True to form, Joe grunted and walked away. He was at his van I hadn’t noticed parked a few feet from the bench when he turned back. “It’s my turn to make lunch. Are you about?”
Damn it. What was it about this family and feeding me? “Don’t worry about me. I’ll sort myself out later.”
“With what? The three-hundred chicken breasts you’ve stashed in the fridge.”
“Probably.”
Joe opened his van and tossed the sausages inside. Again, I expected him to follow the bangers and drive off, but something drew me closer to him. I was a foot or so away when he turned, leaning back on the van, the sun that had been in his eyes before now casting a sinful shadow across his face. “How do you stay so big when you don’t eat fuck all?”
I suppressed an age-old urge to fold my arms across my chest and hunch my shoulders. “I eat.”
“I’ve never seen you.”
“Liar. I had dinner with you last night.”
“That boiled chicken breast shite you were eating? Fuck that.”
I forced a grin. “It’s good for fitness—high protein, low fat. I don’t know how you eat all those carbs and stay so lean.”
“Calling me skinny?”
There was humour in Joe’s stormy eyes, but I denied it anyway. “No, I’m saying that if I ate like you, I’d be the size of a house.”
“You are the size of a house.”
“A softer house, then.”
Joe laughed—really laughed, from deep in his belly instead of his usual gruff and reluctant chuckle. “You’re a strange man.”
He was one to talk, but I let it go with a shrug. “If you say so. I’m probably just jealous. I haven’t had a sausage in years.”
Joe stopped laughing. His eyebrows disappeared into his inky hairline, and his gaze flashed with something I couldn’t quite decipher but yet seemed oddly familiar at the same time. A silence stretched between us—neither loaded or light. And then, finally, the innuendo of what I’d said hit home.
Shit. Was I about to get bitch-slapped with some homophobic bullshit? No one at Whisper Farm seemed interested enough to give a fuck about my queerness, and I’d assumed—given that most of them had referenced my blog—that it wasn’t a secret. That it didn’t need to be.
My heart skipped a beat. That wasn’t unheard of in Joe’s company, but it felt different now, and I took an unconscious step back before I caught myself. Fuck that. I was out and proud and pushing thirty. Was I really going to back down from this when I’d faced down—
Joe’s long fingers closed around my wrist. “What’s up with you?”
“What?”
Joe studied me, his eyebrows back in their rightful place. “You look hungry.”
Even though we’d spent the majority of the last five minutes bickering about food, it was the last thing I expected him to say. “What?”
“Stop saying what. You’re making me feel like I’m jabbering nonsense like my grandparents did.” Joe released my wrist. “Just come home and have your lunch, will you? Ma’s starting to think she can’t cook, and that shit ain’t right.”
He got in the van and drove away. It seemed like he’d left in slow motion, but when I looked up from checking my arm for finger-shaped sear marks, it felt like I’d blinked and come awake to find myself in the strangest of places.
I started running again, instinct drawing me in the general direction of the farm. I’d intended to find a robust tree to use as a chin-up bar on my way back, but I got sucked into the hypnotic rhythm of my feet slapping the ground and was at the farm gate before I knew it.
It was too early for whatever Joe had planned for lunch, so I dodged the kitchen and found some trees by the donkey paddock. One of the donkeys—Reggie, I think—wandered over to stare at me while I completed six-dozen reps of chin-ups. My biceps were burning by the time I’d finished, and hunger rumbled in my gut. I’d learned not to ignore it in recent years, but I didn’t fancy facing Joe again just yet. His moods—and mine—were giving me whiplash.
Lacking any brighter ideas, I shinned up the tree and picked an apple. I dropped out of the branches to find Toby waiting for me, apparently unconcerned with the houseguest climbing the trees. “Joe wants you.”
“Why?”
“Dunno. Just said to fetch you in.”
Brilliant. I trailed Toby to the house, cringing when he veered off in the yard and ducked into the feed store, leaving me to face Joe alone.
With a sigh, I went inside. Joe was in the kitchen, hacking up sausages at the table, an unlit cigarette dangling between his pillowy lips. “You rang?” I said.
“Your mum did, actually. She stayed on the line for a bit, but you took the scenic route to get here from monkeying around in the trees.”
The fact that he’d been watching made me warm all over, almost eclipsing the guilt at pushing my mum’s weekly email to the bottom of my to-do list. “Was she okay?”
“Aye. Seemed to be. I did check that it wasn’t urgent, and I told her that your phone was probably dipping in and out of service. She said to check your email, eat your greens, and call her back when you can.”
Joe kept his eyes on his sausages. Anyone else, I’d have pondered if they were taking the piss, but if there was one thing I knew about Joe, it was that he was an even bigger mummy’s boy than I had once been.
“Thanks,” I said. “My phone is playing up, and I keep forgetting to email her. I gave her the farm number for emergencies. Hope that’s okay.”
“’Course it is. Living here, aren’t you?”
“I s’pose.”
Joe leaned back in his chair and retrieved a net of onions from the vegetable rack behind him. “You’re lucky my ma didn’t take that call. If she found out you’d been blanking your old dear, she’d have your guts for garters.”
“I haven’t heard that saying in years.”
“What saying?”
“Guts for garters. My nan used to say it.”
“Yeah, well. We all talk like old women down here. Ain’t got no slick city speak going on.” Joe started chopping his mountain of onions and chucking them in a huge pan. “But feel free to use the farm phone to call your mum anytime. I can’t promise it won’t get cut off, but feel free all the same.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. I went with not, as every dinnertime seemed to be taken up by him and Emma squabbling about money. “Thanks. What are you making? Do you need a hand?”
“You want to help cook something you have no intention of eating?”
“I never said I wouldn’t eat it.”
Joe threw more onions in the pan. “Fair enough. Stick them bangers on the stove then.”
I swallowed a poor attempt at humour and took the plate of hacked up sausages to the stove. A frying pan was waiting on the burner. “Is this for the sausages?”
“Yup. Fry them off, then I’ll stick them in here.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fried anything, and Sal’s bemusement on the morning she’d caught me poaching my eggs flashed into my mind. “What are you drowning them poor eggs for?”
Joe appeared at my shoulder. “What are you grinning about?”
I didn’t fancy admitting that I’d been daydreaming about his mum, so I shrugged and turned the gas on under the pan. “Just happy to be alive, man.”
Joe’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I reckon that kale sludge sends you bananas.”
“What’s wrong with being happy?”
“Nothing, it just probably means you haven’t lived.”
I wasn’t in the mood to challenge that bullshit, and I knew Joe enough by now to know there was little point. He wore his cynicism like a second skin—spiky and tough—and didn’t respond well to attempts to break through his walls. “If you say so.”
The sausages hit the pan, sizzling and popping, fat leaching out of them. My stomach turned, but I tried to ignore it and then forced myself to when reasoning with my skewed logic didn’t work. I w
ill not be hard on myself today. The affirmation was an old friend, and one I used with my patients too, but today, Joe’s close proximity turned out to be the push I needed to step away from the past.
He chucked his own huge pan on the stove and lit another burner. His shoulder bumped me, and I shivered. His dark eyes found mine. I lost myself briefly in the liquid depths, but I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed my reaction to him. Joe was a perfect contradiction—thoroughly predictable and yet impossible to read.
Fat spat out of the sausage pan and splattered my arm. The sting broke the spell. I tore my gaze from Joe’s and peered at the sausages, bracing myself for another ripple of disgust, but my stomach rebelled and growled, and for the first time in years, I stared at a puddle of saturated fat and wanted to eat it.
The sensation surprised me, but Joe didn’t give me the chance to process it. He reached across me for the salt and his hair brushed my cheek, the nape of his neck inches from my face.
Not for the first time, I wanted to put my lips on him. Most days he was a complete twat, but in moments like these, when he wasn’t glaring or snapping, he was so wonderfully human that I forgot myself.
“Sling them bangers in here.”
“What?”
Joe nudged me, sending another jolt of electricity surging through my veins. “Give me the sausages.”
I tipped the contents of my pan into Joe’s, noting the healthy selection of vegetables he’d added to his onions while I’d been under his thrall—carrots, peppers, tomatoes—and trying not to recoil in horror as he lobbed in two cans of Heinz baked beans.
And failed, apparently. “What’s the face for now?”
I schooled my features. “What face?”
“The one Ma gets when I flick broccoli at the cats.”
“You don’t like broccoli?”
Joe shuddered, and I swear I felt the vibration in my toes. “Fuck no. It looks like liquidised boy scouts when she cooks it.”
I had noticed Sal’s habit of boiling her veg like they’d been to Chernobyl and back. “It’s nice when you treat it right.”
“So are horses, but you still seem shit-scared of them.”
He had me there. I’d only managed to befriend the donkeys so far, and that was mainly because they were so noisy and cartoon-cute that I couldn’t bring myself to be afraid of them. “Which horse do you think is the friendliest? I’ve got a different answer from everyone so far.”
At that, Joe smiled, revealing a set of teeth that were unfairly white, given the amount he seemed to smoke. “Let me guess . . . Emma said Tauna, George plumped for Noel, and the young ’uns said Flea?”
I laughed. “How did you know?”
“Because everyone has their favourites and their reasons for loving them. Tauna brings Emma out of her shell. Shame she’s too knackered to ride, really, ’cause I reckon Emma would go anywhere with her. And George and Noel have been pals for life. George delivered that foal before I was born . . . oldest idiots here, them two.”
“What about Flea?”
“He’s a Shetland,” Joe said. “And he eats Hula Hoops off your fingers. Of course the kids are going to go for him.”
“So . . .” I watched Joe stir up what appeared to be an enormous pot of stew. “What’s the real answer?”
“Mani,” Joe replied like it was obvious. “He’s a true elder. You ever feel like giving up on this shit, go see him and tell him I sent you.”
It was a sweet offer, but as Joe threw a lid on his pan of mystery and left the kitchen, I knew it was one I’d never take up. Mani was huge, and more than that, I’d seen Joe in his stable late at night, his head resting on the horse’s neck, his face buried in his mane. I knew jack about horses, but I knew a sacred bond when I saw one.
Mani was Joe’s soul horse. Perhaps one day I’d find my own.
Chapter Five
Joe
“Come closer,” I called to the young girls who’d come to the farm on a school trip. “Ava don’t bite.”
The gaggle of kids inched closer. Ava paid them no attention whatsoever and continued stripping a nearby tree of its bark, while I went on with my pre-packaged sermon on stable work. It was hard to tell who cared less: the kids, who just wanted to stroke the horses that were small enough to be cute, eat their lunch, and go home. Or me . . . who just wanted a nap.
Because, fuck, I was knackered. The escaped gelding from Crantock Beach—Buddy, apparently—had returned to his owners, but in his place had come two colts from an abandoned fairground in Swindon. Nursing the horsebox there and back and settling the weak youngsters into their stall had taken all night and most of the morning. I’d been on my way to bed when the minibus of bored tweens had shown up. Damn Emma and her bloody anxiety.
I didn’t mean that.
Ava got bored with the tree and wandered off. I clicked my tongue and Mani came to me. The children took a collective step back, and the temptation to hide behind Mani until they went away entirely was strong, but the gazes of their watchful parents were burning a hole in the side of my head, and I reluctantly coaxed Mani forward.
“This is Mani,” I said. “He’s the tallest horse here.”
“Do you ride him?” a young girl asked.
“Occasionally,” I said. “He’s quite old now, but he likes a turn around the field from time to time.”
It was a far cry from the wild rides Mani and I had grown up on—galloping along the beaches at dawn, hurling ourselves over rocks and waves, and tearing through the woods and fields, trees and fences no barriers for two young boys with energy to spare. But life was different now. Mani was old, and I was tired.
But still, the call to ride, combined with the disbelieving stares of the visiting children, prompted me to retrieve some reins from the box I’d brought out from the tack room and fasten them on Mani. I’d rarely ridden him with a saddle, or even a helmet, but I got the feeling the watching parents would do their nuts if I didn’t behave.
So I saddled Mani up and used the fence to mount him. I’d run out of words, so I turned Mani and took him on a slow loop of the paddock, easing him from a walk to a lazy trot. Beneath me, Mani’s muscles bunched, ready for his smooth canter, but I didn’t have time for that right now. “Sorry, old boy. I’ll take you out later.”
If I had time. Fuck it. I’d make time. Mani was born to gallop, even now, with his arthritic joints and knobbly knees.
Harry came out of the house as I trotted back to my starting place. He seemed taken aback to find the yard full of children, but to his credit, didn’t run screaming back inside—he was a better man than me.
He was also on my mind far more than he should’ve been since I’d convinced him to eat the Carter sausage casserole a few days ago, so I decided to have a little fun. “Hey, Harry! Come here.”
Harry moved his graceful bulk across the yard and came to the fence. “You rang?”
“I did. These lovely ladies here seem to think Mani is scary. What do you think? Pussycat, ain’t he?”
Harry glanced briefly at the gaggle of girls and then at me, his gaze as friendly as ever, but with a tinge of wickedness that I didn’t expect. “You’re a pussycat, Mr. Carter. Not sure about Mani yet.”
Wanker. I pursed my lips to contain my grin and slid off Mani. “There’s an easy way to find out. I’ve been riding Mani since I was nine years old, but Mr.—” Shit, I couldn’t remember his surname. Did he even have one? “Uh, Mr. Holistic, here, ain’t never been on a horse’s back. Think he should try now?”
The girls giggled as Harry took a step back from the fence, his eyes wide with mock horror that was likely more real than he cared to admit.
“Come on,” I goaded. “You’re as big as Mani, really. He’s probably more scared of you than you are of him.”
Mani wasn’t scared of anything and Harry knew it. He glared at me, his back to the children, and I thought for a fleeting moment that he would walk away, leaving the joke on me.
But he didn’t. He
came back to the fence, laid his hands on the rail, and jumped over with a nimble grace that belied his broad frame. “If he runs off with me, I’m taking him back to London.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I beckoned him closer and brought Mani alongside him. “Stick this helmet on and put your foot on the fence.”
Harry obeyed. I fed Mani a hay cube and murmured in his ear. He ignored me entirely, which was his usual code for compliance. Mani was a wicked ride, but the rest of the time he was simply too lazy to misbehave. I patted his neck. “Atta boy.”
Then I turned to Harry. “Just grab his mane and vault up. Piece of piss—uh, I mean cake.”
“Right.” Harry took a fistful of Mani’s mane. “You sure I won’t hurt him?”
“You think I’d let you hurt my horse?”
Harry had no comeback to that. He tightened his grip on Mani’s mane and heaved himself up onto Mani’s broad back. The movement was light and easy, like I’d known it would be, and when Mani stayed stock still, staring disinterestedly into the distance, the apprehension in Harry’s face faded.
He grinned and the sunshine beating down on us was suddenly brighter. “Hey, it’s not bad up here. I can see Emma hanging the washing out at the bungalow and even the circus up the road. Who else wants to see?”
Spending an hour lifting kids on and off Mani hadn’t been in my game plan, but it seemed that Harry had got my number. He’d played me at my own game and won. And my morning was all the better for it.
The minibus departed a few hours later. Harry helped me pack up the equipment we’d used and carried the box back to the tack room while I brought Mani into his stable for some water and a light feed in the shade.
I was fussing with his mane when Harry returned. “What was all that about?”
“All what?”
Harry rubbed Mani’s neck like he’d been doing it his whole life. “Getting me up on this monster. I mean, it was fun—empowering, actually—but I didn’t think it was your MO to fuck with people’s fears.”
Whisper (Skins Book 2) Page 5
