Hayloft Honey

Abigail started the dares a month ago, and I still don't fully know what set her off. We'd been dating three years at that point, which for us meant the sex was good but predictable. Same order of operations, same ending, both of us happy but not exactly breathless. I figured that was just what happened when two people got comfortable. She figured it was a problem, apparently, and her solution was weird.

It started at dinner. We were at my kitchen table, just eating pork chops and canned green beans like always, and she put her hand on my thigh under the table. Normal enough. Then she leaned over, real casual, and whispered in my ear that I was going to sit perfectly still and keep eating while she finished her coffee, and if I moved or made a sound she'd stop touching me for a week.

I wish I could claim I understood right away what kind of game she was starting, but I didn't. I thought she was being silly. Then she took her time with that coffee, sipping it slow while her fingers walked up the inside of my leg, and by the time she set the mug down I was gripping the fork so hard my knuckles were white and my pork chop was stone cold. She looked at my plate, looked at my face, and grinned like she'd just won something. Which, I guess, she had.

She was 23 that month. I'm 24, a year older, and I grew up on this farm outside Carson Junction, the kind of dusty little town that exists mostly to serve the training base up the road. She grew up military, moved every couple years until she turned 21, so she never had a hometown. She says Carson Junction counts now. She says it with this look, like she's claiming territory.

Anyway. After the coffee thing she didn't explain herself. That's her whole method, by the way. She doesn't explain. She just issues the next dare like it's a weather report, and I either go along with it or I don't. I always go along with it. Partly because saying no to her is harder than most of the dares, and partly because, and this took me a while to admit, I like it. I like being pushed around by a woman half my size who laughs at me when I squirm.

* * *

Last Tuesday she hit me with the belt thing. We were having breakfast and she stands up from the table, comes back from the bedroom wearing that face, and holds out one of my leather work belts, coiled up like a snake.

"Wear this today," she said. "Looped around your neck, tucked inside your shirt. Nobody sees it. Just you and me know."

"Abigail, it's going to be ninety degrees out."

"Then you'll be extra aware of it. That's the point, silly." She dropped it in my lap and went back to her eggs like she'd asked me to pass the salt.

So I did it. I looped the belt around the back of my neck, let both ends hang down my chest, and buttoned my work shirt over the whole thing. It hung there against my skin all morning, warm from my body heat in about ten minutes, and I swear I could feel every inch of that leather while I fixed the fence line and hauled water. Every time I bent over it shifted. Every time I reached up it tightened a little at the back of my neck. I must have checked my shirt buttons twenty times to make sure nothing was showing.

The worst part was that it worked. I was thinking about her the entire morning. Not the chores. Her.

* * *

Midmorning I had to run to the feed store, because that's what you do in Carson Junction, you go to the feed store, which doubles as the social hub of the whole town. Old Dale behind the counter, a couple of the base guys buying dip, the usual crowd. Abigail rode along, saying she needed... something. I don't even remember what she bought. I remember what she did.

I was at the counter paying for the pig feed when she walked past me behind my back. Quick as anything, two fingers hooked into my collar where the belt loop poked out, and she gave it one tiny tug. Just a flick. Less than a second. Then she was over by the seed racks like nothing happened.

I flushed so hot I thought Dale was going to ask if I was coming down with something. My whole face went red and my ears burned and my heart slammed, all from a one-second tug on a hidden belt in a feed store full of people who had no idea. She didn't even look at me. She picked up a seed packet, read the back of it, put it down. When we got to the truck she looked over at me sitting there gripping the wheel and laughed. Not a mean laugh. A delighted one. Like a kid who got away with something.

"You're so easy," she said.

"You're insane," I said.

"Yeah," she said, still laughing. "But you're the one wearing a belt."

I couldn't argue with that.

* * *

The big dare came that afternoon, in the hay loft. I'd loaded the last of the feed bags up into the loft, forty-pound sacks, one after another, sweating through my shirt with that belt against my neck the whole time. She climbed the ladder after me and stood there in the dusty light coming through the loft boards, arms crossed, looking pleased with herself the way she does.

"Lie down," she said. "Face-down on that bale."

"Okay..." I said, because honestly at this point I just follow instructions.

"And take your shirt off first. Then lie down."

I pulled my shirt off, and there was the belt hanging around my neck in the open air for the first time all day, and she just looked at it, and at me, for a second that went on way too long. Then I got down on the hay bale, face-down, arms hanging off the sides, jeans and all. The bale prickled against my chest and the loft smelled like dust and cut alfalfa.

She pulled the belt off my neck, slow, letting the buckle drag across my shoulder blades. Then she stood beside me and laid the folded end of it across my ass like she was lining up a golf shot.

"Ten," she said. "Over your jeans. Count them out loud. Yes or no?"

"Yes," I said into the bale, and it surprised me how fast.

I remember thinking, before the first one landed, that this was ridiculous, that we were two adults in a hay loft on a Tuesday, that anybody walking into the yard below could theoretically hear. Then the first stroke cracked across my jeans and my thought process got a lot simpler.

"One," I said, into the bale.

It stung even through denim, this hot line of it, and to my own surprise I pushed my hips down against the bale instead of away. She noticed. Of course she noticed. She laughed that same delighted laugh from the feed store and brought the belt down again, lower, right across the crease where my ass meets my thigh.

"Two."

By four I was hard as a rail against the bale and she knew it, I could hear it in her breathing, that slow satisfied sound she makes. By six my voice was cracking on the numbers and I didn't care. She paused after eight, ran her hand over the back of my jeans where the heat was, and I heard her say, quiet, mostly to herself, "God, look at you."

Nine landed harder than the rest. I grunted and gripped the edge of the bale.

"Nine," I managed.

"And ten," she said, and brought it down full across both cheeks, and I groaned loud enough that I actually worried about the yard for half a second. Then I just lay there on the bale, panting, my ass on fire, hay stuck to my arms, while she stood over me coiling the belt back up like she was putting away groceries.

She sat down on the bale next to my head and pushed my sweaty hair off my forehead.

"So," she said, grinning down at me. "Same time Thursday?"

I said yeah, same time Thursday, and she kissed the top of my head and climbed down the ladder and left me there on the bale to recover, which was its own kind of joke. I lay there a minute listening to her boots on the rungs and then the screen door of the house, and I thought about how a month ago I would have said this whole thing was insane, and now I was lying in a hay loft with a burning ass hoping Thursday came fast. It's funny what a person gets used to. Or maybe not used to. Maybe what a person starts wanting, once somebody shows him he wants it. She'd figured that out about me before I did, which is just like her.

* * *

Wednesday came, and it was hotter than Tuesday had been, one of those dry high desert days where the air feels like an open oven. I did my chores in