Harry

For the longest time, I’d fought to control how other people made me feel, but I stood no chance with Joe. He stormed through my hard-won defences and stole my breath away, kissing me like he didn’t have the remnants of the worst bruise I’d ever seen staining his torso.

I gasped in a breath, letting him briefly dominate me before instinct took over and I lifted him clean off his feet, pressing him carefully against the wall behind him. He’d lost weight in recent days, but the lean, coiled planes of his body were still intoxicating as the kiss went on and on until he shuddered in my arms.

Reluctantly, I eased him down and broke away with a nervous laugh. “How did that happen?”

Joe shrugged, his expression guarded. “I’m not complaining.”

Neither was I. But getting physical with him hadn’t been my intention when I’d come to the door. The heat between us could wait. Joe’s beloved horses couldn’t. “Let’s go for a walk,” I whispered. “I heard Mani call out a while ago. I think he’s waiting for you.”

Joe’s eyes stopped flashing. He let go of my hand and opened the door. It crossed my mind to let him go alone, but the thought of not being nearby if he needed help made me nauseous.

We stepped out into the night. Joe walked slowly and I matched his pace, my hands itching to steady him. But I kept them to myself as we reached the tack room to check on the abandoned ponies. With the horses on his mind, Joe didn’t need my help.

He opened the half-door and peered inside. A soft light was on in the corner, George’s radio playing Fleetwood Mac beside it. The man himself was asleep in the hay, and so was one of the ponies. The other staggered to its feet and came to the door, ignoring Joe and butting my arm with her wispy nose.

I stroked her gently and fed her the softened ginger nuts I’d somehow begun carrying in my pockets. The mare and I had an understanding: I’d feed her all the biscuits she liked if she didn’t show me her teeth. It was working out well, so far.

“She likes you,” Joe said.

“I don’t know about that. I’m just glad to see her up. Your—uh—George thought she’d die.”

The mare wandered off. Joe waited for her to lie down close to her stablemate and then shut the door on the cosy scene. “Who needs me, eh?”

“Just about everyone, I reckon. It’s taken three people to keep up with your usual workload.”

“Uh-huh.” Joe shot me a sideways glance. “I know Jonah was here, so there’s no need to cover for him.”

“I wasn’t going to keep it from you.”

“Didn’t tell me, though, did ya?” Joe started for the main stable block.

I trailed him. “When should I have told you?”

“Dunno. Just now? When you put me to bed? I—fuck. I don’t know. I’m just—” Joe stopped at the first stall and flicked some low lights on. “It feels weird knowing he’s been here. I’ve spent so long trying to pretend he never was.”

“He didn’t come in the house, if that’s what you’re worried about. He used the hose to wash, ate outside, and slept in the tack room.”

“That sounds like him even when he lived here.”

“How long ago was that?”

“A fucking long time.” Joe studied Tauna and Carric before moving onto the next stall, and then the next. Shadow was in the sixth one along, which seemed to take him by surprise. “This is Mani’s stall.”

“He’s on the end,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Sorry.”

Joe frowned and turned back to Shadow, who was observing us from the back of his stall. I wondered if I should leave them to it—if there was a private moment that passed between a horse and man when one of them had hurt the other so grievously. But Shadow merely grunted and then shifted so his shoulders blocked the view of his face, and Joe moved on.

The private moment came at Mani’s stable. He heard Joe coming and got to his feet, calling out with the rickety cry that even I recognised as his. He bumped his nose against the door until it opened and then snorted softly in delight as he finally laid eyes on Joe.

I stepped away as the old horse embraced his master. Joe hid his face in Mani’s mane, his shoulders shaking, and I took my cue to go back inside. My knowledge of horses was still limited, but I knew when a man needed a moment alone with his best friend.

Back in the kitchen, I forced myself not to pace the stone floor or peep through the window, and brewed a pot of tea for when Joe came in. Then I sat at the table and stared at my work. It had been a few days since I’d even glanced at the book, and it felt like a year. With Joe in hospital, I’d found myself unable to sit still, and helping out on the farm had given me a healthier outlet for that than running loops of Newquay.

As a result, I’d spent some time with Joe’s father. And fuck, if that hadn’t confused the hell out of me. I wanted to hate him . . . but I didn’t. And I’d yet to figure out why it mattered so much. Could Joe shed any light on that? I’d gone to the hospital every day to find out, but he’d been asleep each time. A sign for me to mind my own business?

Maybe.

Joe came back a little while later and leaned in the kitchen doorway, his eyes hooded and shot through with red. “Everything’s different.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged. “The stables, the feed shed . . . you.”

“Me?” I made an executive decision not to angst over what he’d been doing in the feed shed. “How am I different?”

“I don’t know. But you are.”

“Maybe it’s the fresh air I’ve been getting. I wasn’t taking the piss when I said I hadn’t done much work this week.”

“Emma reckoned you’ve done plenty. Cleaned out the trailer, by all accounts. Wheeled it down to the paddocks.”

“I didn’t do it on my own,” I said carefully.

“I know.”

“Your dad,” I started and then stopped. What was I going to say? That I knew his father had let him down in so many ways, but I kind of liked him anyway? “Your dad helped me.”

“I know that too.”

I searched for something to say that would ease the conflict in his eyes—a turmoil that seemed to make sense, even if I didn’t quite understand it. “I’ve been thinking about that space around the old stud farm.”

“Why?”

“Because your dad has been on my mind when I haven’t been thinking about you, and that led me to the empty field. You’re at capacity, right? You can’t take any more horses?”

Joe leaned heavily on the doorframe. “We don’t have the space, manpower, or equipment, and we can’t afford the horses we already have.”

“So you need another income stream?”

“Is that a trick question?”

Everything about Joe seemed brand new—the way he glowered at me, said my name, and made me feel—but I could handle the sullen cynicism he was throwing my way now. Had expected it. “Have you thought about running a campsite on that field? Just tents to start with, maybe some trailers if you could get hold of any more. You could even convert the stud farm into a shower block.”

“How? Build it with my bare hands and magic beans to pay for the materials?”

“You could get a business loan if you had a viable plan.”

Joe snorted. “We’re up to our eyeballs in loans already, and there’s nothing viable about the way we do business here. That’s why you’re here—because we needed your money.”

Inexplicably, the admission stung. Like my subconscious believed that it had been some romantic twist of fate that had brought me into Joe’s life. “Fair enough. I didn’t really think it through. It’s just you’ve got that spare land and it doesn’t make sense not to use it.”

“Nothing around here makes sense, Harry. If it did, we’d have gone down the swanny years ago.”

His pessimism was suffocating. And unfair. The farm survived because he, and his grandfather before him, had given their lives to make it so. Hard work, sacrifice, and dogged determination. They hadn’t folded because they refused to. “What about a riding school?”

“Nah.” Joe shook his head. “We had one for a while, but the insurance was a nightmare—all those kids coming and going. Besides, someone’s got to teach the little fuckers, and if Emma ain’t in the mood, I haven’t got time for that shit.”

I’d heard fragments of that explanation before and mulled the new additions over in my mind before I realised that Joe had pretty much become one with the doorframe and my pondering was keeping him there.

I got up and went to him, easing him upright and taking his weight. “You ready for bed?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A serious one. Total inactivity can be as bad for the body as doing too much, but you still need to rest.”

Joe stared at me. For a moment he looked like he wanted to punch me, kiss me, or both, but he did neither. Just sighed and pulled away. “Don’t come upstairs with me.”

I stepped back, folding my arms across my chest to stop myself from instinctively steadying him. I hadn’t consciously thought about following him upstairs, but now he’d asked me not to, it took everything I had to stay still.

Joe set one foot on the bottom step. I figured he was bracing himself, but then he turned back to me, his gaze fierce. “It’s not because I don’t want you to.”

“Want me to what?”

“Don’t do that!”

I flinched. Couldn’t help it.

Joe squeezed his eyes shut and slammed his hand on the wall. “Don’t do that, Harry. You know what I’m talking about.”

I really didn’t, but seeing Joe distressed hurt more than I could say. I caught his hand before he could strike the wall again, covering his knuckles with my palm. “If you want to fight something, I’ve got a punchbag in the boot of my car. Give it a couple of weeks and it’s all yours.”

“I don’t want the fucking punchbag.”

“Okay.”

“Is it?” The fire in Joe’s eyes faded. “I want you to come upstairs with me, lie down with me, and kiss the shit out of me until I pass out on you, but I can’t let it happen because I know you’re going to play along and then leave me. How is that fucking fair, Harry?”

I opened my mouth. Shut it again.

Joe snorted in disgust and turned away, and the bedroom door upstairs banged a long time before I’d found my tongue again.

* * *

“. . . play along and then leave me.” Was that what he honestly thought? The idea was horrifying as I paced the kitchen. Joe had left me at the foot of the stairs more than an hour ago, but I still couldn’t make sense of his fury. Patient testimonials said my empathy made me a decent therapist, but I’d always been dense when it came to real life. To my life.

Dense. Oblivious. Incompetent. They all fit. It was why I’d never had a boyfriend—because beyond sex, I didn’t have a clue. Angelo and Dylan’s relationship was a balm to my soul, and I’d always wanted it for myself but never known how. Grindr got me laid when I felt so inclined, but I rarely saw the same bloke twice. Didn’t need to when the app was flooded with new faces by the hour.

But, fuck, I saw Joe every damn day. And I wanted to. I wanted to do all the things he’d said—apart from creeping away from him while he slept, so why had I done it? If I hadn’t, perhaps he wouldn’t have gone to Shadow’s field that day. Perhaps he’d have stayed on the couch with me—kissing, touching . . . more. And maybe after I’d have stuck around to figure out what it all meant.

I stopped pacing and sank into the nearest chair. My laptop glowed accusingly—the only light in the room—and I pulled it towards me. The chapter I’d been working on was almost done, but I had another window open that I’d been plugging at when Joe had come in from the yard. It was a self-help plan for Emma, using the same theory that I’d applied to graded exercise programs for years. An inch at a time, little by little. Things that took a long time to put right took longer to break. And every step, however small, meant something. Meant everything.

Just not to me.

The therapist in me knew I was being unfair—that I hadn’t spent my adult life guiding patients through recovery with complete and total detachment. Of course I hadn’t. How many nights had I sat up with Angelo and Dylan? Teaching Dylan how to help Angelo, and Angelo how to let him? Did I do that because they’d become my friends? Or because it was impossible for me not to?

I blew out a long breath and shut the computer with a bang, plunging myself into darkness. The tangents in my head rarely made sense, and no amount of waiting for this particular one to lead me back to Joe would change anything. I’d fucked up, and despite him having the weight of the world on his mind, he cared.

Work abandoned, habit took me out into the yard. Dawn wasn’t far away and the horses knew it. A few called out as I passed their stalls, and even the ponies in the tack room were awake.

I poked my head in, expecting to see George still kipping in the hay. But George wasn’t there and I found myself face-to-face with Dex. “Oh. Erm. Sorry. I was just seeing if George wanted a cuppa.”

Dex eyed me over the top of the weakest pony’s head. “That’s okay. I heard you coming.”

It wasn’t exactly an invitation to hang around, but I leaned on the half-door anyway, watching the friendly pony lick Dex’s neck. “How are they doing?”

“Not so bad,” Dex replied. “I didn’t think this one would make it, but Jonah’s worked his magic.”

Dex’s opinion on Jonah was hard to gauge. He’d been around a lot while Joe had been in hospital but rarely spoke, and true to Joe’s warning that he didn’t care for strange men, he’d given me a wide berth. “What will happen to them when they’re better?”

Dex shrugged. “Adoption, or a city farm, maybe. I’d take them myself, but I haven’t the room. How’s Joe? Sal said he was still banjaxed.”

It took a moment to make sense of Dex’s soft Irish brogue. “He’s tired, but he’ll be okay.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

Dex patted the pony and came to the half-door. He peered at me in much the same way Joe did, albeit without the heat. “You’re a good gorger, eh?”

Gorger. It took me a moment to translate the term for non-gypsy. I dragged a smile from somewhere and chanced it. “I try.”

“You’re like Seb. I didn’t see it at first, but you’re still here.”

“Where else would I go?”

“Home,” Dex said like it made perfect sense. “This farm isn’t the place for every man.”

He shot me a final shrewd gaze and then returned to the ponies. I stared, unseeing, at his back as the mist in my brain began to clear. I’d never considered my London flat less of a home than I did right now, but what did that matter if Joe was alone upstairs while I lapped the yard like a lost lunatic?

I backed away from the tack room and took off for the house. At the stairs, I kicked off my shoes and jogged up to the landing. A pile of cats had found Joe’s hiding place and were camped outside the bedroom, and the closed door gave me pause. Its earlier slam echoed in the tangled mess my mind had become—or perhaps always had been. Be brave.

Holding my breath, I eased the door open, half expecting to find Joe sitting up, his eyes still bright with the frustration I deserved, but he was huddled on the bed, fast asleep, and still dressed in my clothes.

I moved to the window and drew the curtains, blocking the outside world for the first time since Joe had shown me this room all those weeks ago. Then, as though this was my bed—our bed—I lay down beside Joe and touched his shoulder, tentatively at first, but then with more purpose as my hand slid naturally over his torso and beneath his borrowed hoodie. My fingers found his abdomen and he shivered.

“Harry?”

“It’s me,” I whispered. “It’s okay . . . keep sleeping.”

Joe hummed and rolled over, his head coming to rest on my chest as though we were made to lie together like this—my arms tight around him, his leg hitched over mine. I buried my face in his hair and breathed him in and, for the first time in days, let sleep carry me away.