He sighed, looking away from me. “I almost didn’t pull out. I was literally seconds from coming when I remembered what you’d said about your fantasy.” He paused, glanced at me, and then away again. “And I wanted to make it come true.”
“Well, you did,” I said. “You really, really did.” I had to swallow hard against the knot of emotion lodged in my throat. Who the hell was he to make me feel this strongly? Damn him. “No one’s…ah…um. No one’s ever—ever done that for me before. So…thanks.”
“Done what?”
I rolled a shoulder, looking away from him at the pale blue wall of the tent. “Wanted to…I don’t know.”
“Izz…” he whispered, palming my cheek and turning my face so I was forced to look him in the eyes, forced to let him see the tears welling in my eyes, the stupid, embarrassing, weak, broken-girl tears I was fighting like hell to keep back.
Damn him.
Damn the tears.
Damn the emotions.
I shook my head, blinking hard. “Shit.” I rolled forward, yanking at the tent opening zipper and crawling out.
Pine needles and dirt stuck to my palms and knees as I crawled out, naked and awkward and ungainly—I was still weak and shaky and trembly from the wild fury of the orgasms we’d shared. I made it to my feet and stumbled a few steps away from the tent, tilting my head back as if I could force the stupid tears to drain back into my skull where they fucking belonged.
I felt him behind me.
“Don’t,” I whispered.
“Don’t what?”
“Look at me.” I shook my head. “Make me look at you.”
He didn’t ask what was wrong, and he didn’t ask what he’d done—I think he just knew. He stood behind me for a heartbeat, and then his arms wrapped around my middle, his front pressing to my back—chest to spine, his nose in my hair, his breath on my neck, his hips against my butt, his quads to my hamstrings, his arms wrapped double around me, right hand on left waist and vice versa.
I breathed slowly, shuddering, trembling. “I’m never like this. I hate it.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s stupid. I don’t even know why I’m crying.”
“It’s okay, Izzy.”
I shook my head. “I don’t cry.” I sniffled, wiped at the tears as they fell, giving a lie to my words.
I had no desire to fight his arms around me—his embrace was so comforting, so soothing that I just…I fucking needed his arms around me more than I needed to breathe. I could only breathe if his arms were around me, and that just pissed me off all the more, making me even more weepy.
“What is it I did that no one has ever done before, Isadora?” The question was quiet but razor sharp.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Izz.”
“No one has ever given that much of a shit about me, Ramsey!” I snapped. “No one has ever cared enough to even ask me what my fantasy is, much less make it come true.”
“Why do you sound angry?”
“Because it was supposed to be erotic, not…romantic! Jesus. You fucked me doggy style in a tent in the woods, and you somehow made it feel romantic. And erotic, yes, but…fuck. I don’t get it. You were supposed to be a safe bet for a quickie in a hospital room. Instead, we went down on each other, ignored each other for over a year, and then…this. Whatever the hell this is.”
His arms tightened around me. “I give a shit, Izzy.”
“I know, damn you.” I wiggled in his embrace, but he didn’t let go. “You weren’t supposed to.”
“No, I wasn’t. I tried not to. Trust me, I only gave a shit against my better judgment.”
I laughed at that. “Let go. I can’t breathe.”
He released me, and I stumbled away, stopped, and turned to face him. His eyes, to his credit, stayed on mine.
“Can we just…pack up and go?” I asked. “I need time to process what just happened.”
He nodded. “Sure thing.”
“I’m not trying to—”
He smiled, shaking his head as he cut in over me. “You said all you need to say, Izzy. You need time to process it, and I get it. Shit, babe, I do too. That was motherfuckin’ intense.”
“If you’d let me suck your cock like I was planning, we wouldn’t be in this mess, you know,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.
He gave me his trademark smirk—the arrogant, annoying, sexy one. “Hey, now, babe—if that’s what you want, you can have it any time you want.”
“Yeah?” I arched an eyebrow at him, more at home on this turf—sassy banter. “If I start going down on you, you’re not gonna stop me and try to make love to me again?”
Dammit, dammit, dammit. That phrase was not supposed to come out of my mouth.
And yes, he noticed. His breath caught, his eyes widened.
He recovered quickly, though. “I think you’ll just have to find that one out for yourself, babe.”
I smirked back, giving his long, dangling, flaccid, sticky cock a playful tap as I sashayed past him. “And maybe I will. Just not when you’re expecting it.”
He laughed. “Get dressed, Izz. We have a lot of miles to cover today.”
We were dressed, packed, and on the trail in less than an hour— the sun was still rising, only a few inches above the horizon.
I let Ram set the pace, and he set a pretty hard one. I was sore in places I hadn’t known I had, and no, they were not from fucking…I’m rather well acquainted with that kind of soreness, thank you very much.
This was new. Different. Painful. A deep ache in my lower back, shoulders, and thighs. But it was a good soreness; I felt more alive than ever before— a trite, overused phrase, but one I had a new appreciation for.
The sky seemed bluer, the clouds whiter, the trees greener, the air cleaner, sounds crisper. Everything seemed unbearably beautiful.
We’d set out without breakfast or coffee—our, ummm, activities had distracted us, so the water had boiled over, and Ram had to take the pot down to the river to cool it off and scrub the scorch marks off it. I was ravenous, and craved coffee, but it felt good to be on the trail again, following Ram’s tireless strides.
Of course, I couldn’t think of anything except him.
How he’d looked in the predawn—I’d woken up alone, and then stumbled out of the tent to look for him. I found him in the creek, and he’d looked like some wild, feral god of the river, standing the middle of the current, legs braced apart, heavy cock not quite hidden by the water, muscles bulging and rippling as he stood there, water streaming down his face and chest and arms, coating him in a sheen that gleamed and glimmered in the pink-gray haze. He was huge and powerful, yet beautiful. A man of raw, brutal strength and vitality, a man who could run up a mountain in eighty pounds of gear, who could survive in the wilderness with nothing but a knife and his wits—he didn’t fit in this age of men. He was meant to explore the wild places in bygone eras. If he had been born at any other time, he’d have been a knight, or a king, or an explorer.
I had stood on the bank staring at him for at least a minute before he realized I was there, and in that minute, I had felt a craving for him—for all of him, all of who he was—so strong I’d nearly wept from it. It was a bone-deep, blood-deep craving. Soul-deep.
Another cliché phrase I now truly and fully comprehended: He was inside me, in my blood and bones.
My need for him was beyond sex, beyond chemicals, beyond attraction.
Goddammit—this wasn’t supposed to happen.
I was falling for Ramsey…
If I hadn’t already…
Yet I knew this would happen—and I’m scared out of my fucking mind.
11
Ramsey
The day was uneventful for the most part which, I think, was a good thing. No bears, no elk, no surprises. A few eagles overhead, a beautiful day, lots of miles behind us.
We stopped when the sun was overhead, and I made a small fire just off the trail—I dug out a smal
l pit, ringed it with rocks, and stacked some kindling in the hole and created a fire just large enough to make some coffee and heat up some beans to go with the fruit and jerky. I had some fresh eggs with me, carefully packaged to survive the trip, and I was hoping I’d get a chance tomorrow morning to show Izzy what I could do with a camp stove.
By uneventful, I also mean there was nothing by way of hanky-panky between us, either. Which was a little sad, because my cock was getting pretty ravenous for another taste of Izzy. But my heart was glad for the respite, because I was still reeling from this morning. Mentally and emotionally, I was just…reeling.
I’d chosen doggy style for three reasons—one, it had been what she specified in her fantasy; two, it was one of my favorite positions, just selfishly, because as much as I was hot for her tits, her ass was what kept me up at night with wet dreams, and the opportunity to pound into that tight, round, juicy derriere of hers was one I couldn’t pass up; and third, I’d assumed, wrongly, that fucking Izzy doggy style would be somehow less personal, less intimate, that I’d be able to retain some of my emotional distance from her. Instead, we’d bonded even closer. I’d felt her goddamn soul wrapping around mine as we reached climax together. I’d felt her in my guts and blood and bone and balls. In my heart. In my brain.
She was everywhere—those eyes, that smile, her sass and sarcasm, her prickliness, her quick-to-flare and quick-to-recede hot-flash temper. Her filthy mouth, dirty sense of humor, flirty touches, her annoyance with my tendency to be cocky even when I knew she also found it attractive. Her toughness, her sense of adventure.
An hour and a half or two after lunch, we reached the zenith of a hill and saw the mountains towering above us in the distance, white-capped and breathtaking; I felt Izzy come to a halt beside me.
“Wow…” she breathed. “Just…wow.”
I sat down on the path and shucked my pack, leaning back against it. “Take a minute, Izz. Just soak in the view.”
She sank down to her butt and leaned back against her pack but didn’t take it off. “I’ve lived in Alaska since I was nineteen? Twenty? And I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, I knew mentally, intellectually, that there was a lot of natural beauty around me, and once in a while I’d look around Ketchikan and get a glimpse of it, but I …I was too busy trying to make a living to see it.”
I sighed. “Sorry, sweetheart, but I’m calling bullshit.”
She turned to frown at me. “Ummm, what?”
“You weren’t too busy.”
“I’ve worked sixty to eighty hours a week for ten years.”
“You could’ve made time to look around.”
She shrugged. “I guess. I just…” She glanced at me, at the mountain, and then sighed. “You know what? You’re right. I chose not to—I had my head buried in the sand.”
“Why?”
She stared in silence at the vista of the mountains for a long time. “Because I wanted more, but anything I wanted seemed out of reach.”
“What did you want?” I asked. “What do you want?”
She sniffed, brushed at her cheek. “Goddamn you, Ram.” She stood up, awkwardly lumbering to her feet, hopping to get the pack higher on her shoulders, tightening the straps. “Would you quit digging into my fucking head? Jesus.”
I let her walk away a few steps, and then followed her. If the pattern held, in a few hours she’d answer the question. We hiked for the next two, almost three hours without stopping. She stayed just ahead or behind me the entire time, hiking in thoughtful, if prickly, silence. It was nearing evening, and we were still a couple miles from the next campground when she stopped to take a swig from her canteen.
“I told you what I want—nothing’s really changed about that,” she said, after swallowing a mouthful of water, still holding the canteen with the cap swinging by its chain. “I just don’t think it’s possible.”
“The last time we started talking about this, you shifted the conversation back to me,” I said. “Not happening this time.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, smirking at me. “We’ll see about that.”
I laughed. “You said you wanted to be a doctor, but you’re scared of the time commitment, the money, and how much work it would take to get there.”
She nodded. “Exactly. That’s kind of a lot of things to be afraid of.”
“True,” I said. “But the real question is whether or not your desire for more than what you have in life is stronger than your fear of what it’d take.”
“What about you?” she asked. “What about your dreams, and how you’re putting them off out of loyalty to your brothers?”
I chuckled. “Nope, nice try, babe.”
She huffed. “I don’t know, okay? Right now, the obstacles seem pretty fucking insurmountable.”
“Because you’re stuck looking at the thing as a whole,” I said. “You gotta break it up into smaller individual goals.”
“Meaning?” she said, and took a swig, then capped the canteen and strapped it back into place.
“Meaning, instead of looking at it as, ‘shit, I have to get a bachelor’s degree, and then go into med school, and then do my residency, and all I have is a high school diploma,’ look at it as, step one, apply to a college. From what I’ve heard talking to people who do have college degrees, the lower-level basic stuff isn’t really important in terms of where you go to get it. So, just go somewhere local, like the community college here in Ketchikan. Get some of that bullshit out of the way close and cheap, and on your own time. Step two, get an associate’s degree. Step three, get a bachelor’s. Step four, decide on a university for med school. Step five, figure out how to make that work with your life and other priorities. Step six, apply, and make the move. Step seven, get through med school. Step eight, get through residency. Right now, you’re at step zero—you haven’t even started, so you’re trying to look at the whole process at once and you get overwhelmed. Start small, start simple. Step one, babe.”
“‘Baby steps to the elevator,’” she quoted.
“What About Bob?” I laughed, holding out my fist and we tapped knuckles. “God, that’s such a good movie.” I pointed at her. “And it’s good advice. Just take small, reasonable steps toward your overall goal.”
“You make it sound so simple,” she said, heading off down the trail ahead of me.
“I’m just saying, start by taking a couple easy courses at the community college in Ketchikan.”
“I haven’t set foot in a classroom in twelve years, Ram.”
“So? You’re plenty smart,” I said, catching up to walk beside her. “Yeah, you may be a little older than some of the other students, but I guarantee you, you won’t be the only person going back to school, and you won’t be the oldest person there. And if you are, so what? Who gives a fuck? You’re working toward a goal. Maybe it’ll take you another twelve years to get to the end of step eight, but you’ll still only be forty-two by then, and even if you set your next goal as retirement by sixty-five, that’s twenty-three years of practicing medicine.”
“Sounds nice from here,” she said, not looking at me. “But we’re having a nice walk in the forest, and you’re not the one going back to school.”
“Izz, honey, listen—in the end, no one can make you do anything or convince you to do anything. If you want to work at Angelique’s store and keep building your fashion blog then I, for one, will be happy for you—if that’s what you really want. But if you want something else, you owe it to yourself to at least try, to at least take steps toward it. I have no skin in the game in terms of what you do with your life, Izzy. Right now, we’re just two people who are attracted to each other, okay? Yeah, this morning was intense, but that doesn’t have to mean a damn thing. I’m not saying any of this because I have any vested interest in what you do or don’t do. I just happen to personally think it would be a big stinky load of bullshit if you have this life-long dream of being a doctor and you don’t even fucking try to achieve it because you’re
fucking scared because it’ll be hard.”
“You didn’t have to bring this morning into it,” she snapped.
“Trying not to think about it?”
“No. I mean, yes. I’m trying not to think about it.”
I laughed. “And how’s that going for you?”
She shot me evil side-eye. “Wonderful. I haven’t thought about you or your giant magical cock even once today. It was a totally forgettable experience, and I’ve definitely gotten better dick before.”
I just laughed. “Okay, babe. Keep telling yourself that.”
She glared at me again. “You think yours is the biggest dick I’ve ever had?”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “I am not stepping into that one, Izz. Any answer I could possibly give, you’d take the wrong way.”
“I’m not that sensitive.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Try me!”
“Are we talking about biggest in terms of sheer size, or best in terms of overall experience?”
“Either.”
I snorted. “Now you’re just being petulant.”
“You have an overinflated sense of how well-endowed you are, and how good you are at sex.”
I pivoted and halted to stand in front of her; I stared her down, no humor on my face, now. “If you’re trying to push me away by insulting me, I’ll just say be careful of getting exactly what you wish for, babe.” I lifted my chin to smirk arrogantly down my nose at her. “I’m sure you’ve had bigger dick, and maybe you’ve even had better dick, but I would gamble everything I own that you’ve never in your life had an experience like we shared this morning, Isadora.”
She stared back, blinking rapidly. “Fuck you.”
And with that, she walked away. I let her, because I recognized her outburst for what it was—defensiveness. An attempt to create distance, space between us, an attempt to sever or lessen the bond this morning had created.
If nothing else, it was an attempt to piss me off so I wouldn’t want to try for a repeat.
Good luck with that.
But then again, did I want to repeat it? Did I want to risk deepening the connection? How would that work? Rome lived in Ketchikan, blocks from the bar. Rem lived in town too, mere blocks from the tattoo studio he, Ink, and Juneau owned together. Me? I suppose I technically lived there, but it didn’t feel like home. It was where I kept my shit but, truth be told, I felt more at home out here. I’d done a little sniffing around, and discovered the national parks in the area were short-staffed, so I knew with my qualifications as a smokejumper I’d get hired in a snap of my fingers. Which would mean I’d end up spending significant portions of my life out here, on the trail, in the park—exactly what I wanted, but how would that figure into having any kind of a relationship with Izzy, whether she pursued medicine or not?