Page 123 of Stags

“But Stockton, when I went down on you, I didn’t know not to suck, like I didn’t know how to do it either, and you don’t hold that against me, do you?”

He considered, one hand on the steering wheel, the other going up to examine his antlers. “No, good point. Good point.” He put his other hand on the wheel again too and gripped it tighter. “I keep going back to this thing you said to me in the restaurant, this thing about how it was savage or rough or something?”

“Oh,” she said, remembering. “Yeah, I did say that.”

“He didn’t hurt you, right? Bruin’s a lot of things, but he’s not that kind of guy. Tell me that he didn’t—”

“No, he didn’t hurt me.”

“Good. That’s good. But, uh, why, then? Why did you say that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It seemed that way. I was surprised at how invasive it was, I guess, and how much I was just pinned down and getting, uh, taken?” She wished, immediately, that she hadn’t said that, so she rushed to say, “But I remember you said this thing, too, you said it could be soft.”

“Yeah, I think about that a lot, too,” he said quietly. “Because when I said it, I was thinking that I, uh, wanted to show you that, I wanted to be the guy who could give you something soft and good. It was the moment when I realized how badly I wanted you, when I said that.”

“Oh.” She liked that. She smiled again. Then, she realized he’d said it in the past tense. “Youwantedme. You don’t want me anymore.”

“Uh…?” He glanced at her again. “No, I still do. Actually, maybe, that, uh, that would fix a lot of things, if I did something, anything at all, better than he—”

“But I told you that I don’t want you to compare—”

“It’s just there, though, Rora,” he said. “The comparison thing isthere.”

“Well, I want you to do it better, too,” she said. “When can we?”

“When,” he repeated, his voice insubstantial.

“Like, we’re not busy now, so…” Oh, sun and moon, why had she said that? It was ludicrous to think they would fix this with sex. They should really wait and sort through their feelings and have a proper, mature talk about things and wait until they were in a good place before they even thought about doing it.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Now is… butwhenis not the question, the question iswhere.”

“Oh, we can’t go to your place, because he would be there, and neither of us could handle that.”

“Definitely not,” he said. “And your place is—”

“Out of the question.”

“And not in the back seat of a fucking car, because I told you I want it to be perfect, and that’s not a place for it to be perfect or soft or anything good.”

She looked into the back seat, considering the idea, wondering how they would contort themselves to fit. People did it, right?

“This might be just as fucked up, but I do have an idea,” he said. “And I swear I didn’t start driving out in this direction because I was thinking about it. It really did just occur to me.”

She turned back to him. “This direction…? We’re going out where the Center is, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” he said. “My father gave me a credit card to use for emergencies, and I think it would be warranted to use it to book us a room there. Which, I know, would mean that you were in a room there, like you were before, and maybe that would be—”

“Fine,” she said. “That would be fine.”

“Okay, then,” he said.

It was quiet again.

“It feels weird, like we negotiated this, and now it’s not really organic or natural, and maybe we shouldn’t,” he said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” she said. “But let’s do it anyway.”

It was still the season, and there was a weekend rut event and the Center was packed full of bucks and does, just like when they’d been there before. When they booked the room, the woman at the desk tried to upsell them into the event, but they said they wouldn’t be participating.

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