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“Yeah, his daddy is still there, remarried to some pinch-faced broad , and I’m quoting that from Pam. Got all into religion after gettin’ sober, so he isn’t thrilled his son takes dick. Joel doesn’t have much to do with him, though.”
Damon’s eyes clouded heavily hearing that. “Jesus. I know how that feels, and it’s not a good feeling.”
I reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Babe, he doesn’t seem like it gets to him.”
“He’s hiding it, like I did. Dammit, I wish I’d have known, but now I do. This is why you want us to get to know him before we start anything big.”
“Yeah. Looks like we have a lot more learning to do.”
Eli brought us dessert and we ate while silently thinking of Joel. Noah prodded us to look on the bright side of things, but it was hard.
“You all see him, and that’s maybe the biggest thing. He bounces around, looking for a place in this world. I see it, hell we all do. He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow about some things, but being a cowboy and lovin’ being with men, he’s got those down to a fuckin’ science. Work off that.”
Eli agreed with his partner. “He loves being outside, working with the animals, but he loves learning about things. He is interested in the things all of us do, in…the bedroom, playroom, whatever.”
Damon mentioned, “He learned a lot from the sites I told him to study, and he had a million questions. All in that way he has, you know, barraging a person with weird shit, wondering out loud. It was maybe the sweetest thing, you know? Just seeing him, wanting to know everything about it, so he could do a good job for us, if we take him on! It’s incredible, really.”
I’d made up my mind about him being our boy, but I didn’t know it until that moment. “He’s ours.” All eyes turned to me, and I had to explain, “Oh, we have a long way to go, maybe, but he’s ours. I might have known it that first time he ducked his eyes behind that cowboy hat, blushing up a storm.”
“He’s ours,” Damon whispered. “Now, we just have to figure out where to go from here.”
“That’s easy,” Noah said, scooping a bit of pie onto his fork. “You gotta test him a little, make sure he is ready for all this. Love isn’t an easy thing. Maybe love him a lot more than you want to fuck him, and it’ll be a lot easier then.”
Eli gazed at Noah like he was confirming that was exactly what he’d done. I asked Noah, “That’s how you did it with this one?”
After he chewed his bite of apple pie, he nodded hard, winking at Eli. “Showed him what a real man was after that piece of horse shit he was with and sure enough, he got the message.”
When we were in bed that night, we couldn’t stop talking about it. The excitement of the entire thing maybe overwhelmed us, but it felt good.
“Noah’s a fucking genius. The love, Burke. We have to show him he’s loved first.”
“Okay, slow down. Do we love him? We barely know the guy.”
“Maybe it’s not full blown, moony love yet, but we care about him, we have those feelings sprouting, so we work from there. Love him more than we want to fuck him, right?”
“Right.”
Things in the following days sped into overdrive, and it seemed like all of it was meant to be.
Now, I’m not some crazy person that falls in love fast. I’ve seen friends that fell for a guy after one really great round of sex, and I swore that would never happen to me. The thing was, when it was right, it was right.
Javier Duran, that old friend I had, came by later that week with a package for me. It was night, and I got a tapping on the door as Damon was working in his office.
I was sitting on the sofa, reading a book I’d been dying to read for weeks, so I puffed up a little at being disturbed until I remembered Joel was due back the next morning. I thought he’d gotten home early, so I quickened my step as I made it to the door.
To see Javi there, his full lips spread in a goofy grin, it surprised me to the point I didn’t speak for a few seconds. He simply continued to grin until finally asking, “Gonna let me in?”
“Shit! Yes! Come on in. I wasn’t expecting you.”
I got a tight hug from the man before he came all the way inside and looked around our new place. “Nice. But you’re way the fuck out here! I got a place like this though. How much do you love it?”
“It’s growing on me,” I admitted.
“We’re city in our blood, though, right?”
“Right,” I said laughing. “Let me go get Damon.”
After fetching my partner, we sat in the living room while Javi explained his arrival. “I saw you had a big empty barn. I left you something in there. It’s up to you to dispose of it however you like, but if you want me to do it, I have no problem with it.”
