Page 60 of Rope Burn

Boots scuff along the concrete walkway. They pass our door. The strip of light under the sill flickers as a shadow crosses it, and every muscle in my body loads to move. A key rattles into a lock a few doors down. A television voice spills out and gets cut off when the door shuts behind it.

The air conditioner ticks and rattles beneath the window. I don't tell her it's nothing. I start moving her again, and that's the answer.

The pace builds under my hands. I lift and drop her faster, deeper, the grind at the bottom of every stroke dragging tremors out of her that run straight through her body into mine. The bed creaks once, and I shift my knees until it stops. Sweat slicks the skin where her thighs press my hips.

Her breath breaks into short, ragged bursts against my mouth, and her throat strains around sounds she won't let out. She's holding them for me. She's holding her own wrists because I told her to, straining with the effort of both, and her eyes never leave mine.

When she's so close that every downstroke jerks through her, I put my lips to her ear. "Who's got the door?"

"You do," she breathes, so quietly it barely exists.

"Then let go."

I take my eyes off the door and put them on her.

She comes without a sound. It starts deep, one hard pull of her body around my cock that stops my breath, and then it breaks over her. Her back bows against her own locked arms and drives her breasts against my shirt. Her forehead grinds into mine. Her mouth falls open on a cry that never reaches the air, and her teeth come down on her lower lip hard enough to whiten it.

Inside, she grips, releases, and grips again, slick heat pulsing around me in long, dragging pulls that try to take me over the edge with her. Her thighs shudder against my hips. Her toes curl into the bedspread. A breath saws in through her nose, ragged and shaking, and the scream she won't let out lives in every muscle I'm holding.

Her hands stay locked behind her back through all of it. I hold her down on me and grind her through every wave, watching her face until the last one lets her go.

Watching her is what finishes me. I drive up into her one last time, hard enough to jolt her full weight against my ribs, and the pain and the heat hit together. My balls draw tight. I pin her down on me with my fingers dug into her hips deep enough to leave marks, bury my face in the curve of her shoulder, and come inside her in long, hard pulses that tear loose from low in my gut and keep coming.

The sound comes up my throat, and I kill it there. I bite down on the muscle of her shoulder instead, and her body answers with one more slow pull around me that wrings out the last of it. My ribs scream. I let them. I ride it out with my arms wrapped hard around her and her quick breath against my neck until there's nothing left in me but the weight of her.

For a long time, neither of us moves. I reach behind her and find her hands, still clamped around her own wrist, and I open her fingers one at a time.

"You can let go now."

Her arms come around my neck, stiff from holding, and she presses her face into my throat. I lay her down on the bed and drag my jeans back up over my hips, then buckle the belt one-handed. I take the side of the bed nearest the door and stretch out on my back, where I can watch it. She curls into my side with her head on my shoulder.

"You're still wearing your boots," she whispers.

"I might have to leave in a hurry."

"I know. You were listening the whole time."

"Not the whole time."

She goes quiet at that. Then her fingers tighten at the back of my neck, and she stays where she is.

I draw the sheet up over her and stay on top of the covers, boots and all. She falls asleep curled against me with my arm around her, and I lie awake with my eyes on the door, listening to the lot.

Before first light, we load both vehicles and move to a motel across town. Morgan's name stays off the register.

The second go of team roping starts early in the slack. Clint runs his steer with Quinn and hands his horse off again, and this time I don't follow. I have a different errand.

The sorrel's owner put the horse on my hauling declaration for the next stop, so I have a reason to be at the compliance trailer. I walk up to the window with the declaration in my hand and ask whether it cleared. The clerk from the east chute is behind the counter. He doesn't recognize me, or he's good at pretending he doesn't.

His name is stitched above the APRA logo on his polo: T. TOLLIVER. Until now, the man who hands out those envelopes had a face in my photographs and nothing else. Now Torres can put a name to him. He tells me my paperwork is fine. I thank him and walk to my truck at an easy pace, and from the cab I text Torres.

Compliance clerk from yesterday's east chute photos: T. Tolliver, name stitched on his APRA shirt. Working the trailer window this morning.

Tonight is the short round, the last go of the rodeo, and tomorrow the whole circuit hauls out for the next stop. I spend the afternoon keeping the borrowed sorrel loose for it, with one eye on the east chute. Nothing moves through it. When my turn comes under the lights, the steer runs straight and lies down easy, and the time holds my place in the average.

By the time the evening performance lets out, the competitor bar is packed shoulder to shoulder. Clint is right where I expected him to be, at the end of the counter with a beer in his hand and a young woman at his elbow.

She's not the woman from Clint's trailer. I watched her run barrels earlier tonight. Her back number is still pinned to her shirt, and there's no friend anywhere in sight.