Remember?” Head lolling back on your neck, slurring, s’too much, daddy, but then rolling your hips forward anyway, meeting him on the upthrust.

Lifting you off of himself slightly so he can control the pace and strength of his thrusts, he leaves you helpless. Your cunt’s so wet and stretched the glide is smooth and unhindered. He fucks up into you, tip against the mouth of your womb until you’re coming with a cry, him, following you immediately after that first maddening clench of overwrought muscles. He watches the thick white of his spend seep out, dripping onto his stomach until he finishes spilling inside of you. And then letting you melt against his chest, finally tapped out. He cradles you against his heart, enjoying the feeling of your soft breaths against his throat as you fall immediately into sleep.

He hadn’t needed to set an alarm in years. Waking with the dawn well before he needed to be out of the house, in the barn and ready to work, tending horses. Nature keeping him punctual. It’s the same this morning, even though everything else in the world seems to have changed. He’s awake in a second, eyes blinking open to find your soft, warm weight cuddled against his side. The sight of your small head tucked against his armpit is so tender, that for a moment, his eyes sting, overwhelmed with a feeling he hadn’t experienced in decades.

The mountains watch the morning open above them, the dawn barely blueing the air, and he lays in bed for an unusually long time, enjoying the way it feels to wake up with you in his arms. He won’t fuck this up. He’ll keep you here anyway he can.

When it’s been long enough he knows he’ll be late, that the boys’ll be up and out by now, wondering where he is, he starts to stir, trying to be careful not to wake you and failing anyway.

“Noooo,” you whine, disturbed. He tries to shush you back to sleep, cooing gentle and soothing. “Don’t leave,” you mumble, a lock of hair caught in your mouth that he smooths back behind your ear.

“Go back to sleep, darlin’,” he presses into your hair, soft kiss to the crown of your head. When you look up at him, the happy, sleep creased eyes, all deep and baleful, there are butterflies thrumming in his belly. And he feels a little bit ridiculous with how wrapped around your little finger you’ve already got him.

Nuh-uh. “No, no,” you whine again.

He can feel your little toes stretching in a splay against his shins, then clenching tightly, trying to grip and tug on his leg hair. “You can’t go yet. No.”

“The boys’ll be waitin’ already, baby. We got shit to do. And I gotta keep an eye on the new kid, make sure he’s learnin’ the ropes as he should. Don’t trust Tommy not to turn him into as big of’a dumbass as he is.”

You snicker into his throat, your warm, sleepy scent enveloping him. This just won’t do. This is too good a way to wake up every morning. He’ll never be able to get anything done ever again.

“No. You have to do what I say. I’m the boss. ‘Nd I say I need you here with me. You’re so warm,” you mumble against his pec, arm snaking over his shoulder to hug him more tightly to yourself.

His heart beats so hard in his chest he’s sure you can feel it knocking against your own. The soft brush of your mouth against his nipple makes him shiver and harden even more than his morning wood’s already got him.

Little fucking witch is what you are. Casting spells over weak and malleable creatures that can’t defend themselves.

He groans helplessly. “What’dya want, huh?” Running his palm down your back he palms your rump, squeezing the soft, supple flesh.

You only hum and pout, laughing a little, soft ridiculous noises in the back of your throat that shouldn’t make him as wild and out of control as they do. Mouth practically salivating as you grind and pant against him, opening your knee over his hip so he can feel where you’re still wet from him last night. As the two of you push and pull against each other, soft groans and thready whines, he thinks that you’re a spoiled little brat that won’t be satisfied with anything less than exactly what she wants. Thinks that he’ll need to show you some discipline eventually. Give you the gentle but firm hand your father never took the time to. Thinks that it’ll be one of the most enjoyable things he’s ever had the pleasure of getting to do, teaching you some manners.

“Does the princess need her fucking before she can start her day?” He rolls you over, taking himself in hand to press against your soft, damp hole.

“Mhmm. Yes, please.”

“Please, what?”

“Please, daddy. I need it.” You pout so pretty.

“You're fuckin’ spoiled. You know that?” He really does try to sound put out as he gives into what you want. The boys can wait, the ranch can wait. The whole world can wait. You are the boss, after all.

“Don’t care,” you sigh, when he finally pushes inside.

To be honest, Joel doesn’t think he cares all that much either.

That evening, he comes home to find you in his restroom, perched on the counter with your toes pressed up against the porcelain rounded edge of the sink, painting them a deep purple color you’d stolen from Dina.

He walks with that cowboy swagger, hips swinging in a slow roll, like when he rides a horse. Everything about him is natural, confident, well practiced because he’s been the same sort of man all his life so he’s had decades to grow into himself and settle. It might be one of your favorite things about him, how himself Joel is.

In a way, you can recognize it’s the same thing you’d seen in Tess. That organic earthenness which told you they were fully themselves and comfortable in it. You can’t help the comparison, or the little pulse of savage insecure jealousy it inspires in you.

“Hi’ya, cowboy.”

“Princess.”

On his way to the shower, he presses a soft kiss to your forehead, cranking the water up to sweltering so that soon, the room in filled with hot steam, fogging the glass and curling the hair around your face, supplying an excuse for the heat in your face when he starts to take his clothes off.

His body is so wonderful.

You watch him through lowered lashes as he lathers soap between his thick palms once he’s stepped behind the glass door, tipping his head back to wet his hair, soaping his chest, under his arms, between his legs, the cock that’s still thick and long, even soft as it is, makes you burn all over. He catches your eyes as he takes himself in hand, his gaze dark and teasing, knowing, running his fist up and down the length, stretching it. You flush even hotter looking back down at your purple toes.

This morning when he’d gotten out of bed after ceding to your demands, the sight of that cock as he’d lifted his arms high above his head, muscles stretching, his sweaty armpit hair, joints popping a hollow, tired sound, it’d hung long and sated between his legs, glistening with your come. And it’d left you shocked enough at the sight of it, wondering how something that big could fit between your legs, but also wet and hungry for more of the same thing all day long.

It’d been all you’d been able to think about as you’d lazed around his house. Picking through more of his things like you’d done last night, trying on his clothes and smelling his shampoo, reading the titles of all his DVDs, rearranging the magnets on his fridge just to put him out of sorts, just to leave your mark. You’d felt like a girl again, rifling through his things to glean whatever piece of him you might be able to steal for yourself.

And going through his little house—the woodworking projects, the old, faded picture of him and Sarah and Tommy, reading glasses on his nightstand, and a book on deep space that reminds you how much of a fucking nerd Ellie really is— you’d seen that there were little details of all the people he cares about in his home. Even you. Picking up the text on art history tucked beneath the one on space, your eyes had smarted. Even you were here.

When he shuts the water off, you look up at him again, and it’s obvious but not sudden because it’s been building for years and years: you love him. You love everything about him. You’d loved him as a girl, looking up at a man who was steady and dependable, even when he’d never looked at you. You love him now as a woman, while he looks back at you and finally sees you for who you are.

It feels like such an ordinary moment for how life altering the thought is—to realize that this is a real deal sort of thing, what you feel for him.

But you think that maybe that’s what you’d always been looking for, something lovely in its ordinariness, something to depend on.

“You have a nice day?” He asks as he runs the towel over his wet hair.

“Mhmm,” you hum. “Productive.”

“Oh, yeah? What’d you get up to all day, shut in my house?”

“Snooped through all your shit.”

“Find anything good?”

“No, you’re boring.”

“I did warn you about that.”

“Did you?”

“Sure did.”

Dropping the towel into the hamper, he pulls on a fresh pair of jeans from the closet, no underwear. This guy…

And comes over to you, skin all hot and damp, that big barrel chest, taking you by the jaw to press his mouth, all forceful and demanding, against yours. His possessiveness makes your toes curl.

“Too bad you’re stuck with me now,” he says.

Against his kiss, you say, “Will you do ‘em for me?” Holding up the little nail polish brush, if only to stop yourself from spilling all of your romance-addled-brained secrets. You watch him as he sits on the toilet lid and holds each of your toes in his big fingers, slowly and carefully finishing the purple paint job. Humming and hawing while trying to get it just right.

When he’s done, his smile is so proudly pleased, admiring his work. “Damn, I’m good.”

“You wearin’ my underwear?” He says, taking in the sight of his blue plaid boxers sitting low on your hips when you finally hop off the counter, stretching up on your tiptoes to ease your cramped knees.

“Doesn’t seem like you get much use out of them. Thought I’d break them in,” you tell him, looking down at his crotch.

“Little shit,” he laughs, cocking his head to the side to give you a good once over.

“How do I look?”

“Let’s see…gimme a twirl, gorgeous.”

You spin around, so silly you’re almost drunk with it, and his laugh is smooth and throaty and dark. When he gets up, the look in his eyes is so deliciously threatening, “Yeah, you look fuckin’ good.”

You spin away from his grasping hands, moving across the restroom while he circles you, reaching for the toothbrush you’ve moved in next to his and pointing it at him like a weapon.

“Get away from me with that look. I’m sore and don’t have anything for you right now.”

You turn to face the sink, reaching for the toothpaste and running your brush under the water as he comes up behind you.

“Poor little cunt got stretched out last night, didn’t she?” He rumbles into your neck, pressing a tiny kiss to the hinge of your jaw. You shiver against him, sticking your toothbrush in your mouth to keep from moaning at the feel of all that hot skin and hard muscle crowding up behind you.

You think he’d be scared to know how much you want him. You think you’re a little scared yourself, knowing how much want can fit inside just one girl.

His touch smoothes up your outer thighs, circling your waist and squeezing, slipping his fingers under the lacy edge of the bandeau bra you’ve got on. He softly grazes the undersides of your breasts with his calloused fingertips, and the sound he makes, like a softly chuffing horse, is so intensely erotic, like he can’t even help his reactions to you, that your pussy, which really is so sore and tender, clenches with a soft sting.

He kisses your shoulder, turning you by the hips to face him. “Let me,” he says, voice deep and raspy. “Lemme do it.”

He takes your toothbrush from you, trapping you between his thighs against the counter, and takes hold of your jaw, forcing you to open.

You flush, embarrassed at your sudsy mouth full of toothpaste, growling, trying to get away from him.

“Yeah, c’mere. I wanna do it,” he demands.

He brushes your teeth as slowly and precisely as he’d painted your now drying toenails. Pressing your jaw as wide open as it can go and gently scrubbing each and every tooth in your mouth. It is, undoubtedly, one of the most strangely intimate and erotic things you’ve ever done with a man.

He touches you with such certainty it’s almost disorienting for how foreign it is.

When he’s finished brushing, he holds the glass kept by the sink to your mouth, making you rinse and repeat twice before he’s satisfied. And when he’s done with that, he forces your jaw open again, appreciating his job well done. You can feel his erection hard and throbbing against your belly when he sticks his fingers deep into your mouth, feeling the smooth insides of your cheeks with his thumbs. Pressing his pointer and index fingers flat against your tongue, so far back he makes you gag. His other palm holds your head immobile so you can’t escape, can’t do anything but take his training. Your heart beats between your legs. A slow, stinging throb that tries to convince you you’re not really as sore as you’d thought you were, that you can definitely take him again right here and now.

As he presses down on your tongue again with more pressure, your throat spasms, gagging violently, your abdomen clenching, then lurching. He pulls back, relieves the pressure for a moment, but still doesn’t pull out of your mouth.

“No, no. Hold your breath. Good. Now breathe through your nose,” he orders. “Slow and deep. Good, yeah. Yeah, just like that.” He presses down on your tongue again, making you gag again, pulls back, gives you a second, and then does it again and again. Training your throat and your reflexes to do what he wants.

When he finally decides you’ve had enough, you’re left panting and shaking. Your cunt leaking into the seat of his boxers. You cling to him weakly, and he pets your hair, soothing you with soft sounds in his throat.

“You’re such a good girl,” he murmurs between kisses to your hair.

Clawing at him, you press up on your toes, desperate for his kiss, licking at his mouth and then reaching for his hard cock, trying to tug his jeans open.

Ah, ah. “Thought you said you were sore.”

“No, no. I—I lied.”

You reach for his mouth again, pressing up on your toes, pulling his face towards yours as he laughs at your struggle, getting only a brief taste of his mouth, the tickle of his mustache against your lips, before he’s pulling out of your reach again.

“Did you? Let’s see. Little fuckin’ liar.”

He spins you around by the hips, fast and dizzy, bending you over the sink at the hips so your face is pressed right up against the mirror. Your hot breaths form little clouds of condensation against the glass, and you can’t help the ragged, humiliating moan you let out when he pulls his own boxers down over your ass, letting the cool air soothe the sting against your hot pussy as he crouches down behind you.

He tuts and coos, clicking his tongue as he spreads your cheeks wide enough it worsens the already deep sting. Saying things like look how soaked she is, so fuckin’ red and pretty. “Naw, baby. Don’t think we can,” he tells you, peering around your hip to look at your face.

“Oh, Joel, please. I swear—it’s…” He kisses you right over the tender ring of your hole, losing your train of thought as you moan at the feel of his mouth there. Then moves to smatter kisses over your thighs and ass, down your legs to the sensitive backs of your knees.

While he’s distracted, you try to snake your hand between the counter’s edge and your hips, attempting to press your fingers against your needy clit.

He smacks you, hard, right against your poor and tender sex. A mean hiss follows.

“That’s mine. No touching.”

You do wail at that, trying to stomp your feet and kick back at him when he does nothing more than continue to kiss down the back of your legs and the cheeks of your bottom. What a horrible, nasty old man you’ve caught for yourself.

“Not gonna hurt you worse when you’re already hurtin’. Sorry, baby, but that’s not how this works.”

He pulls his boxers back up your legs, giving your hip a condescending little pat and pulling you back by the hair to kiss your mouth while you pout and spit curses at him.

“‘Sides we got somewhere to be. Don’t got time to fuck you proper right now.”

“You’re absolutely horrible,” you tell him, trying to stomp on his bare foot and missing. “Where are we going?”

“Thinkin’ we should go up to see Miss Leigh. How ‘bout it?”

The drive down the 89 towards Leigh Lake is dark and peaceful. Windows down, he goes way too fast, playing Bob Dylan off an old cassette player he’s got rigged into the 12-volt plug because he refuses to modernize his music collection. Every so often, you’re rewarded with the lovely sound of his voice humming along to Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.

It’s a real strange thing, feeling like you’re getting everything you’ve ever wanted, like you’re finally in the right place at the right time. You feel so happy.

You switch spots once you enter the park, taking the driver's side so that he can get out at the roadblocks to lift the bar gates for you to sneak the truck through, making your slow way up the mountain through the service roads until you make it to the lake. Your last name won’t stop you from getting arrested if you’re caught trespassing on federal property, and the idea of it is sort of thrilling.

The two of you hike the short way left from where you park the truck, and the dark wilderness would be terrifying if not for the solid wall of muscled man you have showing you the way through. You love that he’s so dependable, so capable. That you can do something wild like this and remain carefree because you know he’s here to watch over you.

The last name won’t stop you from getting eaten by a bear either, but you’ve got Joel for that.

In the bright moonlight, the surface of the lake is like a silver quarter, shining so brightly it blinds. There isn’t a single cloud in the sky—all stars. The water’s glass face ripples intermittently, the movement of fish beneath the surface gives it life in the dark. And the butterfly flutter of the aspen trees sounds in the night time’s wind, while the mountains loom pitch black and menacing, rising up towards the sky.

“I love it here so much,” you tell him. “Maria used to bring me all the time when I was a girl. She was so young when she taught me, took care of me—all those years raising me. You never realize, when you’re a kid, how young the adults around you actually are. It was nice to hear she’d gotten with Tommy.”

“Saint of a woman. Puttin’ up with that idiot.”

You laugh softly, wrapping your arms around yourself at the chill coming off the water. “Don’t be mean to him.”

“Were you bad? When you were real little… misbehavin’ sort?”

“God, no. He would’ve killed me.”

The joke lands stilted and ugly. No one laughs.

“No, I wouldn’t think you would’ve been. Not in your nature, I don’t suppose.”

“At least not then. But I promise, I can be real bad now.” You turn to give him a hot look over your shoulder, and his lopsided smirk is so, so sexy. Hands in his pockets and chin tipped back so you can see his face just right in the moonlight.

“I remember you used to come up here with him sometimes, too.”

You scoff a bitter noise, turning back towards the water. “How could you possibly remember that? You weren’t here yet. And it hardly ever happened. Certainly not once I got older.”

“He told me.”

You have nothing to say to that. Nothing nice, at least. There’s something that bothers you about knowing your father shared things like that with Joel. Things that you’d always seen as sacredly intimate, infinitely painful.

“Oh.”

“Oh?” He mimes back.

“Let’s not talk about that. You’ll ruin it.”

“Ruin what?”

“This. I don’t know… Everything.”

You pace away from him, chewing on your fingernails. You catch the lifting edge of the gel manicure on your thumbnail, biting down and ripping off a huge chunk of it. It hurts. Your fingernail smarts from the vicious peel. Pointer finger next, catch and rip, spitting out the little flakes of polish into your other palm. It’s a filthy and disgusting habit.

“I didn’t bring you here to fight, but we can if you’d like to,” he says provokingly.

Rolling your eyes— “I don’t want to fight.”

“Alright… if you don’t wanna talk about it we don’t gotta. Think we should anyway, though.”

You’ve drifted towards the water’s shore, and you hear his heavily booted footsteps come up slowly behind you.

“I want us to be honest with each other.” He doesn’t reach for you and it makes your anger even hotter, that you can sense the intimation of his warmth but not actually enjoy it. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he whispers.

“Nothing. I don’t know…” Finally, his palms come to your hips, the touch is so comforting, too comforting. He tucks his thumbs beneath the hem of your t-shirt, rubbing slow circles against your skin, resting his forehead against the top of your head.

“Thought we decided you were trusting me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. You want to hear that I’m angry? I’m angry. There.” You take a deep breath, closing your eyes to really savor the feel of his hands on your skin, the taste of the clean, sweet air. You can smell the leaf rot and the chill of the water and that achingly specific mineral scent that comes off the mountain rock. A scent you could recall anytime, anywhere in the world when you were far away and especially missing home. “I’m sorry, too,” you tell him. “I should also say that.”

“For what?”

“That I’m angry at you, too. Or that I was.”

“Were you?”

You try to keep the broken crack out of your voice but it comes anyway. “He cared about you. And I was so jealous.”

He sighs, “I think you’ve got the wrong sort of idea about how we were or what he thought of me. At the end of the day, I was still just someone who worked for him.”

“I know there was more. I know he did something for you that no one’s ever talked about. I know there’s more here that you’re not saying, Joel. And it’s not fair that there are things you know about my own father that I don’t get to know, too. It’s not fair that you were with him in his last days and I wasn’t. It’s not fair that you got all that time with him and now I’m the one that’s left to miss him when I didn’t even really know him. When he didn’t even like me.”

“Darlin’...” You step away from him, away from his comfort. The water of the lake laps at your boots.

“You know it’s true. How can I miss him when I didn’t even know him? When you, who knew him so much better than I did, won’t. You said that, remember? That you won’t miss him.”

“I did, yes.”

“Why not? I don’t understand.”

“‘Cause I didn’t give a fuck about him.” He laughs. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Oswald Kelly thought the earth began and ended with him, and ten years is too long a time to be the right hand of a man like that. Is that what you want to hear? Does that make you feel better?”

“I don’t— I feel like I need to understand what it was that was between you two. Why he left you the money. Can you…Do you even know how fucking despicable I felt, being angry that he’d left you something? Because it wasn’t about the money. I want you to have that. I want you to have everything. If you let me, I’ll share every single thing I have with you, but I can’t understand what it is, or what—what there was… I can’t understand why. If you say he didn’t see you as a son, then why?”

He runs a palm flat over his mouth, hand on his hip, thinking, then the backs of his fingers against the edge of his jaw.

“We were similar, in certain ways. We understood each other.”

“You are nothing like my father, Joel. Don’t ever say that again. He was cruel—he was terrible. A terrible father. He ran me off from this place. And it’s horrible, feeling like you can’t ever go home.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Better than you’d believe.”

He goes to sit against a log low on the ground, and you wander towards him as if led by a tether.

“It’s complicated, ain’t it?” He says. “Business of bein’ a good man. No one’s all the same of a single thing forever. There are parts of us that aren’t so good, others that are better. There were pieces of your daddy that I think tried to make up for the rotten parts. He helped a man he knew jack shit about, backed by nothing but the grace of my brother’s good word. Gave me a place, saw something in me worth a damn. He saved my life. But… the way he was with you? That overshadowed any sort of good he might’ve ever tried to do. You get me? No one is perfect, and that’s fine. But I reckon it’s important where a man chooses to place that finite goodness afforded to him. That’s what you gotta remember.”

“It should’ve been me,” you tell him. “He should’ve given that little goodness he had, to me.”

“It should’ve been you,” he agrees.

“But you’re wrong. You’re nothing like him, Joel. You’re so full of goodness.” You go to him then, kneeling between his parted knees, and he takes your face in his palms, smoothing back your hair so lovingly. “I know it. I recognized it from the first moment I laid eyes on you. Trust me. You can tell, when you’ve seen a lot of bad, who’s good and who’s not.”

He shakes his head at you, still stroking your hair, your face, and the look in his eyes is unfathomable, heartbroken.

“There’s something I never told you about Sarah. About how she died.”

You jolt at that. “What?”

“I was too young when I had her, only twenty-two. And it was hard for Tommy and I, harder than anything. He helped me, you see, Tommy’s always been there. God, we were basically kids, trying to take care of this tiny, defenseless thing, just the two of us. And what do you know at twenty-two about how to live? Basically nothin’. It was so fucking hard, but she was like a miracle anyway. Gummy smiles and milk breath and she didn’t like formula, had a hell of a time feeding her ‘cause she wanted a mother and I had none to give her. She struggled to put on weight, was constantly at the doctor which meant constant bills. It was the single most terrifying, most stressful thing I’ve ever lived through,” he says.

“For a few years it was fine, or not so fine, but we managed. She was small, though, skinny and sickly. And things got progressively worse, harder. There was so much I wanted to give her, the whole world, and I just couldn’t. And I wanted Tommy to have a life too, I didn’t want to have to depend on him forever. My brother got involved with some real rough sorts—Sarah was three…maybe four at the time—they called themselves The Fireflies. At first it was muscle work on the weekends and such. Watch a door, drive ‘em here or there, fuck up some guy who owed money for God knows what, but it sure as shit wasn’t my business, right? I kept my head down, tried to look the other way. They were sellin’ shit. On the streets in Austin, college kids in bars with too much of daddy’s money.” You flush deep and ashamed. “Pills, oxys, that sorta crap. The muscle work turned into stuff I never, ever should’ve gotten involved in. It started small: a favor, an errand, drop this off, pick this up. And then I woke up one day, and I was so deep in filth I couldn’t see the way out.” He looks at you then, and his eyes are so wide and dry, so clear, you can see all of him right there in that moment. “But Sarah was fed, she was at a good school, new clothes and a dance class. I wanted to give her even more than just that. It felt easy, even when it was terrifying. Or it felt worth it. And I did it for longer than I should’ve. That’s the thing about doing what you shouldn’t. It’s hard to quit once you’ve started, it’s hard to get yourself out.”

“Tommy'd weaseled his way out a couple years before, smarter than I had the foresight to be. It’d gotten seedier the more time passed, and he’d spooked. He wasn’t good at dealing with the violence the way I was, couldn’t stomach it as easy as I did. They’d been fine with letting him go ‘cause they still had me doing their dirty work, hurting people when they needed me to, trained dog.”

When he leans down to press a small kiss against your mouth, your heart beats in adrenalized panic.

“I knew it’d end badly eventually. So I said to myself, destroy the dog and be the man, but it’s hard putting the animal down.” He breathes one long chuff of rough air before he continues. “They came to our home one night, she was supposed to be asleep, safe in her room. The guy pulled a gun and I panicked, seeing a weapon in her house like that. She was supposed to be in bed, safe in her room. She was supposed to be safe.” His voice breaks, and you can see the silver line of old grief at his waterline. “If I’d died, it wouldn’t’ve mattered. Tommy would’ve taken her, been a better father than I ever could’ve been. She would’ve survived without me, but I was never going to survive without her.”

He takes your hand in his, pressing your fingers to his scarred-over temple. A violent, horrible little thing you’d always been suspicious of.

“Joel. Oh, Joel.”

“I was never going to survive without her. They were going to get me for involuntary manslaughter, possession and trafficking. Lock me up and throw away the key. But Tommy had come here when he’d gotten out of Austin. He told your father about me and Kelly came down to see me. I’ll never know why he chose to do that—we never discussed it after—what he might’ve seen in my brother’s face, in my own, that convinced him to save me. I’ll never forget that feeling, sittin’ in that orange jumpsuit in front of that man that didn’t even seem real. A little bit like a thing out of a nightmare. Coldest eyes I’d ever seen in a man, like there was a shadow around the edges, something not right. Reckon that was your mother in there, haunting him. And I think he must’ve seen the same shadow in my own eyes ‘cause he made some calls right then and there. I was out the next morning and on Kelly property that evening. Your father, he gave me my life back. He brought me here and he saved me. This place saved me.”

You’re crying uncontrollably, tears spilling down your face in a hot, sick rush.

“So you think he was good to you. You’re saying it was your fault—Sarah. That’s what you think. And he saved you from it.”

“I’m saying that there’s bad and good in all of us and that life is complicated and strange and people even worse. Look at what I did to my own child. I’m sayin’ sometimes you’re grateful to the monster, I’m saying sometimes you’re sad he’s dead. It’s okay, baby.”

“But you would never hurt me. I know that as well as I know my own name. And he hurt me.”

“Never intentionally, I wouldn’t, no. But—”

“I met this woman,” you cut him off. “Uh… last year? Two years ago, maybe. I can’t remember anymore. In Sedona. It was a—well… they called it a spa,” you laugh humorlessly. “Wellness thing, that sort of bullshit, but really if you’re there, you know it’s just rehab. I was drinking too much, snorting all sorts of junk I shouldn’t have been. She recognized me.”

You’re looking for some sort of recognition in his face, too.

“She said—from the photograph on my father’s desk. She knew all about me, she showed me pictures of the two of them. She’d been with him for twelve years, and I never even knew she existed. She knew all about me. She knew my mother, her name. She even mentioned you. You knew her.”

“I did.”

“You know who I’m talking about?”

“I do.”

“Twelve years, Joel. His partner or his—his—”

“Wouldn’t really call that mess a partnership,” he says with a small, ironic scoff.

“Don’t be annoying. Don’t joke.”

“I know, honey. I’m sorry,” he says with a sigh. “I know what you’re try’na say, I get it.”

“I didn’t even know him. He was a complete stranger to me. And this woman…she was nice to me. She told me she’d always wanted to meet me and that he’d never let her, and then he just sent her away. Cut her off from one day to the next once he’d decided he was sick of her, a pile of cash and Dina’s well wishes. You know she tried to kill herself? She was in that place for a mental break.”

Joel’s face looks shaken. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“That’s what he did to the women in his life. He had a vision that stretched halfway across the world. And nothing ever stopped him. Especially not something as insignificant as a daughter or a woman that loved him. My mom died on him and he punished us for it for the rest of his miserable fucking life, and I hate him. I hate him, and I’m glad he’s dead.”

You really do sob then, after those spit words. A broken wail like an animal lost in the wilderness and left to die. Or like a child, forgotten and abandoned by her father. Joel holds you very tenderly while you finally let that old grief settle inside you.

“You can’t ever say you’re like him again. You can’t. It hurts me to even think about.”

“It’s alright. It’s okay, baby girl. Let it out. I’m sorry,” he soothes. “I think… I think that your father mistreated you because there was something fundamentally broken in him, and I think he thought he saw that same broken thing in me, and that maybe that comforted him somehow. That what he gave me wasn’t goodness, much as you might want to see it as such.”

“But he saved you. He never, ever saved me. He hurt me so much. He threw me to the dogs. He cared about you, Joel.”

“You’re not understanding me, sweetheart. I’m saying that I did bad before, that I was broken, and Kelly saw that. But you never stay the same way forever. I was able to let it go, to move on. We always change eventually. Growin’ or regressin’ or whatever direction it might be you choose to move in, but we always inevitably make another move. He saved my life, and I was grateful to him, and yet, when I watched him die, I felt nothing but relief for you. I’m sayin’ that I know you feel defined by this, by him, but eventually you’ll move past this moment of struggle, eventually you'll let him go and then it’ll be different, that next place you step into will be different.”

You surge up on your knees to hug him fiercely and you sob and sob onto his wide shoulder, giving him all of your grief because you know he’s strong enough to bear the weight of it.

“Maybe every man is destined to fail his daughter at some point. But you won’t be defined by his failure of you forever. I know that you’ll let it go eventually. You’re so strong, so resilient, my girl.”

“I don’t want to step into any other place. I want to stay here with you and the ranch forever,” you cry.

“We’ll always be here, darlin’,” he says with a kiss to your temple, a soothing hand on your back. “I was a roamin’ dog, and I found my place to roost, here. Wyoming and the ranch will always be your home. I will always be here for you. You’ve never gotta worry about that changin’. What I’m saying is this, love is complicated and if you miss him or you’re glad he’s dead, it’s okay. It’s okay to be wrong and to change or to be right and go bad for a little bit. Tell me, what’s the point of livin’ and feelin’ so loveless? There ain’t none. Nothing is the same forever except for this, here, your home and the care you’ll always find here. You understand me?”

“I think so.”

“I can’t promise you that this’ll be a normal sort of life, you and I together, but I promise it’ll be a good one. I’m going to try my damndest, anyway.”

“My mother was buried under a holly bush the day I was born, this has never been a normal life.”

He presses another kiss against your mouth. “I don’t want you to carry this sadness around with you forever. If you let it, this land will heal you. It’ll fix whatever’s broken in your heart. It did mine. I need you to be happy here.” He presses a tiny kiss to your jaw, tucking his face into your shoulder. “Can’t you try to give me that?”

The water laps gently at the shore at your backs, and the presence of the mountains is so strong they feel almost sentient—watching the two of you bear your hearts at their feet. You’d felt, for so long, like you’d loved him. And even if it’d been only the idea of him, it’d served as such a comfort for you when you’d been young and lost and growing into yourself. And in some curious yet kismet touched way, it felt right, fated, that the two of you had been so changed by the man that was your father.

You ask him the same question as before, hungry for the sound of it: “If I left, would you miss me?”

“I’d follow you. There’d be no missin’.”

“But you love this place.” Your heart throbs with the idea of that word, the potential.

“But I need you now.”

“Maybe I’ll run away, come back when you least expect it just to keep you on your toes.”

“You’d be a wild horse if you could, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe.” You muse his hair, tugging his face to yours, kissing him slow and deep and full of love.

“You’re a good girl. You be wild if you need to, I’ll be here for you when you’re ready. There’s always gonna be someone in the world that loves you, you know. Even when it feels like there isn’t, or you’re all by your lonesome. There’ll always be someone out there who thinks of you with love in their heart no matter how far you go. You just gotta remember that.”

“It’s hard.”

“Most good things are, sweetheart.”

The two of you hold each other for a long time, listening to the mountains grow, the water and the aspens.

“You know, I knew this was going to happen when I came back.”

“Oh, did you now?”

“Yes.”

“And how’s that?”

“I’d been seeing eleven-eleven every single day for weeks. So I knew something big was happening soon.”

“Darlin’, I don’t got a clue what the hell that means.”

“It’s a sign. It means something good is on its way, Joel. Something really, really worth it.”

The Tipsy Bison is loud and hot, and Ellie watches the girl she loves dance and laugh with her best friend, in the middle of the packed crowd. She prefers it here to The Mushroom, too many stupid Jackson tourists over there. The sight of them blinks in and out between the sweaty bodies, hands grasping each other close and then spinning out to twirl wildly in opposite directions. Their heads thrown back in loud laughter.

“She really is something,” Joel comes up beside her to lean against the high top.

“Yeah,” Ellie says, “She really is.” Though she doesn’t think they’re talking about the same girl.

“Ff-hat’re we talk’n ‘bout?” Jesse says, mouthful of pizza bulging his cheeks while he tries to chug his can of Natural Light at the same time. “What’re we lookin’ at?”

“Hey, chucklefuck.”

He swallows his too large bite, wincing, beer dribbling out the corner of his mouth. “I do have a name you know.”

“Sure, buddy,” she pats his head, slaps his cheek a little. “Whatever you say.”

Beside them, Joel is silent. A little hypnotized. The look on his face is so intense he looks like he’s about to pounce. Probably ready to get violent if anyone gets too close for his liking.

Jesse looks between his face and the two girls dancing in the crowd. “Miss Kelly’s lookin’ mighty fine tonight, Joel. You old fuckin’ dog—good job, man.”

He tries to slap him chummy on the shoulder, but the glare Joel throws his way looks like it could quite literally kill. “Don’t look at her, dumbass. Who the fuck do you think you’re talkin’ to?”

He pushes away from the table, sauntering towards the dance floor. Ellie sees the moment when your eyes catch sight of him, the way they brighten. Fucking heart-eyed love-sick look, ugh. And they say her and Dina are gross about it. Ellie still hasn’t recovered from what she’d seen in the barn the other day. Electroshock therapy or fucking church is what she’ll need to forget that shit.

“He’s so mean to me,” Jesse whines, peeved, kicked-puppy look following Joel’s retreating form.

“Oh, Jesse, Jesse, Jesse.”

“What? What now? Haven’t even done anything wrong today.” He’s so sulky, it makes Ellie laugh.

“You have so much to learn,” she says absentmindedly, watching Joel meet you on the dance floor.

“That’s still so fuckin’ crazy to me,” Jesse says when Joel bends to kiss you. It’s passionate, too intimate, and Ellie has to look away.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else besides them.”

“I guess so.”

“Curiosity is a constant happiness. Go out and find something worthwhile, Jesse.”

On the dance floor, Dina has separated from the horde, and she weaves in and out of the pack of crowded bodies making her way over to their table. Her cheeks are flushed, her curls wild and frizzy from dancing. Ellie feels her heart beat in her throat, this is what love is. She knows that now, is able to recognize it easy as day.

This is what Wyoming, what this land had given her. A family, a home. Dina.

“Don’t know what that means. Doesn’t even make any fuckin’ sense,” he mutters. “You’re so fucking weird sometimes.”

Ellie reaches over, yanking on his ear, hard, before walking away to meet her girl.

“Nothing is cooler than being yourself, weatherboy. Remember that.”

Dina meets her at the edge of the dance floor, falling into her. Her arms are strong and lithe, her kiss tastes like cherries. She whispers that she loves her in her ear—I love you, Ellie, she says. Over her shoulder, Joel looks like he’s happier than she’s ever seen him in all the years she’s known him, and she thinks that this is it, the real deal, what all those lonely people that’d grown up on the ranch together had been looking for all their lives.

No lonely dogs left.

Having Joel Miller fall in love with you turns out to be the easiest thing in the world.

You watch as it happens day by day. Easy to read on his face, obvious as the man is—despite what he might think about himself. You watch the story of it play out on his face as the days turn to weeks turn to months. In the things he does, the ways he takes care of you, tending to the land and your legacy and your heart. The way he makes you the beating soul of the ranch in a way you’d always dreamt of being, but had never really thought possible. He makes the place a real home for you.

One evening, waiting for him to come to bed, he brings you a bowl of split figs. Dark purple skin, brilliant red center. Beautifully shaped. There are three of them he’s cut perfectly in half to make a circle of six pieces precisely arranged in the center of the bowl. Each one is perfectly formed, perfectly chosen and set for you.

He puts it in your outstretched hands and goes to his side of the bed, tucking his glasses tight against the bridge of his nose, lamp on with the shade turned towards his open book because he says his eyes are going bad. He’s reading Flannery O’Connor’s book of short stories again, and you know he’s missing home, hungering for a reminder of life in the South and memories of his daughter. You know he only picks this one up when he’s missing it all something desperate.

You know so many things about him now, the way he knows them about you, too.

And looking down at the bowl of perfectly split figs, that’s when you know for sure, this isn’t your wishful heart, not a fable—only something normal, lovely in how ordinary it is. This is love.

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