The Lumberjack Boyfriend - Chapter 10 (Patreon)

This is the chapter featuring Morgan’s fate—the one you chose in the poll.

Chapter 10

He made coffee like the night on the dirt road hadn’t happened.

I sat at the small table in his cabin with my glasses on and last night still in my body — the hood of my family’s sedan, the warm dust, his hand locked on my hip, the extra days they had handed us without knowing what she was wrapping. Morgan stood at the counter in yesterday’s black shorts and nothing else. The mullet was flattened on one side. The mustache needed a hand through it. He didn’t give it one. He poured. He set the mug in front of me. He didn’t sit.

The screen was open on the lake. July coming in already, even this early. A fly kept hitting the mesh and bouncing off. His cabin smelled like coffee and lake water drying in the boards and him — that warm animal smell that had been in the car on the way home, on my skin, in the sheets.

“You’re quiet,” I said.

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s new.”

He looked at me over the rim of his own mug. Dark brown eyes. Almost black. No smirk. The cowboy hat was still on the hook by the door. The dirty cap was in his hand. He turned it once, like it had a job.

“Today I call her.”

The lake made its small morning noise through the screen. A bird. The dock boards ticking as they warmed. Somewhere far out, a fish broke the surface and went back under.

“I want to hear it.”

“No.”

“Morgan—”

“If you’re in the room I won’t be ugly enough.” 

He said it like he was handing me a tool. “I need to be ugly enough. You sit on the dock with the book. Door stays open. You’ll hear what you’re going to hear. You don’t come in until I hang up.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I’m not being fair. I’m being accurate.” He drank. Steam off the mug. The thick column of his throat working. “You want the name in her ear, that’s not for today. Today she gets the thing without the name. That’s already enough fire.”

“Don’t tell her it’s me, Morgan.”

“I won’t, baby boy. Relax.”

He put the cap on. Not to leave. To have something to do with those big hands.

“Dock. Take the glasses. I want you seeing the water, not inventing the conversation.”

I took the book. The cover was still a little curled from the splash two days back. I took the mug. I went.

The boards were already warm under my bare feet. I sat where I always sat — same plank, same slat that stuck up a little on the left — legs toward the water, book open to a page I wasn’t going to read. Behind me the little cabin was a yellow mouth. I heard the recliner creak. I heard the phone ring through the speaker he’d set too loud on purpose or by accident. I couldn’t tell which. With him it was usually on purpose.

Jenna’s voice came thin across the porch.

“Hey. You alive out there?”

“Yeah.”

“You sound weird.”

A pause. I turned a page I didn’t see. Zade’s name sat there like it had nothing to do with a man about to burn a field.

“I’m not coming back to the clinic.”

Silence on her end that I could feel from the dock. The kind of silence Jenna used at the clinic when a number on a chart was wrong.

“What?”

“I’m not coming back to you.”

Another silence. Then her voice, practical first, the clinic voice, because that’s how Jenna survived things.

“Is there someone else?”

I heard him breathe.

“Yeah.”

“A girl from town?”

“No.”

“Morgan. Who. A friend of mine?”

“No, Jenna. I’m not giving you a name so you can hate them. Hate me. That’s the clean version. I’m the guilty party.”

“That’s not clean. That’s you being a coward on my family’s dock.”

“I know.”

“How long.”

“Long enough that I should’ve said it before you left me here alone again.”

She said something I didn’t catch. The lake took it. A word that might have been Jesus and might have been my name and wasn’t, because he hadn’t given her that. Then:

“Does my brother know you’re breaking up with me? He will be intimidated if he knows what you’re doing with me. You’re a fucking cheater, Morgan.”

My stomach dropped. She was worried about me being alone with a guy that’s not her boyfriend anymore. Fuck, the guilt felt like rocks in my stomach. She didn’t have the name. Morgan didn’t correct her. He didn’t confirm it either. He just sat in the silence she’d opened, the way he sat in weather.

“He knows I’m calling. He doesn’t get to hear the words. That part’s mine.”

“You’re in my parents’ cabin.”

“I’m in the small one.”

“That’s not better.”

“I know.”

A long breath from her. A voice in the background that might have been Mom asking who it was. Morgan waited it out.

“I have to go into a consult,” she said. “We’re not done. I’m coming back. You’re going to say it to my face.”

“I figured.”

“Don’t bring her to my parent’s cabin, Morgan. You owe me some respect.” She stopped. Started again, smaller. “I don’t even know who I’m talking to anymore.”

“Bye, Jenna. I’m sorry.”

The line went dead. Not a slam. Jenna didn’t slam phones. She cut them.

I heard him set the phone down. I heard nothing after that for a long time. A boat far out on the lake, motor like a mosquito. My own pulse in my throat. A dragonfly landed on the corner of the book and left. The same page sat in my lap like a prop that had finally figured out it was useless.

I didn’t go in when he hung up. I did what he’d told me. I waited until the waiting got stupid. I tried to read. Adeline was in a house that wasn’t this one and a man who wasn’t this one and none of it would stick. I kept hearing he. I kept hearing hate me. I kept seeing Jenna in the Rover two days ago, kissing him on the mouth while I looked at the trees.

I closed the book. I went.

He was standing at the sink with his hands on the porcelain, head down, cap still on. Water running. Not washing anything. Just running. He didn’t turn.

“You heard what you heard.”

“It’s done.”

“Yeah, it’s done. Sorry for this shit storm.”

“She’s coming back.”

“I know.”

He still didn’t turn. I crossed the small room. The boards complained under my feet the way they had the first night, when the door had been open and he’d had a game and a smirk and I hadn’t known yet what his mouth tasted like. I stopped close enough to smell the coffee and the lake on him and the sweat he already had at nine in the morning because Morgan ran hot even standing still.

“You don’t get to stand there like you just burned a field and I’m supposed to read about it.”

That got him. He shut the tap. He turned. No smirk. The look from the water when he’d asked if I wanted to be his baby — want, and the fear of naming it.

He sat in the recliner. The leather stuck to the backs of his thighs. Then he reached, both hands on my waist, thumbs in the dip above my hips, and pulled me into his lap like I weighed what I weighed. The book hit the floor. My glasses knocked his cheekbone. He hooked them off with two fingers and tossed them onto the table without looking. His chest was bare and warm. The trimmed brown hair scratched my shirt. His arm came around my back, heavy as a beam, the other hand on my thigh, thumb pressing once like a check.

I could feel him breathing. I could feel him not knowing what to do with the fact that he’d just set a fire and still had me in his hands.

“When this week ends you get on a plane to a college somewhere far and I go back to a farm that doesn’t have you in it,” he said, low, into the side of my neck. Mustache. Coffee. Man. “I’m already scared of the winter version of me. The one who comes in at dusk, stomps the mud off, and looks at a kitchen that doesn’t have your book on the table. I don’t know how to be that man and keep you. I’m telling you now so you don’t think the sex is the whole thing.”

I turned my face into his throat. His pulse under the stubble. The smell of him going straight down the way it had the first day on the porch.

“I don’t want the college,” I said. “I want you.”

He went still. The arm across my back turned to wood.

“Say that again.”

“I don’t want the college. I hate the pressure. I hate the hallway. I can go to the farm.”

He didn’t speak long enough that I thought I’d handed him something he couldn’t hold. A fly hit the screen and bounced. His thumb moved once on my thigh and stopped.

“You don’t know January,” he said finally. Not cruel. Accurate. “You don’t know the pipes. You don’t know my old man yelling at a tractor that’s already dead. You like the idea of a man who works. You don’t know if you like the work.”

“Then I learn it.”

“That’s a pretty sentence from a boy who lasted ten minutes on a dirt road and called it a date.”

“I’m not asking you to pick my life so I can resent you for it.” I used his words on him. “I’m telling you I don’t want the version where I get on a plane and you walk into that farm alone.”

His arm tightened. His mouth was at my temple.

“I’m not putting you in a barn today. I’m putting you in this chair. That’s as far as I’ve got.” He was quiet. I could feel him swallowing. “She doesn’t have the name. She gets my face when she gets here. Not yours. Not yet.”

“Okay.”

“Stop saying okay like a wedding. We’re not there…yet.”

I almost laughed. It came out wrecked. He made that noise in his chest, the lake noise, and held me until the coffee went cold and the light on the water changed from morning to the long white of noon. He didn’t kiss me. He didn’t put his hand in my shorts. He just sat there with a boy in his lap and a dead call on the table and the cap still on like taking it off would make the morning real.

We swam because the heat of July didn’t give us another option. He dove first, the way he had the first day, a heavy splash that threw water up onto the boards and onto the book I shouldn’t have brought down again. I went in after him with my glasses on the Adeline paperback and my shirt on the warm wood. He didn’t grab me in the shallows. He swam out and floated on his back with the mullet fanned in the water and the mustache silvered and his chest hair flattened dark against the muscle. I stayed closer to the dock. I watched him anyway. He knew.

When he pulled himself up, the boards creaked. Water sheeted off him. The black shorts — he’d put them back on to swim, some leftover decency that fooled nobody — clung. I saw him the way I had the first afternoon, thick outline, heavy, and I looked at the book so I wouldn’t do the thing with my face he’d already called tragic.

He lay in the sun with the brim of the cap over his eyes. I sat in the shade of the big cabin’s porch and pretended the pages turned themselves. Taylor in my headphones, low. He didn’t ask what I was listening to. I didn’t offer. Every so often he’d shift and the cap would tip and I’d catch the dark of his eyes on me and look away first, and he’d let me, which was new. The old Morgan would have smirked. This one just looked and went back to the sun.

We still didn’t talk about Jenna. We didn’t talk about the winter. He opened two beers after four and drank half of one and let the other sweat a ring into the dock. Neither of us was being decent.

Around six he got up and went into the small cabin and came back with nothing in his hands. No grill. No plan. He sat on the edge of the boards with his feet in the water and I sat next to him close enough that our shoulders almost touched and didn’t.

“You still meaning it,” he said. Not a question that wanted a pretty answer. “The farm. The college. All that shit?”

“I still mean it.”

“You say that in the shade. Sun goes down, lake gets black, you might grow a brain.”

“Then ask me again in the water.”

He looked at me sideways. The mustache twitched. Not the porch smirk. Something smaller.

“I will.”

The pink went out of the sky slow. The cabins behind us turned into yellow squares. The air dropped the way it did every night here, sudden, like the lake had been holding its breath. He stood up and held out his hand.

“Water,” he said. “Now. Before I take you inside and pretend a bed is braver than this.”

The lake at night was a different animal. Black glass. The only real noise the water hitting the pilings and, far off, somebody’s radio on a porch that wasn’t ours. I followed him off the end of the boards. The cold climbed my legs, my stomach, my chest. He was already in to his shoulders, black shorts gone, just him, the mullet wet, the mustache silvered by whatever light the dock had left.

He reached for me.

Not a grab. An invitation. I went into his hands and he lifted me like the water had cut my weight in half and I wrapped my legs around him because there was nothing else to wrap around. His chest against mine. The hair scraping. The heat of him under the cold. I felt him hard against me immediately, the same thick fact from the hood and the cabin and the first day in wet boxers, and he made a sound into my neck that wasn’t the porch growl. It was quieter. It scared me more.

“You good?”

“Yes.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I’m good. Morgan. I want you, you’re everything I can think about since the first day I saw you with her.”

He kissed me in the water. Not the hood kiss. Not the careful restaurant nothing. This was the thing under both. Slow. Deep. His mustache wet on my mouth. My glasses gone, left on the book on the dock, so it was just his face and the dark and the lake slapping the wood in a rhythm that didn’t care about us.

He got a hand between us. Fingers. The cold made it sharper. Two, then a third, patient in a way the dirt road hadn’t been, opening me while he held me up with the other arm like I was a thing he was used to carrying. I dropped my forehead to his and breathed him — beer he’d barely drunk, lake, man, the coffee still somewhere under it.

“You said the farm,” he muttered. “You said you don’t want the college. Don’t you say that in the water if you’re going to take it back on the porch.”

“I’m not taking it back.”

“You don’t know what winter is like there.”

“Then show me January when it comes. Tonight I know this.”

He lined himself up. The lake made it easy and worse at the same time — slick, cold, then the heat of him pushing in, thicker for the water, the stretch pulling a sound out of me that went across the black glass. He stopped buried, holding me up with both arms, my legs around his waist, my mouth on his shoulder.

“That’s you,” he said. “That’s all of it. Don’t you slip.”

“I won’t.”

He started to move. Not the dirt road. Not the two-stroke panic of a man who thought he had to finish before the world came back. This was the dock at twilight slowed down and taken off the wood. Deep. Steady. The water around us chopping small when his hips snapped. My arms around his neck. His chest hair scraping my chest. Every time he bottomed out I felt it in my teeth.

He talked, because Morgan talked when he wanted something too much and didn’t have a tool for it.

“Look at me.”

I looked. His eyes were almost black. The smirk wasn’t there. What was there was the January kitchen and the thing he’d done with his body anyway.

“You’re in my hands. You’re telling me you’ll sit in a kitchen in January and look up when I come in. Don’t you close your eyes on that.”

“I’m not closing them.”

He kissed me while he fucked me. That was the part that undid me. The water, the dark, his mouth open on mine, the thick drag of him, the small broken sound he made every time I clenched. Romantic wasn’t a word he would have used. It was the word anyway. 

The most of it we’d had. No hood. No mask. No TikTok game. Just a man who’d burned a call on a porch and then walked into the lake with the boy he wouldn’t name yet.

He lasted longer than the road. Not because he’d practiced. Because he was scared of the future, and scared made him careful, and careful on Morgan still meant deep enough that I had to bite his shoulder to keep the sound in the water where it belonged. His hand slid down my back, gripped my ass, pulled me onto him on every thrust so I wasn’t only taking it. I pushed back because I wanted him to know I wasn’t a doll on a hood.

“That’s it,” he muttered. “Use it. Don’t just hang there.”

“Morgan—”

“I know. I feel you. Don’t you go quiet on me in the lake. I want the mouth too.”

I kissed him instead of answering. He made the lake noise into my mouth and snapped his hips and I saw white behind my eyes. Cold water. Hot man. The dock lights smeared. He changed the angle and found the place that made my legs lock around him and he stayed on it, grinding, the lake slapping the piles in time, and I came with my face in his neck, shaking, the water taking the sound apart so it wouldn’t reach the big cabin.

He felt it. He swore into my hair.

“Fuck. Harry—”

My name. Not Gay Potter. Not kid. Harry. He followed on it, buried, pulsing inside me, his whole body locking around mine like he could keep the lake from ending the week by force. I felt every pulse. I held the back of his neck and let him shake through it.

We stayed like that. His heart against my chest. A night bird. The dock boards ticking.

He pulled out careful. I felt him leave and the lake take his place, colder, honest, the leak of him going out of me into black water. He kept holding me. My legs were still around him. He walked us to the shallows until he could set me on my feet and keep a hand on my waist so I wouldn’t do something stupid like fall.

His mouth was at my ear.

“When she gets here she still doesn’t get the name. She gets me. You stay on the dock with the book until I say otherwise.”

“Okay.”

“Stop saying okay like a wedding, I didn’t ask yet.”

I laughed. It came out wrecked and small. He made the lake noise in his chest and kissed me once more, wet, tasting like lake water and the beer he hadn’t finished, and then he put me back on the boards and climbed up after me, water sheeting off him, the mullet dark, the mustache dripping, the body that had short-circuited me the first day still doing it in the dark.

He didn’t take me to his cabin immediately. He sat on the dock with his thighs apart and pulled me down sideways into his lap, arm around my back, the same hold as the recliner, except now the lake was on both of us and his voice was lower.

“When we pack,” he said, “I’m already going to be a problem in that barn. I’m telling you so you don’t think I only want you when you’re full of me. I want you when you’re on a plane. That’s worse. That’s the part I don’t have a tool for.”

I put my face in his throat. His pulse. The wet mustache against my temple.

“Then don’t pack like it’s the end.”

“It might be the end of this version.” His hand spread on my ribs. “This version of us…”

We sat until the cold got honest. Then he stood with me in his arms like I weighed what I weighed and carried me to the small cabin without asking if I could walk. He set me down inside. He didn’t turn on the overhead. Just the lamp.

“Book, I want to know the rest of the story.” he said. “Read to me. I want the quiet first.”

I gave him the quiet.

Outside, the lake ticked against the piles.

Tomorrow the driveway would make a sound.

Tonight he still had me in the room, and she still didn’t have the name, and January was a sentence neither of us could finish.

He pulled me into the bed anyway.

I let him.

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