Red Clay
Kenny woke up the next morning and did not know what he was going to do.
That was new. He was usually clear. He had been clear in episode after episode of his life, clear about what he wanted and clear about how to get it and clear about what he was not going to do. The clarity had been one of the things he relied on, the specific confidence of a person who knew the angles and worked them.
He did not know what he was going to do about Colby.
He lay in the bunkhouse in the early morning dark and felt the tally and felt also the south barn from yesterday, the cedar smell and the darker clay and Colby’s hands on his belt and the specific rightness of it before the panic hit and the walking away and the water trough and lying here all last night with all of it unresolved. His body had a position. His body had been very clear about its position since about three in the morning.
His head was still composing objections.
He lay there and let both of those things exist and did not try to resolve them.
The bunkhouse was doing its morning thing around him. Pete’s snoring giving way to the specific sounds of a man waking by feel, no light needed, just the body knowing. Boots going on in the dark. The ceiling fan clicking its off-balance blade. The smell of the place, familiar now, not bad, just the specific smell of ten men living close together that had been specifically, deeply wrong six days ago and was now just the smell of where he was. That reclassification alone was its own thing to sit with.
The tally. The south barn. The specific rightness of Colby’s hands on his belt before the panic hit. His body had a clear position on what it wanted. His head was still generating objections. The objections were getting less convincing but they were still there, which meant the clarity he needed to do the thing he was thinking about doing was not fully present yet.
He lay there with the dark and the breathing men around him and tried to figure out what he was going to do.
He thought about going back to Colby. He thought about not going back to Colby. He had run yesterday with his hands on his own belt and the specific heat of being seen and wanting to be seen and then the panic at the specific moment it became real. He had come to the water trough and stood there with his wrists in the cold water and he had not felt any of the righteous relief of having maintained the categories. He had felt the specific frustrated anger of a body that had been right there and been overruled at the last moment for reasons that were getting harder to name.
He thought about the cedar stand three days ago and the sounds of it and what his body had done with those sounds for three nights in the bunkhouse dark. He thought about Tyler Merritt and Blake and the categories and how the categories had stopped having traction somewhere in the south barn shaded stretch yesterday when Colby’s hands worked his belt open and his breath had left his body before he had finished deciding anything.
He thought about Jax saying go to bed, Kenny and walking away without looking back on the first night.
He thought about his father not calling.
He was still lying there thinking about all of it when the bell rang.
He reached for the sunglasses before his boots.
The world narrowed to what fit inside the frames. He sat on the edge of the bunk and held onto that for a second, the specific narrowing, the specific armor of it.
Then he got up and went to eat Clara’s dry eggs and think about it.
He was at the water trough after breakfast, not going anywhere in particular, just standing in the early heat with his hands in the cold water and not committing to anything, when Wade came across the yard.
Wade moved the way he always moved, like a man who owned the ground he was walking on and had walked it so long he had stopped thinking about it. He came up alongside Kenny and leaned on the fence rail and looked out at the near pasture for a moment without saying anything. This was how Wade operated. He arrived and was present and did not rush the beginning of things.
“Jax tells me you’re having some trouble finding your footing,” Wade said.
Kenny looked at him.
“Said you’re smart but you’re using it to get out of the work instead of do it. Said it might take longer for you than most.”
Kenny felt something move through his chest that was not entirely about Jax. The specific anger of someone being described accurately by someone they had not given permission to describe them. “Jax doesn’t know anything about me.”
“He knows what he sees.”
“He sees what he wants to see.” Kenny’s voice had an edge in it. “He decided what I was the first day I got here and he’s been filing everything through that ever since. Dallas kid. Soft. Sent here because he screwed up.”
Wade looked at him sideways. Not defending Jax. Just listening.
“Everyone here had a story written before I opened my mouth,” Kenny said. The edge was getting sharper and he was aware of it and could not make it stop. “And Jax had the most detailed one. Every time I do something it goes right into the story. He’s not reading me. He’s confirming a reading he already had.”
“That’s not quite what he said.”
“That’s what he meant.”
They stood at the fence and the near pasture did its thing in the morning heat, the horses moving slow, the grass going yellow at the tips.
“What did your father say when he told you you were coming here,” Wade said.
Kenny went still.
“Did he call you himself,” Wade said. “Or did your mother come and tell you.”
The silence stretched out between them and in it was the specific answer to the question, which was that nobody had called Kenny about it. His mother had come to his room and sat on the edge of his bed and told him about the arrangement in the specific careful voice of a woman delivering news she had rehearsed. His father had been in London or Singapore or Tokyo or wherever his father was that week and had not called. Had not called before and had not called after. Had sent a text three days later that said you’re going to be fine which was the specific text of a man who had been told to send a text.
“That’s what I thought,” Wade said.
“Don’t,” Kenny said.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re about to tell me you’re different. That the ranch is good for me. That I just need to give it a chance.” Kenny could hear his own voice, the specific quality of too much in it, the edge getting into something underneath, something closer than he had meant to get. “I’ve heard that speech from three different counselors and I know how it goes.”
“I wasn’t going to give that speech,” Wade said.
“Then what were you going to say.”
Wade looked at him for a long moment. He had the specific look of a man who has been running land his whole life and knows the difference between a problem that needs solving and a feeling that needs space. He was not trying to fix anything. He was just there.
“Not every man is like your father,” Wade said. Simple and plain and not a speech. Not a counselor’s line. Just a fact, stated the way Wade stated facts, which was once and without decoration.
Kenny looked at the pasture.
The near horse moved off toward the far corner, unhurried.
“I’ve got work,” Kenny said.
“I know,” Wade said.
Kenny walked away and was aware of Wade not saying anything else and not following and just standing at the fence and letting him go. That was its own kind of thing. The specific quality of a man who understood that sometimes the right thing to do was nothing at all.
Kenny walked toward the east water line and felt the conversation sitting in him in a way he had not expected.
He worked the east water line through the morning and did not think about Colby.
He thought about his father.
His father was not a bad man. That was the thing that made it complicated, the thing that did not fit cleanly into any of the versions of the story Kenny had been telling himself for three years. His father worked hard and provided and had built something significant and had been building it since before Kenny was born and would be building it long after Kenny figured out whatever he was supposed to figure out, and none of that was about Kenny specifically. It was just what his father was. A man building something. Kenny happened to exist adjacent to the building and had grown up understanding that adjacent was where he would always be.
That was not malice. That was just the shape of his father’s life and the shape of Kenny’s place in it.
Not every man is like your father.
He worked the wire and felt that sitting in him. Wade had not said it like a comfort. He had said it like a fact, the way you tell someone the gate is unlocked, just noting that the thing that has been keeping you out is not actually there.
He thought about Jax, which made him angry in the specific way of someone who had been described accurately by someone they had not given permission to describe them. Jax had been watching him since day one with those steady green eyes and reading him and apparently reporting on the reading to Wade and that was presumptuous in a way that made Kenny want to say something about it and also accurate in a way that made the wanting to say something about it feel less solid.
He thought about the first night at the fence. The stars and Ember walking away and Jax standing close enough to feel warm in the evening air and the story about the tack room in February and the specific thing that had moved in Kenny’s chest that he had put in a drawer.
He thought about his father not calling.
He kept working.
The morning was long and hot and the wire was what the wire was and his hands found the rhythm of it and his mind kept going back to the same three things: his father not calling, Wade saying not every man, the south barn yesterday and the specific rightness of it before the panic hit.
Near the end of the morning he stopped checking the wire and just stood there for a minute with his hand on the fence post and the sun on the back of his neck and the specific smell of red clay and hot grass and the distant cedar stand.
He was tired of the wire he had been carrying. Not the fence wire. The other wire. The one that had been across his chest since the cedar stand three days ago and maybe longer, if he was being honest, maybe since before this ranch, since before Dallas, the specific tension of maintaining a position that his body had stopped believing in while his head was still defending it out of a kind of stubborn momentum that had less and less to do with actual belief.
He was nineteen years old and he was tired of being at war with his own body.
He stood at the fence and felt the sun and felt the decision that had been forming all morning finally settle into something clear.
He finished his section and went to find Colby.
Colby was behind the south barn in the shaded stretch, alone, doing nothing in particular the way men sometimes were in spaces they knew would give them privacy. He looked up when Kenny came around the corner and his expression did not change much but something in it acknowledged the situation.
“Hey,” Kenny said.
“Hey.” Colby leaned against the barn wall with that easy quality, hat pushed back. He looked at Kenny for a moment and then the corner of his mouth moved. “You going to run again.”
“No,” Kenny said.
“Because yesterday I barely looked at you and you ran faster than a jackrabbit landing in a cactus patch.”
Kenny felt the specific warmth of being teased without malice, the specific quality of someone who found a thing funny and was sharing that with him rather than using it against him. “Yeah well,” he said.
“Yeah well,” Colby agreed. He was smiling now, the easy smile of a man who is genuinely amused and not performing it.
They stood there for a moment in the shade of the barn wall. The cedar smell was sharp in the midday heat, resinous and specific, the particular smell of red cedar in July. The clay here was darker than the open yard, softer underfoot. The private lane between the barn and the cedar stand with the specific quality of a space that knew what it was for.
“I’ve been doing some thinking this morning,” Kenny said.
“I can tell.” Colby looked at him with those easy eyes. “You’ve got that look you get when you’ve been somewhere in your head for a while.” He paused. “You going to keep thinking or you going to stop thinking.”
Kenny looked at the cedar trees. He thought about his father not calling and Wade standing at the fence rail and the specific plain fact of not every man is like your father delivered without drama. He thought about the tally and the south barn yesterday and the specific rightness of Colby’s hands on his belt before the panic hit.
He thought about being tired.
“Stop thinking,” Kenny said.
Colby nodded once. No ceremony around it. Just a man acknowledging a decision another man had made.
Colby nodded once. He pushed off the barn wall.
He came close and got his hands on Kenny’s belt and worked it open, the buckle and the button, no ceremony, and Kenny felt his breath go shallow and felt also the old mechanism trying to engage and felt also the specific exhaustion of the old mechanism and let it go. Just let it go. His hands went to the barn wall behind him and he felt the warm rough wood under his palms and he stood there and let Colby work his jeans open and get his hand around his cock.
Kenny’s breath left his body in one pull.
He was already half-hard and Colby’s grip was sure and warm and he worked him slow, learning the weight of him, his thumb moving over the head and down the shaft, and Kenny stood against the barn wall and felt his body moving ahead of his head the way it kept doing out here, not waiting for permission, just going, and this time he did not try to pull it back.
Colby stroked him until he was fully hard and then went to his knees in the red clay dirt without ceremony and looked up at Kenny once before he started, just a look, checking in.
Kenny looked down at him.
The old mechanism was right there. The specific fear of the thing being real, right there, one half-second of it.
He put his hands flat on the barn wall and gave a small nod.
Colby took him into his mouth.
The sound Kenny made was involuntary and low and long and he did not try to stop it. Colby’s mouth was warm and skilled, his tongue tracing along the underside and circling the head and finding what worked fast and returning to it, and Kenny stood against the barn wall and felt the heat of it moving through him in long waves and stopped trying to hold onto anything.
His hands moved from the barn wall to the back of Colby’s head, not pushing, just resting there, and Colby’s hands were on his hips steadying him, the palms warm through his jeans, and Kenny felt every point of contact with the specific sharp clarity of a body that has been waiting for days and is finally getting what it asked for. The warmth and the pressure and the specific weight of the man kneeling in the red clay dirt in front of him like it was nothing, like this was just a thing a person did in the afternoon when the work was done.
The wanting of it was not just the physical fact. It was the being attended to. The full unhurried attention of someone who was not performing anything and was not in any hurry.
Colby worked him slow and thorough, his tongue and lips deliberate and skilled, and Kenny’s hips started moving into the rhythm without him telling them to, small forward motions that Colby let him have, and Kenny looked at the cedar branches above him, the dappled light coming through at the specific angle of midday, and felt the build coming and stopped fighting it.
He tightened his grip in Colby’s hair. His breath came in short pulls. He felt the build crest and then he was there, his head back against the barn wall and a sound the barn absorbed without judgment, low and real and extended, his cock pulsing as he spent into Colby’s mouth in long pulses, his whole body working through it, and stood there after with his legs doing their job and his breathing doing its work and his mind empty for one clean moment.
Then the moment ended.
Colby stood up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, unhurried, the way you wipe sweat. Looked at Kenny with a friendly unconcerned expression and nodded once and picked up his hat from the fence post where he had set it.
“Good work today,” he said, and walked back toward the main yard.
Kenny stood at the barn wall alone.
He waited for the category to close over it. The not that. The way it had always closed before.
It did not close.
It just sat there, what had just happened, plain and complete and real, and there was no filing system that could take it.
He was not gay. He said it to himself and heard how much work that sentence was doing and how tired it had gotten from doing that work for three years without resolution.
He stood there for a while with the cedar throwing its shadows and the ranch going on around him the way it always went on.
He did not know what to do with the fact that it had not felt wrong. He had expected it to feel wrong. He had been counting on it feeling wrong. It had felt real and specific and like something he had been trying not to know about himself for longer than one summer.
He went to the water trough and washed his hands and stood there with the water dripping off his wrists and looked at the pine line going gold.
Wade’s voice was in him somewhere. Not every man is like your father.
He thought about what that meant.
He went to supper.
At supper that night Kenny was quiet.
Not performing. Not deflecting. Just eating. He ate his full plate and went back for more and sat at the table and felt the specific texture of a day that had been several things at once. The conversation with Wade and the thing about his father and the decision finally made and the south barn and the category not closing.
Clara had made steak with peppers and it was good in the honest way of food made by someone who knew what they were doing, not performing, just making something right. He ate all of it and felt his body feeling the way it felt when it had been given what it needed, that specific settled quality of a day that had cost something and delivered something.
The string lights were doing their amber thing above the tables and the sky over the pine line was going its colors, the orange and pink that happened every night out here and that he had stopped pretending not to notice. The men around him talked about the day’s work with the easy texture of men who had been doing this work together long enough that the talking was just the social texture of the work.
Jax was at the other table. Not looking at Kenny. The specific not-looking that had a weight to it, that Kenny had started to understand as its own kind of attention, a man tracking something from the corner of his eye.
Kenny ate his food and felt something that was not quite peace and was in the direction of it and did not try to name it.
He went back for cornbread.
He thought about Wade saying not every man is like your father. He thought about it and turned it over and thought about the specific quality of someone who delivered a thing simply and then stepped back and let it sit without requiring you to respond to it, the way good things were sometimes delivered, and felt the day sitting in him without trying to sort it.
After supper he went to the barn.
His feet went there. He had stopped calling it a decision.
Ember was at her stall door when he came down the aisle, ears forward, finding him in the low light.
“Before you start,” Kenny said. “I had a day.”
She pushed her nose against his chest.
“Wade talked to me this morning,” he said. He put his hand on the side of her face and she breathed against his palm. “Said something I’ve been thinking about all day.” He rubbed along her jaw. “And then I did the thing I’ve been not doing for three years. And the category didn’t close.”
Ember blinked.
“I know,” Kenny said. “I’m aware of how that reads. I’m also aware that you fought everything when Jax first got you and you’re doing fine now. Not lost on me. Just not applicable.”
He stood there for a while.
“That’s not applicable,” he said again, quieter.
He thought about his father. He thought about Wade. He thought about Jax at the fence on the first night, the tack room story and the warmth of standing close to him and the thing that had moved in Kenny’s chest that he had put in a drawer.
He thought about why that first night kept sitting in him differently than the south barn. The south barn had been physical. Real and present and specific, his body getting what it asked for. But standing at the fence on the first night, Jax had not touched him. Had told him a story about a horse and had stood close enough to register as warmth and had said go to bed, Kenny and had walked back to the bunkhouse without looking back. Nothing had happened. And yet it sat in him in a way that the south barn did not, a way that did not resolve when other things resolved, a way that kept coming back.
He stood in the barn aisle with that thought and felt Ember breathing against his palm and let the night be what it was.
He did not have an answer.
He stayed longer than he meant to.
In the bunkhouse he took the sunglasses off the shelf and turned them over in his hands in the thin light from the window.
Still perfect. Not a scratch. Six days of the ranch on him and the sunglasses still unscratched. He held them and looked at the gold logos catching the dim light and thought about three hundred dollars of armor and what it was doing and what it was not doing.
The categories had stopped working. The filing system had stopped filing. The not that had not closed.
He held the sunglasses and thought about that and thought about what it meant for the version of himself he had been maintaining and thought about his father and about Wade and about not every man is like your father and about whether that applied to himself too, whether not every version of himself was like the version he had been running for three years.
He put the sunglasses back on the shelf.
He was not staying. He was just here. Figuring things out.
The figuring out was getting more complicated. But complicated was different from impossible and he was beginning to understand that difference.
He fell asleep before he finished deciding what to do with it.
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