Page 5 of His Country

Flexing his fingers, he tried to get the blood flowing again. The truck was parked in the barn, but the sun was streaming in through the open door. Sitting up, he lifted his ratty ball cap to run his fingers through his hair. It was getting longer than he liked. Ash brown curls tickling his ears despite the near permanent crease from where his hat sat. He’d have to cut it soon.

Brushing some of the dust off his hat, he settled it back on his head. At some point it had been white and green with the name of the local feed store stitched onto the front. Time had replaced it with sweat and dirt.

Now that he’d taken a break, Aiden was surprised to find he was almost done. He wasn’t even supposed to unload the hay this morning. They didn’t need the truck until tomorrow. But he’d been irritated and needed to work it out before he did or said something that would get his ass kicked back across the Mason Dixon line.

“You just don’t believe in love,” Isaac had said around a mouthful of biscuit that morning.

It was an innocuous response to Aiden’s bitching about all the work they’d been doing to get ready for the wedding. Said with all the innocence of someone who only shallowly knew Aiden as the grumpy farmhand that he shared a bunkhouse with. He didn’t mean anything by it. But it had poked thatwound Aiden refused to acknowledge, just enough for it to flare up and remind him it was still there, festering under his crude attempts to bandage it with denial.

The problem is that Aiden knows love exists. He knows two people can be so inexplicably tangled that to know one was to know the other. Denial is easy. He could pretend something didn’t exist, so it didn’t hurt when he didn’t have it. But he’d seen it in the wayhelooked at him. Seen it in gentle touches between classes, a soft kiss on a forehead in the middle of a busy movie theater, or in the soft smiles on a front porch at the end of a date.

And he’d seen it on a day like this. When his hands ached, and his hat was slipping down his brow. It was when he was dusting hay off his hands that Everett had dropped onto the tailgate and fiddled with his hands—those big, priceless hands he couldn’t afford to hurt on something like tossing haybales.

He’d looked up at Aiden with determination. “I’m going to ask Billy to prom.”

It was a bold statement. Up until then they’d been two boys whose looks lingered just a little too long. Nothing for the church biddies to latch onto. After all, Everett was a good boy. He played football.

But if he took Billy to prom, it would be like a a sign on both of their foreheads that they weredifferentin a town that hadn’t changed since the day the first brick had been laid.

Judging by the look on Everett’s face, he knew exactly what he was doing. He knew the risk he was taking. Yet he was going to do it anyway. Because it was worth it. Billy was worth it.

“What do you think?” he’d asked like Aiden’s opinion really mattered.

Swallowing past the dust in his mouth, Aiden had simply grabbed the next bale. “None of my business.”

Everett knew him well enough to know that was as rousing of an endorsement he was going to get. He’d smiled so happily, soprettily, that Aiden nearly dropped the bale he was hefting to the top of the stack.

No, Aiden knows love exists. He knows it exists like he knows planets revolve around the sun or that it snows at the beach. It’s a truth that he’s been so close to, if it were a flame, he would have felt the heat but never experienced the burn.

Billy and Everett went to prom. They danced under cheap streamers and looked so in love cruel words died on bigoted lips before they ever reached them.

Aiden didn’t go. He had to help his dad fix the pump.

Shoving himself to his feet, he reached for the next bale and let the weight of the hay dig into his fingers. With a grunt he pulled it against his hips before using his body to throw it up into the stack. He let the smell of fresh hay and the monotony of motions clear his mind of memories. What Isaac said didn’t matter. The secondhand suit hanging in his closet that he never got to wear didn’t matter. That town didn’t matter. The wedding didn’t matter. Carol didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting this truck unloaded.

Aiden threw another bale and ignored his aching body.

CHAPTER TWO

Carol’s special guests arrived a week later. Aiden only took note of the day when a sleek sedan pulled up the shady gravel drive. The black finish reflected the mid-morning sun, looking wholly out of place beside all the trucks parked out front of the ranch office. He didn’t wait for the guests to get out, he heard Carol shrilly welcoming them from outsidethe office and took that as his cue to get moving.

Nothing was worse than dealing with Carol wearing her Customer Service Mask. Aiden shivered at the thought and scrambled past the office, head down.

Satan’s Merry band of Fuck Wads needed to be taken care of. Unfortunately, that meant feeding them rather than sending the goats off to the closest BBQ. He took the long way around the barn, through the paddocks, and out back to where the goats kept their coven.

The hoop building was long and narrow and had at various times been used for pigs, dogs, and rabbits. Old cages were piled haphazardly in the corner, rusting despite the dry barn. Individual stalls were fastened to the walls, but they were all open now, letting the goats intermingle and steal each other’s feed.

Most of the goats were still too young to be let out without supervision. After winter, when they’d grown big enough not to be carried away by a bird, they’d get put into a big pasture where they could practice witch craft or do whatever it was goats liked doing. Far away from Aiden.

The goats were another one of Carol’s projects. She saw a baby goat at the feed store and decided they justhadto have them. They probably were cute to someone who didn’t have to stare into the soulless void of their eyes.

Ugly horizontal slits watched him as he fed them. They baa’d all cutely while they scratched pentagrams in the floor. He sneered at a baby that had the audacity to head butt his leg affectionately. Isaac was supposed to be caring for these things—he wanted to make goat milk, cheese, and soaps from their poisoned milk. It was another avenue of revenue Aiden quite literally didn’t give a fuck about. But he was on lace duty, so Aiden was forced to consort with demons.

Which was only slightly better than dealing with whatever fuckery Carol neededlacefor.

Carol was one of those people who smiled like she had a secret. She took one look at Aiden and smiled so big her stupid doe eyes crinkled. Aiden figured the waifish woman was a lot like these goats—all cute until they were chasing you up a tree.

Thankfully, they didn’t interact much, but every time they did Carol insisted on beingfriendly.Not in the way Isaac did, which was his default setting, but like she was making a contact. Someone she could exploit in some way later.