The Lumberjack Boyfriend - Chapter 8 (Patreon)

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

Chapter 8

They packed the car like people who felt guilty about it.

Jenna had her bag and that face she wore when work won. Dad had a folder tucked under one arm, the same kind he used when the clinic’s numbers weren’t pretty. Mom kept looking at the lake like the water might take the leaving personally. Two days, they said. City things. The clinic. Dad being a partner meant he actually had to show up sometimes instead of just signing checks from the porch. Jenna would sleep at her place near work. They would be back in two days before dinner if the road stayed kind.

Mom asked first, standing by the open passenger door with her sunglasses in her hand.

“You sure you’re all right here? Just the two of you?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’m going to swim. I’m going to read. That’s the whole plan.”

Dad clapped my shoulder the way he did when he wanted the sentence to be finished.

“Morgan’s an adult. You’re an adult. Don’t burn the place down.”

Jenna looked at Morgan on the porch of the small cabin. He had a coffee he wasn’t drinking. Cap low. Plaid shirt open over the same chest I had put my hand on in the dark two nights ago. He looked like a man who had not been in my room yesterday with my sister ten feet from the door. He looked like the man she thought she’d left as collateral.

“Walk me to the car,” she told him.

I stayed on the steps of the big cabin with Hunting Adeline closed on my knee and listened because the morning was still and voices carried over gravel.

“Don’t call him that,” Jenna said. Not loud. Sharp enough to cut. “Gay Potter. It’s not funny. He’s my brother.”

Morgan said something I didn’t catch. Low. The kind of answer that was supposed to end a conversation.

“I mean it. Look after him. Treat him like a person for two days. He’s not a joke you tell the guys at the farm. He’s shy and he’s here alone and if I find out you were an asshole the whole time I’m gone, Morgan, I swear to God—”

“I’ll look after him, Jenna, just chill.”

His voice. Easy. The dock voice. The lie voice. Except this time I didn’t know which one it was, and that was worse.

“Two days,” Jenna said. “Be decent. He gets scared of stupid things. Thunder. Being left alone. Don’t pick at him. Sleep in the big cabin, don’t leave him alone. He’s special.”

“I heard you.”

She kissed him. I felt so guilty. My sister was protecting me and I was cheating with her boyfriend. I looked at the book. The cover was worn at the corners from how many times I’d opened it to avoid looking at them. Then she came up the steps and hugged me harder than a two-day trip deserved.

“Text me. Read your books, write. Don’t let him make you drink whiskey.”

“I won’t. I don’t like it.”

She searched my face like she might find the last week on it. I kept it blank. I had practice.

They left.

The Range Rover took the gravel, then the first bend, then the trees took the sound and the lake got that wide, stupid quiet it got when there were too few people on it. I stood on the steps until I couldn’t hear the engine. My hands were shaking. I put them in my pockets so I wouldn’t have to watch them do it.

Morgan didn’t come over.

He went into the small cabin and shut the door. I heard the bottle hit a counter. I heard a chair. Then nothing.

I lasted an hour.

I told myself I would stay inside. I told myself I would lock the latch for real this time, the way he’d told me to if they turned around early. I made coffee I didn’t drink. I stood at the window of the big cabin and looked at the small one until the stillness felt like a dare. The dock was empty. The water was a flat plate of light. A dragonfly kept landing on the same post and leaving again.

I took the book to the dock because the dock was honest. Wood. Water. July sun starting to lean toward afternoon. I sat with my legs in the lake up to the calf and opened Hunting Adeline to the page I had already read four times that morning. Zade was in the dark somewhere doing something I usually wanted to sink into. I didn’t sink. I kept hearing Jenna say look after him. I kept hearing Morgan say I’ll look after him like it was a chore and a promise in the same breath.

Every sound on the property became his boots.

A screen door. A crow. Water against the posts. Not him.

I took my glasses off and wiped them on my shirt and put them back on and the paragraph still didn’t take. I thought about the woods. The bottle between his knees. His head on my hair. I don’t want to be alone right now. Then breakfast, and Jenna’s mouth on his, and the way he hadn’t looked at me until he was in my room with his cock already out of his shorts

.

Two days.

I didn’t know what two days were supposed to be. I knew what two hours on a trail had been. I knew what getting thrown out of his cabin had been. The space between those things was the thing that made my hands shake on the page.

I heard him before I saw him.

Boards behind me. The dip of his weight. His shadow cut my page in half.

“Glasses off,” Morgan said. “Book down.”

“I’m reading.”

“You’re hiding. Same thing. Off.”

I took the glasses off. I set the book on the dock, spine up, so the pages wouldn’t blow into the water. When I looked up he was in nothing but the black swim shorts, the ones that sat low on his hips, the ones that had been soaked and filthy the first day I saw him climb out of this lake. No shirt. No hat. Mullet messy, like he’d had his hands in it. Chest bare. The hair there still damp. He looked like the a perfect man out of my dirtiest dreams and like the man who’d told me to get the fuck out in the same body.

“Morgan—”

He bent and picked me up.

No warning. One arm under my knees, one behind my back, the way you pick up something that doesn’t weigh enough to argue. I grabbed his neck because the dock left my feet. He was hot. He smelled like lake and sleep and the coffee he hadn’t finished and a little like the whiskey that never really left him.

“What are you doing?”

“What I said to myself I was gonna do when they left.”

He walked to the edge and jumped.

The water hit like a slap. Cold after the sun. We went under in a knot of limbs and came up with his arms still around me and my t-shirt glued to my back and his mouth already close enough that I could see the water in his mustache.

“You wanna be my baby?”

He said it against my wet hair. Not a joke. Not the Gay Potter voice. Something rougher and smaller, like he’d practiced it and still didn’t trust it out loud.

“You know I dreamed I did this. Picked you up off that dock. Threw us in. You were laughing. I woke up pissed that it was a dream and she was in the bed.”

“Morgan…”

“Fuck! Answer me, boy.”

I had lake water in my mouth. I had his chest against mine. I could feel him through the shorts — hard, obvious, the same thick fact that had been in my throat yesterday while Jenna looked for shoes on our porch.

“Yes, I want to be your baby.” I said.

He kissed me.

Not the hungry kiss from the night he’d carried me to his bed and then thrown me out of it. This one was wet and unhurried and tasted like lake and the leftover coffee on his tongue. He held me in the water like I was actually going to sink without him. My legs went around his waist because there was nowhere else for them to go. He walked us out a little deeper, still kissing, and then he leaned back and dropped us both and we came up sputtering and he was grinning.

I had never seen him grin like that at me.

I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It came out surprised and ugly and real, the sound of somebody who had been holding his breath for a week. He made a noise in his chest like he’d been waiting for it and hadn’t known if it would come.

“There it is,” he said. “I been waiting to hear that. You don’t laugh. You read. You shake. You take it. You don’t laugh.” He pushed wet hair off my forehead with a thumb that was too careful for his mouth. “Do it again.”

“I can’t just—”

He dunked me. Gentle, if dunking can be gentle. I came up cursing and laughing and shoved at his shoulder and he let me, which was new, and he looked almost my age for a second — mustache wet, eyes darker than the water, the arrogance still there but pointed at the moment instead of at me.

“Two days,” he said. “They’re gone two days. I’m not spending them pretending I don’t want you on me. I did that already. It didn’t take. I fucking want you, boy. I kiss her and I think about you.”

He kissed me again. Played. He let me go and I swam a stroke toward the deeper green and he caught my ankle and pulled me back and I hit his chest and felt him hard against my stomach and he didn’t apologize for it. He just held me there in the water with my legs around him and his hands under my thighs and the lake slapping the dock behind us like it approved.

“You scared?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Of me or of they return?”

“Both.”

“Don’t be scared of me, I’m your protector. Just don’t run. You run, I’ll have to come get you with my mask, and I’m trying to be decent like she said.”

“This is decent?”

“This is honest. Decent can wait until they’re in the driveway.”

He carried me out.

Twilight had started without me noticing. The sun was low and mean and gold across the water. The dock was warm on top and the water ran off us in sheets. He set me down on the boards on my back and came down with me, wet shorts, wet chest, the whole heavy line of him blocking out the sky. He pulled my shirt off and threw it toward the book. He hooked my shorts and they joined the shirt. He shoved his own down just far enough that I felt him against me with nothing in the way but lake water and heat.

“Here?” I asked.

“Here.” He spit in his palm. Worked it. 

“Nobody on the lake. Nobody on the road. You said you were gonna swim and read. This is swimming.”

He pushed in slow because the water had taken the easy slick away and he knew it. I grabbed his shoulders. The wood bit my back. He kissed me through the first burn and stayed there, seated inside me, breathing against my mouth like he’d run from the small cabin to this exact second.

“Look at me.”

I looked at him.

“You’re not a secret on a trail,” he said. “Not right now. You’re on my dock. You hear me? I don’t want you in your head with her lecture. I want you here… with me.”

“I hear you.”

He started moving.

It wasn’t the wall. It wasn’t the upside-down throat with a clock on it and spit on my glasses. It was deep and steady and the dock creaked under us every time he gave me his weight. Water dripped off his hair onto my mouth. I could see the sky going from gold to that bruised purple that makes everything look like it might not count in the morning. I could hear a bird I couldn’t name. His hat wasn’t on. His shirt wasn’t on. It was just Morgan, bare and wet, fucking me outdoors, where my parents grilled burgers, and he kept looking at my face like he was trying to memorize the laugh he’d finally gotten before Friday took it back.

“That’s it,” he muttered. “Take it. You can take it. You been taking it since the woods and you still look at me like I might disappear if you blink.”

I pulled him down. He let me. The kiss got sloppy. He hooked one of my legs higher and went deeper and I made a sound that carried over the water and he laughed once, breathless, against my teeth.

“There. That’s the sound. I wanted that too. Louder than the book. Louder than you thinking.”

He didn’t rush. Twilight did the rushing. The light went blue at the edges. He fucked me through it, one hand braced by my head, the other under my hip to keep the wood from eating me alive. When he got close he didn’t pull out and paint me for a camera that wasn’t there. He stayed in, forehead on mine, and came with a low noise that was almost a name, except he still didn’t know what to call me when he wasn’t being cruel.

He stayed inside a minute after.

The lake slapped the posts. His heart hammered against my chest. My glasses were on the dock somewhere by the book, useless.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

“I know.”

“Different shake.”

“I know.”

He pulled out careful and sat back on his heels and looked at me like he’d done something he couldn’t put in the small cabin and close the door on. Then he grabbed my shirt and cleaned what he could and tossed it aside again, disgusted with the shirt, not with me.

“Up. I’m feeding you.”

“I can walk.”

“Didn’t ask.”

He didn’t carry me this time. He kept a hand on the back of my neck all the way to the grill behind the small cabin, the same way he’d steered me through a haunted house that wasn’t a haunted house. Black shorts back on, low, still wet. I got my shorts on and left the shirt. He lit the grill like it was a normal vacation day on a normal lake with a normal boy who was not his girlfriend’s brother. Meat he’d already pulled from the cooler. Salt. Pepper. The easy competence of a man who fed crews and didn’t need a recipe.

“Sit,” he said, and when I reached for the wooden chair he shook his head. “Here.”

He sat first on the wide bench. Pulled me down across his thighs. One arm around my waist like I might slide off and make it a conversation. I could feel him under me, spent and still there, a fact he didn’t hide. and didn’t make a speech about it.

I didn’t ask the questions.

They sat in my mouth anyway. What does two days mean. What does Friday mean. What do you tell her when she calls tonight. What was the dream, exactly, besides the dock. Did you mean baby the way it sounded or the way you say Gay Potter when you want me smaller. I ate instead. He cut a piece of the steak, looked at it, then at me, and held it up. I took it because refusing would have been a question too. He did it once more and then stopped, like he’d noticed he’d done something tender and needed to put it down before it grew legs.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

“You’re happy.”

He snorted. Smoke drifted past us toward the water.

“Don’t start writing poems.”

“I’m not. You just… you are. You haven’t been. Not at breakfast. Not when she’s looking.”

He didn’t deny it. He took a bite. His thumb drew a small useless circle on my hip, over the wet waistband, and stopped, corrected, the same almost he’d been doing since the storm that wasn’t a storm, since the woods, since the bed he threw me out of.

“Tell me about the book,” he said.

“Which one.”

“The one you hide in. The girl and the freak.”

“Adeline. And Zade.”

“He a good guy?”

“Not really… he’s complex.”

Morgan’s mouth twitched.

“Figures you’d like that.”

“He watches her. He decides she’s his before she agrees. She hates him and she goes back.” I stared at the fire in the grill because looking at Morgan while I said it felt like handing him a map. “People think it’s the violence. It’s not. It’s that he sees her when nobody else is looking.”

He was quiet long enough that I thought I’d said too much.

“You want to be seen or you want to be left alone with the page.”

“Both. That’s the problem.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had more air in it.

“Read it to me tonight.”

Not a question that wanted a no.

“The whole thing?”

“As much as your voice lasts. I don’t do small print. I don’t do reading in bed like a person with a plan. I want your voice, not mine in my head.“

“Okay.”

He squeezed my hip once.

“Stop saying okay like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like you’re agreeing to a wedding. It’s a book. It’s two days. Don’t make it bigger than the porch.”

I almost laughed again. He felt it in my back and his arm tightened instead of letting go.

The fire in the grill went down. Bugs started their shift. The small cabin’s porch light made a yellow circle we didn’t enter yet. I sat on his lap with lake water still in my hair and his dinner in my stomach and the dock behind us holding the shape of what we’d done, and I was afraid to move in case the version of him that opened the door and told me to get out came back with the dark.

He rested his chin on my shoulder. His mustache scratched. He didn’t apologize for that either.

“Two days,” he said again. Quieter. For him, not for me. “I don’t know what I am after that. I know what I am tonight. Tonight I’m the guy who jumped in the lake with you and didn’t want to hear the car come back. That’s as honest as I got.”

I stared at the water. The last of the purple was going. The book was still on the dock, a small pale square.

“Maybe one day I’ll write a forbidden book about you,” I said. “My sister’s lumberjack boyfriend.”

He was still for a second. Then his mouth was against my temple, voice rough enough to be a warning and a joke at the same time.

“Maybe you gotta take “my sister” out of the title.”

He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t say or take me out of hers. He stood up with me still in his hands, set me on my feet like I weighed what I weighed, and nodded at the open door of the small cabin.

“Book. Bed. You read. I listen. You stop because you’re scared of Friday, I’ll start the page over until you forget what day it is.”

I walked back to the dock for Hunting Adeline. It was not book one but I guessed he will not figure that out. The pages were a little curled from the splash. My glasses were there too, one arm folded wrong. I put them on. He looked at me with them on the way he always did — like they were part of the problem and the reason he couldn’t leave me alone — and then he walked ahead of me toward the yellow light, black shorts, bare back, the two days sitting on him like a weather system that hadn’t decided what to be yet.

I followed.

I already knew I was going to read until my voice gave out, and that he was going to fall asleep to Zade in the dark, and that I was going to stay awake with my hand on his chest counting the hours until the driveway made a sound.