Homespun (3 page)

The possibility still existed that she might interrupt them by Homespun |
Layla M. Wier

18

stepping out to ask a question or to retrieve something she’d forgotten, but as long as he could hear her washing dishes, he knew where she was. They were exposed yet private, and heat rose in Owen’s chest, spiraling outward to tingle down to his fingertips.

His gaze and his attention had drifted down the stairs; now he came back to himself with a thump, back to Kerry’s gray eyes—curious, nervous, anticipating. Back to Kerry’s face, so close to his own that Owen could feel the warmth of Kerry’s breath.

Kerry had his back against the wall, and all Owen had to do was take a single step to press and hold him there. He didn’t; he leaned forward and took Kerry’s mouth instead, and Kerry closed his eyes and fell forward, fell into his kiss.

And that was all it took. They turned and fumbled and bumped their way down the hall, hands and mouths all over each other.
Six months.
Owen managed to get one sleeve of Kerry’s T-shirt over his shoulder; Kerry had undone Owen’s pants and had a hand inside, when the crunch of wildflower stems underneath their feet made them both jump. Kerry broke the kiss, blinking in surprise. They were in the bedroom; Owen hadn’t even realized it.

“Is there hay on the floor?”

“Wildflowers,” Owen said.

Neither of them reached for a light switch. Kerry usually preferred to make love in the dark. Through the half-open curtains, the blue-white glare of the farm’s halogen floodlights illuminated the room in monochrome, like the light that filters through falling snow.

“I forgot to light the candles,” Owen added, feeling stupid.

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Kerry smiled against Owen’s lips. “I don’t give a damn about the candles, sweetheart,” he said, and kicked the door shut before dragging Owen down onto the bed in a crackling of breaking wildflower stems. Owen found himself on his back, his pants around his knees, with Kerry straddling him and rearing back to skin off his T-shirt over his lean body.

In the dim light, his tattoos were stark black on white skin. All were his own design; he’d made a canvas of himself, too. Spider legs and dragon’s wings reached around Kerry’s ribs from the small of his back; an ornate Celtic knot clasped his biceps like a lover’s fingers, and a cherry tree stretched its flower-laden branches across his chest. Low on his belly, a rose bloomed, its thorny branches curling beneath the waistband of his low-slung jeans, pointing lower yet. Owen himself was wide and muscular and covered with a thatch of gray hair; next to him, Kerry was as thin and sharp as a knife blade.

Owen, breathing hard, paused in the act of fumbling with Kerry’s zipper because Kerry had stopped, too, and was just looking at him. His face was a study in darkness and light, his eyes as clear and brilliant as a winter sky.

“Is something wrong?” Owen asked.

Kerry shook his head. “Nothing, just— You, surrounded by flowers, chiaroscuro… I want to paint you.”

“What,
now
?” was all he could manage.

“Maybe I’ll fuck you first and then paint you.” Kerry smiled his disarmingly sweet wild-child smile and plunged down for another kiss. Owen sank into it, until the saner part of his brain prevailed and he levered himself partly free so he could reach for the condoms in the bedside table. All Homespun |
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he managed to do was knock over the candles and drop the condom package on the floor.

“Oh, honey,” Kerry sighed, and leaned over the side of the bed to get it. Owen took advantage of the opportunity to slide his boxers over his hips and kick off his jeans. They went off the end of the bed with a
clunk
as something fell out of a pocket—the ring box or his Leatherman or half a dozen other heavy things; there was always a hoof trimmer or a bottle of wood oil or some random tool stuck in his pocket.

He leaned over to make sure it wasn’t the ring.

“Where are you going
now
?” Kerry demanded, dragging him back, naked, through a welter of wildflowers. And then Owen forgot the ring, forgot everything. It was just the two of them—hands and tongues and bodies, moving together in the dark.

He’d wanted to make this special. Memorable. Instead it was fast and hard and desperate, six months of longing that exploded all at once into rapid, gasping sex. They knew each other so well by now, anyway—knew what the other liked, all the little places that wanted to be touched, how fast was too fast, how slow was too slow….

There was nothing between them but skin and urgency; still, Owen sensed Kerry holding back. Kerry’s body was there, but his heart was closed off, more so than usual.

There was, had always been, something brittle in Kerry—not fragile, not at all, but easily broken in the way of un-tempered steel—hard, yet prone to shatter. Owen had learned to bend around it. And Kerry was tense tonight, a resistance Owen hadn’t noticed in the kitchen, but here, when it was just the two of them….

But he couldn’t focus on that, not with heat and light rising in him, not with Kerry
here
, in his bed, no longer a Homespun |
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fond memory beyond a gulf of longing. And all he could think, finally, was
This. Yes. This. Forever.

Afterward, they lay tangled together, damp and sticky and happy. Some of the tension seemed to have melted out of Kerry as he nestled into the crook of Owen’s shoulder.

Owen scritched at Kerry’s scalp beneath the heavily permed spikes of his dark hair, just for the pleasure that came from feeling him relax even more, going boneless and limp like a big cat.

The moment broke when Kerry’s face twisted in

discomfort. He squirmed and reached beneath his naked ribcage for a handful of long-stemmed wildflowers, which he tossed onto the floor.

“Ouch! I swear, Owen, don’t you have enough nature outside without having to bring it into the house?”

“I was trying to be romantic,” Owen said, too lazy and contented to rise to the bait.

“A dozen roses is romantic. A bed covered with weeds—I just hope I’m not allergic.”

“They’re asters and goldenrod, not weeds.”

“Potato, potahto….” Kerry propped himself up on his elbow. “So what’s with the romance? You never do romance.

Softening me up for something?” he teased.

Which reminded Owen of his big surprise of the evening.

“Yes,” he said earnestly. “I mean, not ‘softening you up’

exactly, but—hang on, I have something for you.”

He dangled off the bed, rummaging through the pockets of his jeans. “Not that I mind the view,” Kerry said playfully from behind him, “but you’ve got me curious now. You didn’t know I was coming, so how much planning could you have done?”

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22

“I do think about you when you aren’t here, you know,”

Owen said. He looked around just in time to see that soft, affectionate expression on Kerry’s face again. He wanted to freeze it there, to keep it forever. Cupped in his hands was the secret he hoped would do exactly that. He’d picked it out in a jewelry store in Utica six months ago, on the heels of Kerry’s last disappearance. Even Laura didn’t know. As far as she was concerned, he’d driven up to look at farm tractors.

Owen cracked open the little box. It wasn’t a big

diamond. But he hadn’t been able to give Nancy a diamond at all—they’d made do with a cheap dime store ring for the engagement and an inexpensive band at the wedding. There had been no money for things like that at all. And though he’d known she hadn’t begrudged it, he’d wanted to have all the best things for her, just as he wanted to give Kerry all the best things, and now, he could afford at least a few of them.

He had been picturing the look on Kerry’s face for six months, a male mirror of Nancy’s wonder and joy. Shock, awe, delight—

There was shock, all right. That had been the only thing he’d managed to foresee. Kerry stared at the ring with a frozen, stunned look.

“Uh… it’s legal now?” Owen tried, and then felt like an idiot as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Surely Kerry already knew that.

Kerry swung his legs off the bed and reached for his pants.

“Ker? Kerry—goddammit!”

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LAURA was in the living room, filling yarn orders. A row of Priority Mail boxes were neatly lined up on the coffee table, each accompanied by a printed sheet of paper from the order form on Blue Thistle Farm’s website. With deft hands, she neatly wrapped each skein of hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn, sealed it in a plastic Ziploc bag, and double-checked it was going into the right box. She’d dyed most of the yarn herself, and each skein held a story—here was the last of the very light cochineal batch from two years ago; this one was her

“Morning Mist” natural-gray worsted from the dark

Cotswold-cross ewes….

With each fat bag of homemade yarn that went into a box, she felt herself relaxing a little more. The familiar routine calmed her, and anyway, it was impossible to be unhappy and upset with her hands full of yarn.

Uncle Kerry is back,
she thought, tucking away a bag of curly Cotswold locks a customer had purchased for doll’s hair.
We just need to get through the adjustment period, like
always, and then we’ll have picnics, and he’ll draw silly
cartoons to make me laugh, and Daddy will smile more, and
things will be good.
Like always.

Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. She looked up at Kerry, marching downstairs as he pulled his T-shirt over his head. “Ker, don’t do this,” Owen protested from the top of the stairs. He was naked to the waist, hastily buttoning his jeans, his broad chest a mat of curly gray hair. Laura looked away as fast as possible, instead frowning at Kerry’s back as he stomped into the kitchen.

“Daddy! What did you say to him?”

Her father didn’t answer, which was answer enough. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, took a breath, started forward, then stopped again.

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Laura knew her father all too well. Kerry would be long gone before Owen worked up the nerve to go after him. She shoved the yarn off her lap and dashed out the door.

She caught up to Kerry in the yard, under the clear blue-white glare of the halogen floodlights that lit up the barns. “Uncle Kerry,” she called. He was walking fast, hands stuck in his pockets. “Kerry.” She caught him by the shoulder. He could have pulled away, but didn’t.

“Uncle Kerry, I don’t know what stupid thing Daddy said now, but he’s probably just being Daddy. We can fix this.”

The blue tint to the light washed out his skin and made him look like a corpse, especially with his eyes sunken under the shadow of his drawn brows. Still, she could see he didn’t look angry, just miserable.

“Uncle Kerry, talk to me, please. I’ll listen.”

Gently he detached her hands. “You wouldn’t

understand, Sugarblossom.”

“Try me! Maybe I would.”

Kerry tipped up her chin with his fingers. “You wouldn’t, sweetie. I know you mean well, but—we’re different, you and I. Different lives. Different worlds. I can’t explain in a way you’d understand.”

She didn’t press him. She’d learned long ago that

dealing with Uncle Kerry was like wrangling a skittish sheep—you had to let it come to you on its own, so it would learn to trust you, rather than pinning it down. “Well, there won’t be many cars on the highway this late, so at least spend the night, okay?”

He shuddered, an involuntary, all-over shiver. “I’m not going back in there.”

What had Owen
done
? “All right, you don’t have to.

There’s lots of buildings on the farm, right? Oh, what about Homespun |
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the old milking barn?” She was already leading him that way. Gentle nudges…. “We haven’t had animals in it since we sold the dairy-goat herd. It’s my summer dyeing studio now, and Daddy uses it for tearing down machinery in the winter. But it’s clean, and the roof doesn’t leak. I can bring down some bedding from the house. Go on, and I’ll meet you out there.”

He hesitated. But he went—in that direction, not up toward the road.

Owen was hovering in the kitchen doorway, staring out anxiously at the night. “Is he—did he…?”

“He’s in the milking barn. Where he’ll be spending the night.”

Her father followed her upstairs, where she retrieved Kerry’s backpack and the heap of sheets. Owen located a pillow to tuck into the bundle and helped her wrap it all up in a comforter.

“I’m guessing that you’re not coming down with me, Daddy.”

“I don’t know if he’ll want to see me right now. Tell you the truth, sweetie, I don’t know if I want to see
him
, either.”

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what happened between you two,” she said, but Owen just shook his head. So she left him there and sallied forth into the night with her arms full of sheets and Kerry’s pack slung over her shoulder.

The milking barn was one of the farthest outbuildings from the house, which, she thought, might be a bonus at the moment. Kerry had painted this one too, of course. The mural was unfinished just like the rest, trailing away into chalk outlines on the primed boards.

He had let her help him work on this one, she

remembered. She’d been sixteen or seventeen, teetering on a Homespun |
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stepladder and leaning out with a paintbrush. Like so many of Kerry’s murals, it incorporated the buildings of Manhattan, but these were cartoony and distorted with lots of odd inclusions—sheep, dirigibles, Godzilla—a joint production of their combined brainstorming efforts. With every goofy thing they’d added, Owen had rolled his eyes a little harder. “Really?” her father had said. “You two have stuck me with a dinosaur on my barn?
Really
?”

“You can paint over it,” Kerry had said.

But Owen never had, and in the end the mural had

become another half-finished KayRay project, like all the other ones on the outbuildings around the farm. Her father had never insisted on having them finished. Maybe, Laura thought, he hoped that if the murals were never completed, then Kerry would always return to pick up a paintbrush and dab a little more paint here or there. Freeing a hand from the bundle of bedding, she tapped at the door.