Cole
Sex coach.It was a terrible choice of words and perhaps the most ridiculous proposition that had ever left my mouth, but as I watched Toby mull it over, I didn’t regret it. My first queer experiences had come in the form of painful teenage fumbling, and I was glad he’d missed all that. I was a committed pansexual, but there was something magic about the alchemy between men when that shit went right. Toby needed that. He deserved it. And if there were two things in this life I knew I was good at, it was teaching and fucking.
Not that I’d ever combined the two.
“Where would we do it?”
Toby’s soft question brought me back to the present. I forced myself to back up from him even more and reclaimed my perch on the bar. “You can come over to my place when Ella’s not there. I mean, you can come over any time, but for this, only when I can give you my full attention.”
Toby swallowed. I watched his throat work and imagined all the dirty things we could do together if that was something he ever wanted. He was so fucking gorgeous. Everything about him, inside and out. Being around him made me feel like a better man. Perhaps he had much to teach me too.
Contemplating that was distracting. So much so, that I missed Toby speaking again. “Sorry, what?”
Toby blushed, deep and pure. “I said, why would you want to do this with me?”
“Why?”
“Yeah.Why?It’s not like it’s going to be good for you.”
“Are you—what?” Was that even a question? And then it hit me. Toby didn’t need teaching about sex, he needed to learn about himself. All I could do was give him a little confidence along the way. Or at least try. Toby was a young man who would never know how beautiful he was, even if I told him every time I put my hands on him. But I’d tell him anyway.
“Toby,” I said slowly. “If you truly don’t get how good anythingyoudo will be for me, the sooner we start our lessons, the better.”
* * *
Toby
“...the sooner we start our lessons, the better.”
It was a surreal statement, and, as ever with Cole, I was half-convinced it was a joke. Especially as we’d parted ways after he’d said it and hadn’t crossed paths since. We’d exchanged numbers, though, and I was as jumpy as a newborn foal every time my phone buzzed with a message.
Which wasn’t all that often, given that I left my phone on silent in the farmhouse all day, as per farm rules.
“You been dipping your wick somewhere you shouldn’t?” George remarked when I excused myself to the toilet for the fourth time. “Sounds like you’ve got a problem with your waterworks.”
I rolled my eyes and jogged back to the house. Joe was lurking in the kitchen, so I grabbed my phone from my coat pocket in the hallway and ducked into the cloakroom. It was the oldest phone in the world, cracked and dusty. I didn’t usually pay it much attention, but the message notifications lighting up the screen made my heart skip a thousand beats.
Shame the messages were from my sister.
Scowling, I hit delete without reading them. She’d call the farm if it was important, or even if it wasn’t.
I left the cloakroom and dropped my phone in the vicinity of my coat. It had begun to rain while I’d been glaring at my phone, and George was on his way in from the donkey paddocks. “I’m not breaking my back hammering those posts when it’s pissing down. It’s secure enough.”
It wasn’t. The donkeys were the cleverest animals I’d ever known. If there was a weakness in the fence, they’d find it. But there was no reasoning with George when he took to a bad mood. He only still worked on the farm because he refused to retire and because he knew more about horses than the rest of us would ever know.
I trudged back outside to finish fixing the fence. The rain was coming down in big fat drops, and I was soon soaked to the skin. There was nothing more disgusting than wet, muddy jeans clinging to my legs. I wrangled with the last fence post, resigned to the fact that I was going to be soggy for the rest of the day, even if the rain stopped.
Someone shouted my name.
I looked up. Joe was standing by the paddock gate as wet as me.
“I’ve got to go out,” he said. “The police have got a mare tied up in a car park in Redruth. Can you get the emergency stall ready? She’ll need drying out and a soft feed.”
“Of course.” I hopped over the gate, already on my way.
“I’ve left you some dry clothes in the kitchen,” Joe called after me. “Take a break when you’re done, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
