Page 71 of On the Land, We Shoot Straight
“I ain’t never done it that way before.”
“It’s good, ain’t it?” Grady raised both eyebrows, smirked.
Cole laughed. “Yeah.” He shook his head around his smile. “Yeah.”
Grady grabbed him in a headlock, rubbed his hair, and tugged him out of the barn.
“That weren’t actually what I was planning,” Cole said once Grady let him go, but kept him tucked under his arm.
“What were you planning?”
“Riding.”
Grady laughed. “’Course you were.”
“Let a man eat first,” Grady said as he let his arm fall away from Cole’s shoulders, headed up the path before him.
“I ain’t rushin’ you.”
Grady grabbed Cole again before he went inside and planted a kiss on top of his head, just because he felt like it. “No, you ain’t.”
38
I
t did hail. Ithailed something fierce that very night. Cole said he’d keep Grady’s mind off it. Grady raised an eyebrow at that, but when Cole sunk to his knees and made that just the start of the night, well, Grady sure as hell forgot about his fears for the crop.
Once the weather settled and they rode out in a light morning drizzle and surveyed the first field, then the next one, and the next, and Cole looked back over his shoulder from where he was riding Chloe a little ways ahead, Grady had a moment to hope. Cole smiled.
Yeah.
The hail had come and gone, and the crop had yet to sprout grain. The stalks had withstood the barrage and now it could make their final push, wet and nourished from all that rain. It was sprouting more perfect than if Grady had been God himself and planned it.
“Reckon you’re gonna get a good yield,” Cole said as he rode around behind Red and pulled up alongside him.
“Reckon we don’t count ’til they hatch.”
But Grady’s smile belied his words. Cole grinned, nudged Chloe and shouted, “Ya!” turning her loose into a gallop and tearing up the road for no other reason than he could.
Grady shook his head around his smile. He nudged Red to follow with a shout of his own that came from somewhere so deep he’d never felt it before.
They got a lull after that. Animals got plenty of feed on account of the rain, the storms eased off to a steady drizzle that’d graduate to a downpour but nothing to get excited about, and the harvesting didn’t need to start for a while. Cole asked Grady if he minded if he set up some obstacle course for Chloe and practiced some riding. Grady said he could suit himself.
So that’s how Grady found his bed long cold every morning for the fifth day in a row. Cole was already up and riding Chloe in intricate circles and doing jumps. Grady had expected rodeo drills. But Cole was doing the fancy riding—show jumping, dressage, cross country. This was the queer riding they did in the north. The stuff the girls did up at the school along with their barrel racing. And if Grady had thought being the youngest and getting accelerated at school would’ve gotten Cole bullied, he could now add this to the list.
Grady got his coffee, went out and saw Cole at it, turning Chloe in a sharp sweep and grabbing a towel off the top of a pole, yelling for her to charge for the other end. Mounted games. It would’ve been better if he had someone to ride it with him, and Grady was probably going to offer, but as he stopped at the fence and settled in to watch, he thought he wasn’t in too much of a hurry about it. Cole was damn good.
Cole finished the course and rode over.
“You just getting up?”
Grady swung his empty mug loosely in his hand over the fence and looked up into Cole’s exhilarated face.
“It ain’t yet seven,” Grady said.
Cole laughed. “Whaddya think?”
“About?”
