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“Don’t say anything,”

Everett implored.

He couldn’t look Marshall in the eye.

He’d got the impression over the years that Marshall was bent that way, even though the man was careful.

He might hit Everett for asking, but Everett didn’t figure that was too likely, and even if he did, that would be the end of it.

They’d still be friends.

But more likely, Everett thought, Marshall would take him up on his offer.

Everett wanted so badly to know what it was like, not just with Marshall but with any man, and he was finally drunk enough and it was dark enough for him to admit it.

They had no light that night but the moon; even so, Everett waited until a cloud passed in front of it before making his move.

Unsteadily dropping to his knees in front of Marshall where he sat on his rock, one hand on Marshall’s thigh, as clear as anybody could get about his intention.

“Just say yes or no.”

“Yeah?”

Marshall said carefully. Hopefully.

But when Marshall reached for Everett’s face, one rough hand cupping his jaw to draw him up, Everett jerked back. Turned his head, resolute. Drunk heart hammering, on the verge of panic.

Marshall never tried to kiss him a second time. Just breathed out a quiet, “Okay,”

and kept things below the belt.

Everett had done it once before, years earlier, with a boy working alongside him on Marshall’s daddy’s ranch.

They’d both been running hot on hormones, more sex in their blood than brain in their skulls.

They did it fast and clumsy one summer eve, started and finished so quickly that Everett barely knew what he was doing, and hardly remembered it afterwards.

It didn’t really count, not at that age, not when Everett had finished in his pants before the other boy had even got a hand on him.

They didn’t talk about it, after; the other boy mostly spoke French, and they only had a few shared phrases between them.

It was better that way.

After the season ended, the other boy had moved on.

Back home or further west, Everett didn’t know.

Everett couldn’t remember his name — he made sure he forgot it in the years following like he tried to forget the rest of it, the wanting and the shame that came with it — but he remembered the boy’s face.

Fair and freckled with a gap in his front teeth that he could spit tobacco through like a bullet.

Then Everett had seen a man shot dead that fall.

Rumours had coated the poor wretch beforehand like tar, only to fall quiet as the grave after the funeral.

His widow never said a word about the matter and neither did anyone else.

They didn’t need to.

Everett had already heard every whisper, and they had squirmed into his brain and into his heart; thorny, paranoid things that pointed out every similarity between him and the corpse, urging him to keep his mouth shut and his hands to himself, his desires neutered.

So, Everett had folded up his memory of that reckless, immature encounter like a secret letter, writing over the words with sonnets and poetry that made love sound like something chaste and noble and bigger than anything he could ever grasp, with the calluses on his hands and dirt on his boots.

Love was for dreamers and poets.

Cowboys had lust, and Everett’s lust was liable to get his teeth kicked in or his brain shot out if he presented it to the wrong man.

There was a reason the poets didn’t speak its name.

For years, he did his best to black it out, that illegible scrawl against his heart.

But ink had a way of fading with time, and Marshall casually worked his way through every defence Everett built, seemingly without noticing the effect he had.

There were days, weeks, months at a time out on the range with Marshall when Everett felt like a stray dog, so desperate for a tender touch that he wondered if it might be worth whatever beatings followed.

The thoughts that had followed him his whole adult life grew teeth and claws.

That night with Marshall under the cloaked moon, Everett finished hot and sticky.

He barely had time for pleasure before regret crashed over him like a summer storm.

His shirt clung to his back.

He cleaned up with his kerchief before tucking himself away and fastening his jeans again, eyes averted.

When the moon came out, its light brought the devil with it.