Page 86 of Hot Ice, Tennessee

“Whoa there, Maisie-girl,” I said, pulling at the weathered leather reins.

As Maisie rounded a corner on the far end of the dirt path, I guided her around. A little handwritten sign poked up out of the dirt near the edge. It was my dad’s scrawl, in all caps and with a few exclamation points:

WATCH THE CORNER!! HORSES HATE THE ROCKS :-)

I smiled every last fuckin’ time I saw that sign. Dad had written it after a rare incident where a fox had darted out of a cluster of bushes, scattering rocks along the path after it. At the time, I was on Chomp and Dad was on Hopper, and when Chomp saw a shadow coming from a rock the wrong way, he’d reared and nearly tossed me off.

“Oh, that’ll do it,” Dad had said, stopping and hopping off of Hopper. “Chomp isn’t going to like the rocks around here from now on.”

I laughed. “Pretty sure it was the fox running like a missile that scared him, not the pebbles.”

“It can be both!” Dad had said, holding up a finger as he kicked away the rocks back toward the bush. “It’s often both.”

My throat went tight as I passed the sign now, the letters half-faded by the sun.

Dad had been right, like he usually was. Ever since that day, Chomp had been wary of any rocks bigger than a quarter that ended up in his way on the path. It was annoying, sometimes,and I scanned for them every time we rode around this particular corner.

My dad really had been the kind of guy who could talk about anything. When I was a weird kid, who liked horses and riding as much as I liked musicals, he never batted an eye at it. And when I came out as gay one afternoon—alsowhile we were out riding along this path—he had his usual, sunny and warm reaction.

“Well, shit! Whoever you end up with is going to be a lucky guy,” he’d said. “I think Hopper is gay, too. You see the way he cuddles up to Chomp?”

I snorted a laugh, relief flooding me. “It does seem like they’re a little bit in love, doesn’t it?”

Coming out had just been one of a million different conversations that were easy with him. There were others, like the first time I’d gotten drunk at fourteen years old, snagging a bottle of half-finished red wine, and he’d simply told me not to go wild with it but hadn’t been upset. Even when I threw a rager party at the house while he was out of town and I was newly eighteen, he hadn’t been pissed off when he returned home and saw the mess. He clicked his tongue, told me I was cleaning it up, then just set out about his day as normal.

Maisie whinnied.

I felt like there was a lead weight on my heart for the rest of the ride, as I guided Maisie back toward the stables.

I listened to the birds, chattering throughout the trees as if they were trying to one-up the cicadas. It had been a long time since I’d had a true, ugly cry about Dad, but tears stung at the corners of my eyes now, the sunlight coming through them.

I kept thinking of how much Jesse would have liked him.

And, fuck, how much Dad would have liked Jesse, too. I was sure Dad would have something to say about hockey, some perspective on how it wasjust likehorseback riding, that wouldn’t have made sense until he explained it.

He would have known what I should do.

And probably would have called me silly for ever questioning myself at all.

I brought Maisie back in and refreshed her water and food. I visited with all the other horses before heading back to the house, which was yet another beautiful thing about this property that would never feel the same again.

I showered off, tossed on some jeans and a fresh shirt and flannel, and headed back down, just as the golden afternoon sunlight looked best through the tall windows.

When I was heading down the stairs, I saw the car coming up the driveway. The sleek black little sedan pulled up into the curved drive in front of the house, and I had to do a triple take just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.

Jesse was here.

It only took seeing Jesse for about two seconds to realize why I’d been avoiding calling or texting.

I’d been trying to make that tug inside me go away.

And it hadn’t worked. If anything, the tug was doubled now as I spotted him through my front windows and made my way over to the front door, pulling on a pair of boots before walking out.

My shoes crunched on the gravel. Jesse rolled down the window on the driver’s side of his car as I stepped out into the front.

“Get in,” he said, looking up at me.

Forget a tug. It was like an industrial-strength magnet was pulling me toward him as I looked in his eyes again, those goddamn beautiful jewels of green eyes.

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