Page 15 of Windlass (Seal Cove #3)

The next few days were blissfully busy. Stevie worked late, and while she and Angie exchanged their usual memes and photos of the animals they worked with, neither of them acknowledged what had happened.

Not that anything had happened, Stevie reminded herself repeatedly. Angie had checked her out. So what? It had happened before. Stevie had been the one to make it weird by getting off, which Angie never needed to know about. Nothing had changed.

But something had changed. Her skin still felt feverish.

Her lungs burned as if she’d run miles. As she watched Morgan cut an abscess out of a pony’s hoof, flakes of hoof wall piling up on the barn floor while Stevie stroked the pony’s cheeks, she wondered if this is what it felt like to be whittled down to nothing but desire.

“You okay?” Morgan asked as they drove home.

“Yeah.” She rubbed one of her shoulders, trying to loosen a persistent knot. “Why?”

“You just seem off.”

Angie, looking up at her out of eyes liquid with want. Angie, wearing next to nothing with the sun kissing her hair and brow. Angie, laughing the morning after, saying in a voice thick with meaning she was going to need a long shower, putting that image into her head.

Yeah—Stevie was just fine.

“I’m good.”

“Uh huh.” Morgan sounded less than convinced. “How’s the house?”

Stevie’s laugh was strangled. “Fine.”

“You can rent a room from us, if you need to.”

As if Stevie could leave now. She shook her head. “We’re working through it. Oh, the kid’s still here. You should meet her.”

Jaq had emerged from the barn as they pulled in, the evening light elongating her shadow into a narrow finger reaching across the lot, breaking up the awkward conversation.

“Your stable hand?”

“She’s growing on me. Come on.”

Morgan followed Stevie out of the truck. Jaq’s gaze flicked back and forth between the two of them as they approached, and Stevie smiled encouragingly—or at least that was the intent.

“This is Morgan, the vet I work with,” she said. “If anything ever happens with one of the horses and you can’t reach me or Ivy, Morgan’s number is in the tack room, and this is what she looks like.”

“Nice to meet you.” Morgan stuck her hand out, and Jaq gripped it, her large brown eyes gazing up with something like wonder. Stevie suppressed a snort. Morgan had that effect on people. Being her closest friend for over two decades had given her a large sample size to study.

“Nice to meet you too.”

“I gotta take off, but I’ll see you around—and I will see your ass tomorrow,” Morgan added, patting Stevie on the shoulder.

“She has really cool hair.” Jaq watched Morgan walk away.

“Really?” Stevie eyed Morgan’s short curls. “Okay, yes. She does. You’ve got good hair though, too.”

Jaq raised an eyebrow. “I have the world’s most boring hair.”

“It’s not—okay fine. Same.” She scraped her ponytail into a tighter tail to illustrate her point. “You could cut your hair.”

Jaq shrugged, managing to look tiny in her oversized sweatshirt despite being Stevie’s height. “Maybe someday.”

“If we keep having days as hot as Saturday, I’ll be buzzing my head with the horse clippers. I could give you a mohawk.”

“That’d be cool.”

Would it? Stevie had no idea what was cool to kids. She still felt like one half the time, and yet Jaq made her feel ancient.

“How’s Olive?”

“Good. I worked her on a lunge line like Ivy showed me, and she did well.”

“Thanks. Did Ivy pay you?”

“Yeah.” Jaq scuffed her toe on the gravel. “She told me to ask you if we could use your bareback pad on Freddie for a lesson. She wants to do some balance work.”

Which meant someone had signed the form, forged or otherwise. Stevie filed away the reverent way Jaq said Ivy’s name. Jaq looked like a kid with a crush—and not a crush on Stevie, thank god.

Her glee over this discovery faded as she walked toward the house after visiting Olive.

The lights were on and Angie’s car was here, which meant another evening of pretending things were normal.

The few that had passed since the weekend had been excruciating.

Being turned on all the damn time was not only uncomfortable, but a liability.

She’d burned dinner, tripped so badly while getting dressed she’d fallen and nearly concussed herself on her dresser, and her conversational skills had been reduced to a series of mumbles.

She took a deep breath and stepped inside.

“I made pasta. There’s some on the stove for you,” Angie called out as she entered.

“Thanks.” Shedding her things and stripping down to a tank top, tossing her work polo into the laundry, she followed Angie’s voice.

She sat at the kitchen table, sketchbook before her and computer open. A frown creased her forehead. Stevie paused to grab herself a bowl of dinner and slid into a chair.

“What’cha working on?”

“A comic, but I can’t . . .” she trailed off, frowning more intently at her sketch. “I’m having trouble with some anatomy work.”

“Can I see?”

Angie pushed the sketchbook toward her. A series of nudes filled the page. “They look good to me.”

“That’s because you like tits. It’s the posture.” She turned her computer screen, and Stevie blinked as she took in the reference photos. Several nude women stood, crouched, and lounged.

“What am I looking at, besides tits?”

“Well, I can’t find the exact pose I want, so I’ve been trying to combine some of these and it isn’t working. The proportions are all wrong.”

They looked fine to Stevie, but she didn’t argue. No doubt Angie knew what she was talking about.

“I need a model,” Angie muttered, mostly to herself.

“Use me,” Stevie said around a bite of pasta. She could talk to Angie when Angie was distracted. Things felt almost normal, then. “You have before.”

Angie looked up. Normality disintegrated. Those hazel eyes considered her from beneath heavy lashes. “You sure?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Because I need you naked.”

Stevie shut her eyes for what she hoped passed for a blink. There was a sentence that would haunt her: I need you naked .

“Buy a girl dinner first.” She tried to pass off the effect the words had had on her with a joke.

“I made you pasta.”

“Touché.” Stevie took another bite just for something to do with her mouth. She tasted nothing but need. “I mean, you could, I guess.”

What? Had she said that aloud? Was she insane ?

“Really?” Angie tapped her lips with her pen. “That wouldn’t make you uncomfortable?”

While the question itself was considerate, the tone in which it had been asked was all challenge.

“Isn’t that a thing? Drawing nude models or whatever?”

“Yeah, but—” Angie paused. “I mean I guess it wouldn’t be weird if it was you . Pretty sure you’ve seen my tits. Fair exchange.”

Angie needed to stop saying tits. Yes, Stevie had seen Angie topless.

Angie had zero shame. This had been a point of particularly acute agony ever since they’d moved in together.

Some people shut doors when they changed.

Some people didn’t smoke weed in the yard and decide they wanted to feel moonlight on their skin, leaving their best friend holding the blunt while they basked topless on a blanket beneath the stars.

But Angie wanted her, too. Maybe it was time—past time—Angie felt the same way.

Blushing, she leaned back in her chair with what she hoped passed for nonchalance. “Friends help friends, right?”

“Right.”

They looked at each other. Stevie saw the hesitation flit across Angie’s face.

Whatever her reasons for denying her feelings, they were still in place, even if her boundaries had weakened.

If Stevie let the heat of the last few days fade, would Angie pretend they had never happened?

Could Stevie live with herself if she didn’t at least try to push this further?

“Where do you want me?”

Angie’s lips parted, then shut. “Really?”

“You have me for an hour and a half, and then it’s bedtime.”

“You’re such a pumpkin.” Angie’s smile contained an affection that physically hurt.

She couldn’t risk losing her. She couldn’t go back to pretending things were normal, either.

“Better make like Cinderella then.”

“Okay. Okay. Um, living room?”

Stevie rose, clearing her plate, and after dropping it in the kitchen, most of her dinner uneaten, she sauntered into the living room as if she stripped naked in front of others on a regular basis, instead of being the girl who had changed for every gym class in a bathroom stall.

Angie met her there with her sketchbook and a glass of water, which she half-drained in a single gulp. Stevie did not make a joke about thirst traps.

“So, like . . . the couch?” Stevie waved a hand, glad her voice wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t ashamed of her body. She rather liked it, in fact, but that didn’t mean she needed other people to see it. Angie was different—both better and also so much worse.

“Actually, if you could crouch on the coffee table, like—”

“Like it’s a cliff.” She’d seen the brief sketch of scenery.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“If your cat scratches my ass—”

“You’d be lucky.” Angie settled into her customary chair, James sulking on the back. “Stevie, are you sure?”

The use of her name caught her off guard. She froze, her thumbs loosely hooked into her belt loops, listening to her heart hammer at her ribs.

Was she sure?

Yes. She was tired of pretending she didn’t notice the glances Angie snuck when she thought Stevie wasn’t looking. She was tired of pretending she didn’t care that Angie fucked other people. She was so damn tired of denying herself because she thought that was what Angie needed from her.

“I’m sure, Angela.”

This had gotten out of hand very quickly, and Angie had no idea how to rein it in, nor did she possess the inclination.

Stevie’s eyes flashed a defiant blue as she pretended she was cool with stripping for an audience when Angie knew full well the opposite was the case.

She needed to shut this down. She needed to—