My Sister Sat at My Groom's Feet, So I Took His Whole Pack novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Mean It

In his cedar bed she asks for the tie, gets it, learns what it is supposed to feel like, and wakes to a Boom Wife's tally stick hanging on his door.

He shut the door of his house with his back and turned the lock, and I was already pulling his shirt out of his jeans.

The house was one room, with cedar walls and a woodstove and a bed under the window.

Through the glass, the black frame of the fire tower stood against the moon.

"Lock's on," Reuben said, against my mouth. "You can change your mind."

"You said that already."

"I'm going to keep saying it."

"Then say it later," I said. "Unbutton me."

He turned me around by the shoulders.

My grandmother's dress had twenty small cloth buttons down the spine, and I had needed my mother and an aunt to do them up.

He undid the first one with his fingertips and kissed the skin it uncovered.

He undid the second and kissed that too.

"Reuben."

"Twenty," he said into my back. "I saw every one at the dike."

"We'll be here all night."

"That's the idea."

I laughed, and it broke in the middle and turned into something else.

His mouth moved down my spine, one button at a time, and every kiss went through me and gathered between my legs.

By the tenth I had braced both hands on the cedar wall.

By the fifteenth I was pushing my hips back against him, and I could feel how hard he was through his jeans.

At the twentieth the whole dress sagged and slid off me and fell around my ankles.

A dozen cranberries rolled out of the hem.

They bounced red across the floorboards and wandered into the corners of his house.

"I brought the harvest," I said.

"I'll find them in the spring," Reuben said, and he turned me around.

He looked at me for a long moment.

I stood in the moonlight in nothing but my grandmother's lace garter and the berry stains on my hands.

"Lucinda Sooy," he said, low.

"Your turn."

I pulled his shirt up over his head.

He had a lean, hard chest with gray hair across it.

Old burn scars ran from both wrists up past his elbows and across one shoulder in pale, shiny ridges.

I put my palm on the worst one.

"Fire line," he said. "I was twenty-two. The wind turned."

"Does it hurt?"

"Not when you touch it."

I kissed the scar.

I kissed my way across his collarbone and down his chest.

I closed my mouth around his nipple and felt him shudder.

He said my name in a voice I had not heard from him before.

I undid his belt and his jeans.

He kicked them off, and he was naked, and I was done being patient.

"Bed," I said.

He picked me up and laid me down in the middle of it, on a quilt that smelled of cedar and him.

He came down over me, and the whole heat of his body settled on mine.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and my arms around his neck.

"Look at me," Reuben said.

I looked.

His eyes were gray in the dark and wide open, and they did not leave my face.

"I want to hear what you like," he said. "All of it. Tell me."

"I like this," I said.

"What?"

"You, over me, looking at me and not at the door."

He kissed me slowly, until I was arching up under him.

I rubbed against the hot length of his cock where it lay hard against my stomach.

"Now," I said.

"Not yet."

"Reuben. Now. I've come three times and I'm still empty," I said.

"Say that again," he said.

"I'm empty. I want you in me. Fuck me."

He reached between us and took himself in his hand.

He dragged the head of his cock through the wet of me, once, slowly, over my clit and back down.

I whimpered.

He did it again.

"Please," I said.

"There she is."

He pushed in.

It was slow and thick and it stretched me wide.

I felt every inch of him arrive, hot and heavy.

I held onto his shoulders and breathed through it.

"Keep going," I said. "Give me all of it."

He sank the rest of the way.

He was buried to the root, and the hard, swollen ring at the base of him pressed against me, right at my entrance.

I had never felt anything so full.

"God," I said. "God, Reuben."

"You take me so well," he said, hoarsely. "Look at you. You're taking all of it."

He started to move.

He drew back slowly and pushed in again, long and deep, and every stroke dragged along the place that opened me up.

I lifted my hips to meet him.

I raked my nails down his back, and he groaned, and the rhythm broke and came back harder.

"Like that," I said. "Just like that. Don't stop."

"Never."

"Harder."

He gave it to me.

The bed knocked against the cedar wall, and my breath came out in short, ragged sounds that I was not ashamed of.

He braced on one forearm and slid the other hand between us and found my clit with his thumb.

"Come on my cock," he said. "Let me feel you do it."

I came with a cry.

It went through my body in long, rolling waves, and I clenched down around him, and he swore and his rhythm stumbled.

"Lucinda," he said. "I can't, if you keep, it's coming."

"Let it."

"The tie. It's coming. Lucinda, tell me."

I knew what he was asking.

The Boom Wives' tea was still in me.

It stays in a woman for a week after her last cup, and mine had been Thursday, and the tea turned away any man's seed.

I thought that, and I let it go.

"Tie me," I said. "I mean it. Tie me, Reuben."

His eyes closed.

His hips drove forward, once, hard and deep, and the swell at the root of him caught against me and pushed.

I felt it stretch me.

It was thick and hot and impossible, and it slid in past the ring of my entrance and locked there, and I screamed.

"Breathe," he said. "Breathe, I've got you, it's all right."

"It's, oh, it's so full."

"I know. I know it is."

He came, and I felt it.

He came in long hot pulses, deep inside me, with his forehead pressed to mine and a low broken sound dragging out of his chest.

It pushed me over again.

I came around the knot of him, clenching on it, and there was nowhere for any of it to go.

We were stuck.

I felt him lock into me, and neither of us could have moved if we had wanted to, and I did not want to.

He lay on top of me, shaking, holding his weight off me on his arms.

I cried.

I had said I would not, and I cried, quietly, with my face turned into his shoulder.

"Did I hurt you?" he said at once.

"No. No. I'm crying because it doesn't hurt."

He kissed the tears off my temple.

"Is this how it always is?" I asked, when I could talk.

"I wouldn't know. I've never done it."

"I mean," I said, and my voice cracked. "I mean, is this what it's supposed to be?"

"What do you mean, Lucinda?"

"Two years," I said. "Two years and Brant never. I thought it was a story old women told girls. I thought some men were slow."

Reuben went very still.

I felt it in the place where we were joined.

"He never tied you," he said.

"Not once."

"Then he never meant it," he said quietly. "Not once, in two years. And he knew you were waiting."

I turned my face into his throat.

"He had something for her in September," I said. "He gave my sister a pup."

"Yes," Reuben said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just stay."

"I'm here."

He rolled us onto our sides, carefully, so as not to pull, and he drew the quilt over my shoulders.

We lay face to face in the moonlight, tied, with his arms wrapped around me.

He told me what to expect.

It would ease in half an hour, he said, and he did not know how long because he had never had to count.

I told him I did not mind how long.

He kissed my forehead, my cheeks, the corner of my mouth.

We stayed there.

His cock throbbed inside me every time he breathed, and I clenched around it without meaning to, and he groaned and held me closer.

"Again?" I whispered.

"We can't," he said.

"I can feel you hard."

"It's the tie. It does that."

I tilted my hips, very slightly.

His whole body jerked.

"Lucinda."

"Just a little," I said, and I rocked on him, an inch, slow and shallow, against the swell.

He gasped.

I came again, quietly, in his arms, with his name in my mouth and his hand spread across my back.

He followed me, a second time, shuddering, with his face buried in my hair.

After that we slept.

I woke when the room was gray, with the tie gone and Reuben's arm heavy across my waist.

I lay still and listened to him breathe.

Then I saw the door.

It had a square of glass at the top, and through it I could see the outside nail by the frame.

Something hung from the nail on a loop of red thread, where nothing had hung the night before.

It was a short cedar stick, as long as my hand, with three notches cut in the side.

The Boom Wives hang a tally stick like that for one reason.

Someone had walked up to the Stray's door in the dark, while we lay tied and sleeping, and hung my summons to the Standing.

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