“Okay, okay. Enough.”
She laughed. “As far as you kissing him, I get that it scrambled both your brains a little. I bet he wasn’t expecting it any more than you did. Do you want to do it again?”
I thought about Crew, pictured him in my mind’s eye. “Yeah.”
“I assume you haven’t had many chances to explore your sexuality—”
“No, I haven’t.” There’d been a couple of hasty hand jobs in bars while out of town before everything went to shit but nothing more than that.
“Do you think that might make this even scarier?”
It was a good question and one I hadn’t really thought of. “No,” I replied after thinking for a bit. “I don’t see Crew being negative about that in any way.” Not before, during, or after. I might’ve blushed.
“Good. So you know he’s a good man, just like you’re a good man. He’s given you every opportunity to choose here. All he’s asking for is a chance.”
I groaned, then drank the dregs of my beer. “That’s still not…. I mean it’s still jeopardizing everything I’ve built here.”
“Of course it is. I won’t lie and say it’s not, Mal. But would you rather just keep these people and your job for certain and be around Crew from now to what, until you retire? Or would you take a chance and see if there’s something that could be real with Crew, and believe that those same good people, Crew included, will be there for you even if you and Crewdon’twork out in the long run?”
Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
“It’ll come to you. One day you’ll have the answer pop up from nowhere, and then you’ll know. Give it time.”
We talked for a moment longer, then said goodnight, and I retreated inside, put the empty bottle into my recycling bin, and went to curl up under my covers.
The answer would come. I hoped.
As I took my time trying to figure things out, life on the ranch rolled on like it was bound to do.
The colt, who everyone was just calling The Colt now because I hadn’t made up my mind yet, was doing well and wasn’t showing any sign of illness.We’d agreed to two weeks of quarantine for him, but on the fourth day after his arrival, I took him to the arena to see what he could do.
Hawk and I quickly deduced that he learned quickly, but he hadn’t been taught shit. He responded to treats like a dog but was polite enough not to be pushy about them. We knew immediately that training him would be easy once we had him out of quarantine, gelded, and ready to rock.
That night, Pay asked for an evening walk, so I took him to the yearling barn that was nearly empty. I grabbed one of the name plates and a marker, then went with Pay to the other end of the barn to the colt.
I wrote a name on the little whiteboard thing and hung it on the door.
“Can you read what that says, bud?” I asked Pay, who was standing on a step stool, peering into the stall.
He got down carefully, then went to decipher my writing.
“E-z-i-o? But I don’t know how to say that.”
“Ezio,” I pronounced it as they did in one of my old favorite videogames.
“Oh! It’s that guy from that game!” Pay shimmied his butt.
“Good job remembering. It’s been a while since I played that.” He hadn’t been much more than two and a half the last time I’d taken virtual Ezio for a spin. The games were much older than my son, but since they made a Nintendo Switch version of the second Assassin’s Creed game, he’d seen a few less action heavy bits when I relived my nostalgia in a new form a couple of years back or so. Sadly there’d been a sink related incident with thatSwitch and I was sorely lacking in gaming equipment at the moment.
“If Crew buys you another horse, can we call it Mario?”
I wanted to groan. “Okay, first of all, Crew didn’t buy Ezio for me. He bought him for the ranch. It’s a joke that he bought him for me, okay? He’s not mine in the same way Jaina is.” I waited for Pay to nod at me to show he understood. “Secondly, we had that horse at the—the old place whose name was Mario. The one Nana used to ride.”
“Oh, the white one.” He sighed. “But then he got old and had to be sent to horsey heaven.”
“That’s right, buddy.”
“But Ezio is young, right? He’s not gonna go to heaven, right?” Pay’s big, wide, worried eyes almost did me in right there.
