Chase the Stars (Lang Downs 2 ) (27 page)

Jesse silenced the annoying internal voice by pushing Matt against the wall and shoving his hand down the other man’s pants. “You’re in a hurry,” Matt purred. “I like that in a man.”

There wasn’t any choice, Jesse thought cynically. They were in the bathroom of a bar, likely to be interrupted at any moment. This wasn’t the time for slow and sweet.

Matt undid Jesse’s jeans, pulling him free and pumping him roughly. His grip was tight, almost too tight, but his palm was smooth, a city dweller’s hand.

Jesse got Matt’s shirt open to reveal a startlingly smooth chest. Jesse ran his hand over it in surprise, only to feel the slightest hint of stubble.

Waxed.
Fake.
Reminding himself he didn’t have to approve of

Matt’s choices to fuck him, he turned his attention to Matt’s pants instead, but when he pushed them down around his hips and saw the nearly shaved pubes, he groaned and turned away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do this.”
“What do you mean you can’t do this?” Matt demanded behind him. “You didn’t have any trouble all but screwing me on the dance floor.”
Jesse’s stomach roiled, bile rising in his throat.
“I said I can’t do this,” Jesse repeated, straightening his clothes and turning back to face Matt. He opened the stall door and gestured for Matt to leave. “Get out.”
“Fucker!” Matt shouted. “Tease.”
The invectives continued as Jesse closed the door again in the other man’s face, but the words carried over the thin partitions. Jesse couldn’t even hear them after a moment. Nothing Matt could say was worse than what Jesse was saying to himself.
He didn’t want a mindless fuck. He didn’t want some polished, pretty body who’d fuck anything that moved.
He wanted Chris.
His stomach heaved and he collapsed to his knees, everything he’d drunk coming back up in one foul rush. He puked hard, gagging as the bile nearly choked him.
He’d had Chris. He’d had not just the fucking but the friendship and even the love, and he’d thrown it back in Chris’s face like it was as meaningless as every other encounter he’d ever had.
Sweat poured down his face as another wave of nausea shook him and he vomited again. He didn’t think he had anything left in his stomach, but his body disagreed, spasm after spasm leaving him weak and shaking.
He’d blown it. Despite Jesse’s inability to see what was in front of him, Chris had fallen in love with him, warts and all. Jesse hadn’t tried to impress Chris, hadn’t approached him as he would have if he’d been thinking about romance, and Chris loved him anyway.
The vomiting turned to dry heaves, his body still trying to purge all the alcohol he’d consumed even though his stomach was empty, and Jesse’s ragged breathing turned to sobs.
Fuck, he’d sunk low, on his knees in a grungy bar loo that probably hadn’t been cleaned in months, stinking of alcohol and bile.
It served him right.

C
HRIS
sat outside on the tiny veranda of his little house, staring up at the stars. They made him think of Jesse, of all the nights they’d sat together looking up at them with Jesse pointing out constellations or simply watching them wheel overhead, not that Chris could think about much else since he and Caine had talked two days before.

Such simple words, but Chris had no idea how to begin. If Jesse were asleep in the bunkhouse where he belonged, it would be easy. He’d keep talking, keep seducing, keep loving until Jesse had no choice but to see how good things were between them, but Jesse wasn’t there, and Chris didn’t know if he was coming back.

He’d resisted the urge to snoop in Jesse’s room to see if Jesse had left anything behind. Clothes and things could be replaced, of course, but if Jesse had left stuff behind, it meant he’d planned to come back when he left, even if he’d changed his mind since then. If the room was completely empty….

He could wait and see if Jesse came back, see what the man’s mood was when he arrived, but that hardly counted as fighting for him. Maybe it wouldn’t matter. Maybe Jesse would work out whatever demons had sent him running and things would be back to normal, but the cat was out of the bag now. Chris wasn’t sure they could go back to “normal.” Jesse knew how he felt now, even if Chris hadn’t said it to him yet. Even if Chris said he could accept their old arrangement, his feelings would be there, hanging between them, and he’d always wonder what would make Jesse run the next time. And that assumed Jesse would be willing to have any kind of arrangement with Chris, knowing how Chris felt.

“Yes,” Chris said. “Just thinking.”
“About Jesse?”
“Yeah,” Chris said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Do you want to hear about it?” Chris said with a

“Maybe not the details,” Seth said, “but you’re my brother. You’ve been taking care of me for months, and this is kind of my fault. If you need to talk, I’ll listen.”

“I have to figure out what I want with Jesse,” Chris said slowly. “I may or may not get what I want, of course, but if I don’t know what I want, what I can live with, and what I can’t, how can I figure out where to go if he comes back?”

“What Caine and Macklin have,” Chris said. He almost laughed with the relief of saying it aloud for the first time. “God, I never thought I’d say that. I never thought I’d be
able
to say that. Are you okay with that?”

“I’ve never had a problem with you being gay,” Seth reminded him. “I like Jesse, and I like it here on the station. If you want to shack up with Jesse and spend the rest of your life here, I’m good with that.”

“Then I guess I’d better figure out how to make it work, huh?”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Not for sure,” Chris said. “He mentioned Melbourne more than once, saying he spent the winters with friends there, but Melbourne’s not exactly Boorowa or Yass. Just showing up there isn’t going to be enough to find him.”
“You could try calling him,” Seth suggested. “I’m sure Caine has his contact information somewhere.”
Chris blinked a couple of times. “God, you’re brilliant. Okay, first thing in the morning, I’ll get the number from Caine and then I’m going after him. Will you be okay alone here for a few days?”
“Alone?” Seth said with a laugh. “How many people live on this station? I’ll be lucky to spend a second of the time you’re gone alone with everyone coming to check on me.”
“You okay with that?” Chris asked.
Seth grinned. “Oh yeah.”

J
ESSE
woke up the next day, well past noon, still feeling hung over and shaky. His friend had already left for work, but Jesse knew the apartment well enough to stumble into the kitchen and start a pot of tea. He hoped the caffeine would help clear his head. The bottles of water he drank after he got back to the apartment last night hadn’t made a difference, but his stomach wasn’t threatening to empty again like it had been last night.

He prepared the first cup of tea on autopilot, letting the force of habit move him through the motions. By the time he poured the second cup, he could feel his brain starting to kick in and with it, the sense of loss that had driven him to his knees the night before.

He’d blown it with Chris. He knew that, but maybe everything wasn’t as hopeless as it had seemed the night before when he was drunk off his arse. If Seth was right and Chris really did love him, maybe Chris could be convinced to forgive him. Not that Jesse thought it would be that easy. Jesse hadn’t just freaked out at the thought that Chris might love him; he’d run. And now that things had gone down the way they did, he didn’t expect they could go back to the way things had been before. Ignorance had allowed Jesse to imagine they were comfortable with the status quo, but those blinders had been stripped away. If he went back, if he asked Chris to forgive him and give him another chance, he had to be willing to accept Chris’s feelings and all that entailed. He had to be willing to commit to something.

The thought made him twitchy after years of avoiding anything that would tie him down, but he ignored the feeling. That had landed him in this mess already. He had to get past the inclination to run at the first sign of commitment and decide what he could offer Chris, because if he went back unprepared, Chris would be perfectly justified in telling him to take a hike.

He’d pretty much decided to return to Lang Downs next summer, so the thought of staying on the station was the least unnerving of the three questions. He
could
make a life there, and a good one if the experiences of the other year-rounders was any indication.

He’d enjoyed being footloose for the past ten years, but he couldn’t live that way indefinitely. He’d always known it, but he’d always figured when he got tired of the wandering life, he’d get a job working as a mechanic in a shop in Melbourne or Sydney, where he wouldn’t be immediately shunned for being gay and where he had at least the possibility of congenial company from time to time. He hadn’t been to Lang Downs, though, when he’d formulated that approximation of a plan. He hadn’t imagined he could find a sheep station that wouldn’t run him off, much less one where he could envision living comfortably with a partner.

Lang Downs could be home if he chose to let it be. That left Chris and Seth.
He enjoyed Chris’s company. They were friends.

They worked well together. They were comfortable together whether they were herding sheep, hanging out in the bunkhouse, or fucking like madmen. None of that necessarily equaled love.

Last night had shown him that it was more than fucking around, though, because last night he’d tried to go back to empty fucking, and it had felt nothing like what he shared with Chris. Maybe he hadn’t labeled it for what it was, but he’d felt the difference almost from the beginning, chalking it up to having sex with someone he knew and cared about rather than with a stranger.

He might not have been ready to call it love, but he’d known Chris was more than another random fuck, so it wouldn’t be so much a matter of changing things between them as it would be admitting what was between them. The risk inherent in that proposition unnerved him, setting his stomach churning again, but he reminded himself he wasn’t taking that leap with no safety net. He knew Chris loved him, or, to be precise, he knew Seth thought Chris loved him, but that was close enough.

That brought him back to Seth, because Chris wasn’t a one-man deal. Starting a relationship with Chris meant taking on some responsibility for Seth as well, for the next year and possibly beyond that. Seth wasn’t a baby to need constant supervision, but he would be there, part of Chris’s life, desiring (and deserving) attention and love from Chris and from anyone who wanted to be more than a passing part of Chris’s life. It wouldn’t quite make Jesse a father, but it would make him a whole lot closer to older brother or uncle than he’d ever expected to be.

He lifted his tea to his mouth only to realize he’d emptied it. Staring down into the dregs, he considered his two options. Life at Lang Downs with Chris openly as his lover, Seth at their side for the next year or two until he went off to uni and then visiting as he had breaks from school, or an endless series of nights like the preceding one. Suddenly the choice seemed obvious.

He dumped the cup in the sink and looked around for paper to leave a note for his friend. He had to get back to Lang Downs.

C
HRIS
parked the car in the car park outside the Boorowa Hotel. He’d hoped to get away first thing after breakfast so he could make it to Melbourne before the end of the day and hopefully find Jesse before that night, but circumstances had conspired against him and he hadn’t gotten away until well after lunch. If he’d left on time, the twelve-hour drive to Melbourne might have been possible in one day, but as it was, he wouldn’t get much farther than Yass if he tried to continue, and the thought of spending the night alone in a hotel room in Yass was enough to convince him to stay in Boorowa instead. The hour’s extra drive the next day would be worth not having panic attacks every time someone walked past his hotel room door.

He would eat dinner, get a good night’s sleep, leave early the next morning, and be in Melbourne in time for lunch. He could call Jesse once he got to Melbourne and figure out how to meet up with him. And if he was wrong and Jesse had gone somewhere else, he’d decide what to do then. For tonight, he’d settle for a place to sleep.

The hotel had rooms available so he took the cheapest one, tossed his bag on the bed, and went back down for dinner. As he was finishing up, he heard an all-toofamiliar voice asking for a table.

“You don’t need a table,” he interrupted Jesse and the hotel waiter. “You’re welcome to join me.”
The smile that lit up Jesse’s face made Chris’s heart beat faster with hope, love, and desire. “Chris! What are you doing here?”
Chris shook his head, not wanting to have this conversation where others could hear them, but he pushed the chair opposite him back with his foot. Jesse took the seat, ordered something to drink, and turned back to Chris expectantly as the waiter walked off.
“I was coming to find you,” Chris said, keeping his voice soft. “I wasn’t taking the chance that you weren’t coming back.”
“I’m coming back,” Jesse replied. “I’ll always come back.”
Chris liked the sound of that except for one little thing…. “Does that mean you plan on leaving again?”
The waiter interrupted with Jesse’s drink. Jesse ordered bangers and mash without even looking at the menu.
“Maybe this isn’t the best place to talk,” Jesse said after the waiter had left again. “I got a room. We can talk after we eat.”
“I have a room too,” Chris said. He and Jesse had shared a room here the last time they’d come through town at the same time, but that had been a combination of availability and Chris’s panic attacks. Now, though, they didn’t have either of those excuses, and until Chris knew what Jesse intended, he didn’t think falling back into bed would be a good idea. They’d made that mistake once. He didn’t want to make it again. They could talk in Jesse’s room, but Chris would return to his own room to sleep unless Jesse said all the right things.
“Where did you go?” Chris asked while they waited for Jesse’s meal to arrive.
“To Melbourne,” Jesse replied. “I crashed with a friend for a day or two.”
“Why did you leave?”
“We’d better save that for later too.”
Chris nodded and let silence fall between them. They had spent many a silent hour together riding fences or keeping watch on the sheep during the night, but the silence between them had never been as tense as it was now. Chris twitched on his seat, racking his brain for something to say to break the silence, but he drew a blank. He could wait to discuss the issues between Jesse and himself, but he couldn’t fill the intervening time with meaningless chatter.
“How’s Seth?” Jesse asked when the waiter had brought his food and the silence had truly reached the uncomfortable stage.
“He’s fine,” Chris said. “He’s feeling guilty for messing things up.”
“He didn’t mess anything up,” Jesse replied. “He just made me see some things I hadn’t realized before. Or would you have let me leave in April without saying anything?”
“It would have depended on what happened between now and then,” Chris answered honestly. “You’d never given any indication of wanting to stay.”
“I’d never had any reason to think about staying,” Jesse reminded him.
“Oh, and sleeping with—” Jesse’s hiss drew Chris up short. He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. “And sleeping with me even when we weren’t fucking wasn’t a reason to think maybe something had changed?”
“I was a blind, stupid drongo,” Jesse said with a sigh. He pushed the food around his plate, looking so forlorn Chris almost took pity on him. “I owe everyone an apology, and I’ll give yours to you as soon as we’re somewhere private to talk.”
“Fine,” Chris said, trying to keep the hurt and anger out of his voice. Somehow he didn’t think blowing up was what Caine had in mind when he told Chris to fight for Jesse.
Jesse ate a few more bites of his dinner before pushing the plate back. “Let’s go.”
They paid and walked up to the rooms they had rented for the night. They reached Chris’s room first so he unlocked the door and gestured for Jesse to go inside. If nothing else, he could kick the other man out if he got fed up with the course of their conversation.
Fight for him, not with him
, Chris admonished silently.
“Why did you leave?”
“Does it really matter?” Jesse asked. “Isn’t it more important that I came back?”
“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Why did you come back?”
“Because I realized something when I ended up drunk and puking in a bar in Melbourne,” Jesse said. “I didn’t know how good I had it until I nearly threw it all away. As soon as I could drive, I started back to Lang Downs.”
Chris arched an eyebrow.
“Back to you.”
That was more like it.
Chris wanted to throw himself into Jesse’s arms and kiss him, but they hadn’t actually resolved anything.
“So what happens now?”
“What do you want to happen?” Jesse asked in reply.
“I’m not the one who freaked out and ran off,” Chris reminded him. “I’m not the one who has to explain myself.”
“But that’s just it,” Jesse said. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen unless I know what you want to happen, because what I want is to give you what you want.”
That sounded a little too good to be true. “Stop it, damn it. You’re talking in riddles. Just answer the question. Why did you leave and why did you come back?”
Jesse reached for Chris’s hand, drawing him closer. “Seth told me you’d fallen in love with me,” he said. “He was talking about your birthday and making plans about me being a part of your family like it was a given, and I hadn’t thought about any of that and I freaked. I didn’t start the season expecting to settle down somewhere and stay. I didn’t even kiss you the first time with that thought. It was supposed to be exactly what we said it would be. It was supposed to be a nice way to pass the summer. I didn’t plan on falling in love with you, even if it took running away to realize it.”
“That’s why you left,” Chris said, although the words appeased some of the hurt and anger he’d been feeling since watching Jesse’s taillights disappear into the night. “Why did you come back?”
“Because I’m not quite stupid enough to throw away the best shot at a future I’ll ever get,” Jesse replied. “I’ve been around enough to know there aren’t many stations like Lang Downs.” Chris frowned, opening his mouth to protest, but Jesse held up his hand, forestalling the words. “It’s more than that, but that’s part of it too, because you’re tied there already. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but you’ve already made the station part of your future. You’ve put down roots there with Seth, whether you were looking to do that or not. So if I want to be with you, I have to want to be at Lang Downs too, and that’s what I figured out while I was gone. I want it all. I want you and Seth and Lang Downs and a future I’d never imagined could be possible. Maybe I’ll make a mess of it, but I want to try. Will you give me another chance?”
“I was coming to find you,” Chris said slowly. “I’d come to the conclusion that you didn’t just get to walk away and pretend like nothing had changed since the beginning of the season. I was going to fight for us if I had to.”
“You don’t have to,” Jesse said, “but I kind of like knowing you would have. It’s probably a good thing you didn’t find me last night, though. You wouldn’t have wanted me if you had.”
“You said you went out,” Chris remembered, suddenly leery again. “Did you pick up some guy and fuck him?”
“No,” Jesse said. “I thought I would, but I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I ended up comparing every guy I looked at to you, and I didn’t want any of them because they weren’t you. When I was sober enough to drive this morning, I started back north. I’m glad I stopped for the night instead of trying to get all the way back tonight, or I would’ve missed you entirely.”
“I was going to call you when I got to Melbourne so I could come wherever you were,” Chris said with a chuckle. “That would’ve been bad, if you’d been back on Lang Downs and I’d gotten all the way to Melbourne.”
“So am I forgiven?” Jesse asked, leaning his forehead against Chris’s.
“I don’t know,” Chris teased. “You haven’t kissed me yet. Are you sure you’re in love with me?”
Jesse growled, the sound sending both amusement and desire through Chris. “Yes, Chris, I love you.”
Chris ran his fingers through Jesse’s hair. “Then kiss me and I’ll forgive you.”