Lance has always enjoyed sex. The basic act, yes, but almost more so, he’s enjoyed the sense of honing a skill that he has an aptitude for. Maybe it’s competitiveness—or a fundamental need to please—but even when he isn’t particularly attracted to a partner, he can still take pleasure in pleasing someone.
With Robbie, though…obviously, with Robbie, it’s different. But not in the way Lance would have expected. Giving Robbie pleasure makes Lance want to smile, to laugh, and to stop and tease not as a strategic delay of gratification, but because it gives him a visceral thrill to hear Robbie curse and beg. And because he must occasionally stop what he’s doing to kiss Robbie’s mouth, rub his cheek against Robbie’s soft beard, and nuzzle the fascinating, thick curls in the center of Robbie’s hard chest. Every time he gets distracted, Lance is sure to keep lazily stroking Robbie’s length, which is wet and warm from Lance’s mouth.
His entire body feels warm and bright from happiness, like he inhaled sunlight along with every breath of air perfumed by Robbie’s skin. In short, there’s a joy in being with Robbie that Lance hasn’t felt before.
Maybe everything is made more intense by the ticking clock. Lance knows that whatever they’re doing together won’t last past Tuesday night, the deadline that Lance has given himself to tell Robbie everything. When Lance does that, he harbors no illusions that Robbie will continue to look at him like he’s some kind of magical creature who could never do wrong.
This stolen time will end soon, which is all the more reason Lance is determined to enjoy it right now.
He pulls his head up again. He’s had Robbie deep in his throat, and his voice is a rasp as a consequence. Robbie’s cock isn’t the biggest one he’s ever sucked, but it’s the biggest one he’s had the privilege of swallowing in a while, and he’s so greedy for it.
But he’s greedier for something else. He meets Robbie’s eye.
“Will you touch me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Robbie breathes, stroking Lance’s hair.
Lance smiles at his touch. But that isn’t what he meant. He rearranges himself in silent explanation, straddling Robbie’s chest backward, tugging Robbie’s hand back to his cleft. Lance almost lost it at the idea of Robbie there—Robbie fucking him, even with a dry fingertip. He thinks briefly of lube, but dismisses it. He can’t wait. So, he just spits into his own hand, reaches back, and smears it over his hole.
“Jesus, Lance,” Robbie pants. Lance leans down and takes Robbie’s cock back in his mouth again, this time burying his nose in Robbie’s balls instead of his pubic bone, tilting back his hips in a silent quest for Robbie’s hand, and Robbie—
Robbie puts his mouth to Lance’s hole instead.
Lance almost comes from the shock of it, the intense rush of pleasure an afterthought to the euphoria of his thoughts. Robbie. Robbie’s mouth on him. Robbie’s tongue pushing against him, oh, God—
He moans around Robbie’s cock, which makes Robbie’s hips jerk, and his mouth more insistent, which makes Lance moan again. They keep feeding off of each other in a fast and brutal cycle that quickly ends with Robbie pulsing and coming straight down Lance’s throat, so Lance only notices that Robbie is coming because of the undulations in his shaft. And when Robbie in turn closes his hand around Lance’s cock, he comes at that first touch, though after two orgasms in close succession, it almost hurts.
Even after he’s come, Robbie is tonguing his hole, laving it, and Lance can do nothing but fall onto his forehead and elbows between Robbie’s knees while Robbie holds him up by the waist and thigh. He worships Lance until Lance is whimpering with the feeling of a trail of saliva dripping down his balls and his over-sensitized shaft.
Lance collapses, rolls onto his back, and stares at the ceiling, panting. Robbie lays back against the pillows so they’re lying next to each other, but head to toe. Robbie takes Lance gently by the ankle and Lance bats at his calf, warding him off.
“You can’t. You’ll break me.”
Robbie chuckles and guides Lance’s reluctant foot into the center of his body, where he cradles it between both hands, then slowly and gently rolls his thumbs into the arch.
“Oh, my God. I take it back. Do that. Keep doing that.” Lance’s eyes drift closed, and he says nothing else except the occasional murmur of approval for what Robbie’s hands are doing, offering a whimper of protest when Robbie stops and then a happy sigh when he discovers he’s only switching to Lance’s other foot. He throws his arm over Robbie’s leg and strokes small circles into the skin of his thigh, just above his knee, until he falls asleep.
The next thing he knows, he’s lying on his side, neatly tucked under the top sheet and blanket that smell exactly like what they were doing earlier, and he can hear Robbie speaking to the calf.
“Look at you, you big, strong girl,” Robbie coos. “Up on your feet. Lance is going to be sorry he missed this.”
Lance props himself on an elbow, blinking sleepily. “Sorry he missed what?”
Robbie looks up from where he’s crouched. The calf is back in front of the wood stove, but instead of in her blanket nest, she’s standing. She’s definitely wobbly, and looks skeptical about the wisdom of the act, but she’s upright and balanced on her tiny, sharp hooves like they’re four spindles and she’s a trainee acrobat.
Her empty bottle rests on Robbie’s knee. He rubs the calf’s chest and beams at her.
Lance has the absurd urge to ask, “Can we keep her?”, and then to demand that he himself get to name her, considering Robbie’s track record with animal names.
He manages to stop himself.
Regardless of the bliss of the past day, he and Robbie aren’t together. They don’t get to build a picket fence around a new farmhouse and pen in a frolicking pet calf. Soon, Lance will have his court date, and the best-case scenario after that is for him to get to Chicago and take back the small parts of his life that aren’t irretrievably entangled with Niall. Robbie hasn’t invited him to stay forever, and even if he did—
“Hey, what is it?” Robbie rises to his feet, frowning in concern. He’s incredibly beautiful when he’s sleep- and sex-rumpled. His dark eyes are soft and focused on Lance in just the way Lance has always craved, but all of the old intensity is magnified by the fact that Lance still has the taste of him in his mouth, the feel of him on his skin.
He forces a smile and gets out of bed so that he’ll have an excuse to avert his eyes. “I’m just worried she won’t be all right.”
Robbie’s speculative glance lingers, suggesting he isn’t buying Lance’s diversionary tactic, but he plays along, looking back at the calf and giving her a fond rub on the back of the neck. “Megan seemed optimistic.” The calf cranes her head up and sticks out an absurdly long, curled tongue to try to lick Robbie’s wrist. They both laugh.
Lance pulls on Johnny’s jeans and surrenders himself to the welcome distraction of the calf, petting her wonderingly, careful not to let his touch throw her off balance. After a minute or two, she grows tired, anyway, and after taking a few triumphant steps that garner further praise from Lance and Robbie, she collapses back into her towel nest.
“We should set her up downstairs in one of the stalls,” Robbie says. “She’s cute, but she’s going to seem a lot less cute when she starts making regular, um…outputs.”
Lance wrinkles his nose. “You don’t have to convince me. I learned firsthand, remember?”
Robbie grins and nods. “I guess you did.”
“But isn’t it too cold for her?”
“I don’t think so, not now that she’s dry. And it’s a lot warmer down there than it is outside. I also have an overhead heater that I can turn on...provided it still works.”
While Robbie goes about dealing with the logistics of moving the calf to more appropriate quarters, Lance pets her, stroking her from the soft whiskers around her wet nose to the tips of her fluttering ears. It’s been a long time since he’s allowed himself to draw an alternate reality around himself. He knows firsthand what the fallout is like when one of those crumbles around him. But he lets himself indulge, just for a minute. If Robbie were his, and his home were with Robbie, he’d convince Robbie to keep the calf. It probably wouldn’t be hard; she’s much more endearing than the triplicats. And then he’d choose a name for her. He knows exactly what it would be, and the thought makes him grin. Robbie happens to come in while his smile is still lingering, and he smiles in turn.
“The heater fired up just fine. Want to give me a hand with the door?”
Lance dons a coat and boots, and opens and closes the doors so that Robbie can navigate them with both arms full of the calf. When they reach the lower story of the barn, Lance looks around curiously.
“It’s weird, seeing it without the horses,” he says while Robbie places the calf in a nest of fresh straw in the first stall. A wide, flat infrared heater that’s affixed to the ceiling glows red, giving off enough heat that Lance is too warm in his coat.
Robbie looks wistful and nods. “Yeah, to me, too.”
Lance dares to ask a question that he’s had on his mind since Robbie brought him to the ranch on Saturday morning. “What made you stop training?”
Robbie tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, his expression faraway.
“There were a lot of signs that it wasn’t for me. It was hard for me when people took a horse home and didn’t get along with it like I had. Which happened a lot of the time, you know? Every rider feels different to a horse, so they never work exactly the same for two different people. Especially if the second rider doesn’t put the time in with them. It made me anxious, always wondering if a customer would be happy or not. And even though forty-nine out of fifty people were happy, it was always the unhappy one who I couldn’t forget about.”
He steps out of the stall and Lance follows.
Robbie keeps talking. “But I could have dealt with the unhappy people. It was the unhappy horses I couldn’t stomach in the end.” He shoots Lance a sad, strained smile. “The last straw was this nice red mare named Sienna. The young couple who owned her bought her as a foal, and they loved her, even though they were beginners and she was pretty high-strung. I had a lot of fun with her, but I told them all along that I wasn’t sure she’d turn into something they’d get along with. They were inexperienced, and she was a lot of horse for someone without a quiet hand and a lot of confidence. But she and I—well, I like any horse. But every once in a while, I just click with one on another level, and Sienna was like that.
“She went home after about four months, and it took a good six months after that before I got over not seeing her looking over the stall door at me every morning. I never heard a word from her owners. Usually, I considered no news to be good news, but I had this feeling about all of it...and, I really couldn’t get her off my mind. So, one day, I called to see how they were doing with her, and maybe ask if they’d consider selling her to me.”
Lance leans against the stall wall, not taking his eyes off of Robbie, his heart speeding up like his body has already sensed what’s coming even though his imagination hasn’t quite put together how the pieces of this story end in disaster.
“The guy answered, and he was real short with me. I knew right away something was off. But he said he’d be happy to sell her. Rattled off a price that I was sure I heard wrong; seemed like it was missing a zero. He said I was just in time because they’d been planning to pack her off to the auction house, but if I could come that day, I could have her. He told me that, a few days after they brought her home from here, they took her out on a trail ride. His wife was riding, and she had some trouble and got thrown. She wasn’t hurt, but they were upset and scared. So, they sent Sienna to a trainer who some friend of theirs said would get her ‘good and broke.’” He pauses to roll his eyes. “But that didn’t work out, either, he said. She was hopeless, he told me, and they just wanted her gone.”
Robbie swallows and continues in a softer voice. “I went that same day to get her. I wouldn’t have recognized her if she hadn’t heard my voice and looked at me just the way I remembered she would when she was here at the ranch. It seemed like they’d decided to stop feeding her while they waited for the auction date to come. And she had a big swollen joint in her hind leg that no one could explain. I gave him his price, which was about twice what he would have gotten at the sale, without saying a word, and I brought her here.”
He rubs his wrist against his cheek, which is when Lance realizes he’s crying. Not much, just a tear or two, but Lance aches. Still, he stays glued where he is, with his hands trapped between his back and the wall. He senses that he shouldn’t touch Robbie right now, or in any way disrupt the story.
“She didn’t make it,” Robbie says a few seconds later, almost whispering. “I don’t know how she got injured, but we tried everything and couldn’t make her right. She had an infection that got into the bone, then into the joint. Megan helped me find a specialist to look at her who confirmed the worst.” He shrugs. “We couldn’t help her, but at least she had a little peace at the end.
“And after that, I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone who called. I’d thought that was such a well-meaning couple, you know? So, I worried every time that people who seemed decent were actually monsters. And the horses I already had here, I could hardly look in the eye. Here I was teaching them to trust me so that they’d go on to trust other people, and I didn’t trust anyone further than I could goddamn throw them.
“It was all worse for Johnny. He was having a hard time, anyway, and the whole deal with Sienna about broke him. But if training horses is hard on the heart, raising livestock someone is going to eat one day is even harder.” He looks at the calf with an absent, pained smile. “So, I didn’t know what the fuck to do.”
Lance can’t help wishing he’d been there; not that he could have been any help. He imagines the pain all three of them must have felt, and the worry. But of course, they had each other.
“But you figured out the thing with the BLM. The mustangs,” Lance supplies hesitantly, hoping to coax Robbie out of the darkest part of the memory.
Robbie turns a small smile on him, giving his eyes a last brush with his sleeve. “Well, I can’t take any credit for that. That was the brains of the outfit—Danny.”
Lance gives his own small smile back. “Yeah, you said that. But anyway, I already would have known.”
“That’s right, you should have. Anyway, he holed up for a couple of days doing whatever he does to come up with brilliant solutions, and came out with what we should do and how we should do it. I think a timeline, a chart, and a business plan were all involved, but it’s kind of a blur.”
Shaking his head, Lance smiles ruefully, a little bowled over in the moment by how much he misses Danny. “When did all this happen?”
“About five years ago. Not long after you…well.” Robbie’s eyes flick to Lance’s as he trails off.
Lance bites his lip, filling in that blank without difficulty. Not long after you stormed in here, humiliated yourself, and ran off, never to be heard from again.
“Want to help me with this bale of straw? I’m going to break it up for her. It’ll be better bedding than those old towels, won’t it, little girl?”
Lance carries one end of a bale of straw that looks like it’s been collecting dust in a corner of the barn for more than one season, but when Robbie cuts the twine with his pocket knife, the interior is bright gold and smells fresh. They spread it in the stall in silence.
It’s strangely therapeutic, the quiet work of breaking the packed straw into a fluffy carpet. The strain in the air from the telling of Robbie’s story seems to have eased by the time they finish.
“Let’s get upstairs,” Robbie says gently. “I think she’s pretty cozy down here, but you and I don’t have fur coats.”
“I don’t,” Lance allows, glancing at Robbie to gauge his reaction. When Robbie arches a brow, he continues, stepping forward and running a hand down Robbie’s chest. “But you, on the other hand.”
Robbie laughs. “Are you saying I’m hairy?” He puts his hands around Lance’s waist like it’s automatic, an impulse. The thought chases any suggestion of chill from the cold space straight out of Lance’s fingers and toes, leaving them tingling.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Lance admits, and then he leans in and lowers his voice to a murmur against Robbie’s ear. “And I love it.”
“Upstairs,” Robbie orders, his voice rough. “There’s a few more things I want you to show me.”