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“So what the hell are you bothered about? Who are you scared of finding out? Your parents? Your sister?”
“No, I don’t think so. They’d just like to see me happy and settled. I don’t know what stops me.” I was flailing, trying to find an adequate excuse and falling short. “It’s just become who I am. I mean, look at me! I’m a dairy farmer, from a long line of dairy farmers. I drink beer and eat too much bacon and spend too many hours in the pub, playing darts or gossiping at the bar. I’m the least likely homo I know—even less likely than you!”
“So? There isn’t a rule book somewhere saying you have to be like…I don’t know…Lucien or Freddie. Look at Jay, for instance! And there must be gay rugby players and bricklayers and dustmen! And farmers!”
“Yes, I know there are. But I don’t know any. At first, I didn't want people who’ve known me since I was a kid treating me differently, I suppose. I didn’t want to be ‘the gay one’ down the pub. I like being one of the lads in the darts team and the cricket team. I like being a part of the local branch of Young Farmers without having to wear a rainbow armband and be on trend with all the politically correct lingo. I’m not a poster boy for anything, I just want to carry on flying under the radar.”
“Do you wish you were straight?”
“No! Well, yes, if it meant I could carry on being myself. I’m happy fancying the fellas, but I think I always worried about everyone else’s reaction to it. And I kind of… fell into a groove.”
He digested that, and I awaited his next comment, since he had the bit between his teeth. And even though, given the choice, I’d have chosen a different conversation topic for lazing around in bed… cuddling and chatting after fucking was a rather lovely way to spend a morning that, up until now, I hadn’t previously appreciated.
“Would you come out for me?” he asked in a quiet voice, then made a playful sound very much like a giggle. “So we can be gay together?”
“Can I be gay when we’re not together, too?”
I got a punch on the arm. “You know what I mean. So we could do things as a couple, like have drinks with friends, or take a trip or something—as a couple. We’d be getting used to it together, then. It might be easier.”
The sex thing niggled at the back of my brain, and he sensed my hesitation.
“If you think all this is too soon, Rob, then say so, and we’ll keep it casual. But I’m not a casual kind of person. And I don’t think you are either, really.”
With his hands clasped around his cup of tea, he smiled across at me. Sitting up in bed on a Monday morning, talking. Being a couple. I rolled the word around my head a few times, checking out the angles, and decided I liked the sound of it. Not someone’s other half—I hated that phrase. We were both whole men, with independent lives and goals. I was stuck in my ways; my personality was fully formed, as was Evan’s. We wouldn’t always agree on the same things. Like almond milk, for instance. Or vegan sausages.
But two wholes facing the world as a couple?
“Can I think about it?”
He rolled his eyes, already knowing me well enough to conclude that meant yes, if not today then soon, and his hand once more moved over my hernia.
“Okay, but don’t think about it for too long. I want to show you off.”
Show me off. How bloody ridiculous coming from him. For lots of reasons, I grinned back, my mouth stretched wide, and I shuffled closer to him. I had a man. I’d offloaded some of my higgledy-piggledy reasoning for staying closeted all this time. I’d reluctantly bottomed, and it turns out I fucking loved it. And, not that I’d ever tell the person currently digging his fingers gently into the tear in my abdominal wall muscles, I’d found myself an odd kink.
Much later that morning, after milking, I picked up Zeus, and we bought a stupid plastic chicken run. The deluxe igloo version with the extra layer of insulation because I knew how bitterly cold it could get at night when the wind whipped through the farmyard. And then we tripped to the other side of the estate and picked up a couple of bantams from my mate Steve, who threw in a spare cockerel too, a scraggy thing, days from getting his neck wrung and sorry for himself.
Petting zoo, my arse. Evan didn’t know what he was talking about. A noisy cockerel would be a welcome addition to my security arrangements.
CHAPTER 11
Miss Heather Branson, my replacement hernia surgeon, came well recommended, even if she lacked some of Evan’s crucial charms, namely his broad hairy chest and his delicious cock. Her cool hand prodding my hernia didn’t elicit quite the same response either. But she had a cancellation, news conveyed by her rather stern secretary. Which is how, three days after my fabulous night with Evan, I found myself deprived of breakfast and dropped off at the front of the hospital by my sister. At the bottom of my appointment letter, a few lines outlined the visiting rules and kindly invited nervous patients to bring along an emotional support friend, relative, or teddy bear. Nothing about an emotional support bull, incontinent poodle, brace of hens, or a herd of three hundred cows. Therefore, I found myself hovering in the doorway alone.
Needless to say, I’d not slept a wink. I left Bill such a long list of instructions for managing the herd in the event of a catastrophic medical event that he suggested I visit the psychiatric department as well as the surgical one while I was about it. Quite cutting for a man in his seventies that had known me all my life and treated me as the son he’d never had.
Before I left, Watermelons received an extra-large dollop of attention, not that he appreciated this might be the last time he’d ever have his ears tickled in our special private way. In my opinion, Bill just didn’t have the same knack. X56 and X490, always the most sensitive of my girls, picked up something was afoot and produced very little milk the day before, but Bill blamed the nonstop rain yesterday. Zeus, of course, snoozed through the entire saga of my angst-ridden, drawn-out departure.
“Hey, you.”
I’d been standing on shaky legs in the hospital foyer for nigh on five minutes, knowing full well in which direction to go, but giving the impression of a man searching for instructions on his appointment letter, to buy myself a little more time. The phrase ‘a lamb to the slaughter’ was hackneyed, and in no way did I resemble one. More an overgrown heifer, which had mistakenly—
“I said, hey.”
I gulped.
Radiating confidence and control, my beautiful new man strode energetically across the waiting area. I hadn’t seen him since he slipped out from under my ugly flowery eiderdown three days earlier. Oddly, he was dressed in his civvies, not the well-cut navy suit. Either outfit was fine in my opinion. Stopping just short, he threw me a wink. “The surgical ward is down there, and then first door on the left.”
“I know.”
