Lay Your Prompts On Me - 4. 316 - The Long Wait

“Dude…” Jason stopped in the parking lot outside the mall. “White wall tyres.”

“Really?” I stood next to him, leaning on his shoulder and making use of the height difference between us. “With the red wheels and everything?”

“Well, yellow would be better.” Jason shrugged, and knocked my arm away. I knew that it bothered him, my closeness, and I knew why.

“You cannot put white wall tyres on a John Deere, Jason.” We abandoned staring at the fancy car and walked into the blessed cool and air conditioned mall. “That’s like, a crime or something.”

“Which is better than you wanting to have your truck sprayed green is it?” Jason jabbed me in the ribs. It was one of his favourite topics to tease me about.

“I told you I’m not gonna do that. It was a passing fantasy.” I fell behind him as I walked, starting at his ass through his jeans. That was much, much more than a passing fantasy.

“You’re looking again.”

“No I’m not.”

“You’re a shitty liar Stud.”

I loved and hated it when he used my nickname. Three years ago we had gone with his father to a PBR Invitational, and in some weird dancing thing in the stands, his father had won a whole bunch of Stanley tools and a Stud Finder. Jason and I had got all giggly and used it on each other, and the buzzer had gone off when he pointed it at my crotch. It was only picking up my belt buckle, but after that I was always known as ‘Stud’.

We wandered through the mall, and in between lingering glances t Jason’s excellent butt, I watched other people. There was no one else in the mall wearing work jeans and western boots, and I wondered if we should have changed out of the t-shirts we had each modified by removing the sleeves an taking a slice out of the collar, which were dusty, smudged, and branded with Jason’s father’s business. We’d both been working at White Creek Farm since we were very young teenagers, and now that it was the summer, and we were seventeen, both of us were employed there pretty much around the clock.

“We look like a couple of country hicks bud.” I stuck my thumbs into the front pockets of my jeans.

“You are a country hick Stud.” Jason stopped outside of the Jack Wills clothes store. “You think we should change our shirts?”

“You wanna spend good beer and gas money on a fancy shirt that won’t last ten minutes?” I grabbed my friend around the neck and hauled him away from the extravagant window display. “Come on, let’s go get clean t-shirts from the Wrangler store.”

“Get off me!” Jason struggled, and punched the side of my abdomen. “You stupid fuckin’ redneck.”

We chose t-shirts in the Wrangler store, ignoring all the clean cut hipsters, tourists and townie kids wanting to play dress up. I took one in blue-grey, with a sketchy imprint of the PBR logo on the front, Jason picked a classic red with the Wrangler text in classic yellow rope stitch. We paid at the cash desk, grinned at each other, and stripped off in the middle of the store.

Jason flexed his six pack as he dis-robed, showing off, and he didn’t miss the way I looked at him as I used my teeth to take the tags off our new shirts. He grinned. My best friend was the biggest tease, which was one of the many reasons I refused to back down from my general admiration of him. Anyone could tell that he loved the attention. He pulled his shirt on, flicking the hem up briefly in a manner which made me need to think of driving snow and sleet.

“Not bad yourself.” He tugged down my new shirt and stepped close to settle the fabric over my shoulders. I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks, and all I want to do was close the eight inches between us and kiss him. “Come on, I’ll treat you to ice cream.”

“What am I, five?” I followed him out of the shop, both our slightly damp and ratty work shirts in hand. “You know we have to be back on the farm by three?”

“Plenty of time.” Jason clapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t sulk, we all know you love Ben and Jerry’s really.”

I grinned. Ten minutes later we sat in the tail gate of my truck with ice cream and tiny plastic spoons. Jason had gone for the one with the little white chocolate polar bears, I had peanut butter cups in my ice cream. It was swealtering.

“Hey.” Jason was holding a little white chocolate polar bear, making it walk up my bare arm, leaving tiny sticky footprints. “You OK? You’re a bit quiet.”

I tried to steal the candy bear from him, but Jason popped it back in his mouth, holding the shape between his teeth for a second before it vanished. I was slightly jealous.

“You wanna take the horses down to the river this evening?”

“Sure.” I smiled at him. “I thought Christina was holding a party, didn’t you wanna go?”

“Nah.” Jason smiled and shrugged. “I’d rather hang out with you. Hey look, there’s that car.”

We watched the shiny black car with the red wheels pull smoothly out of the parking lot.

“I reckon it must be for a wedding or something.” Jason sighed. “Can you imagine going around in a fancy thing like that?”

“No.” I tapped my boot against the truck. “Wouldn’t last five minutes off the road.” I glanced over at my friend. “Come on, we’d best be getting back, we still gotta go pick up those extra sacks of feed your dad wanted.”

I drove, and Jason relaxed in the shotgun seat and leant with one arm on the open window, and I watched him as I drove. I didn’t really need to, because I spent the majority of each day memorising everything about the way by best friend looked. Jason closed his eyes and exhaled.

Back in the shop, there was no way that Jason hadn’t been showing off. He was such a tease, and looking over at him in the cab of the truck, the wind pressed his new shirt against his chest, showing off muscles built from the long hours we spent working outside. I had always through that he was the most beautiful boy I’d ever known, even though we were both turning rather rapidly into grown men.

I wanted, more than anything else, to pull over on the side of the dusty road, stop the truck and kiss him. It would be the biggest risk, and I could lose everything if it went wrong. He was my best friend, his dad was my boss, and I practically lived at his house and had done for years. For ages we seemed to have been playing this game. Every time I thought I might finally be in luck, Jason would do or say something to back me up. My arm around his shoulders made him uncomfortable sometimes, and yet other times he would pull me close and stand with hips touching, gazing out at the landscape. Whatever was going on in his head, he wasn’t totally happy with it.

As we approached the turning which would bring us onto the farm I made a decision.

“Fuck it.” I pulled over and killed the engine, feet still on the pedals.

“Stud?” Jason blinked, and I realised he’d been half asleep. “Huh?”

“Jay…” I twisted, leant over the centre console, and took a deep breath. Now or never.

“Stanley?” He hardly ever used my real name, and I ignored him.

Mechanically, it was easy: lean in, touch lips, pull away. But it was so much more than that. All the breath went out of me when I kissed him, and his lips tasted of vanilla and white chocolate still, sweet and soft and chapped around the edges. His heart so close to mine thrummed and pounded, my blood thumped in my ears. I sat back into my seat with force, the sudden lack of oxygen making my brain spin.

I started the engine.

“Stanley?” Jason has his fingers against his lips, like he wasn’t allowing himself to believe what I had just done to him. He should’ve believed, he’d been my best friend since we were kids and I’d fancied him since I was about twelve. He knew it too.

“I always wanted to do that.” I smiled and pulled out onto the road. “Come on, we’d better go feed the masses.”

Horses weren’t the bread and butter of White Creek, and the ones that were there were kept purely for pleasure. We stabled ours together, and they trotted up to the edge of the pasture as we got out of the truck. Jason stroked their noses softly, and fed them mints from his pocket. I whistled.

“Sorry boys, we’ll see you later.” I hefted two sacks of lamb and sheep pellets onto my shoulder. “Come on Jason. Time’s a wastin’.”

The rest of the afternoon was busy. We fed the sheep who had been brought to the close pastures to start having their lambs, checked on the new mums and the lambs in the shed, ringed tails and testicles, numbered and tagged them all before letting them out into the fields beyond. Then Jason’s dad wanted us to catch the ram and move him to a new pen. He was being sold this year, because he hand now fathered two generations, and there were very few sheep on the farm we could breed with safely.

The ram was an evil bugger, half Texel and have devil, with big chunky curved horns and a bad attitude. It took Jason and I half an hour sweating in the field with combinations of sheep nuts, fences and bits of string to cordoned him off and catch him. Holding one horn each, and with a makeshift head collar made of baling twine, we began to walk him over to his new pen.

“Afternoon boys.” Jason’s father smiled as he passed us, leading a perfectly soft and obedient ewe, “Having fun are we?”

“Hi dad.” Jason didn’t look up from the ram, hanging onto the horn with both hands. “We put the new feed in the big blue bin.”

“Great.” He stopped and looked down at us. “You boys didn’t buy new shirts in town did you?”

I glanced down at us. We were sweaty, and our new shirts were covered in dust, bits of hay chaff and now smears of saliva and mucus from the ram.

“Change again before dinner.” He waved us off and we finally managed to get the ram into his new pen. After beating at the bars for a few minutes, he settled down happily to eat his nuts and hay.

“Fucking shit.” Jason and the ram were not friends. When he’d first arrived two years ago the beast had taken a firm dislike to my best friend. “I will be so happy to see the back of him.” He glanced down at his shirt. “Jesus we’re filthy.”

“It happens.” I walked back away from the ram’s new house to the nearest tap and hose. When it got hot like it was, we didn’t much care where we got our drinks from. “You want some?”

“Christ, just spray me down. I smell of that fucking ram.”

I grinned, wondered briefly if Jason realised what he’d just said, and then took him at his word. Thumb half over the end of the hose, I sprayed him down. After two seconds of yelping, Jason threw out his arms, turned his face skywards and shouted delight to the tiny clouds which did nothing to obscure the epic heat of the sun. By the time I turned off the hose, he was completely soaked.

For a moment, we both stood there, staring at each other, and then he pelted for me. I dropped the dead hose, turned and ran.

“You bastard!”

“You asked for it!” I dodged around a tractor and glanced over my shoulder.

Jason’s sodden shirt hit me in the face, and then I was on my back, my best friend, trying his best to beat me up or tickle me, his normally fine curly hair dripping water on my face, the both of us laughing and shouting, and struggling to get closer or get away. Eventually I gave up, Jason kneeling either side of my chest, his hand on my wrists.

“Gotcha.”

“Yeah.” I panted. I both feared and desired him to sink his weight against me, because our tussle had left me more than half hard and my cock twitched in my jeans, my shirt pulled up and sideways. “You did.”

Jason bit his lip, blinked hard, then suddenly his lips were on mine I completely forgot how to breathe. The effect was shocking, the taste of him, no longer chocolaty but softly sweet like good hay and molasses, his skin wet against mine, hard and smooth, his chest hammering so hard I thought his heart would leave a bruise on my sternum. But it was quick, over too soon, and I tried to follow him up as he leant away. But he still had me pinned.

“Yeah,” He sighed, “I did.”

We both got up, walked backed towards the main barn without saying anything, Jason only stopping to fetch his sodden shirt. We hung our new t-shirts on the stable doors, changed into another pair of White Creek tees which we had doctored at some point and went to check that we were free for the rest of the evening.

I got the horses in, Jason got the tack, and without more than ‘pass the hoof pick’, we brushed our boys down, saddled up, and rode out of the stables and across the farmland towards the little river and the rapids from which the farm got its name. Once the horses were suitably warmed up, we trotted them down the path between two fields before taking off across the last rolling pasture. We rode together so often, that the horses didn’t race, but ran and brayed with the delight of freedom and speed. Jason whooped and hollered, grinning wide, and everything that had happened in the truck and by the barn seemed magically forgotten. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not.

The horses walked easily along the bank of the little creek, and it was quiet enough that I could hear the crickets in the grass on the opposite bank, the song of little birds somewhere high up in the sky and Jason’s breathing above that of his steed.

“Jay?” I knew we had to talk about it, or we never had to talk about it, ever again.

“You wanna stop down by the rapids?” They weren’t really rapids, just little rocks which made the water fizz and bubble with speed. “The horses can get a drink and we can have a sit in the grass.”

“Jason…” He ignored me, clicked to his horse and led the way down.

We loosened the horse’s girths, hung their bits and tied them with the baling twine one of us always seemed to be carrying to a medium sized tree by the water’s edge. They would be fine without us.

“Hey Stud.” Jason managed to make my nickname sound like much more of a come on than usual. “Come with me.”

“Jason?” He’d stopped just out of the direct line of sight of the horses, some weird sort of privacy, and I wanted so much just to walk up behind him and wrap my arms around him. I nearly did too, and stood mere inches away, breathing on the back of his neck.

“Why’d you kiss me?”

“Because I’ve wanted to since were about thirteen.” I wasn’t telling him anything I hadn’t told him before.

“Yeah, but why?” He shifted his weight back, his shoulder blade touched my chest for a moment.

“Because you’re the most wonderful person I know.”

“You’re biased.”

“I don’t care.” I reached a hand out and wrapped my palm against his side, fingers on his ribs. “You’re smart and kind and fucking sexy as hell.”

With a soft sigh, he relaxed back against my chest. I wrapped both arms around him, under his own, touching his chest, ribs, abdomen. I pressed my face into his neck, his hair, inhaling the scent of him just in case the spell broke and I never got another chance.

“I wish I was as sure as you.” Jason muttered. “I just figured it couldn’t be this easy.”

“Jason?”

“Mmm?”

“Can I kiss you again?”

He turned in my arms and blinked up at me. I wasn’t the only one who’d apparently worn tight trousers. I smiled.

“You gonna live up to your nickname?” He asked in a voice so quiet, I had to check that I hadn’t imagined his words.

“Yeah.” I held his jaw in two fingers, traced the line of his lower lip. All my daydreams were coming true at once. “I promise.”

“OK.” I kissed him.

The long wait was over.