High Jumps

The hunter would not stand. She had been circling the box since the last of the afternoon light went off the yard, and James Davistow had stayed with her because nobody else would, and because that was the work. He spoke to her the way he spoke to anything that wanted to bolt. Easy now. Hold. The words sat low in his chest. His hands were already clean enough for the evening feed; he had washed them at the tap by the feed room and then put them back on the mare anyway, because a frightened animal did not care about soap.

She was a big bay with a white sock on the near fore and a habit of throwing her head when she heard a boot on gravel. The other lads had given her up at four and gone down to the pub. James had not been asked to stay. He had simply not left. The rain began as a fine wetness on the cobbles, then thickened, ticking on the tin roofs of the loose boxes, running in a thin bright line along the gutter above the tack-room door. He smelled wet hay, the iron of the water buckets, and the cheap citrus on his collar that never quite covered the salt.

He ran a hand down the mare's neck and felt the shiver leave her by degrees. Not gone. Settled. There was a difference, and he had learned it on boats before he ever learned it in a yard. You did not force a thing that was already on the edge. You gave it somewhere to put the fear.

When he looked up, she stood in the doorway.

Bella Thorpe stood with one shoulder against the frame, old tweed dark with rain at the cuffs, boots that would have covered a month of his wages and had seen actual mud. Her dark auburn hair was in the knot she wore for the yard, pulled so tight it made her face look carved. Grey-green eyes. She did not say his name. She did not need to. The look she gave the mare was the look she gave a fence she intended to take, and then that look came to him, and he felt it land the way a hand lands on a bridle.

"Walk her again," she said.

"Ma'am."

He clipped the lead and took the mare out into the yard. The cobbles shone. Rain needled the back of his neck where the faded shirt had gone thin. He walked her in a slow circuit past the mounting block and the feed-room wall, talking under his breath, keeping his body quiet so hers would follow. Bella watched from the doorway and did not come in out of the wet. Her attention settled on him like weather. When he brought the mare past her the second time she said, without raising her voice, "Slower."

He slowed. The mare's hooves made a wet, careful sound. James kept his eyes on the animal because that was the job, and because looking at Bella Thorpe for longer than the work required still felt like taking something that did not belong to him.

"Again," she said.

He did it again. The mare's head dropped a fraction. Rain ticked on the tin. Somewhere beyond the yard a car went up the lane toward the old house, tyres hissing, and then the peninsula was quiet except for water and the small noises of a settled horse.

"That will do." Bella stepped aside so he could put the mare away. "Look at me when I am speaking to you."

He looked. It cost him more than the walking had. She was taller than he remembered from across a paddock, five foot nine in those boots, the long muscle of a serious rider under the tweed, a horseman's mouth that did not bother to smile. A small white scar showed on the inside of one wrist where a rein had snagged years ago. He had noticed it in the spring and had not let himself keep noticing. Her eyes gave the order before the rest of her caught up.

"She will stand for you," Bella said. "She will not stand for the others. Why."

"She doesn't like being rushed, ma'am. They come at her like she's a job to get shot of."

"And you do not."

"No, ma'am."

She held his gaze a moment longer than the question needed. Then she turned her head toward the rest of the yard, which had emptied without either of them remarking on it. Lights were off in the other boxes. The lads' radio had gone silent an hour ago. Rain filled the space where voices usually were.

"Put her up," Bella said. "Then close the tack-room door."

He put the mare up. He hung the lead, checked the water, ran a last palm down the bay shoulder until the hide went still. His own pulse had not gone still. It had been running under the courtesy all summer, a streak of hunger he had been careful not to name, the same concentration he used on weather and on horses turning now, without permission, toward the woman in the doorway. He had spent a season learning how the wealthy liked to be anticipated. He had learned to have the tack ready before they asked, the horse in, the gate shut. This was the same skill and it was not the same skill at all.

The tack room was stone-floored, narrow, smelling of saddle soap and neatsfoot and the damp wool of rugs hung to dry. Saddle racks along the left wall. A tack trunk under the window that did not open. Rain made a small continuous sound on the tin above. He closed the door. The latch was cold. When he turned, she was already inside, the room smaller for it.

She did not take off the riding coat. She stood with the wet tweed still on her shoulders and looked at him as if he were another animal she meant to get right.

"Come here."

He came. Three steps on stone. He stopped where he judged she wanted him, close enough to catch the rain on her collar and the clean expensive scent under it, tuberose, something that did not belong in a yard.

She asked it very quietly, so quietly that the rain nearly took it.

"Do you choose this."

Nobody in Thorpe Bay had ever put that question to a hired man. They told you where to be and when, and you were there, and the choosing was not part of the arrangement. James felt the old pride lift in him, the stubbornness he kept off his face in grand rooms, and under it the hunger that had been waiting since June, since the first time she had watched him settle a horse and had not looked away.

"Yes, ma'am."

She reached up and took the knot out of her hair.

It came down darker for the rain, heavy, the severe line of it broken on purpose. The knot, he understood then, had always been a decision. She let him see that. A strand stuck to her cheek and she did not move it. Grey-green eyes, unhurried, taking him in the way she had taken in the mare: what would stand, what would not, how much pressure, how much quiet.

"On your knees."

He went down on the stone. Cold struck through his jeans at once. His canvas jacket pulled at the shoulders. He kept his hands on his thighs because she had not said otherwise, and because he wanted to get this right the way he wanted a fence got right, with no fuss and no wasted motion. She looked down at him. The riding coat hung open. Under it she wore silk the colour of old ivory, already marked dark where the rain had come through the tweed, a skirt that had no business in a tack room, stockings, the boots planted apart on the flags.

"I did not ask what you thought," she said. "I asked you to do it. Look at me."

He looked up. From here she was all carriage and rain and the long pale line of her throat. She gathered the silk in one gloved hand and drew it up. She was bare underneath, the dark auburn of her hair matching what he saw between her thighs, and she did not blush or explain. She stepped forward until her boot touched his knee.

"Mouth," she said. "Slower than you think. You will look at me while you do it."

He put his mouth on her.

She was already wet. The taste of her filled him, salt and heat, and he made a sound he had not meant to make; her gloved fingers closed in his hair at once, not quite a caress, a correction. Sun-lightened brown hair that never lay flat, now gripped. He opened her with his tongue and kept his eyes up as ordered, which meant he saw the exact moment her mouth changed, the horseman's line of it going slack and then firm again as she took the pleasure in hand the way she took everything.

"Slower."

He slowed. He licked her in a long, careful stroke from the wet centre of her up to the small hard peak of her clit and stayed there, not rushing, learning her the way he had learned the mare, by what settled and what asked for more. Her glove tightened. The leather was cold at first and then not. Her breathing changed. Rain on the tin. His own knees aching on stone and the ache meaning nothing beside the work of his mouth.

"Again."

He did it again. And again. She used him with the same hard competence she used on the estate, no theatre, no wasted praise, only the precise instructions of a woman who knew what she wanted and had decided, tonight, to take it from a man who would not sulk about who was in charge. When he tried to put a hand on her hip she said, "No," and he put it back on his thigh. When he pressed closer she said, "Stay where you are," and he stayed, neck craned, mouth working, looking up into grey-green eyes that did not look away.

"There. That. Do not you dare speed up."

He did not. He held the pace she had set until his jaw ached and his cock strained, thick and helpless, in his jeans, untouched, and the hunger that had run under his courtesy all summer had nowhere left to hide. He wanted to be good at this. He wanted her to use him until the using was the whole of the room. He wanted, with a heat that shamed him and did not stop him, to be the creature who took instruction without turning it into a fight.

She came against his tongue with her gloved hand fisted in his hair and her other hand braced on the saddle rack, a low sound in her throat that she did not try to make pretty. Her thigh shook against his cheek. He kept his mouth on her through it because she had not told him to stop, licking her through the clench and wet rush of it, his eyes still up, watching her face as it broke and then came back to command as if command were the thing she trusted more than pleasure.

She held him there a moment longer, then let go of his hair.

"Stand up."

He stood. His legs had gone stiff from the stone. He was shaking a little and hoped the jacket hid it. She looked at the front of his jeans without embarrassment and reached for his belt herself. The buckle was wet from rain he had brought in on his clothes. She undid it with the same unhurried competence, drew the belt through, opened the button, the zip, and put her hand inside as if she had a right to the inventory of him. He was hard enough to hurt. She made a small considering sound, not quite approval, and pushed the denim down far enough. Her glove was still on. Leather on bare skin. He sucked in a breath and she said, "Quiet."

He was quiet.

She turned him by the hip and put his back to the saddle racks. Wood against his shoulders, the smell of soap and leather close now. She hitched the ruined silk higher, planted one boot on the tack trunk, and took him in hand to set him where she wanted. The head of his cock slid through the wet she had left on her own thighs. She watched his face while she did it.

"You will not finish until I say. Do you understand me."

"Yes, ma'am."

She took him standing, in one slow push that seated him inside her to the hilt, and they both went still. She was hot, slick, tight around him, and the silk of her skirt was crushed between their bodies, already marked, already past saving. Her boot stayed on the trunk. The angle drove him deep. She put her gloved hand on his chest, not to caress, to keep him where she had put him, and then she began to use her hips with the long, controlled motion of a woman who rode, who knew exactly how much of her weight to give and how much to withhold.

"Look at me."

He looked. It undid him more than the heat of her. He had hauled wet rope and settled horses all his working life and had never been watched like this, as if the watching were the point and his cock merely the instrument. She fucked herself on him with her riding coat still on, tweed scraping his knuckles when he forgot himself and reached, and she said, "I did not tell you to touch me," so he put his hands back on the rack behind him and held on, fingers hooked over wood, while she took what she had decided to take.

The stone room filled with the wet sound of it. Rain above. Her breath, counted, kept. His own breath going ragged against his will. The finish gathered low in his belly like a tide he was not allowed to meet. She saw it. Of course she saw it. She slowed, which was worse, a long grind that kept him buried in her, her clit rubbing against him on each pass, and her eyes stayed on his face as if she were schooling a young horse that wanted to run.

"Hold."

He held. Christ. The word nearly got out of him. His thighs shook. She took him deeper, the boot on the trunk giving her the leverage, silk ruined against his stomach, and she came again, her forehead nearly against his, a fierce, quiet breaking that clenched around his cock so hard he had to bite the inside of his cheek to stay where she had told him to stay. She did not close her eyes. He was not permitted to close his.

When she had it, when the shake had gone through her and she had taken it without offering him any of it yet, she put her mouth close to his ear. The freeze was still in her voice. County. Clipped.

"Now. You may."

He finished shaking. It tore out of him in hard, helpless pulses, his hips jerking against the brace of her boot, a broken sound in his throat that he could not swallow in time. She held him through it with that gloved hand on his chest, riding out the last of him, taking every spurt as if it belonged to the estate along with the rest. His head dropped. She allowed it for a second, then put two fingers under his chin and lifted it.

"I said look at me."

He looked. He was still inside her, oversensitive, wrecked, the stone cold through the knees of his jeans where he had knelt and the racks biting his shoulders. Her hair was down. The silk was a creased, wet wreck between them. She did not glance at it. She looked at him as she had looked at the mare when the mare had finally stood, and something in his chest went over that had nothing to do with coming.

She stepped back. He slipped out of her, softening, messy, and she let the silk fall as if it were a dropped whip, evidence she did not bother to hide from him. It hung ruined against her stocking. She left it. She fastened nothing. She stood in the tack room of her own estate with her hair down and her cunt wet and a hired man's spend on her inner thigh, and she looked as if the world had been put back into an order she recognised.

Her voice dropped. The freeze thawed, not to softness exactly, to something that might have been the same tenderness she gave anything frightened, which he was not, except that he was shaking still and she could see it.

"Come here."

He came off the racks. She did not kiss him. She put her ungloved hand, the one with the small white scar, against the side of his neck for a moment, a practical touch, checking him the way she would check a horse that had gone quietly over a hard course.

"You did well," she said. "That is enough now."

He could have taken the sex. He had taken worse and better in rooms that did not have her name on the land. The praise undid him. It sat in the same place as easy now, as hold, as the mug of tea he would have made for anyone coming in wet. He heard himself answer before he had decided to speak.

"Yes, ma'am."

She took her hand away. She did up nothing of her own clothing. She watched him get his jeans closed and his belt back through the loops, and she did not offer to help, and he would not have wanted her to. The silk stayed on the floor of the tack room, caught on the edge of the trunk where her boot had been, ivory gone translucent, a thing that would still be there when he opened the door tomorrow to fetch a numnah. She saw him see it. She did not pick it up.

"Thursday," she said. "You will be where I said. The side door, after the evening feed. You will not have to ask twice, and I will not have to repeat myself. Is that clear."

"I'll be there, ma'am. You won't have to ask twice."

A flick of something that might have been satisfaction went through her face and was gone. She reached up, on her way past him, and put her hair back into the knot with three sharp turns of her wrist, as if the letting-down had been a tool she was now putting away. The severe line returned. The county woman returned. Only the ruined silk and the smell of them in the close air kept the truth of the last half-hour from being something he might, later, try to tell himself he had imagined.

She opened the tack-room door on the rain. The yard was still empty. The mare was still standing. Bella Thorpe walked out in her tweed and her boots without looking back, and the wet cobbles took her as if she had never been anything but the woman who ran the estate.

James waited until her footsteps had gone off the stone and onto gravel. He dropped the latch. He stood for a moment in the smell of saddle soap and tuberose that was not his, looking at the silk she had left, and then he turned out the light because that was what you did at the end of the work.

The lane behind the seafront was dark and shining. He walked with his collar up, the canvas jacket no proof against the rain, past the backs of houses that would never have him to dinner and the wet docks where the boats lifted and fell on their ropes. His knees still held the memory of the stone. His mouth still held the taste of her. He could not tell, as he walked, whether the man who had knelt so well was the same man who had left school at sixteen for the fishing boats, or whether he had just handed that man over with the same quiet concentration he used on everything else he was good at.

The rented terrace took him in smelling of rain and sex and the yard. He shut the door with his shoulder. In the narrow hall he caught his own reflection in the darkened glass of the kitchen hatch: sun-lightened hair flattened where her glove had been, the short scar through one eyebrow, hazel eyes that had done as they were told. He put the kettle on because that was what you did, and then he stood in the small kitchen with his hands on the back of a chair and did not drink the tea.

Thursday. The side door. After the evening feed.

He would be there. He would not have to be asked twice. The hunger that had run under his courtesy all summer had a shape now, and a day, and a woman who had asked him if he chose it, which was the one thing nobody had ever offered him along with the work. He did not know yet whether choosing it made him free or only more thoroughly hired. He knew he would walk back up that lane in four days with his one decent shirt under the jacket if the side door required it, or in the faded one if it did not, and he would close whatever door she pointed him at, and he would look at her when she was speaking.

Outside, the rain kept on. The bay turned in the dark. James Davistow washed his hands at the sink until they were clean again, and the tuberose stayed on him anyway, and he did not try to scrub it off.