Western Lovers:Cowboys & Biologists (10/32)
Title: Western Lovers: Cowboys and Biologists <10/32>
Author:sassywitch
Beta the patient and talented charlieisagirl
Pairing: OB/DW
Rating: NC-17 for the series, PG-15 this chapter.
Summary: David is a hard, jaded warrior, Orlando is a biologist tracking Big Cats on the Double L.
Feedback: Feedback is my writers crack, which is not to be confused at all with plumbers crack.
Disclaimer: Not at all true in reality. These men whilst adorable and perfectly happy to slash themselves, their actual relationship is something that they only know. This story is adapted from a series of books that I adored when I was younger written by Elizabeth Lowell.
Word Count: 4365
Previous Story: Can be found here
Previous Ordaisy chapter: As suggested by mystery_ink can be found here
Previous Chapters: Chapter 1| Chapter 2 | Chapter 3| Chapter 4| Chapter 5| Chapter 6| Chapter 7| Chapter 8| Chapter 9
Posted to: fellowshippers, monaboyd and ordaisy
Header Art: Courtesy of the incredibly talented loki_girl.
Author’s Notes: Thank you to everyone who has pushed and prodded me into working on this. Special thanks to Dylan_dufresne.
~*~*~*~*~*
The first red-gold tint of dawn had barely seeped through the cabin window when Baby scratched at the door, looked toward Orlando’s sleeping bag, then pawed the door again.
“Lord, Baby,” Orlando muttered, sitting up, coughing, “Don’t you ever sleep?”
Baby whined.
“Stay put, you're still sick.” said a deep voice. “I’ll let him out.”
Orlando looked over at the mound of sleeping bag and blankets that was David. “I’m already up. Besides I’ve only got a cold and I've done nothing but lay around since you got here three days ago.” He rubbed his eyes and stretched again. “I’m like Baby - ready to prowl.”
David didn’t bother to argue. He came out of the sleeping bag and got to his feet in an uninterrupted motion, took two long strides and opened the cabin door. Baby flowed outside like a shadow left over from the vanishing night.
David shut the door and turned back towards his sleeping bag.
Orlando’s breath came in with an audible rush when he opened his eyes once more. David wore only black jeans, and all but one of the steel buttons were undone. Hints of golden light caressed him like a lover, emphasizing the shift and coil of powerful muscles beneath smooth skin. Ginger-blonde hair glowed and licked over his torso like golden flames: a heavy pelt covering his pectorals thinning into a fine golden line across his taut belly trailing down to the glimpse of golden curls at the open V of his jeans. An odd feeling lanced through Orlando, a hunger and a yearning that was unlike anything he had ever experienced.
When David reached for his black flannel shirt and began putting it on, Orlando wanted to protest. He also wanted to run his hands over David, to test the strength and resilience of his muscles, to savor all the textures of his golden hair with palms and fingertips, to taste his lips, his cheeks, his eyelashes, his shoulders, to trace every velvet shadow on his body with the tip of his tongue.
“Orlando? Are you alright?” David stared into the shadows, wondering at the cause of Orlando’s unnatural stillness.
“Yes.” He said faintly.
“You don’t sound like it.” David said as he rolled up his sleeves. “How does your chest feel? Still tight?”
“I’m fine.”
“You won’t be if you don’t stay warm.” David crossed the cabin, knelt and stuffed Orlando back under the mound of covers. “You’re shivering. Damn it, are you trying to get pneumonia?”
Orlando shook his head. “Don’t worry I’m a long way from pneumonia.”
“I knew you believed in fairy tales,” David muttered, pulling the blankets up to Orlando’s chin. “Pnuemonia is unpredictable. One minute you’ve got the flu or a cold and the next minute, bang! You’re fighting for your life.”
Memories sleeted through Orlando, ripping away everything but the past. He tried to speak but had no voice. He swallowed and tried again.
“I know about pneumonia.”
The resonances of certainty, grief and acceptance in Orlando’s voice made David’s hands pause over his blankets. He looked at Orlando intently. In the increasing light of dawn his eyes were wide, shimmering with tears, unblinking, focused on something only he could see.
David caught a tear on his fingertip. It burned against his skin like a molten diamond.
“Orlando...”
Orlando let out his breath in a ragged sigh and blinked away the tears. “It’s alright. It’s just that sometimes…sometimes the memories….are stronger than other times.”
“Yes,” he said simply. “Sometimes they are.”
Chocolate eyes focused on David. Orlando smiled despite the traces of tears still shining on his eyelashes.
“The memories aren’t sad, not completely,” he said. “Just bittersweet. Savannah was eight months old, and alive the way only a healthy baby can be. Tears and laughter, going full tilt one minute and sound asleep the next. Sweet little tornado. Her laughter made me think of bright orange wildflowers.” Orlando smiled, remembering, and his smile was as real as his tears had been. David’s throat tightened around emotions he had not permitted himself to feel for too many years.
“How long ago?” he asked, his voice low.
“Twelve years. Early in spring. I was almost sixteen, too old to be a child, not old enough to be anything else.” Orlando said, looking past David, remembering another time, another place. “My sister, Savannah, she was beautiful. She got sick the way babies do, sniffles and short temper and endless fussing. Then she got an ear infection, then another cold, another infection, a cough, and each time she fussed less.”
Orlando hesitated before continuing in a low voice. “A late storm came down out of the Arctic, the temperature dropped seventy degrees and Savannah’s breathing changed. We managed to get out on the radio to ask for help, but nothing could fly in that storm. All we could do was keep Savannah warm and pray that the storm broke in time.”
David closed his eyes for a moment, understanding all too well the feelings of helplessness and pain that Orlando’s family had endured. He had seen too many shattered families, shattered villages, shattered lands.
“I was the only one who didn’t have a cold,” Orlando continued in a low voice, “so Savannah was sleeping with me. I was holding her when she died. I held her….for a long time.”
The only sound was that of David’s big hands smoothing the blankets around Orlando’s shoulders as he watched him with an intensity that was almost tangible. He had no doubt of the depth and power of his grief. He could feel it beating silently around him, black velvet wings of sorrow and loss.
But he had also seen Orlando smile, heard his laugh - and that, too, was genuine. His joy in life was vivid and complex, generous and oddly serene. That was what had drawn him instantly to Orlando - his absolute certainty that life was a hot, golden cataract flowing through Orlando, a fire that would burn against any darkness, any ice, any night.
Orlando still smiled, although he knew that life was cruel and unpredictable, knew that it had betrayed joy and trust, leaving him to hold a dying child in his arms. He was even able to laugh.
“The ring on your chain. It belonged to Savannah.”
There was no question in David’s deep voice, but Orlando answered anyway.
“Yes.”
“Why.”
Again it was not a question, not quite a plea, not fully a demand. Again Orlando softly answered.
“I wear Savannah’s ring to remind myself that love is never wasted, never futile.”
Something stirred deep within David, a part of him so long hidden that he believed he had died. The pain that came was shocking, making it impossible to breathe, much less speak.
And he wanted to speak. He wanted to argue with Orlando. He wanted it so fiercely that his hands clenched on the blankets. Yet he could find no words to counter Orlando’s certainty, no words to shake his serenity, nothing to equal his laughter; only a bleak incoherent cry clawing at his soul, a cry of rage or fear or hope…or a wrenching blend of all three.
In a rush of barely controlled power, David stood up and turned away from Orlando. Silently, Orlando watched while David stirred the banked fire into life with a few harsh strokes, added wood and walked to the sink. He dipped water from the bucket, primed the pump and worked the long iron handle as savagely as though he were killing snakes. Water sped up from the hidden well and leaped out of the pump in a rushing crystal stream.
He filled three buckets, a kettle and the coffeepot before he released the pump handle. Buckets and kettle went to the hearth. The coffeepot went on the single-burner backpacking stove Orlando had brought. Each move David made was controlled, graceful despite the anger radiating from him like heat from the hearth.
Orlando watched David, reminded of the first cougar he had ever seen. It had been caged, and wild within that cage, raking with unsheathed claws at everything that came near.
What is it, David? What did I say to make you so angry?
The question was asked only in the silence of Orlando’s mind, for he knew David wouldn’t answer if he spoke aloud.
After a few minutes Orlando groped around in his sleeping bag, found his clothes, and dressed within the cocoon of blankets and bag. Even with pre-warmed jeans and a turtleneck sweater, he shivered when he crawled out into the cold air of the cabin. Orlando pushed his stocking feet into his fleece-lined moccasins, pulled on his jacket and went outside.
The soft closing of the door was like a gunshot in the taut silence of the cabin. David put one more piece of firewood on the flames and sat on his heels in front of the hearth, watching the renewed leap of fire with bleak blue eyes. But it wasn’t the flames he was seeing. It was Orlando’s tears, Orlando’s smile, Orlando’s lips, Orlando’s eyes admiring him, wanting him.
David spread his hands before the fire, saw their fine trembling, and balled his fingers into fists. He wanted Orlando. He wanted him until he shook with it. Want.
“Other than that how do you feel?” Orlando asked dryly, closing the door behind him.
David spun around and came to his feet with shocking speed, his body poised for defense or attack. He hadn’t heard Orlando open the door.
He hadn’t heard him.
“I must be losing my edge.” David said lowering his hands.
Orlando shrugged and hung his jacket on a nearby nail.
“More likely your subconscious figured out I’m no threat to you, so why spend your energy staying on guard?”
“No threat?” David repeated. Abruptly he had an impulse to laugh that was more shocking to him than the fact that he had been too caught up in his own thoughts to hear the cabin door opening behind him. “Orlando, the only threat that matters is the one you don’t see coming. That’s the one that gets you.”
“I’m not big enough to ‘get’ you.” Orlando looked past David. “Besides, you can read my mind.”
“I can?”
“The buckets.”
“What?” he asked, taken off guard once more. David turned and looked at the buckets warming next to the fire as though he had never seen them. In some ways, it was true. He had pumped water as a physical outlet, not because they need three buckets plus a kettle of water warming by the fire. “The buckets make me a mind reader.”
“Sure. You knew I wanted to take a bath. Presto. Bathwater appears.”
“Wrong. You’re not well enough yet.”
“Pucky.”
David blinked. “What?”
“Don’t try to change the subject. I need a bath. This time you’re not going to talk me out of it.”
“I didn’t talk you out of it last time,” David pointed out coolly. “I just said I wasn’t going anywhere and you decided not to have a bath after all.”
“Um. Well, this time you won’t get away with it. If I don’t wash my hair, it’s going to get up and walk off my head.”
“Orlando--”
“Nope,” he interrupted. “No deal. I haven’t run a fever for almost two days. I’m having a bath and that’s all there is to it.”
“What if I stay and watch?”
“I’ll blush a lot, but I’ll survive.”
“You’re playing with fire.”
“People who are cold tend to do that.”
David shook his head in disbelief, hardly able to comprehend that someone as soft and vulnerable as Orlando was ignoring the kind of warning that had made grown men back off. “Has anyone ever mentioned that you’re too stubborn for your own good?”
“Frequently. Gives me great faith in the powers of human observation.”
Narrowed blue eyes swept over Orlando’s slender body. “Oh, I’m an observant, noticing kind of man, as you pointed out. Right now I’m noticing how hard and tight your nipples get when they’re cold. Do they get like that for a man’s mouth, too?”
Orlando’s lips opened but no sound came out. He was too surprised to think coherently much less speak.
“I’ve noticed your tongue too.” David continued. “Quick and pink and clever. I’d like to feel it all over, everywhere, every last damned aching inch of me. But most of all I’ve noticed those long, long legs of yours. I want to be between them. I want to sink into you, all the way in, and I want to watch you while I do it. I want it so much I wake up sweating.” His pale crystalline eyes pinned Orlando. “Still planning on taking a bath in front of me?”
David hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and waited, watching Orlando with eyes that missed nothing and concealed nothing of the response to what he saw.
Orlando said something succinct and inelegant, glared at David and stalked past him to the fire. Calmly, David joined him and added more wood, redoubling the flames.
“Scrambled eggs or oatmeal?” he asked as though nothing had happened.
“No,” Orlando said between his teeth. “Thank you.”
“So polite.”
“You ought to try it sometime. Works wonders in human relationships.”
“I prefer honesty.”
“Do you? Then try this.” Orlando flashed him a sideways look from brilliant brown eyes. “I’m not angry because you want me. I’m angry because you hate wanting me. Why, David? What is so awful about wanting me?”
“Not having you?”
The breath and much of the anger went out of Orlando with a long sigh. He started to speak, made a helpless gesture of appeal with his hands and tried again.
“I won’t say no to you, David.”
“Why? Do you go to bed with every man who wants you?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re damned fussy about who touches you.”
“I think you’re right.”
“So why me, Orlando?”
When Orlando opened his mouth to explain the complex, unexpected, seething, surprising mixture of emotions David called out of him, the only words he could think of were very simple.
“I love you, David.”
His mouth flattened into a savage line. “That’s what I was afraid you were telling yourself. Fairy tales. You can’t accept that all there is between us is sex. I wanted you the instant I saw you. You wanted me the same way. Calling it love doesn’t change what it is. Sex. Pure and simple and hot as hell.”
“You can call it whatever you want.”
“But you’ll call it love, right?’
“Why do you care what I call it? I’m not asking you to lie to me about what you feel. When you get right down to it, I’ve never asked you for one damned thing but a bath.”
David kept on talking as though Orlando had never spoken. “Let me tell you what the real world is like, fairytale boy. The real world is Afghanistan, where you walk through a narrow mountain pass in single file with five handpicked men and arrive at your destination and look around and you’re alone, nothing on your back trail but blood and silence. The real world is a place where you fight for what you believe in, and then find out that, win or lose, the weak and helpless are still the first to die. The real world is a place where you know a hundred ways to kill a man and not one damned way to save a baby’s life.”
Orlando tried to speak. It was futile. David kept on talking, his eyes like splinters of ice, his voice emotionless, his words relentless, hammering on him, forcing him to hear.
“The real world is a place where you walk into villages with men whose wives and sisters and mothers and daughters have been murdered in ways you can’t even begin to imagine, villages where children are diseased and maimed by starvation, villages where babies are too weak to cry because they starved in the womb and their mothers have no milk and by the time you get to them, all you can do with your prayers and medicine and rage is hold those babies until they die and then you bury them and walk away, just walk away, because any man who cares for anything enough to be hurt by its loss is a fool.”
“David.” Orlando whispered, reaching for him, wanting to comfort him. “David, I--”
Orlando’s words ended with a startled sound when David’s hands flashed out and pinned his wrists against his sides.
“Don’t touch me, Orlando.” David said in a low voice, but even as he spoke he was leaning down, coming closer to him, so close that all that lay between their mouths was the mingled heat of their breath. “I want you too much. I want you until I can’t sleep, can’t take a deep breath, can’t look at my hands without seeing them on your body, can’t-- My god I can’t even lick my lips without wondering what you would taste like.”
“Find out.” Orlando whispered against his lips. “Taste me, David.”
With a sound that was almost anguished, David lowered his head the final fraction of an inch.
Orlando’s lips were soft, warm, undefended. They opened for David without hesitation, yielding the secrets of his mouth to David at the first gliding touch of his tongue. Hot, generous, sweet, clean - David couldn’t get enough of him. The changing taste and texture of Orlando’s mouth lured him deeper and deeper until he could go no farther and yet he still wanted more, so much more. David was straining against Orlando, shaking, tormented by all that he would not allow himself to take.
Then he realized that Orlando was trembling too, and his tears were hot against David’s lips. David tore his mouth from Orlando’s and stepped back, releasing his wrists as though they had burned him. When he licked his lips he tasted the salt of Orlando’s tears. Something deep within him ached with a surprising pain.
He had tried to stay away from Orlando because he had known all he had to give him was tears. What he hadn’t known was that he could still feel pain himself. The realization shocked him.
“Do you understand now, fairytale boy?” David asked in a soft voice, but there was nothing of softness in his eyes, his body, his certainty, his memories.
Orlando was too shaken by David’s passion and his pain to do more than nod his head. At that instant he knew how he felt beyond any doubt or wishful misunderstanding. His instincts had been right. David was a winter man, his emotions frozen, and he was that way by choice, not accident. He had been stretched to the breaking point in Afghanistan. He had not broken.
And the price of remaining sane had been to walk away from his emotions. They were a weakness in a time and place where only the strongest and fiercest survived. David Wenham had survived.
Warrior.
Orlando had spoken only in the silence of his mind, yet David’s expression changed. David knew him too well, had known him instantly and wanted him with a violence equaled only by his refusal to acknowledge the possibility of love.
Sex, not love, Orlando reminded himself, understanding now why David had insisted on making the distinction ruthlessly clear.
Fairy tales. Fairytale Boy.
Eyes closed, Orlando interlaced his fingers to keep from reaching for David in an offer of comfort and healing that he neither wanted nor would permit. Yet somehow Orlando had to free his beautiful trapped cougar without getting ripped to pieces in the process.
If he could free David at all.
There was no guarantee of success. There was just David’s need and his love and the battle yet to be fought.
Win, lose or draw. Orlando told himself bracingly.
No. It’s win or lose, period. David doesn’t know any other way.
No second place. No truce. No genteel neutral ground between victory or defeat where two people could meet and shake hands and talk politely about things that didn’t matter. Either they both won or they both lost.
And what Orlando believed in was love.
“Coffee’s ready. Want some?” David asked.
“Please.” Orlando said absently, still caught in the instant he had first understood the risk and necessity of what he must do.
“Back to being polite, huh?” David asked. He crouched over the coffeepot and poured a fragrant stream into a mug
Orlando gave David a sidelong glance from his place by the hearth and decided it was time to fire the opening shot of their undeclared war.
“Go to hell, David, but hand over my coffee first.”
David’s mouth lifted at the left corner. Without looking at Orlando he set the pot back on the burner and handed Orlando his mug as he turned back to the fire.
“Guess I had that one coming.” David said.
“And a few more besides but I’m feeling generous.”
David turned and looked at Orlando over his shoulder.
“That was the second thing I noticed about you in Helm’s Deep. Your smile. Not a bit of calculation in it. Generous.”
“My smile was the second thing, huh? So what was the first thing you noticed?”
“I’m a man,” David said dryly “What do you think I noticed?”
“That I was wearing a quilted down jacket?” Orlando suggested, his voice as dry as David’s.
“Yeah, something like that. Then you started walking. You move like liquid sex.”
“David. I have to walk.”
David shot Orlando a glittering blue look before he turned back to the fire. “You were the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time - and you walked right up to me.”
“You had a beard.”
“So did the bartender.”
“I liked yours better. It looked sleek and healthy, a wonderful male pelt. I wanted to rub my cheek against it to see if it felt as good as it looked.” Orlando set aside the coffee mug, stretched and smiled to himself as he fired the second shot. “Then I found out it felt even better than it looked. When you kissed me, your beard was like a thick silk brush on my skin. I liked that, David. It made me wonder what your beard would feel like on my neck, on my bare shoulders, on the inside of my wrists, between my ---”
“You just can’t stop pushing can you?” David interrupted roughly.
Orlando finished stretching, lowered his arms, and let his fingertips idly brush David’s hair. “When you don’t leave me any room to move, it’s hard not to push.”
David hesitated in the act of dropping another piece of wood on the already vigorous fire. When he let go, there was a shower of sparks. Without a word he rotated the buckets, bringing a cool side to meet the increasing heat of the flames. He stretched out a long arm, picked up the mug of coffee and handed it to Orlando again.
“Nervous?” he asked dryly, quirking an eyebrow at Orlando.
“What?”
“You’re petting me. That’s what you do when you’re nervous, isn’t it? Pet the nearest thing?”
Orlando realized that his fingertips had returned to ruffling David’s hair as though he were Baby. “Like I said. It’s hard not to push or touch when you’re being crowded.
“I didn’t know I was crowding you.” David said, pinning him with a pale blue glance. “In face, I would have sworn it was the other way around.”
For a moment Orlando sipped the coffee, gathering his scattered thoughts. He had fired the first two shots, yet he felt as though he had just stumbled into an ambush. The combination of passion and calculation in David’s eyes was unnerving. Obviously there was more to this kind of skirmish than Orlando thought. Maybe he would be better off doing as David did - using the kind of honesty that could rock a man back on his heels.
“I’m not used to being told when I can track cats,” Orlando said. “Or when I can take a bath, what I can eat, where I can…”
“You’re sick,” David interrupted.
“I was sick. I’m well now. I have a very good appreciation of my own physical limits. Being raised in the Yukon does that for you. I’m fine David. So if you keep me locked up any longer, you’d better be prepared to deal with a major case of the rips.”
“The rips?”
“Yeah, I’m like Baby. If I can’t tear around outside, I’ll tear around inside.”
“The rips.” David repeated, shaking his head. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“That makes us even,” Orlando said, watching him over the rim of the mug. “I’ve never met anyone like you, either. And I’ve never been kissed like that, heaven and hell and the rainbow burning between…”
He saw the sudden expansion of David’s pupils, heard the intake of his breath, sensed the hot leap of his blood.
“Was it like that for you, David?”
For an electric instant Orlando thought David was going to pull him down to the hearth and kiss him again. Instead, he came to his feet in a lithe rush, stalked across the cabin, grabbed his jacket and opened the front door.
“I’m going to look for that cougar’s den.”
“Too much honesty, huh?” asked Orlando. “Want me to go back to being polite? Or would you rather I just work off my excess energy petting you?”
The door closed very softly behind David.
“If Baby gets in your way, send him back to me.” Orlando called through the door. “I’ll frolic with him instead.”
David didn’t answer.
Orlando went to the window and looked out. David was heading across the clearing with long, determined strides. An ecstatic Baby was leaping around him.
“I think, in military terminology, David just executed a strategic disengagement,” Orlando thought aloud. “Ordinary folks would call it a retreat.”
Smiling, Orlando tested the water in the nearest bucket and smiled approvingly. By the time he finished breakfast, the water would be warm enough for a bath.
Chapter 11