The peach harvest at Mercer Orchards started every June like it always had, the air going thick and sweet with ripening fruit and the rows stretching out long and green under the Georgia sun that didn’t ask permission before it got serious. Eli had worked three harvests now. He was lean and sun-browned with sandy hair that went lighter by mid-June and a quick smile that hid how much he thought about things after the fact. He needed the money this year more than the last two. His truck was held together by habit and the college bills weren’t getting smaller.
Mateo showed up the first morning looking like he’d been put together with some particular purpose in mind. Tall, dark-haired, broad through the shoulders from years of work that had left its record on his hands and his back and the quiet way he moved through a job. He’d just come off two years on a cattle ranch in West Texas and he’d taken the bunkhouse room behind the packing shed and the crew had called him Matty from the second day.
Eli called him Mateo. Mostly to see what he’d do.
What he did was look at him with dark eyes and say nothing, which turned out to be more effective than any response would have been.
They were paired from the start. Same row, same ladder, same crates, same sun. By the second week something had already started, though neither of them had named it or intended to.
It started the way these things start, with a look held a beat too long. A brutally hot Wednesday afternoon, late, the two of them alone at the far end of the orchard with the rest of the crew already back at the shed. Mateo wiped his face with the hem of his shirt and exposed a strip of tan stomach and Eli looked at it and didn’t look away fast enough.
“You gonna stare or help me with this crate,” Mateo said.
Eli stepped in close to grab the other side. Too close. Their arms touched and neither moved away and when the crate was loaded onto the trailer Mateo’s hand rested low on Eli’s back for a moment that was one moment longer than a working man’s hand needed to be there.
That was Wednesday.
Friday night most of the crew went to town and Eli and Mateo sat on the edge of Mateo’s bunk sharing a warm beer with the overhead fan doing nothing useful to the humid air. They were laughing about the foreman’s terrible sense of humor and then Mateo’s hand was on Eli’s thigh, just resting there, and Eli looked at it and then looked at him and his heart was going.
“Just messing around,” Eli said. “Right.”
“Yeah,” Mateo said. His voice was low. “Just messing around.”
Then he kissed him, hard and hungry, like he’d been deciding to for a week and had finished deciding. Eli kissed him back and grabbed his shirt and pulled him in and their clothes came off in a graceless rush and they got each other off right there on the narrow bunk, clumsy and desperate and better than anything Eli had done in his twenty-one years. When they were done Mateo wiped them both down with an old towel and said it again. Just messing around.
Eli nodded. Obviously.
They kept saying it all summer.
Early mornings before the crew arrived Eli would find Mateo behind the packing shed in the gray light before sunrise. Mateo would push him back against the weathered boards and drop to his knees without ceremony and take him into his mouth and Eli would press the back of his hand against his own mouth and look up at the sky going pink above the tree line and try to breathe. Mateo sucked him with his full attention, slow and thorough, one hand on his hip, and Eli’s free hand would find his hair and hold on and he’d say his name low enough that only the orchard heard it.
In the afternoons when the heat made the work slow they found reasons to take the far rows. Handjobs in the shade with the peaches forgotten in half-filled crates, both of them quiet and efficient about it, Mateo’s calloused hand sure and practiced on him, Eli working him in return until Mateo’s head dropped back against the tree and his jaw went tight.
Once at dusk Mateo bent him over the tailgate of the old farm truck at the edge of the property with the cicadas going loud in every direction and the sky going dark purple and orange over the tree line and fucked him slow and deep while Eli held onto the truck bed with both hands and felt each long stroke all the way through his chest. He came so hard his arms gave out and afterward they both laughed, breathless and sticky, and said their line.
Just messing around.
It stopped feeling like just messing around sometime in the middle of July.
They started sleeping in the same bunk most nights. Not every night, just when the want got loud enough that the distance between their bunks felt unreasonable. Mateo would pull him in against his chest and wrap his arms around him and Eli would lie there in the dark listening to the fan and Mateo’s breathing slow down and feel something he was not examining closely.
In the mornings they’d be two guys who got along. Joking, shoving each other in line for the coffee, working hard. The crew saw two people who worked well together. Nobody looked further than that.
One Saturday in early August after a long day and too much cheap whiskey at a bonfire down by the river they came back to the bunkhouse while the others were still out and Mateo walked him straight into the shower stall and crowded him under the lukewarm spray. They kissed like they were making up for something, open and messy, the water running down their faces. Mateo was hard against him and Eli pulled him closer by the hips.
Mateo pressed in slow against the tiled wall with Eli’s leg hooked over his hip and the water running between their bodies and they moved together in the steam and the noise of it and neither of them said the line afterward. They just stood there with their foreheads together while the water went cold and then colder.
Later, lying on the bunk with the sheet tangled around them, Eli traced a finger down the center of Mateo’s chest and said, quietly, “This still just messing around?”
Mateo was quiet long enough that Eli heard the fan make several full rotations.
“Yeah,” Mateo said finally. His voice caught on it just slightly, just enough.
Neither of them believed it.
The last two weeks of harvest were brutal the way the end of harvest always was, the peaches ripening fast and the hours running long and everyone tired to the bone. They still found time. Behind the barn at lunch. In the cab of the tractor after dark. Once in the walk-in cooler between crates of peaches, both of them shivering and laughing while they got each other off against the cold metal shelving, breath coming out in visible puffs, the absurdity of it making it better somehow.
But something in the quality of it had changed. The kisses went softer. The touches stayed longer. Mateo started saying baby when they were alone, the word slipping out the way a word slips out when it’s been there a while waiting, and Eli would hear it and feel it in his chest and say nothing and press his face into Mateo’s neck and breathe.
He was falling in love. He was not saying that out loud.
The last day of harvest the orchard threw its cookout the way it always did. The crew ate barbecue and drank beer and somebody had a speaker going. Eli and Mateo stayed until the end and then walked away together as the sun went down into the tree line, orange and purple bleeding out across the sky, the air still warm but changed, something in it that said the summer knew it was finishing.
They went deep into the orchard past the last rows where the trees grew older and thicker and the grass was long between them. Mateo stopped under a heavy tree and turned and pulled Eli in and kissed him slow. No urgency to it. Just his mouth on Eli’s mouth and his hands on his face and Eli holding the front of his shirt and the orchard going quiet around them.
They spread the old blanket Mateo had brought on the ground and lay down together in the failing light.
Mateo undressed him slowly, his hands moving over Eli’s shirt buttons one at a time, and Eli lay back and let him and watched his face, the concentration in it, the way his eyes moved over him like he was memorizing it. He kissed down Eli’s chest and his stomach and his hips and took his time getting back up, learning everything he already knew again, and Eli’s hands moved through his hair and over his shoulders and he stopped thinking about what he was and wasn’t going to say.
Mateo worked him open with careful fingers, patient and thorough, using the small packet they’d started carrying weeks ago, watching Eli’s face and going slow, and Eli lay in the grass under the peach trees with the last of the light coming through the leaves overhead and felt himself open up and let go of the thinking entirely.
When Mateo finally pressed in it was slow and deep and they both went still for a moment at the fullness of it, the rightness. Mateo’s forehead dropped to Eli’s. Both of them breathing.
Then he started to move.
Long deep strokes that built gradually, Mateo’s weight settled over him, Eli’s legs around his waist, and every thrust felt like something being said that neither of them had been able to say with words. Mateo buried his face in Eli’s neck and Eli felt his mouth moving there, felt the words against his skin, so good, need you, been going crazy all summer, and Eli held onto his back with both hands and felt his eyes go wet and didn’t care.
He came first, untouched, his whole body pulling tight and releasing in long waves, saying Mateo’s name to the darkening sky. Mateo followed a few strokes behind him, pressing in deep and saying Eli’s name the way a man says the one word that covers everything, and Eli felt the pulse of it inside him and held on.
They stayed connected for a long time. The orchard was dark now, the sky above the leaves going from purple to deep blue to the first black of evening. An owl started up somewhere in the older trees. The air had gone ten degrees cooler and smelled like grass and fruit and the two of them.
Mateo pulled back eventually and looked at him in the dark.
“I don’t want this to be just messing around anymore,” he said.
Eli looked at him. The dark eyes and the jaw and the serious expression of a man who has made up his mind and knows how much it costs.
He reached up and moved a strand of hair off Mateo’s forehead.
“Me neither,” he said.
Mateo smiled, small and real and relieved in a way that made something in Eli’s chest settle into place like a piece of furniture that had been sitting in the wrong spot all summer.
He leaned down and kissed him soft and easy and tasted like peaches and the whole of the summer and something that was just beginning.
They lay out there a while longer under the old trees while the stars came out one at a time above them, neither of them talking much, Mateo’s hand moving slow on Eli’s back. The sounds of the party had faded out entirely. The orchard was just the orchard again, old and dark and indifferent, the trees full of fruit that had already been picked, the season done.
The last trucks rolled out the next morning loaded with crates and the crew stood around saying their goodbyes in the way of people who will scatter and not think much about each other until next June. Eli and Mateo stood side by side and watched them go.
The lot emptied out. The foreman’s truck was last, disappearing around the bend at the end of the drive, and then it was just the two of them and the empty orchard and the morning already going warm.
Mateo reached over and linked his fingers through Eli’s. Right there in the open lot with nobody left to see and nobody left not to see.
Eli looked down at their hands and then looked over at him.
Mateo was looking at the empty drive where the trucks had been, easy and settled, like a man who has put something down he’d been carrying too long.
Eli squeezed his hand.
The summer was done. The air already smelled like something different coming. But Eli stood in the orchard lot with Mateo’s hand in his and thought about what the man had said last night and what he’d said back and felt the particular quality of a thing that has stopped being temporary without either of you quite deciding it, the kind of thing that just becomes true while you’re busy pretending otherwise.
He didn’t say any of that. He just held on.
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