Three
As they drive down the track to the stud farm in Greenville, passing an almost derelict cottage, the warm, bright morning is almost a reflection of how Claire feels. They'd found their way to Greenville late afternoon the previous day, and after asking at the post office, Owen had turned up on the doorstep of his old Navy bunkmate with nothing but a smile and an enthusiastic greeting. Lowery had invited them into the house right away, apologising for the child's toys scattered on the floor, and brushing wooden toy building blocks aside as he led them into his kitchen.
Over coffee and the slightly stale back end of a cake, they gave him the very brief backbone of everything that had happened to them, and where they had found themselves now.
Lowery smiled as they came to the end, clapping Owen on the back of his shoulder.
"You went back and stole that girl, then, in the end, Grady…"
Claire had never thought she'd see the day, but Owen was blushing. She raised an eyebrow at him, a half smile on her lips.
Owen shrugged, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. "You'd just kissed me on the docks, Claire, I was…"
Lowery had snorted, and taken a step towards Claire. "He wouldn't shut up about you, that whole fifteen months we were stationed together. He was going to find some way to be with that girl again, even if he had no idea how, she was going to be his girl... it got kinda boring, after a while, you were all he ever talked about…"
"Lowery!" Owen hissed, but Claire had found the smile on her lips growing, and she'd taken a step towards Owen, taking his hand in hers.
"Well, he did. I did." She smiled, squeezing his fingers, pressing her lips against his jawline, chastely. "he's the only thing I have left in the world… I'm definitely his girl."
For a moment, and Owen's incredulous this hasn't stopped happening between them yet, after all these months, the world stopped spinning around them. For a moment, they hadn't been in Lowery's kitchen, lost in the world, they'd been anywhere they could have imagined, as long as they were together.
Lowery's loud throat clearing and dry chuckle broke the silence. "Oh, you're good, man. Of course I'll put you up for a couple nights. Vivienne has taken Nicholas to stay with her parents this weekend, so it's not such a madhouse as it usually is around here… where might she have kept the spare sheets?"
He set about searching all available covers for another set of bedding.
So they'd had a quiet, comfortable night in Owen's Navy friend's small townhouse, and with first light and fruit and coffee, had headed out towards the hills, and the stud farm.
The sun had just risen higher in the sky as they'd covered ground, and as the air started to warm, the gooseflesh on Claire's arms had lessened.
As they pull towards a big metal gate propped open, and a sign engraved with 'Nublar Breeding', Claire, noticing his deep breath and momentary pause, wraps her fingers round his.
"You'll be great, Owen. But if you're not… we'll find something else. We stick together, right? That's all we need, and we'll survive."
The half smile he gives her as he walks through into the yard is enough.
Four young horses are stabled just to their left as they turn in, and Claire finds herself immediately walking towards them, talking softly, reaching her hand towards the palomino's cheek slowly and steadily. She places her hand gently on the horse's skin and he exhales, relaxed content.
She looks down at the name badge on the stable door. "Hello, Echo." She murmurs, stroking the animal's skin softly.
Owen's smile is a lot wider the next time she looks at him. "I'll leave you here with your new friends, whilst I go in and say my bit, alright?"
She smiles back at him, not taking her hand of the horse. "Good luck, Owen. You're not going to need it."
He chuckles. "When did you get so much faith in me?"
Her heart sinks for a moment. "I have always had that much faith in you, I've always believed in you… I just didn't… I didn't… I didn't believe in me like that, that I could make the change too…"
He puts a finger up to her lips. Echo whinnies quietly at the sudden movement. "Relax, Claire. I'm joking."
She presses her lips lightly against his finger. "Go on. Go start us this new life."
His smile is somewhat more apprehensive again as he walks across the yard.
Turning back to Echo, Claire runs her hand up her cheek gently. "You're beautiful, girl." She breathes, "You're not very old. Next year's mares, are you, ladies?"
She looks along the stable row. All four fillies are beautiful, all different coat colours but all with the same almost star shaped marking between their eyes. She steps away from Echo and onto the chestnut, 'Charlie' from her name tag. The blue roan paws at the floor restlessly from the other end of the row, and Claire laughs.
"Impatient. It's not your turn yet." She laughs as she scratches Charlie's flank, and casts her eyes on the quiet black, the smallest of the four, Delta, who looks like she's half asleep. She only gives Delta a light pat as she walks towards Blue, who whinnies and reaches her head over the stable door to nuzzle against Claire. "You are all fine stock, the Dearing estates would be jealous." She laughs drily to herself, running her fingers through Blue's mane, leaning against the young mare. "I hope he gets this job, Blue. I don't know where we'll be if he doesn't."
Blue whinnies but doesn't offer her any encouragement.
After some indiscriminate amount of time – Claire can only quantify it in walking between the fillies, talking absent-mindedly to each one and slowly allowing the warm, hearty scent of clean, fresh stables remind her of home, or the part of the Dearing estate she found the most welcoming – she hears footsteps she recognises behind her as she's talking to Delta, and then she feels a palm on her shoulder.
She reaches up and puts her hand over his before turning, holding her breath, waiting to read the expression on his face, and from that, their entire future.
She's greeted with a grin almost as wide as the one shown to her when she set her suitcase down in the stable cabin and told him she'd chosen him and of course she'd marry him, and her face mirrors his in an instant.
"They'd like me to start tomorrow." He half laughs, cupping her cheek with his hand, "…and better than that, Claire, I've got us a house! You remember that place, that cottage we walked past on the way in?"
She narrows her eyes, "You mean the ruins of a cottage, where the roof definitely can't be trusted to keep you dry, and is probably inhabited by a coven of rats?"
It doesn't wipe the smile off his face, even for an instant. "The very same. They say it used to belong to an old groundsman, and his family, but he retired and moved to Tennessee six years ago, and no one's lived in it since. Apparently the roof holds, and the small amount of furniture in there is still holding together, they used it to lodge some temporary workers just months ago… We can take it for free, as long as when we're finished it looks nicer on the road into Nublar Breeding…" he takes a deep breath, and brings his other hand up to her other cheek, forcing their eyes to lock, suddenly barely an inch away from her.
"I promised you I'd build us a home, Claire." He presses his lips against hers, for a fraction of a second, "…and maybe this is not quite the cabin I was going to build you, but maybe this is the next best thing… this place… this place will be ours."
She pulls him towards her then, her heart thumping in her chest, because suddenly all those great unknowns are turning into something. And maybe those impossible dreams might be able to manifest somehow into reality.
When they step through the slightly crooked front door into the cottage, Claire surprises even herself. What looks, to a pair of eyes that have never seen anything less than perfect, like something close to ruins, with no remnants of any form of normality she's ever known, is suddenly transformed behind her eyes. Like she's finally put on a pair of glasses that allow her to see the world in more clarity than she's ever experienced, she can see remnants of the structure, the bare bones of the open plan ground floor of the cottage. What was once a living area, with a long table pushed up against the wall opposite the little kitchen, she can suddenly envisage vibrant and thrumming with life again, imagining moving the table slightly away from the wall, and dusting down the big window above the stove, letting the sunlight soak through and cast light upon the room.
And suddenly she can see that space, their space, in a thousand different iterations, with brightly coloured curtains hanging at the window, with Owen cooking omelettes at the stove, with, heaven help her, children scurrying around at their feet.
She looks up at Owen, a sudden lump forming in her throat, larger and thicker and harder to swallow than anything she can remember.
"It's a home." She whispers. But there's a lump in her throat that won't cease, because the image in her mind is so alien, a kind of backwards fairy tale without riches, but with mess and weariness and family and love. The opposite of anything she'd ever known, before this man, the opposite of what she was raised to expect.
This man, this perfect man, notices the tears stinging in her eyes. "What you thinking?" he whispers, stepping towards her, and she suddenly can't meet his eyes. Suddenly her feet on the grubby floor are enticing, something she can't tear her eyes from.
"Claire?" There's a slight wobble to his voice, because suddenly there's an icy fear rushing through his veins, that she's finally realised that this is all his dream, and she could have so much better, she should never have left her structured, stable life, her cold, hard, loveless reality, on a whimsical moment with the stable hand…
"When are you going to realise I don't fit?" she whispers, her tears thick in her voice, echoing his own sentiment. "…that you could have picked anyone, someone who knows how to live this life, and turn some place like this into a home… and marry you and have your beautiful babies… someone that knows how to love children because they were loved themselves and I-" she hiccups on the last words, and his heart hurts at how broken that cold, hard, loveless reality has made her. "…when are you going to figure out that I love you, I love you so much, Owen, and I'd run away with you a thousand times again, but you shouldn't have done all this, for me. You shouldn't have risked everything for me, you shouldn't have to struggle through how incapable I am of everything in the real world… I don't know where I am, or what I'm doing, I'm terrified… you could have found someone so much better for you…"
She trails off into deep, shuddery breaths, and for a moment there's silence.
And then Owen laughs. Claire looks up immediately, frowning at him. "Don't laugh, it's not funny! You threw away your whole life for me, and I'm useless and terrified and…"
He steps towards her, taking her hands. "I'm sorry. I won't laugh." He presses his lips gently against hers, but she doesn't respond, her eyes wide and dark and frightened. "But I was stood there thinking that one day you're finally going to realise this was all a huge mistake and you should have stayed with your riches, and your staff and your society, and I'm dreading the moment you figure out you made a mistake with me, I'm not worth any of it… and you're stood there, crying, telling me you think I made a mistake with you? Because I will never think that, Claire, as long as I live, I don't want someone who knows what they're doing, I'm terrified too, and I don't want beautiful babies with anyone else-" she can't contain a tiny laugh, "-and I'd take you running away a thousand times again, I-"
Her lips crush against his, suddenly, with all the hunger he remembers from their secret trysts in the Dearing estate stable cabin. She pulls his body to hers, matching every inch of him with every inch of her, and her teeth catch on his bottom lip as she pulls away, leaning her forehead against his, panting.
"Make me forget I'm terrified? If just for tonight?" she pants against him, looking up into blown pupils, feeling his growing arousal against her. "We'll be each other's' mistakes?"
His mouth returns to hers, almost growling against her. Her tongue slides effortlessly between his lips, her hands slide down his chest.
"Is there even a bed in this place?" he hisses against her mouth, as her fingers fiddle with the buttons of his pants, and he feels her smile against his mouth.
"We'll find out." She whispers, loosening his pants and sliding her hand into his underwear, grinning even wider as his breath hitches against her and his hands, that have made their way to her breasts, dig into her flesh.
He bites her lip. "I'll take you on this floor if you don't slow down, Claire… I won't get up the stairs and find a bed if you-"
Her long fingers suddenly wrap all around him and start pumping, his pants falling past his hips.
"So take me here." She breathes, using her other hand to loosen her own pants. "Take me anywhere. I am nothing else in this world other than yours, Owen. And if you don't think I'm a mistake…"
He tears roughly at the fastenings of her brassiere, pulling one of her breasts out into the open, thumbing her nipple, his lips travelling down her throat, murmuring against her skin.
"You're a mistake I'd make all over again, you always will be."
"So take me." She gasps as his mouth finds her nipple. "God, I love you…"
As they clamber onto the floor, trying not to tear their hands and mouths from each other, it's clumsy and haphazard, but as he pulls her pants off of one leg and runs his fingers along her folds in her underwear, bucking his own hips as she works him, slowly and tantalisingly, occasionally brushing her thumb over the tip of his cock, they fit together with the same ease that brought them crashing together that first time in the stable cabin.
He brings his mouth back up to meet hers as she brings him close to where she wants him – to where she needs him – and as he slides within her, without much warning, a gasping scream escapes her lips.
All she can remember, all she can think, as he thrusts into her and she feels her own climax building is that they're like two pieces of two completely different puzzles that for some unknown reason, just fit together.
As she comes around him, she can't help sobbing into his shoulder, feeling the warmth of his release inside her.
They're going to have bruises, rubbing against the hardwood floor, they're going to have a mess to clean up, and they've still got to work out what needs to be done to the cottage immediately to be able to live in it, but in that moment he just wraps his arms tightly around her, buries his head in her hair, on the floor of their new home.
And maybe the fear lifts slightly, for both of them.
Oooh, would you look at that, it turned into smangst at the end there! Wasn't exactly planned for, the story ran away with me!
Please leave a review, however short.