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He was tall, almost my height, and thin, bookish, if that was an ample description, but handsome, sparkling blue eyes behind those horn-rimmed glasses. He had a tablet in his hand, but that was it, and he started for the barn with us to see the inside of the place.
As we got in the door, his head went back to see the top of the ceiling and he gasped in wonder. “Wow, this is…great! It’s a blank canvas for sure.”
“They cleared out all the equipment, the hay, all of it. Now we’re left with the concrete floor, the walls and the loft,” Damon said, pointing around. “At the end, there, behind the western wall, there’s a small, attached room with the genny and heater. I figure we’ll hardline the power, though.”
“It’s not hard lined?”
I took the turn then, having asked the same thing when I first heard, and I think my voice had been a lot higher. “The barn is pretty old. Meaning, it was around before they put a lot of lights into them. It was mostly for feed and grain, stock, equipment, so they just used the generator.”
“Still…did they know electricity has been around now for…a long damn time?”
I laughed, and Damon did too, even though he wanted to defend the former family, feeling kinship with them. “It costs a lot to do, so they saved that money and bought a genny for the barn. You city boys don’t get it.”
I elbowed Roland playfully. “Maybe we should just ditch the club and have hoedowns or whatever they’re called.”
We’d recruited Roland for the job on the recommendation of a friend from a club we frequented. We were clueless about where to start looking for someone that would work on a project like ours. Turns out, that very club had been designed by the man Roland bought his firm from, and he didn’t hesitate to bid on the job.
He was our only bid, of course, but he didn’t know that.
“Well, electricity be damned, we can work those details into the budget, no problem. Now, ideas, gentlemen?”
We both started to ramble off the things we wanted to do to the place, and though we had a lot of similar thoughts, we disagreed on a few things. Damon, for instance, didn’t want a stage in the center. “Why have it in the center, then you have to walk off the thing and through the crowd to get to aftercare.”
“Crowd? We’re planning a few people at a time, here, babe.”
“How many is a few?” Roland said as he swiped and typed on the tablet held in the other arm.
“Well, long weekends, vacations, like in the summer months, holidays, we figure thirty at most. We can house two sets of couples, or groups, in the guesthouse alone, then we were thinking of building a couple cabins, right along the hill right there.”
“That hill, no. Over by the existing guesthouse, yes,” Roland insisted. “I’m guessing there’s runoff from the snow, and that would be a headache. Might as well avoid that. And, I say narrow it down to start. If you get a lot of interest, build more cabins. In fact, you can do tiny homes, make a simple bedroom and bath out of reclaimed materials, saves a ton of money and you can put up as many as you need, if it gets popular.”
“Building permits, and the like?”
I watched Damon and Roland confer over the business end of it, but I wandered outside while they talked, looking over at the guest house and just…imagining.
A little row of cabins, all filled with partners and friends, on our place to have fun and relax. Out in the middle of nowhere, on our land, with no one around to harass them or point fingers. It seemed like a dream that might never come to pass, but with Damon’s tenacity, I knew that wasn’t true. He’d make it real, if only for me.
“Um, hey,” Damon said as he found me there, leaning on the fence as I gazed off, dreamily.
“Hey. You guys get details worked out?”
“Not without you. Just talking some business,” he said, then added, “And he keeps looking at my dick. But besides that, details not relevant to things we are still not clear on. He said the permits wouldn’t be bad, and the prefab places would pass as long as the septic and cisterns were set right, the electricity and shit.” Eyeing me hard, he lowered his voice to ask, “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I assured him. “I’m just maybe seeing your dream as mine now. With others here, enjoying this place, I really can’t wait to see their faces. It’s so beautiful here, babe. You were right.”
He leaned on the fence beside me, sighing a little and his eyes were far off in the distance, as mine had been. I followed his gaze, the blue sky hanging over the deep green of the hills, a cloud cruising by as if hanging there to look down on the same sight we were enjoying.
“I know you did this for me at first. And to see more of Eli, watch over him.”
“Babe, Eli’s fine.”
Damon chuckled, as he knew me better than that. “After he got with Harvey, you worried over that boy so badly, I thought we’d end up taking him on as a sub just to make sure someone had him that cared for him. He’s pretty, sure, but he’s not for us, and now, I’m glad. He’s always been like a brother to you, a real one, not just an army buddy. Seeing him now, here, and happy, well, you want to see that keep going, and I am not mad about it.” He turned toward me, leaning only one muscled, tatted arm on the wood. I turned to him, but tried, and failed to duck my head. “Remember, babe, we’re the kind of guys that have enough love to go around. That means friends and another guy to be with us, whenever the time is right, and we find him. For now, though, you need to come with me to the house and see if I’m way off.”
“Way off?” I locked eyes with him and saw it, the lust darkening them. “What…Roland?”
“Yeah, he kept giving me signals, unless I’m way off, and I’ve been wrong a couple times in life.”
“A couple only, of course.”
