Summer Winds (25 page)

“Think I’ll go take a real shower. Not that afterbirth isn’t a fabulous cologne.” She smiled at me, then jogged back across the pasture, and my heart raced as I watched her go.

She looked agile and athletic as she bounded across the moonlit prairie, and I wanted to be running alongside her. Free like animals, nothing separating us but the wind. In the distance, she paused in the front yard and seesawed the old pump handle up and down, bending over and putting her mouth to the thick stream of cold water, her body a natural outcropping of the land, a fitting evolution of its harsh strength.

Betsy stepped outside the barn, interrupting my reverie, to say the vet had pronounced her favorite mare tired but healthy and able to reproduce again. She was resting now in another stall with fresh straw beneath her and her new baby struggling to nurse. I peeked in long enough to see the spindly legs of the little colt shake as he tried to steady himself and his little muzzle search blindly for his mother’s teats. Betsy talked to him in her rough, kindly way, guiding his little lips to his momma’s udder. The mare stood patiently and tolerated his fumbling until finally he could get a drink. I smiled, thinking every one of us human creatures had done that, drunk from a teat to stay alive.

As I ambled back to the house in the dark, my mind fixated on that idea. Why did some of us get weaned and others didn’t?

Why did Cash want to be at the breast of a woman and I did not?

Really? A voice inside me questioned that thought. So you would be repulsed by running your hands over Cash’s breasts or putting your lips to them? The warm sensation that washed across my body answered that question decisively.

I entered through the back door, past the lightly snoring Moses curled up in her sleep cage, and went straight to my room. Summer had consisted of Cash in the flesh, mental images of Cash, changes in my tone when speaking to her, lectures to myself about her, followed by gay fantasies and cold showers, and none of this seemed to change my nervous condition. I took a long hot shower and hit the bed, lying there and thinking about what had just happened.

Unskilled and untrained, Cash had nonetheless taken a chance and reached inside the dry mare and righted the foal, enabling it to come into the world, take a deep breath, and live.

Perhaps that’s what Cash was trying to do for me…reach into the most barren, windblown parts of my soul, turn things completely around inside me, scaring me as she tried to save me, hurting me as she sought to help me.

And at this moment, my life, my beliefs, my fears seemed to be the very things that were in breech, and Cash Tate the person who could right them.

After midnight, and I lay there. The night hot. The kind of heat that starts trouble—fights or infidelities. I tossed on top of the covers, then ripped off my nightshirt and thrashed half-naked on the cool sheets that became immediately overheated under my sweltering body.

Irritated and unable to rest, I jumped up and went into action, as if my flesh had decided to do something entirely on its own. Had it learned of my body’s plan, my mind would have said it’s late, where do you think you’re going? As it was, my mind was uninformed.

Searching through my closet, I hunted for an outfit that was comfortable but sexy. In the back, I ran across something I hadn’t worn in some time—years, in fact. Yet when I looked at it, the garment appeared brand-new. A pair of black knit pants I’d long rejected in favor of jeans. I held them up and was surprised at how small they appeared. Gingerly putting one leg through the pants, I marveled that the garment slid up and over my hips, fitting me like a glove. I turned to look at my butt in the mirror; the outfit actually made me look thin.

I pulled on the black top that billowed away from my skin and plunged in a V neckline, and I marveled that I looked great, surprisingly. Why hadn’t I ever worn this? When did I buy this?

Then I remembered purchasing it to have something to wear on a date that hadn’t worked out, so I’d shoved it in the back of the closet. Next, I scrounged for shoes and settled for black flats…not exactly ranch wear.

Hoping to find Cash, I entered the living room but didn’t see or hear her. After I uncorked a bottle of wine I poured myself a glass and drank it, as if I was short on heat spreading throughout my body and needed yet another stimulus. What was I doing? I could only think that the mind is an amazing symphony. Once it has experienced a thrilling emotion, the conductor can signal silence, even angrily demand the movement never be played again, but the exhilarating reverberation of the music remains in our DNA. That unnerving sustain keeps the body humming long after the music has ended. And so the mind believes it has driven out the sounds of lust or longing, but the body never forgets how those notes feel blended together, how they ripple across the heart and through the soul and into our consciousness, creating an unending need to replay them just to feel the music again.

Perhaps that’s why, despite every rational thought, my body led the way as I reached into the cabinet and pulled down two clean wineglasses, the stems cradled between my middle and ring fingers and the wine bottle balanced in the crook of my arm. I opened the back door and walked toward the barn in the south pasture as the full moon carved a path through the darkness.

The closer I got to the barn, the nearer I came to the creek beneath the tree grove, where it was cooler. The little barn was aglow, interior lights illuminating stall windows and streaming from the open doors. Cash might be inside, perhaps in the tack room, so I wandered down the dirt trail, headed in that direction when a horse blew air through its nostrils in a contented snort. I glanced to the paddock just west of the barn. The barn lights dimly lit the ground from fifty feet away, and there Cash Tate, with a long riding crop, was lunging Mariah in circles, the white mare seemingly relaxed despite the nighttime workout.

The rope Cash held loosely in her left hand was attached to the ring on Mariah’s halter, and she urged the mare forward with a light snap of the crop in the wind. Cash had convinced the mare to come to her and I stood still, smiling.

Perhaps the mare saw me and lost her concentration, or perhaps she was merely testing Cash, but Mariah jerked away from her orderly circling, creating mad triangles, in and out and away, causing Cash to tighten up on the line, her deerskin gloves protecting her from rope burn. As Cash reeled her in, the mare turned to face her, then took two decisive steps backward, planting herself and using her full weight to create a no-win tug of war.

“Loosen up just a little and she’ll circle back to you,” I said softly from the darkness, and Cash’s body sagged, as if hearing my voice from the void had collapsed her knees. She let the line go slack and the mare relaxed, then looked at Cash and slowly began to circle her again, this time without the aid of a crop. Cash glanced at me for a second, then moved in and unhooked the mare’s lead line and slipped off her halter.

She walked over to the fence, where I rested my arms on the top rail, my head propped up on my hands. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

Even I knew my voice sounded different, as if it were caressing the air. “Can’t,” she said.

I nodded to the wine bottle and glasses propped against the fence post. “Can I interest you in a drink?”

Cash hooked the halter on the fence post, then put one boot on the bottom rail and sprang up and over the fence, landing on the ground beside me. She dusted herself off and yanked off her gloves, tucking them in her back pocket. The wind suddenly picked up, blowing her cologne around and through me, and the leaves on the trees shuddered in one unexpected orchestral whoosh, branches whipping in unison like the tails of a million celestial horses. A thrilling sound of nature that sent chills across my soul.

I looked up at the heavens for a moment, the stars twinkling down and around me, the night black, and the wind soft with possibilities.

I took a deep breath, and then I reached for her, slipping my fingers slowly around her waist, narrow and tight, and up the back of her shirt, feeling her suck in air and freeze. She trembled beneath my touch, making me want her even more.

Tilting my head up I could see her strong features in the moonlight, and without sunlight to highlight her youth, I caught a glimpse of her bone structure. What a magnificent-looking older woman she would most likely become. Her pale eyes sparkled down at me.

“You look wonderful in that outfit,” she said.

“Been saving it for a special occasion.” I pulled her into me, signaling she was the occasion I’d awaited, and put my lips to hers, our mouths softly sliding into a fit so perfect that it frightened me.

My mind was completely jettisoned from the equation, as my mouth enveloped hers as deeply as I could possibly go without crawling inside her. Our longing became urgent now, the desire so intense that it created a kind of passionate pain. Those pale eyes held a fever, her body temperature hot to the touch, perhaps a sickness of wanting.

A sound came from the south side of the horse barn, perhaps Perry moving around in the dark. I grasped Cash’s arm and towed her back up the dirt path. Once concealed in the dim light I propelled her back against a tree trunk and held her face in my hands, pressing my body up against hers. Her hands searched beneath my shirt and I could easily have dissolved under their warmth or the intense probing of her tongue as it sought more and more of me, but I was determined to remain the aggressor. She would not go home saying she had seduced me; if anything she would have to tell the tale of innocence devoured. She had craved me, nearly to the point of stalking me, and now she would get her wish. And yes, beyond all the lessons my mind proposed to teach her, my body simply wanted her more than anyone I had ever wanted in my life.

I unbuckled her belt and slid my hand down the front of her pants, slipping my fingers into the wet hollow between her legs. She moaned and fell back limp and shaking.

A part of me wanted her and another part of me simply wanted to show her what wanting really was: more than a one-night stand, more than some bimbo she’d screwed after a wild night at a bar.

She should know how incendiary true passion could be. Not mere flickers of emotion, infantile flames fanned by youth, but seasoned fire. “I’ve never been loved by a woman,” I whispered to her, “but then neither have you.”

When it appeared she had weakened to the point of collapse, I took her hand and pulled her with me toward the house. Then I broke free and ran ahead and up the back steps and turned out the lights, leaving her to enter in darkness, except for the sliver of moonlight that shone through the shutters. Leading her to my bedroom, I closed the door, placed my back to it, and let my eyes caress her tall frame as she stood expectant.

“I’ve hated that door that kept you from me. Every night I dreamed myself here in your bedroom,” she whispered, as I unbuttoned her shirt and slid it off her shoulders, then slowly pushed her back onto the bed, this time slipping her pants off with ease.

Hadn’t I done it a hundred times in my fantasies?

Naked and stretched out across the bed, she was a painting from an Italian master of a young boy with smooth skin and radiant hair. I paused to take her in before tossing off my own clothes and sliding on top of her. She moaned in appreciation of my flesh meeting hers unhampered by clothing. And now, no longer able to hold back the emotion, I began to kiss her neck, her ears, her beautiful lips.

She whimpered as I kissed my way across her breasts, trailing down her belly to the bones at her hips, skipping the most sensitive areas in favor of her inner thighs, then spreading her legs and, as she begged me to touch her, simply placed my breast against her throbbing lips and looked up to register the ecstasy on her face.

Something about her giving in to me, completely in my charge, aroused by everything I chose to offer her, was in itself sensual and empowering, and it emboldened me. Her body was white-hot, and a light perspiration had broken out on the surface of her skin. I pulled away from her, then opened the delicate folds concealing the softest part of her and put my mouth there. She gasped and clutched my hair as she rocked and writhed and too quickly exploded. And even then I refused to release her until she had to give in again, complaining that I was killing her, and pushed against me rhythmically, her release total as she begged me to let her go. But I would not. And the river I created in her spread its tributaries down to me, and while she was sated, I was insatiable and would have taken her again had she not found the strength to suddenly pull me up to her and kiss me ferociously as she rolled me onto my back. And now the tables turned, and like a drug that had sent me out of my mind, she gained complete control, and I shook as her fingers sought solace in the refuge of my body.

I forgot where I was and who I was as next she held me, facing her with my legs around her, and kissed me, then suddenly fell backward and slid my hips onto her chest, where her face now rested between my legs and, before I could protest, made love to me again.

She was everywhere all at once. Her breath hot inside my body like a summer wind, building to a fury that matched her incessant strokes, then slowing to allow me to linger in her soft breeze. The smell of her all around me, on me, and now in me was breathtaking.

She knew from the twisting of my torso and the near-sobs that tore through me like a storm through the prairie that she had me, and she did not leave one piece of anatomical geography unexplored.

Unable to take the intensity any longer, I rolled off her and onto my back and tried to make light of my feelings. “Had I known you could make love like that I would have locked my front gates and never let you come for the summer.”

“I want to do nothing more than lie here and come for the summer.” She playfully tumbled me onto my stomach and slipped one hand under me, stroking me into an orgasmic eruption that nearly made me black out. I rolled over and fell into her arms and slept. When I awoke she was cradling me and looking down at me with those spectacular eyes.