by Allan, S. H.
Within moments Colt was in his arms, hot lips on his, wide hands cradling his waist.
“I missed you,” Colt whispered into Gray’s neck as they clung to each other.
“I missed you too.”
It was all they needed to say.
“HOW’S work?” Colt asked as they settled down into the porch swing with a couple of bottles of beer, both sore from the quick but incredible fuck they’d both needed before anything else. The need to reconnect always seemed to override everything else—food, water… a shower.
“Good,” Gray said absently. “Busy.”
When he’d graduated with a doctorate in medicine (a discipline his parents had blackmailed him into), there was an expectation that he’d follow the family business and open a local practice as his father and grandfather had done before him. Then he’d come out as gay, and it didn’t matter what Gray did anymore. His family wouldn’t notice or care.
The one thing he’d excelled at through his training was a keen eye for detail and an ability to turn the three-dimensional and grotesque into bold, often beautiful diagrams. Although he’d been approached while studying to provide illustrations, there had never been time—he was too busy.
Then when there was no medical practice to open, he found the time to take on a few jobs. Gray got an agent, took a booking, and from there a career sprang up around him. He provided drawings for medical journals and children’s books and a range of different publications in between. He liked high school textbooks the best—he could be accurate but simple, a delicate balancing act.
“I wasn’t expecting you home quite yet,” Gray said. They’d last spoke on the phone a few days ago, Colt mentioning that things were still rough and he’d be back as soon as he could.
“There was a turn of events,” Colt said. “I’ve picked up an investor.”
“Really? What did they take?”
“Five percent of the business over the next five years, and two acres to build a house on. In return for a seventy-thousand investment over the same time.”
“Where did you give them?”
“Not decided yet. He’s going to come out to finalize the deal, but he wants this area specifically, and I was the only one willing to sell.”
It would stick, and stick hard, Gray knew, for Colt to have to give up some of his precious land. But times were tough. They’d take what they could get.
When Gray noticed Jared’s red truck coming down the drive, he groaned internally. This was not the right time. Colt stayed silent as a fair head leaned out the window. The engine shut off.
“Hey,” Jared called as he slammed the door of his truck closed.
Colt stood, frowning at the newcomer.
“Howdy,” he called back.
“I didn’t recognize the new truck,” Jared said, ambling toward the house. “Thought I’d just come down and check everything’s okay.”
“Everything’s fine,” Colt said, his voice cool now. “I’m Colt Maverick. This is my place.”
“Oh!” Jared said. “Gray said you wouldn’t be back for a while yet.”
“Yeah,” Colt said, eyeing Gray suspiciously. “Surprise visit. Look, sorry, man, but who the hell are you?”
Gray jumped to his feet before Jared could answer, sensing it was too late. Colt was already on edge. That didn’t mean he couldn’t try.
“Listen, Colt,” he said, “I know what you said, but it’s been crazy out here. I have no talent with the horses at all, and I have my own career too, you know? I couldn’t run the ranch and do my own work as well. I tried, and I was working fourteen hours a day.”
“I’m the ranch manager,” Jared supplied.
Colt raised his eyebrows. “No, you’re fucking not.”
“Colt….”
“I trusted you,” Colt said, rounding on him, furious now in sharp contrast to the peace they’d shared only a few minutes before. “You said you could take care of it.”
“And I tried. But it’s too much for one person to do on their own. Even Jared said so.”
“Don’t tell me there are more,” he said slowly, dangerously.
“No,” Gray assured him. “Just Jared and your workers. No more.”
“Clearly we need to talk about this,” Colt said, turning back to Jared. “There seems to have been some confusion. But you can go back to wherever it is that you’re staying and pack your fucking bags, because no one works my horses except me.”
He stormed back into the house and slammed the door behind him—a very final full stop.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Gray said, turning to Jared with the apology ready. But Jared shook it off.
“It’s no problem,” he said. “I understand.”
Gray nodded and turned back toward the house, hoping to go some of the way toward placating his husband.
THE bedroom door was closed and locked from the inside. Gray considered for a moment banging on it, breaking it down. He’d done that before. Colt had done the same thing too. More than one new set of hinges had been installed on that doorframe over the course of their marriage. More like five or six sets of hinges. It was a good way of marking the time passing.
A good boot to the handle would generally cause the lock to give, but Gray decided to try the old-fashioned way first and knocked sharply three times.
“What?” Colt demanded.
“You wanna go for a ride?”
It was a strange thing to ask. Gray wasn’t quite sure where it came from, but it was enough to make Colt open the door and give him a wary look.
“Yeah,” Colt said, nothing more. “Let me get my hat.”
When Colt was home, riding the fences was a job they did together of an evening a few times a week, allowing the ranch hands to skip off early. Once two horses were saddled up, they took off over the ranch so Colt could cast his eye over his property before his employees turned up the next morning.
Technically, Thunder was another one of the ranch horses, but Gray had taken a shine to her early on, and she had quickly become his horse of preference when he went out riding. Over the past few months, he hadn’t been out quite so often; he loved riding, but Colt had been the one to teach him how. He’d never been on a horse before moving to the ranch. It meant riding without Colt by his side felt awkward, uncomfortable, just all wrong.
Colt wasn’t fussy about which of his horses he took out. Generally there were two or three he rode on a day-to-day basis, rotating so they weren’t worked too hard. He picked Mirabelle, a chestnut Arabian who was one of the older horses still working the ranch, and Gray guessed the choice was only because her stall was next to Thunder’s.
The prickly heat was still bearing down as they rode out over the ranch. While Colt took them on a circuitous route around the land and through the grazing area, Gray felt the sweat start to trickle down his back. So this was why he never came out during the day—he’d almost forgotten.
“Did we lose any cows while I was gone?”
“Nope,” Gray said. “They’re all fine.”
“Good. Good.”
Gray tugged on Thunder’s reins and sidled up next to where Colt was peering out across the plains.
“Whose great idea was it to go riding a couple of hours after I’d been fucked senseless for the first time in months?” he asked, wanting a reaction.
Colt’s head whipped around, and he smirked. “Not mine,” he said.
Colt fell silent as the sun started to finally dip beyond the horizon, setting most of what he owned alight in red and gold. They used to do this all the time just after they’d got married, sit out here on horseback, or kick back with a few beers and watch the sun set.
There was no one around for miles. Gray leaned in for a kiss, pleased when Colt’s hand wrapped around the back of his neck and their tongues slid together. Even if there were people around, Colt rarely cared. He would kiss his husband wherever and whenever he chose to.
“Did you fuck the kid?” Colt asked in a low voice, his
hand still on Gray’s neck.
“What?”
“The kid. Jared. Did you fuck him?”
“Jesus. No!” Gray exclaimed, pulling away from the touch.
“Did he fuck you?”
“What? No, Colt. He didn’t fuck me. The only man who’s fucked me in the past nine years is you. And you know it, you bastard.”
He pulled on the reins and set Thunder at a steady gallop back toward the stables. Colt was calling at him to wait, but he didn’t feel like complying, kicking at the horse’s rump to urge her on. He had forgotten Colt had the advantage both as a superior rider and because he had a faster horse, and the two men drew in to the homestead around the same time.
“Gray,” Colt called out again. “I’m sorry.”
Shaking his head, Gray dismounted and led Thunder out to a paddock where the other horses had been set to graze. He’d leave Colt to deal with the tack, knowing there was no way Colt would just abandon two horses that were fully saddled up when it was still hot outside. It meant he could storm back into the house, tossing his shirt on a sofa as he passed on the way to his studio.
“I’m sorry,” Colt said, grabbing on to Gray’s arm and stopping him as his foot landed on the first stair. So Colt had just left the horses. He wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “It’s just…. I’m just….”
“Jealous? Callous? Unpredictable?”
“Yes,” Colt said. “Worried? You can add that to your list too. I spent months missing you and come back to find out you’ve replaced me with another man. What am I supposed to think?”
“You’re supposed to trust me!” Gray yelled. “You’re supposed to know that I’m your husband, for fuck’s sake. I promised you forever, Colt. I’m not about to throw that away.”
Colt nodded. “Okay. But you fucked up too, Gray. This place—it’s all I have. It’s my life. And I trusted that to you.”
“If I’d called you and told you what I needed to do, you would have said no. Or you would have come home and not found an investor, and we would be totally in the shit. I did the only thing I could, given the circumstances.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to make it without my input!”
Gray walked away a few paces, lifting his hat and running his hands over his head in frustration. Then he replaced his hat and walked back.
“I’m sorry for not calling you,” he said. “I thought it was the right decision at the time.”
“I didn’t really think you fucked him,” Colt said in a small voice.
“That’s not an apology.”
Colt looked at him evenly with his big, expressive brown eyes. “No,” he said. “I need to go and check some things out. Find out what’s happening around here.”
“Fine. I have work to do.”
The cool interior of the house only reminded Gray how hot and sweaty the ride had made him. He headed to the bedroom first to put on a clean shirt before carrying on up to the attic studio, realizing he’d left paint on his brushes and probably wrecked at least one of them.
It was getting darker now, and he flicked a light on to move around the room, setting his brushes in a pot of paint thinner in the hope of saving them and neatly filing all his paints in the drawer where they belonged. He’d made the cabinet himself one winter when they’d been snowed in; each compartment was carefully labeled with the color that lived inside, the drawers split up with dividers that sectioned off oils and acrylics and watercolors. His brushes were stored similarly in the upright part of the cabinet, each held in place with a tiny clip.
If he was a bit obsessive over his tools, then so what? Gray spent most of his working life in this room; he wanted it how it made sense to him.
There was a computer desk set up in the corner where he could do research, if he needed to, and most of the correspondence with his agent came via e-mail, so this was where he picked up jobs. Next to the computer desk was his little library. Some of the books were ones he’d illustrated himself; others were there for reference. It was a good setup, as far as he was concerned.
After checking his e-mails, he returned to the painting he’d been working on when Colt had interrupted with his arrival home. The piece was nearly finished. It only needed a few more hours’ work before it would be ready to scan into the computer, ready to be sent off to his agent. There were a few other commissions he needed to get going, though, and he sat down at his desk to start the initial sketches.
This work was calming in its familiarity, allowing Gray to think as his pen flew over the paper. The instruction to create a diagram of a human heart, suitable for studying by third graders, was easy. He didn’t even need to think about it anymore. The illustrations seemed to flow out of his hand without any particular guidance from his head.
In all the months he’d been waiting for Colt to finally come home, this was not how he imagined their reunion. The brief moments of calm were overshadowed by the decisions they had both made while away, things that were in the past with no way of being changed.
Then again, the whole situation, from the moment Colt had told him he had to leave, had been fucked up. They’d fought then too. Gray had been adamant that he couldn’t cope running the ranch on his own, and he’d been right, of course.
He pushed the sketch aside and put his head down on the cool surface of his desk, desperate for a glass of the iced tea he’d made and set to cool in the fridge, but too stubborn to risk running into Colt downstairs.
Instead he stood and walked over to the huge window, looking down on the paddock where the horses were now being brought into the stables by Colt’s workers. Thunder and Mirabelle were already gone, and Gray guessed they had been the first ones to go in. Either that, or Colt had gone back and done it himself. Colt’s truck was still parked where he’d left it earlier.
The overhead light flicked off, then on, then off again. Gray’s eyes snapped to the doorway; when the light came back on, Colt was framed in the light, his hat abandoned—he was wearing a sheepish expression now instead.
“Hey,” Gray said.
Colt opened his arms. Gray took a step forward, then another, realizing it was his turn to fall into his partner’s reassuring embrace.
“I’m sorry,” Colt whispered, his fingers brushing back and forth at Gray’s nape, teasing the straggly hairs there. “I didn’t mean to yell.”
“That’s okay.”
And it was.
Colt had a short temper. Gray had known this from when they’d first met ten years before. After his family had all but disowned him for coming out as gay, Gray had wandered from Chicago to Texas, up to DC, then over to Nevada, crisscrossing the country trying to find somewhere to settle. Home, it turned out, was a big bear of a man in a bar somewhere south and west of Illinois.
After watching the man for most of the night from the opposite side of the bar, drinking beer and eating peanuts and waiting for his chance, he learned that sometimes opportunity ambled up, tipped its hat, and offered a fuck in the back of a pickup.
That one fuck led to another, then another, and then, without meaning to, Gray fell in love. It wasn’t just a fluttering of love either. It was full-blown, heart aching, sweaty palms, head over heels in love. And because of the way Colt kept all his emotions so well concealed, Gray was convinced the other man didn’t feel the same way.
It took time for their relationship to settle around them, each piece slipping into place over a number of years. They had married during a vacation to Canada, took the term “husbands” back home when many around them refused to accept that two men could be in a legal, loving relationship.
They looked like a good couple—people had said so. Gray wasn’t a small man, although he didn’t have anything on Colt’s bulk. In fact, when they’d got the tape measure out, Colt was only a half inch taller, but probably twenty pounds heavier. A lifetime of academics had molded Gray into a quiet, reflective man who could iron his own shirts and always combed his hair and knew how to treat a lady right.
“No need to apologize,” Colt said roughly as his arms tightened around Gray’s body. “I should be the one ’pologizing, for yellin’ at you like that.”
Gray was smiling as he straightened up, pulling his hands out of the embrace so he could play with the unruly hair that fell over Colt’s forehead.
“You wanna go to bed?” he asked.
“I’m sure tired. Someone wore me out.”
“Come on, then,” Gray said with a laugh.
Their bedroom was a sanctuary. No one ever came up here except the two of them; it was a space where they were happy to be just who they were, and fuck anyone who didn’t like it. Gray had painted the walls a soft, dusky blue, tossed rugs on the floor, and had made the lamps that sat on the nightstands himself. It was designed to be a peaceful place for two very tense men.
Gray started to unbutton his shirt, until Colt batted his hand away and took over the task of the undressing. His lips roamed over each exposed inch of Gray’s skin, taking the time to appreciate the toned, tight body. After all these years, Colt still felt the same. Solid. Safe. Home.
Colt’s hands spread out over Gray’s ribs as he leaned in for another kiss, his lips slowly teasing until Gray’s parted and allowed his tongue to steal inside. Laughing into the kiss, Gray tugged at the hem of Colt’s shirt until it was tugged up and over his head, tossed in a corner somewhere, and forgotten about. He’d always loved Colt’s chest—strong and broad and covered in that light dusting of hair.
When Colt’s hands wandered farther, down to Gray’s jean-covered ass, and squeezed, Gray leaned away and raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t you think once in an afternoon is enough?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Well, my poor, sore ass certainly does.”
Colt chuckled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. It was amazing, Gray thought, that after all this time, a simple smile from his husband could make him feel like a teenage girl in love. Aware he was smiling back, probably looking like an idiot, Gray reached up and cupped Colt’s cheek and drew him into another slow kiss.