Page 46 of Ransom
After, we collapsed.
I didn't pull out. I lay there with my chest against his back and my arm around him and my softening cock still in him, and he reached back and put his hand on the back of my thigh and held me there. Neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke. The lamp threw long shadows. The cat scratched once at the door and gave up.
After a long time, I pulled out. Slowly. He hissed. I pressed my hand against the small of his back and apologized without saying anything.
I should have gotten up. I should have found a towel, cleaned us both off, put some distance between his body and mine before the heat faded and the thinking started. That was what I did. That was how it worked. You fucked, and you cleaned up and you went back to being separate people.
I rolled onto my back beside him instead.
The bed was too small for two men our size. His shoulder and hip were pressed against mine. The sheets were a mess, and the room smelled like sex and sweat.
"You got a crack in your ceiling," Winston said, eventually.
"I know."
"Looks like it's getting worse."
"Probably is."
"You gonna patch it?"
"Been meaning to for two years."
"That's a long time to mean to do something."
"It's a small crack."
He let it go. The cat came out from under the bed, jumped up, walked across both of us, and curled up against the back of Winston's knees. He laughed softly.
After a while, he turned his head on the pillow. I kept my eyes on the ceiling.
"Tell me about your brother," he said.
The warmth in my chest went cold.
I should have expected it. Winston was a man who found the soft spots and pressed on them, and he'd been circling Chance since the first day, since the shack, since he'd asked how long's it been and I'd given him eyes instead of an answer.
"You read his file," I said.
"I read a file." His voice had stripped of the Ranger authority and the folksy misdirection both, just the way a man sounded when he was lying in someone else's bed and asking something real. "A file says lightning strike, ten years, UNM Hospital. A file doesn't say anything that matters."
I stared at the crack in the ceiling.
"Chance is my brother," I said. "He's in a bed in Albuquerque. He's been in that bed since I was eighteen. A machine breathes for him and a tube feeds him, and once a month I drive up and sit in a chair next to him and talk to him about the ranch because the doctors say he might be able to hear me." My throat ached. "That's what matters."
Winston was quiet for a long time.
"What was he like?" he asked.
The photo on the nightstand was face down where it had fallen when I'd shoved Winston into the wall. Chance's grin pressed against the wood, invisible, but I could see it anyway. I could always see it.
"Loud," I said. "He was loud. Laughed too much. Talked too much. Picked fights with people twice his size because he thought it was funny." My throat ached. "He would've liked you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. He had a thing for men who ran their mouths."
Winston laughed once, quietly. His shoulder pressed warm against mine.
