against my stomach when it made contact. I bit my lip, and
then, helpless, breathed out hard and noisily. Oro was still
moving, shoving the jeans mercilessly down my calves,
unlacing and removing my boots in approximately an eighth
of the time it had taken me to fasten them up that morning.
A couple of dull thuds marked their encounter with the
opposite wall, and then I was naked, jeans and underwear
and socks all in a haphazard heap on the flagstones, and
Oro was lifting me, one hand hooked between my thighs and
the other arm curled firmly around my waist.
It wasn"t until he laid me down that I remembered the
table. My eyes met his in a moment of startled realization,
and he smiled back at me in the moment before he palmed
my legs open, spreading me there on the table before him
like dinner. He was hard, too, so hard that when he popped
open the button on his jeans, it only took one press of his
thumb at the zipper before his cock burst insistently forward
uninvited, shoving the zipper down the rest of the way. I
groaned deep in my throat, and let my head fall back.
“Alex,” he whispered, approving, “Alex—I"ve got you.”
And then his warm breath was ghosting damply over the
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
43
inside of my thigh, pausing at intervals to nip gently with his
teeth, licking afterward to soothe the redness away. I thrust
up toward him, wanting his mouth, his fingers,
something
,
and not quite knowing what to expect, or where. I was very
close to the edge of the table as it was, but a moment later
he was jerking me still farther forward, pressing my knees
up so that all of me was open before him.
“Christ,” I muttered, understanding; “Oro—
Oro
—”
His tongue, then, curling over my balls, licking at the
damp dark space behind and then trailing lower, coaxing,
claiming. I writhed on the table as the tip reached its goal,
the hot, moist circles he drew around the rim setting shivers
twisting and jerking uncontrollably through my pelvis. My
hands were everywhere, sparking and jolting with sensation:
gripping the edge of the table, the backs of my own knees,
his hair. He circled me for long moments, until it felt as if his
tongue were dragging repeatedly over every nerve in my
body, drawing them all together under his mouth. Then he
pressed inside, with the tip of his tongue firmed to a point,
and I lost my mind.
The thrust of his tongue as it slicked me, breaching the
tight ring of muscle, felt like nothing on fucking
earth.
I"d
been rimmed before, the way Oro was doing earlier, but not
like
this
; not deep and probing and masterful while I
shuddered myself apart around it. His hands were large and
firm on my thighs as he fucked me, holding me wide and
open for him, and I could
not
stop crying out, not even when
the cries dissolved into helpless hiccoughs of air and shock
and sobs. Finally, right when I was sure I was going to come
in his hair without even the capacity to warn him, he
withdrew with an obscene sucking sound, a wet kiss to the
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
44
rim before he reclaimed his tongue. Then he rose up, arms
hooked under my knees, and shoved me a little further back
onto the table. I looked up at him weakly, breathless and
desperate and unable even to move, let alone tell him any of
the things I wanted to say.
“It"s okay,” he told me, like he understood. “Christ, fuck,
Alex, I got you—I got you—”
His jeans were still mostly on when he positioned
himself at my entrance, shoved down around his thighs, but
not worked down any further. Something about the brush of
denim against my calves as he lifted me, as his two fingers
thrust and scissored inside me where his tongue had already
readied me, was undeniably hot. And then he reached into
his jeans pocket and his hand emerged with a condom and a
sachet of lube, and I realized
why
, and somehow that just
made it all the hotter.
Both packets, he ripped open with his teeth, sharp
sudden movements and rustle of foil in quick succession. By
the time he was ready, sheathed and slicked and waiting, I
was clenching in desperation, my breath coming short as my
fingers fumbled and found him. I wanted his heat, his
weight, his solidity over me; wanted the thick fullness of his
cock inside me. “Oro,” I managed, “Oro—come on—fuck me,
please
,” and then he thrust home, and all words failed.
He was everything, everything I needed in that moment:
the warmth of his body and the drag of his skin against
mine, the nubs of his nipples trailing sparks of sensation
over my chest as he rocked and shuddered. My hands were
all over him, in his hair and in the dip of his spine,
smoothing down through the sweat that had collected there,
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
45
palming back up over his sides. Somewhere in the middle,
his mouth found mine, clung, and we licked at each other,
sloppy and uncoordinated and glorious. He twisted against
me, torques of his hips sending spirals of heat coiling
through every inch of my body, fingers clutching at my hips
tight enough to bruise. I
wanted
his bruises, like the bruise
on my throat, indelible. I
wanted
to thrust up against him
like this, slamming my hips into his, meeting him each time
in a collision of flesh and bone and want. He nipped at my
mouth, at my throat, his breath rasping toward completion. I
lifted my hips, and—
there
was that spot inside me, his
cockhead slamming against it as he moved; and
there
again,
over and over until my eyes were sightless, whited-out with
the riptide of orgasm. “Oro,” I gasped out; “Oro—fuck—
fuck
—”
And then I was coming, spurting thick and copious
between us, slick-sticky and clinging all over my stomach so
he thrust through it, his body still rocking spasmodically
into mine.
He lowered his mouth to my collarbone when I cried out,
his fingers twitching, mouth finding flesh and
biting
, sending
aftershocks tripping over my skin. I could feel him inside me,
hard and hot where my muscles had clenched reflexively,
and I knew he was close by the shivers that wracked him as
he moved. “Oro,” I murmured, “Come on, baby. Come for
me.”
He froze, then; stilled on the crest of a wave, and choked
back sound after sound in his throat until I stroked his hair,
and he let out a cry into my throat. Through the thin latex
between us, I felt him shoot, and then his body fell suddenly
still like the sea after a storm. I stroked his hair, his
shoulders, his neck. “Ssshh,” I soothed. “It"s okay. It"s okay.”
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
46
We lay there, for a moment or two, still and calm and
tangled sweaty on the table. But, much as my muscles
protested against any suggestion of movement, there is only
so long that one can comfortably lie on an old kitchen table
in a side-room tacked onto a barn. The ache in my back
indicated that our time was up.
“Oro,” I murmured, at length, “Hey. Come on.” I touched
his face; shoved at his shoulders a little. “Up, boy.”
He laughed softly, groaning deep in his throat. “Do I
have to?”
“My back hurts,” I told him, pointedly. The atmosphere
between us was soft and easy; familiar. Not sex-familiar,
either. Friend-familiar. Maybe even….
I pushed aside that thought, and then pushed aside
Oro. “Up.”
Oro sighed, laughed again, and withdrew, slipping off
the table bonelessly. When he landed on his feet, I was
genuinely surprised. “You"re amazing,” I told him, mouth
broad in a smile.
Oro hitched up his jeans and fastened the button. The
zipper he pulled up very deliberately, smiling down into my
face. Then he leaned down, pushing my hair back from my
forehead. “So are you,” he said softly, gently. It wasn"t a “we
just fucked and you were good and that"s the end of it” kind
of smile. His hand curled through mine, pulling me up, and I
let myself smile back, studying his face. It was, at least, an
“I"d like to do that again” smile. Maybe it was more. Maybe,
maybe, maybe.
He found my boots for me; retrieved them while I
squashed myself back into my jeans. Skinnies are
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
47
uncomfortable to put on at the best of times, but when
you"re sweaty and overheated, the discomfort is
unimaginable. I didn"t mention any of this to Oro, of course.
He"d only tell me I should have been wearing proper jeans.
And I couldn"t have argued, because I knew he"d have been
absolutely right. The trouble with Oro—one of the very tiny,
but very persistent, sometimes-infuriating troubles I"ve
found with Oro—is that he almost always is.
We made it home unscathed, that day after the calving.
We sluiced out the barn, and put our shirts back on. I got
the hell over the non-existent stain on the shoulder of my T-
shirt, mostly because I forgot it was there until later in the
day, at which point I had a closer look and decided there
wasn"t actually anything there to complain about. Oro
checked over the cow, to make sure she was still fine; there
hadn"t been any bleeding, but it"s good practice to check over
her thoroughly an hour or so after the birth, make sure no
obvious problems have presented themselves. When nothing
had, it was time for me to go back to my fencing, as if that
didn"t feel like a memory from another universe. Oro kissed
me in the doorway—in the doorway of the barn where he"d
fucked
me—and the sky looked a whole other shade of blue,
like the earth had somehow shifted on its axis, and it took
me a massive effort of will to remind myself that nothing had
actually changed. We were still here, the ranch was still here
and moving, and it needed us to function exactly like before.
Sex is kind of hard, sometimes, to slot easily back into
reality. But the reality, whatever my feelings, still existed.
The show must go on.
It was a little easier to connect with reality once I"d
thrown my leg back over Sasha and resettled myself on her
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
48
back. It burned so much at first, in fact, that I almost
considered riding back out to my fence-gap side-saddle,
before I decided it wasn"t worth the strange looks. Besides,
there was something good about feeling him in me like that,
the stretch of him, the shape. It anchored me, as I tacked
chicken wire to fence posts, while my mind floated dreamily
half out of my body. It said,
Oro was in you, and that was
real.
SO, THAT was how it happened, with Oro. I don"t know if I
really need to spell out the fact that the first time certainly
was
not
the only time. I guess, last semester in San Diego, I"d
managed to set myself four hundred percent against the way
I was raised, against ranches and cowboys and mountains
that stretch up endlessly to the New Mexico sky. But things
have changed more than a little since then. I remembered, in
Magdalena, things I"d always known, about ranchers and
Uncle Frank, and the taste of desert rain. Behind the main
house the night after we first fucked, Oro caught me just as
it was getting dark—stepped out of the shadows and pulled
me against him and kissed me. I"ve never asked him if Uncle
Frank knew he was gay. I guess if he had, he would never
have held it against him. Knowing Uncle Frank, really, he
might know without ever having been told. Anyway, I never
really feared discovery.
Oro"s twenty-five to my almost-twenty-one, all Latin fire
and quiet cleverness behind dark eyes. He makes me miss
red dirt before I"ve left it. He makes me want the blue skies,
and the silence. He fucked me once in the dark, way up in
This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
49
the foothills of the mountains; and later, again, in the back