Four of the horses, Gabe and Quint earmarked to sell to beginning riders in the area. The last horse, a thin gelding with a scraggly mane, didn’t even make it as far as being saddled up. He threw up his head, hand shy, eyes rolling as he tried to jerk his head out of Gabe’s grasp.
“Oh, sweet one,” said Gabe to the horse, as if he were alone and didn’t have an audience of three astonished men to hear him speaking to the horse as if it was a baby. “Who did this to you?”
“I expect he’s getting picked on by other horses,” said Quint. “You guys don’t have stalls to separate them into, but if we build that—”
“We might as well build a barn,” said Gabe, petting the horse quite gently with his bare hand, having taken the glove off and stuffed it in his pocket. “Maybe it’ll come to that, even if we take it down before the next season starts. What do you reckon, Quint?”
Gabe was asking about the destination of the horse, what they should do with it.
“He needs somewhere quiet where he can graze and not get picked on,” said Quint. “With someone who’ll make sure he gets his fair share. Someone who’ll groom that mane of his back into being pretty again.”
“Mrs. Tate sometimes takes horses in,” said Gabe. “Maybe we could ask her.”
They helped Quint haul his gear back to the truck, and even though all Gabe wanted to do after he watched Quint drive off was to pull Blaze to one side so they could share a quiet word together about what was to happen next, he knew the horses needed taking care of. Then he needed a shower, hopefully before dinner, but maybe Blaze did as well, so maybe that was when—
“Boss,” said Wayne with a cavalier wave. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Sounds good,” said Gabe, and then Blaze was standing in front of him, almost blocking his way. Gabe could easily have gone around, of course, but he didn’t want to and was grateful for the excuse of watching Wayne walk away, leaving them alone.
“Shall we groom?” asked Gabe, for the horses still needed caring for, even after their short ride. Still, he now had time alone with Blaze and hadn’t the faintest idea what to say.
“Sure.”
Gabe grabbed a bucket and put some grooming supplies into it from where they’d been stored beneath a canvas tarp.
“We need a shed for all this gear,” said Gabe as he took the halter off the smallest gelding, the one with the raggedy mane, and looped the lead through one of his belt loops. Then he handed Blaze a body brush and between them, they brushed the horse down.
The gelding seemed particularly fond of the way Blaze smelled, snuffing amidst his pockets as if he might find a lump of sugar or something he might like.
“I guess we could build a shelter of sorts, as well,” he said to Blaze over the horse’s back, hoping for a response. “Do you know carpentry?”
Blaze shook his head no, then paused, his hands resting the brush on the horse’s narrow withers. “Bet I could learn, though,” he said. “I know how to drive a dump truck now, so I can learn anything.”
There was a tease in those eyes, a flicker of silver in green, a toss of dark hair, and Gabe, drawn in, leaned close, as if to whisper a secret, and was rewarded by a kiss of soft lips.
“Let’s hurry this up,” said Blaze. “Then we can go off on our own.”
Gabe didn’t gasp, but his indrawn breath almost choked him. “Sure,” he said, wishing they were done. Wishing they had something to stand on rather than an uncertain future, with a separation at the end of summer the only sure thing. “Sure.”
They had their own little bubble, but for how long? Next week, Royce would show up to fill his role as team lead, along with an unknown number of parolees. The bubble couldn’t last if they were surrounded by other people, intruders into the small dream that had taken root in Gabe’s heart, keeping him warm inside. Which raised the question, should they even be doing this, him and Blaze?
Chapter23
Blaze
Blaze could feel Gabe’s withdrawal as they sat at dinner. The three of them, Wayne and him on one side, Gabe on the other, were silent like a very small family who had run out of conversation. At the Butterworth trailer, conversation, the lack of silence, anyway, had never been a problem because one of them always had something to say, and Blaze had typically joined in just to keep up, sometimes having to shout to be heard.
In the group counseling session earlier that afternoon, as Blaze and Wayne sat around a table in the mess tent, Bob or Ted or whatever the counselor’s name was, had tried to encourage the two of them to talk about how they processed their feelings. About how to communicate those feelings. How to let the feelings move through your body without stopping them, and other happy crappy stuff like that.
Blaze had done his best to stumble through the exercise so as not to piss the counselor off, but he’d fallen into silence, just the same. A silence much like this one, where the only sounds were faraway-seeming chatter of the two cooks in the kitchen hut in back of the tent, the clank of silverware on white china, the faraway rush of the wind in the trees, bird call.
“What will happen to the little horse?” asked Blaze, a sense of desperation filling him to fill the silence.
“Dog food factory, I’ll bet,” said Wayne with a grunt, polishing a dark smear of A-1 sauce from his plate with a bit of bread.
“No, that won’t happen.” Gabe wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, then folded it on his plate. Maybe he wasn’t meeting Blaze’s gaze on purpose, or maybe he was just focused on setting Wayne straight. Either way, he wasn’t looking at Blaze atall.
“Leland’s policy on this project is a home for every horse. Even the skinny ones. Mrs. Tate, that’s his mom, has a pasture out back of her house that’s five, maybe ten, acres. We’ll take the little horse there. That’ll give him time to fatten up, then we can decide where he’ll go.”
