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I didn’t blink when I, again, whispered, “I’m up for it.”
We rode down to the cattle and in one barn, there were rolls of fencing, and Noah dragged one to his horse. “I’m going to set this up at the top of the hill and start putting it up. Grab that other one.”
I did, and we went back up to the hill, and for the next few hours, we strung the fencing onto poles I hadn’t noticed, as they blended in with the surroundings. Log poles, buried deep in the hard packed earth.
Noah lived his life like most tried to profess to. Sustainable, renewable, and thinking about it, I remembered seeing so little plastics in his home. If he bought something, he reused it.
Like his home, decorated sparsely, but comfortably. Soft blankets on the chairs and couch, a few candles, a few plants. Instead of a lot of prints on the walls, the walls themselves were the décor, wood, rustic beauty.
He lived with his land, and I was jealous, admiring the guy more and more every day. I liked his way of living, but my guilt nagged me, and I knew that soon I’d have to tell him the truth.
The thing was, as much as I feared to do it, deep in my guts, I trusted him. If he threw me out of his place, well, I must deserve it. So, setting that into my mind, I decided as I twisted the metal wire, putting the last few feet of fencing in place. I knew everything would be okay.
We rode back on the road he’d mentioned, and though it had its share of hills, it was a much easier ride for me.
The quiet closed in on me, and it wasn’t suffocating. Instead, it blanketed me in a feeling that I was protected. The mountains alone protected me from all the pain I’d felt almost my entire life. Those trees felt as if they held my secrets, that they knew everything, didn’t judge me, and would hold everything I’d ever done inside the rings inside them.
Noah and I said little on the way back, and I think I knew why. He was thinking over things, sure, but he was also letting me settle in with my offer to stay to help him. He wanted me to be as sure as he needed to be with it.
I was shown how to get Tawny’s saddle off her back and put away before letting her into the corral. We walked to the house so Noah could make supper, and on the way, he asked me, “Have you ever seen a winter in the high country?”
“On TV,” I said honestly.
He chuckled in that way he had, deep, resonating, and then he gripped my shoulder briefly before we walked up the few steps to the front porch. As he unlocked the door, he whispered, “TV.”
I noticed he didn’t have one, so he was likely someone who never watched it, but I’d never seen his bedroom, so I wasn’t sure. Still, those long days in the apartment, and I had read every book or listened to every new song that was on the satellite radio station I preferred, TV was something to pass the time.
I doubted that there was much free time to pass in the winters in the mountains.
As he set in to cook, he started to chop vegetables, celery, carrots and onions and he had me get the plates and utensils, like normal. It was a nice routine we had, and it was a good way to slug off the work of the day.
As he started some cubes of beef in a skillet, he asked, with his back to me, “Are we ready to talk?”
There it was, his lead into me giving up my story. I sat on the stool, back to the backrest, and tried to swallow the lump that formed in my throat. That part wasn’t easy, and I knew the rest would be much harder than that.
It was. At first, anyway.
“I… had a partner, if you could call him that. Yes, I’m gay too.”
“I knew that,” he said, again, using a wooden spatula to move the cubes around the cast iron.
“You knew?”
Those that I had told in the past were usually surprised.
“I have one of those, what do they call ‘em? Gaydars? Haven’t been wrong yet.”
The questions came then. Did he know and want me around to fuck? Did that matter if he did? Would I be just another trophy or some kind of conquest?
“Go on,” he pushed, and I let the questions fall away for the moment.
“Right. Um, he… lied to me about what our relationship would be, but I don’t even know if I hold that against him anymore. He worked, I stayed home, and he didn’t want me to have a job or interests outside of it, so I was… God, I sound like I’m whining, and I don’t mean to.”
Very slowly, he set the spatula into the utensil dish and turned, his hands coming flat on the island as he stared at me, fully, unblinking. “You’re not whining, Eli. You’re telling me the truth of your story. Tell me. Please.”
His jaw was set hard, and his eyes never moved from mine, keeping mine there too, though I wanted to look down, shame and guilt beginning to engulf my shaking chest.
“He lied, and he just wanted me for…”
