Ladies' Man - 5. Chapter 5

“Have you ever been here before?” Ashlee asked him with an easy excited smile as they stood in the front of the big chalkboard. Clem gulped, scanning through the myriad choices of drinks and flavours, and wished suddenly that he was in Lockhart, where the coffee shops were familiar, the menus were smaller, and he knew he could order sweet tea without getting stared at. This place was much swankier.

“Umm…”

“Just get what you normally order,” Ashlee touched his hand quickly and turned to the barista, “skinny chai latte with an extra shot please, and a…?”

“Sweet tea?”

“A sweet tea. Thanks.” Ashlee rummaged in his pocket, but Clem blinked hard and stepped forwards with a pair of bills folded between his fingers. He had the growing and pleasant suspicion that asking an incredibly hot guy in eyeliner out for coffee counted as a date, and there was no way Clem was going to let his date pay. His mother might not have approved of the type of people her son wanted to go out with, but Clem imagined she would have slapped him upside the head if she’d ever heard that he’d let a potential partner pay for coffee on a date.

They took a little round table in the corner and the barista brought over their drinks just as Clem parked the bag containing his neatly folded and boxed new shirt by his feet: he’d never before bought any piece of clothing that came with its own packaging and tissue paper. Ashlee smiled at him and touched the edges of their cups together before he sipped his complicated coffee.

“So what do you do, Clem Linton? Nice name by the way, is it short for anything?”

“Clemence,” Clem arched an eyebrow, “but that’s my pop really. I work at Four Corners Farm out past Lockhart: I’m a farm hand. Not very glamorous I know,” he smiled ruefully, “what about you?”

“I love my job. I work at Texas Food and Wine magazine; I’m personal assistant to the editor in chief.” He smiled and wiggled his hips in a happy-puppy manner, “we get a lot of restaurant perks: maybe I could take you out for dinner sometime.”

Clem blinked. He knew he had a good smile and charming country accent, but even so, it was the fastest he’d ever made it to the offer of a second date.

“I’d like that.”

Ashlee folded his slender hands together and rested his pointed chin in his knuckles. Clem couldn’t look away from his sparkling honey-brown eyes.

“So tell me everything, Clem. What’s it like where you live?”

Amongst farm and country people, Clem could often talk about Four Corners for hours, and he and other country-sons would wax lyrical about the love of the land and the animals, the things they’d done and wanted to do, and the places of their own they dreamt of. Generally speaking, Clem kept all details about the farm brief and to the point when talking to anyone from outside that world, because half of them didn’t really want to know, and the other half had only asked to be polite. With Ashlee, Clem couldn’t have held back even if a dozen mustangs had been trying to haul him the other way.

“Lambing is the best: I love the spring. It’s damn hard, and we sleep in shifts – the ewe’s can have their little ones at all times of day and night – but you gotta love those first few minutes when you get the little guy up and standing, bleating and then drinking until his belly is full.”

“Do you ever name them?”

“Some of the girl’s sometimes, Penny and Dime love picking out names for them, but you can never name the boys; even the cute ones. After all, they’ll be dinner in eight months.” Clem shrugged, because to him, the cycle of birth, life, death and dinner was perfectly normal: to his surprise and pleasure, Ashlee didn’t look particularly shocked. “Bringing in the hay is great, but I hate fertilising after the cut. Driving in very slow straight lines is not my strong point.”

Ashlee leant forwards over the table, his empty cup long discarded, and the angle pulled his shirt cuffs away from his wrists. Clem could not have explained why, but the soft fine skin there made him want to touch the young man again.

“And what is your strong point?” Ashlee asked, his shiny pink lips dripping suggestion.

Clem gulped.

“I can wrestle a ram pretty good.” He thought of the fight he’d had with the chunky spiral horned creature when they’d had to put the chalk harness on him to see how successful he was with the girls. “He probably weighs more than you do.”

“Sounds interesting,” Ashlee held the end of one finger between his teeth for a moment, and Clem could only tear his eyes away from the young man’s mouth in order to watch him gather up the condensation from Clem’s glass of sweet tea. “And I was wondering where you got your muscles.”

The big farm hand felt his stomach start to throw a fit again, and he hoped he could keep it and his heart from fighting or exploding long enough to secure a second date properly.

“I have to get back to the office,” Ashlee stood, so Clem jumped to his feet automatically. The beautiful young man tucked a loose strand of hair back behind his ear with a thoughtful expression. “Would… um, you walk back to the office with me? It’s not far.”

“Of course.”

Clem reached the door before his companion, and he opened it and stepped aside with a little tilt of his hat.

“Ladies first.” He froze as his brain leapt from what his mouth had said to the inevitable conclusion of being left feeling stupid and ignorant on the sidewalk, but Ashlee brushed his fingers against Clem’s broad chest as he passed.

“Thanks, Sugar.”

They walked together down the street, and Clem kept his stride deliberately short so he wouldn’t draw ahead of the shorter man. Glancing at the lighted clock display over the pharmacy, he couldn’t imagine how he’d not noticed so much time passing: even so, he didn’t want to let Ashlee go.

“So you live in the city?”

“Yeah, I live in a pretty nice neighbourhood: lots of families and small dogs.”

“You live with your family?” Clem inquired.

“No, by myself,” with one glance the young man understood what he was really asking, “I’m really lucky though, my family is really cool. My brother is a fire fighter, an’ my sister is a paramedic: they work out of the same house on the other side of town, so I always tend to see them together.” Ashlee smiled fondly, “he might be jus’ as skinny as me, but I’ve seen my brother throw a two-hundred pound football player over his shoulder an’ out onto the street for picking on me. My sister is just as bad, but not so skinny. I wouldn’t trade them for the world.”

“Sounds awesome.”

“This is my building,” Ashlee gestured to the brass plate next to the door: the fourth and fifth floors were both labelled for the Texas Food and Wine magazine. Clem would have given anything right then to be somewhere far away, where he wouldn’t have to let Ashlee go back to work. “I meant what I said about dinner.”

“Oh…”

“Here…” Ashlee took his hand and rubbed the pad of his thumb in a circle over Clem’s rough palm. He produced a sharpie from his pocket as if by magic, and wrote his number on the farm hand’s skin. “Call me.”

“I will.”

“You’re gonna look real pretty in that shirt, Sugar,” Ashlee smiled, and Clem’s world got a little bit brighter. “Jus’ one more thing.”

It was so sudden that Clem just stood there as Ashlee took the collar of his jacket, bounced up on his tiptoes, and placed a soft, sweet, and slightly sticky kiss against his cheek. Clem blinked, and the moment was over, and Ashlee beamed as he moved away. Just as the glass doors were about to swish closed behind him, he turned and looked over his shoulder. Clem inhaled, trying to get enough air to stop from being dizzy, and all he could smell was vanilla. Ashlee waved to him, a soft gesture that was so cute it replaced the sweet tea as the sweetest flavour in Clem’s mouth, and then he was gone.

The first thing Clem did when he got back to his truck was transfer Ashlee’s phone number into his cell with meticulous accuracy, and then he called the line just to hear the young man’s voice on the answering machine. It was too quick, too soon, and much too eager, but Clem left a slightly breathless voice message before he was able to even consider firing up the truck to drive home. By the time he was back on the farm, there was a text message waiting for him.

Ashlee: I can already tell you’ll be keeping me up all night xxx

*

“The alternator on the gator is screwing up again,” Cruz waited for an answer, then took off his cap and hit Clem around the head with it. “D’you hear what I said?”

“Yeah!” Clem scowled and re-set his cap over his messy hair, “I heard ya…”

“You’ve been day dreamin’ all day, boy.”

“I have not.” Clem shook himself down and held his hand out to his work-mate, “Keys?”

“Here.”

As he walked out of the machine shop and towards the spot where the gator had been left sitting, green, rugged and largely useless unless Clem fixed it, the big farm hand managed to smile tightly at Malik as the other man came walking in the other direction.

“What’s up with him?”

“He’s mooning over someone; that’s fer damn sure.”

Clem would have wasted time being annoyed with their comments, but he couldn’t, because behind his layers of distraction, his heart was going a thousand miles an hour and his stomach was tied up all in knots. For three days he and Ashlee had traded texts and missed phone call voice messages, and tonight he was finally going to get the chance to meet the beautiful young man again. Clem wished, just a little bit, that he was the one asking Ashlee out to dinner, but his new friend had beat him to it, and Clem didn’t care so much about the fact that Ashlee’s work-based perks would be paying for dinner. He was going to spend the evening with the young man with the rich vanilla scent and honey-toffee eyes, and Clem could hardly focus on anything else at all.

After the gator was up and running again, Clem walked through the cold breeze towards the main house, and left his boots on the porch step as he knocked gently against the door jamb.

“Clem?” Mrs Riley wiped her hands on a cloth stuck into the waist tapes of her apron as she emerged from the kitchen. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes ma’am, I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

“You won’t be at dinner?” she asked, one eyebrow raised quizzically. It was not the first time Clem had come to let her know that he would be going out to eat. Malik and Cruz didn’t always bother, and Clem thought it rude of them.

“No ma’am.”

Mrs Riley folded her arms across her breasts and looked at him, her head titled to one side. She seemed to be weighing him up somehow.

“You have a date?”

“Yes ma’am.” Clem couldn’t help his broad smile.

“I thought you’d looked a little happier lately: good for you Clem.” She turned to go, but then rounded again to face him. “You know, I never really like the Cole boy, his family are good people an’ all, but he was never very nice to you. You have a good evening now, OK?”

“Yes ma’am,” Clem repeated. “Thank you.”

Though their official work day ended at five, Clem was never that careful with his timekeeping. Generally if there were still bits to be done here and there that ran over, he didn’t mind, and never begrudged an extra half hour or so, but not tonight. The moment the clock hit five pm, Clem downed his tools and sprinted to the truck. He gunned the engine and pulled the big black and silver truck around from the machine shop to the side alley where the pressure hose was fitted to the water outlet in the wall. Not for a long time had Clem been given an excuse to wash his truck, and though he was normally quite proud of having dust in the flat bed and mud on all four wheels, he had a vision of being able to drive Ashlee back to his apartment in a vehicle as gleaming and gorgeous as the day he’d bought it. Clem had borrowed the vacuum from the house and swept the inside the previous day, then been fastidious about not getting mud all over the newly cleaned seat covers. Now he made sure all the windows were up and doors shut before turning on the pressure hose and rinsing off the entire body of the truck until the whole thing glinted in the late evening sun. After a quick wipe over the chrome trims, Clem realised the only thing he needed to still clean was himself.

Since meeting Ashlee, getting naked had become different. Every time Clem stripped off his clothes he was reminded of how the young man had watched him, completely open and unafraid, and Clem knew he wanted his body to be something Ashlee wanted to look at; and hopefully more than that. And since the first time the young man had reached up and kissed his cheek, every time Clem got naked, his cock sprang to attention. Stepping into the shower, Clem looked down and sighed at his hopeful erection.

“Ya ain’t no use ta me a’ all ri’ now,” he sighed, “fuck it…”

Concentrating, focusing, and staying in a straight line all the way to Austin was going to be hard enough without an iron bar in his pants, so Clem washed his hair, chest and shoulders quickly with his favourite lime scented body wash and a scratchy sponge which Nathan had always teased him about for being girly, then stood under the hot water and tilted his face into the stream as he wrapped his hand around his erection. He groaned, purely to fill the cubicle with another noise apart from the patter of the water and the slickness of flesh on flesh, and cupped his other palm under his testicles. Every time he jerked off, his brain gave him the same set of images: the figure in the club, those flashing eyes and curved lines turning to look at him; the heady scent of vanilla, like stepping into a cake factory. Then the bright pink curve of Ashlee’s lips, smiling at him as Clem had come out in the blue and black shirt; the warm honey colour of his eyes, a few slow blinks through long dark lashes. The skin of his wrist, smooth and fine; the moment Ashlee had said his name. Clem grunted, swallowed some of the shower as he tried to catch his breath, and came all over himself. The shower got rid of the evidence, and feeling only slightly less nervous, Clem went to get ready.

*

He managed to park less than half a block away from the restaurant, and Clem turned off the rarely used sat-nav on his phone just as he saw Ashlee’s text.

Ashlee: two minutes! xxx

Clem hadn’t had a single text message from him that didn’t end with kisses, and every single one of them made his heart skip, even though he knew in theory a lot of people used the symbol fairly casually. Clem didn’t remember ever giving or receiving kisses on a single text he’d ever exchanged with his ex – but then Nathan would have thought it girly. The restaurant was softly lit, and looked expensive, and Clem resisted the urge to shove his hands in his pockets as he scanned the windows, wondering whether or not to wait inside: it was chilly out, but not cold enough through the layers of his brand new western shirt and newly cleaned black leather jacket to make him uncomfortable. In the half-reflection of the glass Clem pushed his fingers through his combed and sort-of styled hair, and then turned as he caught a movement behind him out of the corner of his eye.

“An’ I was gonna surprise you…” Ashlee pouted.

Clem stared at his date. If he himself was all male, and someone like Madison was all girl all of the time, then Clem knew he would need another word to describe the way Ashlee looked. There could be no mistaking that he was a man, not when you looked properly, but a blink or passing glance could probably fool most people. He was wearing a thin black V-neck sweater with long sleeves over a white shirt, the collar of which poked out over the top. His hair was brushed and styled, and his bangs held away from his face on one side with a pair of slightly glittery hair clips the same shade of blue as the piping on Clem’s new shirt. The eyeliner was subtle, but still visible, and his soft and happy smile glimmered peachy-pink. Clem gulped as he looked the young man up and down, because Ashlee was wearing cute lace-up black boots that had even less of a heel than Clem’s westerns, and had paired them with a short pleated black skirt. He had lovely shapely legs, and the skirt was just short enough and cut just right so that it accentuated the natural curve of his hips. By the time Clem’s gaze met Ashlee’s, his date’s smile was touched with nervousness.

“What d’you think?”

“I like your necklace.” Clem had noticed it on his visual tour, a string of blue and silver beads sitting on his collar bone. He opened the door and smiled, “after you. You look amazing.”

The maître D took their coats and showed them to a table roughly in the centre of the restaurant, and Clem waited until Ashlee was seated before he took his own chair. He was given the wine list, and the menus were presented as sleek and slim cards, printed with a gold foil edge onto cardstock which Clem though was probably more expensive than some whole books. After one glance Clem also realised most it was either in French, or in a fancy vocabulary he did not understand.

“So how was your week?”

“Good, a bit slow, which is sort of nice this time of year. I spent most of yesterday rubbing down and painting window frames in the main house.”

Ashlee tilted his head to one side, and Clem was fascinated by the sinuous movements of his silky hair, watching the light reflect off it and into a million tiny slices.

“Is there a lot of maintenance in your job?”

“Oh yeah, it’s why people pay the hands to live on site. Anything breaks on Four Corners’ property and one of us is there to fix it. If the weather gets bad there’ll be late night call outs to check on the herd, and in the summer when it gets really dry we’re all on fire watch the entire time.”

“It sounds stressful.”

“Not really,” Clem shrugged, “I like being outside and working with my hands. Is your job stressful?”

“Oh, it can be,” Ashlee bit his lower lip softly, and the movement drew all of Clem’s attention for several heartbeats. He wondered what it would be like to taste those lips. “But the rewards are excellent,” he tapped his menu with one slender finger. “So what do you fancy?”

Clem swallowed noisily.

“Is that a trick question?”

“Oohhh…” Ashlee’s eyes flashed from under his incredible lashes, “I knew this was a good idea.”

After it had been established that Clem didn’t really understand anything on the menu, Ashlee took it off him and said he’d order for both of them. Clem trusted him implicitly. Wine and water came, but Clem didn’t drink because he was driving, then tiny bite sized appetisers that the farm hand could barely describe, let alone name. While Clem was watching Ashlee eat, he lost all track of time, and by the time the entrees arrived, he had no idea what either one of them ordered or enjoyed. The food was delicious, but it could have been canned peaches and chocolate chip cookies for all Clem cared, because his brain was too busy telling stories, laughing, listening to Ashlee talk about every subject that seemed to interest them both and more besides, and imagining what it would be like to love a person so obviously fearless.