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Jesus, what the fuck was happening to him? His stomach was rolling with nerves and he actually found himself leaning in towards Callan before he realized what he was doing. Jerking back, Rhys quickly undid the tie for the horse he’d been riding and reworked it. Somehow he got it tied correctly and was both pleased and disappointed. As much as he’d like having Callan’s hands on him, he needed to end this before he did something stupid. Not only was the guy playing it straight for some reason, the man clearly hated him, not to mention that Finn, someone he was already considering a friend, had been hung up on this man for a while.
“Good,” Callan murmured as he checked the second tie, then stepped back. “I spoke with Frank last night to let him know you made it okay.”
Callan’s words were like ice water being dumped on his emotions. This man thought of him as a loser. Had said as much yesterday when he’d been warning Rhys off Finn. “Yeah?” he said coolly as he took the hose back from Callan and focused all his attention on getting the horses cleaned up.
“He said to call him if you need anything.”
“Right,” Rhys said.
“Tell Finn I’ll be up at the main house if he needs me,” Callan said.
Rhys nodded and finally took his first deep breath once Callan had disappeared back into the barn. God, how the fuck was he ever going to make it six months around these two men?
ChapterFive
Callan Bale tamped down on his runaway lust as he left the barn and headed up the driveway towards the main house. His eyes automatically searched the area for Finn since it was unlike him to disappear while they were still working. It was even more unusual for him to abandon his horse to someone else’s care. He’d given the gelding to Finn himself as a graduation present. It had been the same day that Finn’s whole life had changed because he had the courage to be who he was and wouldn’t be relegated to playing a role just to please those around him. As young and innocent as Finn was, he was still a hell of a lot braver than Callan would ever be.
Callan had known long before he met Finn Stewart that he preferred men to women. But unlike Finn, he’d tested the waters only when distance offered him the anonymity he needed. His first sexual experience with a man hadn’t even happened until his sophomore year of college when he and his roommate had gotten more than a little drunk and Callan had gotten his first blowjob. But the morning after had been nearly comical as both he and his roommate played dumb and pretended nothing had happened. Two days later his roommate had transferred to a new dorm so he could supposedly be closer to his classes and Callan had found himself spending the rest of the semester dating one flighty coed after the other.
He’d been the ripe old age of twenty-one when he finally fucked another man for the first time. He’d spent the night of his birthday doing what all college guys were expected to do – bar hop with his buddies and his shiny new ID to prove he was legal. But the next night he’d snuck out on his own and went to a gay club on the outside of town he’d passed more than once on his way home each weekend to help his father at the ranch. The club had offered every kind of guy imaginable, but it had been a tattooed, muscle head named Mav that had dragged him into one of the bathroom stalls and kissed the shit out of him. Any hope that he’d be able to find the same level of sexual gratification with a woman ended the second he buried his cock deep inside the other man’s ass as he bent him over the toilet.
He’d gone back the next night and found another guy who’d blown him in the alley behind the club. And that had been how he’d spent most nights during his last year of school. Going to class and flirting with pretty girls during the day, fucking random men on the nights he could no longer deny the craving. And then one night he’d met the wrong man and he’d ended up broken and bleeding in an alley next to a dumpster. The trip to the ER had been a lesson in humiliation and when the cops had made it clear that anyone and everyone would find out the circumstances of what had been done to him, Callan took them up on their offer to ‘forget the whole thing’ and had scurried back to his dorm room with instructions to get tested for the whole gamut of STDs for the next six months. And when his father had asked him the next time he went home why he was limping and where the bruises on his face had come from, the lie that he’d been mugged had fallen easily from his lips.
There’d been no men since that night and anytime he had the urge, all it took was the memory of being brutalized to deflate his dick faster than air seeping out of a flat tire. Until Finn. Callan smiled to himself as he remembered the sight of the gangly, pimply faced boy that had been introduced to him when Callan was twenty-five and working for his father full-time. From that day forward, thirteen-year-old Finn had stuck to him like glue and never stopped talking for longer than a minute or two.
Callan hadn’t had a brother or sister so it had been strange to adjust to the ever-present kid tagging along and trying to mimic everything he did, but at some point things changed and he actually missed Finn when he was at school. But he noticed a change in Finn after he turned fifteen. The kid’s hero worship had turned into something else, something deeper and Callan had tried to pull back since he knew where Finn’s infatuation would ultimately lead. He was certain that after Finn’s disastrous sixteenth birthday that he would lose the only friend he really had, but Finn had always been the better man, even before he was actually a man, and he’d let Callan ease them back to what they’d been before the almost-kiss.
Keeping the truth about his own sexuality from Finn had been difficult, especially in the times he could tell that Finn needed someone to talk to about what he was going through after the ruinous episode with the mayor’s son and his father’s brutal assault, but Callan had been a coward because being honest about who and what he was would mean he’d lose everything he’d worked for. But as Finn had grown and matured, Callan’s body began to betray him and he found it harder to deny that he craved Finn in a way that wasn’t okay for someone who may as well have been his little brother. Not to mention the twelve-year age difference between them.
And since his life wasn’t already fucked up enough, God had apparently thought it amusing to send Rhys Tellar barreling into their lives. Not only was his own attraction to the other man palpable, seeing him with Finn had him burning with hate and lust at the same time. When he’d seen them nearly kiss in that stall yesterday, part of him had wanted to stop it but a darker part had wanted to join them – to order them both to their knees and let them taste each other while their tongues were wrapped around his cock.
“Callan honey, is that you?” he heard his Aunt Dolly’s voice call out as he pushed open the screen door to the main house. Hearing her voice quelled any hard-on that had been forming at the image that had managed to imprint itself in his brain only seconds earlier.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he responded as he made his way to the kitchen.
Dolly was covered in flour so he pressed a kiss to her cheek and snagged one of the fresh cookies she had cooling on a baking rack on the counter. She was a petite woman and he marveled that she and his father had come from the same parents, considering their differences in size and coloring. Dolly didn’t even hit the 5-foot mark in heels while his own father was closer to Callan’s 6’2. Age had taken a harsh toll on his father, but Dolly, though she was three years older than her brother, still acted spry. She’d been in their lives for just the past few years as his father’s health deteriorated, but with her loving and open nature it felt like she’d been there forever. He reached for another cookie, but she snatched the baking rack out of his reach and began putting the cookies in a plastic container.
“These are for Finn,” she said. “And your new man.”
A surge went through Callan at hearing Rhys described as his man even though he knew Dolly hadn’t meant it that way.
“What’s his name again?”
“Rhys.”
“Yes. Invite them both to dinner tomorrow night,” she commented as she reached into the oven to get the next batch of cookies out.
“Probably not a good idea,” Callan said as he pulled a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water from the kitchen sink.
“How come? Finn hasn’t stopped by for dinner in such a long time…”
Callan stiffened as he heard footsteps shuffling into the kitchen. “I don’t want that little queer in my house,” his father said.
“Carter!” Dolly said in shock.
Callan forced himself to take in a deep breath and put the glass carefully down on the counter, afraid that otherwise he’d end up shattering it. “I told you what I would do if you called him that again-” Callan began.
“Callan, don’t,” he heard Dolly say behind him, then felt her hand close around his arm. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” she whispered.
