At the mess tent, he focused on breakfast. On the good coffee and plentiful, crisply cooked hash browns. After that, he focused on the pasture and the paddock, on gathering horses to give each one a perfect grooming.
While they worked, he kept an eye on Cal, who seemed a little stiff, but was in good spirits in spite of the bruise on his face. When he saw Galen going by with his team, Zeke ducked out of the pasture and pulled Galen to the side of the path.
“Do you have a minute?” asked Zeke.
“Sure,” said Galen. “What’s up?”
Zeke looked around him and then flushed hot that he was being a coward. On more than one occasion, he’d faced down rough, eight-second rides on bucking broncos, so he could do this.
“I keep thinking about what you said last year when you asked me out.” Zeke looked directly at Galen, at his pretty face and wavy hair, those bright, intelligent eyes. “When you thought I was gay.”
“I didn’t think you were gay, necessarily,” said Galen, quite slowly. “I mean, I did, a little, but I asked you out because I had a crush on you.”
“On me?” With his palm flattened against his chest, Zeke hardly knew what to make of this statement.
“You’re handsome and smart, and yeah, you did give off a few gay vibes. I don’t know what it was about you. Nothing I can define. Just a feeling.” Galen looked at Zeke with careful eyes. “Why are you asking after all this time?”
This was the hard part. Not just what he was feeling for Cal and about himself, but saying it out loud.
Zeke was not a coward and Galen had been kind when Zeke had turned him down.
It was strange to realize that he valued things like kindness and morning snuggles after the rain had stopped, after being a pretty rough and tumble bronc rider for so many years. But he did. All he had to do was admit it out loud, and then he could move on with his life, which would have Cal in it.
“I kept thinking about it,” said Zeke after taking a huge breath. “Over and over in my mind. What did it mean. How did I feel about it.” He laughed under his breath and ran his thumb over his lower lip, remembering Cal’s kiss from just hours ago. “I fall in love slow,” he said. “And always with women, only this time—” He shook his head, then waded right into it. “I fell in love with Cal—IthinkI have—and I fell fast. Am I crazy? Is this normal for a man to switch it up like that?”
Galen smiled at Zeke, a low, private smile as though Zeke had finally stumbled upon a secret that everybody else already knew. But no matter what Galen said, whatever his response, Zeke knew that what he’d said was true. He’d fallen for Cal in so many ways that all of his feelings spun around inside of him.
“How do I know it’s real?” he asked, feeling a little desperate.
“It’s real because you feel it,” said Galen. “I saw something in you that made me feel like you might say yes if I asked you out. And maybeyou’reseeing it now, as well.” He paused. “What matters is how you feel about each other. And to hell with thenon-fraternization rule. Leland doesn’t follow it, which makes it null in my book.”
“As long as it doesn’t get in the way of the program, the work,” said Zeke.
“As long as it doesn’t,” said Galen in agreement. “Whatever happens is between you and him. Whatever you guys want it to be. There’s no rule book, unfortunately.”
There was no rule book. Zeke knew that. Which meant that he needed to think about this in a different way. He needed to focus on how he felt about Cal, and how Cal seemed to feel about him.
Cal was the one he needed to be talking to. And once they did that, and after the summer was over, and the Fresh Start Program had drawn to conclusion, he and Cal would be free to do whatever they wanted.
“You’re a classy guy, Zeke,” said Galen as he looked over his shoulder to where his men were patiently waiting. “You’re not going to make a bad decision about this. It’s not in you.”
“Thanks,” said Zeke, rather faintly as he watched Galen march off to whatever tasks awaited him and his team. He had the answer he wanted, and maybe he’d known the answer all along.
Nerves rolled in his belly, like the time he and Betty Lou went to the mall to pick out rings. But it felt better now that he’d talked with Galen. It buoyed him up and settled him at the same time.
Still, he wanted to make a gesture. A courtship gesture, because that’s the kind of man he was. Maybe he couldn’t say the words out loud, maybe he couldn’t discuss his feelings in plain words, at least not just yet. But he could make a gesture, something sincere and sweet.
He was an old-fashioned man, and that’s how things were done. But what kind of gesture?
It was that afternoon when a truck and a flatbed full of hay bales showed up that he got his answer. Work was like that. He could focus on the physical labor, the eight-second ride or, in this case, the heavy work of shifting the hay bales, crisp and green and new, to a spot just outside the wire of the pasture, and the answer would come to him.
The rain started coming down. Zeke was at the head of the line to grab each bale, leather gloves curled around the bailing wire, hefting it to toss the bale down so someone could grab it and lug it to the growing pile.
They had to hurry on the count of the rain might spoil the hay. It needed to be covered before it got too wet, when the idea struck him. He’d borrow a truck after dinner, and head into town to the bodega off Main Street. The bodega in Farthing carried a bit of everything, including bouquets of flowers.
He didn’t think Cal would laugh at him when Zeke handed him a small nosegay, something that smelled nice and looked bright, wrapped in thin green paper with a bit of stiff ribbon hanging down.
But fate had other ideas for him because when he jumped down from the trailer, just as the last bale had been piled and the whole stack covered with a large tarp, he caught his foot on something.
