The Lumberjack Boyfriend - Morgan’s POV - Chapter 6 (Patreon)

Chapter 6 — Morgan’s POV

I heard the Range Rover before anyone else did.

The engine cut through the quiet of the trees the way it always did when Jenna came back from the clinic. I set the axe against the stump, wiped the sweat off my hands on my jeans, and walked down toward the dock at the same steady pace I used for everything. No rush. No show. Just enough time to get my face right before she saw me.

She ran the last few steps and threw herself at me. I caught her the way I was supposed to, lifted her off the ground, spun her once, and kissed her in front of her parents like nothing in my head was on fire. She tasted like the drive and the mint gum she always chewed when she was nervous. My hands settled on her waist because that was where they belonged. Her father clapped me on the shoulder. Her mother kept touching her hair and asking about the issues at the vet clinic. I answered everything she asked me in the low,  cool, easy voice they all expected from me.

I never once looked toward the smaller cabin.

I could feel him there anyway. Standing on the porch. Watching. The same way he’d watched me every day since the night I threw him out of my bed and told him it didn’t mean anything. Gay Potter. The kid who read too much and felt too much and had somehow gotten under my skin so deep I couldn’t dig him out no matter how hard I tried.

I kept my arm around Jenna’s shoulders and smiled down at her like she was the only person on the lake who mattered. Because that was the job. That was the version of me that made sense. The lumberjack boyfriend who waited, who stayed faithful to her beautiful girlfriend, who didn’t think about her younger brother’s mouth or the way his body had opened for me under the trees two nights ago.

The afternoon was a special kind of hell.

We swam. I put her on my shoulders and dunked us both because it made her laugh the way she used to. I floated on my back with her sitting on my stomach. I kissed her slow in the middle of the water while her parents watched from the dock, proud and relieved that their daughter had a man who looked at her like that. Water ran down my chest. The same chest Gay Potter had pressed his face against. The same arms that had held him against a pine trunk while I fucked him like I was trying to crawl inside his skin.

I didn’t look at the porch of the smaller cabin.

Not once.

But I knew he was there. Book open. Eyes on us. Hurting. And the worst part—the part that made the whiskey start calling my name before the sun even dropped—was that some fucked-up piece of me liked that he was hurting. Liked that he couldn’t look away. Liked that whatever this thing was between us still had teeth.

Dinner was terrible for me.

They made us all sit together on the big porch. Jenna pressed against my side. I kept my arm along the back of her chair the entire meal. Passed her things before she asked. Watched her mouth when she talked. Played the part so well even I almost believed it. That nothing happened…

Harry sat across from us pushing food around his plate. When his mother asked about his book he answered in that quiet voice of his. When his father made a joke about college he nodded. When Jenna asked if he was okay he said he was just tired from the heat.

My jaw tightened at the sound of his voice. I still didn’t look up.

I couldn’t. If I looked at him across that table I was going to give something away. Something I didn’t even have a name for yet…

After dinner he went straight to his cabin. I stayed with Jenna until the lights in the main house went dark. Then the argument started.

It was the same one we’d been having in pieces for months. She said I was never really there, even when I was sitting right next to her. I told her the clinic mattered, that I was trying. She said it felt like she was always waiting for me to come back from somewhere she couldn’t reach. I said that wasn’t fair. Something got knocked over— a chair, maybe. Her voice rose and then cut off. A few minutes later the door of our cabin slammed and I watched her silhouette walk toward her parents’ place without looking back.

The bottle of Jack was already half gone by the time I stepped outside.

I didn’t plan on going into the trees. My feet just took me there. Past the first line of pines. Soft ground. Old needles. And there he was, sitting with his back against a trunk, hands pressed against his eyes like he could push the whole day back out of his head. Crying. Quiet. Angry. Over me.

Something in my chest cracked open so wide I almost turned around and left him there.

I didn’t.

I stopped a few feet away, bottle hanging from my fingers, shirt unbuttoned and hanging open because the night air felt better that way. My head was swimming. The whiskey had done its job too well. Everything felt looser and sharper at the same time.

Harry looked up.

I saw the second he registered the state I was in— glassy eyes, messy hair, the same confusion I’d been carrying since the night I told him to get the fuck out of my cabin. I wanted to say something smooth. Something that put the wall back up. Instead the truth came out raw.

“I fucked up,” I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “With her. With everything. With you… fuck, kid, I hurt you and that shit’s tearing me apart inside, you know?”

He didn’t answer. Smart. Safer.

I took another long pull from the bottle, wiped my mouth, and let my head fall back against the bark as I slid down beside him. The ground was cold through my jeans. His shoulder was right there. Warm.

“She says I’m never really there. Even when I’m sitting right next to her.” I laughed once, short and ugly. “Funny, right? I’ve been trying so goddamn hard to be what she wants and she still feels like I’m somewhere else.”

I turned my head. In the dark his face looked younger and older at the same time. The kid who read dark romance and let me wreck his holes against a tree. The only person who’d ever looked at me like I was enough exactly as I was.

“I don’t know how to do this shit, Gay Potter. Relationships. Being the right kind of man for someone. I only know how to work and drink and… take what I want when it’s right in front of me.”

My shoulder brushed his when I shifted. I didn’t move away. The contact felt like the first honest thing I’d done all day.

“Can you… just…” The words stuck. I had to force them out. “I don’t want to be alone right now. Can you just… stay here? With me?”

He should have told me to go to hell like I did with him. He should have stood up and left me in the dirt with my bottle and my excuses. Instead he stayed.

I let out a breath that smelled like whiskey and failure and tilted sideways until my weight settled against him. One arm came up and draped across his shoulders— not the way I usually grabbed him, not possessive, just tired. Needing somewhere solid. My temple dropped against the top of his hair. He smelled like a summer lemon perfume, the lake and the book he’d been reading and the quiet kind of hurt I’d put there.

“I’m so fucking tired of pretending I’ve got it all figured out,” I muttered.

His hands were shaking when they touched me.

I felt it. The careful way his palms settled on my upper arm through the open shirt. The heat of his skin against mine. I should have stopped him. I should have reminded both of us what the rules were. Instead I made a low sound that was almost a sigh and leaned harder into the contact.

“That feels nice,” I heard myself say. “Don’t stop.”

His hand slid higher, over my shoulder, then carefully inside the open plaid. Palm flat against my hairy chest. Fingers tracing the edge of my collarbone, then lower, over the hair between my pecs, staying careful, staying above anything that would turn this into the kind of night we’d already had. Just touch. A gentle touch. Just the simple fact of his hand on my skin while the rest of the world stayed broken.

I breathed against his hair and let it happen.

Every slow stroke of his fingers loosened something in my chest I hadn’t realized was clenched all day. The argument with Jenna. The performance at dinner. The way I’d refused to look at him even though every cell in my body had known exactly where he was sitting. All of it eased under the quiet pressure of his hand over my heart.

“I just want someone who doesn’t need me to be different,” I said after a long time. My voice had gone soft, almost drifting. 

“Someone who looks at me and doesn’t immediately start trying to fix the parts they don’t like. Is that so fucking hard to find?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. His hand kept moving— steady, gentle, devastating in how little it asked for. My shirt hung open around his wrist. The night air cooled the whiskey-sweat on my skin. Above us the pines shifted. Somewhere far off the lake kept its own quiet rhythm.

I sat there with my drunk weight leaning into him, his palm resting over my heart, and the clear, brutal knowledge that tomorrow Jenna would still be here. That I had to apologize for my behavior… she would accept my apologies, she would smile at me over coffee and I would smile back. That Harry would watch from a distance and I would pretend not to notice. That nothing about any of this had become simpler just because I’d come looking for him in the dark with a bottle and a confession I couldn’t take back.

My eyes got heavy.

I didn’t fight it.

The last thing I felt before sleep pulled me under was the careful, steady movement of his hand across my chest and the terrifying, quiet thought that I could stay right here— against this tree, against this boy, against every version of myself I’d been trying to protect— and it would still feel more honest than anything waiting for me back at the cabin.

I didn’t know what that made me.

I only knew I wasn’t ready to move.

I drifted under with his hand still warm against my chest.

In the dream there was no Jenna. No argument. No bottle. Just the two of us walking the narrow path between the pines, late afternoon light cutting through the branches in long gold stripes. The boy walked a little ahead of me, book forgotten somewhere, looking back over his shoulder with that half-shy smile that always undid me. I caught up in three strides, hooked an arm around his waist, and lifted him clean off the ground like he weighed nothing. He laughed—bright, surprised—and I carried him the last stretch to the water’s edge and threw him in.

He came up sputtering, hair plastered to his forehead, still laughing. I waded in after him, the lake cold and perfect, and pulled him back into my arms before he could swim away. Water ran down both of us. His legs wrapped around my waist. I held him there, chest to chest, and kissed him the way I’d never let myself kiss him when I was awake—slow, deep, no guilt, no counting the seconds until it had to stop. Just the taste of him, the heat of his mouth, the quiet certainty that this was allowed. That he was mine in the only way that had ever felt true.

I woke with the ghost of that kiss still on my lips and his real hand still resting over my heart, and for one long, dangerous second I didn’t want morning to come.

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.