by Zoe Dakota
“Come on,” he said, and opened up the nearest horse stall.
Lydia shot without talking much for half an hour, just snapping away, listening to the gentle way that Hudson talked to the animals, taking their heads close to his, murmuring soothing sounds and clicks. They all seemed to relax in his presence, even Stella, the big mare who’d thrown her the other day. He didn’t want to be in the photos — like so many people she knew, Hudson was camera-shy — but little by little, she started sneaking him into shots, just his hands on a mane, then his face near a horse’s face, his eyes closed. A full-body shot of him and the horse, the odd cloudy light showing every line in his face, the shadows of the horse’s lines, all looking almost sculptural.
Finally she stopped shooting and just watched.
“You finally out of film?” he asked.
Lydia laughed, even though it hurt her ribs. “It’s digital,” she said. I’ve still got gigs and gigs of memory left.”
He shook his head. “Never did understand all that stuff,” he said. “I can use my iPad well enough, but anything more complicated and the world’s passed me by.”
Lydia took a step toward Stella, the horse.
“Go ahead,” Hudson said. “She ain’t nothin’ to be afraid of.”
“Hey, Stella,” Lydia breathed. She patted the horse’s nose very, very gently. “Sorry for the other day.”
The horse swung her head toward Lydia and the girl jumped a little, pulling her hand away.
“Don’t get spooked,” said Hudson. He came to stand next to her. There was one big, warm hand on her shoulder, and it made her feel steadier. “Just pet her. She don’t like you being jumpy any more than you do.”
Lydia reached out again, stroking Stella’s long, velvety nose again in long, gentle strokes. The horse snorted, and Lydia moved her hand up to her forehead, her mane. Next to her, Hudson stroked her mane as well, making those soothing noises he always made with the horses.
“You’re so good with them,” Lydia said.
“I got a lot of experience,” he said.
Their faces were no more than a foot apart. Lydia’s head still felt a little strange and detached. Loopy. Out of it.
“I’m going to the rodeo tomorrow,” she blurted out. “Even though Bryce doesn’t want me to.”
Hudson regarded her face for a long time, and then looked back at the horse.
Shit, he’s just going to tell Bryce and they’ll lock me in my room or something, Lydia thought.
“I get it,” he said. “I understand what it’s like to love something.”
He stroked Stella’s mane a few more times. “Bryce does too, even if he don’t like to admit it.”
He looked at her again, and then he had the side of her face in his big, warm hand, his thumb on her cheekbone.
Is he going to—
Then he kissed her.
His mouth was warm and dry, his lips gentle, his hand steady and firm on her face. Lydia felt a chasm yawn inside her, suddenly, and pain or no pain, she reached out for his head. She missed and got his arm, her other hand flopping a little against his solid chest.
He grabbed her to him, pressing himself against her gently, as though he needed her but knew how fragile she was right now, how easily broken. Lydia felt as though she could just melt into him, his warm, hard body, his scent of pine and hay. She opened her mouth against his, tasting him for the first time, and she felt his hand on her hip, moving up her side. It hurt a little, but she wanted his touch more than she was afraid of the pain.
He broke away from her, a little out of breath, his other hand still against her face, warm in the cool stables. She was still collapsed against him, their bodies together and their faces apart.
His thumb stroked her cheekbone again, and then his hand dropped.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
“Why?” said Lydia.
He stepped away, and the front of her body felt cold and empty where he’d been a moment before.
“I got a slew of reasons,” he said. “Chief among them, you’re doped to the gills on painkillers and muscle relaxers.”
“I feel fine,” said Lydia. “I know what I’m doing.”
The glance he gave her then she thought was full of longing and hope, but then again, she might have just been high.
“I’ll take you to the rodeo tomorrow,” he said. “I know you’re gonna go anyway. I can see it in you. Better I’m there in case something goes wrong than you’ve got nobody.”
Lydia understood, intuitively, that they weren’t going to talk about the kiss. That was the big problem with manly, rugged, cowboy types: they never wanted to talk thing over.
“Thanks,” she said. “It means a lot.”
“One condition.”
“Anything.”
“Don’t tell Bryce.”
Lydia just nodded. She had the uncomfortable sensation that she’d been put in the middle of a bigger situation than she knew, something she’d only seen a small part of. Together, they left the stables, walked through the chilly, damp field, and back to the warm, welcoming main house.
Chapter Six
Saturday morning Bryce had to fly to Houston. He’d been grumbling about it all week, this board meeting for Centennial Oil, but when the time came he boarded his private jet at dawn and flew off, promising to be back the next day.
At breakfast it was just Lydia and Hudson, sipping coffee and making conversation for Cecilia’s benefit. Hudson had been serious, it turned out, when he said Bryce couldn’t know — the other man really, really couldn’t know.
“So, got any plans for today?” Hudson asked Lydia, a little too loudly, as they ate.
“Not really,” she said, matching his tone. “I’m still in some pain so I’m gonna take it easy, probably watch some movies in my room.”
“Anything good?”
“Probably just Zoolander,” she said. “It always makes me feel better. When does Bryce get back?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Hudson practically shouted.
If Cecilia thought they were acting weird, she didn’t show it.
An hour later, Hudson loudly announced that he was going to the rodeo in town, for old times’ sake, and Lydia heard him say goodbye to Cecilia. That was her cue to sneak out of her bedroom and meet him in the garage, ducking down in the passenger seat until they were well out of sight of the house.
“I think we’re in the clear,” Bryce said when he turned onto the main road from the ranch’s long, curving driveway.
Lydia sat up — everything hurt from hunching over for so long — and smoothed her plaid shirt, tamed her hair.
“Let’s rodeo,” she said, flashing her biggest smile at Hudson.
She couldn’t lie to herself: she was hoping that something else would happen. In the stables, yesterday, for a moment he’d clearly been unable to control himself, and she was hoping that happened again. She still wasn’t quite sure what was going on between him and Bryce — it certainly seemed like they were closer than just “employer and employee,” but who knew. Men out here were so untalkative, Lydia thought she might simply never know.
Before she got out of the truck, she popped an extra Vicodin, just in case. She thought she’d probably need it, with all the action that the rodeo promised. Once again she had her lightest camera, and minimal equipment, one extra lens and a few extra memory packs.
When they got to the rodeo, Hudson parked in the performers’ lot, the one closest to the amphitheater, and it turned out that he knew everybody. Lydia wasn’t exactly surprised. He was a friendly guy, but she wouldn’t have guessed he’d be popular like this.
As he introduced her around to person after person, cowboys, managers, horse owners, anyone who was in the backstage area, Lydia began to get a little bit nervous. How, exactly, were they going to keep Bryce from finding out about all this? Even if a lot of the people on the rodeo circuit traveled constantly, the chance of someone from town mentioning to him that s
he’d been there were pretty good.
But then again, Hudson knew everything here better than she did: the rodeo scene, what Bryce was like, all of it. She decided not to worry, and hung back a little, pleased to get this backstage glimpse at the rodeo life. She shot broncos in their carriers, looking calm and sleepy; a half-dressed rodeo clown chatting up a young woman; a short parade of young women in some very sparkly getup riding horses through the center of it all.
In short, plenty of things she’d never known existed before. Exactly what she’d come to get.
By the time the rodeo actually started, she’d shot almost half her memory backstage, but she didn’t mind, the pictures had been so great. She saved a little for each event, but for most of it she sat and watched, letting Hudson explain the intricacies to her, what she should watch for, what each rider’s strengths and weaknesses were likely to be.
“So it’s like ballet, except with animals too, and all the people are trying not to die.”
To his credit, Hudson considered this nonsense from a city girl seriously.
“Sorta,” he finally said. “It’s not so nitpicky, and the part where you don’t die or get busted up is given much more weight than the rest.”
“Got it,” she said, and went back to watching.
Then, a little while later, she said, “Why’d you quit?”
Hudson was sitting on the first row of the bleachers, leaning slightly forward, his hands clasping his knees. She stood next to him. She found that standing was easier on her back.
“I got thrown real bad,” he said. “Broke a leg, compressed a disc in my spine, messed up an ankle real good, some other stuff. I was lucky I didn’t get paralyzed.”
Lydia, still in a back brace and considerable pain, couldn’t imagine a life where she got thrown off of horses routinely.
“So that was it?”
“Well,” he said, and stopped for a moment. He watched the man ride a bronco, six seconds, seven, and then off. He whistled low, and then went on. “I was getting up there in years. Thirty-two is about eighty in rodeo years. And, by then Bryce had gotten started, made some money from oil and was getting into the investment game, and he wanted me to quit, so...”
“I didn’t know you’d worked for him for that long.”
Hudson smiled his smile, lines crinkling gently around his blue eyes. Lydia’s heart skipped a beat. “We’ve known each other for a very long time,” he said. “We met doing rodeo, but he left a year later to go into oil. It worked out okay for him, I guess.”
Lydia laughed at the understatement.
“I can’t picture Bryce on a bronco like that,” she said. “He just seems so, I don’t know, formal, sometimes?”
“He was good,” Hudson said. “Not as good as me, and I wasn’t the best, but he was good.”
He seemed as though he was going to say something else, but he just stared into the middle distance, wrapped up in his memories.
Then, someone else came over, shook Hudson’s hand. He introduced her to the mayor of Aspen, and Lydia took his picture. They never did get back to talking about how he’d met Bryce, or his past in the rodeo.
Chapter Seven
Bryce got home around noon the next day, the big SUV pulling into the garage. This time, Lydia really was on the couch watching TV, under another of the soft, old Navajo-patterned blankets that were around the living room. Hudson was next to her, in a recliner, half watching the TV and half doing the Sudoku from the Sunday paper. He looked up when Bryce entered.
“You bring me a present from Houston?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Bryce. “Got a barrel of crude with your name on it out in the car.”
“You get me the most thoughtful things,” said Hudson.
“How was the rodeo?”
“Pretty good. Saw a lot of folks I ain’t seen in a while. Everybody was looking for you, of course, so I passed on your good wishes.”
Bryce nodded.
“There’s some real talented kids out there this year. This one nineteen year old — Bucky something — he hung on for eleven seconds.”
Bryce raised both eyebrows and whistled low. “He’ll be one to watch out for.”
Hudson nodded.
“As long as he don’t break both legs and get paralyzed from the waist down by twenty.”
“It’s a risk these kids take,” said Hudson. “They know the risk. You knew it. I knew it.”
“What choice do they have?” asked Bryce. He sat heavily on the other plush leather chair, opposite Hudson. “It’s either work the family sheep farm or go on the rodeo circuit, and we both know which is more exciting for a twenty year old man.”
Neither was paying much attention to Lydia, but she suspected she’d just learned something about Bryce that she hadn’t known. A sheep farm?
“Start a scholarship,” Hudson said. “You could do it, easy. Twenty thousand a year for a promising young man to go to college instead of getting himself busted up in the ring.”
“That’s not even all that much,” said Bryce.
“That’ll cover most state schools, easy,” Hudson said.
Lydia nodded, not that she was really part of the conversation.
“You could give out two, three,” Hudson went on.
“That’s not a bad idea,” mused Bryce.
Lydia took a nap that afternoon, then headed outside again. She figured she may as well get some more shooting done; she wasn’t sure when she’d be able to make it to the top of [whatever mountain], though her back felt better every day. The colors were gorgeous this time of year: the Aspens were a bright yellow, the other trees orange and red, the evergreens the same staid dark green as always. The mountainsides looked like fireworks, and even though she’d seen fall color before, Lydia just couldn’t get enough.
When she got back, the sun was lowering and the lights were on in the house. She could see in perfectly through the big plate glass windows — the downstairs, the TV room, the kitchen.
And, strangely, the curtains to Bryce’s bedroom were open, everything in it exposed to the whole mountainside.
Unless Lydia’s eyes deceived her, currently, that was two shirtless men, embracing and making out. She stopped dead in her tracks, and then, scooted a little bit behind a short, stubby cedar tree. The two men grappled with one another, hands moving over hard muscles, tugging at pants, their bodies pressed close together.
Who would break into Bryce’s bedroom just to make out like that? She wondered.
Then she realized she was being dumb.
Obviously, it was Bryce and Hudson. Once she realized that, she could see them even more clearly: that was the way Hudson stood, for sure, that was Bryce’s short, almost-black hair. Her jaw dropped open and her eyes went wide, and she was surprised, but maybe not all that surprised.
This does explain a lot, she thought.
And then she thought, why not tell people?
And then she realized that she was almost certainly the last person to figure out this open secret.
I’m from San Francisco, she thought. I love gay people! Why not tell me?
Meanwhile, in the window, Hudson was taking Bryce’s pants off, sliding the denim over his round ass, tossing them to the floor. They were followed by his own, and then by his boxer briefs, and then, both men were naked in the window.
I can’t believe they’re just leaving the window open like this, Lydia thought.
Well, it’s just a mountainside, and they’re probably not expecting some perv to be watching.
Bryce pushed Hudson backward onto his huge bed. Hudson bounced a little, and then Bryce followed him, bending his head down and taking the other man’s cock in his mouth.
Lydia felt the heat begin to gather in her lower belly, and she cursed mentally. As wildly inappropriate as it seemed to watch them have sex, it seemed even more inappropriate to get turned on by it.
Even though they were both very, very good looking. And the way they moved against each other
, muscle on muscle, was beyond sensual to her, more like pure, raw sex.
You should stop watching, she thought to herself as she continued to watch.
Bryce’s head was bobbing up and down on Hudson, slow and steady, and Hudson was writhing just a little bit. Lydia imagined that he was moaning, tossing from side to side. He had both his hands on Bryce’s head, his fingers in the other man’s hair, running back and forth.
Lydia crossed her legs, hard, the seam in the crotch of her jeans just barely touching her sex. It felt so wrong to be watching the two of them, her benefactor and his... friend? But it looked so delicious, so wonderful. It was easily the sexiest thing she’d ever seen.
Then Bryce was on top of Hudson, and Lydia couldn’t see that well — she was too far from the house — but it looked like they were rutting against each other, rubbing their cocks together. Bryce’s hand was there, holding them together, and Lydia could see the muscles on each man ripple in the strong light of the bedroom, until she almost couldn’t tell where one man started and the other ended.
She crossed her legs tighter, the warm, glowing feeling spreading. Touching herself while she watched them definitely crossed some kind of moral line, at least in her mind, but it was so hot, she desperately wanted to reach down, just rub one out real quick.
She had her camera, she thought. If she made a calendar or something out of this she could make a killing back in San Francisco. But if jerking off to them crossed a line, taking pictures definitely crossed a line. Her camera stayed where it was, off.
The two men in the bedroom whispered something to each other. Then Hudson playfully pushed Bryce over, rolling their bodies across the bed, then rolling Bryce onto his stomach. He reached back, got something out of a drawer, and rubbed it down his long, thick cock.
Lydia held her breath, cunt absolutely pounding with desire.
Now Bryce was up on his knees, then he slid partway down the bed until he was standing on the floor, still bent over. Hudson put his cock at the other man’s hole, bent over, said something to him. Lydia wished she could hear whatever he was saying in his slightly rough accent, that country way he had of talking.
