This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon
15
As I saw it, I had two options. I was, after all, Frank"s
nephew, his guest. Frank had not personally given me any
orders at all, and I presumed he was unaware that anybody
else had. I could still go back into the house, pretending
never to have been awake, and wander in to find Frank for
breakfast. But the potential pitfalls of this plan were
manifold. Frank, a rancher all his life, would have been
awake for hours by now. His general tendency, though, now
that he was getting a little older, was to get up in good time
to give his men their orders and then go back to the house to
order supplies and check accounts before breakfast.
Chances were, he had spotted me already from his window. I
had no desire to be caught out in my deception after what I
said last night. Additionally, I did not fail to recognize the
fact that, as one of Frank"s trained ranchmen, it was quite
likely that Oro"s idea of an easy task for a beginner had been
gleaned from Frank in the first place, and that Frank, even if
I succeeded in convincing him that I had just woken up,
would simply set me the same task again himself. And if that
happened I would be here again, still facing the same
Himalayas of horse dung, but without several of the
advantages of the current situation. Frank wouldn"t know
that I had dragged myself valiantly out of bed without ever
being asked; that I had set about finding myself something
to do in order to prove myself as eager for and capable of
work as any of his hired hands. Furthermore—and I can"t
pretend this wasn"t the overriding factor—Oro would know
everything. He would know that my attempted projection of
myself as an honest working man was nothing but a
delusion; most likely, he would think me a pampered little
faggot, and, what"s worse, dishonest. The thought of Oro
coming in here after the agreed hour and a half had elapsed
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Louise Blaydon
16
and finding that I had completely disregarded his
suggestions—never orders, but genuine attempts to help—
was too cringe-inducing to tolerate. Oro of the open smile
and honey-bronze beauty, I could not disappoint.
Fortified by this decision, I resettled my shovel in my
hands, squared my jaw in what I hoped was a manly
fashion, and turned back toward the stalls. I would show
them, Frank and Oro both. When Oro returned to check, this
place would be spotless.
In any event, “spotless” proved to be something of an
overambitious goal. A better description of the row of stalls,
after I"d had my vigorous way with them, might have been
“ravaged,” or perhaps “incompetently scalped.” (Hey, when in
the ol" Wild West, right?) I"d managed to dispose of the
contents of four of the stalls, shoveling the majority of the
straw and dung out into the wheelbarrow, and subsequently
tossing it on the small mountain behind the building.
Unsurprisingly, that hadn"t been too hard to find. The guys
used it for fertilizer, so it was depleted pretty much on a
daily basis, but even when it was mostly gone, the smell
could have guided any beginner toward the correct spot. By
the time I was done, man
was it plentiful. I had no idea that
horses could shit so much, or that it could be so freakin"
heavy.
Still, I was running on a potent mixture of adrenaline
and anxiety, so the “heavy” factor slipped my concern fairly
early in the game. The only problem was that there always
seemed to be just a few more stalls
,
right when I thought I
must be nearing the end. By the end of the fourth stall, I no
longer had any concept of the passing of time. There was just
me, aching and filthy with sweat and muck and dust, and
the insurmountable, endless task before me. Oh, I was doing
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Louise Blaydon
17
it well enough, I was pretty sure, but it looked to me like it
could conceivably go on
forever.
And I didn"t want to spend
forever smelling like horse shit.
I had paused for a breather, forearm resting on the
handle of my shovel as I surveyed my temporary domain,
when he came back. Oro: a series of soft-fallen steps through
the straw, and a smile I could feel. I knew he was there
almost before I even heard him, and the hairs on my nape, I
swear to God, stood up. Oh, man.
I"ve never really liked having people stand behind me. It
makes me uncomfortable, like I can feel every inch of space
between my skin and theirs, and it makes my flesh creep.
The muscles of my back were all ready to clench up in self-
defense as Oro approached, but he didn"t stop behind me,
although he brushed past close enough that his forearm
touched my shirt. He settled himself, instead, slightly to the
left of me, on the side where the shovel wasn"t. And then, for
a long, long moment, he just looked.
I have to admit, I was looking, too. Not at the stalls,
which so occupied Oro"s attention, but at him, my forehead
practically touching my sweat-damp arm on the shovel"s
handle, face turned sideways, ostensibly at rest, but really
just to take him in. He had his hands in his pockets, casual,
collected; his elbows turned out loosely, the muscles in his
arms swelling gently under the skin. He still had his hat
neatly, jauntily in place, but there was sweat, now, licking
the hollow of his throat, touching his clavicle within the
opened collar of his shirt. The lines of his profile were as
clean-cut and sharp as the rest of him, his face dark and
fine like a toreador"s, his black eyes watchful. He smelled:
warm
, working-man warm, musky and human, fresh sweat
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Louise Blaydon
18
and honest toil. The scent of him pricked my nostrils,
resonated between my legs. Abruptly, I turned my face away
and waited.
“Done pretty good here,” he said, when the long moment
finally drew to an end. His smile, when he turned it toward
me, was unclouded and clean. He was
so
clean; I don"t know
why I thought of him so vividly as such, but I did. I couldn"t
help feeling it. I smiled back. I doubt I could have stopped
myself.
“I only managed four stalls,” I pointed out. “And I never
got around to the disinfecting part.”
Oro laughed, rich and heady in the heat. “Four"s plenty
in an hour and a half, man. Hell, I only expected two. Maybe
three, if you were stronger than you look.” He winked at me.
“I guess you must be a
lot
stronger.”
“Oh, yeah?” I could feel my body"s desperation to
respond, to drape itself unconcernedly over the shovel, to
angle itself toward him all wanting, inviting. I struggled
against the urge with every fiber of my being. “How do I
look
,
then?”
He surveyed me for a minute, head quirked slightly to
one side. I could feel myself heating, blood boiling to the
surface of my skin under his gaze. I shuffled my feet, and
tried to look defiantly back at him, chin uplifted, eyebrows
raised in bold inquiry. He laughed a little, as if he"d noticed,
and then stopped laughing, so that what he said was very
serious.
“You look,” he said, “too pretty for Magdalena.
Everybody"s rough as the roads out here.”
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Louise Blaydon
19
And he turned on his heel, his swagger languid,
unchallenged. “Do the rest,” he called brightly over his
shoulder as he departed. “I"ll be back later.”
I stared after him, voice lost somewhere in my throat. It
hadn"t sounded like an insult, in his gorgeous mouth. But if
not an insult, I couldn"t imagine what it meant. Or rather, I
could imagine all too well, and I thought I"d probably better
stop myself. Oro was a
ranch hand
, I told myself; a cowboy
and a Catholic. When he said I was
pretty
, what he meant
was that he thought I was fey, fragile, too goddamn San
Diego to get anything done around here. Except I"d proven
him wrong in that already, hadn"t I? I"d proven him wrong,
and hell, I"d do it again. I"d do it again
now
, so when he came
back this whole place would be done single-handed.
I hefted my shovel, and stalked into the next stall. The
muscles pulled across my shoulders as I bent to my task,
and it helped a little, the pain, against the imaginings:
against the thought of Oro and his fine-cut, masculine
beauty. There was nothing
rough
about him, whatever he
said.
I shook my head, and repositioned the wheelbarrow by
the door.
I didn"t see Uncle Frank at all, that first day. Oro came
back a couple of hours later with a packet of sandwiches and
a bottle of water; my stomach was protesting so vehemently
by this point that my food-hunger actually outweighed any
attention I might ordinarily have paid to his person. After
rasping my thanks through the thickness of exertion in my
throat, knocking back some water and wolfing down the first
sandwich with barely a pause to chew, I felt a little more
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Louise Blaydon
20
myself—enough, at least, to notice that he looked pleased.
Impressed, even. I let myself indulge, for a moment, the
glowing sensation in my chest.
“Hungry?” he asked, eyebrow quirking along with the
corner of his mouth (oh, God, his
mouth
).
“Hungry work,” I told him shortly, picking up a second
sandwich and tearing it soundly across the middle. “What
d"you think?”
The combination of physical exertion and hunger—the
sheer
physicality
, maybe, of the morning; the raw sense of
masculine endeavor—had made me confident, unusually
unconcerned. He seemed to like that, too.
“You did good,” he told me, mouth curved around a grin.
“Like you were in any doubt about that, huh?”
“Still nice to hear,” I tossed back at him, stuffing the
half-sandwich into my mouth. Under my breath—and
through a mouthful of sandwich—I scoffed, “
Pretty
.”
I don"t know, even now, whether I expected, or even
wanted him to catch that. But Oro was a sharp one, sharp-
eyed and keen, and his laugh only ripened. “I didn"t mean it
as an insult,
compa.
I can see you have muscles on you.”
At this point, I still had most of a bread roll in my
mouth, which sort of inhibited my capacity for speech. Even
still, I could feel my throat tensing up in surprise, or
anticipation. Oro tossed me a wink, and another packet of
sandwiches. “Here. Keep you going while you disinfect them
all, right?”
And with that, he strode out, the curve of his backside
drawing my eyes under his dirt-smeared denim jeans. I
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Louise Blaydon
21
started to feel like a pattern was setting in.
I was starting
to feel that, maybe, this might not be a
bad thing.
WHETHER Oro specifically requested charge of me, or if it
was Uncle Frank"s independent idea, I never found out. Or
when, even—had he volunteered himself before he met me?
Was that why he"d known who I was? Or had that been the
sort of thing the whole staff had become aware of by some
kind of vague osmosis, and Oro really had stumbled upon
me all on his own? Maybe he"d asked Frank about me while I
was mucking out the horses. Maybe he"d asked after he"d
brought me the sandwiches, once he knew I was maybe good
for something. Or
maybe
, he"d bumped into Frank at some
point during the day and told him what he had me doing,
and maybe Frank had said, “Oh, yeah? Well, thanks, son;
that saves me a job. Hey, you wanna maybe keep an eye on
him for me the rest of the time? Show him the ropes a little?”
And
maybe
Oro said yes, because he wanted to keep in
Frank"s good books. Or
maybe
he"d said yes because he liked
me, and there were too many
maybes
there to count.
Anyway. Let"s just leave it at me not knowing how things