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“I, um, well… with you gone, the dogs kind of looked to me for instructions. And I wanted them to stay behind to keep an eye on the animals. So I told them to stay. And Captain stayed. And I didn’t want to take it back and have them all come…”
“They’d have stayed if you had just asked Captain to come,” he informed me, but there was a furrowing of his brow.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. They just… they never take commands from anyone else.”
“Are you jealous?” I asked, feeling my lips tip up at the idea.
“Haven’t seen that in a while,” he mumbled, so low I was sure I misheard him. “Not jealous. Just curious. Not a dog expert, but I think this means they are starting to see you as part of the pack.”
“I like that,” I admitted, gaze dropping a little. “It’s nice to fit in.”
“Meadow…” he started, voice a slow, low sound, something that shivered across my skin then down into my belly, a delicious sensation.
My head rose, gaze finding his on me, waiting, expectant almost.
“Yeah?”
“I’m a fuck.”
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“I’m a fuck. Back in the sawmill. Then after. I’m a fuck.”
“Ah, okay…” I said, unsure what he expected from me. To deny it? Because, well, I couldn’t exactly do that. He’d been pretty hurtful.
“I was a little over-emo…”
“Nope,” he cut me off, shaking his head. “Nope. You don’t get to share the blame. You’re a good person. Good people like to try to do that even if they had no part in it. And you didn’t. Have any part in it,” he clarified. “It was me. I was a fuck. Didn’t know exactly what to say, so I said nothing. Then too much time was passing. It got…”
“Awkward,” I supplied.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “See, the thing is. The way I figure it, if you’re going to stay, if we’re going to still work side-by-side, we need to be able to communicate. Now, I can’t claim it is a strong suit of mine.”
“It’s not mine either,” I confessed.
“But I’m gonna try. And in the interest of that, I think we need to talk. About the sawmill.”
“No, it’s… we don’t have…”
“We have to talk about it,” he cut me off. “You need to understand.”
“I think it was pretty clear.”
“No, see, that just proves it wasn’t. Things like that, they can’t just happen. There needs to be a discussion. It felt like I was taking advantage.”
“You weren’t taking advantage.”
“It was too soon.”
“I think that is my place to decide. Was,” I clarified. “It was my place.”
“I wasn’t sure you were even ready, emotionally, to make that decision.”
“You could have asked me.”
“Think I explained my shitty communication skills,” he told me, lips slipping up into a self-deprecating smirk. “But I will work on it. Asking instead of assuming.”
“That might make things easier,” I agreed. “I’ll try too,” I added. My gaze fell, studying his hands planted on the tabletop to the sides of me, big, strong hands that had slipped up my thighs, sank into my bare ass, filled my body with promise. Right before he ripped it away, of course. “Ranger?”
“Yeah?”
“Was it just an impulse thing?” I heard myself ask, throat tightening uncomfortably. But if he was going to try, so was I too. Even if I was sure I was somehow choking on my own heart.
“Was what an impulse thing?”
“Kissing me,” I clarified, voice small enough to be hard to hear even to my own ears. “Did you actually, you know, want to? Or was it just a weird, spur of the moment, it’s been too long kind of thing?”
The sound that came from above me was suspiciously similar to a snort, a sound that raised my curiosity enough to overcome my sudden case of insecurity, making my head turn up.
To find him looking down at me, eyes intense. “I wanted to,” he told me, voice a little scratchy. “Thought about it a lot. More than I should have, given the situation.”
“You know what I realized?” I asked as my belly fluttered around in a way that was both uncomfortable, and yet intoxicating.
“What’s that?”
“Maybe there aren’t any ‘shoulds’ in this kind of situation. Maybe that kind of pressure on top of everything else isn’t going to help anything. If it feels right, then it is right. I mean… that’s what I decided anyway. I don’t know what the textbooks on the topic would say.”
“Who the fuck cares what some stranger who isn’t going through it says anyway?”
“Exactly,” I agreed, nodding. “So I am going to stick with my new motto.”
“If it feels right, it is right,” he repeated.
“Exactly.” My smile slipped a bit as my gaze fell again, taking a deep breath, trying to find just a tiny bit more courage. “Hey, Ranger?”
“Yeah?” he asked as my head lifted again.
“Kissing you felt right,” I told him, the words nearly tripping over one another in a rush to get out, but they did. They got out.
