Chapter Twenty-Four
Vanessa
I sprawled out on my bed, kicking my feet in the air as I scrolled through the emails I had accumulated from various artists regarding the gallery. It was good to have such an overwhelmingly positive response to the emails that I’d sent out, but at the same time, it added even more pressure to the task of finding the funding to open the gallery.
Which I still hadn’t been able to do.
Originally, it had given me a lot of joy to look though these emails, but I started feeling more and more guilty about them. Every new artist that said it was a great idea, every artist who pledged to create a couple unique works specifically for the gallery’s opening, was another painful reminder that now, weeks after first hatching the idea for the gallery, I still had no hope of opening the place soon.
I sighed and closed my computer, putting my head down on the bed and trying my best not to give into my gloomy feelings.
There was a knock on my door, and I frowned, cracking one eye open and looking toward it. Then, I rolled onto my back and pushed myself into a sitting position. “It’s open,” I called.
To my surprise, Trethan poked his head around the door. “Hey,” he said, smiling at me. “I just finished up inventory on the ranch, and I was looking for your dad. Do you have any idea where he is?”
I frowned. “He’s in town,” I told him. “He’ll be gone for a little while longer, I think. I sent him grocery shopping, and then he was going to stop in at the barbershop, maybe buy some flowers and visit Mom’s grave. And I think he mentioned needing something for the ranch, too, although I can’t really remember what it was.”
Trethan raised an eyebrow at me. “You trust him to go grocery shopping?” he asked teasingly. “You think you’re going to be able to cook anything with the random things that he comes back with?”
I laughed. “I gave him a detailed list,” I admitted. “With pictures and everything.”
“Wouldn’t it have been faster to just go shopping on your own?”
I shrugged. “He offered to do it.”
“You seem upset,” Trethan said, coming further into the room. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s just the gallery thing,” I told him with a sight. “I’m getting more and more emails from artists who are interested, even artists who are willing to chip in some money to get the thing off the ground. But we’re still short of what we need to get the bank to match us with a loan, and I know that if we don’t make any progress on the project, I’m going to start losing people’s interest.”
He grimaced. “I’ve been trying to think of ideas, as well,” he told me.
I shook my head. “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “It’s my project to worry about.”
“I know that,” he said. “But I want to help you if I can.” He sat down next to me on the bed and reached out to stroke my back. “You deserve to be happy doing something that you really want to do. And, I know that you’ve been giving yourself a deadline of the end of this summer to get some sort of a job. Your dad mentioned that.”
I sighed and pressed my palms to my eyes. “Dad said he’d be fine with it if I just stayed here and continued living off the ranch for a while,” I admitted. “But I don’t feel like it’s very fair, doing that. It’s good for him. He could use the company around the house. I know that. At the same time, I feel like if I’m going to stay here for longer than a summer, I really need to start pulling my weight around the ranch. I can’t just do nothing. But the ranch is your job now. I don’t want to take work from you.”
Trethan shook his head. “You’re worrying yourself into a mess thinking like that,” he said.
“I know,” I moaned. “But I can’t seem to stop worrying about it. Anyway, I’ve given myself just a month or so, maybe two at the most, and if I haven’t made any progress on the gallery by then, then I’m going to have to take a job at an established place, wherever they’ll hire me. Hopefully, then I’ll be able to save up some money over a couple years, and then I can come back and do the gallery.”
Trethan looked down at that. “I hate the idea of you going away for another couple years,” he admitted.
“I don’t particularly like the idea, either,” I said with a small sigh. “I’ve missed you, and I’ve missed Dad, and I’ve missed White Bluff. This place is my home. I never really thought I’d miss the ranch because we both know how ready I was to get away from here. But I really missed the Lazy J, and the longer I’m back here, the more I start to think about what it would be like to just stay here. But you know I can’t do that without a job.”
“I know,” he said, shaking his head. Then, he smiled at me, cocking his head to the side. “You’re a really great person, Vanessa. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that, but you’re so hardworking and so intelligent. So creative, too. I’m sure that you’ll find some way to get the gallery open. I’ll help you in any way that I can.”
I grinned wickedly at him. “In any way that you can?”
Trethan looked surprised and then smirked at me. “Anyway,” he agreed. “Did you have something in mind?”
“I can think of a few ideas,” I said, turning toward him and tilting my head to the side, a clear invitation in my body language. “After all, it’s going to take Dad a while to finish the grocery shopping and get his hair cut and everything else that he needs to do. I’m sure we could find some way to make use of the house while he’s gone.”
Without another word, Trethan pushed me back on the bed until we laid next to each other, propped up on our sides and facing one another. His fingers traced my hip where my shirt had ridden up, exposing my skin. For a moment, neither of us moved further, and neither of us spoke.
There was a weight to this. We’d been here before, back when we were teenagers. But we’d never taken things all the way in this house. I wondered if we might this time, here in my childhood bedroom. The thought sent a thrill through me, and I leaned forward, seeking out Trethan’s lips with my own.
The kiss was gentle, more an exploration of one another’s lips than anything else. He slipped a hand up under my shirt, fondling my breasts, and I caught his hips in my own fingertips, pulling him closer to me, pressing my body up against his.
He nipped at my lower lip and then rolled me over onto my back, covering me with his body as he continued to languidly make out with me.
I couldn’t help giggling as we broke apart for air.
“What are you laughing about?” he asked, a grin on his face. He stroked back my hair, tucking it gently behind my ear.
“This just feels like high school all over again,” I told him. I shook my head. “I mean, I know that it shouldn’t. We’ve both grown beyond that. We’re not the same people that we were back then, and our relationship definitely isn’t the same. But at the same time, here, in this room…it just all feels so surreal.”
Trethan didn’t laugh, though. Instead, he gave me a very serious, considering look. Then, he smirked and slipped his hand up under my skirt, pushing my panties to the side and trailing the pads of his fingers along my velvety folds. “Does this feel like high school?” he asked.
“We fooled around back then,” I reminded him. “We never had sex, but we definitely fooled around.”
He raised an eyebrow at me and then slowly, deliberately, started to strip me naked, starting with my shirt and ending with my panties.
He bent down, trailing a line of kisses along my stomach and down past my navel, not stopping until he was down between my legs, lightly sucking at my mons. He lavished my folds with soft kisses that turned into dirty licks and naughty nibbles at my clit and lips. He stabbed his fingers inside of me, working them in sharp counterpoint to the soft ministrations of his mouth against my tender skin. I whimpered at the feeling.
But he wasn’t done there. When he had me good and wet, ready to go, he pulled away and smirked. “Still feel like high school?” he asked as he played his fingers inside of me, dragging those calloused pads against the walls of my pussy, forcing me to relax against the intrusion and stoking my lust ever hotter.
We kissed again. There was a tenderness there, a slight hesitance, as though we really were back in those uncertain, teenaged days. I was surprised that I felt a little shy. It wasn’t as though I’d never done this before. It wasn’t as though we had never done this before.
When Trethan finally pulled back, he sat back on his heels for a moment, staring down at me with something animalistic and dark in his gaze. It made my pulse sing with an answering desire, which I knew must be evident in my expression.
He lined his member up against my entrance and slid slowly inside of me. I cried out at the feeling, back arching against the sheets, fingers scrabbling for purchase. Trethan smirked at the noise, looking entirely too proud of himself at having drawn that noise out of me.
His thrusts were slow. Nothing like the frenzied need I’d felt from him before. It wasn’t that this felt particularly gentle, but at the same time, there was a certain tenderness there that I’d never felt from Trethan before. Especially not before I’d gone off to college. There was a certain sweetness to this, in the way that his eyes searched my face, in the way that his hands softly stroked my skin or brushed back a lock of my hair, which had fallen into my eyes.
He changed the angle of my hips slightly, allowing himself to better hit that special spot inside of me, the one that had all my nerves singing in pleasure. I gasped, back arching desperately, and began a litany of nonsense pleas and soft, needy whimpers.
“That’s it, baby,” Trethan murmured. “Come for me. Come on, come for me.”
My body responded to his request as though it were made for that, and I sobbed helplessly as my ecstasy overcame me. The world seemed to drift away, until it was just Trethan and me there, his hips pumping into mine, his gaze boring down into my soul, pulling me through my orgasm and wringing me out on the other side.
Then, he came, too, his thrusts becoming erratic, his breathing labored. His eyes fluttered shut for a moment, and his fingers, where they had at some point found mine, spasmed and clenched hard in a tight hold.
I felt him throbbing inside me, and it was enough to have me crying out again, still overstimulated from before. I shivered beneath him, clinging to him and welcoming his weight as he fell against me.
After a long moment of stillness, he dropped a soft kiss to my temple and rolled away from me. I made a noise of protest and rolled with him until I was curled into his side with my head pillowed on his chest. Trethan smiled and stroked my hair.
“Still feel like high school?” he asked again.
I had to giggle at that. “Not even remotely,” I told him.
“Good,” he growled. His arms wrapped tightly around me as he kissed my hair.