Page 39 of Thunder

It's the hardest I've ever come and the quietest, forced inward with nowhere to go.

He follows me a few strokes later with his face buried in my neck and his groan swallowed against my skin.

We lie there after in the dark, both of us shaking, his heart slamming against mine, his weight a warm anchor holding me to the earth.

He unbuckles my wrists after and rubs the feeling back into them, slowly, pressing his mouth to the faint red marks the belt left, and neither of us says anything for a while.

This is the part I'm not ready for.

The after. The tenderness.

The sex I could always tell myself was just sex, but this—him cradling my wrists and kissing where the leather bit, checking me over like I'm something precious—this is the part that's going to wreck me when it all comes apart.

Because it is going to come apart.

That's what I can't ever quite forget, even here, even now.

"Stay till the alarm," he murmurs into my hair. "Slip out before Raine's up. I know the drill by now."

"Yeah."

"One of these days you won't have to."

I don't answer that. I can't.

He knows I can't, and he lets it go, and he pulls me in against his chest and I let myself have a few hours of pretending, the way I do every night now, the way I swore to Mitch's ashes I'd never let myself do with a man in this life again.

I'm getting really good at pretending.

It's starting to scare me how good.

* * *

Grace comes out to the pens the next afternoon to check on Number 68.

I didn't call her this time.

She texted me first, said she was on the ranch anyway and would swing by and take a look.

I stood there holding my phone a full minute after because Grace texting me first isn’t something that's happened since the hospital.

Small.

But it landed in my whole chest.

She's warmer today.

Not warm.

Not us-from-before, not love you see you at supper.

But she gives me a real nod when she gets out of the truck, and she asks how my week's been like she halfway wants to know.

When she looks the heifer over she talks me through what she's seeing instead of working in silence.

"Lungs sound clean now." She straightens up, peeling off a glove. "You did good with her. But I'd give her another couple days in quarantine, away from the herd, before you turn her back out. Just to be safe. No sense risking the whole group over a few days' patience."

"Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Grace."