Caleb had come to the fair alone this year, which was fine. His friends were gone to college already and his parents had stayed home with his sister and he didn’t mind the solitude. He liked the noise when it wasn’t directed at him. He liked moving through a crowd without anyone making claims on his attention.
He was tall and lean from summers baling hay and he wore a faded chambray shirt with the collar open and his hair had gone light at the ends from the sun and he was wandering the livestock barns when the first fat drops of rain came down.
The draft horses in the nearest pen shifted and blew and one of them turned its enormous head toward the smell of the rain coming and Caleb watched it and thought about nothing in particular.
“Storm’s coming in fast.”
He looked over. The man had come up beside him without Caleb noticing, which didn’t usually happen. Dark hair, sharp jaw, a worn black t-shirt that had been washed enough times to go soft. He was looking at the horses, not at Caleb, but there was something in the way he’d said it, low and easy, that wasn’t quite weather talk.
“Lights are gonna look good in the rain,” Caleb said.
The man looked at him then. Something passed between them that was quick and wordless and Caleb felt it in his chest.
“Rowan,” the man said.
“Caleb.”
They stood at the pen rail and talked about nothing important. The new rodeo bull, the ring toss games that had been rigged the same way for twenty years, how the fair never changed and somehow that was the point of it. Rowan had been back in town three days after four years working construction out west and he talked about the town the way someone talks about a place they’ve made their peace with, not warmly but without grievance.
Thunder rolled across the sky and then the blackout hit.
Every light on the grounds died at once. The Ferris wheel groaned and stopped mid-turn. Out on the midway somebody screamed and then a lot of people were talking at once and kids were crying and the generators sputtered and caught nothing and the dark came down complete and immediate.
“Whole town’s going to lose their minds,” Caleb said.
Rowan’s laugh was close in the dark. “Come on. I know a place.”
He moved with confidence through the darkness, his hand touching Caleb’s elbow once to steer him around a puddle, and Caleb followed him past the main barns and through the new mud and around the back of the 4-H building to the old hayloft attached to the rear. The ladder creaked under them as they climbed. At the top the air was sweet and dusty with dried alfalfa and the moonlight came through the high slats in the roof in thin bars that turned everything silver and shadow and indistinct.
They sat on the hay bales against the rough wall. Below them flashlights moved across the fairgrounds like something scattered. Voices carried up on the wind. Someone from the power company was yelling about a transformer. A child was calling for its mother. The distant wail of a siren started up somewhere and then stopped.
“Could be hours,” Rowan said.
Caleb’s heart was going faster than the situation called for. He’d never done anything like this. Hadn’t done much of anything, if he was being straight about it, and definitely not with another man anywhere someone might find him. But the dark felt different from regular dark. It felt like a condition. Like weather.
“You come up here as a kid?” Caleb asked.
“Used to sneak cigarettes up here with my cousin.” Rowan’s shoulder was touching his. “Never brought anyone else.”
The rain started hammering the tin roof and drowned out everything below.
Caleb turned his head. In the near dark he could just make out the line of Rowan’s jaw, the way his throat moved. Rowan was already looking at him.
He reached out slow, giving Caleb every chance to move. His fingers brushed along Caleb’s jaw and his thumb traced his lower lip, just the edge of it, just enough to make Caleb’s breath go shallow.
“Yeah,” Caleb said, before Rowan could ask.
Rowan kissed him careful at first, patient, just his mouth pressing into Caleb’s and waiting. Then Caleb made a sound low in his throat and grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him in and that was the end of careful. Rowan tilted his head and deepened it and tasted like salt and the faint ghost of fair beer and Caleb felt the whole length of the evening behind them, all the small accumulated tension of it, finally resolving into this.
They sank back into the hay together. Rowan’s palm slid under Caleb’s shirt, calloused and warm, and moved over the bare skin of his stomach and his ribs and Caleb arched into it. Rowan’s thumb found his nipple and pressed and Caleb gasped against his mouth.
“You’re sensitive,” Rowan said, low, with something like pleasure in it.
“Shut up,” Caleb said. He didn’t mean it.
Rowan pulled his shirt off and tossed it and then his own and they came back together chest to chest, skin warm and slightly damp in the humid air, and Caleb ran his hands over the hard planes of Rowan’s chest and his stomach and felt the solid reality of him and couldn’t stop.
Rowan kissed down his neck, his collarbone, his sternum, the soft skin below his navel, and Caleb’s hands were in his hair. When Rowan’s fingers reached the button of his jeans he paused and looked up.
Caleb nodded before he finished looking.
The zipper was loud over the rain. Rowan freed him and wrapped a big calloused hand around his cock and stroked him once, slow, root to tip, and the sound Caleb made wasn’t dignified but there was nobody to hear it except Rowan and Rowan looked up at him with dark eyes and did it again.
He worked him with steady confidence, thumb moving over the head on every upstroke, spreading the slickness there, and Caleb lay back in the hay and looked up at the slats of the roof with the thin moonlight coming through and felt the rain on the tin above him and Rowan’s hand on him and felt like the luckiest person at the fair by a significant margin.
He got Rowan’s belt open and got his hand around him and they both went quiet for a moment. Rowan was thick and already hard and warm in his fist and when Caleb stroked him Rowan’s hips pressed forward and his forehead dropped to Caleb’s shoulder.
They worked each other for a while in the dark and the rain, learning what made the other’s breath catch, the pace and the pressure, adjusting. Rowan’s grip on him was loose and knowing. Caleb tightened his fist and felt Rowan exhale against his neck.
Then Rowan pulled back.
He moved down and took Caleb into his mouth and Caleb’s hand flew to his hair and held on. Rowan sucked him deep and slow, one hand on his hip, the other moving between his legs, pressing against his entrance without pushing in, just pressure, just heat, and Caleb felt it through his whole lower body and said Rowan’s name and Rowan hummed around him and Caleb’s legs shook.
He felt it building fast and said so and Rowan pulled off with a wet sound.
“Not yet,” he said.
He crawled back up and kissed him deep and dirty and their cocks slid together between their bodies, slick and hot, and Caleb wrapped his legs around Rowan’s waist and ground up into him and Rowan groaned against his mouth.
He reached into his back pocket and held up a small packet of lube and a condom and looked almost uncertain about it for the first time all night. “I didn’t plan this. Just. Hopeful.”
Caleb laughed, a little loose in the head from want. “Thank god for hopeful.”
Rowan worked him open slow. One finger and then two, patient and careful, kissing him through every adjustment, reading his sounds and going easy when he needed easy and less easy when he didn’t. The hay was soft under Caleb’s back and the rain was loud on the roof and Rowan’s fingers curled inside him and found something that made Caleb’s whole body pull tight and then release.
When Rowan finally rolled the condom on and pressed in it was slow and incremental and Caleb held onto his shoulders and breathed and felt every fraction of the stretch, the burn of it that lived right alongside the pleasure, the fullness that built as Rowan pressed deeper. When he bottomed out they both held still. Their foreheads were touching. The rain hammered the roof.
Then Rowan started to move.
Slow at first. Long rolling thrusts that dragged over the place inside Caleb that Rowan’s fingers had already found and the pleasure of it went up Caleb’s spine and behind his eyes and he stopped being able to think in complete sentences. The hay shifted under them. The old building creaked. Rowan’s low groans came each time Caleb clenched around him and Caleb filed that away and did it deliberately and Rowan’s rhythm broke for a half second and recovered.
“Feel so good,” Rowan said against his neck. His voice had gone rough.
Caleb pulled him down harder by the shoulders. Rowan took the instruction and drove in deeper and Caleb cried out into the dark of the loft, the sound swallowed by the rain.
They found a hard rhythm, urgent and sweat-damp, Rowan’s arm hooked under Caleb’s knee to open him wider and the new angle was devastating and Caleb said don’t stop and meant it like he’d meant few things in his life. Rowan’s hand wrapped around his cock and stroked him in time with his thrusts and Caleb lasted about thirty seconds after that before he came, hard, his whole body seizing up, cock pulsing in Rowan’s fist, a broken sound coming out of him that he’d think about later.
Rowan came a few thrusts behind him, burying himself deep and saying Caleb’s name low and private against his temple, and Caleb felt the pulse of it through the condom and held on.
They lay in the hay while it settled through them. Rowan’s weight was on him and Caleb didn’t want to move. The rain on the roof had started to ease. Below them, generators finally kicked on somewhere and a cheer went up from the crowd.
Caleb laughed against Rowan’s chest. “Power’s back.”
Rowan’s fingers moved slow on his back. “Yep.”
They dressed unhurried, stealing kisses between buttons. Caleb found his shirt in the hay where it had been thrown and shook the alfalfa out of it. They climbed down the ladder into a fairground coming back to noisy life and nobody looked at them twice.
At the edge of the main path Rowan caught his hand briefly. Just a second.
“I’m staying at my uncle’s place on Maple. Cabin behind the barn.” He let go. “If you weren’t done yet.”
Caleb looked at him in the returning light of the fair, the jaw and the dark eyes and the quiet certainty of him, and felt his heart do something simple and decisive.
“I’m not done,” he said.
They didn’t touch again there in the lights. But the thing between them was warm and specific and it held all the way across town.
Rowan was on the porch of the cabin when Caleb came through the dark, two beers in hand, and he looked at Caleb coming up the path with a slow smile that did something to the bottom of Caleb’s stomach.
Inside he pressed him against the door the moment it closed and kissed him like the hayloft had been a beginning and this was the real thing. Caleb grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him back and they stood like that against the door for a while, no hurry, just learning each other in the light this time.
They took it slower here. The old wooden bed creaked under them and the cabin was quiet except for what they made of it, and Rowan took his time moving over every part of Caleb with his mouth and his hands, finding the places he’d found in the dark and others he hadn’t, and Caleb lay there and let himself be taken apart unhurriedly by a man who seemed to find genuine pleasure in the work.
When Rowan pressed into him again it was different from the loft, slower and more deliberate, the urgency gone out of it, and they moved together in the lamplight with their eyes open and Caleb watched Rowan’s face and saw in it something focused and unguarded that he hadn’t expected and that he would carry with him for a long time after.
He came with his face pressed into the side of Rowan’s neck, quiet this time, his whole body shuddering. Rowan followed a minute later with his forehead to Caleb’s and his breath going ragged and soft.
They lay tangled together and the cabin settled around them and outside through the window the county fair lights still glowed against the dark sky.
After a while Rowan traced a finger down Caleb’s spine, just once, just slowly.
“You around tomorrow?”
Caleb looked at the window, the lights out there, the sky above the tree line already starting to show the faintest difference at the eastern edge that meant it was later than it felt.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.”
The lights on the midway pulsed in the dark two miles off, the same lights they’d been coming to every August since they were small, and Caleb lay in the cabin on Maple Street and felt the particular quality of a night that has given you something you didn’t know you were missing, and listened to Rowan breathe beside him, and didn’t sleep for a while, and didn’t mind.
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