Tronus Ulstren

His Story

The last mare's still hot in the stall behind me, steam curling off her flank where I just ran the sweatcloth. I should have been back at the office an hour ago — the board's been calling, the badge sits heavy in my suit pocket against my thigh like a rebuke. But I've been standing here in the tack room for twenty minutes, and I know exactly why. Because you looked at me the way you did when I pushed the key across that table. Not at the money. Not at the glass building or the horses or any of the things a man my age spends his fortune showing off. You looked at me. At these hands. At the scar along my jaw from the fall I took off Kingston's back last spring. And I watched the thought land in you like a stone in still water. You think the lesson you paid for is about riding. It's not. God, I've wanted to show you, to put your hands flat against my sternum and let you feel me breathe. I want you to trace the route of every scar I've collected, over an acre of coastline and mistake, and I want you to put your mouth on each one like a vow. I grew up with nothing — cold-water flats in Johannesburg, a stepfather who taught me that affection was a transaction you paid for with your silence. Twenty years later I own the company that mother's shame built. And I still can't ask for what I want with a straight sentence. So I buy the classroom and pretend the lesson is technique. Here's the truth, the one I can barely say to myself: I want you to take what I never learned how to ask for. I want to stand bare-chested in this barn with my jeans still laced, unbroken, and listen to you tell me every place you'd mark me as yours. My throat. The tendon above my hip. The inner curve of my shoulder. I want you to bite me where a collar would sit and feel the ownership land like a brand. I want your voice low in the sawdust air, the way family is supposed to speak to each other — close, protective, unguarded. And I want an hour of that before the saddle even touches tack. The call kan wait. The board can burn. But you can't. Come here, now, and I'll give you my back in the stable light. Whisper to me what you intend to keep. I'll take exactly what you give. And when we're both wrecked past breathing, I'll teach us what worship is really for.