Chapter 8
Seth
Ebony lay in her straw, looking sleepy and heavy-lidded. She wouldn’t stand, no matter how I encouraged her, kept her head tucked in and wouldn’t lift her muzzle out of the straw. Her ears felt cold, her nose dry, and occasional muscle twitches shivered over her skin.
“Milk fever,” I told Austin. “You seen it before?”
“No.”
“Low calcium from getting her milk coming in suddenly.” I rubbed the cow’s broad forehead. “Good news is it’s easy to treat by giving her calcium. Bad news is the vet usually does it, and if not, John does. I haven’t.”
“How hard can it be?” Austin asked. “I’ve done deworming drenches into the mouths of calves. She’s just got a bigger mouth.”
“Has to go in a vein,” I told him. I kept my voice steady for Austin’s sake, even though panic clawed at my gut. Not now, not Ebony. Fuck!
“Oh.” His eyes went wide. “That sounds bad.”
“I know how to do the job!” I regretted my harsh tone when he backed up a step.
“Sorry. Just didn’t want my first time running an IV on a cow to be in a snowstorm with no advice.
” I checked my phone again, but the fucking bars had not reappeared.
No Davis or John, or even Kendrick, to soothe my jitters.
“Maybe we could call the vet from the house.”
“We could try.” What if I was wrong about her problem? Did I need to check with the vet before treating her? “No chance the vet could make it out here in the snow, though. Especially for something routine.”
“Yeah, not like she’s dying, I guess.”
“Well, she could,” I admitted. Austin flinched so I quickly added, “But she won’t.
Not if we treat her. Come on.” I needed to put on my big-boy pants and trust myself.
One bad fuck-up years ago didn’t mean I didn’t know what I was doing.
Milk fever. Basic shit I’d seen a dozen times.
We’d lost one heifer from being too late, but we’d caught Ebony right away.
She’d be fine. She has to be. “Let’s get the IV stuff. ”
Kendrick kept medications in a locked cabinet in the feed room.
Several bottles of calcium sat on a shelf next to the tubing and needles.
Austin tagged along and I had him hold a bucket to contain my supplies.
Telling him what I was getting, running through each step as I placed the items in his hands, steadied me.
We returned to the cow and I showed him the prominent vein on her belly that would be easy to use.
His pale face and wide eyes forced me to act like confident as I uncapped the needle, felt for my spot, and poked.
Turned out to be easier than I expected, the first needle pop and blood a bit nerve-wracking but the same as when I saw John do this.
I hooked up the tubing, connected the calcium solution bottle to the wide end, and passed it to Austin.
“Hold that high so gravity can work. We need to get two bottles into her.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to lean on her shoulder, make sure the needle stays in the vein, and hopefully keep her from trying to get up till we’re done.” I felt a lot better seeing the needle sitting where it was supposed to be, the solution flowing into her winter-furred body. I got it right.
“Getting up?” Austin eyed Ebony’s lowered head.
“When the calcium works, it hits ’em pretty fast. They can go from being downer to up on their feet real quick.”
“Fuck, I hope she does. Come on, Ebony.” Austin held the bottle up. “You need to get better.”
The slow seep of liquid flowed down the tubing and into Kendrick’s pet cow. Come on, Ebony, I echoed in my head. This was one I was not going to lose.
Administering the supplement was a slow process. John had told me once you didn’t want too fast of a flow, or the cow could have a heart attack. Something else to torment myself worrying about, but hopefully she’d be fine. The calcium trickled in.
“This is boring,” Austin said. “Too bad we can’t make out while it’s flowing.” He grinned, and that look on his face, the curve of his mouth—
“No!” I glared up at him. “No making out while important work is happening. That’s dangerous. See? This is why a relationship is a bad idea.”
“I didn’t ask for a relationship—”
“Or even sex,” I said. My heart thudded a drumbeat in my chest. “Distractions are too risky. We should stop right now. I’m not taking chances. Not again. Never again!”
“Hey, hey.” Austin held out his free hand like I was a frightened calf. “I wasn’t serious. Just chill.”
“Fuck.” I stared down at where my hand trembled over the needle and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Seth.” Austin’s murmur came soft and warm. “It’s okay. I don’t know why you’re freaked out, but if you want to stop flirting, we’ll stop.”
“I’m not freaked out.” I opened my eyes to digest that lie. “Cautious. That’s all.” Under my hand, the calcium still flowed smoothly.
“Nothing wrong with cautious.” Austin’s voice remained too kind, too reassuring.
I was fine. I didn’t need fucking reassurance. “Exactly.” I refused to look at him. “How’s that bottle doing?”
“About a third left.”
“Let me know when it’s almost gone and we’ll hook up the next one.”
“Sure.”
Time passed with the deep breaths of the cow and little ear twitches from her calf. Austin stood unnaturally quiet and tense.
We pinched the tubing, unhooked bottle one, hooked up bottle two.
“We could talk about something else,” Austin offered. “Favorite movies? Favorite colors?” After a pause, he said, “Shelter, and green, in case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.” Okay, that sounded surly even to my own ears. “Sorry, you just don’t know.”
“No, I don’t.” Austin shifted the bottle to his other hand. “Want to tell me?”
No. And yet, if I was going to shut him down, didn’t he deserve an explanation? We were sharing a cabin, hell, a bed. Maybe he should know why his wiry body and lush lips were forbidden territory.
Maybe I wanted to tell my story to someone who wouldn’t think I was weird for lusting after another cowboy.
The IV solution flowed. Ebony lifted her head and flicked her ears. Her skin had stopped twitching. Good signs.
“Miguel was the hottest man I’d ever seen,” I said out of the blue, my voice surprising myself.
“I was twenty-five, not in the closet, but not precisely out. I’d hooked up now and then, away from the ranch.
He started flirting. Well, he flirted with everybody, but I was the guy who flirted back.
We became a thing.” I paused, not sure even now what we’d been.
“A thing?” Austin asked.
I shrugged, trying to seem casual. “He started as a seasonal hand, but at the end of the season, he moved in with me. We’d just started strip grazing, needed the extra man in the winter.
We shared a bed. We sometimes went out to bars, occasionally to clubs in San Francisco, if we had two days off.
Miguel loved to dance. Holy shit, that man could dance.
” I could almost see him, moving sinuously in a crowd of men.
He’d whip off his shirt and stick it into the back of his belt by the second song.
The lights glinted over his sweaty tanned skin, and he looked like pure sex.
“I can’t dance.” Austin switched hands again. “I feel like my arms and legs are in the wrong places.”
“Me neither, but I loved to watch Miguel. All the men wanted him. Sometimes he’d take a guy off for a quick hand job or a suck, nothing big. I was the guy he was coming home with. He wasn’t made for the city.”
“You said he loved horses.”
“Yeah. Breeding, training, riding. The cattle bored him.” Was that part of the problem, the beginning of the end? Or was it really all my fault?
I fell silent. Down the aisle, one of the horses whickered. Little Olive struggled to her feet and wobbled down again closer to her mother’s nose. Ebony gave her calf a lick, which was another good sign.
“I like the cows,” Austin said. “It’s a balance, right?
You can’t get too attached. They’re either meat on the hoof, or they’re breeding stock and even those mostly don’t stick around too long.
But they’re living creatures, and they have their personalities and their ways, and those ridiculous ears and eyelashes.
It’s a privilege and a responsibility to work with them. ”
“Yes.” I couldn’t have put my thoughts into words, but those two felt right for this job I loved. Privilege, to be out here on the range and not cooped up in an office. Responsibility— where the pain began. “I was responsible for a disaster, once. I guess I’m gun shy.”
Austin didn’t ask, just said, “Half done on this bottle.”
Him not asking was what let me tell him.
“It was breeding season, late July. Miguel had been with us a year. Sounds like a long time, but what we had still felt new. To me. Maybe Miguel was getting bored.” With me as well as the cows.
“He liked to flirt. Harmless stuff. He liked to make me blush and get flustered, out in the open.”
“You didn’t mind?”
“Not really. I was embarrassed I was so easy to wind up. But… Miguel had a shitty time at home as a teen. Got beaten up by his dad and his uncle for acting too gay, more than once. As soon as he was free, he was determined no one would make him act straight ever again. Flirting was flexing his queer power. I understood.”
“You’re a good man, Seth.”
I liked hearing Austin say that, but he didn’t know.
“Yeah, until you hear the next part.” I swallowed hard, not sure I wanted to say this stuff out loud, except I couldn’t quit now.
“So, there we were, moving one of the bulls out from the bred cows over to the heifers. Dozer, big bull, five years old, so he was experienced and ornery. Zachary and I were keeping the pressure on him, riding one on either side.”
“Who’s Zachary?”