“Writing.”
“And you never did anything with it?”
“I had an English professor who went on to open an independent publishing house. At the top of my final work he wrote: Let me know when your first book comes out. That sentence? Man, he had no idea what that did. He was the first one who made me believe I had talent.”
“You should send him your manuscript.”
“Nah. His house acquires stories that preserve the Southern way of life. He’s also old-school. Only takes paper submissions.”
“You can’t get any more old-school and Southern than Nat Meier.”
“He’s not going to publish cyborg cowboys, J.”
“You don’t know that. He believed in you once. And if nothing else, he may have a connection to someone who would publish cyborg cowboys.”
“I don’t know.”
She did, but she knew enough not to push the subject after his resistance in the stable office. Instead, she turned into him, burrowed against his side, his heat. Her body felt light, grounded by their nodes of contact. Sleep would have come easily had arousal not had a formidable hold. She closed her eyes to it, the way a Hopi elder had taught her on an outcropping of red rock in Sedona. Alone isn’t a test, he said. With others, we know our truths. Right now, her truth came in the form of a beehive sensation at her core. Dizzying, spiraling sensations took flight, up her inner thighs, behind her navel, deliciously stinging all the spac
es between. She breathed through it, as the elder had instructed.
The truth came stronger.
His lips nestled against her hair. Heat from Nat’s unsteady exhales against her scalp penetrated and slipped south to join the chaos.
Stronger…
Her knee moved of its own accord, to his body’s front plane, up and over and atop his button fly, a complete and unapologetic offering of her hips.
His free hand reached for her knee, gripped it in place. Through two layers of denim, his and hers, his dick pulsed.
Stronger still…
God help her, she wanted to make every inch of this space theirs and only theirs. Walls, broken chair, passages from the book punctuated by intimate explorations of the tongue. Her ability to give two fucks about tomorrow and beyond was close to shattering.
“J?”
“Hmm?”
“I can’t go through it all again.”
She stiffened, her muscles toxic, her body immediately plunged into an icy bath of rejection. The buzz at her core died. This time, when tears scorched, she didn’t try to hide them. On some level, she wanted him to hurt, too. And therein was her truth. She was broken. Nat brought comfort to others. She brought pain.
And loneliness really was an insidious bastard, hell-bent on changing everything.
“I know.”
He slipped free of her and stood. “I’ll sleep with the animals tonight.”
She closed her eyes to his retreating footfalls, hollow against the century-old wood. The moment the door closed behind him, a decade of regret leaked out. Against the quilt, her muffled sobs took the rest of her.
* * *
January didn’t know the hour, but she had to escape the four walls, find space, feel cool air against her heated face. A few hours of sleep had remedied the worst of her brain’s heaviness after a cathartic cry. She wrapped herself in the quilt, fetched her journal from her pack, and slipped on her boots before heading outside.
The night showed signs of lifting. Lighter blues encroached on the horizon. The moon made its return, post-storm, to illuminate nature’s surfaces. She found an oak tree near the cabin’s corner with blushing autumn leaves and plenty of footholds. The cabin roof seemed like the perfect place to add to her travel journal.
Nat’s warning about wood rot returned to her. His practicality, his fear of the unknown, denied him moments that he would circle back to in his old age. Breathtaking moments, like the one when she settled onto that roof Clem had built with his hands and joined the sky with the vantage of a bird. In moonlight, she added three pages—sketches of the trees growing spindly with the chill, poetry that made zero sense, Nat’s name scrolled in different ways because it brought her comfort.