Lida slipped back into guard mode, attune to every sight and sound. It gave me the space for my thoughts to wander and I found myself fixating on sex in a way I never had before Ranger, even after Jake had shown me intimacy with a man could feel better than forced torture.
I fucked Ranger a lot. Most days. Most nights. Sometimes he fucked me too, and I lived for that. How his gentle touch had evolved to something less controlled. Ranger had never triggered a bad memory for me. I did not believe that he could.
My phone vibrated.
I pulled it out to a flurry of texts.
Cam:sorry I got in your face. i’m a lairy cunt
Cam:joe called about the horse. escaped from a riding school 10 miles away
Viktor:What is her name?
Cam:hang on
Cam:Ash
I took a slow breath, feeling Ranger all around me as the trees parted to reveal the cliffs. A hidden trail led to the house, and a once public path would take me to the cliff-face and the sheer drop below. It had been closed for decades, memorials clustered in the rocky undergrowth. Benches no one ever sat on anymore. It made Ranger shiver whenever we passed, but I did not mind it. Confronting death reminded me I was alive.
And that I wanted to be.
I clicked out of Cam’s thread and opened Ranger’s again. Telling him how I felt through a text message seemed ridiculous, but to call him, to hear his voice and not be able to see him, touch him, or press my face to his skin and breathe him in...
It frightened me.
Viktor:Asher, I miss you
The message didn’t deliver right away. I lost time staring at the screen. So much time it rained twice without me shifting another foot. My imagination had never been prone to catastrophic thoughts, but as the wind began to peel my wet hair from my face I pictured terrible things, and my pulse boomed in my ears, my veins itching for the kind of relief only found in toxic oblivion.
Call Jake.
But I could not make my hands move. I could only stare and stare and stare until my phone finally flared with life.
Ranger:u better
Ranger:feel like i’ve lost a fuckin limb
I sagged with relief. Perhaps shame too. I did not want Ranger to feel as wretched as I did. I wanted him to find whatever reassurance he sought on the road and come back to me with the confidence he’d lost. But his coarse words slid through my soul anyway, soothing the scrapes and scratches his absence had left behind, and air moved freely through my lungs again.
For now, anyway.
Lida nudged my hand.
I obeyed her silent command and grounded myself in the present. The trees. The cliffs. The Ranger-scented sanctuary that awaited me if I could make myself move.
Lida rumbled.
I took the hint and began walking once more, following the steep trail to the house, my gaze on my boots, forcing my brain away from the itch in my blood and to all the ways I might occupy myself while Ranger was gone. Some were more entertaining than others, and it made me mindful of where I placed my feet, the stability in my damaged hip not as reliable as I wanted it to be. I had learned that by fucking Ranger. By him fucking me. In the bed. In the shower. In the open air of the?—
Lida froze.
Ears flicked back, front paw lifted, her tell that she had sensed something she deemed not an immediate threat but wanted me to see for myself.
She had never been wrong, but tension flooded me all the same, and I reached, again, for the blade in my boot, wrapping my fingers around blood-warm metal, sinking closer to the ground as I followed Lida’s endless stare to the cliffs above me and the shadowed figure of a man.
Tall, rangy, and dressed in cargo shorts in the dead of winter, he stood at the edge, as if he might jump. As if hewantedto jump. And this man...
He was not a stranger.