When Cal was in the saddle and doing his best to fold the reins properly in his left hand, Zeke was pushing his legs back, his hands busy beneath Cal’s thighs, first one and then the other.
“I’m adjusting the stirrups for the length of your leg,” said Zeke, as if to explain the intimacy of his touch. “You’ve got some long legs.”
“Bronc riding?” asked Cal again.
In the small silence that followed, Cal looked at the woods beyond the paddock, at the way his perception shifted, and he felt tall on horseback. Then he looked down at Zeke.
“I was a bronc rider for many years,” said Zeke, almost as an afterthought, as if this was something he’d forgotten he’d done.
When he looked up at Cal, Cal shrugged.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Bucking horses at the rodeo,” said Zeke. His small smile did not reflect in his eyes. “I busted my leg when a bronc—a horse—fell on me. Had to get out. Came to the ranch and now I’m in the valley.”
The words were terse and short with almost no emotion, and maybe to anyone else they might have sounded casual, as if Zeke were indifferent to everything he’d just said. But Cal knew better. After prison, hell, after Preston, Cal had become rather good at reading between the lines.
“That sounds bad,” said Cal.
Zeke’s expression darkened in a way that Cal couldn’t quite read.
“No, I mean it,” said Cal. Maybe Dusty felt the unsettled moment between them, for he moved beneath Cal in a way that felt like Cal had been rocked violently forward and back, though it was just Dusty shifting his weight. “It sounds like you had a whole life before you came here. Something you really liked doing. Then you got busted up. That’s a huge change.”
“Everything changed,” said Zeke. The words were still terse, but his expression softened, as if he appreciated the fact that someone cared about what happened to him. As if he’d never before had a chance to say anything about it. “Everything.”
Settling his hat on his head, Zeke seemed to pull himself together. He gave Dusty a pat on his neck, and then he gave Cal a pat on his thigh as his gaze traveled over both of them.
“Let me walk you around a time or two,” he said. “Then I’ll let you take the reins. How does that sound?”
“That sounds fine,” said Cal, though he wasn’t in any way ready to guide Dusty on his own. Still, they were in a closed paddock, and Zeke was right there, so how bad could it get?
It didn’t get very bad, and in fact it turned out to be fun. Zeke was patient with him and at the end of the lesson, by late afternoon, Cal had almost managed to get Dusty up to a canter without Zeke clicking his teeth at Dusty.
The problem came when Cal had to dismount and his legs had turned to jelly when he wasn’t looking. and again Zeke hauled him to his feet with strong arms and a patient manner.
“Let’s unsaddle and groom Dusty,” said Zeke. “Then you can hit the showers before dinner because you’re all covered in horsehair.”
“You’recovered in horsehair, too,” said Cal, making what to him was an obvious observation.
But Zeke just shrugged, as if the horsehair on him didn’t matter, and together they unsaddled and groomed Dusty and wiped down the saddle and bridle and put the grooming tools away. After they put the green halter on Dusty and gave him a horse cookie, fed to him from Cal’s studiously flat palm, they released Dusty into the paddock.
“You’re covered in horsehair,” said Cal again as he watched Zeke close and secure the supply shed. A few parolees had arrived and were tossing flakes of hay into the pasture and fiddling with the water tanks, where silver streams of water were now pouring out from wide hoses.
“You go ahead, Cal,” said Zeke. “I need to make sure of what those fellows are doing.”
“Okay,” said Cal, swallowing down the sense of disappointment that the afternoon was well and truly over. He’d learned a lot but more, the interaction, Zeke’s attention, had buoyed him up in a way he’d not experienced in a long, long time.
Zeke was already walking away and there was nothing for Cal to do but head to his tent and grab his shower things and head to the showers, as instructed. Again, he appreciated the warm stream and the privacy and the way everything was high end and gleamed.
Beneath the spray of the shower, and even before he lathered up, he folded his arms against the shower wall and buried hisface in them and pretended he was standing beneath a warm rain. A rain that let him imagine he wasn’t feeling what he was feeling.
It was foolish. After prison, after Preston, Cal knew better than to mistake kindness for affection. Knew better than to let himself be drawn into the shadow of a man who held more power than he did.
And yet Zeke’s patience made him feel brave and capable. Zeke’s smile warmed him up from the inside. Zeke’s touch?—
Zeke’s touch filled all the cold, lonely places inside of him that had ached for tenderness for years and years. He was a stone-cold junkie for touches like that. A warm palm on his thigh. Guiding fingers on his around thick, sun-warmed reins. A smile of encouragement. A low glimmer of approval in those bright green eyes.
Cal was starving for all of those things, and had been for ages, but now his body, his soul, had been awakened to the fact that he’d been starving for a long time and now he was ravenous.
