Homespun (10 page)

“Love you, sweetie.”

Owen flopped back against the pillows and channel-

surfed idly until the bathroom door opened and Kerry padded out, barefoot and naked to the waist, in a cloud of steam.

“Laura sends her love.”

“Good for her,” Kerry said absently, and sat on the edge of the bed. Gooseflesh prickled his arms under the tattoos.

“Oh, by the way, I think I have something that belongs to you.”

He pressed something into Owen’s palm—soft, organic, and slightly damp. For a startled moment Owen thought it was a hair clog from the drain, before realizing what it actually was.

“This is the Merino lamb’s wool?” He tilted it to the light of the bedside lamp, the fine fibers silky on his fingers. The faint pink stain was a blush in the heart of the yarn.

Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

79

Kerry leaned forward to look, too, his bare shoulder brushing Owen’s. “The paint wouldn’t come out. I really am sorry about that. I’m not sure why I took it….”

Owen thought
he
knew, but if Kerry wasn’t ready to admit he needed to carry a piece of the farm around with him, then Owen figured he’d done enough pushing for one day. As a kid, he’d sometimes built card houses for fun with his dad. Place one wrong card, and the whole thing falls down, all that work undone….

“It’s all right. Doesn’t look bad. Color’s interesting.” He tipped it to the light again, studying the glossy flicker of the fibers. And then he couldn’t stop watching the lamplight on Kerry’s face, the pale interested eyes…. “You want to learn to spin it?” he asked suddenly.

“Whoa, hey.” Kerry drew back. “
You
spin. I paint.

Remember?”

“It’s not hard. Anyone can learn.” Owen drafted some fiber with an expert movement of his blunt fingers. “You’ve got good hands for this kind of thing. Long fingers. I think you’d be good at it.”

Kerry wet his lips, then held out his hand, palm up. It seemed to Owen that Kerry’s heart rested in that open palm.

“Show me.”

“Come here,” Owen said, and Kerry gave him a wary look. “This is easier if I can guide you.”

Tentative as a wild bird, Kerry came to rest between Owen’s knees, his back against Owen’s chest. He was still warm and damp from the shower, his hair smelling of hotel shampoo.

Owen laid his hands in their shared lap and tilted his head past Kerry’s ear so he could see what he was doing.

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“Spinning works because the wool fibers twist and lock together. You just have to put the right twist on them.” He was nervous as a teenager, his heart pounding; surely Kerry must be able to feel its trip-hammer beat through the thin fabric of Owen’s T-shirt. “For proper hand spinning, you need a drop spindle. Got a lot of them at home. Not here, of course.”

“But you can do it without?”

“You can. Enough to get an idea, anyway.” Owen held the wool in the palm of his hand and spread a little of the fiber with his thumb and forefinger. “This isn’t carded or combed, so it won’t be as easy to spin as a prepared batt of wool. But it’s fine for a beginner.”

He took the separated strands with his left hand, using that one to twist the fibers together while simultaneously drafting out more wool with his right. A few twisted inches was enough for a demonstration, and the short length of cord he’d spun held its shape—not as tightly as it would have with a drop spindle, but it was still adequate. Owen wrapped it around his index finger with a quick twirl. “Yarn,”

he murmured against Kerry’s ear.

“That’s all there is to it?” Kerry sounded incredulous. He touched the little twist of cord with a fingertip. Where his fingers brushed Owen’s, they seemed to leave little electric sparkles behind. Owen was suddenly, acutely conscious of Kerry’s body pressing into his own—the sharp curve of his spine, his narrow hips, his ear against Owen’s cheek.

“It’s not hard,” Owen said, trying to drag his mind back on track. It wasn’t easy, not with Kerry’s lithe body between his legs, Kerry’s warmth against his chest. “You’ve seen me do it plenty of times.”

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“I’ve seen you do it with the spinning wheel,” Kerry corrected him.

“This is the same process, just on a smaller scale.”

Owen opened Kerry’s hand, and laid the small bundle of wool into his palm. He kept his hand curled around Kerry’s, gently, a cushion rather than a cage. “Now you try it.”

“Show me,” Kerry said softly.

Owen shaped Kerry’s hands with his own,

demonstrating how to feed out the fibers. “Separating the fiber for spinning is called drafting. You pull out a few strands, like this, see? The unspun part is called the roving.

That’s what’s still in your hand.”

“I might’ve known there would be a whole jargon for this,” Kerry groused, but in a gentle, not-displeased way.

Owen closed Kerry’s other hand around the twisted cord he’d begun. “There’s nothing more to spinning yarn than drafting and twisting. With a spinning wheel or drop spindle, the tool puts tension on the yarn. Here, you have to pull as you twist. Try it.”

Kerry tried. His first attempt was lumpy and instantly began to unravel. Rather than reacting with frustration, though, he focused on the woolen strands with laser-like intensity—the same single-mindedness that Owen had seen in him when he painted, when he made love. He corrected himself before Owen could correct him, getting a firmer tension on the winding strands.

“Yes,” Owen whispered against his cheek. “Like that.”

Kerry smiled—Owen could feel the soft tug at the corner of his mouth. “That’s yarn?” Kerry murmured in wonder, letting the cord trail out of his hand.

“One-ply yarn, yeah.”

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“What keeps it from untwisting?”

“Right now? Just its own tension,” Owen said. “You’d lock it together by washing it again.” He reached around Kerry to catch the end of the yarn. “And when you twist two one-ply cords together, you have two-ply yarn—it’s much stronger.” He demonstrated, doubling the yarn back on itself.

Two separate strands, twisted together, becoming something strong and new.

Kerry was now caged gently in Owen’s arms, but he

made no attempt to escape; instead he nestled back, settled over Owen’s heart. “That’s really all there is to it? I always thought it would be hard.”

Owen didn’t have the heart to tell him that while the basic technique was simple, getting an even tension and a smooth yarn was something he still didn’t feel
he’d
completely mastered, even after all these years. “I knew you’d be a natural at it,” he said, and lightly kissed Kerry’s cheek—or he meant to, but Kerry turned his head at the last minute and Owen’s lips grazed his mouth. Owen sensed Kerry’s hesitation before Kerry opened his mouth tentatively.

They kissed, long and gentle, exploring each other’s mouths like necking adolescents. Then Owen kissed him from the corner of his mouth up to the half-closed, long-lashed eyes. Carefully he kissed away the salt from Kerry’s tear-matted lashes, as Kerry relaxed bonelessly against him.

Their fingers were tangled together, bound with a length of half-spun yarn.

“We don’t have to do anything tonight,” Owen whispered into the soft, bruise-colored skin at the corner of Kerry’s eye.

“I know you won’t—I know it’s… probably the worst possible time for something like this, and I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do, okay?”

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“Screw that,” Kerry said. He opened his eyes and tilted his head, looking back into Owen’s face. “I want to feel alive.

Fuck me senseless, baby.”

Owen untangled a hand and reached for the lamp. Kerry stopped him, fingers closing over Owen’s.

“In the light,” he said gently. “I want to see you.”

Always before, there had been something furtive about their lovemaking. Stolen. Secret. Acutely aware of Laura in her room, or of the farm chores going undone. Aware of their own boundaries and the places in each other they could never touch.

But now it was just them, in a motel room in a town where Owen had never been. They were two very different men, hundreds of miles from home, and the lingering taint of grief and missed opportunity hung heavy on the air. But it was just the two of them, and they had all the time in the world.

By the light of the motel lamp, they explored each other’s bodies, inch by inch, and every touch, every kiss was at once familiar and new. Orgasm was secondary, almost, to the simple pleasure of
being
, of
loving
, of being touched and being held. Perhaps, Owen thought, this was one of the small benefits age had brought them, along with grief and loss and the earliest creeping onset of physical infirmity—a deepened awareness that sex wasn’t a race to the finish line, and neither was life. The journey was what mattered, and he took Kerry on a journey as long and loving and fond as he was able.

Kerry wept when he came, burying his face in Owen’s shoulder, shaking silently.

Afterward, they lay on the bed, hands laced together, the sweat on their bodies drying quickly in the room’s chill.

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Layla M. Wier

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The motel’s heating system rattled fitfully. Owen roused himself enough to reach down to the foot of the bed and drag the comforter over both of them. They slept with the lights on, and there was frost on the window in the morning.

LAURA drove down for the funeral in Blue Thistle Farm’s rattling, smoke-spewing, five-mile-to-the-gallon hay truck.

“Like you could have stopped me,” she said, and hugged Owen before giving a much longer, gentler hug to Kerry. “I brought your dark suit, Daddy.”

Owen tried to stop adding up the gas bill for the trip in his head. “Who’s taking care of the stock?”

“The Walker kids are coming over to feed and milk the animals.” At Owen’s look of horror, she said, “You’re thinking of Studly Walker, aren’t you? Relax. I know he hasn’t got three brain cells to rub together, but his sisters are all right.”

“You have a neighbor named Studly Walker?” Kerry

asked.

“We don’t call him that to his face,” Owen said. “Stop looking so interested.”

Laura’s arrival came as a welcome relief. By this point Owen was thoroughly tired of pointy-faced Ruehling relatives, though, he figured, not half as tired of them as Kerry had to be. There was a seemingly endless number of them—aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews, all dark and skinny and clearly related to Kerry.

Kerry had visibly toned himself down for the funeral. He hadn’t gone so far as to wear a suit, but he’d compromised on a black sweater to go with his black jeans, had taken out his piercings, and even combed his hair down. It didn’t help; Homespun |
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he still didn’t fit with the rest of them. Kerry’s sister was there, with her husband and teenage children and a bunch of Ruehling cousins—all of them well-scrubbed and well-trimmed and very…
straight
, Owen thought, in all senses of the word. They all were. It was exactly the sort of crowd that would have turned up for a church bake sale or a Fourth of July picnic in Hazel. Women in skirts, men with their hair trimmed above the collar. Male paired off with female, two by two.

For the first time in his life, he began to understand how out of place Kerry must feel on Blue Thistle Farm. For Owen, it was his own world, where everyone knew him and all his friends had known Nancy, and he swam in it like a fish in water. His neighbors liked him and accepted him—

but would they still accept him just the same if he turned up wearing a shiny new wedding ring, hand in hand with a queer punk from the city?

And he also thought he might understand why Kerry

was more comfortable with his artist friends in New York City than with the people he’d grown up around. Steeped in his own family history, never unwelcome among them, Owen had never grasped that rootlessness before. And he had a glimmering of a few more reasons, now, why Kerry might find a wedding ring more like a leash than a benediction.

Kerry’s family was friendly to Owen right up to the point when they realized he wasn’t one of the senior Mr. Ruehling’s friends—that he was, in fact, there with Kerry. There was no outright rudeness, just coolness and disapproving glances he felt across his skin like sandpaper. When the family retired to Kerry’s sister’s place for the reception after the funeral, Owen thought about heading out—but Kerry went, so he and Laura went too.

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The reception was awkward but not as terrible as he’d expected. Some of the younger family members unbent enough to chat with him, as did an elderly aunt Owen found himself liking. She wore an outrageous flowered hat, completely inappropriate, and didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone thought about it. Occasionally he glimpsed Laura, circulating and making small talk with a sort of manic cheerfulness.

Owen kept a constant eye on Kerry, ready to ride to the rescue if any of the Ruehlings turned vicious. It was more of a cold war, though, a mutual frosty silence. Kerry leaned against a wall and gazed through the Ruehling herd, which obligingly ignored him. Despite Kerry’s silence and obvious attempts to blend into the background, Owen couldn’t help being aware of him, no matter where in the room either of them went. Kerry, even this subdued version of him, stood out among the rest of the Ruehlings like a graceful swan in a gathering of chattering magpies. When he disappeared, Owen noticed his absence immediately.

Owen found him a block away, sitting on a bench at a bus stop. “Going somewhere?” Owen asked quietly, sitting beside him. The air was cold and still and smelled like snow, though it was still too early in the year for it.

“I’m not sure. I suppose it’s nice to have the fantasy of it. Besides,” Kerry added, “it’s a place to sit down.”

“True.” Owen glanced down at Kerry’s pointy-toed

shoes. They had only slight platform heels, not such that they might be called
high
, but enough to look uncomfortable to walk in. Owen himself was feeling the pinch of his dress shoes—the last time he’d worn them was for Laura’s graduation.