What had been a matter of plopping some onions and mushrooms into the crockpot with a chunk of elk became the effort of slicing the rings evenly and rinsing the mushrooms five times in case grit stuck to them. Maybe Don should skip the mushrooms altogether. He might have made a mistake last summer, and gathered a kind even bears wouldn’t eat.
No, darn it! Don had to have more confidence than that. This was a meal with a new friend, hopefully a new friend... He wouldn’t mention how friendly he’d like to get with Trevor; dear Lord, no he wouldn’t. Bad enough he could hear the smile in Megan’s voice when he called off for Thanksgiving dinner.
Oh, damn, they’d need to talk. About stuff. Don was screwed. What could he possibly talk about to a man who probably lived, ate, and drank news and events? Don didn’t even have a TV—why bother when he couldn’t get reception out here? Least, that’s what his dad had always said. Maybe Don should look into it. Things could have changed in twenty years. Not that he needed the habit of watching TV when he had so much else to do.
Don could probably keep his foot out of his mouth for a couple of hours. Or not insert it too deeply. He stewed along with the elk in the crockpot for the hours it would take until he’d head to town.
Bandit hung his nose over the edge of the seat, sniffing hopefully at the meaty fumes escaping the hot cooker.
“You keep your snout to yourself,” Don scolded his dog. Bandit was about sixy-five pounds of black-splotched gray, of no known ancestry. Not even two known types for his muttliness. He’d ended up with Don after a small boy with hopeful eyes set his crate of puppies in front of the grocery store. He’d given the boy five dollars for one squirmy little furball, and had to discourage the child’s mother from slipping the money back into his hand. “You’re not a thousand-dollar pup, but you’re worth the world to me.”
Bandit acknowledged his lovability with a huge sigh. He had better manners than to keep nosing, and he was the world’s best listener, didn’t interrupt Don’s muttering even once, even though Don wished he could stop fretting about what he’d talk about with his host.
Ten miles to town went way too fast for his nerves and way too slow for his anxiousness. Would Trevor like the meal? Or the cook? Or were loneliness and good manners all that prompted him to accept an invitation that had been more blurted out than thought out?
Trevor came outside into the light fall of flakes to open the gate, greeting him with a smile that looked real, and Don dared to believe. “Heya, Harper! And this must be Bandit!” He extended his closed hand for sniffing. Bandit whuffled and lolled a doggy approval. “I thought we ought to introduce the dogs out here.”
“Good idea.” Don let Trevor slip into the house with the crockpot, and when he returned, a tan streak shot out the door at his feet. An orgy of sniffing ensued, followed by chasing and romping.
“She’s good with other dogs,” Don observed.
“I think she’s amazed dogs come that big.” Trevor relaxed as the dogs frolicked. “She’s used to corgis and Shi Tzus. Although Jared’s Labradoodle was about the same size as Bandit.”
“Labradoodle?” Don couldn’t keep the question out of his voice.
“Yup, another custom mutt.” Trevor grinned at him—oh thank God. “Think we can leave them out until they run off some energy?”
“With this light of a snowfall, they won’t be cold for a while. It’s not sticking much.” Don chuckled when the California transplant snapped at a fat flake. “Has she ever seen snow before?”
“Nope. First time.” Trevor snatched a snowflake out of the air. “Been a while for me.”
“You’ll have lots of opportunities to get reacquainted.”
They left the dogs to prance around the back yard, with frequent pauses for sniffing and scent marking. The house looked much homier with furnishings: curtains and a sofa and a desk with a computer. “Looks like you’re getting settled.”
“Still a work in progress, but getting there.”
The brick fireplace had a jumble of logs, some charred, and a dozen burnt matches on the hearth. Should Don say anything? Trevor noticed where he was looking. “Not having a lot of luck getting the fire started, sorry.”
Well, of course not, with all those big chunks of wood and no firedogs. Weighing the possibility of giving offence, Don settled for, “Want me to show you an easier way?”
“Please do.”
That meant a trip out back to chop some logs into more appropriate kindling size, which Don probably should have mentioned needed doing when he brought the wood in, but how did a man hit this advanced age without learning such a basic thing?
Trevor watched closely as Don built a teepee of kindling. “Got some dryer fluff? Or an old magazine?”
A page of Variety got sacrificed as tinder, all crumpled and ready for the match. Don held the flame to his structure, and the smaller wood caught even before the paper burned away. “Start small, and add the bigger pieces when the kindling’s burning. Just a few at first.”
“That’s... a much better way. Thanks.” Trevor watched the fire carefully, and fed two pieces of aspen in without losing the flames. “Okay, now I know how it’s done.”
“I suppose you didn’t need a fire much, in California.” Don couldn’t really imagine a climate that didn’t get cold in the winter.
“Oh, I had a fireplace, and we lit it, too.” Trevor grinned. “With a gas jet and a switch. Not a log to be seen.”
Don shook his head. “California.”
Trevor was an easy host, with a choice of beverages and small talk that let Don relax. One question kept him going for a while, and they talked of things the same and different in California and Montana. “Oh, I do not miss the traffic!” Trevor gloated. “An hour of slow and go to get thirty miles, and you’re still in the city.”
“And people like that?” Don couldn’t imagine so many vehicles.
“No, but they put up with it for the rest of what LA offers.” Trevor shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll cuss twice as hard when I go back for a meeting and I’m not used to it.”
“Yeah, six cars at a light is heavy traffic here,” Don mused, not saying six vehicles might be headed four different directions. “The city used to have twice as many people, but that was before I was born. The copper company was still the biggest employer in town. This house was one of the most expensive in the city when it was new.”
“It’s nice, I like it, but...” Trevor glanced around his home while setting out plates. “I thought there were nicer, bigger houses a couple streets over, of about the same vintage.”
“Isn’t the saying ‘location, location, location’?” Don pulled the elk roast apart: it went to tender, fragrant shreds under two forks. “It wasn’t the size or the appointments then, it was the distance to the mines. When everyone walked to work, they paid a premium for a short commute. Walk farther, pay less.”
“Hadn’t thought of that.” Trevor seemed only to be thinking of the platter of meat and cup of gravy Don brought to the table, where cranberries, mashed sweet potatoes, and something weird and green sat in a serving dish. “That smells very, very good.”
Trevor froze, his fork poised over his plate when Don bent his head for a silent moment. “Oops.”
“No problem.” Don had given a quiet thanks for all good things in his life, the good things to come, and for the social grace that might not desert him just yet. He didn’t want to panic, but Trevor was about to take a bite, and what if the meat hadn’t turned out right?
“So, the implication is, that if this house was pricy then, the mines were close. There’s a headframe a few blocks over.” Trevor ate a mouthful of the elk, and any question he might have asked got lost in the bliss that flowed across him while he chewed.
Oh good, he liked the meat! Don wasn’t quite as thrilled about the green things, but he’d eat a second bite. In a minute. There were sweet potatoes and cranberries first.
“Oh, man! This is so good!” Trevor opened his eyes long enough to find where to load his fork for the next bite. “I had no idea elk tasted like this.”
“A thousand wolves can’t be wrong.” The wolves didn’t slow cook the meat in red wine, but Don would accept the compliment. His misgivings unknotted in his belly. “What are these green things?”
“Brussel sprouts. I sliced them thin and roasted them with balsamic vinegar. Taste okay?” Trevor looked concerned.
“Taste fine. I don’t think I ever had them before, and for sure not like this.” Don might as well explain. “I learned to cook from my dad, and he was a basic meat and potato guy. Didn’t hold with much green stuff.” The old man didn’t hold with much of anything that had to be brought in from town, and if he couldn’t buy the spuds in fifty pound sacks from a farmer about seventy miles away, they might not have eaten many of those either. “We grew it or caught it or we didn’t eat it, mostly.”
“If you caught it and made it taste like this, you did okay.” Trevor scooped up another bite. “Because this is delicious.”
One hurdle down—that was genuine enjoyment. Don breathed a little easier and didn’t mention he’d never eaten cranberry sauce that didn’t hold a circular shape. Trevor didn’t need to know how few experiences, culinary or otherwise, Don had.
“This is really amazing!” Trevor ladled another serving out. “What else do you do with elk?”
Don could talk about sausage and backstrap steaks, and while he left out the finer points about the deer saw, he could still hold his audience.
A scratch at the door drew their attention to the dogs, who had played themselves into exhaustion. Bandit did a quick investigation and flopped onto Sabrina’s dog bed. Sabrina fell into the curl of Bandit’s body like she belonged there. Don had to look away, because he didn’t want to risk snuggling up to her owner before he could be sure that was a real thing to do. Trevor came across as a desk and office kind of guy, which didn’t mean he wouldn’t take offense.
They’d finished the washing up and wandered into the book-lined living room in that awkward “what next?” stage. The walls of full shelves led Don to comment on the scariest thing in the room. “Have you read all these?”
“Most of them,” Trevor said. “Wrote a few of them too.”
“Really?” Whoa, he was so out of Trevor’s league! A writer—like a real person, only who wrote books? Somehow Don knew writers were out there because of books, but he’d never thought to meet one. Gotta say something half-smart. “Which ones?”
“Oh...” Red rose up Trevor’s neck all the way to the curve of his ears. “Um, those...” He waved in a general direction. “Not sure you’d be interested. In fact, I’m quite sure you wouldn’t be interested. Not interesting at all, really.”
“Oh come on. I never knew an author before, of course I’m interested.” If Don couldn’t find the books, he’d ask again, but his sense of direction was pretty good, and if he was an author, he’d put his own books at nose height... He could pick out the names on the spines, he ought to be able to find them... “These?” Don was pretty sure that said “Trevor Cunningham” on the spine.
He pulled one out and yeah, when he wasn’t trying to read sideways and down, that was his host’s name. The title didn’t matter nearly as much as the two men on the cover, one with his arms around the other. Damn if they didn’t look one inch away from a kiss. “Ah, wow.”
Half Don’s blood went north, half went south. His face heated and his cock swelled, and he hoped Trevor didn’t notice either. He flipped the book over and puzzled out the description. “...would break the bond between them.” A bond. Between men. “Sounds kinda romantic.”
“It is.” Trevor sounded like he’d swallowed a frog.
“Is that so?” Don nearly dropped the book. “And there’s a bunch of them. Wow.” Oh hot damn, he was holding the answer to the most burning questions he had for a man from the big city. “Lot of people read about men being romantic?”
“A bunch, yeah.”
Don turned to see his host about six shades of purple and white. “That’s really... Um, wow. I never knew...” How the hell had these books existed without him knowing? Had they been around all these years? All these sad, lonely years, where he thought he was the only one who wanted to kiss a man? Been certain he was the only one, except maybe Jimmy Redfeather?
Every remembered blow from the old man ached along with his heart. His dad wanted him to be like everyone else, and there were others he was already like. Don held the book as if it might explode, or disappear, or turn to smoke in his hands like a cruel joke, and he’d be back to being the strange guy in the cabin west of town, all alone. “Do you think there’s books like this in the library?”
“Around here, probably not.” Trevor had gone completely pale now. “In Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, yeah. I have books in libraries there.”
“Guess there’s a benefit to the big city.” Don turned the volume over in his hands, still not believing. Check another book, and a third, to make sure. Oh yeah, smiling men gazing at each other under palm trees or near fancy cars, or against city skylines. A whole shelf of them. No, two shelves. More. Oh man. His knees might not hold. “And you wrote these?”
“Yes. I did.” Trevor had some color again, and he was standing stiff and mean. “Is that a problem?”
“Not to me.” Don pulled another book from the shelf, needing desperately to see there were more, from authors besides Trevor. One could be a fluke, two would be a coincidence, three would be a fact and four... Four might be a sign that hell had frozen over. These two men with the bare chests and the come-hither eyes on the cover of a book that promised “scorching heat between them” meant his old man was wrong as wrong could be.
There were more books. More authors. The Apocalypse must be upon them—there were others who wanted what he wanted. Others who wanted to read about the kind of things he wanted. Others who didn’t think what he wanted was nasty or evil or vile. Every word his old man used was wrong. He wanted to grab all the books off the shelf and roll in them. Use them to beat the shit out of his old man the way the old man had whaled on him. But no, he wouldn’t damage such precious books, and his father was beyond paybacks.
Don sank into the leather couch, unable to stand any longer, or take his eyes away from the book covers. Opening one seemed like a sacrilege, and maybe a cruel joke—there’d be horrible accusations of perversion inside, wouldn’t there, just to trap men like him? “Is... is there kissing in these books?” There had to be.
“Yeah.” Trevor hadn’t moved from his spot.
“Anything... more...sexy?” Don dared to hope.
“Oh yeah.”
“I never wished so much I was a reading man.” He ran his hand over the first book, leaving a fingertip covering the mouths so close to meeting.
“Oh good.” Trevor landed on the couch next to Don. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to call the cops or the pitchfork-wielding neighbors, or just hit me.”
“Stupidest thing I could do. And meanest.” Don shook his head. “I been afraid all these years someone was gonna do that to me. My old man did. Hit me. I wouldn’t do that to anyone else.”
“Oh man, I am sorry about that. My parents are kind of pompous, but they never gave me crap about being gay.” Trevor leaned back, with the remnants of shaking slowly leaving him.
“So there’s even a decent word for it. I never knew. I thought I was the only one...” The enormity of not being alone grew like a bud in his heart.
“You didn’t? I mean, you did?” Trevor scrunched up. “You’re what, early thirties?”
Damn it, Trevor shouldn’t oughta laugh! “Yeah, in Nowhereville, population thirty thousand, counting the rattlesnakes, where the joke is ‘Welcome to Montana, turn your calendar back thirty years.’ Where my old man took me out of school when I was in seventh grade, because he said he wasn’t going to drag me into town every day if all I was gonna do was something stupid and perverted.” The pain and the shame of that day boiled up inside.
Other students passed through the halls, their snickers coming through the office door, and whispers of what he’d done. He’d sat hunched up in a green plastic chair under the evil glare of Mrs. Hamentree, waiting for his old man to come get him. He knew he was going to be hurting soon, but he didn’t know he’d never be back.
“And I don’t just live in the armpit of the world, I live ten miles down a dirt road outside the armpit of the world, with no TV and shit for radio signal cause of the mountain, and by the time I could get my own newspaper subscription the town didn’t have a newspaper no more, and who’d deliver it all the way out in the boonies?” He would have jumped out and paced, but his lap was full of paperbacks. Don stopped punching out at the world when he realized he’d nearly smacked Trevor in the face with his own book. “And it’s easy to say ‘you could leave,’ but it ain’t so easy to actually do it when you got some security on one hand and no education on the other. A thousand other guys want the jobs I could get, and they mostly graduated high school. So yeah, I might as well be living in a cave my whole life.”
“I’m not going to give you grief for what you did or didn’t do, or what you don’t know. It’s just... unusual to be so sheltered, but there’s guys older than you who figure this out about themselves when they’re even older.” Trevor patted Don’s shoulder and it was like electrocution, his arm too shocked to move.
“It ain’t like I didn’t know about me, it’s I didn’t know there was anyone else.” Hugging the precious books to his chest, Don fought not to cry. The beautiful men on the covers proved he wasn’t alone. Trevor, too. Trevor wrote those books.
“There’s a lot of us, Don.” Trevor spoke softly. “Maybe not around here, or not willing to be known around here, but yeah. There’s places where guys walking down the street holding hands don’t raise an eyebrow, and kissing someone hello or goodbye is ordinary. Gays should be able to get married, even in Montana. Um, it was on the news a lot recently.”
“Not on any radio station I can get.” What kind of a world did Trevor live in, Don wondered, and why had he left it behind to come here?
Bandit perked up, and dumped his companion off to come lay his head on Don’s knee. “Good boy.” His dog never judged him. Always loved him. If men could actually get married, that meant some of them found other men who loved them like that. It could happen. Maybe never to him, but it could happen.
“I knew it would be different out here, but I didn’t realize how different.” Trevor reached out to stroke Bandit’s ears. Sabrina shoved up underneath her new pal’s muzzle, demanding the caresses for herself. “It sounds horribly lonely.”
“You could say that. Um, Trevor?” Suddenly being alone wasn’t horrible, it was necessary. He had so much to think about. “I... I gotta go. For now. I gotta think. And...”
“And?” Trevor turned to him, hand on his puggle’s neck.
“Can I borrow one of your books?”