His truck smells like leather and hay and something underneath that's just him — warm skin, soap that isn't trying — and I'm cataloging all of it against my will like a woman building evidence for a crime she hasn't committed yet. Window down, warm night air pulling my braid apart one strand at a time, neither of us speaking.
"You always this quiet after four bourbons?" He glances over, dashboard light catching the lines around his eyes.
"I had two."
"You had four. I was counting." His thumb taps the steering wheel once and I feel the corner of my mouth twitch before I can stop it.
"That's either sweet or creepy."
"Probably both." The corner of his mouth lifts and something in my stomach shifts with it — a slow tilt, like a boat changing weight. "Where am I taking you?"
The honest answer is: anywhere that isn't the apartment where a man screams about beer cans. The honest answer would get me committed. "Wherever you want."
He watches me for a beat too long, then turns back to the road. "My ranch is forty minutes out. That okay?"
"That's okay." My neck is on fire.
The drive is dark highway and open land. He doesn't fill the silence and I don't need him to. Somewhere around the thirty-minute mark my head tips against the window and I think: this is the longest I've gone without being afraid since I can remember.
The ranch house sits at the end of a gravel road, porch light on, the rest dark. Wooden frame, wide steps, a swing on the porch creaking in the wind. The hallway smells like coffee and wood and the specific scent of a man living alone in a house he built for more. He pours two whiskeys from a bottle on the kitchen counter and holds one out. Our fingers touch around the glass and neither of us pulls away, and the contact — his calluses against my knuckles — sends something electric into the base of my throat. I think, very clearly: I'm going to do something stupid tonight.
"One more question." He leans against the counter, ankles crossed, glass low against his thigh. "When's the last time someone let you just — be?"
My throat closes. "I don't know what you mean."
"You've been holding yourself like a fist since the first drink. Shoulders, hands, jaw." He tips his glass toward me. "Except when you talk about horses. Then you open right up. Hands moving. Voice changes." I look down. My fingers are white around the glass. I hate that a man I've known three hours has seen something Troy hasn't noticed in three years — or noticed and decided to use against me.
"You're observant for a rancher."
"I work with animals." One shoulder shrugs. "You learn to read what a body's saying when the mouth won't."
I set the glass on the counter and the click is loud in the quiet house. He's close enough that I can see the scar above his eyebrow, the stubble, the tan line vanishing into his collar. I kiss him first.
Not a decision — a release, the way lungs let go when they simply can't hold. His hand comes up to my jaw, fingers sliding into my hair, and I make a sound against his lips that I didn't plan and can't take back.
"Jessie." He pulls back an inch. His thumb traces my cheekbone, breath warm on my mouth. "We don't have to."
"Wade." My fingers close on his collar, cotton warm from his chest. "Stop asking and stay."
He exhales against my mouth like something in him broke open too and then his hands are at my waist, fingers on bare skin, and my muscles clench so hard my back arches into him.
"Easy," he says against my jaw, the spot where my pulse hammers against his lips. "I'm not going anywhere." My shirt comes off and the way his eyes move over me erases the cold entirely. "You're beautiful," he says into the hollow of my throat. Not a compliment — a fact.
"You don't have to…" I start. "I'm not performing, Jessie."
The back of my knees hit his bed and his weight settles over me — careful, on his forearms, not trapping. With Troy I go somewhere else. I leave my body at the door and survive it the way you survive weather.
This is nothing like weather. Wade's mouth moves down my collarbone and I can't keep still — my back arches, my fingers dig into his shoulders, and a sound comes out of me I didn't authorize. Something between a gasp and his name.
"There you are," he says against my skin, almost to himself. And something snaps open inside me — not breaks, snaps, like a lock I've held shut with both hands. I pull at his shirt and he shrugs it off and the sight of his bare chest rising fast makes my hips move against him before thought can catch up to skin.
"God, Jessie…" His forehead drops to mine, breathing ragged, and the fact that my body can make a man like this lose his rhythm makes my eyes sting for reasons I can't name.
He moves slow, deliberate. But I don't want slow anymore. I wrap my legs around him and the sound he makes — low, broken, grateful — presses into my neck like a confession. I say his name and it sounds like a woman I used to be.
Afterward. Ceiling fan clicking every third rotation. My cheek against his chest, his heartbeat steady, his fingers tracing circles on my shoulder. "Tell me something you don't tell people," he says.
"I talk to horses more than humans."
"That's not a secret. That's good judgment." His chest vibrates. "What do you tell them?"
"That they're safe. That nobody's coming in too fast or too loud." I trace his collarbone and his skin twitches. "That the door's open if they need it."
His hand stills. The circles stop. "Sounds like you're talking to yourself, Jessie."
My breath catches. The precision slides between my ribs and I don't answer because being seen this clearly by a stranger is either the best thing that's happened to me or the most dangerous.
I fall asleep with his arm heavy around me, and for the first time in three years the last thing I feel isn't dread.
As I wake up there are grey light. Thin curtains. I open my eyes and for three seconds the world is wrong — then it rushes back in a flood of skin and the word yes until it stopped being a word, and my face goes so hot I bury it in the pillow.
Wade is asleep on his stomach, one arm stretched across the space where I was lying, fingers curled, still reaching. In sleep his face is younger. Like a boy someone forgot to be careful with. Something cracks in my chest — the grief of finding a good thing when your hands are too full of bad ones to hold it.
I sit up one inch at a time. Reach for my shirt. That's when I see it — the nightstand. A framed photo. Wade with a woman, dark hair, bright smile, leaning into him the way a body leans into something it trusts. Both looking at the camera like they share a secret the photographer wasn't invited to.
My stomach drops — the same freefall I get when Troy goes quiet and I hear the chair push back. I was the other woman. Someone's betrayal dressed up as a girl too desperate to fill a stranger's silence to ask the only question that mattered.
I dress without a sound. Fingers shaking, buttons wrong twice, copper on my tongue from biting my cheek. I carry my boots down the hallway, past the kitchen where our glasses are still on the counter, and ease the front door open.
The gravel driveway bites my bare soles. The sky is going pink over the barn and the land stretches flat in every direction. I sit on the bottom porch step and pull my boots on with shaking hands.
A horse blows air somewhere in the stable and the sound nearly breaks me because it sounds like home and I'm running from it.
I start walking.