Page 15 of His Country

“Zero.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The old square body rocked to a halt with a squeak of brakes that needed to be replaced sometime before the turn of last century. Aiden didn’t stop what he was doing, knowing full well the windows didn’t work, and Frank would have to put the truck in park and get out if he wanted to holler at him.

All in, it was a nice truck. Rode hard and put away wet, the truck was like a storybook of life on the farm. Some green hand a few seasons back managed to snap off both rearview mirrors going through gates. Another broke the tailgate and if you weren’t careful, it would drop right onto your foot.

At some point it was probably some other color besides rust, but now it was just corroded metal and duct tape.

The driver’s side door shrieked open. “Goddammit boy,” Frank huffed as he drew himself out from the seat. “Get your ass in the truck!”

Aiden looked up at him from under the brim of his hat. Frank’s mustache was bristling. Could mean one of two things—he was either in a good mood because Carol made baconandham for breakfast, or he was irate. There was really no telling until you spoke to him.

Unease gnawed at Aiden’s belly as he put his tools away. He’d been working on the tractor again. Isaac tended to drive it like he was being paid by the lap and was always busting the belt on the PTO.

It had been a couple of days since that night with Ethan and, much to his surprise, it didn’t seem like Ethan had told anyone about it. He’d been certain when he saw Frank next that his ass would be grass, but here he was. Still working under the shade of that prodigious mustache.

Frank was a lot of things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. If Ethan had told him, Aiden would be fertilizer by now. He grinned at the thought.Jokes would be on them,he thought as he carefully dropped the tailgate so Sugar could hop into the bed.The bitterness in his bones would kill anything trying to grow.

He climbed into the cab, glancing back to make sure Sugar was situated before Frank eased the truck onto the gravel drive toward the cow pastures. He didn’t say anything, leaning against the door while he drove with his wrist, fingers tapping on the dash to the crackle of the radio. If he concentrated, he could hear the faint twang of whatever station had been playing when someone broke the knob off the radio. They couldn’t even turn the damn thing off.

Scratching under his hat, Aiden tried to relax into the bench seat, but he couldn’t help but keep an eye on Frank. His lips were pursed, mustache jumping with every bump in the road. Aiden wasn’t sure what color his eyes were—the man was always squinting. His skin toughened from a life outside, even his hair was beginning to resemble straw. Frank was part of the old guard, a man who minded is business and rarely found himself pondering the nature of anything that wasn’t right in front of him.

He was rarely chatty, it seemed today would be no different, so Aiden contented himself with slumping down in the seat and watching the scenery.

He was still tired, and his rib hurt like a bitch. He wasn’t sure if it was broken or not, but even Carol had clocked the way he was guarding it and said something. Every time the damn thing twinged he was reminded of that night. Of the way Ethan’s voice filled the space between them until he didn’t feel so alone, or how he pulled on the cigarette with a mixture of loathing and ecstasy, his mouth turning into a frown but his eyes fluttering closed.

The pain in his rib wasn’t his only souvenir from that night. Somewhere between vomiting all over his shoes and watching the sun rise from the bed of Ethan’s truck, that buzzing under his skin dissipated. That feeling of busting at the seams, too big for his skin with clumsy limbs and chattering teeth, had eased into a lingering sourness on the back of his tongue. He could breathe again. Not deep lungfuls of steadying air, he hadn’t breathed like that since before he knew that the mailbox was a bad, bad place, but breathing, nonetheless. Little, aborted breaths. Just enough to keep him alive.

Leaves skittered across the ground as the truck trundled on. Little more than two dire tracks eroded into the earth from time, the road took them up the hill from the main farmstead. If Aiden looked back down the embankment, through a mess of dead trees and tangled shrubbery he could see the Taylor’s house, the barn, and distantly the bunkhouse.

While the horses were kept closer to the house and barn, the cow’s winter paddocks were a little bit of a drive. Attached to the cow shed, stocks, and chutes, it was a third of the size of the range they spent the more pleasant months on, but it had access to shelter for the winter.

As he watched the farm pass by, he caught sight of his reflection. As a rule, Aiden didn’t spend much time looking at himself in the mirror. The only one who might have an opinion on the way he looked was Eagle, but he often had hay in his forelock so who was he to judge? It was sometimes strange to think that a face that in some ways was so unfamiliar to him was the one everyone saw. They saw the bags under his eyes, and the thick freckles across boyish cheeks. Sullen green eyes that he often thought were the same color as the scum off a water trough. Billy once said they looked like peridot rather than emeralds. Aiden had punched him for making shit up.

Frank shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “Ah, Carol mentioned some unpleasantness the other day.” He looked deeply uncomfortable, and Aiden could only guess that him mentioning it at all was at Carol’s behest.

“Now, I don’t know Everett and Billy—except for what I’ve seen on TV, of course—but Ethan’s got a good head on his shoulders. Smart, ya know?”

Frank was under the belief that a college degree automatically gave you some kind of key to a higher level of society. And Ethan, the nosy ass, had two.

“He just graduated and already half the farms in the area are using him,” Frank continued. The way he was going on, it sounded like Ethan was the second coming.

Aiden felt that familiar knot in his chest tightening. Ethan was another star, a success story. Someone with a future.

“—if it’s something to do with the whole…uh…gay thing, then you’re just going to have to keep your opinions to yourself.”

He doesn’t correct him. Aiden wasn’t even sure he was wrong. Was it the whole gay thing? He supposed it would be the readily obvious reason not to like the sweethearts. But he doesn’t. Aiden doesn’t hate them for being gay, he hates himself for not accepting himself for that same reason. For feeling loveof any kind, really. For never being able to kill the small bud of hope that keeps trying to bloom in the hostile soil of his heart.

Aiden cleared his throat. “No problems here, sir.”

Frank nodded quickly, grateful the conversation was over, and they could go back to their stony silence.

As they trundled over the final bump in the road, Aiden looked past the brim of his hat to see a truck parked outside the cow shed. A very familiar truck.

If he looked close enough, he could probably see the ash stains from where his cigarette burned out a few nights ago. Frank’s timing was always auspicious.

Frank threw the truck in park, oblivious to Aiden’s discomfort. Swallowing thickly, Aiden followed him out. Ethan hadn’t told Frank anything, and seemed unlikely he would tell him now. They could just pretend nothing happened and get on with their lives.