While Lance sits alone in the hayloft, he finds he’s reached his limit for how long he can stop himself from thinking about his predicament.
He’s good at fooling himself. Just like he avoided untangling himself from Niall, even when it became clear that he’d become too dependent. Niall had always made it clear that he expected Lance to do as Niall liked—and Niall liked to have Lance close, so he’d never even considered getting his own apartment. Niall covered all of the expenses of the business and their extravagant lifestyle, so it would have been ungrateful for Lance to ask to draw a salary. Niall hadn’t even wanted him to have his own bank account, insisting that their lives were simplest and most pleasant when fully merged.
It had all built to an awful crescendo, where Lance felt like he couldn’t breathe. He barely remembered getting in the car two nights ago…only that it had seemed imperative that he leave.
He’d assumed his father’s house was empty. He’d figured he could stay there; it was the only place he’d been able to think of to go. Funny that he’d gone to the care home first, but a small, pathetic part of him had needed to see his father totally bedridden with his own eyes before going to the house. Otherwise, that part of him would have been sure that his father was inside, waiting for him, and he’d never bring himself to open the door.
But if he hadn’t gone to the care home, maybe nosy cops wouldn’t have noticed the Mercedes in the parking lot and decided to run the license plate. If he’d gone straight to the house and seen that it wasn’t the empty hiding place he’d pictured, he would have turned around and driven back to Chicago. He wouldn’t be facing criminal charges and he wouldn’t have had to endure a night in jail.
But he wouldn’t have had his time with Robbie, either.
That series of strange events led him here, where he still feels the pressure of Robbie’s hand on his hip and the thrill of Robbie’s hard, warm body against his.
Lance casts himself down on the bed because there’s nowhere else to sit, and a distressed yowl alerts him too late to the presence of a cat. He still can’t tell them apart, and even if he could, he wouldn’t be willing to refer to them even internally by Robbie’s ridiculous names. But as he quickly rolls away from the feline, whose hair is standing on end in fervent communication of its distress, he registers that there isn’t a white hair anywhere on its body. Which is how he realizes he’s officially meeting the cat that has been hiding from him since he arrived.
“Hello, One.”
She glares at him, then streaks from the bed and out of sight beneath the horrible couch.
He makes a note to ask Robbie how he wound up with three vicious cat triplets. It’s a question that he can ask without feeling like he’s overstepping, unlike all of the others on his mind.
Lance rolls onto his back, thinking through those questions yet again.
What happened with your brothers?
It seems like more than just ordinary life events are separating the Chases. It’s always been hard to imagine them being apart, but Lance knew that Danny would go to school eventually. He’d imagined constant phone calls, though, maybe with video. He can’t be sure, but he gets the impression that all they really do is a bit of texting.
And Johnny—that Johnny has willingly been away from the ranch for so long is hard to reconcile with Lance’s memories of him. His devotion to Riverside always seemed to surpass even Robbie’s. Remembering him with his horses, Lance finds that his absence is especially hard to understand. Lance has never been a horseman, but even he was struck by the occasional, impromptu shows Johnny would put on for his brothers and Lance—riding one of his bays while the other followed like a shadow, or standing in the grass and sending them in loops and circles around him without halters or lines, like they were dancing together.
What happened with Megan?
Lance always thought Robbie and Megan would end up together. So had everyone else in Trace County and beyond who’d, over the years, dared to hope otherwise. The handsome, young, land-rich rancher and the knockout veterinarian each had long lists of admirers, but no matter how often they drifted apart, they always came back together. What finally stopped that cycle?
Lance knows what answer he’d like to hear: that all they ever were to one another was convenient. Not that either of them fell for someone else, and certainly not that Megan left Robbie and Robbie was still pining for her.
What do you want from me?
He remembers the almost tentative way Robbie touched him at first, and thinks with unexpected excitement that he might be the first man Robbie has ever been with. The idea of being any kind of first for Robbie is almost unbearable—enough to make Lance want to slide his hand past the waistband of his borrowed jeans and moan.
Still, the question is dangerous. Lance isn’t sure he knows what he wants the answer to be. Once, Lance wanted nothing more than Robbie’s pure, nonromantic love.
Then, when he got it, he came to think it wasn’t enough.
In the years since then, though, through the hardest and loneliest times when he’s worried he’ll never feel safety or joy again—in those moments, what he’s wanted back wasn’t a dream where Robbie wanted Lance the way Lance wanted Robbie.
No, he’s wanted the reality, where Robbie loves Lance, and the way Robbie’s love makes him feel warm and safe.
Lance buries his face in a pillow that smells just like Robbie, and fuck, maybe his heart doesn’t know the answer it wants, but his body does. Just the idea of Robbie getting into bed with him again, and this time for more than just comfort, has him whimpering and thrusting into the rumpled blankets like the teenager he was just reminiscing about. The idea of Robbie fucking him makes his ass clench and his balls tighten. Lance has never found any particular joy in being on the receiving end of anal sex; it’s something he thinks of as having learned to bear. But the idea of Robbie drilling into him…Robbie’s finger-shaped bruises on his hips…Robbie’s grunts and cries as he comes…Robbie’s cum, painting him inside with a splash of heat….
Lance lifts his hips and gets his hand under his stomach and around his cock, suddenly desperate for any touch of skin, even if it’s just his own. He folds his other arm and puts his face into the vee of his elbow, catching his own gasp as he works himself, hissing at the friction of his dry palm and then sighing as a surge of precum offers him a sweep of lubrication that makes everything more intense, driving him to a fever-pitch that has more to do with the fantasy in his mind than his own touch.
When he’s about to come, he hastily rolls onto his back and cups his palm over his cock so he can catch all of his release on his stomach and in his hand. And then he lies gasping with his eyes trained on the capsized-ship ceiling of the hayloft, dazed.
Because Robbie will be back any time, he only gives himself to the count of ten to catch his breath, and then he scrambles out of bed to clean up. He worries that a telltale scent will still linger in the air, but then he realizes that a much stronger and less pleasant smell emanates from the calf’s nest of towels.
Megan said that it would be a good sign when this happened. Still, he claps a hand over his nose and struggles not to gag as he peeks into the bathroom. The calf is looking at him with those big, innocent dark eyes.
“How can something so cute make such a terrible smell?” he asks her conversationally, and then he pulls on a pair of Johnny’s jeans and carefully goes about the task of changing out the calf’s towels and cleaning her up. He isn’t sure where Robbie does laundry, and a hose might be the better first step for the towels, anyway, so he bundles everything into a trash bag and sets it on the deck, where he sees that Robbie happens to be coming up the steps.
“The baby took a shit,” he tells Robbie proudly, holding up the bag. Then a gust of wind hits him and he steps back into the hayloft quickly, eyeing the bags in Robbie’s hands and the sack of something over his shoulder. “Need help?”
Robbie smiles as he scales the deck stairs carefully. The snow he shoveled away earlier has already been replaced by a fresh, soft layer.
“I’ve got it,” Robbie assures him. “But if you can take these sacks when I get up there?”
Lance nods, waiting in the doorway, shivering and peering at the silvery sky until Robbie is within reach. Lance is hurrying to take the sacks, which means he doesn’t have a chance to figure out a way to take the bags without their hands touching. When he dips his crooked fingers through the handles, lifting the weight off of Robbie’s hands in a silent signal to let go, he misses Robbie’s cold fingers as soon as they’re gone.
The intensity of these feelings is ridiculous, he thinks around his racing heart. Ridiculous even for Lance, who has never reacted proportionately to anything. Ridiculous even for feelings Lance has for Robbie, and the complex and tormented history of Robbie’s place in Lance’s heart.
Lance backs out of the doorway with the shopping bags, giving Robbie room to shake off the snow and shed his outer clothes. He busies himself putting milk, a dozen eggs, and a brick of cheese into the mostly empty fridge. In the second bag, he encounters the cereal, which makes him laugh. Robbie, now stripped down to jeans and a crewneck long-sleeved shirt in a navy blue so dark that it’s almost inseparable from the spill of his hair and his beard, glances up from the calf he’s knelt to pet with a smile. Lance can’t meet his eye for more than a second before his stomach clenches and he remembers jerking off in Robbie’s bed, to thoughts of Robbie, with a flash of guilt and shame. And excitement, too, that if Robbie knew, he might not mind. He might even….
Distracting himself by combing through another bag, Lance finds the box.
“What’s this?”
The lid isn’t taped down, so just Lance’s handling has it tipping back and the smell of the contents wafting up at him.
Lance looks up to find Robbie on his feet where he was kneeling a moment before, staring back. There’s a splash of red on each of his cheeks. Lance feels that strange sense of being a second behind an important realization, and looks back down at the box. He pushes the lid out of the way altogether and a murmur of surprised pleasure escapes him as his thumb runs over the ridges of a cake of molded soap. It smells wonderful. He didn’t see anything like this in the rows of economical bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and bodywash in Robbie’s shower.
“What’s this?” he asks, glancing at Robbie again.
“Um.” Robbie lifts his right hand to rake it through his hair, pulling up the hem of his shirt. The resulting flash of smooth, hard abdomen grazed with a trail of black hair makes Lance’s heart jump. “I guess it made me think of—I thought you might like it. It seemed nice.” His smile eases toward teasing. “You know, fancy.”
Lance can’t remember when he last felt so breathless over a gift. He’s always liked to have small and pretty things, so much so that he has a sordid history of taking them for himself. Some of the memories this feeling evokes are darker and uglier than others, but those threads of bad memory are quickly stifled by the thrill of the present.
Lance plucks the soap from its box and steps around the kitchen island countertop, and he rolls the edge of the soap against his opposite wrist, then lifts his arm toward his face and inhales the residual scent there, eyes half-closed.
Robbie looks like a feather could knock him over.
Lance continues to wander closer. “I do like it,” he tells Robbie in a low murmur, stopping just within reach—if Robbie wanted to grab him. And he does; Lance can see with satisfaction that there’s a fine tremor in his arms, the one still raised, his hand frozen on the back of his head, and the other, which dangles at his side, though his fingers have curled into a tight fist of restraint.
Dreamily, Lance recalls the first time he ever got in front of a camera. How the terror subsided and gave way to a pure sense of liberation. The wonder he felt at how he could lose himself in a performance. For Lance, it wasn’t becoming someone else, as he’d heard others describe performing in the past. It was becoming a version of himself that was unbound by expectation.
He knows this dance with a man very well. It’s been a performance, too, but one that he’s grown to resent. This moment with Robbie, though, feels like being in front of the camera lens. That stripping away of restraint, that infusion of confidence that seems to have come from the ether and insists that he knows what he is doing; that if he gives in, he can’t lose. He is a hawk on a thermal of air, lifted higher and higher. Nothing can reach him and bring him to Earth unless he agrees to return.
He lifts the bar of soap to his neck and rubs it there, looking at Robbie through hooded eyes, his eyelashes blurring the edges of Robbie’s image. Somehow, that half-focus intensifies all the darkness of Robbie’s beard and hair and eyes, which are snared by Lance like he’s hypnotized.
“What do you think? Does it suit me?” Lance takes another step forward, head tilted, neck bared, and with a strangled sigh, Robbie leans forward to smell his neck. He isn’t touching Lance, but there’s a blooming heat from the proximity of their bodies, and Lance thinks Robbie must be aching just as Lance is, because the heat and energy he’s radiating feels as tangible as a touch. Robbie’s face hovers just over Lance’s throat. His hair falls forward and brushes Lance’s shoulder, but otherwise, they are bodies apart as Lance listens to the rasp of Robbie’s inhale.
“It’s—” Robbie begins to say, but the gust of his warm breath on Lance’s neck as he speaks makes Lance gasp, which makes Robbie groan, and then, abruptly—
They go from being within a hair’s breadth of touching to touching everywhere, bodies pressed tightly together as Robbie steps into Lance and closes his arms around him at the same moment, one arm an iron bar around Lance’s waist, and his other hand splayed over his back. Robbie rubs his cheek against the line of Lance’s neck, his nose against the crux of Lance’s shoulder, and Lance isn’t sure whether Robbie is kissing him so much as he’s breathing him in. Overwhelmed, all Lance can do in return is anchor himself with both hands on Robbie’s shoulders and whimper.
He studied these shoulders as a child, memorized their shape and carried the image with him every day of his life until today. Square, strong, able to bear anything. Lance has imagined being held like this, his hands just here on the warm curves of Robbie’s shoulders, the biceps carved from ordinary hard work as beautifully taut and defined as anything honed in a gym.
But as soon as he has the feel of Robbie’s shoulders under his palms, it’s not enough. Robbie trails his mouth to map a new spot on the terrain of Lance’s neck, his beard dragging over Lance’s skin in a way that Lance wants to feel on his stomach, his thighs, and the back of his neck.
He leans back in Robbie’s arms, because more than this, more than touch and heat and the circle of Robbie’s arms, more than feeling the insistent press of Robbie’s hard cock between their flush bodies and knowing it’s hard because of Lance, Lance has wanted something else. Something simpler. Something much more complex.
“Robbie,” he murmurs against Robbie’s temple. “Robbie, Robbie,” he says again, a murmured chant. Robbie lifts his head, his lips still parted from the charted path of hot laves he left on Lance’s neck. The moment their eyes meet, by unspoken and instant agreement, Robbie’s hand leaves Lance’s back to cup his head, and they’re kissing.
Despite the fervor of their grasping, straining touches, Robbie is so careful. So gentle. Even as he’s insistent, he’s responsive. He seems to interpret every yielding in Lance and every spot of tension, navigating the vocabulary of Lance’s body like he’s already fluent. He focuses on Lance’s hypersensitive lower lip, stroking it with darts of his tongue and teasing it with his teeth, then sealing their lips together in a long, warm moment of pressure that’s languorous and practically chaste.
They might have stayed like this forever, kissing, if Lance could have stopped himself from grinding against Robbie’s pelvis, incredibly desperate for friction considering that he just had a decent orgasm only twenty minutes ago.
Robbie breaks their kiss and groans. “Lance. Sweetheart. I don’t—” His hands fall to Lance’s waist and he rolls his hips back against Lance’s, which makes them both pant. “God. I have no idea what to do with you.”
“Yes, you do,” Lance says immediately. “You do.”
“I don’t—” Robbie interrupts himself with another gasp as Lance guides one of Robbie’s hands lower so that his fingers are digging into the cleft of Lance’s ass. “Oh, fuck. I mean—I’ve never done anything with a guy.”
Lance feels incandescent at the admission, and also unspeakably tender. “It’s okay,” he says soothingly. The reality of taking Robbie somewhere unfamiliar is exponentially more intense than his earlier daydream. “Please, please, please. I want you so much.”
Robbie doesn’t protest as Lance separates them enough to drop his hands to Robbie’s fly, then his. Lance thinks Robbie might startle if given the chance, so he doesn’t bother getting himself out; he just reaches into Robbie’s boxers and circles his hardness with his hand. He feels silky and thick, slightly curved. Lance strokes him slowly, feeling every bump and vein—another part of Robbie he wants to memorize.
“Oh my God,” Robbie says hoarsely, clutching Lance’s hips. With the jeans loosened, his hands are now closing around Lance’s bare skin and the hem of the threadbare old boxers he fished out of Johnny’s drawers. “You can’t…I’m not going to last long,” he warns.
Lance hums approvingly, and then, because he wants to be able to take his time and he’s more or less assured that Robbie isn’t going anywhere, he lets go of his cock, an exercise of sheer willpower, and nods toward the bed. “Lie down,” he says, the word emerging as a low command.