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Some days, Boyd wished that electricity had never been invented.
If that were the case, he wouldn’t have to fight so much with the wiring in the Givens’ house. Now, Boyd was usually up for a fight, and he’d give as good as he got. But it was quite a bit different when it was a shock up his arm instead of a right hook to the jaw, and the wires sure as hell didn’t feel it when he ripped them out of the wall.
Raylan walked in at the precise time that Boyd’s frustration had reached its peak. Boyd heard him coming in, boots heavy at the door, the creak of the hinges--which he really should get around to fixing-- and the clack of the storm door as it shut behind him. Boyd didn’t turn, just kept on laying out the wire, which he had measured twice already, and come up short when going to connect to the service panel.
Raylan said nothing, just walked past him as Boyd kept working. He went into the kitchen, pulled open the fridge, and took out a beer. Boyd heard the snap and hiss of the bottle opening and Raylan’s footsteps as he came back in.
“Raylan,” Boyd said evenly, not looking away from his work.
Raylan finished his sip and answered, “Boyd. Beer’s a little warm.”
“The power’s out. I cut it at the box, pulled out all the fuses. I don’t trust your daddy’s wiring.”
“I wouldn't either.” Boyd turned to see Raylan’s smile.
He had his hat on, his lean jeans, and his work jacket. He looked more relaxed than many times Boyd had seen him come in, but there was something uncertain in his eyes.
Boyd’s hands and stopped moving when his gaze settled on Raylan. He pushed the wire aside.
Boyd had gutted the walls in the front living room since Raylan had last been there. He’d knocked out the dividing wall between the dining room and the living room, opening up the space. He’d fixed some old studs, and done some repairs on the floor.
Raylan had told Boyd, years ago, he could do whatever he wanted with the house, with the shit inside it and with the structure itself. The only thing he couldn’t touch were the graves, not that Boyd would have anyway. The dead were best left buried.
Raylan told Boyd he could do whatever he wanted with his life, he just couldn’t bring anything unsavory or illegal inside the house. Boyd respected the stipulation. It made sense, in a Raylan sort of way, and Boyd didn’t feel like he had much ground to stand on for complaint. It did make scheming and planning harder in the long run, but Boyd did it for a while, until he didn’t anymore.
One would think, knowing Boyd, that he wouldn’t like Raylan telling him what he could and couldn’t do. But there was the added parameter of the house. The house was Raylan’s. Raylan could dictate what was going on in and around his own property. Boyd wanted to stay in the house--there was something he liked about the idea--and he hadn’t had any better prospects when he first moved in. So Boyd followed Raylan’s rules, until it was just how he lived.
Boyd also liked that Raylan came around sometimes. He liked that a lot.
“You done?” Raylan asked.
“For right now, I believe I am,” he replied. “I have no desire to look at this shit anymore today.”
“You work this weekend?”
Boyd smiled. God forbid, Raylan call and ask him before coming. He shook his head, thinking he sounded just like Helen, not that he’d ever say such a thing to Raylan’s face. “I do not. I’m not in ‘til third shift, Monday.”
Raylan grinned at him and Boyd stood, brushing dust and wood shavings off his pants. Raylan took off his hat and set his beer on the floor.
Boyd--stepping forward to draw Raylan upstairs--was not prepared for him to advance quickly, intercepting Boyd, and pushing him roughly up against two of the studs. Raylan’s hand came up fast and forceful, pressing Boyd’s chin up and away so that their lips did not meet when his body moved in close, his breath blowing lightly across Boyd’s cheek.
He unbuckled Boyd’s belt with one hand.
Raylan just stood, just breathed on him for a second, then sank to his knees.
He took Boyd’s cock from his jeans with both hands and steady fingers. He looked up, meeting Boyd’s eyes, clear and wide open, before he wrapped his fingers around Boyd’s shaft and took him into his mouth.
Boyd leaned back, letting the studs, hard and narrow, jut into his shoulder blades and back, grounding him in a way that he was sure his feet wouldn’t be able to in a very short time.
He let Raylan extract from him all that frustration. Let him replace it with a slow maelstrom of compounding need and extraordinary release.
When Boyd and Raylan had started this thing back up, ten years after their aborted confessions on the night of Raylan’s departure from Harlan, neither of them were particularly good or knowledgeable about certain sexual acts.
Things had changed over the past few years, and, while maybe they didn’t get as much practice as people who lived together on a regular basis, Boyd couldn’t help but sincerely believe that being sucked off by Raylan Givens was one of the most rewarding experiences of his life.
But it wasn’t as if the act itself was a regular occurrence. A blow job from Raylan came around less than a blue moon, and was an almost certain indication that something was afoot, if not clearly wrong in Raylan’s world.
As was his custom, Raylan swallowed about half Boyd’s come in a smooth motion, took his mouth off Boyd with a slick sound, and spat the rest on the floor.
Boyd smiled, feeling loose and good, trailing his hand through Raylan’s mussed hair. “I’ll have to clean that up later, you know.”
Raylan stood, kissed Boyd quick and dirty, hands sure and rough, knowing Boyd loved to taste himself on him, and said simply, “Let’s go get some dinner.”
Since there was no power for cooking and no food to cook anyway, Boyd straightened himself out and they went.
They never called it a relationship. They never talked about it as anything at all. It was just what they did now.
Early on, in the year after Boyd moved in, Raylan would fly in late on a Friday and stay the weekend, fly back out to Salt Lake on Sunday. Later, like today, Raylan would drive in from Glynco, where he taught the boys to shoot. The drive wasn’t so far, so he came more often, though never as often as Boyd would have liked.
Usually after he arrived, he’d drink his beer while he watched Boyd finish up whatever renovation project he was doing. They would never say much right away, not ‘til after Boyd cleaned everything up. Then Boyd would pour them two fingers each of Jimmy, though he did always prefer Jack. He would decipher the trajectory of the evening by how fast Raylan drank his, and if he asked for another.
There were two reasons Raylan came to Harlan when he did, and it was never one reason or the other. It was always a varying mixture of both. He came to leave behind the memories of violence and layers of guilt that his job showered upon him and he came to fuck Boyd.
As Boyd sat silent in the passenger seat of Raylan’s trusty old Lincoln Town Car, he realized today was just a little bit different. Sex before the bourbon, a goddamn blow job at that, and now out to dinner. The uncertain look in Raylan’s eyes. It wasn’t something Boyd could ignore.
“What’s on your mind, Raylan?” Boyd asked, seeing no sense in waiting.
Raylan’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and he gave Boyd a significant glance.
“Would you like me to be patient about this?” Boyd, it seemed, had an infinite supply of patience when it came to Raylan.
“I would.”
So Boyd began to talk about the house and Raylan listened and drove on.
Whenever Raylan would show up like he had today, when Boyd was in the middle of some project or other, he would look over what Boyd was doing and give him a half-smile before he’d go to the fridge for a beer.
And they would talk about it. Boyd would detail what he had done, when, and why he had done things the way he did. He would complain to Raylan about generations of shoddy Givens’ workmanship, then Raylan would laugh ruefully and tell him carefully edited stories about Arlo’s attempts to fix anything.
Boyd knew Raylan loved the idea that the house was different now, though he never said as much. Boyd knew from the way he looked around at it, with that smile he couldn’t quite hide. So, Boyd just kept changing things.
He’d redone the kitchen first, then both of the bathrooms, then he’d begun work on the dining room and the porch. He didn’t need to labor full time at the mine to support this particular lifestyle. Taxes were low in Harlan, there was no rent, no mortgage, just utilities left after that, and Boyd spent the rest of his money on food and renovation supplies.
Helen would bring people over sometimes, or he’d have old friends stop by for a beer, never for real dealings, and they’d see what he’d done. He’d snagged himself a few odd contracting jobs that way, though he wasn’t licensed, and often he’d be paid in goods he would have to pawn off on Johnny or Devil in order to get any real money.
It was all work to him and it was something that kept him occupied, left him something to look forward to during those increasingly few hours he spent at the mine.
Boyd didn’t mind living in the chaos of a perpetual renovation. As long as Raylan kept coming back to see things different, and as long as that made Raylan smile when he walked in the house, Boyd didn’t mind at all.
They would always drive a ways to go eat, to a place it would be difficult to find someone who knew them. It wasn’t anyone’s particular idea, it was just the best course of action for the way things were.
Boyd never lied to people about what was between Raylan and him. But no one ever asked, because they’d been so careful, so discreet. Only Helen knew, and she picked up on it almost immediately, because she knew Raylan so well.
“I see the way he looks when I talk to him about you, about what you’re doin’ to this place,” she’d told Boyd over a jar of shine on a Sunday after Raylan left again, years before. She’d smiled at him wickedly and said, “I’d ask who tops, but I ain’t sure I want to know.”
She laughed at the level to which Boyd’s jaw had dropped and took another pull on the jar, then lit a cigarette between her lips. When she offered him one, he demurred. “Raylan doesn’t like it,” he admitted.
She smiled again, big and pleased. “You got it bad, boy.”
“I know it,” he’d answered.
After a while, right before she left, Helen said, “He’ll hurt you, if you let him, Boyd. He don’t know how not to.”
Boyd had sighed, and felt the pull of a sigh now, in Raylan’s car, as he remembered. “I know that too, Helen.” He’d looked at her and promised, “We’ll be fine. We’ll be careful.”
“You just keep tearing this place up, turning it around, and he won’t have time to think about ripping you or himself apart.”
Boyd had heeded that advice, to the letter.
Usually when Boyd and Raylan ate out, they’d go to a roadside barbecue, or a bar neither had been to before. Tonight, Raylan took them to an Italian place on the far side of Cumberland, with a four page menu and a wine list.
Boyd wasn’t sure he had enough money in his wallet to cover a meal at this place, and he sure as shit didn’t have it in his bank account. He eyed Raylan uncomfortably from the far side of the table, trying to decide if he should say something, and then saw him notice.
“My treat,” Raylan said, but with a small question at the tail end of the statement, that uncertainty lurking in his eyes again.
They didn’t buy each other things, ever, really. Unless you counted the building supplies and the renovation, or the gift of the house rent-free. But they didn’t count that at all, because that was the arrangement, the basis for their entire relationship.
Boyd tightened his lips and nodded, needing to know what had got Raylan so wound up, he felt like he had to pull the rug out from under everything in order to talk about it.
He ordered something small and inexpensive, made a drink of a double of the well whiskey, and put a look on his face that dared Raylan to say something.
“Art Mullen was transferred to head the Lexington Office,” Raylan told him and took a long sip from his bourbon.
“Art, the one who teaches with you?” Boyd was unable to keep the surprise from his voice. “In Lexington, Kentucky?”
Raylan looked away and Boyd couldn’t fathom why. “Yeah.”
He didn’t say anything else about it until they’d got their food.
“Art asked me to come up with him from Glynco. Get back in the field for a while,” Raylan said as he sliced through his chicken parmesan.
“In Kentucky, you mean?” Boyd asked, trying to make sure he understood. “In Lexington?”
Raylan looked at him then, chewing slowly. “Yeah.”
“Well, Raylan,” he said, mystified as to why this was such a hard thing to get out. “That sounds just fine. It sounds...” and Boyd can’t bring himself to say perfect. “It sounds great.”
“Does it?”
Boyd put down his fork and settled himself in to stare Raylan down. “Doesn’t it? I’d be hard pressed to find a problem here. Just last time, you said you wanted to go back out, you said you’re done with teaching. And the distance. It would be less. I understand if you don’t want to--”
But Raylan shook his head and Boyd stopped talking, worried, as he always was, that he’d pressure Raylan into backing off, into never coming back. They’d always struck a careful balance in what they would speak about, and Boyd was walking a fine line here.
“I do want to get back into the field. I like working with Art. And... coming back to Kentucky sometimes, makes me think... it wasn’t here that I hated so much. I--” Raylan stuttered to a stop, then gathered himself up somehow, and Boyd saw that ragged emotion that had begun to show itself in him recede, disappear again. “It’s not just that the distance would be less than Glynco, Boyd,” he said. “I’m going to have to come down. For my job. I’ll be working in Harlan.”
To Boyd that seemed all the better, but he didn’t say so, and instead asked, “Why should that make a difference?”
“You sure you want to see that much of me?” And there was that uncertainty, lingering in his eyes, pulling his lips into that small frown of his.
“Raylan, when have I ever said I wanted to see less of you?”
Raylan smiled, but it was a pained one and fleeting, “I dunno, Boyd, it’ll just be different. That’s all I’m saying.”
Boyd wanted to lunge forward, snatch up Raylan’s hand in his, but he stopped himself, knowing that would be the very last thing Raylan desired. “You think what’s going on here is so fragile that any kind of change would topple it?”
Raylan didn’t answer and Boyd told himself he understood. Raylan’s habit was thinking everything good was fragile and Boyd knew why. Didn’t make it hurt less to hear that silence, though.
“Do you want it to be different? To be here more?”
The vulnerable look in Raylan’s eyes was gone before Boyd could even be sure it was there at all. But it was all the answer Boyd needed.
They didn’t speak about it any more after that, and it wasn’t until they’d been in the car for twenty minutes, driving back toward Harlan that Boyd realized how white Raylan’s knuckles were around the wheel, how tense and straight he was through his legs and back.
“Pull over, Raylan,” Boyd said.
At Raylan’s questioning look, Boyd repeated, “Pull over. I mean it.”
“You gonna be sick?” Raylan asked, confused, as he stopped the car and put it in park off the highway. “You don’t look sick, Boyd.”
Boyd leaned forward and reached down under Raylan’s seat, pulling hard at the seat adjustment bar. The seat rolled back fast, like an old-fashioned mine cart, letting Raylan’s legs stretch out in front of him.
Boyd smirked as he looked at Raylan’s wide eyes. “I ain’t sick, son,” he said and climbed on top of him.
They didn’t do things like this. The closest they ever got to fucking outside Raylan’s house was the time Raylan took him on the back porch because they might have been too drunk to make it up the stairs. They didn’t go out, they didn’t take these kind of risks.
But Raylan had started it and Boyd knew Raylan needed things to start being different before he went and made them truly that way.
“Come on, baby,” Boyd said, though he’d never called Raylan any such thing before, and kissed him, full and long, sliding his tongue in Raylan’s mouth, letting it sink in, letting him really feel it.
Only when Raylan began to kiss him back, began to drag his long fingers up across Boyd’s jaw and hairline, up and around his neck, did Boyd move to unbuckle his belt.
Raylan did the same, keeping one hand threaded through Boyd’s hair, sliding his palm down to Boyd’s cheek and back up in a rough caress. He took Boyd’s cock out again with only his right hand. “Show off,” Boyd breathed to Raylan’s lips and smiled, breath hitching, into his kiss.
“You love it,” Raylan responded and Boyd knew he wasn’t thinking that it was the first time either of them had ever used that word in a sentence spoken to the other that wasn’t about food or booze. Raylan was only thinking that Boyd had just taken his cock out of his pants.
Boyd laughed softly and felt his smile grow too wide to kiss properly. Raylan was erect and hard in his hand and he swirled his thumb around his head, then began to steadily work his fingers up and down.
Raylan groaned slightly, pushing his hips up into Boyd’s hand. His eyes fell to Boyd’s smile. “Wh-what’s so funny?”
Boyd shook his head, knowing Raylan wouldn’t believe that he was just happy. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
“Bullshit.” Raylan finally had his hand on Boyd’s cock, and he used the other to pull Boyd’s jeans down slightly, around his thighs. He gripped Boyd’s backside hard, digging taut fingers, blunt fingernails, into his skin.
They breathed deep, panted into each other’s mouths and Boyd wasn’t smiling anymore. “It’s everything, then, Raylan,” Boyd said, barely aware he was speaking. “Your choice,” he rambled. “It’s always been yo-”
Raylan interrupted the flow of words with the jet and flow of his orgasm, hard and fast into Boyd’s hand, with the harsh cry of pleasure that was torn from his lips, pressed to Boyd’s neck.
He didn’t stop his hand moving on Boyd and the insistent pull and push and his steady, slowing breath against Boyd’s skin sent him gently, excruciatingly over the edge. He tipped his head back, letting his breath escape in a low moan at the same quiet pace as his ejaculation. Raylan pursed his lips and he turned his head so they traveled lightly across his collarbone and back to Boyd’s mouth.
Spring hadn’t been in Harlan so long that the nights weren’t close to freezing. The windows had fogged up with the weight of their sighs and Boyd knew that it wouldn’t be hard to figure out from any outside perspective what it was they were getting up to in a parked car on the side of the road.
Even still, it took them a while to untangle themselves and get straightened out.
Raylan kept smiling though, softly, as they pulled back onto the road.
It wasn’t until Boyd felt the subtle stop and jerk of the car as Raylan put it in park that he realized he’d been dozing against the passenger side door. He stretched stiff limbs and joints, groaning slightly.
He turned to see Raylan, leaning his elbow up on the wheel and looking at him with a funny smile on his face.
Boyd rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “What?”
“I’m just thinkin’ about all the different kind of ways I could wake you up,” Raylan replied.
“Do any of them involve electricity?” Boyd asked, thinking about how dark the house was.
“Huh?” Raylan had his head tilted to the side, genuine confusion on his face.
“The power, Raylan,” Boyd said with a sigh. “I cut the power this morning. Shit, the water heater’s on electric. I’d better hook it back up if we’re gonna shower tonight.”
Raylan closed his eyes and rubbed his hand across his face in echo of Boyd a few moments before. “I got a flashlight in the trunk. Let’s get it taken care of, then.”
The fuse box was in a forgotten corner of the cellar, which became quite a bit more treacherous a journey with only one flashlight between the two of them. The stairs were still a little rickety, though Boyd had replaced two of the steps already, and there were various items strewn across a winding path through old woodworking tools, snows shovels and a child’s bicycle. They made it through to the electric panel with Raylan illuminating the floor in front of them.
Boyd had stowed the removed fuses in a cigar tin directly below the panel and he stooped to retrieve it as Raylan stood over him, shining the flashlight at his hands.
The cellar, as always, smelled musty and old, but Raylan’s presence at Boyd’s back brought with him the scent of strong, spicy drink and the intimate activities they’d just got up to in the car. It made the place feel different than when it was just Boyd, made him think that nothing he did to this old house would ever be as much of a transformation as Raylan living and breathing and being something like happy inside it.
He pulled the first fuse out of the box, the one that ran the circuit for the cellar and the water heater and the kitchen upstairs. Raylan shined the light where Boyd’s hands came up to the panel, but it wavered as Raylan shifted, leaning back on a pile of old boxes up against the wall, tilting his head at an odd angle to avoid a low-hanging pipe.
“Am I boring you already, Raylan?” Boyd asked as he began to screw in the fuse.
“Oh, no, Boyd,” Raylan said, dry as a desert. “This is just riveting.”
“If you quit complaining, I’ll suck you off in the shower,” Boyd bargained with a smile.
Raylan laughed, a short, mirthful bark, and didn’t say anything else.
When he got the fuse screwed in as far as it would go, he turned to Raylan and said, “You can turn on the light over there, if you’d rather not hold the flashlight anymore. The rest of the fuses are for the rooms upstairs.”
Raylan smiled at him and turned to the doorway, a few steps away. “I remember,” he said, flicking the switch and turning off his flashlight as Boyd continued on to the next fuse.
“You don’t have to--” Boyd began, speaking to the box again. But Raylan cut him off with a warm hand to his back.
“I’ll stay,” he said, settling himself back against those boxes, undoubtedly full of old memories, left untouched for years.
As Boyd screwed the second fuse in, he thought a little more about what having Raylan in and around Harlan so much more would be like. How it would certainly change matters, in the way that they acted, in what they said and what they did. He realized, probably later than he should have, they had to make some decisions.
“Raylan,” Boyd led in with a warning to his voice, the way he did when he knew Raylan wasn’t going to like what was in store. He pulled out the third fuse, fitted it to the socket, and asked, “What have you told Art about things here?”
Boyd glanced over his shoulder to see that Raylan wasn’t looking at him. “He knows I own property in Harlan. That I have a tenant. I haven’t--” he cut himself off abruptly.
Boyd rolled his eyes, but didn’t turn around all the way to speak. “Raylan, I don’t care what you tell the man. Truly, it does not matter to me. I just need to know how it is that people perceive me. We should at least have the same story to tell.”
Raylan didn’t say anything for a moment, but the cellar held a loud silence, one made more tense by the soft metal scraping sound of the last fuse meeting it’s socket. “I won’t tell him unless I have to,” Raylan declared. “Not unless he asks. It’s my business. And yours. No one else’s.”
Now Boyd smiled and closed the panel door, turning to face him. He saw the discomfort in Raylan’s expression, and knew there was a battle going on inside him. Raylan was the last person Boyd could think of who would try, or want, to live a lie. But there was a fear within him too, one buried deep in both of them, and a desperate need for privacy that had its roots in the way this house once was.
“It is that, Raylan,” Boyd said, comfort in his tone, “It’s no one’s business but ours.”
He let Raylan retreat up the stairs and followed slowly after.
Boyd told himself he didn’t care either way. It rankled his pride a little that he was perhaps something Raylan could never publicly own up to, but Boyd knew he had more to lose, more that could be ruined by someone looking at things the wrong way. Raylan’s fears were legitimate, except he knew the man didn’t see them that way.
Usually, Boyd would have let it lie, like he had when it came out that Helen knew. As far as Boyd was aware, Raylan had still not spoken to his aunt regarding the circumstances of Boyd’s stay in his house, despite the fact that it was obvious she took no offense to it. When Boyd told Raylan about the conversation he’d had with Helen, the man had stared at him for ten long seconds, set down his beer, and walked out the door.
He didn’t return for over two months and Boyd kept his mouth shut after that.
This time, since things were changing, and fast, Boyd felt he couldn’t leave the conversation be.
“What about the people in town, Raylan?” he asked, as he came into the kitchen. He opened the beer Raylan had set on the counter for him.
“What do you mean?” The tone of Raylan’s voice held the same warning that Boyd’s had a few minutes before. They didn’t fight much. Boyd didn’t like to when they saw each other so rarely, and he knew Raylan avoided it, always fearful of breaking things beyond repair.
They had learned to take these warnings to heart, to drop arguments before they could hurt each other, make it worse.
Boyd just couldn’t let it be.
“If you’re gonna be here more,” Boyd said, quietly, trying to take it slow, “we have to talk about this. I’m not sure you understand, I haven’t lied about us because I wasn’t asked to do so. No one knows, no one’s ever said anything, save Helen. But people are going to find out, be it weeks or years in the future, regardless of whether or not it’s their business. Would you ask me to lie now?”
Raylan looked away and shrugged his shoulders and Boyd’s insides squirmed at his shuttered expression. Raylan never liked being backed into a corner. “I dunno, say what you want, Boyd. It’s not like we’re in some kind of rel--”
Boyd felt something in him crack as he realized what Raylan was about to say, crack so viciously and loudly, that it roared in his ears and he didn’t, couldn’t, wait to hear the rest of that sentence. The bottle in his hand, still near full, flew from his fingers and smashed to soaking pieces in the metal sink to Boyd’s left. Raylan’s eyes darted to it, going wide and shocked as his voice fell away mid-word. He stepped back involuntarily.
“Don’t you say that, Raylan Givens. Don’t you dare,” he hissed. No, Boyd would not have that, not now. He advanced on Raylan, who had backed up against the sturdy kitchen counter that Boyd installed just over four years before. He didn’t touch him, just came up close and looked hard with outrage and hurt in his eyes. “You been with a woman since your daddy died?”
“No,” Raylan replied.
“You been with another man?”
“No,” he denied sincerely and reached for Boyd, regret in his eyes and in the hesitation of his fingers.
Boyd evaded his grasp and spat the words at him, “Then what the hell do you think this is?”
“I don’t-- I wasn’t-- I never wanted to tie you down with that. You shouldn’t always have to be waiting for me. I thought, if we never said what it was...”
Boyd shook his head, knowing those were excuses, nothing better than lies. “Then you could go on pretending it wasn’t something you could lose,” he finished the sentence for him.
“Fuck, Boyd,” Raylan said helplessly.
Boyd shook his head, threw his hand out to the side and slung it across the room. “What do you think I do this for, Raylan?” he asked. He slammed his hand onto the counter. “It’s not my house. It never was. This, you--you’ve always been something I could lose, every time you walk out that door, how am I to know when you’ll come back? I stayed here, I did everything I could think of to keep you here. With me.”
Raylan looked at Boyd with dark and desperate eyes. It wasn’t the way he looked when the lights were off upstairs, in the low sunshine of the living room that day, or in the dim twilight of the car that night. It was lost and small. “I didn’t think I wanted to be kept, Boyd.”
Boyd heaved a sigh and looked back at him, dead on, seeing him for what he was, like always. “I know, Raylan. I know about you, I do. But you...” he smiled, couldn’t help it really, and couldn’t stop that bitter irony showing through, “you don’t know anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Raylan said, the edge of something broken in his voice. And Boyd let him push forward, hesitantly grasping at his hips, pulling their bodies together.
They fit together, like they’d always seemed to. Raylan was warm and right and breathed steady even when his heart was pounding. It was what had made Boyd think Raylan might be something he could actually hold onto, if he just had enough patience.
Raylan murmured to Boyd’s shoulder. “Boyd, for what it’s worth, that’s why I keep coming back. I can’t think of anyone, knows me like you do.”
Boyd kissed him and said, “Come upstairs.”
They undressed each other slow, clothes coming away stiff and sticky in some places. Boyd would have had a shower, but he was beyond caring. He needed this now, there would be no waiting.
They breathed soft onto each other’s bare skin, keeping themselves close and quiet. They didn’t kiss again until they were both naked, when Raylan took Boyd’s face in his hands and stared at him, the way Boyd thought he must look sometimes, when he was seeing just what Raylan was thinking.
“I love you,” Raylan said, clear as a bell, then pressed their lips together.
Boyd lost himself in that kiss and clung to Raylan like he was the only way back. He climbed on top of him before they even got to the bed. They didn’t laugh or smile, they just pressed themselves together and sighed and moaned and hitched their breath together, tangled up their limbs, hands, fingers.
Raylan was all carefully restrained desperation. Boyd could feel the tension thrumming in him, laid aside from the argument, from the banked panic that Boyd would walk away. Raylan was gentle and slow and it didn’t feel forced in the way he took his time loosening Boyd up, feeling him out and drawing it long and sweet.
Boyd moaned with it and grasped harder across Raylan’s back, unable to stop himself from pushing him forward, begging for his cock with his hands. He craned his neck, caught Raylan’s mouth with his again and whispered to him, babbling a ridiculous string of uncensored thought and sentiment he never would have allowed past his lips had Raylan not spoken those words to him.
He shut up when Raylan started fucking him. He was reduced to grunts and inarticulate cries and only Raylan’s name until he spiraled out in a whirl and haze of release, coming hard as soon as he heard his own name forced through Raylan’s teeth.
Raylan collapsed in a heap on top him and rolled to the side a moment later. He buried his face in the sheen of sweat and come spread across Boyd’s chest.
Boyd panted breathlessly, his fingers curling into Raylan’s hair, and heard himself say, though he’d spoken without conscious thought, “Don’t ask me to lie, Raylan, please, not about you.”
He’d never wanted to, even from the beginning. This was too real, too true, to lie about.
Raylan didn’t say another word after that, and Boyd knew it was his way of doing as he asked.
In the morning, Raylan was gone. Boyd couldn’t say he was surprised, though he spent over an hour lying in bed, soaking up what was left him, breathing him quietly in and out, like it might be the last time.
Two weeks later, Raylan called him on the phone. Helen would have proclaimed it a goddamn miracle.
“Meet me in Lexington on Friday,” Raylan said, without a hello or how-are-you.
Boyd had a hunch, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking hoarsely, “Why?”
“I need you to help me move in.”
Boyd let himself smile now. “Sure thing, Raylan.”
“A motel room?” Boyd said as soon as he got there. “Really, Raylan?”
But the man just shrugged. “I don’t plan on spending a ton of time here,” he said in a low voice.
Boyd smiled and picked up the first box from the truck, then looked at what else Raylan had stowed in his U-HAUL, a few pieces of furniture, a messily packed box of photos and knicknacks, a bed and a mattress. “What’s all this, if you’re moving into a furnished room?”
Raylan gave him a significant look “Some stuff I want to put in the house. There’s room in the attic, right? And I thought we could replace that shit mattress in my old bedroom.”
Boyd imagined he didn’t look quite as floored as he felt, but Raylan smirked at him anyway and asked, “You really weren’t sure what I was gonna do, were you?”
“I never can be, Raylan. You don’t tell me what the plan is.”
“Boyd,” he replied, with something like fondness in his tone. “It’s not that I don’t tell you. You just don’t believe me when I say there is no plan. Never was.”
Boyd shook his head, not willing to say anything to that, and lifted the box, labeled “clothes,” taking it inside.
They worked steadily for just about an hour, and nearly had everything inside, or stowed in Boyd’s own truck, when a man came up to the door.
“Hey, Art,” Raylan said with true surprise in his voice. He stood up straight from where he’d been bending over a low stack of boxes, and reached his hand to rub the back of his neck.
“Hey, Raylan,” Art said, “sorry to disturb when you’re movin’ in and everything, and I know you don’t actually start ‘til Monday, but, there’s something I’d like your help with in Winchester.”
Art Mullen was perhaps a little older and a little balder than Boyd had pictured in his mind. But he had a keen look to him, especially around the eyes, that made Boyd think he didn’t miss much. He approached the door to Raylan’s new housing with a grudging resolve that, to Boyd, seemed to be just the right attitude for a man in a position such as his.
“Uh, yeah, okay,” Raylan replied looking down at his dusty, sweaty white t-shirt and ripped jeans, then around the mess of boxes, presumably for a shirt and tie.
Boyd saw the shirts easy enough from where he was standing, so he pried open the box, pulled one out, and handed it to Raylan, who smiled at him with something bright in his eyes.
“Art,” Raylan motioned from Boyd to his boss, and said, “This is Boyd, he lives in my house in Harlan. ‘Scuse me.” He looked between them again, then disappeared into the bathroom.
“You known Raylan for a long time?” Art asked politely after a few beats of silence.
Boyd smiled and wished he were better at hiding it in such instances. “Since we were real little, I guess. Grade school. Small-town life, you know? But we didn’t become friends ‘til we were nineteen. We dug coal together.”
“Oh yeah?” Art asked. “Raylan never mentioned he was a miner.”
Boyd almost laughed, except he never laughed about the mine unless he was inside it. “Raylan wasn’t down there long enough to become a miner.”
Art looked at him kind of funny for a second then changed the subject, in a way, “You still dig coal, son?”
“I quit right about the time Raylan did. Went back to it on and off,” as he spoke, Boyd saw Art nod, almost imperceptibly, and knew the man was making assumptions about him. Not that any of them weren’t true. “I work in the mine. I do the powder mostly, as they seem to think I’m good at that. But only about three shifts a week.”
“What else do you do?” This question was real quiet, and Boyd felt bad. He hadn’t meant to be so truthful, to betray himself so easy. But Art was asking, and it would have been easy for Boyd to be caught in a lie with this man.
“Boyd’s been workin’ on my house, Art,” Raylan said, coming out of the bathroom, changed and fresh. He glanced between them again, real fast, but not terribly nervous. “The one my daddy left me a few years back, remember?”
“I do,” Art said. “It was real nice to meet you, Boyd.” He took Boyd’s hand without hesitation and Boyd couldn’t help but grin. “You ready?” he asked Raylan, who nodded.
“Do you want me to wait?” Boyd asked, unable to keep his eyes from glancing over to Art.
Raylan smiled, that smile just for him and, like it was nothing in the world, reached out and touched Boyd’s arm just above the elbow, squeezed it lightly. “Nah, go on. I’ll see you at home. And don’t unload the truck ‘til I get there.”
Boyd nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
As the two Marshals walked away, he heard Art say, with something like disbelieving humor in his voice, “All right, Raylan. Okay.”
Raylan shook his head, though there really was nothing to deny, glanced back for one second at Boyd, then settled his hat down low on his brow.