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"The Dog He Fed (And The One He Starved)"
Cash's palm stayed up, patient. Jackson laid his own in it, and that was the whole decision.
They met in the soft mouth of lamplight and sawdust, bodies finding the old geometry like a song remembered on the second verse. Cash's hand slid to the small of Jackson's back and fit there like it had been measured. The other framed his jaw, thumb grazing the corner of his mouth as if to tidy a truth that had got too bright.
"C'mere," Cash murmured, and the words came slow as syrup.
Jackson stepped in until there wasn't any harmless space left. The tank was warm and thin under his palms. The muscle under it answered every question his fingers asked. He traced the sweat-dark at Cash's collar like a man following a road he meant to take. Cash didn't rush him. He just breathed and watched, that wide, tender gaze that always saw Jackson better than mirrors did.
"You sure?" he asked, because he had learned that question like a sacrament.
Jackson nodded, throat working. "Been sure for a long time," he said, voice gone rough. "Just took me five years to get brave enough to say it."
They kissed like friends who had waited too long, and men who didn't intend to wait anymore, mouths slow, then not, breath exchanging like a promise they'd owed each other since grade school. It wasn't pretty. It was better. Cash tasted like pine and sweat and something that made Jackson's knees loosen, home, maybe. Jackson answered with his whole sternum, that old ache stepping aside to let the rest of him lead.
"I missed your taste," he mumbled.
When Cash's lip caught on Jackson's teeth and they both laughed, the sound landed soft on the shavings at their feet and stayed.
"Hands," Jackson whispered, impatient with his own patience.
"I gotcha." Cash slid them low, then higher, mapping the long planes he'd learned by accident on hot afternoons by the river and never been allowed to own. Calluses caught and soothed, caught and soothed. He worked the buttons of Jackson's shirt one by one, knuckles grazing skin, reverent as a man opening a letter he'd carried too long. The shirt fell. The lamp made Jackson's tanned chest gold and new, a country Cash had lived beside his whole life and was only now settling. He bent and pressed his mouth to the hollow at the base of Jackson's throat, exhaling like he'd been under too long and finally surfaced. Jackson made a sound that would've embarrassed him anywhere else and lifted his chin to give it over.
"Slow," Cash said, though his hands had their own ideas.
"Slow," Jackson breathed into his hair.
He pushed the tank up, palms sweeping along the ribs that had grown hard with work, the flat rope of muscle curving into shoulder. The cotton bunched under Cash's arms and clung. Jackson laughed again, helpless, and Cash peeled it off, grinning into the soft fight.
Bare, Cash looked carved and lived-in all at once, a man now, built of hours and heat. Jackson laid both hands flat on that chest and felt steadiness he'd been missing the whole length of Texas.
"Lord," he said, not to be pious. "You're real."
"Ain't that a mercy," Cash answered and pulled him in.
They backed toward the bench, hands pushing down their pants, denim hitting the floor with a soft thud. Briefs came next. Jackson's eyes couldn't help but glance down, lingering on the sight of Cash's eight-incher, throbbing like a steady heartbeat, eager. Cash sat and drew Jackson across his thighs like it had been waiting for this exact purpose, a workbench, a pew, a front-porch step. Jackson straddled easy, knees bracketing wood, arms draped around Cash's shoulders as if they'd been designed to anchor there. The move wasn't obscene. It was honest. Their foreheads touched again and stayed until the shake went out of both of them. They didn't hide the small sounds, little broken yeses that weren't words so much as breath deciding what to be.
"Look at me," Cash said, and Jackson did. Up close, those eyes were the blue that happens after storms, washed clean, dangerous only if you lie to them. Cash ran one knuckle along the line of Jackson's cheek, down the day's shadow on his jaw, over the nick by his brow. He shook his head once, lit up from somewhere deep. "You got even more beautiful and mean."
"Mean enough to come home," Jackson said. "Mean enough to want what's mine."
"Take it, then."
So he did, but tender.
He took Cash's mouth. He took the hollow of his shoulder where the skin tasted like July. He took the hush that fell over them when Cash said his name like it hurt. Cash took him back with steady hands and a patience that had learned to wait and was done waiting. Shirts went stupid and then disappeared. Skin met skin with that shock, which isn't shock but more like recognition. The lamp hummed louder and the room went small in the right way, narrowed to two men rediscovering a border that never should've been drawn.
"Tell me," Cash said around a tongue kiss, because words are tools in the right hands. "What'd you miss?"
"You," Jackson said, immediate. "Your smell. Your lips. Your hands. The way you hold my temper till it quits kickin'. The way you never made me feel like I had to be less to be loved."
Cash went quiet for a beat, palms firm at Jackson's back. "I missed you callin' me back to myself," he said, not fancy. "And this..." He tilted his hips, slow, not crude, just making sure their bodies remembered how to talk without language. His stiff shaft found the soft space between Jackson's cheeks. "...this right here, where the world gets quiet."
Jackson's breath hitched. He let it. "Fuck," he managed, smiling and ruined.
"Damn right," Cash murmured into his mouth, and kissed him till the smile broke into a sound.
They found a rhythm that had been waiting five years under the floorboards. It wasn't hurried. It was hungry the way men are when they've done all their starving and decided to live. Jackson moved with Cash and then against him and then with him again, learning a music only the two of them could hear. Cash's hands roamed, shoulders, the fine ladder of Jackson's spine, the curve where back met hip, fingers sliding gently inside Jackson's crack. Those places that make a man feel seen and not inspected. Jackson's hands answered, mapping muscle and scar and the sweet, stupid fragility right under the breastbone where boys learn to hide how much they need.
Words went ragged and then gave up. Names did the work. Jackson said "Cash," like a prayer and a dare. Cash said "Jacks," like a solved problem and an open door. The bench creaked once, indignantly, then joined the choir.
"Don't you up and run off from me no more," Cash said into Jackson's neck, the word an accident and a plea.
"Won't," Jackson answered. "Not ever again."
Heat built careful, then bold. It pooled where old fear used to sit and turned into something kinder. Cash pressed his forehead to Jackson's collarbone and laughed once, wrecked. "We was fools," he said, feeling the tip of his manhood nudging against Jackson's soft entrance.
"Yeah...but we're home now," Jackson corrected, making Cash's fingers bite sweet into his waist. He let his body sink into Cash's and soon, eyes closing as he felt his best friend and the love of his life enter him for the first time.
And when that storm finally broke, it wasn't loud. It was a long exhale, a shudder, a catching and a catching and then a letting go that left both of them shaking and smiling against each other's mouths. Jackson's fingers curled at the back of Cash's neck and stayed there, gentle now, like a palm over a skittish heart.
They didn't untangle fast. Cash leaned back just enough to see him, thumbs framing his face, eyes bright and damp and not ashamed of it. "You all right?"
Jackson nodded, dazed and certain. He touched Cash's jaw with a touch that felt like ownership without theft. "You?"
Cash's answer came in the form of a kiss, quick and eager. Then he set his forehead to Jackson's again, breath evening. "Hear that?" he asked as he began to gently thrust into Jackson.
"What?" Jackson replied, voice husky, fingers digging into Cash's neck.
"Nothin' creakin' that ain't supposed to. Room's holdin' us fine."
Jackson laughed, weak with relief. "Right."
They slid together off the bench in a slow tangle, finding the old moving language they'd never gotten to speak out loud. Cash caught Jackson's weight with a palm at his spine and guided him down to the throw he kept for doors, ugly plaid, soft as an old shirt, smelling faintly of cedar and the summers it had outlasted. The blinds cast little ladders of shadow across their shoulders. Sawdust peppered Jackson's skin where it met the floor, not rough, just real.
"Here?" Cash asked, low, not a hesitation so much as a habit of care.
"Here," Jackson breathed, and the word landed like a stake.
Cash kissed him like a man who had built patience with his hands, slow first, as if checking a spirit level, then deeper when everything came true. Mouth to mouth. Mouth to the hollow of the collarbone. Mouth to the place on Jackson's shoulder that used to carry too much. His hands worked a quiet inventory: the long map of ribs, the narrow waist that had learned endurance, the sweep of back where muscle met memory. Wherever he touched, he lingered a heartbeat, as though he were learning a house by candlelight. And with each pause of adoration, he'd push himself deeper, the most monumental pleasure coursing through his body as he felt Jackson's warm walls hug his essence.
Jackson answered in kind, palms splayed over the breadth of Cash's chest, the steady rise and fall that said home clearer than any road sign. He traced the old nick at Cash's knuckle, the pale ladder of a scar over his forearm, the rope of tendon where shoulder met neck. He put his mouth there and felt the low sound Cash made tremble against his lips as he made love to him. The floor was cool under Jackson's back. Cash's body was summer. The heat where they met wasn't a blaze. It was a deep, banked thing that threw light for miles.
This was not wildfire and hailstones and the dare of a door kicked in. This was rain found after a long dry month. This was the soft thunder of a porch roof when the storm finally remembers how.
Blake had taught Jackson what it felt like to be struck.
Cash was teaching him what it meant to be kept.
"Look at me," Cash said again, his hips pushing into Jackson slowly, reverently.
And Jackson did, because he always would. Eye to eye, breath to breath, they edged closer until hips learned a rhythm that felt less like hunger than recognition. Hands bracketed, steadied, urged. Knees hitched. Ankles hooked. They made a small country out of the throw, a border no one else could cross.
"That...feel good?" Cash asked, checking the latch on every word.
"Yes," Jackson managed, a laugh shaking loose with the truth. "Don't stop."
"Wouldn't know how," Cash said, and proved it, meeting him, easing in, meeting again, reading the microflinches and the yeses rolling off Jackson's skin like heat. He kissed the corner of Jackson's smile, then the place a tear had considered and thought better of. With every thrust, he told the same story: I see you. I ain't goin' anywhere. All the doors in me are open for you.
Jackson's hands slid lower, firming on the narrowest part of Cash's back to pull him nearer, to say more without saying it. Cash breathed out against his throat, a broken sound, and the pace shifted, a little more weight, a little more want, a bit of speed, nothing reckless. The friction was honest. The sweet ache grew deliberate. Jackson curled up into him, forehead knocking Cash's, moaning, gasping, losing the difference between prayer and cussing.
"Tell me," Cash rasped, not to show off, but to keep the bridge between them strong.
"Feels so good," Jackson said, words tumbling, breath bright. "The way you ain't takin'..." he mumbled, feeling just how deep Cash was going. "The way you...holdin'."
Cash's face changed at that, something deep caught and softened. He kissed him hard enough to change both their breathing and then gentler than sense. "I got you," he said into Jackson's mouth, the sentence a fact he'd waited half a life to be allowed to say. "I always did."
They moved the way river stones find a groove and fit, adjusting, settling, learning, the old pressure finally turning to polish. Jackson arched. Cash followed. Cash slowed. Jackson guided. They found the line between plenty and too much and walked it like a beam, laughing when they wobbled, steadying each other back to center. Names were the only words left that made sense.
The heat rose without fanfare. The shop narrowed to their bodies, the lamplight, the quiet rasp of skin against cotton and skin. Cash took Jackson's hand and pressed it to his own chest, right over the thudding proof of him. "Feel that?" he asked, wrecked.
Jackson nodded, eyes gone glassy, mouth wet. "Been hearin' it since we were ten," he said. Jackson could feel Cash poke his soft spot, his blue eyes rolling back in delight.
"Good," Cash said, a growl threaded through the word, and Jackson did, hips finding that last, right cadence, the one that steals attention and gives it back holy. Cash's head tipped, teeth catching his own lower lip. Jackson swore softly, almost laughing, and then the two of them slid over the edge together, with no spectacle or roar, just that long, shaking surrender that quiets a man from the inside out.
"I..." Jackson muttered, hand sliding between their bodies and clutching his cock.
"Fuckin' hell..." Cash replied, half-chuckling and half-disbelieving as he felt himself lose what little control he held.
His hand went tight at Jackson's waist. Jackson's left hand curled in Cash's hair. Both of them breathed the other's name like a benediction they were finally allowed to say as they felt each other's loads explode. Jackson felt the warm wave first. Gentle. Respectful. Bodied. Then came his own. Unrehearsed. Unreleting. A mixture of sweat and salt exploding into their merged stomachs in perfect alchemy.
After, the kind of after that gentles voices and turns every flinch into a stroke, Cash didn't roll away. He lowered himself carefully and took Jackson with him, pillowing a hand under his neck so the throw's rough couldn't argue. Jackson's chest bucked once more as the last rush of rapture ran through him. Cash rode it out with the easy patience that makes a colt quit fighting the halter, murmuring nothing words into his hair until breath remembered itself.
And through all this, he never pulled out, cock still twitching inside Jackson. Unwilling to leave a place he had already anointed his own.
"You okay?" Cash asked, thumb at Jackson's temple, grounding and sweet.
"Yeah," Jackson said, a little ragged, a lot sure. He laid his palm on Cash's cheek, thumb brushing the graphite smudge he'd noticed when he walked in. "That was quick," he added, smiling helpless. "Couldn't hold it."
"Me neither," Cash said. "Reckon we're gon' have to give it another go." He huffed a laugh.
Jackson leaned in and stole a soft kiss for that. "Reckon so."
They lay there under the tidy hush of the blinds, the shop settling around them like a good house after supper. They shifted, and rolled slowly to the side, Jackson slinging a thigh over Cash's hip, claiming the space like he'd paid for it. Cash's hand found the back of his knee and held it, lazy and pleased. For a long while nothing needed saying. Then, because they were who they were and had always been, boys who'd learned safety by telling the truth, Jackson spoke into the quiet.
"What now?" he asked.
"Now...we lie here," Cash said, running a slow line down his spine.
Jackson exhaled, long and content. "I can live with that."
"Good," Cash said, and kissed his hair, and then his forehead, and then his mouth, slow as a porch swing on a windless night before they finally fell into a serene slumber.
Morning came eventually, nosing along the sill, thin and gray, turning the slats of the blinds into ladders of soft light. The floor still held their heat. They lay where they'd fallen, limbs braided carelessly, sweat cooling to a clean salt. Somewhere beyond the shutters a truck coughed to life, a bird tried on three notes and kept one, and the bakery two doors down exhaled bread. None of it asked anything of them. They didn't offer anything back.
Jackson lay half on Cash, ear to his chest, hearing the thrum he'd once matched through a mattress and a childhood. His palm rode the slow tide of Cash's ribs, counting without meaning to. Cash's hand cupped the back of his neck, thumb drawing lazy figure eights where hair met skin.
"You hear that?" Cash murmured, voice worn smooth.
"Town wakin'," Jackson said, words thick with contentment.
They went quiet again, the kind that's full, not empty. Sweat beaded and slid. A sawdust fleck clung to Jackson's shoulder and Cash brushed it away with a touch so soft it almost apologized.
"I could lay here forever," Jackson said at last, and meant it.
"You could," Cash answered. "Floor might complain, but I won't."
They smiled without looking. Jackson traced the long ladder of Cash's collarbone, the pale nick on his shoulder that never quite learned to fade, the stubble rasp he loved. His finger traveled down to the square of Cash's sternum and rested there, pressing just enough to feel the answer underneath.
"I love you," he said quietly, the way a man says a name to see if the room will keep it.
Cash's breath hitched once, small and honest. He turned his head to kiss the heel of Jackson's hand. "I love you back."
The words didn't swell the moment. They tucked it in. Jackson closed his eyes. The warmth in his chest spread and then snagged, as if it had remembered a knot he'd skipped. He lifted his head, hesitated, set it down again.
"Say it," Cash prompted, not unkind. He had the patience of men who measure twice and cut once. He'd learned to wait without letting waiting turn cruel.
Jackson breathed through his nose. "I...don't know how to..." He didn't say the name. The room didn't ask him to. "It feels like I tracked mud on your good floor."
Cash's fingers tightened at his nape, not to hold him, only to keep him. He looked up at the blinds, at the little ladders of light, at the door he'd hung himself. When he spoke, it was slow as truth.
"Listen to me," he said. "I ain't a boy tryin' to win a fight. I don't need you to hand me a ledger of where your mouth has been to prove you belong. I know you. I trust you."
Jackson swallowed. Guilt, small, mean, persistent, loosened its grip by degrees. "You ain't...mad?"
"I got jealous blood same as any mule," Cash said, smiling a little at his own meanness. "But I ain't gonna let it boss me. I ain't holdin' you hostage so my fear can sleep."
Jackson blinked. It was such a simple thing and it turned the whole room. He rolled, chest to chest, soft cocks rubbing together, and slid both arms around Cash until there wasn't an inch left to argue with. He tucked his face into the curve of Cash's neck where the skin smelled like cedar and last night. "Thank you," he whispered, the words hot with relief.
Cash kissed Jackson's hair, then his temple, then the corner of his mouth, slow as Sunday.
Jackson pulled back just enough to see him. The dark in Cash's eyes in morning light had always looked clean, sure, deep enough to take a life if you disrespected it. Today it looked like a place to float. They lay like that while the town made its little noises and the shop stayed faithful. A distant bell counted a clean hour. Somebody swept a threshold. Somebody unlocked a door. Jackson pressed closer in the name of not moving and felt the old dread, small now, almost tender, go quiet under Cash's palm.
"Look," Cash said, not as a promise he might fail, but as a fact he'd already made true. "I ain't goin' anywhere."
Jackson smiled without trying to hide it. The guilt cracked and light came through. He hugged Cash harder, the kind that's half thanks, half claim, and let his whole weight say the rest. "All right," he breathed.
They didn't get up.
The blinds kept making their little ladders on skin.
The breath between them stayed even.
The floor didn't complain.
They lay tangled and unafraid, saying little truths slow and sure, and letting morning find them exactly as they were.
*
Blake woke in Jackson's room.
He lay where he was a moment longer, hand flat on the cool, empty place beside him, listening to the house. Somewhere a pipe thunked. Somewhere else, a kettle negotiated with a flame. The ache under his ribs had the particular taste of a thing you couldn't ride out: loss with its hat still in its hand, undecided, waiting on a man's sense.
He swung his legs over, naked feet on scuffed floorboards. Jackson's closet door hung a fraction open. Inside, a shirt he'd left behind years ago leaned against a newer one like cousins reunited at a funeral.
He washed his face in Jackson's sink, splashed his neck, dragged his fingers through his long hair and came up with a path a comb would never find, rolling it into his signature bun. He thumbed the corner of the dresser mirror, as if he could smear the road out of his reflection, and gave up polite. He found his jeans, pulled them on, and hooked the saint through a belt loop. He took the hat in his hand instead of on his head. His mama's house, he told himself. Show respect.
Daisy's kitchen was already running.
She stood barefoot at the stove in a robe the color of sweet tea, hair piled up like sense held with pins. She didn't turn when he reached the threshold. She didn't need to. "You got two choices," she said, voice light enough to carry and heavy enough to hold him still. "Sit and let me feed you before I tell you about yourself, or stand there and I'll tell you anyway."
He smiled without meaning to. "Yes, ma..." He caught himself and softened it. "Mornin', Daisy."
"That's better." She slid two eggs onto a plate like a magician finishing her trick. "Cowboy, if you 'ma'am' me again I'm gon' write you a citation."
He pulled a chair and sat where she could see his face. The bowl of St. Christophers sat by the sign-in sheet like silver minnows. She plucked one on reflex and saw the glint at his belt loop. Her eyes flicked to it, then up to him. Approval, small and unbragged.
She set a plate in front of him, eggs, bacon, and a biscuit. She poured coffee and pushed the mug close enough for the steam to touch his knuckles. "Eat somethin'," she said. "You look like you need salt and forgiveness."
He split the biscuit with a thumb, watched the steam make an honest case for mercy.
For a few minutes, she let the sounds do the talking: the scrape of the fork, the sigh of the burner, the click of her fingernail against the mug. When he'd done respectable work on the plate, she leaned back against the counter and crossed her ankles. No judge ever arranged herself more kindly.
"You sleep?" she asked.
"Some," he said. He didn't flinch.
"Dream?"
He hesitated. "I was drivin' a long road that kept turnin' into other people's yards."
"Mm." She sipped. "Sounds like a man who ain't decided if he's company or kin."
He huffed, winced, smiled because she was funny even when she landed the blow. "I made a mess of it last night," he said.
"I know," Daisy said.
He took it like a shot of something unwatered, face steady, throat working. "I've been runnin'...my whole life," he said. "Didn't have to think to do it. Just did it and then had to look down and see my hand empty." He glanced at the doorway like the absence might be posted there with the utility notices. "I'm sorry. I don't have a better word than that."
"It'll do," she said. "It's a good word when it comes with change."
Blake spread his fingers on the oilcloth like he could set intentions in lemon. "I ain't..." He stopped, started over. "I pulled my hand back because...mine's been bit. I ain't proud of it."
"That's the first decent thing you've said since you come down my steps," Daisy replied, and some of the starch in her shoulders softened. "Second decent thing is you didn't go try to find him with your hat in your hand."
He opened his mouth, closed it, nodded. "I wanted to," he admitted. "But I don't think wantin' and shouldin' line up much this mornin'."
"They don't." She set the mug down and came around the table, not to loom but to be nearer. She set a hand on the back of his chair. The other, she left for him to take or not. He did, quick, grateful, cowboy palm big, callused, scared of breaking what wasn't breakable.
"Blake," she said, and his name in her mouth made him sit up straighter. "I am a woman who has loved imperfect men. I raised a son with a God who ain't exactly tidy in His affections. I've learned some things, and because I'm bossy, I share 'em."
He smiled despite himself.
"We are our choices and we are also our scars. Both of those things tell the truth, and sometimes they tell different ones. I ain't in the business of pretendin' a scar ain't there if it's the only reason you're breathin'. But I also ain't gonna bless a man's fear just because it kept him safe once. Fear don't get a forever pass." She tapped the oilcloth. "Love ain't a lock, Blake Buckley. You know this...Lord knows I've put it on the wall big enough for the blind to read. It's a door. Doors swing. Sometimes they swing open. Sometimes they swing shut. Sometimes they stick because the house has settled, and it's humid out, and you need a man with a chisel." Her mouth softened. "Lucky you, we got one of those in town."
Blake's smile couldn't decide what to do with itself.
She squeezed his shoulder once. "You and my boy? You were fire he needed. You taught him somethin' he couldn't have learned under my roof: how to want without apologizin'. I ain't never gon' be mad at you for that." Her gaze steadied, and he felt measured and tended in the same breath. "But last night, you chose your old life over his new one. That's not me bein' cruel. That's me tellin' the plain. There's a cost for that. Don't run from the bill."
He blew out a breath that might have been a laugh if it didn't have so much ache on it. "I deserve that."
"This ain't about deserving." She shook her head. "Jackson's findin' out he likes roofs as much as sky. You can either learn to sit under one without thinkin' it's a trap, or you can keep countin' exits and call that freedom. Both are a life. Both are a truth. They just ain't the same one."
He stared at the steam off his coffee like it held a map. "I could go after him."
"You could," Daisy agreed. "And he might come with you because he's soft where you are and that's a tenderness I will not scold." She bent a little to make sure he saw her eyes clear. "But I think you ought not. Not today. Let him come to you if he means to. Let him walk his own street, decide what kind of man he is when no one's watchin' but God. Don't chase him."
He nodded, pain and sense in it both.
She straightened and took her hand back so he'd feel the change. "Good. "Now eat the other half that biscuit. And drink that coffee so your blood knows what to do with your good intentions."
He didn't argue. He bit the biscuit. Then he washed it down and set the mug aside and then, as if his body had been waiting for his mouth to do the decent thing, he reached for her hand again and held it in both of his. He didn't squeeze hard. He didn't try to bless what she'd already blessed. He just looked up at her full and unashamed.
"You are a remarkable woman, Daisy. Any man'd be lucky to have you. You deserve...somebody who'll love you the way you love the world," he said, voice gone gravel-soft.
Her laugh came up easy, then pinched in the middle by a feeling she didn't invite and wouldn't hide. She reached with her free hand and pushed his hat brim where it lay on the table, a small, fond scold. "I'm content," she said, and the word was so clean even the coffee went quiet to hear it. "The Lord gave me a boy who turned into a good man, a town that lets me fuss without lockin' me up, a table that stays hot, and enough fight in my bones to keep the pantry stocked and the board nervous. I loved what I got and I got what I loved. That'll do." She tilted her head, a smile easing across her mouth like sunlight laying itself down. "Now I'll take a man if he can stand to be fed and bossed, but I ain't hungry enough to marry a problem."
Blake grinned, the real one that lit and wrecked him at once.
"Go on now, rinse your plate. I gotta clean this kitchen before I go fuss at a grant that thinks it's smarter than me," she said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling in a little prayer that had more humor than doctrine.
He rose, rinsed his plate, and gently set it in Daisy's rack like a man returning a borrowed thing. He wiped his hands on a dish towel that said Bless This Mess in glitter and tried not to smile at the nerve of it. "Gon' swing by the grounds," he said, lingering in the doorway the way a boy does when he wants permission to leave a church he ain't done praying in. "Walk it off some. Let the dust talk."
Daisy glanced up from the stove, eyes soft but edged. "Walk, then." She flicked the burner off and pointed with the spoon without looking mean.
Out on the street, Willow Creek was wiping sleep out its eyes.
Blake slid behind the wheel and let the engine find its voice, window down so the morning could count his sins.
The rodeo grounds sat in the new sun, looking half-broken, half-ready, banners slack, aluminum bleachers yawning, stock pens scuffed with yesterday's worry. Blake rolled the truck slow over the gravel, tires crunching a rhythm he could ride to. He killed the engine and let the silence fill back in around him, then climbed out, hat in hand because there are some places a man don't wear a crown until he's earned it again. He walked the rail, boots ticking the boards, fingers ghosting the rough where boys had carved initials and lies with pocketknives. In the open of it, his shoulders came down a quarter inch. The world made a different kind of sense when it had gates and chalk and a chute with your name on it. He took a breath to his boots.
"Buckley!" a voice called, bright with money. "Well I'll be."
Three of them came at him from the shadows under the grandstand, starched denim, turquoise rings, one polo shirt with a steer skull embroidered small like the devil had learned to whisper. Dale Whitaker he knew, owner of a tire company that sold to folks who liked their rubber loud. The woman beside him was new, Tessa, she said, hand quick, grip real, sunglasses that cost more than Blake's first horse. The third wore a smile that didn't make it past his teeth. Clipboard man. Every town had one.
"Blake Buckley in the flesh," Dale said, clapping him in that sideways hug rich men think makes them poor again. "Heard you were back visitin'."
"Somethin' like that," Blake said, easy.
"Perfect timing," Tessa said, already fishing a slick trifold out of her tote. "We're puttin' together a national push this season, co-branded, premium stops only. Tulsa to Reno, twenty dates, guaranteed money at every show, plus performance bonuses. Media team, travel handled, new wrap on your trailer, day-rate on sponsor events. We want a face folks trust and a seat folks can't take their eyes off. That's you, cowboy."
Clipboard laughed too loud. "Hell, we'll even talk health coverage," he said, like it was a joke and a miracle.
Blake angled his body to let the sun off their faces and lie on theirs. Paper glinted. The numbers sang. He felt the old hunger wake up slow and sweet in his belly, the same wolf that had paced under his ribs since he was big enough to saddle his own trouble. He could see the miles like a string of lights, could feel the whistle in his hands, the slam of the chute, eight seconds that fixed everything wrong in a man for the length of a breath. His mouth moved before he could catch it. "What's the guarantee?"
Tessa smiled like commission. She tapped the sheet, nails tidy as a bank teller's. He didn't need the digits read out loud to see them. Summer's worth of feed. A new axle that didn't complain. Rooms with doors that shut right. Nights in beds that weren't borrowed. A phone bill you didn't have to look at twice. The paper's edge bit his thumb, friendly.
Dale's voice went to the register men use when they mean to be kind and end up performin'. "We'll do right by you, Buckley. You've paid your dues in dust. Time to collect your shine on a real stage."
Blake's jaw said yes, something in it loosening. He saw himself fresh-wrapped again, logos like armor, cameras finding a good angle and treating it like truth. He saw his face on somebody's banner, a fist pump, a hat circle, the old grin that had saved him in worse rooms. He felt the yes lift to his mouth.
But the yes hit something and broke apart.
"You still with us?" Tessa laughed, not unkind. "Somebody steal you for a second."
"Just hearin' the whistle," Blake said, which was true enough.
Dale hooked his thumbs in his belt and rocked back, salesman at ease. "Tour bus leaves in three weeks. We're fillin' the last saddle by Friday." He tilted his head, eyes narrowing with a friendliness that had brass under it. "We're askin' for 'yes' with an exclamation point, not a paragraph."
Clipboard chimed in, careful as a cottonmouth. "It's a family-forward campaign," he added, like he was tipping a card without showing it. "Clean lines. Clean stories. We'd need socials tidy. No...surprises. You understand."
Blake let the words sit where they landed. He felt the old heat climb his neck, the one that had kept him alive and small enough to stack in motel drawers. He glanced toward the pens and found a kid at the far end, maybe twelve, working a nervous gelding through a figure-eight, patient hands, no show in them. The colt blew once, ears finding forward again. The boy laughed, quiet and pleased. The sound cut him in a merciful way.
He could say yes and outrun whatever this town had made him remember. He could climb the old ladder hand over hand till his arms gave or his luck did. He could do it.
God knows he had before.
"Looks good," he managed, voice steady by habit. He folded the trifold without creasing it ugly and slid it into his back pocket where old tickets and old vows went to sweat. "Let me think on it."
Tessa's smile held, thinner now. "We're not the only ones askin'."
Dale lifted his chin. "You got forty-eight hours."
"Twenty-four," Clipboard corrected, eyes on his watch. "We want to announce before the weekend run."
Blake nodded like a man who agrees to weather rather than commands. "Gimme a couple'a days," he said.
Tessa read him the way smart women do when a man's face is saying two things at once. "You got someone here," she said, not a question. "Or a reason."
"I got a town that knows my middle name," Blake said. He put his hat on because he needed the shade, then took it off again because Daisy had taught him a better habit. "And a woman who will skin me alive if I do somethin' stupid without eatin' first."
Dale laughed like that had been the plan all along. "We'll be at the Hampton," he said, shaking Blake's hand like he was tying a knot. "Call me. Let's make a run."
They left in a waft of cologne and timing, boots too clean for that dirt. Blake stood at the rail and watched the dust settle where they'd walked, then looked back at the kid with the colt. The boy had found it now, the little give, and he was wise enough not to celebrate it out loud. He just stood with the animal and breathed until breath matched. Blake felt his own lungs do it before he told them to.
He climbed the fence, third rung, habit, and sat with one boot hooked, one dangling. He lit a cigarette, then thumbed it out after a drag. He tucked the half-smoked thing back in the pack without drama, Saint Christopher cooling under his thumb like a coin in a pocket.
The sun had shouldered up over the grandstand, dragging heat behind it.
By the stock trailer, three rigs had nosed in sometime before breakfast. Nebraska plates, a cracked Wyoming sticker peeling off the corner of one windshield, a fresher Texas tag that still had roadkill jokes written in finger on the grime.
"Buckley!" somebody hollered, and the old reflex had him smiling before he found the mouth.
Roany Pike, built like the kind of fence you run into and apologize to, loped up with his arms already out like he'd invented the hug and wanted credit. He smelled like Copenhagen and the kind of motel that counts as "nice" when the AC obeys. Behind him were Miguel Luján, split lip healing bright, and J.T. Archer with a limp and a grin that implied they were related. Shorty, a bullfighter in a sunbleached cap, who had saved more boys' knees than prayer, shadowed them with a coffee the size of a bale.
"Thought that was your sorry rig comin' in a couple days ago," Roany said, thumping Blake's back hard enough to adjust his posture. "What're you doin' in a town with hydrangeas? Folks around here got porches. You sure you eligible to be seen with us rough stock animals? You smell like biscuits."
"I ate," Blake said, deadpan. "Y'all should try it sometime."
Miguel whistled and wagged his brows. "Look at him. Face ain't roadburnt. Eyes ain't peeled back like a skinned grape. Boy slept horizontal in a real bed next to somebody's curtain. That's domestic, hermano."
Shorty tipped his cap at the saint on Blake's belt loop. "He's wearin' a necklace for his keys. That there's a warning sign."
"Saint Christopher," Blake said dryly. "Patron of the undecided."
J.T. leaned on the rail and clucked his tongue. "He's got apronstrings on. Can't you hear 'em flappin'? Willow Creek done wifed you up. Next we'll hear you got a mailbox with your name painted cute."
"Leave him alone," Shorty said, smiling, because he'd cut his teeth on this kind of cruelty that wasn't and he knew when to blunt it. "Man's allowed to rest his bones where the floor don't move."
"Rest?" Roany hooted. "We just got a look at the Whitaker packet." He slapped his thigh where a rolled brochure rode shotgun. "Nationals, baby. Day-rates, bonuses, per diems. Rodeo Jesus comin' back for His boys. They tried to sell it to us in the parking lot of the Waffle House like a miracle in a coupon book."
Miguel fanned himself with the trifold like a church lady. "You know they want your face. And your ass. In their jeans, on their posters, sittin' still for moms and minors. Twenty-five stops. Tulsa to Reno. 'Family-forward,'" he added, with a wink that wasn't kind.
Shorty snorted. "Means don't scare the advertisers. Keep your stories tidy."
Roany elbowed Blake, not gently. "You in? They said your name with little dollar signs in their eyes. You looked like you were fixin' to say yes before you remembered your..." he spun his finger in the air, searching for a word. "...porch."
Blake balanced the hat brim on his thigh and looked at the arena like it might answer for him. "I told 'em I'd think."
"Uh-oh," J.T. said, drawing the syllables out like taffy. "Boy said 'think.' That's settlin’-down talk. Next thing you know he'll be arguin' about paint colors and complainin' about how the washer eats socks."
"Hell, I'd love a washer that eats socks," Miguel said.
Roany hooked his thumbs in his belt. "You ain't got but two, Buckley. Be a legend with sponsors and wrap your rig like a NASCAR, or get you a rocking chair and learn what day the trash runs."
Blake grinned at him, but the grin sat crooked.
"You got somebody here? Or just a bed that remembered your name?" Shorty asked, measuring him the way you measure a man for a new vest.
Blake didn't answer that, not straight. He rolled the saint between finger and thumb and let the silver cool his skin. Roany took that as answer enough and let out a low whistle.
"Domesticated," he sang, like a camp kid. "We lose another one to the porches and casseroles. Boys, bow your heads. A great one has fallen. Who's gonna break colts and hearts if Buckley's out here teachin' Sunday school and plantin' beans?"
"Plantin' beans sounds peaceful," Miguel said.
J.T. kicked his heel against a post and winced when his knee complained. "You hear what they're sayin' on the feed?" he asked, the grin going flat at the edges. "About...boys holdin' hands in church basements. 'Family-forward' might not be a place you wanna be if you can't fit on a poster with a straight story."
"That why you limpin'?" Blake asked, because he'd rather take the road where it got rough than stand at the polite end of it.
J.T. shrugged. "You know how it is. Somebody needs you to be a story they don't have to explain to their cousin...they make sure you remember your parts." He slid him a look that had warning under it. "You say yes to Whitaker, you say yes to smiling more than you want and keepin' your hand where they can see it, if you take my meaning."
"I do," Blake said, easy. Then he twisted his mouth. "Ain't like the independents are full of saints neither."
"No," Shorty said. "But they let you sin honest."
Roany slung an arm over Blake's shoulders again and shook him like he was trying to settle flour. "Quit thinkin'. C'mon. We're grabbin' canned biscuits and drownin' 'em in gravy at Eula's and then we're rollin' to Hattiesburg for the 2 p.m. Slack. Come pretend you ain't got options. We'll talk about nothin' and everything and make fun of J.T.'s knee."
"I will fight you," J.T. said pleasantly.
"Come on," Miguel coaxed. "You can call Dale from the parking lot and say yes with gravy on your breath like a king."
Blake let the want hit him, the simple old want of a booth sticky with sugar, four voices all trying to talk the world back into its right shape, a dashboard that hummed all afternoon, chalk dust, welders fixing panels, that first whistle rising out of heat that makes every bad thought sit down and shut up for eight seconds at a time. He could let himself be the version of Blake Buckley that could live in that sentence forever.
Shorty, who did not miss much in this life or the next, watched the math land behind Blake's eyes. "Ain't a wrong answer," he said. "Just don't lie to yourself about the one you pick."
Roany huffed. "Or lie. But do it convincin' so we ain't gotta watch you come apart in a motel Taco Bell."
Miguel cut his eyes toward Blake's keys, toward the saint, toward the town. "We'll be at Eula's for twenty minutes," he said. "After that, we're gone. You need to breathe with people who ain't tryin' to teach you how, that's where we'll be."
J.T. straightened up with a groan and thumped Blake's chest once. "Love you, bigot," he said, which in his mouth meant I'd bleed for you and also you're a fool.
They left him in the gate's wobbling shadow. He stood there and listened to their laughter fade under the bleachers, the clatter of spurs, the flop of a stray banner. A dust devil spun out by the bucking chute, wandered, and died like a joke that had lost its punchline. In the far pen, the kid with the gelding had the rope laid out in a figure-eight again. He lifted his hand, and the colt's ear flicked.
Blake walked the top rail one foot at a time, a little boy's balance game played by a man with too much history in his boots, and when he dropped back to the gravel he felt the ground give enough to count as grace.
*
Twilight sutured the heat to the day and let Willow Creek breathe again. Porches came on one by one, a hush spreading like cool water across the square.
Blake walked with his hat in his hand and the Saint still ticking against his belt loop, letting the town sort him without saying a word. Near the barber shop, he slowed. Two men leaned in the glow of a streetlamp, paper cups of sweet tea sweating down their knuckles.
"Ain't seen him closed since the storm took that steeple," one said.
"Five years I been comin' on Thursdays," the other answered, almost proud of the continuity. "First time that door didn't swing."
Blake didn't need them to say the name. He felt it rise in him like a tide: Door & Light. He nodded at the men, got nods back, and kept walking because there wasn't any other honest direction once you'd heard truth phrased that plain.
On Main, the lamplight fell in deliberate squares. When he reached the shop he didn't go to the front. Habit and a kind of mercy made him circle the alley to the back, boots careful on grit. The service door's window was high and small, a worker's window. From the gravel, he could see only the top of the pegboard and the warm light the bench lamp shed over the room. He set his hat on a crate, palmed the rough brick, and lifted himself just enough to angle a look.
Sawdust made a gold fog in the beam. Tools hung in good order, chisels asleep with their mouths closed, planes set on their sides like old dogs conserving virtue. The ugly plaid throw lay unrolled on the floor, the kind of blanket a man keeps to keep good wood from getting scratched.
And on it were the two people he'd been avoiding all day.
He saw only part of them at first: a shoulder, a hand, the long line of a back in motion, the cut of a jaw gone slack with something like relief. It wasn't crude and it wasn't coy. It was the kind of private that knows the room and trusts the walls. Jackson's laugh came soft and broke into a sound Blake had heard a thousand miles away without admitting it. Cash answered with a low, helpless noise. Bodies met and eased and met again with a steadiness that wasn't hunger's first trick, it was belonging's.
No performance.
No prove.
All the rough places turned to sure.
He didn't mean to lean closer. He did anyway, because he was human and the night was thin and love, even when it's leaving you, has a way of asking for witness.
Jackson had his back against Cash's chest, feet planted on Cash's knees, hips bouncing as he rode his best friend's cock. Cash's hands held Jackson secure, their bodies pouring sweat into the floor. And inside their eyes, a bliss Blake knew all too well. And yet, felt unfamiliar at the same time.
Words traveled in snatches through the old sash.
"You gonna make me bust again," Cash whispered, voice ragged. "You comin'?"
"Almost..." Jackson, immediate, no boy in it.
"Fuck," one of them said, and Blake couldn't swear which, because the word fit both mouths.
Then Jackson, lower, sure, a sentence that cut and healed at once. "Come in my ass."
"Again?" Cash mumbled between heavy breaths.
"Always..." Jackson let out, the first breath of release escorting the word.
Blake put his forehead to the glass and let its cool tell him what heat had been doing under his skin since Willow Creek hove into view. He had wanted to be the one who taught the boy that trick. He had taught him fire, danger, and how to jump and dare the ground to show up, but not this: how to be held without going scarce. Inside, Jackson said Cash's name like an anchor thrown true, and Cash said Jackson's like a door catching home. The cadence of it went through Blake like an old song he'd pretended not to know the words to. He could see just enough to understand the shape of the love, and not enough to lie to himself about it.
It wasn't what he and Jackson had built.
That had been all sky and lightning and flight, eight seconds of redemption at a time, breathless and expensive and worth it until it wasn't.
This was floor and roof and a blanket you didn't apologize for. The difference was a living thing, breathing against the pane.
He dropped back to his heels, then rose again in spite of himself at the small sound Jackson made when everything inside him changed keys. The room settled. A quiet followed and then the soft mess of tenderness: a laugh choked off, a kiss that missed and found, a murmur that meant again, another that meant forever.
It wasn't his.
It wasn't meant to be.
The knowledge came sweet and mean at once, and he stood there with both tastes in his mouth like a man learning the difference between hunger and harm.
He let his heels meet gravel, this time for good. He picked up his hat and held it against his chest because a man ought to take his hat off when he's standing this close to the holy.
He could have knocked. He could have shouldered the door, made a scene, burned the room down to prove the fire hadn't gone out in him. But what he did was lean back against the brick and let the old wolf in his ribs wear itself out. He breathed. In. Out. Counted the ways a man can love and not own. Counted the doors he'd been given and the ones he'd slammed. Counted the miles he could drive in a day if he put the Saint in his pocket and didn't look in the mirror.
Inside, something knocked, and two low laughs dropped into it like coins.
"Watcha doin'?" Cash's voice whispered.
"Cleanin' you up. Reckon I'll wanna go again before we eat somethin'..." Jackson muttered, the sound already full along with his mouth as he wrapped his lips around Cash's cum covered cock.
"Lord Almighty," Cash replied, the words blending with a rousing chuckle.
Blake put the hat on his head and felt the crown settle the old way, not a costume this time, just shade. He stepped away from the window without looking again, because not looking was the cleanest tribute he had to offer.
At the mouth of the alley he paused and looked up. The evening had gone that Mississippi blue that erases edges. He slid the Whitaker brochure from his back pocket, unfolded it, looked at the numbers in the failing light, then folded it back without creasing the life out of it and slid it away.
He walked, not fast. He didn't call anyone. He didn't set himself on fire to prove he still could. He didn't chase. He put one foot in front of the other and let Willow Creek decide how much of him to keep.
Minutes later, he was at The Rusty Spur.
Inside, the jukebox crooned something from a summer that wouldn't apologize for itself. Betsy sat quietly in the corner. Blake took the two-top by the window where the glass showed a watery version of Main Street and put his hat on the chair instead of his head, the Saint on his belt loop ticking a soft reminder against his thigh.
They came as they always did, three women with church hair and mean laughter, a girl in cutoffs who said she'd seen him ride in Tupelo and wanted to see it again but closer, a man in a baseball cap doing careful friendliness with an angle under it. Blake gave each one the politeness his papa hadn't managed to beat out of him and turned them all aside with an economy that suggested kindness and meant no.
Blake wasn't fit for company tonight.
He was two swallows into a beer that tasted like resignation when the air changed. Colton came in smiling like a new bruise, collar open, eyes already looking for a floor to climb on. He clocked Blake in one breath and made a line for him without bothering to fetch a drink first.
"Evenin', Buckley," he said, dropping into the empty chair like it had always been his. He angled his body wide, claiming table and light.
Blake didn't look up right away. He finished the swallow, set the bottle down with a civility that rang like a warning, and raised his eyes. "Fuck off," he said, voice even. "Before I lay hands on you."
Colton's grin brightened, not chastened at all. If anything, he sat deeper. "There he is. I was wonderin' if you'd show me the teeth." He folded his hands on the table like a man ready for grace. "Go on and threaten me some more, baby. It's the sweetest you've sounded all year."
Blake's hand flexed. He could see how easy it would be, arm back, fist forward, a clean line from the shoulder, knuckles and bone and a sick little satisfaction. He could also see Daisy's spoon aimed at his chest and the Sheriff's hand on the bar phone and Jackson's mouth hard with a new kind of no. He breathed once through his nose. "I don't owe you a show."
"Nah," Colton said, delighting in the game. "But you owe somebody somethin'. Might as well spend it here."
"Stand up," Blake repeated, softer, more dangerous. "Or I'll do it for you."
Colton leaned in, and the mean in him went candle-flame, pretty, flickering, easy to blow out. "Ditched you, didn't he?" he murmured. "Boy finally figured out which door swung true. You could smell it on 'em even back then. Those two were built out of the same boards. Made for each other. You were just the road between them."
The line cut, clean and exactly where he meant it to. Blake's jaw worked. The bottle sweated under his palm. He pictured the window at the back of Door & Light, the way Jackson rode Cash. He let the picture finish without flinching.
"Maybe," he said. The word surprised Colton enough to blink him straight. Blake let the corner of his mouth have a humorless try at lifting. "Maybe they are. Maybe I ain't never been much but miles and a good cock."
Colton's mouth opened and shut. He'd come to feed on a fight. He'd been handed a man who'd put his own blood on the bar and called it change. The nasty went out of him for a heartbeat, and something else flashed through, curiosity, that old, awful tenderness he hid under jokes and threats.
"You finally talkin' like we speak the same language," he said, quieter. "World's endin', I guess."
"Could be," Blake answered. He studied Colton's face as if it were a horizon, flat until you noticed the heat shimmering. Up close, the meanness looked tired. Up close, the pretty showed the corners where it cracked. Blake's own anger went thin and then useful.
Colton tipped his chin. "You still mad at me?"
"Not for the reasons you hope," Blake said, but the heat had gone out of it.
"What reasons are those?"
"That you want me to be the worst thing you think you are," Blake said. "So you don't have to be it alone."
Colton stared at him like a trick had gone wrong and revealed something he hadn't meant to put on stage. Pale silence, and then a smile edged with relief he didn't want to own. "Maybe I do."
Blake nodded. It was the first honest agreement he'd offered Colton since they met. He glanced at the door, the alley beyond it, and the tables before looking back at Colton.
"You wanna get outta here?" he asked, calm as a weather report.
Colton blinked again, then smiled for real, the kind of smile that shows you the boy who used to wear it before he learned to weaponize it. "Fuck, yeah," he said, breathless enough to almost be decent.
Blake picked up his hat, set it on his head, and stood. "Let's go, then."
*
The lake lay black as oil, a slip of moon caught in the reeds. Blake's truck sat nosed toward the water, engine off, ticking as it cooled. Crickets sawed. Cypress knees leaned like old men listening. Inside the vehicle, the air went breath-warm and close, windows fogging in slow, shivery blooms.
They didn't talk much.
Didn't need to.
Colton slid across the bench seat all muscle and want, a laugh caught in his throat and swallowed. Blake met him hard, jaw set, hand at the back of Colton's neck, the other finding a belt loop and using it. Fabric rasped. Knuckles thudded dully on vinyl. Blake pushed back, angling them, turning the narrow world of the truck into a single fierce line of motion before he shoved himself into Colton.
"Shit," Colton breathed, pleased, fingers digging into the backseat's fabric like he'd finally found the thing he'd been courting with his meanness. "Don't go all soft on me."
Blake wasn't soft.
He wasn't careless either.
He checked, grit-soft yeses traded against skin, and then drove the moment like a bull he meant to make understand him. Bodies found a rhythm that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with heat and decision. The truck rocked on its shocks in a tight, hungry cadence. A seat-belt buckle knocked a staccato against the door. Glass smoked over until the moon became a pale smear and then disappeared.
Colton took the rough like medicine, eyes half-lidded, throat working. He gave as good as he got, teeth at Blake's hand as he bit on it, a low curse when Blake's cock nudged where it should, a helpless sound when Blake set the pace and kept it. "Fuck," Colton hissed, a laugh braided through the pain. "You a fuckin' stallion, Buckley."
Blake answered with breath and weight, with the brief, brutal mercy of being no one's anything for a handful of minutes. He let the aggression run, reined just short of cruelty, and felt Colton lean into it, ask for more with the way he arched his back, the way he braced a palm to the door and pushed back. Leather squealed. Sweat salted their mouths. The truck filled with the small, unpretty sounds of want being honest.
It rose fast, then faster, the kind of climb that turns thought to static. Colton's hand skated down, slipped, gripped, dragged Blake nearer. He drove into the last of it, jaw clenched, breath ragged, the old hunger and the new ache colliding and, for once, not canceling each other out. Release came sharp and shaking, a hard, gutted exhale as Balke unloaded inside Colton's greedy body, his own released spewing over the worn leather.
Silence pressed in.
Their chests sawed.
Colton turned, still catching air, groping the floor for his shirt. "Gimme a second..." he muttered, laughing as his fingers found cotton and the hem tangled. He tugged, bent to free it.
Then it happened.
A shadow skimmed over him, close enough to blot the moon smear. There was a sharp rap, skin on bone, bright and mean, then the world tilted.
Black.
*
He came to with a taste of metal and wet cloth in his mouth and a throb in his skull. Ropes bit his wrists where somebody had tied him. Another loop pinned his ankles. The gag was a bandanna that smelled like dust and tobacco. Every time he swallowed, he swallowed cloth.
Blake paced a groove in front of him, boots ticking grit. "Welcome back," he said without looking down. "You went out like somebody blew a fuse. My apologies." The politeness in it wasn't polite at all.
Blake raised a hand and Colton stilled.
He'd expected the fist.
He got a phone.
His phone.
All the blood that wasn't pounding behind Colton's eyes went to ground. He rattled the gag against a useless sound. Blake cocked his head, studying the black glass like a map.
"Curious thing about men who live in their mouths," he said, thumb waking the screen, his accent gone clean and slow. "They forget how much truth they stow in their hands."
He swiped with a mechanic's patience, none of the nervous pecking that shows haste, then angled the screen so the bare bulb's glare slid off. Messages bloomed into a column of little green and gray rectangles, and for a second the set to his jaw cracked.
He scrolled up. And up. And up.
Colton tried to jerk his chin away from his own life and couldn't.
"Weston," Blake read. There were hundreds of bubbles. Months of them. Anxious pings at midnight, you up?, and noon-day mundanities, ate?, memes so dumb they circled back to sweet. Photographs of river light on brown water. A thumb over a lens. There were words that could be taken for cruelties, and weren't. Sentences that started sharp and softened before they ended.
A man who wanted to be cruel wouldn't have kept these.
A man who wanted to hide tenderness would.
He glanced at Colton and found him feral at the edges, panting through linen, eyes huge. Not triumph there, something wilder and worse: a boy who had laced their cruelty with his own need and hadn't known where one ended and the other started.
"You talked to him like you were tryin' to make your hands do better," Blake said, not a question and not praise. "And then you talked like you had a mean dog inside you and were proud to feed it."
He swiped out, thumb sure. His expression went flat again, professional. "Where I'm fixin' to find," he said, mild as coffee, "you ain't gonna want me to." He tapped an icon, then the bar that asked for what it was owed.
Colton shook his head, hard enough that pain rattled the world and he tasted rust. He tried to hide his hands without being able to move them. Blake reached down, took the right one. He didn't squeeze. He didn't hurt for sport. He held Colton's finger the way a farrier holds a hoof, firm, exact, impersonal, and guided it to the glass.
A little click.
The private folder unlocked.
Blake didn't look at him for that petty victory. He didn't have hunger in his gaze now. He scrolled through thumbnails laid end to end like a calendar of sins, bar rooms, and truck cabs, and river dark, the blank, idiot eye of the camera knowing more than any person had a right to.
"Date," he said to himself, not to Colton. "We're lookin' for a specific date." He worked back to the week the sirens had cut the barbecue into grief. "There," he said, and the word lay flat as a hammer. A clip with the right date. A shimmer and a dark shape and motion you couldn't call anything but wrong.
Colton thrashed, a useless sawing that set the chair's metal feet to squealing across the concrete. Blake didn't move. He didn't raise his voice. He knelt, bringing himself level with the bound man so there'd be no mistaking what he meant to do or why.
"You wanted a show," he said softly, the old heat caged behind each syllable. "Tonight we're watchin' the one you made."
He held Colton's gaze one long second so the room would remember it, then set his thumb to the play triangle.
The screen filled with river-dark and cheap light. Off camera, Colton's breathing made the mic whisper. You could hear his thumb scrape glass when he tightened his grip.
"Evenin', West," Sheriff Calvin drawled from somewhere to the left, voice lazy in the way men get when they mean harm and want it to sound like manners. The beam found Weston's face. Startled, narrowed with that flash of hope people wear when they recognize a set of headlights they thought were safe. He had come to meet one man. He got three.
Another voice, lower, all gravel, came in from the right. Cade Whitlow, a crescent scar climbing his cheek like a ladder to a bad idea. "Thought you liked night walks, princess," Cade said. The light jittered and dragged over Weston's shoes, up his jeans, too close.
Blake's thumb tightened on the phone until the case creaked.
What followed curdled fast. Words first, mock-pleasant questions. That backwoods sermon tone that turns a name into a blade. Sheriff Calvin made a joke that wasn't one. Cade chuckled, and the chuckle had metal in it. They stepped nearer. Slurs arrived, old, ugly ones that don't deserve daylight, spat into the dark like tobacco. Weston tried twice to keep his voice steady. "I ain't here for y'all," he said. "I'll go." He took a step. A boot scuffed in his way.
Blake felt the old rodeo calm drop onto his shoulders and then slide off, useless. He couldn't breathe through the screen. His ribs acted like the phone had reached in and got hold of them.
On the video, the light hopped. A rough hand caught Weston's arm and shoved. Gravel ground. Sheriff Calvin's laugh got quieter and worse. Cade said something about "teachin' a lesson," and the camera dipped to Weston's hands, then jerked up again as if Colton wanted to catch the faces, to be sure the record knew who'd done it.
The harassment shifted from language to touch.
Weston's plea, "Don't", came through clenched teeth. The sound had a tremor in it Blake had only ever heard in barn stalls. They pressed him back into the shadows under the bridge. Stone kissed spine. Sheriff Calvin crowded close, voice turning that friendly venom again. Cade said a word that made Blake's mouth fill with copper. The phone's angle went crooked, Colton trying to see and not be seen. You could feel his pulse in the panicked little zooms and refocuses.
Blake's stomach turned. He made himself watch because someone had to. He put his free hand on his knee to stop it from shaking and failed.
Then the escalation.
Quick, mean, all at once.
A shape pinned Weston, and another blocked the space to run. The flashlight clattered somewhere out of frame and spun, throwing the world into an ugly strobe: slices of faces, water, hands. The noises, the caught breath, the choked-off cry, the way a body sounds when dignity is taken from it.
Until his cries turned to silence.
Blake's jaw locked until his molars throbbed. He thought of Weston, laughing soft, tapping that cardinal cane. He thought of Levi's little red badge reel nodding yes. He wanted to break something with his hands that wouldn't fix to make this even.
"Please," Weston said once, bare and hoarse, and something in Blake's chest clawed.
It was over fast and not fast enough.
And then came the beating.
Punctuation marks after a sentence already unforgivable. Fists. A boot. Weston folded wrong and tried to unfold. They didn't let him. The camera caught flashes of it, an arm coming down, a shoe heel, riprap winking with water, then lost it, then found it again because Colton kept filming, breathing ragged, saying nothing at all.
Blake's vision tunneled. His breath went short and hot. He tasted bile. He wanted to hurl the phone at the ground, to put his fist through time, to drag men off the screen and throw them into the river until the water had to choose between washing them clean or keeping them.
On the glass, Weston's body went smaller and then smaller again, instinct trying to make him a thing not worth hurting. Sheriff Calvin said, "That's enough," and then didn't mean it. Cade laughed, breathless. One last hit landed, sick sound, meat and stone, and Weston's head snapped. His arm twitched that little, involuntary twitch that haunts a man's sleep.
Something inside Blake snapped into place with a deadly clarity, the same feeling as the whistle, as the chute gate slam, except there was no bell at eight. There was only this.
He hit pause.
The shed went back to the hum of the single bulb. The video froze on a frame he would never unsee: river light juddering across wet rock. A shadow where a face should've been. A boot sole lifted for one more lesson. Blake's thumb hovered over the screen like a trigger. His other hand shook, finally, in a way he couldn't hide.
He lowered the phone and looked at Colton, who had gone as white as primer, eyes blown wide around a panic that had no place to hide.
Blake didn't press play again. He kept the frame frozen, then lifted his eyes to Colton. "You know what the meanest thing in that whole damn video is?" he asked, voice low enough to make the moths quiet. "It's the fact you never stopped recordin'."
Colton made a sound behind the gag, frantic and thin.
Blake went on, steady, as if he were tightening a latigo, hole by hole. "I been on the road long. I've seen men do harm because they don't know nothin' else, and I've seen men do harm because they enjoy it. This...Sheriff Calvin...he's the first kind. Cade Whitlow? That boy learned early that pain makes him feel like a king and he ain't never been corrected. But you..." He lifted the phone and let the frozen image ghost across Colton's face. "You're another breed. You built yourself a window and called that innocence."
He started scrolling with his thumb, just a little, enough to bring up one of the soft photos. "You talked to Weston like you wanted to be better than your blood. You sent him good mornings. You made him laugh stupid. Then you brought him here and you kept your hands clean by puttin' a lens between you and the sin." Blake shook his head once, something like pity catching and refusing to soften. "You fed your mean dog and made the puppy watch."
The words landed, clean, and Colton flinched as if they'd been swung.
"You think a jury cares if your knuckles split?" Blake asked. "You think a mother's sleep is sweeter 'cause you never threw the first? The world we live in got rocks sharp enough without men like you chippin' edges into 'em with a phone."
Tears backed up hot in Colton's eyes.
Blake's voice stayed calm, almost conversational, because real anger in a grown man knows how to speak in declarative sentences. "I ain't talkin' to the part of you that likes the smell of gasoline. I'm talkin' to the part that sent a picture of a bird 'cause you knew it would make him smile. That part knows this: there ain't any camera angle on earth that makes what you did a different thing."
He tapped send, the soft chime bright and obscene in the concrete room. He sent the thread, the file, the whole damn ledger to his own number, twice, three times, until the little bar filled and the insurance felt like weight in his pocket. Then he tossed the phone into Colton's lap. It thumped against his thighs and slid, the screen going black on the way down like a curtain at the end of a bad play.
Blake pulled his knife, not the flashy one, the work one, and cut the rope at Colton's ankles with two efficient strokes. He stepped behind him, a hand between shoulder blades, and slid the blade under the bandanna. The gag fell, wet, to concrete. Colton gulped air like a boy hauled from the deep.
Blake didn't offer water. He didn't offer comfort. He crouched in front of him again, close enough that there wasn't a thing between them but the truth and the stink of fear.
"You're gonna walk out on your own feet, and for the next small handful of hours you are a free man. Enjoy it. It'll end soon enough," he said.
"What..." Colton's voice broke, raw as an abraded palm. "They'll kill me." Panic came up like floodwater, fast and stupid. "You don't...you don't understand. Cade's daddy's Ellis Whitlow. Governor Whitlow. You know what that means here? Calvin'll drown my ass in that lake before sunrise. I ain't got anywhere to..." The rest dissolved into a sound that wasn't pretty.
Blake stood, tucking the knife away like a tool done with for now. "If you're smart," he said, "you'll find a door before dawn."
"Buckley," Colton pleaded, the name stripped of swagger. "Please."
Blake didn't answer. He walked to the truck door without hurry, climbed in, shut the door soft, and let the darkness put its face to the glass. He put the truck in gear and pulled away, headlights painting two white lanes across the dirt that were here and gone in the same breath.
Behind him, Colton sat with the phone in his lap.
The knot gone from his mouth, but not his soul.
Listening to the night for footsteps he couldn't outrun.
(To be continued...)
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