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“I wanna thank you again for the job and the place. It’s taken a load off us.”
“Thank Theo. It’s his…his family’s house. I just work for them too.”
“I will, if I ever…”
I laughed a little. “I’ll tell Theo for you. Okay?”
“Thanks,” he breathed and smiled at me in gratitude.
Once he left, I looked back at the house to see Theo’s silhouette there, like he’d watched the whole thing, but with how dark it was outside, I wondered how he’d seen a thing.
When I returned to the house, he was in the kitchen, his robe open to his thin thigh and high-waisted briefs as he poured himself a glass of iced tea. “Theo.”
“Hud,” he returned without looking my way. “Have fun with Tucker?”
“Fun? We had a very brief conversation in which he asked me to thank you for letting him and Dale stay.”
“I didn’t. You did.”
He took his glass and brushed past me, his body hot and scented of lavender. With his hair damp, I knew he’d just enjoyed the new tub that had just been installed. That vision left me shaking, thinking of him lounging in the heated water, bath salts making him relax, his body long and lean in the tub…
“Goodnight, Monster.”
I had to smile because I missed him calling me that. “Goodnight, pain in the ass.”
His standing off in the distance, watching me, was becoming a habit. I’d catch him almost every day, staring in my direction and trying hard to get my attention when he wasn’t watching me. One day, it caught me so off-guard I wasn’t sure how to feel.
Not having weights at the farmhouse, I had to make do, so I chopped firewood for my stress relief and workout and found other chores around the house that would keep me in shape.
It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was ask Dale and Tucker; they had many ideas. One made them terribly happy when they’d gone into town and filled the back of their pickup with grain feed bags for the pigs. They sat and drank from their water bottles while I unloaded the entire thing, stacking them neatly in the barn.
It was a hell of a workout. Halfway through, I took off my shirt, as I was sweating like they said about the pigs. Even if it was a very calm day, the pigs were in the wet mud, and I doubted they were sweating.
Tucker was laughing, but Dale yelled encouragingly. “You’re a big fella! Carry three at a time!”
“Oh yeah? Ya think I should?”
“Sure! Why not?”
The two were fun and funny. I did three at a time, hiking the bags on my shoulder and carrying them in, but as I returned for another three, I saw Theo leaning on a tree off the trail.
He was mostly hidden behind the sunflowers, but I saw him as if he could stand out in the middle of a blizzard.
The longing on his face was heartbreaking. It wasn’t longing for me, at least not totally. It was a longing for inclusion. That’s when I realized; he wasn’t coming after me strictly for my dick. He wanted me to like him. And the messed-up part about it, he’d told me that.
I finished unloading the truck and got my shirt in my hand, telling Dale and Tucker goodbye, but Theo was already gone. Strolling back to the house, I got on the phone with Javi.
“Hud, how’s it going?”
“I…need to know some things, and they don’t exactly matter to my position here.”
“Shoot. If I know it, you’ll know it.”
I stopped in the spot where Theo had been standing and felt as if I were him for that second. On the outside, looking in with a chilly wind blowing away the words everyone else was speaking. Always on the outside looking in.
“Javi, what is Theo’s story, exactly? You said his mom wasn’t around; he has no siblings.”
“He was a lonely fucking kid. I'd feel bad for him if he wasn’t such an asshole. Danny was the same way, except Danny didn’t have money. Theo, that’s all he had. And all his friends, boyfriends, and all of them were there with their hands out.”
