by Ariel Tachna
“Let me just tell the others where we’re going,” Jesse said.
Chris nodded and climbed on Titan’s back again. His arm was sore, but he ignored it. He refused to let his injury keep him from doing what needed to be done. He had a life to build here, and that couldn’t happen if he couldn’t work.
Jesse joined him a moment later, leading his horse. Seeing Chris already mounted, he swung into the saddle with an ease Chris envied, and that added to the desire clawing at his gut. Neil and Ian might despair of some of the new jackaroos, but Jesse was the real thing, a stockman just like Neil, Ian, or Macklin.
“Up for a little run?” Jesse asked.
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “I’m not much of a horseman, but go ahead. I’ll meet you at the fence line.”
“Are you sure?”
Oh yeah, Chris was sure. He wanted to see Jesse really ride, not just sit his horse.
“Okay, see you at the fences,” Jesse said, urging his mount to run.
Chris followed along behind at a much slower pace, relishing the sight of man and beast moving together. One day maybe he’d ride like that. For now, though, he’d enjoy the show.
As promised, Jesse waited for him at the fence line.
“I thought Caine said he had people check the fences earlier in the season,” Chris said as they rode along the barbed wire barrier.
“I’m sure he did,” Jesse replied, “but things happen. Trees fall, posts get rotten. It’s like the huts. It’s easy to bring a set of batteries if you know you need them, but if no one pays attention, suddenly you’ve got an entire ute full of supplies. It’s easy to fix a small section of fence, but if you don’t catch it early, it ends up being a huge job instead.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Chris said.
Jesse looked back the way they’d come, then pulled on Chris’s good arm until Chris leaned in for a kiss.
“Mmm,” Jesse said. “It’s been too long since we’ve done that.”
Chris smiled and kissed him again. “We should do something about that.”
“We should,” Jesse agreed, pulling back so he could swing down from his horse. “C’mere.”
Chris slid down into Jesse’s arms, ignoring Titan’s huffed snort. The horse could just get over it. Chris wanted to kiss his lover. The word brought his thoughts to a grinding halt even as Jesse kissed him. Chris’s body reacted, returning the kiss, but his mind remained stuck on that word. Lover. Were they lovers? They had sex. They spent time together even when they weren’t having sex. They were friends. They supported each other. Well, Jesse supported Chris. Chris wasn’t sure how much support he’d provided Jesse so far. All of those things seemed to imply an affirmative answer, but lovers were people like Caine and Macklin, solid, committed couples. He and Jesse were just screwing around and passing the time. Weren’t they?
Then Jesse’s tongue interrupted Chris’s musings, playing across Chris’s lips until he parted them and sucked the wet muscle inside. His worry over details faded as Jesse’s hands gripped his arms and dragged him closer.
“Hang out at the bunkhouse tonight,” Jesse said when he broke the kiss. “We’ll wait for the others to go to bed and then you can sneak into my room. Please, Chris. I need to fuck you.”
Chris groaned. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a rubber in your pocket.”
“I’m working.”
“That didn’t stop you when we were stocking the huts.”
“Neil and Ian are just on the other side of the ridge. They could come looking for us at any second.”
“Then I’ll have to be quick,” Chris said as he tugged on Jesse’s belt. “You can’t fuck me without a condom, but I can take the edge off.”
“This is a bad idea,” Jesse said.
Chris shrugged as he sank to his knees. “Are you saying no?”
Jesse shook his head, so Chris unbuttoned his jeans and slipped a hand inside, ignoring the twinge in his elbow. He wouldn’t need his arm for long. Just long enough to get his mouth on his prize.
An extra frisson ran through Chris as he pulled Jesse free of his clothes and licked the mushroomed head, already damp with Jesse’s excitement. He’d never gotten off on exhibitionism, but this wasn’t that. No one was watching. It was the possibility of being discovered that added the extra thrill as he slid his lips down the length of Jesse’s shaft, taking him all the way in. It was the need to hurry that added urgency to his movements. They could be interrupted any second, and Chris didn’t intend to get caught with his pants down. Or with Jesse’s down in this case.
When Chris glanced up at Jesse, he was arrested by the vision of Jesse’s face, eyes wild with passion and yet gaze flitting along the horizon constantly on alert for Neil or Ian. That only heightened Chris’s desire as he rolled Jesse’s balls against his palm, urging Jesse to find release as quickly as possible.
Jesse must have been as desperate as Chris because in a gratifyingly short time, he stiffened beneath Chris’s hands and mouth as he found his release.
Licking his lips, Chris drew back. “That should hold you until tonight.”
“What about you?” Jesse asked. “Damn it. There’s Max.” He fixed his clothes quickly. “I wasn’t going to do anything but kiss you.”
“Max can’t tell tales.”
“No, but if Max is coming this way, Neil isn’t far behind.”
Chris let Jesse pull him to his feet.
“Did you find something?” Neil called, cresting the rise that had hidden Chris and Jesse from the drover’s hut.
“No,” Jesse called back. “Just some brush tangled in the fence, but we wanted to make sure the wire was intact.”
“Good man!” Neil said.
“How’s the lamb?”
“He’s going to be stiff and swollen for a while, but there’s nothing to suggest it’s worse than that. We’ll keep him in the lean-to where it’s warm and dry for a few days to make sure the swelling goes down. Any sign of more dingo tracks?”
“Not that we’ve seen,” Jesse said, “but we just got started when we stopped to check the fence. We’ll finish the perimeter and meet you back at the hut?”
Neil nodded his agreement and headed back toward the lean-to.
“That was close,” Jesse said when Neil was out of earshot. “Let’s get this finished.”
“Don’t be like that,” Chris said, though he climbed back onto Titan immediately. “He didn’t catch us, and he’s Caine’s biggest supporter.”
“Because Caine saved his life,” Jesse reminded Chris. “From what I heard, Neil was pretty nasty to Caine before that.”
“He knows I’m gay.”
“There’s a difference between knowing and catching you with my dick in your mouth while we were supposed to be working. This can’t happen again. A kiss is one thing, but nothing more.”
Chris still thought Jesse was overreacting, but he let it go for now.
They finished checking the fence and rode back to the drover’s hut. “What now?”
“Now we sit here and stare at the sheep until it’s time for lunch,” Jesse said. “As long as they don’t need us, we can relax a bit.”
“Sounds good,” Chris said, dismounting and reaching for the saddle on Titan’s back.
“Loosen the girth, but leave him tacked up,” Ian said. “If we need to mount up in a hurry, you wouldn’t want to have to tack him up again.”
“Why would we need to do that?” Chris asked, even as he followed Ian’s advice.
“Kyle saw dingo tracks. If one came around, we’d have a much better chance of scaring him off on horseback than on foot. We humans aren’t very scary or fast, but a big horse is. One well-placed kick from old Titan there and that dingo’s dead.”
“Can you do that? I thought they were protected.”
“We can’t train Titan to do it,” Neil said, “but if he does it out of self-defense, that’s the dingo’s problem, not ours. They’re pests, nothing more.”
THEY
WERE cleaning up the remains of their lunch when Max’s wild barking interrupted. The three experienced jackaroos dropped everything immediately, heading for the door without hesitation. Chris followed more slowly, not knowing if he’d be able to help and not wanting to be in the way.
At the far end of the paddock, Max raced toward a group of dingoes at the crest of the ridge.
“Bloody hell,” Neil shouted. “They only hunt in packs when they’re starving.” He tightened the cinch on his horse before swinging onto its back and spurring it across the field. Ian was only seconds behind him.
“Stay here,” Jesse told Chris as he mounted in turn. “You don’t ride that well yet, and this could get messy.”
“Do I need to call for help?” Chris yelled as Jesse started away.
“It’ll be over before they could get here,” Jesse yelled back as he sent his horse at an angle to the path Neil and Ian had taken, intercepting a dingo that had come from a different direction, intending to drive the mob into the trap of the rest of the pack.
Chris watched, his chest tight, as the three men did their best to run off the dingoes, Max racing into the fray as well. A particularly nasty snarl of canine flesh made Chris wince, but when Ian arrived on horseback to break up the chaos, Max emerged victorious, the dingo he had tangled with limping away as fast as it could move on three legs.
As quickly as it had started, the melee was over, and Jesse, Ian, and Neil were riding back toward where Chris stood, Max trotting proudly beside them.
“Bloody stupid dingoes,” Neil muttered as he swung down from his horse. Chris grabbed the reins Neil dropped without care as he knelt to check on Max.
“Is Max all right?” Chris asked.
“He seems to be,” Neil said, running his hands over the dog’s sides and legs to check for bite marks. “The dingo took the worst of their fight.”
“I didn’t think dingoes would be that bold,” Chris added. “I’d always heard they were pretty timid creatures.”
Jesse nudged Chris’s arm and shook his head. Chris took the hint and let the subject drop, especially when Neil glared at him. Deciding discretion was the better part of valor, Chris retreated to the lean-to with Neil’s horse in tow. He took care to only loosen the girth a little in case they needed the horses again.
“Dingoes are a sore spot with a lot of jackaroos,” Jesse said a moment later from the entrance to the lean-to. “I don’t know Neil’s reasons, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he lost a dog to them in the past. Max is awfully young for a jackaroo with as much experience as Neil has.”
Chris shuddered. “Yeah, I could see that souring him on dingoes.”
“Even those of us who don’t have that kind of reason still don’t like them,” Jesse added. “They’re a threat to our sheep. A single dingo couldn’t bring down a full-grown ewe, but a pack like the one we had today? They could have made off with several. I don’t know how Caine runs things, but I’ve been on stations where the cost of those animals would have come out of our pay.”
“Really?”
“Not all of them, and like I said, I don’t know how they do things here on Lang Downs, but yeah, the argument is that if a dingo made off with a sheep on your watch, you were negligent and owed the station owner the cost of the animal. And believe me, they aren’t cheap.”
“Wow, that’s kind of… mercenary.”
“It’s that kind of industry for the most part,” Jesse said with a shrug. “Most stations are making ends meet, nothing more, unless they’re huge and industrialized. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with Caine’s organic certification plan. It’s the exact opposite of the route most places seem to be taking.”
“You don’t think it’ll work?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said. “And at the end of the day, as long as he pays my salary, it’s not my problem. This is my job, not my life.”
The words made Chris realize how clear a picture he’d started painting for himself of the future, and how at odds that picture was with Jesse’s apparent vision of his own path in life. He should have known better than to read any more into Jesse’s support than the friendship he’d offered first. He’d never suggested it was anything more than that, but Chris had started to hope. He’d obviously been wrong.
Sixteen
CHRIS SAT with Seth and Jason at the canteen that night, not wanting his brother to feel neglected after Chris had spent all day with the jackaroos. By the time Jesse made it to the canteen, all the seats at their table were full. Chris smiled apologetically at Jesse, but he made no move to clear a space or pull a chair over to squeeze Jesse in.
Jesse hadn’t led him on, not really anyway, but Chris still felt the need to reestablish some independence. He’d fallen into the trap of thinking of them as a couple, of including Jesse in his thoughts of family things, and that was a mistake. Jesse was a fuck buddy he could pass the time with until the summer ended.
They had nearly finished eating when Neil stood up and clinked his glass with his fork. The rumble of conversation in the canteen dwindled to silence.
“Sorry to disturb everyone’s dinner,” Neil said, clearing his throat. Chris almost chuckled at how ill at ease the usually confident jackaroo appeared, but Neil wouldn’t be standing there if whatever he intended to say wasn’t important.
“I wanted to tell everyone that Molly has done me the great honor of agreeing to marry me at the end of the summer.”
The men broke into cheers and applause as the woman in question rose as well. Neil slid his arm around her waist, keeping her by his side as the other jackaroos crowded around to shake Neil’s hand or slap his shoulder and call him a lucky dog.
Chris joined the throng, holding back only to let those who knew Neil better approach first. “Congratulations,” he said when he reached the couple. “I hope you’ll both be very happy.”
“I’m sure we will be,” Molly said with a smile.
Chris stepped aside to let someone else speak to them, only to bump into Jesse.
“Hi,” he said, not wanting to be rude.
“Hi,” Jesse said. “I missed having dinner with you. Sorry I was late getting here.”
As simple as the words were, they relaxed something in Chris’s chest. He’d taken Jesse’s words at lunchtime as a dismissal, but they weren’t, at least not completely. Jesse might not be thinking in terms of forever—and he had no reason to; they hadn’t talked about anything beyond the present moment—but he did enjoy Chris’s company both in bed and out. They were friends, and Chris couldn’t discount that. He had few enough friends at the moment to dismiss one simply because he’d jumped ahead in the playbook.
“I’m sorry I didn’t save you a seat,” Chris said. “By the time I realized you weren’t right there, the table was already full.”
“We’ll just have to have a beer together instead,” Jesse said with a grin. “Paul picked some up for me when he made the supply run into Boorowa today. It’s in the bunkhouse if you want one.”
“Sure,” Chris said. He’d been trying to spend more time in the bunkhouse anyway, figuring Caine and Macklin would eventually like their house back. This gave him yet another excuse to spend the evening there. “Let me just make sure Seth doesn’t need me.”
“Chris,” Jesse said, catching Chris’s arm before he could turn away, “he’s sixteen. He won’t appreciate you hovering. There’s not a lot of trouble he can get into out here anyway, not without someone stopping him before he does something stupid.”
Chris hesitated a moment more, but Seth was still sitting with Jason talking, and Jason’s father stood nearby with Neil, Molly, and a few other of the year-rounders.
“He’ll be fine,” Jesse repeated. His hand on Chris’s arm turned from a grip to a caress, and Chris gave in.
“I could use a beer.”
“SO… MARRIED, huh?” Macklin said, coming up to Neil and Molly when most of the others had drifted away. “Are you going to both fit in that little house
of yours?”
“We’ll make it work,” Neil said. “Maybe we’ll add an extra room over the winter when things are quieter around here.”
“You could do that,” Macklin said slowly. “You wouldn’t be the first, but it occurs to me that there’s this big house sitting empty now that I’m not using it anymore. Seems kind of a waste to add on when you could just move across the road and have all the space you need.”
“But that’s the foreman’s house,” Neil protested.
“It was the foreman’s house,” Macklin reminded him. “Unless you think Caine’s planning on firing me any time soon.”
“He wasn’t that stupid when he was a blow-in,” Neil retorted. “He’s certainly not that stupid now that you’re his partner.”
“And if I did step down,” Macklin went on, “I’d tell him to hire you in my place, so the house would be yours anyway. Unless you don’t want it?”
“We would love to have it,” Molly interrupted. “It’s very generous.”
“Consider it an early wedding present,” Macklin said. “I’m pretty sure all my things are already out of the house, but I’ll check this evening and you can start moving in on your next day off. Once you’re settled, I’ll see if Chris and Seth want some space of their own instead of having to bunk in the big house.”
“They’ll appreciate that,” Neil said, “Chris especially.”
“Oh?” Macklin asked, though he thought he knew what Neil was implying.
“Neil, that isn’t any of your business,” Molly scolded.
“I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble,” Neil said. “I just… well, I think Chris and Jesse might have a thing going on.”
“Are you okay with that?” Macklin asked, remembering all too clearly how badly Neil had reacted to finding out Caine was gay.
Neil shrugged. “They aren’t bothering me. Jesse’s a good jackaroo, and Chris is a hard worker and eager to learn. I didn’t expect to end up surrounded by poofters, but then I’ve never known poofters like the ones here.”