by Joanna Bell
He wasn't gentle. He wasn't slow, either. And still, somehow, I needed more of him. I was barely holding onto the table, my knees were on the verge of buckling, and still I needed more.
"I want to feel you come," he panted, bending all the way down over me and sucking my earlobe into his mouth. "Do you hear me? I want – baby, oh fuck – I want to feel your little pussy coming around my – ohhh, fuck, Astrid. Ohhh..."
It worked, too. Like some kind of dark magic, just being told what he wanted from me shoved me right to the very edge of giving it to him. I bit my lower lip and whimpered as he quickened his movements, barely pulling out at all. A droplet of sweat ran down my forehead as he reached between my legs and ran that single finger over my clit again. Once, then twice, and then over and over.
I never knew. I never knew I was one of those women who wanted to be taken. Not until Cillian Devlin took me, and the pure relief of being dragged out of myself – out of my own insecurity and anxiety and worry-filled head – proved utterly addictive.
My muscles tightened as the surge approached. There was nothing for me except him. Nothing except the sweetness of being opened, invaded, taken over. Of being fucked.
"Mmmmm..." I moaned into my own forearm, losing it. "Mmm. Ohhh."
He was there, too. I tried to brace myself but I was suddenly floating in white space, barely human as my body pulsed and burned underneath Cillian.
"Fuck," he panted. "Oh, Astrid. Oh baby, I can feel you. Oh Jesus. I can... feel you."
He grasped my hips when he came, pushing himself into me so hard the table suddenly splintered loudly.
***
"I don't know if I can stand up," I panted, a few moments later. The only reason I didn't collapse to the floor was Cillian's arm, locked around my waist at the moment the table gave way.
"Jesus," he chuckled. "OK. OK. Hold on. Give me a sec."
He eased himself out of me, employing a gentleness that had not been in evidence seconds before. Then he took my hands in his and helped me, slowly, to stand upright again.
"Are you OK?" He whispered as I leaned back against him. "I didn't break you did I?"
"No," I smiled, still catching my breath. "But I don't think the table was so lucky."
We glanced down at the table. It looked like it might be fine, just slightly angled downwards on one side. But as soon as Cillian gave it a gentle push, the leg on the lower side collapsed completely. He laughed out loud.
"Goddamn, we broke it."
***
I was full. Fuller than I had ever been. Full of food, full of Cillian Devlin's warmth, full of just being with him. My eyelids began to flutter closed seconds after I was in bed. Cillian climbed in next to me and just as I was about to slip into dreamland my phone rang.
"Ignore it," I mumbled. "I'll check it when I wake up. I forgot I turned it on."
But it kept ringing and Cillian got out of bed to fish it out of my purse.
"It's your mother."
My mom. I had to tell her. I had to tell her – and my dad – that I was married to a seafood-hating cowboy they'd never met. I had to tell them I was moving to Montana – forever.
Yes. Later.
I dropped off to sleep with the cowboy's hand on my belly and the storm-clouds of reality gathering on the horizon.
Chapter 13: Cillian
A few days after we got married in Las Vegas, Astrid and I flew back to Montana to meet my family. To meet my dad, mostly, because his opinion was the only one that mattered and everyone except his new daughter-in-law knew it.
She slept through the first part of the flight, curled up next to me with her head in my lap, and I caught myself absentmindedly stroking her cheek as the first snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains appeared below us.
I'm not an idiot. I mean, I am an idiot. I learned that the hard way. But I wasn't as big of an idiot as some people – very possibly including Astrid herself – thought I was. Sure, we'd just spent the better part of a week in bed, gorging on each other like starving animals on fresh meat. And yes, being with her made me feel like I was a kid again and it was the last day of school before summer vacation. But I knew she was a stranger. I understood that we didn't really know each other at all, regardless of how insanely hot the sex was.
I'm not a robot, either. I've had feelings for girls before. They just weren't the same feelings I had for Astrid. With other women, my emotions were about me. If whatever random I was seeing that week had to work late and couldn't see me that night, I might get annoyed. Or, alternatively, if said random suddenly got it into her head that my willingness to let her suck my dick translated into a willingness to spend time with her outside of dick-sucking-related activities, I might get irritated.
And yeah, I know that makes me sound like an asshole. It makes me sound like an asshole because I was an asshole. A real triple-A, premium grade asshole. And like almost all true assholes, I didn't have the first clue I was one.
Still. Astrid Walker made me feel things. Things I had not felt before I met her. Things that turned me into the kind of man who strokes a woman's cheek while she sleeps and then ponders precisely how soft that cheek is, how translucently fragile the skin under his touch.
Astrid herself seemed fragile. I've never liked fragility in others – it freaks me out, makes me wonder when they're going to crack and let me down. But in her? In her all it did was fill me with the bull-headed need to look after her. To protect her.
I never wanted to protect anything before – except cattle, and only then because they're worth money and my dad would have killed me if I ever did anything to fuck with his income.
"What are you looking at?"
My girl was awake, looking up at me sleepily. A flood of something warm and unfamiliar filled my heart.
"The mountains. We'll be there soon."
She turned towards me and nestled her face into my belly. If we hadn't already fucked twice that morning I would have been instantly ready again. "Are you nervous?"
"A little. I'm sure it'll be fine."
In truth, I was nervous as hell. Before I met Astrid, what I cared about was my dad's approval of my choice of wife. After I met Astrid, what I cared about was her approval of my dad – of my whole messed up family.
"Do you think so?"
I nodded unconvincingly. "Uh-huh. Yeah. Why wouldn't it be? How about you – when are you going to tell your parents?"
I had a feeling that my wife's parents were going to be less than entirely happy with me. Even in Sweetgrass Ridge, where the Devlin family rules unchallenged, not all the parents of the girls I got involved with were overjoyed about it.
She sighed and sat up. "I'm not sure. It has to be in person, though. At least Ava already knows."
"She thinks it was stupid – doesn't she?"
Astrid met my gaze before turning towards the window and pressing her forehead against it, looking straight down. "Yeah. She does. I should warn you my parents are probably going to react the same way. We'll need to give them some time to get used to it."
Time. I took a sip of flat champagne and pondered how much time it might take Astrid's mom and dad to come around to their daughter being married to a cowshit-smelling rube from Nowheresville. They were wealthy in their own right – much wealthier than Jack Devlin – so I wasn't even going to be able to impress them with the family fortune.
"The mountains are so weird."
Astrid still had her face pressed against the window.
"Are they?" I asked.
"Yeah. Don't they feel oppressive sometimes?"
"Not really."
"It's like they're watching you. Every time you look up in that town, there they are."
I'm not sure I ever gave the Rocky Mountains more than a second's thought in my entire life. They were just there, the way the sky and the clouds are just there.
"You grew up in Florida, though – right?" I asked, as if being not entirely sure where your own wife grew up is a normal thing.
&n
bsp; "Mostly, yeah."
"So you're used to – well there aren't any mountains in Florida. Are there?"
Astrid giggled the giggle I was starting to recognize as the 'you're so cute and dumb' giggle. "No. It's mostly flat and swampy – not around where I live, though."
"I bet."
She turned and gave me a look. "I just meant I live in the city. How many swampy cities do you know of?"
I shrugged. "I dunno. How about that one in Europe with all the canals – Sydney?"
I managed to keep a straight face for about 4 seconds as Astrid's eyes widened. "Cillian, Sydney is in –"
"Australia," I laughed. "I know. And it's Venice with the canals. I'm just foolin' with ya."
She gave me a playful slap on the arm before her expression suddenly became serious.
"What?" I asked, teasing her. "Are you mad you couldn't make fun of me for not knowing where Sydney is?"
"No," she smiled. "I'm not mad. I was just thinking. I was thinking last night, actually – when you were asleep. About you not having a passport."
She was so beautiful. It's not that I wasn't listening to her – I was. But she really was distractingly pretty. Just watching her lips move as she talked had an almost mesmerizing effect on me. I leaned forward and kissed her. "Don't worry, Miss Fancy-Pants. I'll get a passport. I'll get 10 passports if it'll make you happy."
Astrid lowered her eyes shyly for just a second, the way she always does right after I kiss her. "No, I'm not talking about that – although you should definitely get a passport. I'm talking about – well, I think I'm actually kind of jealous of people like you."
"Jealous?" I asked. "Of non-travelling rubes?"
She shook her head. "No. I'm not kidding. I'm jealous of your rootedness, I guess?"
"My 'rootedness?'" I replied, raising my eyebrows. "I don't even know what that means."
She pursed her lips, pondering. "Yes you do. It means what it sounds like. How rooted someone is. You know, to the place where they live. I'm starting to think my take on that kind of life may be a little unsophisticated."
If there was one thing Astrid Walker was not, it was unsophisticated. It was also, by then, not the first time she'd launched into a conversation that made me feel distinctly out of my depth. Unusually – because I don't generally like feeling stupid – it didn't bother me. It never did with her. Instead of feeling like her intelligence was some kind of personal insult, I was just proud of it. Proud to be with a girl like her. It hadn't even been a week at that point and she was already, without either of us being conscious of it, rearranging furniture in the rooms of my soul.
"Oh yeah?" I prompted, just happy to listen to her talk even if half of it flew over my head.
"Yeah. It's just about values, isn't it – what people value? My social milieu values travel and we don't really value rootedness. If I had refused to leave Miami, my parents would have thought –"
"Your what?" I asked. "You're mil-what?"
"Milieu. It just means your environment, your crowd, your scene."
No, I definitely had no idea what she was talking about. I sure liked listening to her talk about it, though.
"Anyway," she continued, "I'm just saying I think there's something to be said for rootedness. There's something to be said for not just knowing where you come from but for staying there. When did you say your ancestors came to Sweetgrass Ridge?"
"Late 1800s. And it was ancestor – just the one. Seán Devlin. It was him that founded Sweetgrass Ridge."
"Really?" Astrid replied, looking almost stricken.
"Yeah. Is that bad?"
"No!" She cried, grabbing and squeezing my forearm in her enthusiasm. "That's what I'm jealous of! It's what I said – it's the rootedness. You know that land, don't you? I mean you really know that place. And your family knew it, the ones who came before you. They didn't just know it – they built it! That's so crazy to me. I wish I had something like that."
"You don't?" I asked, confused. "What about Miami?"
But she'd already told me only her dad was actually born in Miami, to parents who had themselves only been there for a year.
"It's different," she said quietly. "It's not like it is for you in Sweetgrass Ridge. I don't have a history like you do, all in one place."
Do you want to know why I loved her? Why I loved her even then, before I was ready to fully admit it even to myself? It wasn't just because our naked bodies fit together like long-lost puzzle pieces or because her desperate sighs drove me to complete, helpless distraction. It was because she made me think. She made me think like no one else ever did, forcing my mind to use muscles I didn't even know it had.
She was right about Sweetgrass Ridge and my history there. She was right that not many people – including her – had a history like that, so neatly tied to a specific place. I took it for granted my whole life, the same way I took the big open skies and the mountains for granted.
I pulled my wife back onto my lap and kissed her cheek. "When I was little," I told her, "my dad used to drag us out some weekends and make us buck hay."
"What's bucking hay?"
"Just stacking it, piling it up."
"What, just loose hay?"
I chuckled at the idea of tossing loose hay around. "No, bales. My dad would have whipped our asses raw if we chucked hay all over his barn, believe me. Anyway, yeah. He used to make us do that in the fall, when the –"
"Cillian?"
Astrid was looking worriedly up at me. I put one of my hands on her belly and slid it around her waist. Jesus Christ her skin was soft.
"What?"
"Did you just say your dad used to whip you?"
Like I said, there were a thousand little differences between us – to go along with the thousand big ones.
"Yeah," I replied, shrugging. "Not like with an actual whip or anything. Just a leather belt."
"Just a leather belt?"
I nodded. "It's not like we got daily beatings – he only did it if we fucked up."
I was aware of being studied as I detailed my dad's willingness to mete out corporal punishment to his misbehaving sons. Astrid watched my face as I spoke, as if searching for hidden clues.
"What?" I asked again, when she reached up and touched my face with the kind of tenderness I would have thought more appropriate to a confession that I had been routinely tortured as a child. "It really wasn't a big deal."
She kept her hand on my face, caressing my cheek. "So that's why you're so closed off."
I exhaled and turned to look out the window, not prepared for the conversation to go where it seemed to be going.
"I was just trying to tell you a story," I said, not quite managing to keep a note of defensive irritation out of my voice. "And I'm not – what did you say? I'm not closed off. Or maybe I am. Fuck it – I don't even know what that means."
"Cillian?"
A few moments had passed. I was looking out the window again, watching the lower slopes of the mountains soften into foothills. We would be landing soon.
"I'm sorry," I said, looking back at my wife. "I didn't mean to snap. I think I was just too focused on telling my story."
"You didn't snap at me," she replied. "We don't have to talk about anything you don't want to talk about. And I still want to hear your story."
"Do you?"
Astrid took one of my hands and held it against her against her own cheek, nestling into it, and I swear to God my heart almost exploded. "Yes. I do. Your dad used to take you out to – what did you say? Buck hay?"
"Yeah. To buck hay in the barn. He started it when we were really young – I remember before Connor was even a year old he had him out there crawling around in the barn with the rest of us. And once we had it all bucked up into the hayloft he would make us climb the ladder and throw it back down and do it all over again."
"Why?"
"Trying to toughen us up, I think. It worked, too. When I was 15 I probably could have bucked 10 goddamn fields' worth in
an hour."
"Yeah," Astrid smiled slyly, glancing up at me. "It's too bad you're so weak and puny now."
"Careful, woman," I warned, unable to keep myself from smiling back at her.
We were a couple of lovesick, sex-drunk fools and I loved every minute of it.
"So your dad used to make you work hard?"
"Yeah," I replied, dragging my focus away from her and back to the story. "And sometimes my mom would make a big plate of mayo and bologna sandwiches and bring them out to us. You probably think that sounds gross but I swear I fuckin' love mayo and bologna sandwiches to this day. I'll make you one, if you want."
"I would like that."
So there was another thing added to my List Of Things To Do With Astrid Walker that was already full of things I hadn't ever thought to do with anyone else. It was a long time since I ate a mayo and bologna sandwich – in fact I wasn't sure that I'd had even a single one since my mom died – but how hard could a mayo and lunchmeat sandwich be?
"So anyway," I continued, as Astrid pushed her fingers through mine and squeezed my hand tight. "My dad would let us stop working to eat and I just remember my mom used to talk about the family sometimes. Like I remember a few times she would come and sit beside me in the field – on a hay-bale, because there was nothing else to sit on – and point to the mountains and ask me if I ever thought about my great-granddaddy or my great-great-grandma or whoever sitting in that exact same spot, looking out at that exact same view. She was big on that stuff. Family stuff, you know. What you said about roots and all that – it kind of reminded me of her."
I didn't start crying. My eyes did not fill with picturesque tears. But for some reason, on those last few words – it kind of reminded me of her – my voice broke. I was so surprised I didn't even have time to be embarrassed, and before I could make an excuse or play it off as a joke Astrid sat up and wrapped her arms around my neck.
"It's OK," I said, as if she was the one being comforted.
Except I didn't actually say anything at all, because the words wouldn't come out. Nothing would come out. All I could do was hold her close and bury my face in the oasis of her neck.
