by Amy Aislin
“It’s not?” Marco put his camera away in a camera bag. “That’s a bummer.”
Gathering his papers and his own camera bag, Austin flicked the lights off on his way out the door. “I teach it as part of the intermediate workshop in September.”
“Damn,” Marco said, following Austin out. “I won’t be here in September.”
“No?”
They passed by exercise rooms on their way out, one with women contorted into yoga positions and another with couples his parents’ age learning ballroom dancing.
“What are you going to do when your contract’s up?” Austin asked. He pushed on the doors with a wave to the guest services receptionist, and then they were out in the warm night. “Las mentioned you’re a hockey player?”
“Recreationally.”
Austin’s brows lowered. “Didn’t you attend a training camp or something?”
“Development camp in DC. But that’s all it was. It wasn’t a tryout. Even if they do want to sign me, I’m not interested.”
The eyebrows flew up this time. “Not interested in possibly making millions?”
“The millions would be great.” They stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the parking lot. “And I love hockey, but I don’t want to play professionally. Never have.”
“Got another job lined up then?”
“Not yet. Truth is I haven’t really looked.” He’d been so busy with his day job at the ranch and then with spending every available second with Las that thoughts of the future hadn’t even been on his mind. If he could have his way, he’d stay here forever. And it wasn’t about Las. Okay, it was partly about Las. But it was also the quiet Windsor streets, the tall mountains standing sentinel against an open sky, the country culture that was both more hardworking than any he’d ever seen and more relaxed, as if people here knew how to balance work and life. It was the friendliness of everyone he’d met. It was learning from Austin. It was horseback riding lessons. It was sleeping under a sky bright with stars.
It was peace, pure and simple. Peace and the sense of home he’d felt since he’d first driven through Windsor. There was magic in this place, and it called to Marco’s soul, completed the shape of his heart like nothing else ever had.
“Marco?”
He didn’t realize he’d come to a stop in the middle of the parking lot until Austin called his name from several feet ahead. “Shit, sorry.” He waved an apology to the car waiting for him to move and jogged to catch up to Austin.
“You okay?”
“Yup.” His grin stretched so wide it made his cheeks hurt. “I’m great.” I’m not leaving, he almost said. But he didn’t tell Austin. Couldn’t. Not until he told Las. And not even Las until he figured out where he’d live and work once his contract with Windsor Ranch was up. Something that would prove to Las that he wasn’t going anywhere.
It wasn’t the millions his parents wanted him to make in the NHL. But it was the peace and quiet and the sense of place Marco had craved for most of his life.
Opening the door of his car, he called a goodnight to Austin over his shoulder. Sitting in the driver’s seat, camera bag on his lap, he let his decision percolate. Which was all it took for him to realize that he was, for the first time, breathing easily while thinking of his future.
LATER THAN PLANNED, LAS TOOK the back-porch steps of his house two at a time. It was just after dinner, the summer sun still high in the sky, the temperature hovering somewhere in the high seventies. It would fall once the sun disappeared behind the mountains, creating a comfortable evening perfect for stargazing with Marco.
But first, family game night.
He was half an hour late. He didn’t always work on Saturdays but it was the summer and the ranch hands often took a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks, of summer vacation with their families, especially in August before the kids went back to school. Las pitched in where he could.
Last summer, while he’d been home between his junior and senior years, he’d spent a lot of time shadowing his mom and learning about what she did behind the scenes. Everything from ordering inventory and tools, following up with vendors, negotiating prices, learning about the costs of fencing and water, assessing risk strategies for cutting overhead costs, evaluating whether the employees were organized in a way that would get the best results from labor and management, continuing education in low-stress livestock handling. He’d spent time with his dad too on the marketing side of things. It wasn’t as interesting and he didn’t particularly have an interest in marketing, but it was handy knowledge to have in case he ever needed it.
This summer, he’d spent most of it outside with Cal and the ranch hands. When he wasn’t helping out where needed, he was being taught new procedures and technologies he’d missed the implementation of while at college. Ranching changed so quickly that he was sure there’d be yet more procedures and new technologies to learn when he returned home after the first year of his master’s program.
And next summer, he’d, hopefully, be starting his thesis research in conservation grazing practices with support from USNC. The meeting between his mom and the scientists from USNC was scheduled for next week, so he’d know soon enough one way or another. At least everything else was ready for him to start grad school, including an apartment, which he’d gotten the call about twenty minutes ago.
“Lassiter.”
His name drew his gaze to a corner of the back porch, where his parents, Alice, Marco, Cal, and Austin sat around an iron table topped with several board games. Las made his way over with a smile for Marco, whose naturally golden skin had tanned to a dark caramel over the past several weeks.
“Hey. Did I miss anything?”
When he drew up to the table, Marco reached up and took his hand. Las’s heart skipped a beat.
“We waited for you,” his dad said. “Want to get cleaned up?”
“Yeah, give me ten minutes.”
He’d spent the day ferrying parts and tools to one of the ranch hands out in the north pastures who’d been dealing with a malfunctioning ATV, cleaning the cattle barn, and checking on the wheat field on the other side of the highway. He smelled like sweat and horse and cow dung.
He was back in less than ten minutes with a plate of reheated chicken-fried steak slathered in gravy and potatoes. Taking the empty chair next to Marco, he kicked a foot out to rest it against Marco’s and sent an inquisitive glance Cal and Austin’s way.
“I found them lurking,” Alice explained. “So I invited them to play.”
“What are we playing today?” Las asked.
“Things.”
Alice passed around scraps of paper and pencils, then read off the first card: “Things cannibals think about while dining.”
“This is so unfair,” Marco grumbled as he scratched out his answer on his paper. “You all know each other.”
Once all of the answers were passed back to Alice, she shuffled them and read them off one by one. “How delicious their brother tastes. Ew, gross. If there are any pickled toes as a side dish. God, you guys are disgusting.” Once she’d read off all six answers twice, Cal, sitting to her left, was the first up to guess who’d said what.
He pointed at Austin. “The pickled-toe thing.”
Austin cackled and rubbed his hands together. Alice afforded Cal one point on the score sheet.
Pointing next at Las, Cal said, “The one about how they’d keep their lineage alive if they keep eating each other.”
Las toasted him with his fork. Alice gave Cal another point.
“You.” Cal looked at Marco. “The ordering-takeout-next-time one.”
“Damn,” Marco said. “You’re good.”
After playing a round where everyone got a turn being the reader, Las’s parents went to bed. Las turned on the outdoor porch lights against the darkening evening, and that was when things got more interesting but also easier.
“As a reminder, the card reads Things you need to survive,” Marco said. He shuffled the
four answers in his hands before reading them off. “Duct tape. Peace…” Faltering for a second, Marco’s eyes cut to Las briefly. “Peace and quiet. Sex. A partner in crime.”
Since he was sitting to Marco’s left, Las was up first. Marco was out since he was this round’s reader, which left the three people on the other side of the table. Easy peasy. He pointed at Alice. “Sex.” Cal. “Duct tape.” Austin. “Partner in crime.”
Marco gave him three points.
“Aww.” Alice poked Austin in the bicep. “Look at you getting all sentimental.”
Cal was side-eyeing Austin like he’d never seen him before.
They switched games after that, opting for Settlers of Catan and breaking out the seldom-used expansion pack since they had an extra player.
As Alice and Cal set up the game board, Las squeezed Marco’s forearm to get his attention. “I got the apartment I wanted.”
“Shut up!” Cupping the back of Las’s neck, Marco hauled him forward for a hard and fast kiss. “The one in the renovated apartment building?”
“Yup.”
They’d gone to Laramie last weekend with much better success, and he’d put in applications at six different places. Getting the one he wanted was a bonus.
At only a mile from campus, his new apartment had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a renovated kitchen and living room, and a back patio with a grill. The building boasted a fully equipped fitness center, a sports room with foosball and air hockey and a mini arcade, and a business lounge.
“Is this the building with the parking space?” Marco asked.
“Yeah.”
“Will you be getting your own car then?”
“Nah. My dad says I can borrow one of the old ranch trucks for the year.” So that he could come home whenever he wanted, his dad had said, knowing that Las’s heart was here.
“An ‘old’ truck?” Marco repeated, concern crossing his expression. “Will it hold up on the drive during the winter?”
“Says the guy with the twenty-year-old Kia.”
“Fifteen,” Marco corrected with a smile.
Once the game started, it was competitiveness to the max. Las sat back and surveyed his friends on Alice’s turn.
In college, his roommates had considered a trip to the local pizza joint followed by a stop at the Student Union’s Café Bar for drinks and dancing a fun night. Las had frequently followed along, wanting to experience everything college had to offer, even without Ben there to go through it all with his junior and senior years. And it had been fun in the moment. But that was the problem—everything his roommates did was for instant gratification, whereas Las had been looking toward his future for as long as he could remember.
And he’d missed this, just sitting around on a clear evening, playing board games with friends and family, partaking in friendly competition, nursing a beer or two and munching on pretzels while horse neighs and cow lows drifted to them on the breeze.
There wasn’t a lot of downtime on the ranch. The last time he’d played board games with Alice, Cal, and Austin had been the summer before his junior year, when he and Ben had still been together. It was odd now, seeing Marco in Ben’s place.
Except Marco wasn’t in Ben’s place, wasn’t replacing him. There was no replacing Ben and not because Las was still holding a torch for him—he’d stopped moping for Ben and wishing things were different a long time ago—but because Ben wasn’t replaceable. He’d been a huge part of Las’s life and no one could take his place.
And Marco hadn’t. He was something more. Something bigger. Something that made Las’s heart lurch sideways uncontrollably. He didn’t fill in those gaps, those holes in Las’s heart where Ben should’ve been—and he wasn’t meant to.
He did, however, blunt the edges of Las’s past hurt, allowing Las to see through and over them.
Next to him, Marco was frowning at his cards. Across from him, Austin was accusing Cal of resource blocking him. Las didn’t realize the floaty feeling of comfort and happiness in his chest was making him grin like crazy until Alice nudged his leg with her foot and raised an eyebrow at him.
He had his friends. He had his family. He had Marco. Even with only five weeks left on Marco’s seasonal contract, it was a fear that, on a night like this, was relegated to the back of Las’s mind.
Running a hand over Marco’s broad shoulders just because he could, Las inhaled deeply, breathing in the night air scented with grass and farm animals. And when Marco winked at him, life and love settled into place.
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, MARCO ENTERED his cabin after dinner, a takeout container of food in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other.
“Hey, man.”
Reid’s head popped up. He sat on the end of his bed untying his shoelaces. Around a groan, he said, “Please tell me those are for me.”
Marco handed his items over.
“You’re a lifesaver.” Reid opened the container and stuck his nose in it. “Fuck, that smells good. I was going to go into town to grab dinner, but I’ve been ferrying people around all day and wasn’t in the mood to go out again. Thanks, man.”
“No worries.”
Marco had kept an eye out for him, but the closer it got to the end of their two-hour dinner window with still no Reid, Marco had figured Reid had been kept busy today and made a plate to go for him. Grabbing his towel and a fresh pair of briefs, Marco headed into the bathroom to shower off the day’s sweat. Between eight and four, he’d taken out four different groups on the intermediate-level hiking trails.
His and Reid’s cabin wasn’t as stale as it had been when Marco first moved in. Dirty laundry lay in piles, a collection of empty plastic water bottles needed to be brought to the recycling bin in the staff dining room, they tracked mud and crumpled leaves in on occasion, their beds were always unmade, they’d collected things—in Reid’s case, books from the Windsor Ranch House library; in Marco’s case, camera equipment, knick-knacks from the Saturday market in town, and a small stack of Austin’s photography.
If nine could be considered a small stack.
They were tacked up on the wall next to his bed. Some people made vision boards, others used charts and graphs, some used apps or journaling or lists.
Marco used inspiration. Austin’s photography was what Marco wanted to work toward. Not so he could be a copycat—Austin’s creativity was his own. But so that he could take photos equally as stunning in their own right. Ones that evoked that sense of awe and imagination and grandeur that Austin’s had when Marco had first seen them. Ones that made people feel something.
“You’ll get there,” Austin had said last week after Thursday’s workshop when Marco had asked, again, about astrophotography. “Just keep practicing. Think of photography like hockey—it takes dedication and practice and hard work, right? You don’t become a sensation overnight.”
He couldn’t have used a better analogy. Marco now had a subscription to three magazines: one for amateur photographers, one about digital photography, and a third featuring tips and tricks for outdoor photography. In the last week, he’d been waking an hour earlier to head out for some practice; there was something about the misty dawn sunlight that was as whimsical as it was refreshing, stimulating creative juices he hadn’t known he had. He brought his camera on every hike he led although he only used it when the group stopped for a photo opp.
He hadn’t expected photography to make him feel like hockey did, but that same sense of wonder and magic that thrummed through his veins as soon as his skates hit the ice was the same as when his finger pressed down on a camera shutter.
Once showered, dried, and in clean briefs, he picked up his phone from the bathroom counter, hoping for a message from Las telling him when to meet him and grinning when he found it.
Anytime, Las’s text said. Marco sent him back the thumbs-up emoji.
The smile fell off his face and a weight on his chest settled into place when he spotted the second message.
I know you haven’
t heard anything from the NHL yet, his mom had written. But you still need a backup plan.
She’d included a link to a job site listing no less than seventy communications coordinator positions in and around Philly.
I also found this, the rest of her message said. It’ll help you keep up your skills until the NHL signs you.
She had serious delusions about his future.
This turned out to be a link to a premier adult hockey league in Northeast Philadelphia, which sounded fun but also really, really intense.
With a sigh, he put the phone face down, braced his hands on the counter, and stared at himself in the foggy mirror. Wet hair dripping onto his shoulders. Skin tanned from the sun. Many days’ worth of facial scruff. He had a farmer’s tan going, which Las had laughed at last week until Marco pointed out that he had one too.
Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and held it until the pressure on his chest dissipated. He had no interest in a communications coordinator job, no matter where it was located. Knowing that about himself, even if he still had no idea where he’d be living or working come mid-September, lowered his shoulders from where they’d hiked up to his ears.
He knew what he did want—more nights in Las’s tent and Las’s arms, evenings learning photography from the best of the best, starting his day with morning hikes through the forest. In other words, Las, photography, and Windsor. More or less in that order, although one wasn’t contingent on the other. They just all happened to be in the place he didn’t want to leave. Which meant he had to figure out how to not leave, and that started with hunting down a place to live and a job once his contract was up.
He came out of the bathroom toweling his hair. Reid was sitting cross-legged on his bed, three-quarters of the way through his meal, book in hand.
“What are you up to tonight?” Marco asked. “Going to the fire pit?” Marco couldn’t remember the last time he’d been there. Couldn’t remember why he’d ever felt like there wasn’t anything to do around here. How could he have ever been bored in this place?
Reid held up the book. “I’ve got a date with Jack Reacher. You?”
