Sixty Days Left, So He Asked the Deacon's Son for Every One novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Number One

In the pecan grove at dusk Cooper has his first real kiss, and Jonas stops it; a bruise shows in his elbow.

By the time the dialysis chair let him go, Cooper's arm ached and his head felt thick.

Rudy drove him home in silence and did not argue when Jonas came down the porch steps and took the bag.

"Walk with me," Jonas said at six o'clock, when the light was going gold.

"I'm tired."

"You're tired and you're stubborn. Walk anyway. There's something on your list."

They went out through the kitchen door and down a path between the old trees.

The pecans were coming in, and the ground under Cooper's boots crunched with husks.

The rows ran straight and tall in both directions, and the sun came through the leaves in long bars.

Cooper had worked on this land for five years and never once seen it at this hour.

"Pretty," he said.

"I thought you'd like it."

"Don't act like you planned that."

"I didn't plan the sun." Jonas stopped at the end of the row where the trees opened onto a field. "I planned the walk."

He turned and looked at Cooper.

The same look from the packing house, steady and gray and not at all pitying, and Cooper's mouth went dry.

"Item one," Jonas said.

"I wrote it so you'd have a hard time."

"I'm having a very hard time."

Cooper laughed, short and surprised, and that was the moment Jonas stepped in.

He did not grab.

He took Cooper's hands first and turned them over, the grease still in the lines of the palms.

He held them against his own chest.

His heart was going hard under Cooper's knuckles.

"I've been waiting to do this right," Jonas said.

"I don't know what right is."

"Then I'll show you."

He kissed him slowly.

It was nothing like the one in the office, which had been a shove.

This one was deliberate, and it did not let up.

Jonas's lips moved against his, careful and unhurried.

Cooper made a sound he had not meant to make, and Jonas answered it with his mouth open and his hand sliding up the back of Cooper's neck.

Cooper had been told his whole life that kissing was a mess of teeth and noise.

Nobody had told him it could feel like being handed something heavy and told to put it down.

He pushed up on his toes and kissed back, clumsy and hungry.

Jonas made a rough noise in his throat and backed him against the trunk of the nearest tree.

The bark was cool through Cooper's shirt.

Jonas's body was hot all along the front of him, all heat and muscle, and one big hand spread over his ribs and held on.

"Easy," Jonas murmured against his mouth.

"No."

"Coop," Jonas said.

"I said no. Don't tell me easy. I've got fifty-some days and I'm not spending them on easy."

Jonas's laugh was low and shaky.

"You're going to be the death of me."

"I'm the one who's dying, remember? Try to keep up."

It was a terrible joke, and they both knew it, and Jonas stopped laughing.

Cooper felt him go still.

He felt the thumb that had been stroking his ribs stop, and the arm braced beside his head go rigid.

"Jonas."

"Not like that."

"Like what?" Cooper asked.

"Don't make it a joke."

"It's my joke."

"It's your life." Jonas rested his forehead against Cooper's, breathing hard. "Give me tonight. Let me do this one right. I'm not stopping because I don't want to."

"I can feel that you don't want to stop."

"Then you know."

Cooper did know.

Jonas's cock was hard against his hip, plain and impossible to miss, and he couldn't stop thinking about it.

His face burned.

His own cock had answered without asking him, hard and aching against his jeans, and he'd never felt anything so unfair in his life.

"You're a tease, Brannen."

"I'm a gentleman," Jonas said.

"That's worse."

"That's the Deacon's fault." Jonas pulled back and straightened Cooper's collar with fingers that weren't quite steady. "Come on. You're shivering."

"I'm not shivering."

"You are, a little."

He took off his flannel overshirt and put it around Cooper's shoulders before Cooper could object.

It came down past his hands.

It smelled like Jonas.

They started back down the row in the last of the light, Cooper with his sleeves hanging over his knuckles.

Jonas had rolled up his own sleeves against the chill.

That was how Cooper saw it.

On the inside of Jonas's left elbow, in the pale skin below the crook, there was a bruise the size of a half-dollar.

It was yellow at the edges, with a tiny red dot at its center.

"What happened to your arm?" Cooper asked.

Jonas looked down and tugged the cuff of his shirt back over it.

"Branch," he said. "Caught me Monday in the north grove."

He did not look at Cooper when he said it.

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