This Red Rock (7 page)

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

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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

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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,

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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.”

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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

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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

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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

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49

the foothills of the mountains; and later, again, in the back