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“Yeah. Well, it’s like this. The stuff y’all do is as much for my head as my dick and ass, ya know? It’s gonna help me in a lotta ways. It helped him. Did you know Memphis puts him in a cage?”
I smiled and confessed, “Yeah. He mentioned it.”
“He likes it! Don’t that beat all? Said he felt like someone finally wan’ed ta keep ‘im. And, well, I figure it, me too. I’d…like that.”
Damon was as shocked as me. “You want a cage, Joel?”
“Not so much that, I reckon, unless y’all want that, but doin’ stuff that makes me know y’all want me. I’d…like that.”
My heart did a leap right into my throat, and it stuck there so I couldn’t get out any words. Damon seemed to have the same trouble until he yanked Joel over to hold him tightly and he got out, “We want you, Joel. We want you.”
I told Eli about it when we got over there, and Eli looked like he’d cry. We were walking behind the house, looking over the vegetable garden Noah and Eli had made, the new vegetables starting to grow tall. We leaned on the fence around it as Eli absorbed all of it.
“I know how he feels. I wanted the same, to belong, to feel wanted. Joel might have the same trouble as me, feeling like everyone wants him for his looks, or his sexuality, something. He gets guys, a lot of them, but no boyfriend, ever, I don’t think.”
“It sounds like that, yeah. He doesn’t want to be kept from fucking around though. Wouldn’t he want us to be jealous of him?”
Eli shrugged his shoulder as he thought it over. “Jealousy and sharing are different. If you two were to take notice of someone, besides just a fuck, he’d likely tear you both apart. But the sex? I’m sure he feels like you two, that there’s a wide gap between sex and love. He said it, right?”
“What?”
“That he wants you guys to want him, that no one ever saw past fucking him.”
I saw his point. “In that Joel-speak he has, yeah. Roundabout way of it, but I think that’s exactly what he meant. He offered to let us cage him just so he knew we’d want him that way, like Memphis did with his Xen.”
“That’s a sad story,” Eli said. I had told him what Memphis had confessed to us, and there was a reason for that. Eli had felt that way most of his life too. Not so much that men only wanted him for sex, though. With Eli, it was his looks. Few saw past them. I had, which is why he’d clung to me as a friend, and I loved him for much more than his looks.
“It had a happy ending, like yours. I only hope we’re up to give Joel one of those.”
He hugged me one-armed and whispered, “You two have a lot of love to give him. If you don’t break his neck first.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” I said in my best Joel voice.
We laughed as we saw Joel riding off on Spirit. “He loves that horse.”
“We all do. Noah’s letting him run the property soon. We might need Joel to help us next week to make sure all the fences are up and ready for that. Noah and me, we’ve rode most of them, but there’s a lot of fences to check.”
“You rode all that?”
“Yeah,” he said, shyly, but I saw how proud it made him.
“You’re becoming a regular cowboy. We might have to go riding our bikes soon, so you don’t forget how.”
“Ugh, please! I miss it! I never get to go, or you guys are busy. I want to take Noah for a long ride, but he’s always got something going on where he can’t get away.”
“We’ll come take care of things for you. Isn’t that what we country folk do? Help out the neighbors and all that?”
Eli kissed my cheek and once again, I waited for a shotgun blast to my backside. “Eli! Noah’s gonna kill me one day for you doing that.”
“He knows I love you like a brother.”
“Sure. Until I get shot.”
Noah hemmed and hawed about going, but Eli pouted pitifully until he okayed it. They were going to take off the following weekend and ride around the mountains and do some camping. I thought, why would they camp? Their life was a big camping trip, but that’s what they wanted. Who was I to judge?
Joel rode back to the corral with Spirit and climbed off him while we watched. Noah patted his back as he closed the corral gate on his way out of it. “That horse is great. I’m tellin’ y’all. He’s jus’ great.”
“We have two of our own that need exercising, so I hope you’re up for another ride,” Damon warned, but all Joel could do was grin wicked at him.
