R-18: RIDING THE COWBOY

The rain hit like punishment, hard, cold, and merciless.

Karlie cursed under her breath as her windshield wipers gave up their dying struggle and froze mid-swipe. Her headlights were barely cutting through the darkness, and her phone screen blinked a soft no signal before it blacked out for good. Classic. Like something out of a slasher film. All that was missing was the knife.

The car sputtered once. Twice. Then died completely, jerking to a wet stop on the shoulder of an unlit country road.

“Are you kidding me?” she snapped, slamming the steering wheel. The sound was swallowed by the storm outside.

She sat there a moment, soaked in the silence, shivering, breath fogging up the glass. She was a city girl. Lived off noise and neon and taxi rides. This? This was nowhere. And nowhere was starting to feel like it might swallow her whole.

But then she saw it—a faint, amber glow through the trees, like a house set back behind the woods. It was a shot in the dark, but her choices were slim.

She pulled her coat tighter and stepped into the downpour.

The house was plain, old, and solid—wooden porch, light in the window, no car in the driveway. She hesitated at the door, drenched and freezing, her breath shaky.

Then she knocked. It took a long moment, but eventually, it opened.

He stood there.

Tall. Broad. Barefoot in jeans and a thermal shirt. Dark hair, damp like he'd just come in from chopping wood. The kind of face you don’t expect to see outside of an oil painting or a cigarette ad—sharp jaw, heavy brow, mouth like a threat.

She blinked. He didn’t.

“I’m sorry,” she rushed. “My car broke down just up the road. I don’t have signal. I—I didn’t know where else to go.”

He said nothing. Just looked at her for a long, unreadable beat. Then.

“You’re soaked.”

He stepped aside.

The inside of the house smelled like woodsmoke and something masculine, cedar, maybe, and something deeper, like sweat and old books. She stood awkwardly near the door, dripping on the rug, as he disappeared into another room.

When he came back, he held out a towel.

“I’m not a serial killer,” she blurted, drying her face.

“That’s what a serial killer would say.”

The corners of his mouth twitched, just slightly. Then he nodded to the couch. “You want coffee?”

“God, yes.”

_____

His name was Zach. That was all she got. No last name. No backstory. Just a name, handed over like a weapon or a warning.

She told him hers. He didn’t say it back.

They sat in silence for a while, her fingers curled around a mug, steam rising into her face. She noticed his hands— big, rough, marked by a life spent working with them. He wasn’t trying to be polite. Wasn’t offering small talk or sympathy. He just was, like the walls or the floorboards.

And yet, she couldn’t stop looking at him.

She felt feral. Wet and lost and wired. Everything about him felt wrong for the moment and somehow, exactly right.

_____

When the storm eased up hours later, he walked her back to the car. Helped jumpstart it without a word. Didn’t ask her to stay. Didn’t ask her to come back.

But she did.

The next weekend, without an excuse, she drove up again. Knocked on his door like it was normal. He opened it the same way, quiet, unreadable, like maybe he wasn’t surprised at all.

No questions. No explanations. Just that same damn towel and the couch. It became a pattern.

______

She always find him out back.

The yard was wide, open, and framed by pasture. A fence line stretched along the horizon, half-finished. He was standing shirtless, hammer in hand, sweat slicking down the ridges of his back like syrup. His jeans were dirty. Work boots caked. Forearms corded with tension.

He didn’t look up. Just kept swinging.

One. Two. Slam. Like the ground had insulted him.

Karlie leaned on the porch post, watching. Pretending she wasn’t staring. Pretending she wasn’t already wet beneath her sundress, just from the sight of him.

“You’re early,” he finally said, not turning around.

She blinked. “You were expecting me?”

He wiped his brow with the back of his hand, still not looking at her. “You show up like clockwork, city girl. Only surprise is what shoes you’ll ruin this time.”

Karlie glanced down at her thin flats, already dusted with dry soil. “These were expensive.”

“So’s stupidity,” he muttered.

She should’ve been pissed. Should’ve rolled her eyes, stormed back into her car, and driven straight back to the sterile chaos of the city. But there was something about the way he said it—gruff, blunt, amused like maybe he liked her here just enough to be annoyed by her.

She came down the steps, trailing dust in her wake.

“You always do this?” she asked, crossing the yard slowly. “Fix fences like it owes you money?”

“I always do what needs doing.”

“That sounds like a motto on a bumper sticker.”

Zach finally looked at her. Not up and down. Not lingering. Just a hard glance, direct enough to pin her in place.

“You here to help?” he asked. “Or just watch me sweat?”

She didn’t answer right away. The sun was already burning high, painting him gold where sweat clung to skin, and for a moment she forgot how to speak at all.

"Both," Karlie said, at last. “Mostly the second.”

Zach snorted, a rough little sound in his throat—half amusement, half dismissal. He jammed the hammer into the pouch on his belt, the weight of it tugging his jeans just slightly lower on his hips. The kind of accidental sin that made her knees feel untrustworthy.

“You got gloves in that fancy purse of yours?” he asked, nodding toward her small leather bag like it was a joke that wrote itself.

Karlie held it up. “This bag cost more than your entire outfit.”

“That’s tragic,” he said, and turned away.

She should’ve stayed on the porch. She should’ve stayed in the city. But instead, she followed him to the half-finished fence. The ground was uneven, the sun ruthless, and the air smelled like dirt and horses and the salt of his skin.

He handed her a post without ceremony.

“Hold it straight.”

“No ‘please’?”

Zach’s eyes flicked to hers. “You want manners, find a man who wears cologne.”

That should’ve hit wrong. It didn’t. It lodged somewhere deep and low, dragging a smile out of her she didn’t try to hide. She held the post steady while he hammered it into the earth, each blow a reverberation through her spine.

They didn’t speak for a while. Just the rhythm of labor, of sweat, of shared silence.

But Karlie watched him. Always watched him.

When they paused for water, he handed her a bottle, already half-drunk.

“No cold Evian?” she teased.

“This ain’t a damn hotel.”

She tilted it back, the warm plastic crinkling beneath her fingers. “Do you ever talk about anything besides work?”

Zach wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at her, really looked, for the first time since she arrived. “Why do you keep coming back?”

The question hung between them, louder than the hammer strikes had ever been.

She opened her mouth, then closed it.

Because the city stopped feeling like a place to breathe. Because silence with him meant more than conversations with anyone else. Because he didn’t ask anything of her and somehow, that made her want to give him everything.

But instead, she shrugged.

“Because I like the way you say stupid things like ‘You here to help or watch me sweat?’ Makes me feel seen.”

Zach’s lips twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. But enough.

“You’re a mess,” he said.

Karlie stepped closer. “Takes one to know one, cowboy.”

_____

Later that night, after a thunderstorm cracked the sky wide open, after dinner.

“I don’t want the couch tonight.”

______

He didn’t say anything. Just stepped forward, slow. One hand slid into her hair, tilting her face up. His other rested on her hip—possessive, final. “You sure?”

Her breath hitched. “Yes.”

That was it.

He kissed her like he’d been starving. Like every inch of restraint finally shattered. His mouth was rough, lips hard, tongue sliding into hers with filthy purpose. She moaned, pressing against him, desperate for more.

Zach walked her backward into the bedroom, lifting her shirt, unbuttoning her jeans with a practiced, brutal patience. Stripping her bare like he’d earned it.

“You been thinking about this?” he murmured against her throat. “All those nights showing up at my door.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Every fucking time.”

He growled, low and lethal—and shoved her onto the bed.

He worshipped her and ruined her all at once.

His hands pinned her wrists as he thrust deep, slow at first, watching her come apart under him. His mouth moved over her body, murmuring filth and fire.

“So tight,” he muttered. “Like your cvnt was made for me.”

She arched, gasping, thighs trembling as he picked up the pace, grunting into her neck.

When she came, it was with a cry, his name dragged out like prayer. And when he came, it was rough, messy, possessive. He stayed inside her, breathing hard against her shoulder.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

_____

The sheets still smelled like him.

Karlie blinked awake in the grey light of morning, naked, sore in all the right places, and alone. The room was quiet, too quiet. No sounds of a shower running, no clinking in the kitchen. Just the distant creak of leather and the muffled thump of hooves outside.

She slipped out of bed, pulling on one of his old flannel shirts that had been tossed over a chair. It swallowed her whole. Her bare legs peeked out as she padded barefoot through the house, the wood cold beneath her soles.

Then she saw him. Outside.

Zach sat on the back of a chestnut stallion like he'd been carved into the saddle. One hand on the reins, the other resting casually on his thigh. His shirt was half-unbuttoned, sweat already clinging to his chest despite the cool air.

She stepped out onto the porch. "You always saddle up this early?"

He shrugged. “Figured you might want a ride.”

Her mouth twitched. “You talking about the horse or you?”

Zach didn’t smirk. He didn’t flirt. That wasn’t his style. But his eyes?

They devoured her.

“Both.”

She climbed up, straddling the horse, slipping between his thighs, her back pressed to his chest, thighs snug around the saddle. He didn’t say a word. Just adjusted her against him until she felt the unmistakable press of his cock already hard beneath her.

The reins twitched in his hands, and the horse began to walk, slow and steady down the trail.

Karlie shuddered.

His hand slid between her thighs, fingers slicking through her folds.

“So wet already,” he muttered, lips brushing her ear.

“Zach—fvck, someone's gonna—”

“No one out here but the trees,” he said, thickening his voice to a growl as he tugged himself free and guided his cóck between her legs. “And they don’t care.”

The horse kept moving as he slid into her from behind—deep, slow, filling her inch by inch while the saddle rocked beneath them. The horse barely flinched, too used to its owner’s filth to care.

Karlie choked on a móan. “Shít—”

His arm coiled tight around her waist, anchoring her as the horse’s gait kept bouncing her subtly, rhythmically. Every step made her jolt on his cock. Every thrust hit deeper with the natural motion of the ride.

"You like to be fvcked in the open, like this?" he rasped against her ear, biting just beneath it. "Where anyone could find you, dripping all over my saddle?"

Her hands clawed at the horn, struggling to steady herself as the friction built. “Yes—fvck—I don’t care—”

With a sharp click of his tongue and a low, muttered “Hyah,” Zach tightened the reins and nudged his heels into the mare’s sides. The horse surged forward, pace shifting from a lazy sway to a faster, deliberate trot that bounced Karlie tighter against him, her breath catching as the rhythm grew rougher beneath them.

"City girl likes getting ruined with the sky watching, huh?” He asked, voice gritted in her ear, one hand firm on her hip, the other steering the beast beneath them like it was just another extension of him.

Her moan came raw and wrecked, lost to the wind. Her hair whipped around her face as the horse cut across the open field, and still—still—his hips snapped against her àss, again and again, filling her in rhythm with the wild, pounding hooves.

“God, Zach—”

“That ain’t God inside you, sweetheart.”

He gripped her tighter, using the sway of the ride to drive himself in deeper, filthier, like he was trying to brand himself into her bones. The saddle creaked beneath them, every motion a promise she’d feel for days.

And Karlie? She didn’t care who saw.

She just threw her head back and let him use her—bucking and breathless and ruined under the wide, watching sky.

“I should take you back like this,” he said, voice dark and low. “Let everyone see what kind of girl shows up out here. City mouth, country holes.”

That did it.

She shattered, loud and raw, thighs locking around the saddle as her climax tore through her like lightning on dry land. Zach held her steady, fucked her through it, then finally buried himself deep with a groan that vibrated through his chest and into her spine.

For a long second, neither of them moved—just the sound of the wind and the horse’s slow, lazy steps carrying them across the field.

Then Zach leaned in, mouth brushing her ear, breath still ragged. “Don’t go running back to your city thinking this was some goddamn dream.”