A Prairie Dog's Love Song (3 page)

“Plus they’re cute as the dickens. The calves I mean. Dad always let me pick any one I wanted every spring. ’Member Sparky? God, I loved that bull.”

Joshua remembered. Sparky was the biggest, blackest, meanest-looking Angus bull anyone had ever seen. You walked into his pasture, and you were taking your life in your hands—and maybe waving it in front of a taxiing 747. But Ben had raised Sparky for 4-H and showed him at the state fair, and that damn bull loved the boy like he was sunshine and green grass and plump heifers all rolled into one. He’d run up to Ben at full speed, stop, and lift his chin up, begging to be scratched.

“Sparky was a fine-looking bull,” Joshua agreed. And he was. He’d won two championship titles. Sparky was now living the life of a pampered stud on a ranch south of Helena.

“And I mean, just look at this,” Ben said, waving his hand around haphazardly at the sky. “Wouldn’t it suck to live in a city? I hear you can’t hardly see the stars at all ’cause of all the lights.”

“Yup.”

“So what is it? That
you
love, I mean?”

Ben finally stopped talking and listened. He was lying on his side just a few feet away and looking at Joshua like he really wanted to know. Joshua turned his head a little and studied Ben.

He supposed this was one of those mentorish sorts of talks older men had with younger boys where he was expected to impart pearls of wisdom. And he supposed he could rightly fuck it up real bad if he was flip about it. Even though Joshua was only twenty-one, he’d been working the family ranch full-time with his father since he was eighteen, which was practically a lifetime. And before that he’d grown up with it, just as Ben and Chet had. Ben was just six years younger, but the gulf between fifteen and twenty-one was wider than the Montana sky.

“What you said,” Joshua said, clearing his throat. “But mostly… freedom.”

“Freedom?” Ben snuggled a little closer.

“I know what needs to be done, and I do it. No one’s makin’ me punch a card or lookin’ over my shoulder. I’m not stuck in a building. I’m outside. I’m free.”

Those weren’t the right words. They hardly made a dent in something as vast and as perfect as the Montana wilderness, or the beauty of his family’s ranch, or how Joshua felt about it. It was like, once you’d gotten the
open
inside you, anything less felt like it could strangle a body until it had squeezed all the life out and you were just a shell. A lot of people lived like that, he reckoned. Becoming more a shell year by year, stuck in jobs they hated, maybe marriages they hated too.

Not him. Montana, the animals… they filled him up inside, every day.

“Yeah,” Ben said with a sort of hushed awe, as if he understood all that, even though Joshua hadn’t said it. He flipped over onto his back and looked up at the sky. “You ain’t never gonna leave it, are ya?”

“Nope.”

Ben looked over at Chet. “He will.”

“Chet wants to see things,” Joshua agreed.

“He hates muckin’ the barn. He’s a big old baby about
it.”

Joshua could have said more. Chet had been his best friend since grade school, and he understood that Chet dreamed of seeing faraway places. Joshua knew there were exotic lands that sure would be a sight to see. But he also thought it was possible that a man could travel over every spot of this earth only to realize that the best place was the one he’d left. And he thought maybe a place got inside you, and that
made
it the best, because you belonged to it, were rooted in it, like the grass or the trees. And he thought maybe, too, there was a lot of peace in appreciating what you had, in watching the small changes that happened season by season in just one special place instead of watching fleeting moments go by in a million places you didn’t really know and never would.

But that all seemed so fanciful. Joshua didn’t say anything.

“
I
love it too,” Ben sighed, craning his head back to look at the stars.

Joshua grunted. He knew that. Maybe that was why he liked Ben so much, more than he’d ever be willing to admit. “It’d be good for your dad if you stuck.”

“Yeah.”

Ben sat up then and scooted himself like a mummy a little closer to Joshua so that their nylon-and-batting-covered legs were touching. Joshua looked up at him with a quirked brow.

“
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
!” Ben sang softly, dragging out the note.

Joshua snorted and glanced at Chet. “Hush. You’ll wake ’im.”

Ben broke off the note long enough to say, “Nah, Chet sleeps like the dead,” and went back to “
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…
.”

Joshua covered his face in his hands.

“
Oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above
…,” Ben sang.

Joshua groaned.

“
Don’t fence me in!
”

“Ben
.
”

“C’mon, everybody sing!”

“I ain’t singin’.”

Joshua peeked through his fingers at the boy. Ben loved old cowboy songs, which their town radio station played 24-7. His head was tilted back, and he sang the song soulfully. He was being a little silly. But only a little.

“
Don’t fence me in!
”

Ben’s voice was warm and clear in the night and right pleasant. He wasn’t mugging now; he was singing sweetly. Joshua sighed and gave in to it. He looked at the fire, and his lips tugged into a smile. Ben shuffled around, and his head landed on Joshua’s stomach.

It was nice like that.

Ben reached the end of the song and started over.  This time Joshua couldn’t resist laying a hand on Ben’s arm and joining in. “Oh give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don’t fence me in!”

“D
EAR
SWEET
baby Jesus,” Baxter said. He was looking out the window at something, and by the tone of his voice, it wasn’t the sprinkler system.

Ben was busy humming
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry
and rigging the gray bedroom for tonight’s shoot—making sure all the cameras had fresh batteries, the stashed mics hadn’t been buried in bedding, smashed, or clogged with come, and the room had been well cleaned (it had). Baxter, who was supposed to be helping him, wasn’t.

Five days ago, Ben had gone from occasional star talent to permanent gaffer boy. When he’d shown up on Sunday, cried out and feeling like a lost lamb, Frankie had stepped up. Ben didn’t want to go back home? That was fine. He filled Ben’s calendar with video shoots for the next two months and penciled in behind-the-scenes work around his shooting schedule.

B2B only did three video updates a week, and the same guy couldn’t be in more than one of those, no matter how popular. It was called “overexposure,” which was kinda ironic, when you really thought about it. Anyway, there were only so many sex scenes for Ben to film. But Frankie was all shoulder to cry on as he offered Ben side work and a place to stay. He was currently stashed at one of the apartments B2B rented for out-of-town models, and he could stay till he arranged his own place. He was grateful.

Grateful for a place to land, but not over the hurt of it all. It still stung like a bullwhip had cracked against his chest. Repeatedly.

Ben still didn’t understand how Henry Atkins had found out about it. When Ben had first been recruited, after having clicked on an ad for “male modeling” on Facebook, he’d been cautious. But B2B had flown him out to Vegas to check them out, and he was impressed by the operation. The Vegas house was a gated ten-thousand-foot faux pueblo McMansion, with lots of bedrooms, a big common room with video game controllers, and a pool and cabana out back. And there were always so many cool guys hanging around. It was glamorous, but it was like a big family too.

After that first trip, Ben really wanted to do it. He’d always loved attention, always loved being in the show ring. And this—well, this wasn’t about showing animals anymore. This was about
him
, his physique, his sex appeal, his ability to perform on camera. And it was a helluva lotta money and, well,
sex
, an opportunity to experiment around a little, try some new things. It was hard to beat that with a ten-inch stick.

And he couldn’t see how anyone from home would ever know about it. Who in the conservative little Montana town of Clyde’s Corner would be looking at gay porn? Most folks didn’t even have high-speed Internet yet. And even if someone was looking for stuff like that, B2B was just one of many gay porn sites. And even if someone
did
see him, wouldn’t they be too ashamed to admit it? Ben had thought he was pretty safe.

For a while, he’d had it all. He could have his simple life back home and fly out to Vegas a few days a month, film three or four scenes, and get topped up with sex and money. It was like he was Clark Kent back home and Superman in Vegas. He got reams of fan mail. He was a bona fide star—the number two ranked model on B2B. That was something.

If it had been starting to get just a
little
bit old… the fluffing and the waiting and having sex with guys who acted completely uninterested the moment the cameras turned off…. If he’d started thinking once in a while about hanging up his old Caleb spurs, about having sex between just him and someone he really cared about,
off camera
, well, the opposite had also been true. He’d begun to realize that maybe Clyde’s Corner wasn’t going to be it for him for the rest of his life after all, that maybe he was too odd a peg to fit into the nice round holes there.

And man, that really sucked.

Now the decision was made. Because Henry Atkins hadn’t just
seen
Ben Rivers as Caleb, B2B star. He’d shouted out the details in front of the entire population of Nora’s Diner. That horse had done jumped the fence.

Ben’s heart was leaden as he took the batteries out of the hand cam and tested them. Twenty percent.

“Baxter, can you go see if there are any more D cells in the supply closet?” Ben asked.

“I can’t move. I’m paralyzed by love. No, delete that, it’s just that my dick is stuck to the window.”

Slightly annoyed, Ben went over to see what Baxter was going on about. He knew that, whatever it was, it had to be male. Baxter was not a model, though he wanted to be. He was strictly staff. He was too thin, too fem, and too gay to be on camera. B2B took their “Straight boys having gay sex” tagline seriously. And if not every model was as straight as they claimed to be, they had to at least look the part.

“Dear God,
please
tell me he’s going to be filming with us! I’ll give up all my Halloween candy to charity, I swear!” Baxter gushed.

Ben looked down at the driveway where Devon, a huge blond Adonis, and B2B’s number one model, was talking to some guy.

Some guy
. Ben blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to the brighter light. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. The guy’s back was turned, but….

Oh. Lord
. Ben would know those fitted, worn Wranglers, those long, long legs, that amazing ass, and those crazy broad shoulders anywhere, even if the view of the man from the window were such that Ben could only see the top of his….

Stetson
.

Ben’s hand flew to his mouth. He stopped breathing.

“I know, right?” Baxter said with a gloat. Then he did a double take at Ben’s face. “Caleb? What’s wrong?”

The man below turned and glanced up at the house. It was. It was Joshua Braintree. Joshua Braintree was standing in the ever-loving driveway. At B2B porn studio. In goddamn Vegas. It just didn’t fit. It was kind of like seeing a sow and her piglets walking down the Vegas strip.

“Oh balls,” Ben groaned, backing away from the window.

“
Caleb
.” Baxter put out a soothing hand. “Is that your brother or something? You want me to—”

But Ben was already running out of the room.

T
HE
FOYER
of the B2B house was open to the second story. A railed hallway ran along the upper level, and it was perfect for things like dropping stuff on someone’s head, mooning, practicing your cruise ship royal wave, and, of course, eavesdropping.

Especially if you sank down against the hallway wall, you could hear everything without being seen, and you could get a view of the foyer by lifting yourself up a bit, as long as the people below weren’t looking up.

Ben sank down against the wall. His palms were sweaty, and his heart was hammering so loud it probably sounded like rain to the people downstairs.

Maybe Joshua wouldn’t come inside. Or maybe Frankie’d just tell him to come back tomorrow. Or maybe—

The front door opened.

“Wait here,” he heard Devon say. “I’ll go find Frankie.”

Ben dared a peek. Joshua was standing by the front door. He took off his hat and wiped his brow, ran a hand through his hair.
Damn
, he looked fine. His hair was light brown with natural gold highlights, straight and thick. It was layered and down to his shoulders. He’d worn it that way since high school, and it suited his chiseled features. Joshua Braintree was
a man
, and despite all the studly boys that ran around B2B, this was a different level of macho altogether. Because it was
real.
Joshua Braintree didn’t
try
to be anything. He just
was
.

Ben barely registered it when Baxter slid down next to him.

Baxter elbowed him. “Your brother?” he mouthed. He made a “hot” gesture by fanning himself with his hand.

Ben shook his head, his mouth pinched tight.
No
.

No. Not his brother. Ben could only wish it was Chet. Chet would ream his ass and maybe drag him to the airport by his ear. Something like that, Ben could get mad about, he could fight and defend himself.
That
he could handle.

But
this
. If there was one person on earth Ben didn’t want to know about the porn, even less than he’d wanted his dad or Chet to know, or even Mrs. Barnaby, his sweet little old Sunday school teacher, it was the man standing in the foyer below. Ben felt his insides shrivel. He closed his eyes and thunked his head back on the wall.
Please, God, let this be a nightmare
.