excerpt from Chapter 5: Ennis and his new friend David go horseback riding. David tells Ennis about how his deceased best friend, stepbrother and lover Nathan came to live with his family, and Ennis and David discover an attraction to each other.
“Damn, I’m sorry,” David said suddenly. “We’re out ridin’ on a beautiful day, and here I am talkin’ about plane crashes. I guess it’s been on my mind lately, it was exactly 22 years ago last week.”
Ennis thought for a moment. “Hey, you really ride bareback sometimes, like ya said last night?”
“Sure, when I was growin’ up anyway. Why, you thought I made it up?”
Ennis gave him a sidelong glance. “Well, they were kinda givin’ you a hard time about your ridin’ last night,” he said a little archly.
David took the bait, as he had guessed. “Well, they’re your horses but I can prove it if you don’t believe me.” Ennis gestured toward David’s horse, and David immediately started undoing the saddle, struggling with the unfamiliar straps and buckles.
“Here…” Ennis walked up next to him and quickly unfastened the saddle. Standing on slightly sloping ground their feet touched and their arms and shoulders brushed against each other; and Ennis glanced over to find David already looking closely at him.
When they’d met two nights before they had both been wearing suits, with the conventional dark heavy fabric serving its intended function of smoothing out the slopes and angles of male bodies. Now they were both wearing jeans, Ennis in the type of snapped cotton shirt he’d worn since his teens and David in a sweatshirt, a garment Ennis had never worn but which suddenly seemed improbably sensual to him. The sleeves were pushed up slightly, enough to show the light growth of fine dark hair on the wrists above the squarish but fine-boned hands with their short spatulate fingers. Ennis did not look down, but during their side-by-side rides he had already noticed, with awareness of it only half-surfacing, the compact legs and slightly rounded buttocks. He suddenly wanted more than anything to slide his hand under the soft fabric and up David’s back and then down again. His thoughts would have progressed further than that, but the realization in the same moment of his stiffening cock and of David frozen with one hand on the saddle, looking back at him, stopped them in their tracks.
“I’ll do it.” David’s voice sounded somewhat shaky despite the casual words, but he turned and pulled the saddle off the horse’s back. There was no anger nor fear nor hostility in his manner, just a hand put out to stop a slowly swinging door from opening any further.
Ennis untethered his own horse, the familiar action dispelling the momentary sense of the world having shifted subtly and of his suddenly being in some alien realm with all signs written in unreadable languages. He swung himself up into the saddle and David stepped on the high end of the log to vault onto his horse’s back. “Over t’ that fence and back?” he suggested as they rode back out in the sunlight, pointing to a single tree a hundred yards or so away. Ennis nodded wordlessly, not trusting himself to answer at that moment, and they urged their horses into a canter.
Shaken as he was, he couldn’t resist glancing over. David’s legs were clinging to his horse’s flanks as if he were shinnying up a fleshy tree, leaning back very slightly, his pelvis rocking rhythmically back and forth with the horse’s three-time gait. He glanced over at Ennis and smiled triumphantly: “told ya!” Ennis nodded, but did not look over at him again until they reached the tree.
read the rest of Chapter 5 at http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
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