“Oh. Will. Me and Will?”
Kyle flipped up the brim of his dusty cowboy hat. “I know you and Will don’t exactly get along, but he’s wheedled out of doing guard duty at the site for the past week. As bunkhouse manager, I thought he might listen to you. God knows he doesn’t pay any mind to me.”
“Sure, yeah, no problems with Will at all.” I lied. Kyle knew it too, but he let it go. Will and I had come to blows not that long ago. I could just ignore Will. Bury my nose in the fossils then read a book. I was happy to get to the dig site and check out the bones that had been collected since I’d last been there two days ago. It was incredibly cool to have a real team of paleontologists here excavating dinosaur bones. I’d loved dinosaurs as a kid and that interest hadn’t waned as I’d grown. I read every book I could get my hands on about the subject. Well, that and a lot of other subjects. I much preferred reading and spending time with horses to interacting with other people most days. “I’ll go round him up and we’ll head out.”
“Cool, thanks. Listen, don’t let him shirk it. Nate and Landon do not want anyone out there alone.” I nodded. Ever since the thefts of some bones followed by an assault on Bishop Haney and one of his undergrads, security at the site had been reinstated. “If he starts then tell him I said he pulls his weight or I’ll dock his pay.”
“Will do.” I looked from Kyle’s stern face to my mare and her foal. “Will you get them back inside before dark?”
“Yep.” He clapped me on the back. “I’ll tuck them in and read them a story.”
I felt the heat rush to my face at the gentle teasing. It was okay for Kyle to kid. I knew him. Family did that, they teased. It was fine. I knew I was a freakish sort of ranch hand. Most of my young male friends were into sports, drinking, chasing girls, and getting as far away from books as humanly possible. Most had no wish for further education and certainly no desire to stare into masculine sky blue eyes. I’d learned that lesson early on. I was the skinny geek who read books to horses and hid from pretty girls. Being me had called out the bullies at the integrated school I’d attended just outside the reservation. Being Native was enough to get you noticed, being a nerd was enough to get you shoved into walls, being gay was enough to get you dead. That was no exaggeration. A young Native man had been beaten to death when I was in sixth grade just for being trans. The guy who had killed him had used the “panic” defense and had been found not guilty. So yeah, watching that take place on the news when I was entering puberty had hammered in the need to keep the gay Perry well hidden.
So I hid what I could—the gay part—from everyone and learned to circumvent the bullies. Until tenth grade. Over the summer from ninth to tenth, when several of my friends from the reservation had already dropped out of school due to disparity shown to favor White students over Indigenous, I’d shot up six inches and had put on about thirty pounds of muscle working here for the first time. Suddenly, the bullies didn’t want to tangle with Perry Yellow Horse anymore. Now they were trying to talk me into trying out for the football team. I declined the offer numerous times and was then shunned by the student body. Which hurt for a while, but I found solace in books and horses. And that was where I stayed. Until we’d found dinosaur fossils on the Prairie Smoke a couple of months ago. That discovery had changed everything here.
Nate had met and fallen in love with Bishop, thieves had appeared on our land, and Will Abbott had arrived. The last development had been the hardest to deal with for me. Bullies and thieves I knew. I’d dealt with them all my life. But this thing with Will…that was new. Different. Scary. Exhilarating. The way he moved, the swagger and strut he possessed…it did things to me.
Leaving Kyle with my girls, I jumped on my weary four-wheeler and rode to the long building that housed all the hired hands. All ten of us. It wasn’t a huge ranch after all. Just ten thousand acres. Half of what the McCrary’s own. The dormitory was as old as Nate. Hell, maybe older. Weathered barn boards covered the outside. Inside were ten beds, a large food prep area with two large refrigerators, a dark wood table and benches that sat ten, and a commercial stove. No dishwasher but everyone was to clean up after themselves and most did an okay job of keeping the kitchen clean. There was also a communal shower room just off the toilet area that held two toilets and several urinals. Ceiling fans whirred overhead in the summer and winter to move around the air or heat from the woodstove in the corner. It wasn’t fancy, but we called it home.
At the end of the long walkway that separated the beds was a small room with a door. That was my room. I’d been given charge of the bunkhouse last winter. It was a role I took seriously. Yeah, there were older hands residing here, but I’d been here the longest, aside from Nate and Kyle, and I’d worked hard for that tiny cubicle. Privacy was incredibly important to me as a gay man living in a wildly hetero space. Or it had been. Now that the owner and his husband lived here, and our foreman had taken a male lover, the rainbow love was starting to spread. Maybe someday I’d find the courage to be out and proud.
I pushed through the front door, the hinges creaking despite the oiling they got on the regular. The only person here was Will. Because of course he was. Everyone else was still working the ranch. He was stretched out on his twin bed, his lean lanky body almost too long for the bed, earbuds in, the air around him thick with the scent of vanilla. Ankles crossed, hands behind his dark head, he cracked an eye when I slapped the toe of his cowboy boot.
“Grab your sleeping bag. We’re on duty at the dig site,” I said. He yawned, popped out an earbud, and gave me a sleepy smile.
“Sorry, didn’t hear you. Can you repeat?”
“Grab a sleeping bag. We’re spending the night at the dig site,” I stated then walked off as he bitched at my retreating back. I shoved open the door to my room, grabbed the green sleeping bag neatly rolled up in the corner, checked my phone to make sure it was charged enough to cover a night of reading, and then sauntered back to the communal area with the sleeping bag under my arm. Will was sitting up yet still bitching. He started flinging excuses at me. I raised my right hand, but his mouth kept running.
“What exactly are we supposed to do out there all night? It’s fucking boring!” He shoved to his feet, his eyes sparking with anger. The man was like lightning in a bottle: brilliant, beautiful, and breakneck. You knew you shouldn’t try to hold onto the jar, but you simply had to. I was going to end up singed, I just knew it…
“Bring a book.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, no. I’m not you.”
“Then watch the stars. I don’t care what you do. Kyle said we were on tonight.”
“Well, fuck my brother.” He folded his arms over his chest. “You go watch the stupid bones lay there in the stupid ground. I have better things to do.”
“Whatever. Don’t come bitching to me when you get your pay packet and there’s a deduction,” I threw out then spun on my heel.
“Wait! What?! Why would my pay get docked?!” He ran after me, catching me at the front door. I sighed, gave the cold wood stove a long look, then turned to face him. Man he was pretty. Irritation added a flush to his cheeks and fire to his eyes.
“Ask your brother.” He came a little unglued. “Look, I’m just the messenger. Do what you want. I’m leaving now so I can hang out with the dino gang before they head to their cabins. Ride with me, walk, or stay here and kiss your money goodbye.”
“Fuck! Ugh, I fucking hate my brother.” He threw himself through the open doorway, tripped over Bane the ginger cat who was coming by for a chin scratch or to mouse the bunkhouse. Or both. Will stumbled out the door, arms waving, then crashed into and went over one of the rickety rocking chairs on the porch. The warm evening air was blue with profanity. I laughed until I was close to passing out.
“Good one, Bane,” I whispered to the cat rubbing around my legs. I gave him an extra chin scratch. It was going to be a long, long night for Mr. Will Abbott.