Chapter Two
~ Macon ~
Three months is long enough for memory to rot at the edges, but not nearly long enough to forget the taste of someone you shouldn’t have touched in the first place.
I woke up with my hand clenched around nothing. Just air, which is colder than flesh, colder than the half-remembered pressure of Carter’s thigh under my palm.
My sheets were damp, darkened with sweat that had nowhere to go in the old farmhouse bedroom, and the pillow beside me was cratered like I’d spent half the night wrestling ghosts.
Sunlight slid between the ragged curtains, throwing prison-stripe shadows across the ceiling beams. I stared at the ceiling until my heart stopped tripping over itself, then flexed my fingers, one by one, counting them back into submission.
Five, four, three, two, one. I’d learned the trick in a Baghdad safe house, trying to stop my hands from shaking before a breach.
It didn’t work as well with memories as it did with rifles.
The next step was always the same: roll out of bed, right foot first. Stand up slow, in case vertigo decided to pull a sneak attack. I planted my feet on the faded pine boards and sat there a minute, elbows on knees, breathing through the sour, metallic aftertaste of the nightmare.
The dream always started the same. Carter’s laugh echoing in the barn, soft like rain, the way it had sounded when I made that first stupid joke about goat pheromones.
Then the barn went silent, and the only thing left was the weight of his body—small but relentless—pressed up against me on the hay mat. Then thunder, louder than God, and Rawley’s voice cracking the world open with my name.
That last part never happened in real life. Which is why, when I actually left Carter curled up under the horse blanket, hair wild and mouth parted in sleep, I’d moved so goddamn quiet I could’ve ghosted through a minefield.
I was out the barn door before sunrise, heart hammering so hard it nearly tore a seam in my chest.
And for three months, I’d kept up that pace. Hauling fence posts, lugging feed, dry-walling the new tack room, anything that would keep my body moving faster than my head.
The only time I slowed down was in the first five minutes after waking, when Carter’s scent still clung to my skin, when I could almost trick myself into believing he was real, that I hadn’t broken something beyond repair by touching him.
I made myself stand. The world was gray and blue, predawn colors, the kind that trick you into thinking you’ve got a head start on your problems. The floorboards creaked, but no one was awake to hear it except the mice in the walls and the three legged dog Rawley rescued from the Hargrove property line last April.
Jojo adored that damn mutt.
I made it to the washroom on autopilot, undid my fly, pissed in the tin bucket, and then splashed water on my face. The water here always tasted faintly of rust and whatever algae survived the well’s last chemical shock, but at least it was cold.
I let it run over my wrists, then braced both palms against the edge of the ancient porcelain sink and stared at the reflection in the cracked medicine cabinet.
Six-foot-three of fuck-up, thirty-four years old but looking closer to forty.
I’d shaved the beard after Carter left, but the shadow was back within a week.
My eyes were red-rimmed, pupils slow to catch up.
The cut above my eyebrow—courtesy of a low-hanging barn beam I’d lost a fight to last month—was almost healed, but a faint greenish bruise colored the edge of my socket.
I looked every inch the ex-SEAL Rawley hired me to be: reliable muscle, problem solver, no questions asked.
But lately, I was starting to see a trace of something else. That hollowness in my gaze, the kind of vacancy you see in old dogs too tired to bark at the mailman.
I lifted my shirt and checked the bandage on my side, where the splinter had gouged me open last week. Healing fine. No sign of infection, not that I’d do anything about it if there was.
I dressed in the same order as always—thermal, flannel, then the Carhartt jacket, battered and sun-bleached from two years of Montana wind.
The boots went on last, soles still caked with last week’s mud.
My hands shook when I laced them, so I did it slow, thinking about nothing but the over-under of leather through the eyelets.
But there was never really nothing, was there?
Carter’s face hovered behind my eyelids, just like the scent of the hay loft never really left my skin.
I remembered the sound he made when I pressed into him, the gasp he tried to hide with the back of his hand, the way he looked at me when I called him beautiful.
No one ever called him that before, which was a fucking crime.
The look in his eyes when I said it—like he’d just been handed a secret he wasn’t sure he could keep—stuck with me longer than any other part of that night.
If I closed my eyes, I could still feel the curve of his hip under my palm, the way he arched into my grip, needy and desperate and absolutely unashamed. He’d made a mess of himself on my fingers and looked me dead in the eye the whole time, daring me to turn away.
I should have. I should have walked out the second he smiled at me, the second I realized he was the reason I even came to Montana after all these years. I should have run the moment I became infatuated with that photo of Carter that Rawley showed around.
Instead, I stayed. I stayed long enough to mark him, to fill him, to know what it felt like to be wanted by someone who saw all the jagged edges and decided to bleed anyway.
And then I left before he woke up, because I was a coward.
I shook my head, splashed more water over my face, and bit the inside of my cheek until the pain blotted out everything else.
It wasn’t Rawley I was afraid of, not really. It was the idea that maybe I’d ruined the one good thing that ever happened to me. That Carter would never look at me again the way he had in the dark.
I put my teeth on edge, forced a slow exhale, and finished lacing up the boots. Time to work. Time to pretend I could dig enough holes, drive enough posts, or stretch enough miles of wire to undo what I’d done.
I left the washroom, hands still wet, and grabbed a banana off the kitchen counter. Burke had scrawled “DO NOT TOUCH” on the bunch with a Sharpie, so I bit into it anyway, grinning around the mouthful. It tasted sweet, which was the opposite of how the morning felt.
The clock over the stove ticked loud in the quiet. It was barely 5:30, but I knew Rawley would be up already, working through the night’s ranch ledgers like he did every Monday.
Some part of me wanted to go to him, say, “I fucked up. I touched your brother. I can’t stop thinking about him.” But I never did. That would mean admitting I wanted something I couldn’t have, that I’d made the same mistake my old man had warned me about: falling for someone who wouldn’t ever stay.
I threw the banana peel in the compost, wiped my hands on a dish towel, and checked the day’s job list, taped to the fridge in Burke’s chicken-scratch.
There were five new tasks: fence repair, tractor tune-up, grain run, goat vaccinations, and weed-whacking the back paddock.
All chores designed to keep a man busy, to keep his hands full and his mind blank.
I took the list and started for the mudroom, shoulders hunched against the memory that followed me like a bloodhound.
Some mornings, the ache dulled a little.
Some mornings, it was all I could do not to walk out the front door, climb into the truck, and drive east until I hit whatever city Carter had disappeared into.
But I never did. I stayed here, anchored to this patch of ground by a promise I’d never made, not to anyone who cared.
I opened the door to the morning, boots sinking into the rutted earth. The sun was crawling over the ridge, turning the clouds orange and gold. It looked like a new day, but I knew better.
I squared my shoulders, put on my best blank face, and started walking. If Rawley saw me first, maybe I could ask him what it felt like to be loved without apology. Or maybe I’d just keep my mouth shut, same as always.
One foot in front of the other, down the drive and across the pasture, until the only thing left was the work, and the ghosts I carried with me.
That was the trick: keep moving. Don’t look back.
There’s a rhythm to ranch work you can’t learn from books, only by failing at it a couple hundred times and wearing out your pride along the way.
Most days I could sync up to that rhythm and forget myself, at least until the whistle of a distant train or the smell of new-cut cedar tripped some wire in my head.
Rawley was waiting at the east paddock, already elbow-deep in a tangle of barbed wire and bad attitude. The morning wind dragged his voice all the way to the gate before he said, “You’re late.”
I checked my watch, though I knew I wasn’t. “Clock says six on the nose, boss.”
He didn’t smile, but the left side of his mouth twitched. “Get the auger. The posts aren’t gonna drive themselves.”
If you wanted to measure time on a ranch, you could do it in fence posts, in yards of wire, in the weight of things carried until your bones ached. That’s how we did it: side by side, eyes fixed on the horizon, never talking unless a job required it.
Rawley stretched wire with his whole body, the sleeves on his shirt tight over the muscle he built during his SEAL years and never let go of. I hauled fence posts from the pile near the tree line, one on each shoulder, teeth gritted until I could taste blood.
Burke would have said we were trying to out-macho each other, but it was simpler than that. You worked until the work was done.