So much for Robbie’s resolve to control himself, despite his inappropriate feelings and thoughts. He blames his discomposure on having slept on the horrible couch, contorted to avoid both the hard places and the cats. He could hardly have run the air compressor for the air mattress with Lance sleeping only feet away, but in hindsight, he would have been better off on the floor with a pillow and blanket.
At least his dropped mug didn’t shatter into a thousand pieces, making him worry about stepping on a stray shard of ceramic for weeks. Instead, there are just four or five big chunks, which he carefully gathers and wraps in an empty plastic bag. When that’s in the trash, Robbie moves to finish cleaning up the floor so that he’ll have a good excuse not to look at Lance.
But, mercifully, Lance doesn’t seem bothered by Robbie’s temporary loss of sanity. He’s drifting over to the couch, where two of the triplicats are rowed up like something out of a modern art magazine, their paws close together and their tails curled around their bodies in a monochrome row.
“What are their names?” Lance asks.
Robbie stands up, coffee-saturated rag in his hand, and sees Lance presenting his knuckles to Two. Before Robbie can warn him, she flattens her ears and tries to sink her fangs into Lance’s hand, but he jerks it back, laughing, just in time.
“Um,” Robbie drops the rag in the sink and rubs the back of his head wryly. “Their names are Two and Three.”
Lance gives him an unimpressed look that’s ruined by the obvious fact that he’s fighting a smile. “So, you haven’t gotten any better at naming animals, then.”
Robbie crosses his arms, but smiles. “I haven’t gotten any better at anything.” It comes out sounding a little more serious than he intended.
Lance’s smile twists, almost wistful. “No, you’re exactly the same,” he murmurs, and looks down at the cats. Three, who has the two white front paws, has dropped to the floor and is skimming his sides against Lance’s calves enticingly.
“Don’t fall for any of that,” Robbie advises. “He’ll bite you, too.”
Lance’s chuckle makes Robbie feel like a time traveler, because although his voice has changed, deepened, in concert with the taller, bigger body he’s developed since he was a half-wild teenager clambering across the creek every day, his laugh is still the same. A little high and a little breathy, like he’s surprised that he has the urge but couldn’t stop himself if he tried.
Uninhibited, is what it is; that’s a word that Robbie once would have used for so many aspects of Lance, but now he isn’t sure.
“Maybe I haven’t changed, but you have,” Robbie says, shooting for matter-of-fact and landing somewhere between simply fond and hopelessly fond, which earns him another quick smile before Lance goes back to watching the cats. Now, both Two and Three are at his feet, sniffing his shoes and circling. One’s head briefly appears from beneath the couch, her favorite hiding place. Her mirror-like eyes flash before she vanishes again.
Lance frowns, as though struck by a sudden thought, and then turns to Robbie, accusing. “Wait, did you sleep on this awful couch?” He looks around the room, presumably searching for that deluxe air mattress Robbie mentioned the night before.
“Well, yeah,” Robbie admits. “The air compressor for the air mattress is loud as hell, and I didn’t want to wake you up.” He rubs the small of his back with a grimace. “I’m regretting being so kind and thoughtful now, though, let me tell you.”
Two leaps back onto the arm of the couch, cocks her head, and meows in a very pathetic, plaintive way. Robbie watches Lance’s reason vanish in the face of her adorableness, the sucker. As he reaches out to pet her, Robbie, smirking to himself, reaches for another coffee cup.
“Ow!” Lance exclaims a second or two later, and Robbie looks over to find Lance disentangling himself not only from Two’s teeth, but the extended claws of both her front paws.
“Yeah, she’s the worst of the bunch,” Robbie says. “You can’t fall for her, no matter how cute she looks. Hey, hellcats, maybe it’s time for you to go outside and terrorize the local wildlife instead, huh?”
Two and Three trot over happily as he walks toward the door, and they’re followed a few moments later by One, who shoots out from beneath the couch and straight out the door after it’s opened. Robbie hastily pushes the door closed behind them. Even in that short time, a rush of air has penetrated the cozy sanctuary of the hayloft, and when he turns back, Lance is hugging himself with one arm and shivering, taking another slug of coffee.
“Brr. But, mostly, it stays so warm in here. I wouldn’t have thought that, with the rock walls.”
Robbie nods toward the wood stove humming away between the bed and the kitchen. “The power of a wood stove. I think I’ve burned ten or fifteen acres’ worth of trees this winter.”
Of course, all he’s burned is about half the hedge from one young stand that was crowding a place along the riverbank where the horses often drink. But still, his supply is running low despite his having split almost twice as much as he’d expected to need. “It’s been a long winter.”
Lance laughs again—another one of those half-involuntary sounds that reveals so much emotion, it’s like a glimpse into his heart. And what Robbie sees this time makes his own chest ache in sympathy.
“You can say that again.” He turns, staring down at his coffee, his curls so much shorter than he kept them as a kid, but still long enough to make a messy tumble when he’s just out of bed.
Admiring Lance’s bedhead, which he acquired in Robbie’s bed, isn’t doing anything helpful for Robbie’s intrusive thoughts. He sternly reminds his subconscious who Lance is to his family, how damaging his past feelings for Robbie were, that those feelings are in the past, and that even if they could be resurrected now—that is not the way to ‘take care’ of him.
And he’s promised Danny, like he’s promised himself, that he’ll take care of Lance.
“You hungry? I’ve got cereal and bread and—” He checks the mini fridge. “Yep, eggs,” he adds, feeling a little triumphant, and then tips back the lid on the foam carton and frowns. “Oh. Not ‘eggs,’ plural. ‘Egg,’ singular.” He sighs. He’d been planning to stock up yesterday, before the weather came in, but of course his trip into Dell turned into a rescue rather than a grocery run.
Lance laughs again, but he doesn’t sound remotely sad this time. Robbie decides he’s content with the pathetic state of his pantry, if it makes Lance laugh.
“Toast is okay,” Lance says, sliding back onto the barstool he left a minute before and draining his cup. Robbie reaches out with the carafe and refills it, only meeting Lance’s gaze for the briefest moment, and only because not to do so would feel unnatural. Yet, he feels like he’s stolen something by catching sight of Lance’s face, illuminated to an unearthly silver pallor by the winter sunlight, like a marble statue breathed to fragile life, his dark chestnut curls softly haloed.
Robbie’s hands are unsteady as he sets out the toaster and unwinds the end of the plastic sleeve holding the bread. It’s not Wonder, but it’s some kind of small-grocery-store equivalent, and he shoots Lance an apologetic glance as he feeds two slices into the toaster. “Nothing fancy.”
Lance puts his elbows on the edge of the counter and props his chin in his hands. “I don’t need anything fancy.”
“You sure?” Robbie keeps his tone as light as he can. “I’m pretty sure the clothes I threw in the laundry this morning are dry-clean-only. They’re probably screaming in French about the indignity of being machine-washed.”
He expected Lance to laugh, or to be annoyed, but realizes his mistake at once. Maybe his brothers roll their eyes or raise their hackles when he pries, but if Lance has a temper, Robbie has never seen it. This seems to be as true in the man as it was in the boy. Lance’s cheeks flush, but he looks quietly troubled instead of defensive, spinning his cup in a slow circle that makes its contents rise up toward the lip like a small, dark whirlpool and causes the faint steam to curl.
“I do like fancy things,” he admits at last, his voice hesitant. He shoots a look up at Robbie. Lance’s eyes are wide and soft beneath his eyelashes—showing that emotional fearlessness that Robbie remembers, which always touched him. Lance was mistreated throughout his entire childhood, and yet was so eager to go around handing his heart to people. It always made Robbie crazy with the urge to protect him, all too aware of how easily someone could take advantage.
He feels that protective urge now, too. It doesn’t matter that Lance is grown up and presumably better-equipped to protect himself than when he was only a slip of a thing, running the trails with Danny. And now, there’s another element to the old feeling that’s making Robbie’s pulse speed up. It’s the idea of Lance easing his long limbs into fancy clothes, the brush of fine fabric against his fair skin, perfumed by expensive cologne—
The toast pops up, yanking Robbie out of his brief visit to unreality. The bread is supposedly whole wheat, but from what Robbie can tell, all that means is that the thin slices are an unappealing shade of light brown instead of white. Robbie wordlessly puts the toasted slices on a plate and slathers them with butter. Then, he reaches into the cabinet where the little-used spices and seasonings are gathering dust. He isn’t sure he’ll have what he needs, but whistles softly in triumph when he finds cinnamon, the seal still on the bottle. Most of the miniature spice rack is in the same dusty condition. It was Megan’s house-warming gift to Johnny when the loft got to the point that it was habitable and he relocated from the house.
“What are you…?” Lance starts to ask.
“I don’t have any of that cereal you used to eat by the box that was all dye and sugar,” Robbie says, flashing him a grin, “but I have something that might be even better.” Robbie fishes two paper sugar packets from a drawer that also contains a handful of ketchup and mustard packets, four sets of plastic silverware, and three fortune cookies. Robbie tears open the sugars, pours them carefully out on a saucer, and then adds a dash of cinnamon and stirs. Lance has gone quiet. Robbie’s hands are starting to tremble again when the mixture is ready to be spooned up and sprinkled carefully over each piece of buttered toast.
He slides the plate toward Lance before looking up. As he meets Lance’s eye, Robbie realizes he’s adopted Lance’s ridiculous and inadvisable behavior—that he’s opened his chest and exposed his heart in this small gesture, this callback to the past; if Lance doesn’t remember, it will hurt.
But when he glances up, Lance is smiling back, with his whole heart out, too.
Robbie forgets all of the internal speeches he’s given himself over the past twelve hours and loses himself for a while in the bright warmth of that smile.
“You remembered,” Lance says happily, breaking eye contact first so he can drag the plate closer and snag a slice. His enormous bite consumes about half of the first piece, so Robbie, smiling to himself, turns to reload the toaster.
“Yeah,” he says so quietly that it’s possible Lance can’t hear over his enthusiastic chewing. “I remember everything.”
He knows he should press Lance a little more. Ask the questions that have gotten even harder to ignore since yesterday. But, he doesn’t want to disrupt this moment, or that smile. So, he lets the peaceful, companionable quiet fall and spreads a careful layer of cinnamon and sugar over the second serving of toast after it pops out. When he scoots it in front of Lance, Robbie sees that, over Lance’s shoulder and through the big window by the sleeping area, the snow is falling again.
An hour later, Robbie is pulling on his coveralls and boots when he catches Lance watching him wistfully. He’s confused for a moment, but then he understands. It’s like the cinnamon toast all over again, convincing him one step at a time that there isn’t that much difference between this new Lance and his old Lance—not as much as there appeared to be yesterday, anyway.
“I’ve got a few spare coveralls and coats. And there’s a new pair of boots Johnny didn’t get around to wearing.” He nods toward a storage chest on the other side of the door; there are two plastic tubs set on top of it, both full of stuff he hasn’t gotten around to unpacking yet. He hasn’t needed any winter clothes except his own, and judging by how long Johnny’s been gone, maybe he won’t be unpacking them at all.
Lance perks up. “Yeah? It might be nice to go for a walk. Maybe out to the wooden bridge. If that’s okay?”
Robbie smiles reassuringly. “I wouldn’t have offered if it wasn’t okay.” He hesitates with his arms halfway into his coat and catches Lance’s eye again, more seriously. “Anything you need around here, it’s yours. Anywhere you want to be, go there. That hasn’t changed, okay?”
Lance hesitates for a moment, then nods slowly.
When Robbie gets out the door, he feels both eager and loath to leave the warm bubble in the hayloft. Even after just one night, the place is permeated with Lance. Robbie doesn’t know how to describe the change, exactly, except that the whole space feels warm, in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature.
These thoughts lead Robbie into a cycle of waxing poetic and then berating himself for being an idiot at best and a predator at worst, which leads in turn to a lot of muttering, even though Megan has told him that the more he talks to himself, the more she worries about the side effects of social isolation.
He checks the horse pen first. They’re in a semicircle at the round bale, though only Poco looks content; the others are eating as fast as possible while snow collects down the broad lines of their shoulders, backs, and hips. Poco jerks his head up at the sight of Robbie, looking hopeful, but when Robbie only checks the water tank and doesn’t move near the gate, he goes back to his hay without coming over.
Robbie probably does spend too much time alone. That has to be part of the reason why he’s reacting so powerfully to Lance’s pretty face. Not to mention his pretty…everything else. But it’s not that Robbie wants to be all alone out here, as he told Megan plenty of times. Who’s he going to make an effort to go and see? The few of his old friends from high school who still live around here? They never had much in common except that they were born in the same place. It was no hardship to stop spending time with them in favor of keeping the ranch going and taking care of the boys. The boys were company enough.
Then the boys left him, one by one.
As Robbie treks over to check on his neighbor’s runaway cows, he’s so lost in his thoughts that he stares at the dark spot in the snow inside their pen for a solid second before he registers what it is. When he does, he breaks into a run, leaps over the board fence, and skids to the ground on his knees next to the unmoving shape, hoping he’s not already too late.