The last thing I wanted to do was pressure Katie into doing something she really didn’t want to do, but a week after our last conversation, which had included her agreeing to go out on a date with me, I still hadn’t heard from her. She hadn’t been at the bar, and I had kept myself from going by the motel to check if her bike was parked in the lot. I considered it torture.
Maybe I should’ve just given her my number, or gotten hers. That way, I could’ve at least sent a text message to ask her if she was still in Rio Seco. Or just seen if she was doing okay. Or told her to forget about the date thing, not to worry about it anymore, just come back to the bar and have fun and just hang out, no pressure.
Then, though, one Sunday afternoon, as I prepped for opening at the bar, the door swung open and there she was again, back in my life.
“Weeklong hangover?” I guessed, grinning at her. “You did have enough tequila that I would believe it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Had some things I had to take care of.”
“On vacation?”
Katie hung her head. “Truthfully?”
“If you feel like being truthful.”
“I…was kind of, well, not dreading this, per se, but was just nervous, uh, about it.”
“You absolutely don’t have to do this,” I said with a swift rush of guilt for causing her angst.
“No, no, I want to do it, I really do.” She fidgeted. “I guess the anxiety comes more from not knowing what we’re planning on doing.”
“Well, that’s something I can easily solve for you,” I said. “I thought I would take you on one of my favorite rides around here.”
“On your motorcycle?”
“Yeah, if you want,” I said. “That way, you can enjoy the scenery instead of having to focus on the road. But if you’d prefer using your own bike, that’s fine, too.”
“When would you like to go?” she asked, after a beat.
“Any time you’re free,” I said. “We could take off right now, if you wanted.”
“You’re getting ready to open, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but I can get out of it.”
“Confident in your job security, are you?”
“That’s what you get when you work with your friends,” I said. “I’ll just text one of them now and let them know. There won’t be any problem.”
Brody was the one I texted instead of Jack, though it was usually the other way around. Jack and I were closer than Brody and I were, but after the last conversation I’d had with Jack regarding Katie, I didn’t know where he would stand on me getting out of work to hang out with her. He’d never been so protective before, and I could only guess it had something to do with his current mental state, the sleep that his nightmares were depriving him.
“Ah, here’s a response,” I said.
“That was quick,” Katie observed.
“What can I say?” I opened the message and stifled a laugh. “I have good friends.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing important. Just that he said he’d cover my shift.” Brody had texted back a string of fruit and vegetable emojis that suggested sexual intercourse.
“I’d love to go out on a ride with you,” Katie said. “I’m excited, actually. I’ve been riding around a little bit, but you told me you knew the really good ones, and I haven’t found those yet.”
“Where have you been going?”
We fell into easy conversation about all the different routes available to bikers in this part of the state as we walked into the alley to my motorcycle. Katie had parked hers beside mine in a gesture that struck me as oddly intimate. It almost felt as if this was the true reset moment of our rocky relationship, like we were really about to make a connection and leave all the nastiness and drama behind us.
“So, are you sure the only reason you want me to ride on your bike with you isn’t so you’ll get felt up?” Katie asked, smirking.
I snorted at her. “If you’re thinking about getting as frisky today as you were the other night, at least warn me first, so I don’t swerve off the road and kill us both.”
The smirk vanished instantly. “What are you talking about, before?”
“We’ve done this before, you know.”
“We have?”
“Sure enough. When I took you back to your motel that night you got so drunk.”
“I can’t believe I don’t remember that,” Katie said, putting her helmet on and climbing on behind me. It wasn’t until I started the engine and started walking the machine out that she placed her hands on my hips, casual and comfortable.
“You should believe it,” I said. “You were wasted. What got into you that night?”
We roared out onto the main street, and then I really opened it up the moment I was beyond the last building in the historic strip of downtown Rio Seco. Katie leaned forward, her torso flush to my back.
“I guess I got a little carried away,” she said.
“Happens to the best of us.”
“I don’t think I’ll be doing any tequila shots in the foreseeable future.”
“Give it a chance,” I coached. “You’ll come back around. Tequila never leaves your life without a little kicking and screaming.”
“It’ll be me doing the kicking and screaming if anyone tries to get me to do any tequila shots,” she vowed.
Five minutes or so of silence well, the wind rushing past my ears, uninterrupted by the woman who still leaned close against me, her arms around my middle, now and then Katie cleared her throat.
“What did you mean, earlier, when you said that I got frisky on your bike the other night?” she asked.
“Oh, not much. Don’t worry about it.”
“I worry about every embarrassing thing I do that I don’t remember doing. You can tell me.”
“While we were on the road, you grabbed my, well…you grabbed…me. In a private place.”
“You’re telling me I grabbed your cock.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t want to chance checking the expression on her face precious cargo aboard, and all that but I did catch the scoff of surprise she made.
“I’m shocked I didn’t let go and fall off,” she said.
“You’d be surprised at the level of self-preservation even a blacked-out drunk could have,” I assured her. “You wouldn’t let go for nothing or nobody. You thought you were getting some that night, if you’ll remember.”
“I don’t remember. I will not. You can’t make me.”
I laughed at her. “It was fine. Minus the vomit, you were actually pretty cute.”
“Keep that kind of talk up and I’ll let go this time.”
“All right,” I said, relenting. “I promised you a fresh start and I’ll stick to that promise. Nothing happened between us since today. Clean slate. I’m Ace and you’re Katie, and we are going on a very fun first date or whatever you want to call this.”
“Please don’t call it a date.”
“Okay. We’re definitely not going on a date. No dates allowed. They have been outlawed on your behalf. We’re just going on a, uh, on a…” I trailed off, hoping she’d throw my sinking ass a life preserver or something, because I had no idea what to label this thing.
“We’re going on a ride,” she suggested.
“Yes. A ride.”
The miles flew past, and we both lapsed into silence. I was afraid it would be awkward, but it was actually comfortable, especially since the roar of the machine beneath us and the whip of the wind covered all the talking for us. We came over a slight rise in the terrain and I took one hand off the handlebars to point, and just like that, I knew this was a good idea. I vaguely heard what I was pretty sure was Katie gasping in delight at the way the desert just sort of unfolded before us, like a velvety, living thing, the topography undulating as if on a geological whim.
I was glad I could share this beauty with her.
God, this place was beautiful. I was reminded every day of the purer reasons I decided to remain in Rio Seco, the ones not colored by guilt and regret and pain. The town was the perfect base for seeing the parts of New Mexico I really loved, the way the desert rose into mountains, everything weathered by wind and sun. It was as if some creative deity decided to go wild on all the scenery around here, and even though I’d been on this road before, the land that stretched before me was different. Katie colored it differently, I believed, her hands around my middle even though she was an accomplished enough rider to not need to hang on to stay on the back of a motorcycle. I was seeing it through her eyes, seeing it for the first time, and I wasn’t sure what that meant.
She tapped me on the helmet. “Can you pull over?”
I did so immediately, not another soul within miles. “Everything all right?”
“No, everything is not all right.” She slipped off the back of the bike and removed her helmet. Sucking in a deep breath, she turned around, taking in her surroundings.
“Katie?”
“Everything is better than all right. Everything is magnificent.” She swept her arm out, indicating the red rocks around us, the purpling mountain, the way the sky acted as some kind of mirror and catalyst for the colors around us, all at once.
“Pretty special place,” I agreed.
“That’s an understatement.” Katie turned to me, her full lips parted, brows drawn together. “Why did you bring me here?”
I shrugged. “I just wanted to show you how special Rio Seco could be. Well, to be honest, this might fall out of the city limits of Rio Seco, but I still count it as home.”
“But why did you want to show me this?”
“You didn’t seem to think that Rio Seco was anything special.” I smiled at her. “Now, granted, you were also drunk enough to try and proposition me, so that might not be saying much about your state of mind at the time.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll admit it. I was drunk and stupid. Rio Seco’s beautiful. New Mexico is a magical place, and we should tell no one because then everyone would want to be here.”
“You’re right. Why did I tell you?”
She smiled. “Trying to impress me, Ace?”
“Is it working?”
“Maybe.” She took a couple of steps toward me, her eyes lingering over my lips. “Do you know a good place to watch the sunset?”
“This is as good a place as any.” Why was she standing so close to me?
“What I mean to say is…is there a more private place to watch the sunset?”
The way my groin tightened at her words gave me a little help in understanding just what Katie was attempting to do.
“We could walk up that rise, there,” I said. “In another life, I might’ve done something similar to watch the sunset or sunrise. I don’t remember which it was, which shows you that the memory doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” she said, though she laughed and tromped off through the desert vegetation and sand. “Taking me somewhere you’ve taken another girl. Hoping you get lucky and it works as well for you now as it did then.”
“It was ages ago. I don’t even remember her name.”
“Yeah, I don’t believe you.” There wasn’t any heat to her words, though, as we puffed over the rise, fingers scrambling over rocks, warding against brambles and thorns and spikes. “Have you ever, uh, did you see any snakes while you were out here?”
“Never,” I said, “though that probably means I wasn’t looking hard enough.”
“Great.”
“You’re afraid of snakes?”
“When one of them surprises you on a path in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles away from medical attention, everyone is afraid of snakes.”
“Fair enough.”
We made the summit of the rise without incident, and the sun broke through the cloud bank that had threatened to obscure the horizon, painting all the surrounding rock and sand. It took even my breath away, and I had been here before, in this very spot, watching the sun on the horizon. That didn’t mean that it was ever the same. It was always different. It might’ve been the same sun and the same sky and the same rocks and sand and vegetation, but everyone changed with every day. I was a different person with each new piece of information I got, each new thing I experienced, each person I met and interacted with. I was a different person from the last time I was on top of this rise, someone attempting to relate to the woman I’d brought here with me, hoping for something that was probably against hope.
But the way Katie looked at me, when she finally found she could drag her eyes away from the tableau unfolding before us, was something that twisted my insides even more than the beautiful scenery. Her skin was painted golden in the setting sun, red coloring her cheeks, a testament to the iron in the rocks, the crimson undertones of the land around us. Her blue eyes had darkened to something bottomless in this light, and it was hard to gauge what was driving her, just what emotion was behind the wheel, making her look at me like that.
She bit her bottom lip, glancing downward, and it was like watching someone at war with herself. Katie wanted something. She clearly wanted something, but as much as she wanted it, something was keeping her from it.
I spoke up without knowing, exactly, what I was doing. “Look, just because I brought you here doesn’t mean that you have to feel like you should be doing something for me. I brought you here because I wanted to share it with you, because beautiful things mean more with someone else. I’m expecting nothing from you, do you understand? Even with this whole thing, I’m expecting nothing.”
This was completely incongruous with the person I thought I was, the person everyone else knew me to be. I loved women. I loved having a good time with them, and theyusually loved me, too. I had never really been rejected so thoroughly as Katie had rejected me and that was without any real ego speaking. Women tended to always like me. If I was hanging out with the rest of the guys, I was usually the first one to have luck with any members of the opposite sex we encountered. It was something of a legend. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do or achieve with Katie, here. I should’ve just walked away, or let her walk away. I shouldn’t have had this stupid idea, going on this ride. I didn’t want her to think that I had some kind of ulterior motive, driving us all the way out here, away from civilization, looking to hook up or for some kind of recompense for, in her words, being so nice to her when she was being so mean to me. I didn’t want her to think that she was on the hook for anything. That wasn’t why I’d brought her out here. It really wasn’t.
“Katie, regardless of what you think, I’m not that kind of guy. I didn’t want”
“Fuck,” she said, interrupting my rambling, and then she kissed me.
My lips parted in an “oh” of surprise, and she took that opportunity to deepen it. I had a fleeting thoughthow tickled the rest of the guys would be if they knew I had been surprised by a kiss in the middle of a romantic vista and situation and then forgot everything at the feeling of her tongue against mine, gently asking permission. I would deny her nothing. If this was what she wanted, this was what I would give her. We kissed as the sun brushed against the horizon, liquid light pooling against the sand, shimmering to make it look as if a molten sea stretched before us.
Katie broke contact. “Fuck,” she repeated, breathless, bracketing the action in profanity.
“Everything’s fine,” I tried to assure her, babbling to try and drown out our various insecurities. “It’s better than fine. I … really liked kissing you. It was nice. But if you don’t want to do it again, if you don’t want it to go any further than that, I’m completely fine with that, too.”
“Shut up,” she said, fisting her hand in the front of my shirt. “Please.”
“Okay.”
She kissed me again, making words superfluous, our mouths ushering the sun below the edge of the horizon. It didn’t matter what time of the day or night it was. The vista was always different, a living painting, changing with the weather, or the light, or the season.
“Do you have anywhere you need to be right now?” she asked, breaking the kiss again. “Anywhere you want to be? Anywhere else we should be?”
“We can’t go, now,” I said, smiling gently against her lips, aware of the deepening dusk that surrounded us. “We’d miss the real show.”
“The real show?”
“There aren’t artificial lights for miles out here,” I told her. “If that cloud bank on the horizon behaves, you’ll see stars like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I think I’m already seeing stars,” she said, her voice faint.
I had to laugh at her. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re cheesy?”
“No, because that’s not true.” She lifted her chin, defiant. “I’m not cheesy.”
“What if I like cheesy?”
“Then stick around,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. Maybe standing on top of a mountain at sunset with you. You have to admit, that’s a little cheesy. Maybe it takes cheese to know cheese.”
“This is downright poetic,” I said with mock defensiveness. “There isn’t so much as a sprinkle of cheese up here right now. And this isn’t a mountain. You want to climb mountains, I’ll take you to climb mountains.”
“Is that a promise?”
“If you want it to be.”
Katie touched her lips, contemplative, looking around as the light bled to lavender, repainting the mountains and desert in broad strokes. “It won’t be full dark for a while,” she observed.
“It won’t take too long, especially in the winter. The stars will start coming out soon. Venus will be the first thing you’ll see.”
She gave me a dubious look. “You’re into astronomy?”
“Not really. I just wondered what the really bright thing I’ve been seeing just after sunset is, and I have a smartphone, so I guess we have modern technology to thank.”
“I guess we do.”
I had to hide a smile. I did have something of a surprise for her, depending on how long we stayed out here, that sort of went beyond the realm of basic understandings of astronomy, but only time would tell.
“Have you ever run into anyone else out here?” she asked.
“No, never,” I said. “New Mexico’s a pretty big state, though. I’m sure people have other favorite spots to go to, other than this one.”
“This is an Ace-Black-approved favorite spot?” she asked, a smile playing on her face.
“Definitely Ace Black approved.”
“And does Ace Black approve of me kissing him again, seeing as how we’ve established that no one’s going to surprise us here?”
“If I can stop referring to myself in the third person, which I think is super creepy, then I would say yes, definitely.”
“Okay, I’ll let you off the hook for that.”
I really, really liked kissing Katie. But what I liked more was that she seemed to like kissing me, too. I hadn’t asked for this. Honest to God, I hadn’t even really expected anything like this to happen. It had just seemed like Katie needed something good, that something bad had been gnawing at her for so long that she forgot what the good stuff felt like. I knew that she would like the ride hell, I liked the ride, and there wasn’t a single second of it that I didn’t know like the back of my hand, that’s how often I came out this way. This kissing, and whatever might accompany it, that just seemed to be a happy little bonus.
The next surprise was Katie copping a feel of my helpless, raging erection through my jeans.
“Does that ring any bells for you?” I joked.
“I think I’m perhaps looking forward to making some new memories with this,” she said, squeezing meaningfully. I thrust toward her almost reflexively, then laughed, embarrassed at my own eagerness. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.”
“Okay.” I leered at her, really leaning in to it. “Not sorry at all.”
I kissed her this time, confident that this was what she wanted, that whatever misgiving had held her up before was deemed inconsequential. Kissing her and being so sure about it was something different entirely than the kisses she’d surprised me with before. Now I could feel the breadth of my attraction to her. It all came rushing toward me at once, and I responded probably a little too eagerly. I hoped I didn’t spook her. It was the last thing I wanted to do.
I helped her out of her clothes, covered every expanse of skin I’d uncovered with my mouth, kissing and sucking until Katie was shaking and moaning.
“You’re not too cold?” I asked, my pulse fluttering as I cupped one perfect breast in my hand. I could see my breath in the space between us, and Katie shuddered. “We don’t have to do this here, or now. Come on. You just shivered.”
“That’s because you were touching me, not because I was cold, and I want to do this here and now.”
“If you’re uncomfortable in any moment, do you promise to tell me? I could have us in a shitty but warm motel in under an hour.”
“I don’t think I could wait an hour.”
That made my breath catch in my throat. “You mean to tell me that you are truly prepared to do this thing, right here, right now, in the middle of the desert, snakes be damned?”
She paled. “Please don’t bring up snakes right now.”
“What about this snake?” I ground my erection into her hip bone and she laughed.
“You are the absolute worst.”
“I’m an acquired taste. You’ll find me charming soon enough.”
“Uh-huh. I bet that works on all the ladies.”
I stripped off my clothes and arranged them in a sort of makeshift drop cloth. “Okay. You get down on that and keep watch over my shoulder, and I’ll keep watch over your shoulder. That way, we’ll be able to see anything sneaking up on us.”
“You are really, really giving me doubts about this whole thing,” Katie said, her face telling me that she knew I was talking about snakes, or scorpions, or people, or other desert-centric threats to our chances of intimacy.
“Just being careful,” I said. “You can never be too careful.” I reached into my wallet and showed her a condom, and she laughed at me.
“You’re a real boy scout, do you know that?”
“I hope that’s sexy.”
“It’s…well, it’s something.”
I slipped the condom on and guided my cock to her soft labia, parting them gently, testing the waters, so to speak.
“I’m ready for you,” she said, even if her trembling voice told me something different.
“Any moment you have second thoughts…”
“Ace. Now.”
“All right.”
I sank into her, and we both sucked in air at the same time Katie at the invasion, and me at just how tight she was.
“Are you sure this is okay?” I asked, suffering the indignity of my voice cracking.
“If you ask me that one more time, Ace, so help me God…”
“Okay.”
I snapped my hips backward until just the head of my cock was in her, and her fingernails scrabbled at my shoulders until I entered again, sliding all the way home. Katie just held on to me tightly, and I let her, wishing I could just fold myself around her, but I was focused on keeping my full weight from stealing her breath, on angling my hips just right, on being able to slip one hand between us to rub her clit in time to my thrusting.
“Ace,” she said breathlessly. “I can’t I’m going to…”
“Let go,” I breathed. “There’s no one out here to hear you but me, and I want to hear you. I want to hear you come. Let me hear it.”
Her howls were a beautiful thing, echoing off the sands around us, the first stars winking to life in the deepening sky, and as her muscles convulsed around me, I joined her, grateful, dumbfounded, lucky as fuck to have met the woman in front of me and somehow won her over.
There was nothing better than this. Nothing.
We held on to each other for a long time, longer than we needed to catch our breath, just because we were comfortable.
“There’s something else special about tonight,” I said, breaking the warm silence. “Are you cold?”
“It’s just a little chilly,” she said gamely. “Stay close to me and I’ll be fine.”
“We should’ve put on another layer.”
“I didn’t think we’d be out this late, honestly.”
“So what you mean is that you didn’t think the date was going to go this well?”
“I thought we weren’t going to call it a date.”
“I didn’t call it a date. You called it a date.”
Katie laughed, exasperated. “Why are we out this late?”
“We’re stargazing tonight,” I informed her. “Specifically, we’re hoping to view a meteor shower.”
“Seriously?”
“My hand to God. I brought you out here with the very innocent plan of watching shooting stars.”
“You’re not only cheesy. You’re a nerd. You’re a nerd disguised as a biker.”
“I contain multitudes,” I said with dignity, as Katie’s laugh echoed around the desert until she gasped.
“Snake?” I guessed, my voice higher pitched than I wanted it to be. “Where?”
“No, I just saw a shooting star,” she said. “Oh, my God. I’ve never seen a shooting star before in my life. Look!”
This time, I did catch the stream of light, streaking across the sky. “Make a wish.”
“If this is really a meteor shower, then we’re going to be making lots of wishes tonight.”
“Maybe we can grant a few of them tonight, too.”
“Cheesy. So, so cheesy.”
But I loved to hear our laughter joined in the night, loved that we had each other’s heat to keep warm, loved that Katie was out here, doing this with me.
Loved her.
I made love to her two more times under those falling stars, wishing only that the night would never end.