Page 92 of Close Quarters

He frowned at me. “Don’t be like that.”

“What?”

“Shit on yourself like that.”

“That your job now?”

Reno opened his mouth and then closed it with a heavy sigh. “Look, I know I give you a lot of shit…more than you deserve most of the time, so I should probably fucking quit at some point. But I don’t think you’re a fuck up or an idiot. So don’t treat yourself like one.”

I was taken aback but quickly recovered and squeezed my arm around him as I leaned in. “I just do that shit because…it’s easier that way.”

“Insulting yourself is easy?”

“It’s easier than letting other people do it. If I can make fun of myself, even if it’s about shit I don’t believe about myself but other people are gonna say anyway…how can they possibly hurt me? They can say whatever the hell they want, but if I’ve already laughed at myself, their punches…lack punch.”

Reno sighed, staring down into the fire. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Telling me not to beat myself up?”

“No. I treated you like shit—a lot. And yeah, you used to get on my nerves, usually on purpose, I think, but…I also deserved a lot of it. I was a prick to you.”

“Yeah,” I said with a laugh, laying my head on his shoulder. “But I was also a dickhead to you a lot of the time. So it’s pretty safe to say we were both going out of our way to be assholes to each other.”

He turned his head so he could eye me with a smirk. “You could be an annoying fucker sometimes.”

“And you could be the grumpiest dick on the planet,” I told him with a laugh.

“You know, I’m glad we’re not like that now,” he said, laying a hand on my knee and squeezing it.

“Me too,” I said with a heavy sigh of contentment. His hand stayed on my knee as we stared into the darkness and occasionally back to the fire. I’d never been much of an outdoorsy person but after working at the ranch for almost a year and now this little camping ‘trip’, I was starting to come around to the idea. Or maybe I was just enjoying the little fantasy that I could compare this to being on a date with Reno and giving in to my fuzziest of feelings.

Whatever the case, I let myself sit there next to him, not caring when my butt began to ache in protest. It wasn’t until the light of the fire started to die down that I realized we’d been sitting there for a couple of hours, just the two of us enjoying the moment.

“C’mon,” he said with a yawn. “We should see if we can’t shove the roll-out cots together.”

“Sure,” I said with a snort, getting up to follow him and then turning around. “Shit, you do that, I better get the fire.”

“Not sure there’s too much that can be set on fire around here.”

“Our tents.”

“Alright, be my guest.”

Plus, for all I knew, it could like…send embers flying off in the wind and catch some of the cacti or something on fire. The last thing I wanted was a giant fire on our hands. It was oddly satisfying to kick the dirt and dust at the fire and watch it sputter, fighting to keep itself lit. Once it was low enough, I used one of the water bottles to kill the rest of the flames and mixed in more dirt until there was a sludgy mix of ashes, chunks of wood, and mud that wouldn’t stay wet past sunrise.

Reno had fought to get the two cots into the tent, though it was causing a slight bulge on the sides. Slipping into just our underwear, we propped our clothes up in one corner, checking on the horses before getting into the tent to close it behind us.

Without the fire, we had no light as we fumbled to make ourselves comfortable. Neither of us was all that dexterous as we tangled ourselves around one another. Heat in a desert was generally something you wanted to avoid, but I was immediately drawn to the feel of his bare, warm skin brushing and pressing against mine.

“Perv,” he muttered affectionately when my accidental brush against his dick with my hand became purposeful.

“And you love it,” I told him, feeling him growing hard.

If I’d been thinking romantically, I would have tried to draw him out of the tent. The idea of having sex under the stars in the middle of nowhere was appealing. But my little head took over where my heart might have served just fine, and in seconds, I was wriggling out of my underwear.

Even without the stars overhead, I could feel my heart thumping excitedly when I gripped his hard shaft. And I groaned when he used the lube I’d smuggled out to slide his fingers into me. A few minutes later, he was above me, holding tight as he pushed into me, making me moan freely in our isolation as he stretched me open.

One of my greatest fears during my time jumping from boyfriend to boyfriend had always been that one day, I would grow tired of the sex. That one day, the things that had driven me crazy would barely tickle the pleasure centers of my brain. So many things in my life that I’d been into had lost their luster, and I was left staring at dull, shineless things that I no longer wanted to look at.

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