Page 4 of Broken Cedar

In the city, I eat dinner alone most nights. I stand at my kitchen counter with a container of delivery and my phone propped against the toaster, and I tell myself this is independence. This is success. This is the life I chose.

But chosen things can be lonely. And right now, with Colt’s dishwater-warm hands passing me a wet plate to dry, with Mom humming some old country song by the sink, I am so hungry for this—for this—that it physically hurts.

Colt’s fingers brush mine as he hands me the last plate. Our eyes meet over the rim of the plate. His are steady. Mine are not. Neither of us says a word.

* * *

The spare room used to be my room. That’s the first thing I think when I close the door behind me. This narrow bed, this window facing the pasture, this dresser with the drawer that always sticks—they were mine, once. Mom has turned it into a guest room, which is her way of being kind without being obvious about it.

I unzip my suitcase and start unpacking because unpacking is a thing I can do. Blouses on hangers. Jeans folded into the drawer. Toiletries lined up on the dresser top.

Our old yearbooks are on the shelf above the dresser. Three of them, spines cracked, covers dog-eared. I pull down the one from our senior year and let it fall open in my lap. There’s Colt, three rows back in the group photo, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Then there’s me, front row, smiling so hard my cheeks must have hurt. On the facing page, in the narrow margin beside the club photos, someone has written in blue pen:

Hallie—Don’t forget the creek. —C

I gently close the yearbook.

In the city, I have a corner office with my name on the door. Friends who remember my birthday. A career I’ve fought hard for. A life I built one careful decision at a time. No one looks at me and sees the girl who grew up on Broken Cedar Ranch. They see the woman who closes impossible deals and never misses a deadline. I worked hard to become her.

But sitting here with Colt’s handwriting still fresh in my mind, it all feels strangely far away. Not because it isn’t real. Because, for the first time in years, it isn’t the only life I can imagine.

Somewhere in the house, a door closes. Colt’s footsteps, probably, heading to his room down the hall. I listen to them—the familiar weight of his stride, the creak of the floorboards he hits every time—and something in my chest pulls tight, like a wire drawn to breaking.

I slide the yearbook back onto the shelf. Then I lie down on the spare bed in the spare room and stare at the ceiling. The house goes quiet around eleven. Mom’s bedroom door closes first, then Colt’s door down the hall. I lie in the dark and count the sounds. I cannot sleep.

My body has other ideas. Ideas that involve Colt’s knee pressed against mine under the dinner table. Ideas that involve the way his shirt clung to his shoulders when he sweated through it earlier, dark patches spreading across cotton like a map of places I wanted to put my hands.

I turn onto my side. The sheets are cool against my skin. My hand moves before my brain can stop it. Under the waistband of my sleep shorts, and lower, until my fingertips find the heat between my legs. I’m already wet. Of course I am. My body has always been more honest than the rest of me.

I circle once, lightly, and my hips jump off the mattress like I’ve been shocked.

“Shit,” I breathe. I force myself to slow down, because rushing this means it’ll be over too fast, and what I need right now isn’t quick relief—it’s something deeper, something that might actually take the edge off the wanting that’s been building since I crested that ridge and saw the red barn waiting.

So I take my time. My fingers move in slow circles, building pressure gradually, letting the sensation spread. My other hand finds my breast through my thin camisole, pinching lightly at the nipple, and bite my lip to keep from making noise. The house is quiet. The walls are thin. Colt is twenty feet away.

Colt.

The name becomes the fantasy. First, his hands. Rough palms, callused fingers. Those hands on my hips, holding me down. Those hands between my legs, replacing my own. His voice in my ear, low and rough the way it gets when he’s been working all day: Hallie. Look at me.

I don’t have to try very hard. The images come on their own, vivid and merciless. Colt at the fence, sweat-dark shirt, forearms corded with effort. In my head, he’s above me now, his weight pressing me into this narrow bed, his mouth on my neck, his hips between my thighs.

“Fuck,” I whisper into the pillow, and my fingers move faster.

I am depraved. Actually, clinically depraved. But the depravity feels good, and my body is rewarding me for it—tension building low in my belly, heat spreading through my thighs, my breathing gone short and ragged against the pillow. I curl my fingers, finding the spot that makes my back arch, and the fantasy sharpens: Colt inside me, filling me, his rhythm steady the way he does everything, patient and thorough and impossible to rush.

“Colt,” I say, or think I say—it might just be a sound, a broken, desperate noise that gets swallowed by the pillow. My hips are moving now, chasing my hand, and the friction is perfect, and the fantasy of him—above me, inside me, his face tense with the effort of holding back—is so vivid I could reach out and touch it.

My orgasm hits like something breaking. A wave, then another, then a third, each one pulling a gasp from my throat that I muffle against the pillow with my free hand. My body goes tight, then tighter, then shatters, and for three glorious seconds, everything makes sense. Then it’s over.

The room comes back. The darkness. The quiet. The narrow bed with its patchwork quilt and its single pillow. My hand is still between my legs, slick and trembling, and the edge is still there. Sharper than before. Hungrier.

I pull my hand free and wipe it on the sheet. Then I lie there in the dark with my heart hammering and my skin too sensitive for the sheets, and the hollow, aching certainty that seeing him again was a mistake. The thought is enough to keep me awake.

Chapter Two

Iwake to the sound of trucks. My eyes open. My hand is curled against my stomach, and I have the distinct, mortifying memory of where that hand was six hours ago, and whose name was in my head when everything went white behind my eyelids.

Six hours of sleep. Maybe five. Not enough for a day like today.