Wade came in last. He said nothing at all. He sat down on the bench beside me, his shoulder solid and warm against mine, one large hand resting open on his knee with his palm turned up, present, not pressing. The gunpowder scent of him settled around me alongside the black orchid from Rhett and the warm outdoor smell of Cole, and all three of them layered into the air around my own heavy heat-scent, and my body understood something about that before I finished forming the thought.
The heat peaked.
It moved through me in waves, each one cresting higher than the one before, my face and chest flushed and my breath coming in shallow pulls that I was trying to make deeper and failing. Cole pressed a cup of water into my free hand and I drank it without tasting it. Rhett’s voice was steady in front of me, low and even, talking me through slow breaths with the particular focused patience he never showed at the dinner table, no joke in it now, no angle, just the sound of him giving me something to follow with my lungs. Wade’s thumb moved in slow, unhurried circles against the inside of my wrist, againstthe place where my pulse was hammering, the rhythm of it deliberate and grounding.
My grip on the bench edge loosened by degrees.
I stopped forming sentences. There was a period where I was aware of single words only, and then not even those, just the warmth of them around me and the weight of Hope pressing her slow, certain presence against my palm where my hand had come to rest against the swell of her. My head tipped back against the barn wall and the ceiling above me was old timber and thin winter light coming through the gaps in the boards, and I let the heat do what it was doing without fighting it for the first time.
Cole’s hands moved to my shoulders.
He worked from the base of my neck outward, his thumbs finding the knot that had lived between my shoulder blades since October and applying the slow, steady pressure of a man who intended to stay as long as the work required. My shoulders dropped away from my ears. The release of it traveled up through my jaw, into the tension I had been holding there without knowing, and I exhaled a sound I had not planned to make.
Rhett brushed the hair back from my face.
He did it with the same careful, practical attention he had used with the cloth and the blanket on other nights, two fingers gathering the loose strands from my cheek and moving them back, and his usual humor was entirely quiet in him, nothing deflecting, nothing managing the room. Just his attention, full and still and given over entirely to me.
I turned toward him.
He met me where I was, his mouth warm and unhurried, his hands gentle at my jaw, steady and careful around the swollen weight of me in the same instinctive, unrehearsed way they were always careful. I brought one hand up and closed it into the fabric of his shirt and felt him smile against my mouth before he kissed me properly, and the heat that had been moving through me in waves found a different direction, a focus, a channel.
Wade’s hand had moved to the small of my back.
He pressed into the tight muscles there with the flat, even pressure that he had learned weeks ago worked, and I tipped my weight into it without deciding to, my spine unwinding by degrees, one knot giving way and then another. Cole’s mouth found the side of my neck, warm and deliberate, and I heard a sound that was mine and did not try to swallow it.
They worked around Hope, careful and completely serious about it, adjusting without being asked, their hands and their attention moving above and below and around the weight of her with the instinctive choreography of people who had been paying close attention for long enough to know the map. Rhett’s forearm settled below her when I leaned back, supporting rather than pressing. Wade kept his palm over her when his mouth moved elsewhere, warm and flat and constant.
I let them.
I let them without managing it, without keeping track of the correct distance or monitoring the shape of what I was asking for. My hands found warm skin and worn cotton and I held on, and the last of the rigid thing I had been carrying, the particular locked quality of a person who had carried themselves for too long alone, gave way somewhere beneath Rhett’s handsand Cole’s mouth and Wade’s steady palm, and I stopped being careful about it.
The heat broke gradually, the highest edge of it receding the way a fever broke, not all at once, but in degrees, each wave a fraction lower than the one before, until what remained was the warmth of the barn and the warmth of them and the clean, exhausted quiet of a body that had finally been given what it was asking for.
I was aware, slowly, of the bench beneath me. Of the smell of the barn returning to its ordinary self around the sweetness still in the air. Of Wade’s shoulder under my head, my cheek against the worn canvas of his coat. Cole’s hand rested at the base of my neck, his thumb barely moving. Rhett sat at my feet with his back against the stall door and his legs stretched out in front of him, looking at the middle distance with an expression I did not have the energy to interpret, and he did not seem to need me to.
A horse shifted in the next stall. The wind found the gap under the barn door and moved through the loose straw along the floor. Somewhere above us, the weathervane turned in its slow, creaking arc.
Nobody said anything.
The afternoon light lay across the floor of the barn in its long, late-winter bars, pale and exact, catching the dust still suspended in the air from earlier, the gold of it settling slowly back toward the ground.
***
The loft was narrow and warm in the way of closed spaces that had collected the day’s light and held it. The boards beneath me were old and smooth, worn by years of use into a surface that had no splinters left in it, and the hay in the far corner gave offits dry, faintly sweet smell that had nothing to do with warmth and everything to do with the particular quality of a place where living things had been housed and tended. I lay back against the incline of the old grain sacks that had been there since before I owned this ranch and watched the late afternoon come through the slats in its narrow gold bars, each one precise and still, the dust in them hanging without movement in the trapped air.
The heat had left me loose in every joint. Not weak, it was not weakness, exactly. It was the quality of a body that had been wrung through something and had arrived on the other side of it. My skin still trembled at the surface, a fine, residual trembling that I felt most in the backs of my hands and along the inside of my arms. The smell of the loft was us, all four of us, hay and sweat and the heavy sweet floral that was mine and underneath it the warm cedar and outdoor smell of Cole and Rhett’s black orchid and the gunpowder trace of Wade, all of it wound into the enclosed air until I could not have separated one from another and did not try.
Cole slid beside me. “Mark me!” I demanded, panting.
He moved with the same unhurried quality he brought to all of it, no announcement, no ceremony, just his body alongside mine and his warmth solid against my arm. His hand was at the back of my neck, his thumb finding the hollow at the base of my skull, and then his mouth was there. The pressure was light at first, his lips at the back of my neck, and then his teeth closed against my skin with the particular precision of something deliberate, and the sensation came in a single clean wave from the bite outward, copper on the back of my tongue as he bit down, heat flooding down through my shoulders, every nerve in me registering the fact of it before I had finished forming a thought about what it meant. My fingers found his arm and closed around it. I was not holding on from alarm. Iwas holding on because the bite had marked me, made me his, done something to the center of me that needed steadying, a bell struck and still ringing, and I held his arm and breathed.
Rhett moved in behind me.
His hands were gentle at my jaw, turning my face slightly, and I felt his breath at the soft hollow below my jaw before I felt the bite itself. When it came it was precise, he was precise about things that mattered to him, more precise than his easy manner suggested, and my breath caught in the back of my throat, a short involuntary sound that I felt rather than heard. His teeth held for a moment before releasing, and the mark he had left was warm and tender immediately, a warmth that radiated out into my jaw and my ear and down through the line of my throat. His fingers threaded through my hair, gathering it back from my face in the same careful, unhurried way he had moved it back in the heat, and he pressed his lips to the mark without pressure, just there.
I felt the low, settled sound that came out of me somewhere below my ribs.
Wade knelt in front of me.
