“How much further?”

“Not far,” Eliot grinned, hoisting the pack on his shoulder, “you’re gonna love this. I swear.”

I wiped my brow, grabbing a branch as I leapt over another slick dip in the trail. The sun was warm, and the snow was long gone.  But the ground this time of year was still glazed in ice, all pearly and hard as enamel.

“You sure you know where you’re going?”

He stopped, squinting around the dense evergreens, his thumbs hooked through the loops of his jeans.

“You know, now that you mention it...”

I froze, feeling the color drain from my face.

“We’re lost?”

He let me suffer a moment, then chuckled and tossed me his canteen.

“Chill out,” he ran a hand through his hair, “You know I wouldn’t lead you astray.”

Do I, though? I rolled my eyes and drank.

“You’re a real riot. You know that?”

I threw it back, and he took a sip for himself. I don’t know why I agreed to come with him that morning. It made me nervous, really, being alone in the woods.

Don’t lie... The voice in the back of my head whispered, you know exactly why you came. I sighed, trying not to stare as he stretched, arching himself in the dappled sunlight as it broke through the branches above.

I’d met Eliot two summers ago when I first came out west to work in the stables. He was a trail guide for the hotel’s guests, and taught archery on the side. I, meanwhile, was as a lowly groom. Normally I’d spend a day like this tacking horses for overweight midwesterners who couldn’t tell a bit from a bridle, then shoveling out stalls until my palms were blistered and bleeding. But this was the lull—a rare weekend after the skiers had fled, but before the ice thawed, and the trails were still too treacherous to lead clumsy tourists up a cliffside. The hotel itself was almost empty, and most of the staff took advantage to poke around inside, indulging dreams of Old World grandeur. All high tea and ball gowns and mahogany banisters; birch logs crackling to the twinkle of a baby grand piano. 

But I didn’t want to waste the day inside. Even without its Gilded Age hotel, compared to the quiet cottage where I grew up, bobbing in its endless sea of sawgrass, the splendor of this place was like nothing I’d ever dared to imagine. Hidden high up in the snow-pocked Canadian Rockies, kissing the edge of a topaz-blue lake—to me at least, it was love at first sight. 

Still the scut of the stables kept me busy dawn to dusk, and chances like this were few and far between.  Not that I minded the work. I loved horses. I grew up with them, and still got along better with Sable Island ponies than I did with most people. And the horses here—they were the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen. 

Well... second most beautiful. I blushed, stealing another glance at Eliot.

He was the only real reason I kept coming back. Of course I’d never told him as much—until two weeks ago, I wasn’t even convinced he knew my name. But like every starry-eyed girl in the valley, that hardly kept me from being in love with him. It was pretty much impossible not to be. His easy smile, and smiling eyes. The way he talked, like a spring breeze rustling through heather. He rolled his own cigarettes; wore a white bandana, and brass spurs on his boots. He played the part perfectly. 

But Eliot was no cowboy. He’d gone to school out east, and probably grew up there, too. Something about how he’d drop his r’s and articulate his t’s—my best guess was New England. Maybe Ivy League. I couldn’t count how many nights I spotted him in the lamplight, scribbling out his endless dissertation on Marcel Proust.

Yes, I was infatuated. But silently so, and until very recently, for all my heartsick, puppy-dog pining, Eliot was untouchable. 

My bête noire’s name was Anna, and I hated her with every ounce of blood in my body. It was a vague and vacuous hatred, though—one aimed at the sheer inconvenience of her being, more so than whoever she might’ve been as a person. Hearsay said she’d been a guide, too, years ago. It said she and Eliot were inseparable—until one of the hotel’s wealthy widowers made an offer, and she jetted off to take up as his trophy wife. 

I tried to imagine it. To be someone’s show pony. Always sheltered and fed. Clothed, walked, well-groomed. Ready and waiting whenever he wanted his slow, clumsy ride up the pass—never allowed to run wild.

But Anna still ran. Even after trading in her riding boots for a pair of Manolos, she and the widower still came back every summer. And while her faceless husband sat at the bar, his head half-hidden in a cloud of tobacco, Anna would steal out to rekindle the ashes with Eliot.

I remember the first time I caught them. I couldn’t sleep. I’d been tossing half the night in a cold sweat, tangling my legs in the empty twin sheets. It was Eliot who kept me up—his Cheshire smile fading in and out of the darkness. It was ridiculous.

I never knew I could want something so badly. I never knew how horribly that emptiness inside me could ache. Like a deep, blue bruise. Like a wound that wouldn’t heal. 

I stepped outdoors to clear my head. I didn’t bother with my jeans. The night was warm, and everyone else was sound asleep. I breathed in, letting the quilted stillness of the north woods fill me. Crickets chirred. Somewhere a snow owl barked in the trees. I breathed out, expelling my heat into the clean evening air, hoping against hope the ache might vanish with it.

I’d just turned to head back in when I spotted a light in the stable. I frowned, crossing my arms tight as I trudged up to take a look. There was an odd sound on the breeze. Like snapping twigs, but rhythmic. Evenly spaced. A dark shadow flickered over the window.

I froze. Who’s in there? A swell of panic began to bubble. I grabbed a smooth blue stone from the ground, praying I wouldn’t have bludgeon anyone as I crept my way to the window.

It was Eliot. I could see him there, his back to the stall. And down on her knees beneath him knelt Anna—her pillowy lips smoothly encircling his cock. I gasped and ducked down, smothering a yelp as the rock fell onto my toe. My heart fluttered, terrified they might’ve heard me. 

But no... I could still hear the soft lapping of Anna’s lips, and Eliot’s low, rumbling sighs. I peeked again, discreetly, and felt my panic supplanted by something else entirely.

He was fully dressed still, with just his jeans split open. But Anna was in a far sorrier state. He had her wrists lashed behind her with saddle string. Her blouse was torn open, exposing her ice-pale breasts beneath. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were wide. Her hair, always pulled back in an austere bun, hung loose, with a few flaxen strands stuck to her cheek, plastered there by the glistening sweat of her efforts. 

I watched, breathless, as he reached to caress her chest, and felt my own hand slip under my flannel, quietly mimicking his ministrations. Anna moaned, taking him deeper. I bit my tongue to keep silent. Eliot chuckled, his leer just dripping with sin.

“You’re enjoying this too much, aren’t you?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Anna nodded, never letting him leave her lips.

“You know it’s wrong, don’t you?” His tone darkened, “A married woman?”

“Mmm-hmm,” she pulled back, letting her tongue glissade along the length of him.

I licked my own lips, and felt my hips start to rock against the empty night air.

“You know what you need, don’t you?”

She sat back; a rider’s posture—straight enough to balance both volumes of The Decline and Fall on her head.

“Yes, sir,” she smacked her lips.

Eliot chuckled again, rockier, raspier than before, and grabbed his belt from the edge of the stall. My hand slid lower, slipping beneath the silk band of my panties. Eliot hiked the hem of her skirt, laying bare her ivory thighs, and the cloud-white cleft of her ass. 

“Count,” he growled.

Anna nodded, sinking herself to the root of him just as the belt cracked across her backside. 

I gasped. Snapping twigs... 

The sound echoed in my ears. Anna swallowed her shriek, groaning a muffled ‘one’ as she thrust him desperately down her throat. My fingers trembled, grazing along my slickening lips, and the aching tip of my clitoris. My knees quaked. My toes curled tight. The tension was about to take me. He struck her again, burning a crimson Xacross her cheeks. She shut her eyes this time, and squealed. 

And thank the stars she did—for right in that moment my eyes rolled back, and I collapsed, writhing, to the ground.

The suddenness left me half-senseless. I laid there in the grass, quivering, panting hard as the ‘snaps’ and ‘slaps’ continued, punctuated by Anna’s slurping, sibilant moans. I rolled myself over, staring dazed into the stippled starlight, wondering what the hell had just happened. 

I wondered what it was; wondered why I’d stayed there, and watched it. But more than anything else, I wondered why on God’s green earth I had liked it. 

I shook my head and shut my eyes. With the afterglow of my orgasm fading, I was far too afraid to stay, and see what was next. And though I went to bed that night haunted by at least a million menacing questions, somehow it was still the best I’d slept in weeks.

I’m not proud of this next part, but I kept a very close eye on Eliot after that—his comings and goings, all the odd hours he was missing from work. Infatuation, I knew, was slowly spilling over to obsession. I left my window open at night, listening for the creak of hinges, or the soft swish of footsteps through the grass. Whenever he snuck off to the woods, if I could, I’d prowl along behind like a starving animal, hungry to glimpse his next tryst with Anna. 

More than once I was rewarded. From behind a fallen maple, I watched him force her down on all fours, fucking her slowly, savagely, and swatting her backside with his bare palm. I imagined myself as Anna—imagined Eliot doing these same dreadful things to me. My hips writhed against the cool forest floor. I touched myself, wishing all the while it was him violating me. Him, Eliot, thrusting himself deeper and deeper. I bit my arm, holding in the delirious, starburst oblivion of my climax, and watched jealously as Anna—her cheeks aglow in the moonlight—turned to lick the last liquid pearl from the tip of him. 

Even deeper in the summer, deeper into the woods, I saw him tie her stark naked to a towering spruce, and whip her with a switch until she screamed. They argued after that one. She worried her husband would notice the welts. He said he hoped so—that he wanted him to know; that he wanted her to leave him.

And I, for my part, never quite felt the wrongness of what I’d been doing so fully as I did in that moment. I’d spent weeks in a trance; wholly believing that simply to watch was harmless. As if they were animals, meeting in heat by a clear mountain spring—and I, a diligent researcher, studying these strange mating habits in the shade a boreal forest. But now seeing them this way—as a couple, as lovers, quarreling over things that ran so much deeper than instinct—it shocked me awake, and I left the woods that night feeling filthy, and ashamed.

I didn’t follow him anymore after that. And anyways, the thread unraveled just a couple weeks later. Inevitably, Anna’s husband found out and raised hell. Rumors flew that someone had snitched. It was an ugly scene by the end. Anna in tears. Her marriage in tatters. Reputation ruined. Eliot all the while was nowhere to be found, vanishing before his rival could slap him with the proverbial glove. It really bothered me that he abandoned her—I didn’t know the rest til much later.

But that was then. Anna was gone now. And for the first time ever, Eliot didn’t seem so completely out of reach. I still wanted him. Needed him, really—more and more with each passing moment—and on our first night back that next summer, I thought for certain I’d get my chance.

The staff always got together that night, drinking way too much around a roaring bonfire. Someone strummed the obligatory guitar. A few brave souls stripped, and went skinny dipping down in the lake. I sat on a log beside Eliot, our knees nearly touching. The static electricity bristled. Honeybees buzzed in my stomach. In truth, I’d never been so close to him before. 

He rolled a cigarette for himself, and one for me, asking how I fell into horses as he struck his match. I told him I’d been riding my whole life. He said something smart, and I smiled. I told him a joke, and he laughed. We both laughed—harder and harder as the bottle of rye evanesced. He slapped his knee, and squeezed my thigh. I teased him for wearing his gauntlets all the time—an archer’s affectation—and he smacked me playfully on the ass as I went to go grab more wood. 

My heart stopped dead in my chest. I didn’t know what it meant; if it was just a drunken indiscretion. But either way the sting rippled through me, a vicarious sense-memory, and gave me the nerve to slink over, and slip myself in his lap. We kissed a little. I knew he might’ve felt me up. But all the rest is bleary, and black.

I woke up in his bed the next morning, fully clothed, with a headache that could’ve split granite. His arm was around me. His snores were soft, almost musical. Through his jeans I could feel his hard-on, jutting against the steamy crease of my thighs. My skin sizzled. I felt feverish. With bated breath, I rocked slowly, softly against him, praying he wouldn’t wake. I arched my back, maneuvering my chest into his limp and empty palm. I sighed, feeling the ache unravel inside me. My muscles drew tight. My breath grew shallow. My quivering fingers crept low, ready to put an end to me.

But then he yawned, and his comatose arm came to life. I froze, horrified to let him catch me red-handed, and kept deadly still as he rolled over, stretching and rubbing his eyes.

“Lord...” he groaned, clutching his head, “just kill me now.”

We’d hardly spoken a word since. These past few weeks, I was really afraid that I blew it—that I’d sealed my fate as a drunken and disappointing hook-up. Nothing more. And certainly no one who could ever hope to help him forget about Anna.

And then this morning, almost out of nowhere he poked his head in the stall I was cleaning. He drummed his fingers on the post—watching me, waiting. And when I looked up at last, he told me to follow.

I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t know where he was taking me, and I didn’t dare wonder what would happen when we got there. We’d been walking for only an hour or two. But already, he’d led me far deeper in the forest than I’d ever followed him before.

“Come on,” he nodded, “Just up ahead.”

We came out into a little clearing, a meadow dusted with goldenrod and wood lilies, with a clear stream meandering through the middle. Here and there, the rain-polished tops of huge, blue boulders poked from the ground, like a cemetery for an ancient race of giants. It was beautiful, to be sure. But we’d passed a dozen like it on our way here. I didn’t see what was so special. 

“Stop.”

He pressed his hand to my chest, holding me back. My breath hitched. His touch sent shockwaves up and down my spine.

“What?” I rasped, trying hard not to shiver, “What is it?”

He pointed out to the tree-line. I squinted, searching—then my eyes dilated, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“You see it?” He whispered.

I nodded softly. There at the water’s edge stood a dusky, young mare—raven-black and smooth as brushed velvet—bending low to drink from the stream. I blinked twice, half-expecting her to vanish. It was hardly what I expected Eliot to show me out here in the forest. But she truly was magnificent. The mere sight of her stole the air from my lungs.

“Not one of ours...” I murmured, still awe-struck, “Where’d she come from?”

Gently, silently, he lowered his pack, and smiled.

“I think she’s wild.”

Wild? I swallowed. The word tasted sweet on my tongue. It seemed impossible. Compared to our shaggy feral ponies back east, this creature seemed scarcely the same species. 

“... She’s beautiful,” I breathed.

He nodded, still smirking, and edged in behind me.

“I’ve been clearing the trails the past few weeks. Kept spotting her out here around midday,” he slipped his hand onto my waist, and my knees nearly gave out beneath me, “You said you grew up with wild ones, right? Thought you might wanna see.”

I swallowed again, tensing every sinew in my body to keep from trembling. I couldn’t believe he remembered. I couldn’t believe he was listening.

“What do you think?” He let go, plucking a blonde coil of rope from his pack, “Wanna ride her?”

My lips fell open. But my tongue had forgotten how to speak. He bent in close, letting his lips graze the edge of my ear.

“Stay put,” he squeezed, “Lemme try and nab her.”

I watched, rooted in place and repeatedly reminding myself to breathe, as Eliot stepped into the meadow, treading quietly toward the mare, and fashioning a lasso as he went. She glanced up as he neared, her mane and muzzle dripping. He raised the rope over his head, and swung it once. Twice. My jaw clenched as he let the loop fly.

It flopped against her velvet haunches, missing her head completely. She sniffed and whinnied. She sounded annoyed. I clapped a hand to my mouth, stifling my giggle.

But Eliot was unfazed. He tried again, catching her cleanly this time. My heart stuttered as he closed the cinch, and I felt a warm throb move through me. For just a minute, I really thought he might pull this off. But his tugging spooked her. 

She reared, taking off like a blast of cannon fire. I shrieked as she dragged him ten or twenty meters on his belly, and thrashed herself free from the lasso. I dashed out, genuinely afraid she might’ve killed him. He was lying facedown in the wildflowers. He didn’t look to be moving. 

But by the time I dropped to his side, I could hear him laughing his head off. He rolled over and tried to sit up, still in stitches. I tried to smile too, but my heart was stuck in my throat.

“Are you hurt?”

“Just my pride,” he smiled.

He brushed the pollen and dirt from his jeans. His forearms were bleeding, but it didn’t look bad.

I frowned.

“That was pretty fucking dumb of you.”

He cracked his neck, nodding.

“What can I say?” He let his leer settle on me like fresh fallen snow, “Just showing off for a pretty girl.”

My face caught fire. I dropped my eyes to the grass, kicking his tangled lasso with my toe.

“Do you even know how to use one of these?”

He shrugged, still grinning gamely.

“Well. Let’s just see.”

He stood, casting his shadow over me, and snatched up the rope. I watched him snake the coil through his hand. That glint in his eye—like smoldering coals—I’d seen it before, when he looked down at Anna. But I never dreamt in a million years he would actually aim it at me. He swung the loop high over his head.

“Oh, no. No, don’t...”  I backed away, warning him, “Eliot. Don’t you dare.”

He chuckled darkly, letting me stammer and stagger, and caught me easily in his trap. The rope snagged tight around my shoulders. I struggled—and not entirely for the fun of it. A little part of me really tried to get free. But hand-over-hand, he dragged me back to him. That feeling swelling up inside—it was stronger, stormier than I expected. A swirling, molten mix of genuine panic, pain, and utterly blistering lust.

I sneered at him, suppressing a wild and wanton smirk as he pulled me closer, “Bastard...”

He yanked hard, cinching a second loop around my wrists as I collapsed against his chest.

“Bitch,” he grinned, and kissed me. 

His lips. They were so soft. His breath was cool as wintergreen. He melted me. And without meaning to, I set loose a feint and fragile moan in his mouth as my lips conspired to kiss him back.

I was writhing by the time he ripped away. He had my whole body ablaze. Our eyes locked, like mortise and tenon. He jerked the rope again, raising my bound hands between us, clasped like they were praying.

“Do you like this?” he growled.

“... I don’t know,” I shuddered. I could barely string two words together.

“Do you want me to stop?”

Stop? The word almost paralyzed me. I shook my head, frantic, straining for another kiss. But he held me fast.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded my head, blushing furiously, and bit deep into my lower lip.

“You know, I did something, sir,” my voice rustled softly, “... I did something wrong.”

His fiery glint flickered, and a shallow crease cut across his brow.

“Tell me.”

“I can’t,” I swallowed, trembling all over, “... but I think you should spank me for it.”

He paused, eyeing me up-and-down, his gaze singeing every bit of skin it traversed.

“Is that what you want?”

His words bristled over my ears, prickly as the rope around my wrists. I shrugged, dropping my eyes to wildflowers below.

“It’s what I deserve.”

He nodded darkly. And that was all. In a flash, his hands were on me again. He ripped my jeans down, and snapped my panties over my ankles, rising to catch me in a violent kiss as he tore loose the front of my flannel, and my milk-white brassiere beneath. It happened so fast. He left me dizzy—bound and stripped bare in the blinding summer sunlight.

“Christ, look at you,” he leaned back, gritting his teeth, “... Beautiful.”

I blushed, embarrassed by my nakedness; like Eve, apple-stung in her fragrant garden. I tried pitifully to cover myself, but he pulled me close, kissing me, killing me, and tightening the knots as he dragged me back to a smooth, blue boulder, and forced my cheek to its mossy surface.

“Legs. Spread them.”

Panic cut through me. I rushed to do as he said, sliding my feet wide apart in the grass.

“Now count.”

I tried to nod. But it happened before I could even begin to gather my wits—the first swat of his hand, whistling through the air like a Roman candle. It stung. It stung like fire. I bit my tongue to keep from shrieking. Then came the next, and the next after that—each blow ringing deeper than the one before it—until the ripples spilled over, and the screaming nerves of my buttocks began to burn themselves out.

I moaned into the moss. And I counted—numbering each one for him, like fading stars in a late April sky. I got dizzy again. I was spinning. My cheeks were scorched, and scourged. I was turning to cinders in the sun. The pain, the ache; I swear it was about the split me in two. And then suddenly, he stopped.

I gasped, breathless, praying the worst was over—until he sank his hand between my thighs, and every leather-tight fiber of my body turned to ash.

“Mmm. So wet...” he stroked, making me suffer, “You’re enjoying this too much, aren’t you?”

I heard the echo. I heard him slap me again. I heard a snow owl in the trees. And then I heard the soft, metal ‘clink’ of his belt buckle; the purr of his dehiscent zipper.

I could feel him there—the heat of him. I could feel his stone-smooth cock beneath me, grazing just barely along my begging, dew-kissed lips. 

“Bray,” he growled softly.

Do what? My face twisted. I couldn’t. It was too silly. Too degrading. But to let him leave me dangling on the edge any longer was really more than I could bear. I parted my lips, breathing a soft and half-hearted whinny.

He slapped me hard again, snatching a fistful of my hair, and pulled me back into a painful, quivering arc.

“Like you mean it, Miss.”

My breath left me, and with it went any lingering shred of my dignity. I brayed for him—brayed like an animal—and he split me open.

I choked. I convulsed. For a moment, I might’ve passed out. But it didn’t matter. My body didn’t need me anymore. It could move on its own; on the steam of its animal impulses—rolling like water, undulating against him as he thrust himself deeper, and deeper.

His breath was hot on the back of my neck. His knots held tight on my arms and wrists. He filled me. Filled me to the brim, and spilled over. And as his hand snaked over my trembling thigh—before his fingers even realized their ambition—I could already feel myself slipping.

He touched me. Touched my dew-kissed clitoris. And I came.

The waves racked me; left me battered and broken on the rock. My ears rang. My vision faded in and out. Behind me, I could feel him quickening, pulverizing me, even as my body collapsed to pieces beneath him. I heard him groan, muffled and far off somehow, as if one or both of us were underwater. And with the last speck of cognizance left in my head, I felt the warm, pearly pulsations as he spilled himself inside me.

I slumped down, speechless, barely remembering how to breathe. He sank low beside me, loosening my knots, and wrapped me up tight in his arms. I blinked, and blinked again, slowly riding the rise and fall of his chest. 

Almost idly, I noticed his hands. I noticed

one of his leather gauntlets was loose—probably knocked askew while the horse was dragging him. And beneath the little nicks and cuts of the underbrush, I saw a thicket of raised, pale scars on his wrist. Not new. But not awfully old, either. 

“... Eliot,” I murmured, finding my voice, “is this—?”

He tensed a little as I reached for the laces. But he didn’t move to stop me. I loosened the strings, and looked.

“Yeah,” he turned away, “It, uh... it was a rough winter,” his throat strained, “you know. After Anna.”

I felt a sting of saltwater brim up in my eyes. Christ. Was it really that bad? I had no idea. And with a strange swell of sorrow in my chest, I realized that for as long as I’d been in love with him, in truth, I didn’t really know Eliot at all.

I swallowed my tears. I had to tell him.

“The thing I did wrong,” I murmured, “... It was me.”

He glanced down, squinting.

“I’m the one who told Anna’s husband.”

He sighed coldly, and ran a hand through his hair.

“I know,” he nodded, and my eyes shot wide, “I know you used to spy on us, too.”

Fuck what? His words struck me like a kick in the stomach, and even in the afterglow of my orgasm, I felt all the color drain from my face.

“Y-you knew?” I stammered, “you knew all along?”

“Anna was kinky,” he sniffed, forcing a lopsided smile, “I think she kinda liked it.”

I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t. And weirdly, it made me feel more exposed, more embarrassed, than I did even while he was stripping me bare in the middle of the meadow. 

“I did it for you, you know,” I murmured, “That time you two fought. You said you wanted him to know,” the tears returned, trickling out in earnest this time. I felt so foolish for meddling, “Eliot. God, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I just—“

“It’s fine.”

He put his hand to my lips, hushing me. I breathed through his fingers, my eyes still lingering on his wrist.

“... Is it?”

He nodded, leaning to kiss the dew from my lashes.

“It will be,” he smirked, “... I like you. You know that? Always have.”

He drew me in close. I could smell his musk, and the wisp of tobacco on his breath. I could hear his heart beating in his chest.

“You’re so good with the horses,” he squeezed, “...They trust you.”

I blushed red as wine, burying myself in his arms.

“Even though I’m a psycho-stalker, sir?”

He chuckled softly, stroking my hair. I wanted him to kiss me again. But then he stiffened, and sat up.

“What?” I shuddered, “what is it?”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he nodded, “Look who’s back.”

It was the mare—her anthracite eyes agleam, watching us from the edge of the stream.

“Wonder how much she saw,” he chuckled, reaching down for the rope as he rose.

“Eliot. Let her go,” I grabbed his hand.

He turned back, brow furrowed, and I slipped onto my knees beneath him.

“You broke one of us. It’s enough.”