Chapter 3 #2
He glanced back when Emerson didn’t respond. He still stood on the other side of the gate, a hand on top of the fence post. His eyes bounced to Luca’s and then immediately away, as if he’d been caught looking at something he shouldn’t have. Luca wondered if Emerson had been checking out his ass.
He’d never had a man check out his ass while holding a basket of fresh eggs before.
He didn’t mind it.
Your boss, he tried to remind himself. Possibly not quite sternly enough. You want this man to be your boss.
“Yeah.” Emerson cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s the thought. Even though they’re a mess.”
Luca doubted it. The paths were a little rough and tumble, sure; the fields the goats and the hens and Sally the cow grazed in a bit wild.
But it was a working farm. Luca thought this was probably how it was all supposed to look.
Certainly didn’t appear the total mess Emerson had made it sound like back at the bar, at least not to Luca.
“Let’s go look, then.”
“At the wildflower fields? It’s a bit more of a walk. And it’s getting kind of late.”
“It’s August in Oregon.” Luca shrugged. Daylight seemed to last forever, sometimes, during a Pacific Northwest summer. “We’ve got another hour at least.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Emerson took a few sloping steps back to the barn. Luca watched him place his basket of eggs on a shelf before he returned, latching the gate behind them.
A kind of bubbly lightness filled Luca’s chest when they walked side by side again. He was relieved Emerson had said yes. That there was more to explore.
With a jolt of something like surprise, Luca realized he was having fun.
It had maybe been too long since he’d had fun, if its sudden appearance felt so startling.
How many minutes had gone by since he’d thought about pathetic spreadsheets on his computer? The spreadsheets that had been the reason he’d headed to the brewery tonight in the first place.
But this was better.
Sure, once upon a time, he’d dreamed of…
not this. Leaving the family business in a different way.
Spending all his time off a boat and inside that cabin of his, with only his thoughts and a blinking cursor.
Safe and warm and free to write whatever he wanted to write, to disappear into the worlds he’d spent so long creating.
The worlds where he felt most alive, most himself. To live however he wanted to live.
But then the spreadsheets had come into it.
No. This would be better. Still being outside, keeping his body occupied, mind quiet. He sensed it in his bones with each step he took on Emerson’s farm. The rightness of it.
This could be his fresh start. His time, finally, to move forward. Not just from fishing. But from fucking all of it. His own delusional head.
He’d do what he could to keep this.
“So you’re a beekeeper too,” he said, taking a few quick shuffles to keep up with Emerson’s strides.
“Eh,” Emerson replied. “An amateur one.” And then, a small self-deprecating laugh. “I’m an amateur at all this, really.”
Luca looked around as they walked up the dirt road toward a tree line in the distance.
“Doesn’t look very amateurish to me. How long’ve you been here?”
“Four years,” Emerson answered after a beat. Another stretch of silence hung in the air until he added, “Feels longer, though.”
“Makes sense,” Luca said. He’d always wondered how time passed for folks who had regular jobs, tasks that weren’t dependent on the finicky cycles of the sea or the land, the whims of a changing Earth. Some fishing seasons felt like decades.
“Up here,” Emerson said next. “I’m thinking Ben and Lex will probably want to get married up here.”
Luca and Emerson crested a small hill. And shit.
Of course a person would want to get married here.
Life stretched out before them: wildflowers and high grasses, golden in the light, almost as far as Luca could see. The velvety hills of the Coastal Range rose behind them. Insects buzzed all around; birdsong filtered across the expanse.
Luca didn’t know the names of any of it: the flowers, the birds. But he knew how it felt to be there.
“Wow,” he said. Insufficient with his words, as always.
“I eventually want to harvest up here, too,” Emerson said.
“Get on a better rotation schedule for the crops. My ex always wanted to turn this into his fall festival fantasy.” A warm, wistful look stole over his face.
“A corn maze, a pumpkin patch. I don’t know.
That’ll probably never happen here, not like he imagined it, but crops like that, that need more space.
I’d be interested in trying that sometime, up here. ”
Like anyone, Luca couldn’t deny the comfort of a corn maze or a pumpkin patch. But right now, looking at the bounty in front of them, the riot of color, the natural wildness of it—Luca couldn’t picture this place being anything but this.
“For now, though,” Emerson finished, “it works for the bees.”
“Right,” Luca said, still feeling a bit stunned, a bit humbled. This man tended all of this. “Where are those?”
“Those boxes, back there.”
Luca followed the direction of Emerson’s gesture. He could just barely make out the small mountain of boxes Emerson referred to.
“Do you wear one of those white suits when you harvest the honey?” he asked after a moment. “Or do you just bare knuckle it?”
Although as soon as he’d asked—
Seriously now, how did either possibility seem sexy?
Emerson released another tiny laugh.
“I, uh—” He shook his head. “I have a suit, yeah.”
Luca recalled Emerson tenderly caressing a leaf of lettuce.
The way he’d smiled down at the eggs in his basket, called them pretty.
Even the way he’d stared at Matt in the bar had been obvious but somehow politely restrained.
Luca could fill in the unspoken words. I’m not the kind of guy to stick my bare hand into a beehive.
But maybe all farmers were a mixture of soft and hard. Maybe you needed both to get the job done.
And either way, Emerson still stuck his arm inside a buzzing beehive.
“Badass,” Luca assessed.
Another small laugh. Luca was already starting to grow a little addicted to it. Complimenting Emerson, digging under his skin a bit. Making him laugh.
It was okay, probably. Making his boss laugh.
“Anyway.” Emerson scratched the back of his neck. “The fields work for the bees, but it’s gonna take some doing to make it wedding-ready.”
Luca opened his mouth to respond, then closed it, looking at the field again. Where…there wasn’t space for a person to walk at all, really.
“You can just mow a bunch of this down, though, right?” The thought hurt Luca’s heart, but there would still be plenty of wildflowers left over.
“Potentially, but—gotta make sure I do it the right way. For the soil, and to make sure it looks…pretty, for everyone. For a hundred people I don’t know. Anyway.” Emerson turned, started walking back the way they came. “It’ll get done.”
Luca caught up to him. They ambled down the hill, gaits easy, almost in sync.
“How many acres you have here?”
“Twelve. Only have about four of them in active use so far, though. Only two cultivated into permanent beds, the ones we walked through earlier.”
“That’s still a decent amount of acres.”
“Yeah.” Their feet clomped over the hard earth.
Another small Emerson laugh. “If anything it’s too much.
The technical term for what I have going here is a small-acreage microfarm.
Or if you want to sound fancy, a regenerative market farm, or a diversified biointensive farm, or other words that mean producing a variety of things without chemicals or heavy duty equipment.
I don’t own a tractor that could plow that whole field down; that’s not how it works here.
No matter what you call this place, though…
doesn’t feel so small to me, most days.”
“You probably don’t ever get bored, though.”
Luca had hoped that one would earn another mini-laugh, another huff of semi-amused air; he felt a swell of pride when it did.
“No, can’t say I often feel that exact adjective. Farming’ll make you feel a bunch of other ones, though.” And then, almost off-hand: “I’ll show you the barn they want to have the reception in later.”
“Different from the barn with the chickens and Sally?”
“Yeah. I’d never be able to get the smell out of that one for a wedding. But there’s an even older one, back there by the trees. It’s…kind of falling apart.” Emerson scratched the back of his neck again. “Ben seemed to think it’ll work. I don’t know.”
“You really don’t have any other help here?” Luca asked after another stretch of silence.
“No, I do. I have some summer hires, though they’ve left for the season now. You’ll meet Jansel, though, my one full-time farmhand. He knows what he’s doing. I’d be lost without him.”
You’ll meet Jansel. I’ll show you the barn later.
Something warm and hazy, like fresh honey, stirred in Luca’s belly.
This was really happening. Emerson was going to let him do this.
“How hard will Jansel judge me for not knowing what I’m doing?”
Another soft laugh. “He won’t. Not at all.”
Sally’s barn came into view. The lengthy produce beds. The house across from them, the windshields of their cars gleaming in the setting sun.
Emerson’s feet came to a stop before they’d quite reached the drive. He looked into the distance, toward his wishful orchard.
Luca waited, his stomach clenching for the first time all night. Maybe he’d been wrong. He didn’t think Emerson would back out now, but—
“I feel like I still don’t know anything about you,” Emerson said.
And there it was. Luca had been enjoying it, learning about the farm. Pretending no one had to know anything about Luca at all.
“Other than…you’re a fisherman? Or your family are fishermen? Is that why you came to the bar, too? To feel depressed about your chosen profession?”
Luca released a quiet sigh, joining Emerson in his contemplation of the horizon.
The truth was two-pronged, but neither path would do for explaining out loud.
He didn’t want to tell his potential employer that maybe he had come to the brewery to find a good fuck.
He’d needed a distraction, and his sexual well had run rather dry since Dell McCleary dumped his unserious ass almost a year ago now.
Although, if he was more honest about it, it wasn’t the lack of sex that bothered him the most. He was…
lonely, he supposed, a deep-boned feature of his life that hadn’t been cured by two years of intermittently sleeping with Dell.
If anything, Luca had always thought they worked so well because they could be obviously lonely together. The loss of it still stung.
And so even if the feeling wasn’t new, and even if another night with Matt wasn’t exactly what he’d been looking for either, it was a truth universally acknowledged that being around a flirty queer bartender in a place that could use more of them—well, it helped.
Luca had seen it broadcast across Emerson’s face, too, the moment he’d seen him.
And he certainly wouldn’t tell Emerson the main thing that had propelled him to the bar tonight, the reason he’d desired a distraction so badly. A milestone so embarrassing he wouldn’t have told Dell about it either.
Earlier this afternoon, Luca had received his hundredth rejection. A bleak milestone on his spreadsheet he had been both steadily chugging toward and dreading for years. One hundred literary agents had rejected the manuscript he’d been working on since he was fourteen.
And if that wasn’t a sign he needed to finally change his fucking life, he didn’t know what was.
“No,” he eventually said, getting down to the bare bones of it all. “The problem with fishing is that it’s never been what I’ve chosen at all.”
Emerson looked at him then. A slanted, curious but kind look, one brow furrowed down, the other lifting in the corner.
“And farming would be?”
A fair question, if still one that had Luca shifting his eyes away. Maybe Luca had never contemplated farming until two hours ago, but maybe it didn’t matter. This was a good option. Writing sure as hell wasn’t going to get him out of fishing. It was time to give up the ghost.
“Could be,” he eventually answered, and hoped Emerson knew how much he meant it. How much he wanted it to be true.
I feel like I still don’t know anything about you, Emerson had said.
But they’d had a beer together. Had just spent a decent amount of time walking this land, while largely being silent.
These days, a beer and some silence was a lot for Luca to share with a person. He rather thought Emerson probably knew him as well as anyone else did.
Emerson only regarded him a minute more before he shrugged, looking once more toward the golden fields of his land.
“Sounds good enough for me. When could you start?”