Chapter 7: A Test At The Stables
Celeste borrowed the bicycle from the rack by the kitchen door and told no one where she was going. The road out to the stables ran through shade and open sun in long alternations, and she pedaled standing up, letting the wind move over her bare arms, trying to feel again what she had felt two nights ago in the dark. The flutter. Eleven heartbeats, counted against her own. It did not come back on the road. It sat where it sat, low and quiet, like something patient.
The stables smelled of hay and warm leather and horse. Light came through gaps in the timber slats in hard golden stripes, and the dust drifted in them. Two horses shifted in their stalls. From the far end, past the tack room, came the soft wet sound of suckling, and a low hummed tune.
Sable sat on an upturned bucket in the strip of shade behind the last stall, braids tied back, work shirt unbuttoned to the waist. One of her huge dark breasts was out, heavy on her thigh, and a barn cat was nowhere near her; she had her own mouth's work done and was now simply resting, nipple dark and wet, milk drying in a shine down the curve of her stomach. She looked up without surprise.
"Celeste." She shifted her hips on the bucket, and her broad hips made the wood creak. "Come to check on your rival or your fellow soldier?"
"Fellow soldier, if I had to pick." Celeste leaned the bike against the rail and came into the shade. The change in temperature was immediate. She sat down on an empty feed crate across from her, close, knees almost touching.
Sable studied her the way she studied horses, an unhurried inventory. "You look different than at dinner."
"Do I?"
"Settled. Like you've made up your mind about something and you're walking around with it." Sable reached for the hem of her shirt and thought better of it, leaving herself half open instead. Her waist was soft and deep, her belly a gentle round shelf above her jeans. "I'm leaking again. Second time today. Since spring I was dry as a fencepost, and now I'm leaking at the smell of hay."
"It doesn't settle," Celeste said. "It aches when it's full. It aches when it's empty. It's just a different ache."
"Mm." Sable's dark eyes moved down, deliberately, to Celeste's chest, where her shirt had pulled and two spreading damp patches had bloomed. "Look at you. We're the same right now. Two women sitting in horse shade, dripping."
Celeste laughed, and it came out easier than she expected. She pulled her shirt up without ceremony, and the cool air hit her skin, and her breasts swung heavy and full, milk beading at both tips. Sable leaned forward and looked without shame, the way she looked at a good mare's line.
"You're fuller than me," Sable said. "You're feeding someone besides Jordan, aren't you. You've been at it longer."
"Since the first morning."
"That explains the veins." Sable reached out, and Celeste thought she was going to touch her breast, the way everyone touched everyone in that house now, but the broad hand went lower instead, past the curve, and pressed flat against Celeste's belly, just below her navel, before she could move.
"Sable."
"Hold still." The hand was warm and rough from reins and stall work. Sable pressed lightly and left it there, and her face changed. Her mouth opened a little. The pressure of the palm, and then, faint but there, against her skin, a flutter that was not wind and not hunger and not anything Sable had felt in her own body since she was twenty-two with her only pregnancy, the one that had ended badly in a hospital two counties away.
"Oh," Sable said. "Oh, you sneaky thing."
"Move your hand."
"No." She kept it there another second, feeling the flutter answer her palm, tiny and quick, like a bird turning over under a blanket. Then she lifted it, slow, and sat back on the bucket, and looked at Celeste with something that had gone past blunt into fierce. "Does he know?"
"No."
"Does she?"
"Nobody. Not even my sister." Celeste pulled her shirt down over herself, and her hands were not quite steady. "Two nights. That's all it's been. And I felt it the first night, which shouldn't be possible, and I counted, and I'm not telling anyone until I'm sure."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure it's there." Celeste looked at her. "You felt it. That's not droplets. That's not hunger. That's a heartbeat that isn't mine."
Sable was quiet for a moment, which was unlike her. She put both hands on her own belly, over the soft round of it, and pressed, and waited, and her expression said she felt nothing, and that the nothing cost her something.
"Two days before you," she said at last. "He finished in me twice at the creek and once more in the grass with Celeste's hands on my hips. And my milk came back after five months of nothing. That's not a supplement working. That's a body rerouting itself for a reason." She dropped her hands. "But I've got nothing to feel. Not yet."
"So we wait."
"So we wait." Sable stood, and the bucket tipped over behind her, and she ignored it. "Or we don't. I'm not good at waiting." She stepped in close, and Celeste stayed on the crate, and the height difference put Sable's breasts level with her mouth. Milk smell and horse smell and the heat coming off her skin. "Here's what I know about you. You came out here with a secret instead of staying home with it. You wanted to be near the only other woman who might be carrying the same load. That's not a visit. That's a need."
"And what do you know about needs," Celeste said, and reached up, and took Sable's hip in both hands.
Sable made a low sound in her chest and pulled Celeste's face against her breast. The nipple went into her mouth fat and wet, and Celeste sucked, and the letdown came fast, a hot flood across her tongue, thicker than her own, sweeter. Sable's knees braced against the crate, her hands going into Celeste's loose dark hair.
"That's it," Sable muttered. "Drink it down. Wasting it on a bucket's a sin."
Celeste nursed until the flow eased, then switched sides without asking, and Sable braced a hand on the stall rail and rolled her hips, her jeans going damp at the front. When Celeste finally came off her breast with a gasp, her own nipples were hard and aching, and Sable saw it and dropped to her knees in the dust in one motion, dragging Celeste's jeans open.
"Up," she said, and Celeste lifted her hips, and the jeans and her underwear came down in one rough pull, off one leg entirely, leaving her open on the crate with her heels braced on the wood. Sable put her mouth on her without any preamble at all, tongue flat and broad, licking up through the wet of her, and Celeste grabbed the crate's edge and swore.
The sun stripes had moved. The horses stamped. Sable ate her with the patience of a woman who had spent her life doing slow work with her hands, circling her clit with the tip of her tongue until Celeste's thighs shook, then working two thick fingers into her and curling them, and Celeste came with her own hand clamped over her mouth and milk running freely down her front onto Sable's dark shoulder.
Then the sound of a bicycle bell at the rail, two short rings, and the creak of the gate.
Celeste's head came up. Sable didn't even lift her mouth, just grinned against her, fingers still moving.
"Celeste," Jordan said from the tack room door, with Mara beside him in a linen dress and a leather satchel, and Naya half-hidden behind them both with her braid over her shoulder and her dark eyes going wide. "Katherine sent your sister out with the formulation. You weren't at the house, so we rode out together."
"We can see that," Mara said dryly, setting the satchel on the rail.
"You can stay," Sable said, standing, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, her fingers still buried knuckle-deep in Celeste, "or you can watch. Door's right there if watching's not your speed."
Naya did not go to the door.
Celeste reached up and took hold of Sable's belt.
"Hey," Sable said, half a laugh, fingers still moving inside her.
"You got yours." Celeste popped the button and dragged the zipper down over the damp dark front of the jeans. "Now hold still like you told me to."
She pulled. The jeans came down over the broad swell of Sable's hips, catching once at the thighs before they gave, and Sable stepped out of one leg with a grunt and left the denim hanging off the other, her underwear already soaked through, grey cotton gone dark at the center. The smell of her filled the little shade, musk and milk and warm horse. Celeste hooked a thumb in the waistband and dragged the underwear down too, and Sable's bare sex came into the striped light, thick-lipped, glistening, trimmed coarse.
"There," Celeste said. "Fair's fair."
Sable looked down at her, at Celeste open on the crate with her own jeans off one leg and Sable's fingers still buried in her, and something in her face went loose and hungrier than before. "You've got a mouth on you now. Katherine did that?"
"Everyone did that." Celeste leaned in and licked up through her, one long flat stroke, and Sable's hips jerked and her hand shoved deeper into Celeste, knuckle-deep, thumb finding her clit.
Celeste ate her with the confidence of a woman who had been the first mouth anyone ever drank from, sealing her lips over the clit and sucking while her tongue worked underneath, and the crate groaned under both their weights. Sable braced a hand on the stall rail. Her milk let down again, unseen, running freely off her nipple and pattering the dust between her feet.
"Celeste," Jordan said again, from the tack room door. His voice had gone low.
"Shut the door or come in," Sable said, breath ragged. "One of the two. Standing's not an option."
Naya came in first. She crossed the dirt slowly, braid clutched in one fist, dark eyes fixed on the two women, and she stopped an arm's length away and then reached out and put her palm flat on Sable's bare stomach, over the soft shelf of it, feeling the skin jump under her hand.
"She's so warm," Naya said.
Mara set the satchel on the rail and looked her sister up and down with a pharmacist's flat appraising stare. Celeste lifted her mouth from Sable just long enough to speak.
"Mara. Before you say anything."
"Katherine sent the new droplets for Sable's relactation schedule," Mara said. "That was the errand." She watched Celeste's tongue go back to work. "Nobody sent the rest of this."
"She's my sister," Celeste said against Sable's sex, and didn't stop.
Jordan came in last and closed the tack room door behind him. He stood at the edge of the shade with the sunlight cutting across his chest, and he watched Sable's fingers working in Celeste, watched the milk running down her own front, and his hand went to the front of his jeans without him deciding it.
"Sit him down," Sable gasped. Her thighs were shaking now, her heels planted wide, Celeste's mouth dragging her up a long slow slope. "Sit him down and get him out, girl, I want to watch you take him while you eat me."
Naya was already moving. She took Jordan's wrist with both hands, the nervous girl from the master bed and the girl who steered him to the stables now something in between, and she walked him backward to the stack of hay bales against the wall and sat him down on the soft top one. Her fingers shook on his belt, and then didn't. She pulled his jeans open and dragged them down over his hips, and he was already hard, straining up against his stomach, and Naya made a small sound low in her throat and wrapped her hand around him and just held it, feeling the heat.
Mara crouched beside Celeste, close enough to see everything. "Roll your hips," she said, clinical, and when Celeste obeyed and Sable's fingers slid out and back in, glistening, Mara watched the way the muscle gripped. "You're open easy. How many times today?"
"None. Just him, last night."
"Mm." Mara's eyes went down to Celeste's belly, the low curve of it under the bunched shirt, and stayed there a beat too long.
Celeste pushed two fingers into Sable alongside her tongue and Sable came apart. She went loudly, in the way of a woman who worked alone outdoors, a long open-throated groan that scattered the barn cat and made one of the horses stamp and circle in its stall, her hips slamming forward into Celeste's face, milk spraying with each contraction of her orgasm, splashing Celeste's cheek and throat. Celeste held on and worked her through it and didn't stop until Sable shoved her head back with a hand in her hair, overdone, laughing breathlessly.
Then Sable was hauling her upright with strong arms, turning her, bending her over the crate. "Get up here and fill her," she said to Jordan over her shoulder. "She's been sitting on a secret for two days. Make her forget it for ten minutes."
Naya stepped back from Jordan's cock to let him rise, and he crossed the dirt and came up behind Celeste, and the broad head of him pushed through her wet and slid in, and Celeste's whole body took him at once, clenching, and she swore into her own forearm.
Sable didn't leave. She knelt in front of the crate so that her face was level with Celeste's swinging breasts, and she took one nipple into her mouth and nursed while Jordan drove, and the double sensation, the thick pull at her chest and the deep push below, made Celeste's legs go. Mara caught her by the hips and held her steady, her linen dress brushing Celeste's bare thigh.
Milk leaked out the corner of Sable's mouth and ran down her chin. "There it is," she murmured against the nipple. "That's the ache. Better with his weight on you, isn't it."
"Yes," Celeste said, and it came out torn.
Naya had moved too. She pressed herself against Jordan's back, on her toes, her arms around his waist, one hand flat on his stomach feeling the rhythm of his thrusts from behind, her mouth against his shoulder blade. Her braid had come loose and hung across his spine. She was watching Sable drink over Celeste's arched back with her lips parted.
"She's going to come again," Naya whispered. "I can feel it building in his back."
Mara looked up. "Count it out loud," she said. "I want to hear how a Daly finishes."
Celeste came with a shout she didn't bother to smother this time, milk flooding down over Sable's face, her channel clamping around Jordan in long hard waves, and Sable pulled off her nipple and pressed her palm flat against Celeste's belly from the outside, feeling the spasm of it through the wall of skin, feeling underneath the spasm the small quick flutter answering, and her eyes flicked up over Celeste's shoulder to Jordan and then to Mara, one second of fierce deliberate silence, before she looked away and said nothing.
Jordan groaned and drove in to the root and pulsed, and Naya felt it happen against her palm through his stomach, three long throbs of it, and made a soft awed sound into his back.
The barn went quiet again. Somewhere a horse blew air. Sable sat back on her heels with milk shining on her face and wiped it slowly with her wrist, and Mara stood, and brushed off her dress, and picked up the satchel.
"You leaked on my sleeve," Mara said. "And I need to talk to my sister. Alone, before we ride back."
Celeste, still bent over the crate with Jordan softening inside her, felt the words land like a hand on her skin.