They were brought together by knitting, but past mistakes might just keep them apart.
When Travis is told that he needs to start a hobby, he never expects to take up knitting. But a bright display in a yarn store has him stopping to check it out. There he meets Gavin, divorced father of a teenager, who owns sheep and makes his own yarn from their wool. Their attraction is instant, but that only lasts until Gavin finds out that Travis cheated on his last boyfriend. Gavin doesn’t want to be hurt, and he doesn’t know if he can trust Travis not to break his heart the same way he broke Cal’s.
But sometimes people deserve a second chance, and Travis has learned his lesson. If they’re willing to take a chance on each other, they might just find love again.
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All Tangled Up
Copyright © 2020 Caitlin Ricci
ISBN: 978-1-4874-2771-9
Cover art by Martine Jardin
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All Tangled Up
Hillcrest Farm Book 2
By
Caitlin Ricci
Chapter One
Travis
My therapist wanted me to have a hobby. It was more like a demand, actually. I’d been living on my own for eight months, and the four before that I’d been living with my ex. For five years we’d been happy, then I’d had to go screw it all up.
Since moving out I’d started therapy. I was still going twice a week. I was also still feeling stuck and miserable–every night I fought the urge to call Cal up and beg him to take me back.
He had moved on. We were still Facebook friends, so I got to see all the pictures that he posted of himself and Dillon together. His rebound guy was half my age and not even old enough to drink. I knew that Cal hadn’t left me for Dillon, but it was hard not to hate the man who had replaced me in his bed.
I didn’t even know him or anything about him, but I hated him so much. It was that obsessive thinking, and the anger, and the guilt that still had me in therapy almost a year after I had confessed to cheating on Cal and he had broken up with me.
There was no coming back from the cheating I had done. I’d been with the guy for months. What was supposed to be a one-time thing simply hadn’t been and I regretted what I’d done every day. But my regrets wouldn’t have made me feel any better about Cal and how he was a stripper. I didn’t know how Dillon could date Cal while he was still a stripper either, but maybe he somehow found a way to keep it from bothering him the way it had eaten at me for five long years, where every night I had wondered what Cal was doing and who he was doing it with and hating every second of not knowing those answers.
I was desperate to think about something besides them. I needed to. I couldn’t go through another day, let alone another six months, obsessing over my ex and his new boyfriend.
I hadn’t expected them to last. Not really. I figured Dillon would be Cal’s fling, his rebound to get over what I’d done to him, then Cal would get bored of having an obnoxious little teenager to deal with all the time, and he’d eventually forgive me and we could pick up where we’d left off.
That had been my plan, anyway. Clearly it hadn’t worked, but I had expected a phone call from Cal every day for the first few months. I expected that he would even quit his job for me and go find something where I didn’t have to worry about who he was with all the time.
But he hadn’t. He was still a stripper and he was still with Dillon and I was all alone in a search for a new hobby to keep my mind off of them both.
I wasn’t being very successful with it. I was trying, but I was definitely failing. I didn’t have hobbies. My hobby had been making sure the house looked nice and being a good boyfriend to Cal. Now I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Springfield that took only about ten minutes to really clean since I never made it a mess and I had no boyfriend to take care of. I had no one. Just me. And that was the most depressing thing of all.
My search for a new hobby led me to painting, which I sucked at and hated the mess of, and then to photography. I wasn’t any good at that either, and I definitely didn’t have an eye for it, whatever that meant. My photos were boring. Maybe because my life was boring. I needed something where I could make something. I needed a hobby where I could be doing something, and I needed to be able to do it anywhere.
I was driving, really with no destination in mind, just a need to be out of my tiny apartment and away from my miserable life, when I found myself practically on the Arkansas border. There was a shopping center there, so out of the way and hidden by tall evergreen trees that I was surprised the stores there could stay in business.
The shopping center had a yarn store and cafe. The yarn store’s two big glass windows were filled with balls of brightly colored yarn, blocking me from seeing anything inside. The yarn was arranged in a rainbow, all different shades and thicknesses. I knew nothing about yarn or knitting, or anything else that probably happened in that store, but I was drawn to it because of the rainbows. Ever since I had come out years ago, I’d always been attracted to rainbows.
I parked in front of the store and went in, not expecting much of anything. Not the brightness of the plain wooden shelves stuffed full with bright yarn, not the smell of sweet chai tea coming from the pot at the back of the store where a blue couch stood invitingly, and not the smile of the man behind the counter who had a pair of long wooden sticks in his hands that he was winding yarn around. It took me a moment to realize he was knitting something as he stood there at the register.
“Hi, I’m Gavin, welcome to my store. Can I help you find anything special, or are you just looking around?”
I had no business being in a store like this. I didn’t know the first thing about knitting or anything else that could be done with yarn. But I was definitely attracted to all the colors. I went to the nearest shelf, one packed full of bright blues and purples, and began running my fingers over the soft yarn. “I’ve never been in a yarn store before. The closest I’ve ever been was at one of those big stores that has a craft section that might have a few stacks of yarn, but nothing like this.” I looked around and was overwhelmed by everything I saw before me. Gavin’s store was filled with colorful gems of yarn that I liked staring at, but I would have no idea what to do with them if I actually took one home.
“Yarn has become a bit of an obsession of mine over the years. Knitting used to be just a thing I did. I would make scarves for Christmas. But then I got my first sheep, and that obsession for yarn turned into an obsession for making my own yarn as well.”
“I’m definitely not talented like that,” I admitted.
Gavin gave a little laugh. “You don’
t have to be talented to make yarn, just very patient and focused. Do you knit?”
I shook my head and stepped away from the shelf full of yarn. I wanted some, though for what I had no idea. All it would do was sit there on my dining room table, collecting dust like everything else in my miserable little apartment. “I don’t do anything with yarn, but my therapist told me to get a hobby, and I liked your rainbow display out front.”
“Thanks. I spent a long time choosing just the right yarns and shades to make that. It took a lot of planning, but in the end I think it was worth it, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.”
His attention to detail showed. “Is it hard to knit?”
“Depends on what you consider easy or hard, I imagine. If you’ve got some time right now, I can show you some of the basics. You won’t be making anything too elaborate after a little lesson with me. I can’t make anything that impressive myself. But after half an hour you should be able to tell if you actually like it or not.”
It would be easy to take him up on his offer, but I didn’t want to monopolize his time, especially since he had a business to run. “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“You’re not. Let’s go back to the couches. I’ve got some scrap yarn in a basket over there and lots of extra needles. I hold classes during the week. Can I get you some tea or something?”
Being taken care of felt nice. It had been a long time since anyone, not to mention someone as attractive as Gavin, had offered me a drink and half an hour of his undivided attention. I was glad to go back with him, and once we each had a cup of hot sweet chai tea, I had a ball of yellow yarn in front of me and a wooden stick in each of my hands, just like he did.
“These are your knitting needles,” Gavin said.
“I’m Travis,” I introduced myself, offering him my hand despite the knitting needle in it.
Instead of taking my hand, Gavin clinked his needle against mine as if we were about to have a sword fight, then it was down to business as he tried to teach me how to knit.
Chapter Two
Gavin
I had a history of liking the people I did quickly and without hesitation. My ex-wife, Cindy, said I fell in love quickly, but that wasn’t quite the case. I didn’t love Travis. Definitely not. But within half an hour of having him quietly sitting there beside me while I taught him how to knit, I was interested in him. I didn’t know if he dated men at all, or if he was single to begin with, but I wanted to find out more about him.
That was my problem. One of them, anyway. Half an hour of knowing Travis and I wanted to touch his hand or lean in close to him. He looked so lost while trying to figure out knitting, but he was still trying hard at it, even after many restarts on the same small patch he was trying to make. Eventually, with a lot of practice, he could make a scarf, but right now he was still learning how to count his stitches and cast on correctly.
“Do you meet a lot of guys who come here looking for a hobby because their therapists tell them to?” he asked.
I shook my head and helped him loop the yarn over his needle so that he could move the yarn from one needle to the other to make the knit. “If I do, they don’t tell me that’s why they’re here. But generally when people try to find a hobby and they have no idea what they want to do, I think they usually go to a big box store kind of place and not to something as specialized as a yarn store is.”
“I wouldn’t have stopped by either, except for the rainbow in your window.”
I didn’t mind his honesty. I liked it a lot, actually.
“You haven’t asked me why I was in therapy,” he continued.
I didn’t really care to pry into his life. Liking him, wanting to touch him, wanting to kiss him even—those impulses didn’t mean that I had to know everything about him. I was happy with the glimpses that I had of him right now. “I think most people should be in therapy at some point in their lives. I went through my own personal issues, and then I tried marriage counseling for a while with my ex.”
Travis made a face.
I guessed there was probably some old pain there.
“I have my own ex issues as well. Maybe counseling could have helped us, but I think we would have been just as unsuccessful as you two were.”
That was an assumption on his part, and he was wrong about it, too. “Oh, we weren’t unsuccessful. The counseling worked out just fine for us.”
He stopped trying to knit and looked over at me with a frown. “But you said they were your ex. So didn’t you end up breaking up anyway?”
“Yes, we got a divorce. But that wasn’t what we were trying to avoid. We wanted to be able to come to a civil relationship for our son. We were both hurting, but we needed to be united for him. So we did our best, and with a lot of work we found our way back to being friends. I love my kid. Kyle’s amazing, and I would not have him if I hadn’t started a relationship with Cindy, but I feel very fortunate to have her as my friend, and nothing more than that, now.”
I knew it was hard for people to understand. Even my own family had struggled with the idea of me wanting to be close friends with my ex after all the fighting we’d done when we’d been married. But now we were great. Cindy was my closest friend by far. It was everything else that had made life complicated for us and gotten in the way of our marriage.
“That sounds nice.”
Travis’s tone had gone flat. I had no idea what I’d said to cause that change in him, so I quietly went back to knitting, sitting beside him and working the yarn over my needles. After a moment or two he started knitting again as well. I went slowly, giving him a chance to copy my movements as he went. I kept things simple. There wasn’t any reason to get crazy here.
“Sorry, I know this is weird, but I kind of thought you might have been into me,” Travis mumbled.
I stopped knitting and peered over at him. “I was. I mean, I am.”
“But you’re straight.” He didn’t turn his gaze toward me.
“I’m bi,” I corrected him.
I would have liked to have continued that line of conversation for a while, but my kid chose that moment to come into the store. I got up, putting my knitting aside, and went to go greet him.
“Hey,” I said, putting my arm around him as he dropped his backpack behind the register.
“Hey. New customer?”
Kyle knew every one of my regulars, so of course he wouldn’t know Travis. “He is. Come, meet Travis.”
He came forward and offered Travis his hand, just like I’d taught him when he was young. I ruffled his hair and stepped away as Kyle introduced himself. I wanted some more tea, and part of me was glad that Kyle had shown up. I didn’t need to become interested in a new customer, which was exactly what was going to happen if I kept sitting there next to Travis.
With Kyle there, flirting with Travis simply wasn’t possible, but I could still knit with him. While Kyle got himself some tea and pulled out his homework, like every afternoon where he spent a few hours in the store before we went home together, I took up my knitting again .
It didn’t take long for Travis to get frustrated, which I understood. Knitting was tricky to get into at first. But he persevered, which I appreciated. A lot of people I saw come in here had this idea that knitting was easy and anyone could do it, but then when they started and realized that it wasn’t all that easy they were ready to give up.
Travis wasn’t like that. He stumbled, he messed up—I was pretty sure he wanted to give up sometimes—but maybe it was that his therapist had told him that he needed to have a hobby, or maybe he’d tried a bunch of others and they hadn’t stuck. Whatever the reason was, Travis was still right there next to me, knitting even as he screwed up and had to take it out and redo it.
“I think I like knitting,” he said after an hour of work. He’d managed to do two who rows without a single screw up.
“I like it too.” I was surprised that he did, actually, given how many
mistakes he’d made. “You don’t give up. I admire that.”
Travis gave me a little smile, then he put his knitting aside. He stretched out his fingers and then he rubbed his wrist. “Don’t get me wrong, I do tend to give up. It’s a bad habit of mine. One of many, actually. But I’m trying to get better about it. It’s not easy though, breaking away from years of learned behavior.” He rolled his eyes at himself. “Sorry, that’s my therapist talking and coming out of my mouth.”
“I don’t mind. You’re honest.” I wanted to tell him how good it was to be around someone so completely honest. How refreshing that was, but I thought that might sound odd since we’d only just met.
“I’m trying to be, at least.” He started to unwind the rows of whatever he’d been working on. Maybe he’d meant it to be the beginning of a scarf, or maybe just part of a square. Either way, it was back to being a ball of yarn again. Full of possibilities, but not for him anymore. That ball would be ready for the next person who wanted to learn how to knit to use.
“Are you all done?” I asked as he put his needles back where they’d been before in a big basket between us.
“Yeah. So, to get started, what do I need? Just needles and a ball of yarn?”
There was a lot more to it than that, but those were the basics, and I didn’t want to overwhelm him with things he might want later but wouldn’t need right now. “That’s pretty much it.” We got up together and I helped him pick out some knitting needles. That was the easy part. Picking a first ball of yarn to take home was a lot harder. It had to feel good in his hands. He had to like looking at it. And it had to be a weight that he would enjoy working with for a while. All of that was personal preference, though.
I watched quietly from the register with a cup of tea between my hands and Kyle fiddling nearby with inventory sheets. I hadn’t asked my kid to work in the store, but if he wanted to help out, then I was all for it. Less work for me meant that I got to spend more time with him, and also with the sheep.
All Tangled Up Page 1
