Somewhere to Belong

by Caitlin Ricci

  My next client, surprisingly, was in Parker. I rarely had clients in Colorado. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had one, and I loved not having to travel for my latest job. My client was Evaline Green, who was a sweet-sounding older woman who ran a place called the Green Acres Equine Sanctuary. Not surprisingly, she was losing money, as most animal rescues often were. But I had some nonprofit experience, and I wasn’t lacking money in the least, especially since I no longer had a mortgage to pay, so I was able to accept the price she offered for my services. Even though it was nearly half of what I would have normally asked for.

  As I was driving down from Thornwood to Parker and grumbling at the traffic I was hitting even on a Friday morning, I couldn’t help thinking of Eli and how he’d said he worked at a horse rescue. I’d admired him for that, for working with animals and helping them. It was a far cry from what I did, but I thought that it fit what little I’d known of him. Now that he was out of my life, I had no idea what to think of him.

  But as I pulled up to a dilapidated wood barn and saw him standing outside with a sanctuary polo shirt on and a clipboard that he held clutched to his chest, my mood brightened instantly.

  His eyes widened when I got out of my car, and his cheeks darkened as he looked away.

  “Hello,” I said as I came up to him.

  Eli looked up at me. There were dark smudges under his eyes and a trace of fear in his gaze.

  “I’m not going to say anything,” I assured him. To prove my point, I extended my hand. “Good morning. I’m Grayson Pendleton. Evaline hired me to go over the financials of the rescue and see how she can squeeze a few more pennies out for the horses.”

  He gave me his hand, though he was trembling, and I took the lead by shaking his hand before he could pull it out of my grasp. “Eli Walker. I’m a senior employee here, and I handle the adoptions. When Evaline is called out unexpectedly like this, I assist visitors. I can’t be around all the time. You’ll have to call if you need something. I’ll explain all that once we’re inside.”

  He took his hand out of mine as soon as he was done talking. “Please follow me to the office.”

  The office was little more than a poorly converted stall in the barn. It smelled of hay, leather, and horses, which were all scents I hadn’t experienced since I was a child on my grandfather’s farm and weren’t all that welcome to me now. Still, I had a job to do, so I squared my shoulders and took a seat behind the desk where Eli indicated I sit.

  “Does she keep everything on a laptop somewhere?” I asked him once I realized that there was no desktop in front of me.

  Eli gave me a sheepish smile. “Um… I do. And I transfer all the documentation to it at the end of the day, but Evaline likes to work with the hard copies.” He crouched down at a safe behind me and pulled out a laptop with a bright rainbow pride sticker on it.

  “You certainly aren’t subtle,” I said with some appreciation as he opened the laptop, unlocked it, then turned it around to face me.

  “I don’t have any reason to be.” He moved back, putting some much-needed distance between us. He was working, as was I, but that didn’t diminish my body’s easy reaction to him in the least. My cock seemed to know no boundaries when it came to him, and I was able to easily picture him on his knees in front of me even here in a horse barn. He pointed to a folder marked Important: For The Rescue before he put a walkie-talkie down beside my hand. “I have one too. We only use one channel here, so be careful what you say over it. If you need some help or can’t find something, let me know.”

  “You aren’t staying?” I’d assumed I’d have his help for the day, or at least his company since I likely wouldn’t need his help.

  He shook his head and moved even farther away. “No. I have stuff to do too. And I’m pretty sure I’d just get in your way. There’s a bathroom and a vending machine in the barn here if you need either. See you.”

  “Eli?” I stopped him.

  He turned back to me at the stall’s open door. “Yes?”

  “I missed you.”

  He ducked his head to hide his blush. “Use the walkie if you need anything.”

  “I will,” I said, but he was already walking away from me.

  A FEW hours later, he came back to me with a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a soda in his hands. “Everyone is fed lunch here,” he explained as he put them on the desk in front of me. His brisk tone made me think he didn’t want me thinking he was doing me a favor or treating me any differently than anyone else at the rescue.

  “Thank you. Do you have a minute? I have some questions.”

  He perched himself on the edge of the desk. “Sure. I guess. What’s going on?”

  I took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. Truthfully I had no questions about the rescue or its operations. Everything pertaining to Green Acres was well documented and easy to find. Whether that was because Eli kept the files on his computer neat and organized or that was how Evaline insisted they be, I had no idea, and I didn’t really care. Her margins were already tight, and I was struggling to find anywhere that could be cut. Perhaps if she didn’t insist on feeding everyone while they were there, but I was pretty sure she would have still wanted to thank the volunteers for their time in some fashion.

  “Why have you been avoiding me?”

  He narrowed his gaze at me and started to slip off the desk, but I grabbed his wrist to stop him. He looked down at my hand on his skin, and I would have given anything to know what he was thinking right then.

  “I thought you wanted to talk business,” he finally said after a few moments.

  “Please?”

  With a sigh he came back onto the desk, and I released his hand. “I let you get too close. You were almost in friend territory.”

  Yes, we had been getting close to friends. But I’d been looking forward to that new development in our dynamic. It seemed that Eli had wanted to be anything but. “And friends is….” I tried to come up with a word that I thought would fit, but nothing came to mind. “Wrong?”

  His quick nod left me feeling like he’d slapped me. “Yes. We can’t be friends.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m glad.”

  I had been hungry before, but now I had definitely lost my appetite. “Is it my age that prevents you from wanting me as your friend, or is it because I’m black?”

  “What? No.” He genuinely looked like I’d offended him. He chewed on his lip for a while as I watched him, no idea what was going on in his head. “We can’t be friends because when I get to that point, with anyone, I end up getting clingy and needy and inevitably wanting to be with them. So I don’t have sex with my friends, and I don’t become friends with the people I have sex with.”

  His brand of logic made no sense to me. I didn’t mind the possibility of a relationship with him on the basis of more than sex. But if that’s all he was willing to give me, if he even still was, then I knew I’d settle for that in order to have him in my life on any kind of a basis.

  I leaned forward over the table to be closer to him. “If we went back to not knowing anything about each other beyond our names, then would you go back to agreeing to meet with me?”

  “I’ve never tried to rewind things before.”

  “But?”

  He gently smiled, but he was no longer looking at me. Instead he was focusing on the wall across from himself. “If you think you can be like that with me, then we can try. I don’t want to be friends, though, so you need to remember that.”

  I wanted to be more than just someone who messaged him for sex and spent an hour or two a week with him, but if that was all he was willing to give me, then I would agree. “I think that will work.”

  “Thanks for seeing it my way.”

  If his way was that I’d agreed to continue to treat him like a no-name hookup then sure, that’s what I’d do. But I certainly didn’t agree with the way he wanted things to be, and I didn’t see why he would want that either. We weren’t
friends, though, and I couldn’t force him to accept me in his life as anything more than a casual sex partner.

  “Do you want to stay for lunch?” My appetite was back, to a degree, and I would have welcomed his company.

  Eli shook his head. “I need to get back to work. I already had my lunch.”

  To me it sounded suspiciously like he was trying to avoid me again. He must have been able to read some of that on my face because he smiled as if to soften my rejected offer.

  “I really do have work to do. We got a mare in last month that has some medical issues and needed a lot of weight put on her. The vet cleared her yesterday for an evaluation, so I get to see if she can be ridden and what she knows. I’m hoping not to get thrown again today.”

  That was probably the most he’d ever told me about himself or his life, and listening to him, even for such a short amount of time, had me smiling. “You fell off today? Were you hurt?”

  He got off the desk. “I’m okay. The arena is soft. And now we know that horse bucks at a canter. The vet will look at him, and then Evaline decides if a trainer needs to come out or if he should be adopted to someone with enough experience to handle a horse with that behavioral issue.”

  “Adopt him out as is,” I told him, even though my opinion wouldn’t matter.

  “Why? He’d be easier to place after a few months of training.”

  He was right, but he hadn’t been going over the numbers all morning either. “The sanctuary’s base price for a rideable horse is five hundred. When that horse is well trained and a child can ride it, that price only goes up to one thousand. Evaline has spent more money fixing issues like your bucking horse than she will ever make back. But you may say that the money she spends on one horse to get him a home helps other horses down the road, only it doesn’t because each horse needs at the very least vet care, farrier care, and hay. In the winter they are given feed and blankets, and during the summer they get extra farrier care. Some of this is offset by donations, but the majority of the income for this sanctuary comes in the form of adoptions, and unless she has a string of free, completely kid-ready, rideable horses come in that need no additional vet or farrier work, other than what each horse gets as a minimum, she cannot keep affording to get these horses trained. So my suggestion to her will be, in order to cut the most costs, that she stop training horses if she wants to keep her sanctuary going for longer than the next two years.”

  Eli just stared at me for a long time. “How long have you been working with horses?”

  I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose. I hadn’t meant to say all that, but talking business and explaining my choices and my suggestions was easy to me, even when I wasn’t speaking to the person who had hired me.

  “I don’t. I spent a few summers on my grandfather’s farm as a kid.”

  “You picked up a lot. So finding a free trainer is the only solution?”

  Nodding, I reached for the soda he’d brought me and opened it. “That would do it, but I’ve never heard of such a person that would have the knowledge to work with problem horses. You already know that, though. Training a horse from the ground up is one thing. Correcting behaviors is another.”

  “I’ll think about a solution. I would prefer to get these horses trained and then placed into homes where I know they won’t be a danger to anyone based on behaviors that we know about.”

  He could think all he wanted about it, but I was pretty sure we’d both come up with the same answer. The horses needed to be adopted out as-is as long as they were medically treated for any immediate needs. The chronically sick horses were another problem, but even from what little I knew of Evaline, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t agree to stop taking those horses in. She seemed to genuinely care about the horses she rescued, and some she’d had on the property for twenty years according to the records Eli had.

  “See you,” Eli said after a few moments.

  I nodded, and he left me alone in the stall to continue my work. Normally I would begin an evaluation by looking at any employees and seeing if there was some overlap of responsibilities there that the employer could restructure and cut down so that one employee might feel overworked for a while until things smoothed out but so that the employer wasn’t paying two salaries. The problem with the sanctuary, though, was that there were no employees other than Eli, and he made very little as it was and his position came with no benefits. I wondered how he even managed to survive on such a low income unless he had another job. That was the only option that made sense, but since we weren’t going to be friends, I tried not to think about him and his life. I’d get to enjoy sex with him, and that was it. I should have been happy about that instead of feeling like I’d just been on the losing end of a compromise I didn’t want to make.

  Chapter Five

  Eli

  I HADN’T expected Grayson to be able to keep his promise of just sex between us, but when he stopped messaging me just to say hi, I got my hopes up. When he gave me an address and asked me to be there at a specific time, like he’d done in the months before the night I’d let him get too close, I was happy to accept.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to go see Grayson, but I really wanted the break from what had essentially become my life of working and screwing Brent with very little in between. It seemed like he was watching me sometimes, waiting for me to come home just so he could text. And I didn’t feel comfortable saying no to him. That was the worst part of it. I had this gut feeling that if I ever did refuse, he’d take that as me agreeing to pay rent again, and I couldn’t afford to even pay what my rent had been at this point since I’d had some unexpected bills come up. I was in a rut, and I felt trapped. Grayson was definitely a welcome change from the mundane life I’d started to lead without even trying to.

  His hotel was in Black Hawk this time, and since I knew he lived in Thornwood now, this hotel couldn’t have been more than a ten-minute drive for him. For me it was over an hour, but by the time I got to the casino hotel, I was much more relaxed than I had been when I’d decided to meet up with him. I’d come straight from work too, and instead of changing out of my sanctuary polo shirt, I simply went up to his room in that. I kept a few extra shirts in my car so that no one would ever know where I worked, but with Grayson I didn’t have to worry about that. It was a strange sort of situation we found ourselves in, and part of me really wanted it to work out for us just being fuck buddies. The other part of me was ready to swear off guys for a while in general just so I wouldn’t have to have Brent on top of me anymore.

  Grayson smiled at me when I came into his hotel room. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” I stripped off my clothes quickly, just like I always did, and he moved the sheet aside. Instead of getting on him right away this time, I knelt between his thighs and gently lapped at the head of his cock for a bit. I hadn’t been with anyone but Brent lately, and he didn’t really inspire me to take my time and linger in the moment at all. But Grayson did. Maybe it was because he didn’t rush me or make me feel degraded for agreeing to be with him. He didn’t treat me like he owned me and he was somehow allowing me to do him a favor by getting on my knees for him.

  So I took my time with Grayson’s cock, and I tasted his salt, and I buried my nose in his tight curls when I took him deep into my mouth. And though he whispered my name, he said nothing else to me. I wasn’t his whore or his slut. I was just Eli with him, and now he knew a lot more about me than most people I met up with did. Before I could get him too close to coming, I slid over his lap and took out my plug. A condom came next, and then I sank onto him, and he laid his hands gently over my thighs. Riding him was always pleasant, and I used to look forward to the times when I would find him on his back on the bed. Now I practically needed these moments between us.

  “You’ve got some bruises,” he said as I began slowly swaying on his cock and worked to find the angle that would be best for me.

  Was this part of being friends, or was it a question I could answer? I�
�d thought he’d meant from when I’d fallen off a horse the day before, but his gaze was on my upper arm, where bruises wrapped around my bicep. Where Brent had been just a bit too rough with me. I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to intentionally cross that barrier either. So I simply shrugged. Grayson lifted one hand off my thigh to be able to trace those dark purple marks on my arm.

  “Would you tell me if someone was hurting you? More than you would like them to?”

  I shook my head. That was the truth. I wouldn’t tell him. Because we weren’t friends and I didn’t want his help in this situation. I didn’t need it either. Brent was foul, and he was a bully, and I hated having sex with him, and I never once got off, and he didn’t seem to care in the least, but this was my mess that I’d created, and I was going to live with it until I had enough money to find a new place. Or until I stopped caring about who used my body and how. I was afraid that I was dangerously close to that point already.

  “Do you have anyone you could tell?”

  I really wished he would drop it. They were just bruises. They didn’t matter. I got banged up horseback riding all the time. Just because I now had bruises from sex didn’t change the fact that I bruised easily, and he didn’t have to worry about me.

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  He looked sad, and I realized that I was losing him as he started to go soft inside of me.