The Boy Who Was Summer - 1. The Boy Who Was Summer

The First Day It Rained

The end of summer was always a terrible thing, those first few specks of rain falling from a clear blue sky, the threat of encroaching clouds, the knowledge that the days were getting shorter, the nights longer, and the ground more squelchy. First rain can be a lovely thing, soft relief from the heat that bleeds into the beginning of autumn, a chance to stand outside in what feels like a shower, mouth open and upturned, t-shirt clinging to your skin.

It rained the day he left me.

I had sort of known, in that way you do, that things were wrong, that our relationship was no longer clicking along on bright rails like it had been in the previous months. We had meandered towards the end of the summer, and I saw him checking out other guys, having less time for me, having less and less desire to come down to the farm and be with us. As he walked out of the door I thought about the beginning of August, the four days we had spent helping to bring in the hay harvest, a thousand bales of sweet good grass. He had smiled in the sunshine, jeans, boots and work gloves, paper dust mask around his neck. In between then and now, it had all gone so wrong.

Dillon had always said there was something odd about Gavin, and my older brother had never trusted my boyfriend. Hindsight is a terrible thing, and as I watched him drive away in his little Japanese eco-friendly car, I knew Dillon had been right. Gavin was only ever in anything for the easy times. He’d helped with the harvest because it got him an all over tan, meant he didn’t have to go away with his parents, and because I had been so grateful for his help I had spent every evening on my knees. Despite the duties of farm and horses, it was always me who made the effort. Gavin wasn’t happy unless a Saturday night involved going out to a club, getting wasted and dancing with his shirt off. I hated clubs.

But there was no time to dwell on all the bad things, because heartbroken or not, there were still half a dozen horses to deal with, and jobs to be done. I pulled on calf length muck boots, even though the ground wouldn’t yet be properly wet and grabbed an old ball-cap to walk up to the stables.

Gavin hadn’t been able to fathom the reason why I, at the age of twenty four, still lived with my parents, or why Dillon and his wife Tori did either; but he was a city kid, a townie, and didn’t understand. The farmhouse was big and sprawling enough that it was more like three separate houses, and we treated it that way. My parents lived with the three spaniels in the main body of the house, Dillon and Tori had the south wing and I had the smaller north wing. My windows looked out away from the lake and formal gardens across the smaller paddocks which ran down towards the hay fields.

We all had our responsibilities, and I found Dillon in the workshop, lying on an old skateboard under the scary looking front of an industrial mower. My brother had developed the logical engineering brain in the family, and split his time between working with Dad in the garage and his mowing and landscaping company.

“Did I hear the whine of Gavin’s car leaving?” Dillon liked big American trucks, and his engagement present to himself had been his prized black Chevy Silverado. I drove a decrepit old Land Rover we had inherited from a friend of a friend. The thing ran on hope, duct tape and Dillon’s considerable skill with engines.

“Yeah.”

Dillon rolled out from under the lawnmower to look up at me. We were built sort of the same, tall and long in the leg, both with blue eyes and slightly curly blond hair. Dillon kept his hair shorn short and mine was floppy, but despite the two and half year age gap, people often mistook us for twins. He frowned.

“He’s left for good didn’t he?” I sniffed. “Aww little brother.” He was up in seconds, coming to wrap me in a massive hug. Not caring that his t-shirt was smudged with oil and the ever present dusty-dirt being on the farm seemed to give everything, I hugged him back and pressed my face into his shoulder. “I know I never liked him, but I know it hurts.” He patted my hair. “Come on, I’ll give you a hand with the horses. You can show me up for being rubbish again.”

“But you’re busy.” I gestured to the non-functional lawnmower.

“It’s raining.” Dillon sighed. “I won’t be cutting grass for a while eh?”

Five Days Damp

“Well that sucks.”

Colt snorted in agreement, and nuzzled my shoulder. I stood with the ten year old grey gelding staring at the sheeting rain coming down outside, feet from where we stood in the dry shelter of the stable yard. It had been drizzling all day, and had rained and showered on an off now for five days straight. Now the rain came down completely straight and solid.

“I’m bettin’ you don’t wanna go out no more eh boy?”

Colt lay his velvet nose into my palm, and without using the reins I turned him back towards his stall. It had not been bad enough over the last few days to keep all the horses in, but they were all back in their coats. I stripped Colt of his tack in under a minute, left his saddle sitting on the side of the manger and grabbed three head collars before heading out into the rain. The other horses stood waiting patiently by the fence of their paddock, and it only took two trips to bring the other five in.

Dillon had his landscaping, Dad had the garage, Mum, and now Tori, ran the boarding kennels, and I had the horses. Colt was mine, my pride and joy, and had been since the day we’d bought him when he had been only two and I had been just seventeen. We had learnt everything together, under a sporadic variety of old-hands and odd tutors. I had spent the best part of my late teen years renovating the crapped-out stable block until it could be called a decent yard, and started taking in livery horses. Now that was my job, and I loved it.

I rubbed down the five who had been rained on, changed them into their stable rugs and hung the field rugs to dry on racks suspended from the ceiling. After putting a flake of hay in each manger and checking on the water levels, I went back to stare at the water outside. The day was miserable, and a quick check of the weather app on my phone confirmed that the next few days weren’t likely to change anything. I was already wet from going outside to fetch the livery horses in, so I wandered out into the rain to the sand school.

We had been lucky enough to have the flat space to build a rather decent sized sand school, but not rich enough to build an indoor one. Its costs were now shared with the kennels, who used it in wet weather to walk dogs who could not be trusted not to jump in the lake or get totally covered in mud. It was also great for dogs who liked to run off. I combed the sodden sand, and wondered how long it would take for the whole thing to turn into a lake. With Dillon’s help we’d put in two layers of drainage substrate, but if it rained this hard for three or more days, I’d be riding the horses through four inches of water.

After an hour or so, the rain eased off to a light drizzle. I stuck my hands in my pockets and headed back to the house. It was time to put laundry on, because I was pretty much out of t-shirts which didn’t smell like wet dog. And that was when I found it.

I hadn’t done laundry since the day Gavin had driven off without once looking back. I kicked off my boots and stripped on the way to the washing machine, throwing in the sodden items with a series of wet slaps. In nothing but one of my last pairs of boxer-briefs, these in a desert camo print which Tori had bought me soon after she discovered neither myself nor my brother were any good at clothes shopping, I walked up to my bathroom for the hamper and came down again. As I fed everything into the machine, my fingers caught on a texture which made my heart thump painfully.

A white shirt, actually white rather than dusty farm-white, in cotton and silk with embroidered cuffs. It was one of Gavin’s favourite things to strip off and shove in the waist band of my jeans, so it didn’t hide his butt, after ten minutes in a club – always just long enough to make sure he got seen by everyone. Like all of Gavin’s going out clothes, it had been expensive; five times what I would pay for a button down shirt. But then, I wasn’t known for my fashion sense.

I sat heavily on the floor of the utility room, much of which was covered in discarded boots, wellingtons and other footwear, and stared at the shirt in my hands. It had only been five days ago, only six since he had been in my bed, warm and soft and hard all at once, and even though in the back of my head I thought it was weak, but I buried my face in his shirt and sniffed.

It still smelt like him, a mix of Old Spice shower gel (he fancied the guy in the adverts) and Calvin Klein (he wore their underwear too), and I looked up having lost ten minutes of my life to find myself crying. I couldn’t bring myself to wash the shirt.

It hung over the back of one of the kitchen chairs while I cooked a pasta dinner dressed in a pair of old sweatpants Gavin had hated and I kept finding myself looking at it. He would miss the shirt, maybe he would call, maybe he would come round…

And maybe you could allow him to break your heart twice. I stopped myself, and for a moment I wondered why my mental voice sounded exactly like my brother. Gavin is shallow enough to fuck you ‘cause it’s convenient and leave you without a moment’s guilt.

I looked over at the shirt again. It seemed resistential, and full of well masked spite. None of my clothes were that clean, or fancy. And it wasn’t like I could keep it, because where would I wear such a thing?

Also it wouldn’t fit your shoulders. My inner voice smirked. Gavin was a weedy bastard.

Knowing I was going to regret it, I located my phone and called him.

“Hey?” Gavin sounded distracted, like he wasn’t not really listening on the phone.

“Hi…” I paused, because suddenly my chest hurt. “Hey.”

“Hey babe!” My heart swelled treacherously, and then I realised he wasn’t not talking to me. “Just grab a coffee, I’ll be right there!” There was the noise of a door shutting. “What do you want Dev?”

Gavin sounded angry, and I stared blankly up at the clock to realise he almost certainly had some pre going-clubbing hook-up at his house. The thought made me want to be sick.

“I found your shirt. It was in the wash.”

“Oh cool. I was looking for that. Can you bring it into town?” His tone brightened, suddenly happy. “I wanted to wear it at the weekend.” There was more noise behind him and Gavin made a small ‘oof’ noise. Someone hugging him – or trying to.

“Were you seeing him while we were still together?”

“Him? No.” There was so much implied and unsaid in that sentence and I wanted to smash the phone, punch something and break down crying. “Dev? You still there? You can come over tomorrow and bring the shirt…”

“Fetch it yourself!” I hung up and wished smartphones still needed to be slammed against a cradle to stop the call, because that at least would be satisfying.

It was still raining, but I got dressed, and headed out of the house towards the workshop. Dillon was there, tinkering under the hood of his Chevy.

“Hammer and nails?”

“On the bench.” Dillon looked sideways at me. “Isn’t that one of Gavin’s shirts?”

“Yup.” I took a hammer and a two inch carpentry nail and used the compact green and yellow, and mud, coloured utility vehicle to drive the three hundred yards up to the main farm gate.

We had two driveways, one for the kennels and the garage, and one for the horses and the actual house. Next to the big wooden gatepost was an oak sign, lovingly hand painted one sunny afternoon last summer, proclaiming the wide gravel drive entrance to Brick-Smith Farm. The gatepost was made of oak too, a whole trimmed sapling twelve inches across and five feet tall.

I drove back down to the farm in the wind and rain, Gavin’s fancy white shirt nailed through, flapping in the weather.

Four Week Downpour

“Dev!” Dillon shouted through the house. “Come on! I need you!”

“Coming!” I located my newer pair of waterproof trousers, pulled them on over my jeans and grabbed my yellow and navy storm jacket on the way out through the house. There was a central corridor which ran over half a dozen different levels, with odd sized steps and weird three inch drops where new sections had been added to the house over time, and it went from my kitchen, through the main section of the house, all the way to Dillon and Tori’s front door. Dillon was waiting for me in the main grand hallway, a pair of ear defenders around his neck. “What’s up?”

“It’s stopped raining-”

“Finally.”

“-and there are trees down at Redgrave Manor, over the driveway. We need to get out there.”

“I hate chainsaws…”

“No you don’t.” Dillon cuffed me around the back of the hand. “Come on, let’s bounce.”

We had started living by the weather reports on our phones. Dillon drove and I checked the weather, taking readings from three different sites. We had four clear dry hours until the weather turned, and then we would have heavy rain and more wind overnight again. I had turned the horses out in the morning with their thickest most waterproof rugs on, and I updated Dillon on our timeline.

“We’ll get cleared what we can and get back. Can’t leave the horses standing in the mud.”

Dillon was a dab hand with a chainsaw, and it took him no time at all to don a bright orange hard hat, clip his ear defenders on and get to work. I used the little saw to trim off the branches of the big birch trees, leaving the clean trunks for Dillon and his three foot long monster of a chainsaw. We rolled the sections out of the driveway and stacked them to one side. At some point the owners of the house would need to take them indoors somewhere to dry out, and they would make excellent firewood.

We stopped at three and packed up the gear. The driveway was at least clear now. Dillon went up to the main house to log our hours, deal with the schedule for getting the rest cleared and money due, and we drove back to the farm. Dillon helped me get the horses in, and we fed and watered them, washed, dried and checked over their feet from standing in the mud, and left them with the radio on.

We were greeted by the scent of dinner, and Dad came in behind us, just as the rain came down again.

“Hey Ma!” Dillon hugged his wife and went to stand by the Aga. “Do I smell pie?”

“You do indeed.” Our mother smiled. “I made it from those rabbits we had in the freezer you boys shot back in August.”

We didn’t always eat together, but in the warm orange light of the kitchen, it was nice to sit around the big table and share food and warmth. All we talked about was the weather, mud, rain, wind, water damage and the amount of laundry which needed doing.

“I’ve never known the weather to be this bad.” Tori dished up peas and potatoes to go along with the pie, and I took the gravy from Dad as it went around the table. “It’s rained every day for what, a month now?

“I’m gonna have to start keeping the horses in more.” I sighed. “We need to retire the field by South block, its half churned up mud already.”

“We can barely walk the dogs anywhere.” Mum sighed. “If we even think of using the long fields there’ll be no hay come summer time.”

“Not something we can afford.” Dad spat. “The weather will clear, it’s only October after all.”

That night I lay in bed listening to the wind as it howled past the windows, making the single panes quake and shudder. We lived in an old farm house, and much of the original building had been built in the eighteen hundreds. The clay roof tiles were especially noisy. The wind swept along the tiles, lifting them from the roof and causing them to clatter like chattering teeth as they tried to remove themselves from the long roofing nails which held them in place. I had always kind of liked the noise, but it made it hard to sleep.

I rolled onto my side and swept my arm across the empty space. It had been long enough now that my sheets didn’t smell like Gavin anymore, and anyway, I didn’t miss him. Not as such. I missed the warmth of having someone else in bed, the weight of someone else on the mattress beside me. Mornings were painful, but going to sleep was worse. There were no night time kisses, no being cuddled after coming back from the bathroom at three am, no sleepy mumbled conversations which made little sense in the light of morning. More importantly there was no sex.

I missed sex. I missed having sex a lot. It would have been less of problem if everyone around me hadn’t been deeply adorable and in love. Mum and Dad had always been completely cute, and as kids Dillon and I had thought it horrible. But they had gotten together when they were teenagers, and stayed together all through school and college, got married at eighteen and had Dillon pretty much right away. Dillon and Tori were endearing too, always in and out of each other’s pockets and finishing each other’s sentences. More than missing sex, I wanted that closeness with somebody.

Gavin was never that somebody… My inner voice sulked.

He might’ve been. I replied. He was sweet sometimes, and pretty.

And a high maintenance, two-timing jerk. The voice in my head sounded exactly like Dillon, right down to the way my brother would speak between gritted teeth at the end of the sentence.

I sighed. My inner-Dillon was right, but that didn’t make me feel much better. It was cold and dark, and wind was making the tiles shake. Having sex would have covered the noise beautifully. There was very little to be done, except draw on my extensive library of fantasies and jerk off in bed.

God I missed having sex.

Three Month Deluge

Another five minutes… I knew it was getting late, and I’d have to be up soon. Just a bit longer… There were jobs, horses. I needed to go back out into the rain and mud, but I didn’t want to. Three more minutes and I could get out of bed happy. I snapped my eyes closed again, bit my bottom lip and tried not to groan too loudly as I stroked myself.

“Dev?”

I growled, and stroked faster. I wanted to feel pleasure exploding in the pit of my belly, needed that heat I hadn’t felt in ages.

“Dev!”

I tried to hold onto the fantasy, tried to keep all the heat in my head and in my crotch, but it was no use, and my stroke faltered as my brother’s voice got closer, combined with the sound of his boots on the stairs.

“Devon! Get up!”

“Hold on!” I managed to get my hands out from under the sheets and sat up in bed as Dillon burst through my door, fully but haphazardly dressed, looking worried. “Fuck bro!”

“Oh Jesus!” Dillon spun around to face the other way. “I do not even wanna know little brother. Get dressed.”

“What the hell Dill?” I jumped out of bed, switched for clean boxers, and stuffed my annoyed hard-on into my jeans, pulling on a shirt all at the same time. “What’s going on?”

“Water pipe burst down at the south block kennel, and the flood defences let out downstream, half the village is flooded out. We gotta bounce.”

“Holy shit.”

Although people being flooded out was bad, horses being stood around in flooded fields was worse. Local yards were taking in horses whose owners had no dry space, because their stables were six inches deep in muddy water, and I spent most of my morning leading animals through flood water and up into the trailer. We didn’t have any spare stalls, and our fields were too wet to take anyone else in. Dillon helped deal with trees down all over the district and Dad spent most of his day helping to haul dead and dying cars out to dry land.

We hadn’t had a single twenty four hour period without some sort of rain in three months, and it was starting to show. The weather was awful right across the country, and ours wasn’t the only flooded village out there. Plenty of people were going to be spending Christmas somewhere they didn’t want to be, because where they lived was underwater.

I made it back in time to relieve the horses from their dirty stables. I turned them out in three batches into the sand school to stand in the drizzle while I skipped out all six in rapid succession. I checked on all their feet, and sighed when I found both Colt and Blue, a lovely roan livery horse, were showing signs of mud fever. In the stall, I knelt on the rubber matting and coated Colt’s pasterns with a thick white barrier cream. Mud fever was painful and irritating, but not dangerous, and the cream would help to seal the wounds while the chapped and broken skin healed. After that I stayed in the stables, talking to the horses, and tried to ignore the weather outside.

The emergency had distracted me from my lingering desire to do something about my lack of sexual satisfaction – not that jerking off was going to be nearly as satisfying as even kissing someone else. And finding someone else was starting to seem like an impossible task, as I had been reminded by Tori the previous week.

“You know you’re prettier when you smile, right Devon?”

“Huh?”

Tori tapped me on the shoulder as I stood with one hand on the fence, watching the horses without seeing them.

“You’ve been moping around for ages Dev. You’re not still hung up on Gavin are you?”

“No. Just lonely.”

“Well go find someone!” Tori pushed me gently and I turned to look at her. “The perfect man isn’t just gonna fall out of the sky y’know.”

“I know that.” I was being sulky.

“Dev, when was the last time you left the farm?” Tori sighed at me. “You’ve not gone out in months Devon. It’s no wonder you’re lonely. Me and your brother aren’t the best company in the world.”

“I do see other people.”

“Your parents and the girls who work at the kennels don’t count.” Tori smiled. “Find someone, get yourself out there Devon. Nothing lasts forever…”

Now I finished up petting Colt’s velvet soft nose and went up the narrow wooden ladder to the hayloft. Regardless of how neatly the hay bales were stacked, one or two always broke open, and at the back of the loft, out of sight from the ground, was a pile of clean, dry, sweet smelling hay. I threw four bales down to fill the mangers and found myself sitting on the wooden floor of the loft, lying back on the bed of hay.

My sister-in-law was right. The only place I’d been off the farm in the last three months was the village in the flood, Redgrave Manor and the occasional trips to the supermarket. It was no wonder I felt lonely. And it wasn’t like I didn’t want to meet someone, I really did. But if Gavin was proof of anything, it was that I had pretty bad taste in guys. Trying to find anyone who wanted to spend most of their free time out in the middle of nowhere was hard enough without the added complication of quite liking that man to be handsome and beautiful with a great smile and nice abs. My pool of experience wasn’t enormous, and apart from my boyfriend when I was seventeen who had moved across the country with his horses, all my other relationships (a grand total of two) had ended the same way – with them deciding farm life was too hard to be bothering with.

I needed the kind of guy who only existed in stories and silly love songs, someone strong and handsome and kind and nice and generally perfect. I lay in the hayloft listening to the wind and rain outside and wondered where on earth I would find a man like that.

Who knows, my inner voice said, right now I’d settle for some decent weather.

Half a Year of Rain

I stood in the kitchen in my boxers, coming to the gradual realisation that despite doing three lots of washing in the last week, I had nothing left that was both clean and dry. Nothing dried anymore and the inside of the house sometimes felt as damp as the outside was. I’d taken to hanging my sheets over the banister on the landing so they could air, because the bedroom had started to smell slightly like mould. We had treated the house from top to bottom, but the fight against the damp had become a long running problem.

I put on a pair of jeans still damp from being washed, found two odd socks and pulled on a pair of waterproof trousers over the top. We were all simply living in our outdoor clothes, and I grabbed my old canvas army smock on the way out of the door.

“How’s my favourite boy?” Colt snorted at me as I entered the yard, and quit eating long enough to have his nose petted.

The horses had been in so long now that we had pimped their stalls with all sorts of toys and treats to keep them amused, but interestingly flavoured and textured foods hanging from the ceiling was no substitute for exercise in the fresh air. The fields were still completely out of commission, but we had dug a drainage ditch around the sand school which kept it in fairly useable condition. As the rain slackened off to merely drizzling, I saddled up Colt and rode him out into the school.

The horses were bored, and generally damp, because it never seemed to be clear enough to let the coats fully dry and all I could do was switch out their rugs every couple of days for something a bit more comfortable. Colt didn’t want to ride in the sand school, and he fussed when I took him over to the mounting block. We warmed up around the edge of the school and he relaxed as we trotted in large figure eight shapes across the wet sand.

Everything in my universe was wet – horses, mud, dogs, clothes, house, land… love life. After Tori’s talking to, I had taken a short and disastrous foray into town, gone to a club and had a miserable evening. A man had asked me to go home with him without ever asking my name, and another had assumed that just because I was standing looking out at the dance floor, this was open invitation to fondle my cock. I left before the bouncers could throw me out. I did know there were other guys out there like me – other guys who liked to talk, to spend time outdoors, who liked to cuddle up under the duvet with a silly action movie and popcorn. Other guys who wanted to fall in love, not just to hook up for an evening. Sometimes I wondered if maybe all of us romantics were sitting at home wondering how to get in touch.

The Boy Who Was Summer

“Dev!” Dad was standing in my kitchen. “Can you go check the fencing up by the main gate?”

“Sure.” I thudded downstairs in still damp socks. We’d had another big storm overnight, very windy but with remarkably little rain, and there was damage everywhere. Dillon had already taken his mate Liam out to go and deal with trees, and there were shrubs uprooted and flattened in the garden. “Weather report says no heavy rain until three. I’ll take the Land Rover.”

“Alright then.” Dad smiled. “Your Mum’s gone into town to buy everyone more socks and stuff. At least when she gets back you can change for something not damp.”

I grinned, secretly relieved, and desperately hoped that Mum didn’t try to buy me any really lovely but totally impractical clothes. We had fitted chunky off road tyres to all the vehicles after it was established that an end to the bad weather was not in sight, and it was an easy drive along what was left of our driveway out to the main gate. The fields up the far end of the farm were on higher ground, drier and better for the horses, but much more exposed to the road. Every time we left the horses out there I worried constantly, and ended up checking on them so much it almost wasn’t worth the effort of them being outside.

Now the fields were empty, and I was pleased to see that we had surprisingly few fence posts down, and the electric fencing wire was all still intact. I left the Land Rover on the driveway and went out with hammer, post driver and a bunch of rounded staples to fix the bits of the fence which weren’t looking so healthy.

I hadn’t been out more than an hour when I heard a motor behind me, and turned to find a car, a little white Ford Cortina from the sixties, idling in the wide entrance to the driveway. We had roped the gates open to stop them from getting damaged, and now I walked up to the entranceway with a frown. We didn’t get a great deal of visitors with number plates from The Golden State.

“Can I help you?”

The window rolled down, the door opened, and a boy, no a man, got out of the car. And he smiled, and the sun came out.

“Hi!” He sounded gorgeously Californian. “I think I might be lost.”

“Probably.” I couldn’t help but smile back, because he looked happy, and because he was beautiful.

For half a year I had wished for nice weather and someone beautiful, and here he was, right on my doorstep. He was beautiful, in that smooth, polished way dancers and Americans seemed to have, tanned and blond with Memphis blue eyes. He was wearing worn blue jeans, red tennis shoes and a green sweater, and he kept smiling.

“I’m lookin’ for Dean’s Park Nursery?” He named the posh ornamental plant, seed and garden store closest to us.

“You here on holiday?” I asked carefully.

“No. I’m working there, but I’m not quite sure where I am.”

“This is Brick-Smith Farm. You’re pretty close.”

“Oh… cool. I have a map, hang on.”

I tried not to ogle him as he reached into the car to grab the map from the front seat. Looking closer, the back of the little car contained a couple of suitcases and reinforced cardboard boxes.

“Can you show me?”

We ended up leaning over the hood of his car in the suddenly blazing sunshine as I unfolded the right part of the map and showed him where we were. The moisture rose from my clothes as steam, because it was the beginning of April, and with the sun out, and the rain gone, it was warm quickly.

“We’re here.” I prodded the place on the map and he marked it with a little pencil cross. “And you’re headed here.” The nursery was only two miles away, but on another road and around the corner. “Ten minutes tops.”

“Wow.” The man full of sunshine smiled. “I wasn’t as far off as I thought.” He glanced up at me, and his eyes sparkled. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.” I made sure I kept breathing, because it was easy to forget while I was looking at him. “Ummm… I’m Devon, Smith. Devon Smith, people call me Dev…” I lost track of what I was saying, knowing I was blushing and starting to babble. The boy grinned.

“Hunter Mackessy.” He held out his hand, and his skin was soft and warm. “It’s great to meet you.”

There was a long pause when I couldn’t work out how to let go of his hand. My brain kicked my mouth and my libido took over my vocal chords and decided I was sick of being lonely.

“Could I take you for a drink?” Breathe. “I mean, if you’re new around here, and I thought maybe you might like-”

“That’d be great.” Hunter smiled at me, and his teeth were super white.

“Where are you staying?”

“I booked a room at The White Hart Inn. I haven’t found somewhere to live yet.” Hunter grinned again and bit his lower lip. “Can you come pick me up?”

“Seven?”

“Sure.”

I stood at the gate as he drove off, watching the little white car out of sight, and only then did I actually notice it had stopped raining.

*

It took a week for the ground to dry out, the horses went back into the fields to gallivant around and it started to get easier to walk the dogs. The excess water from around the farm began to vanish, and for the first time in six months the sand school was back to its usual pale colour. Wood, swollen with moisture, began to shrink, the kitchen door stopped sticking and Tori began to smile properly when she was able to hang out washing and have it dry within the hour.

The warm weather lasted over the weekend, and the one after; and the grass grew in the long field, the dogs frolicked in the lake and dried out as they walked around the fields with Mum and Tori, the horses played in the paddocks and cropped the new grass, and Dillon went back to mowing the fast growing lawns of country houses.

And I saw Hunter every day, near enough. He came for lunch sometimes, or I drove out to the Nursery to see him, and we would sit on the little brick wall out front with the spring breeze making the plant leaves rustle. We would talk about our days, Hunter would tell me stories of his customers: the old dears who came in with green fingers and could grow anything, the cool dad’s with their kids and vegetable gardens, the posh country men in tweed and flat caps who wanted strange and interesting plants for their extensive grounds. I would tell him about the horse people, those who liveried with us and were back to riding much more often now that the weather was better. He would ask about Colt and I would talk about the horses and the progress of the hay until my mouth was dry and our lunch breaks were over. I couldn’t ever remember having so much fun.

Hunter had his first proper day off and I was pleased and surprised to find his little white Cortina pulling up outside the stables as I was walking Colt and Blue in from their paddock. The sun was up and shining and the horses were happy on their head collars. I stopped on the concrete and watched Hunter getting out of the car. He was wearing jeans, a sky blue t-shirt and a pair of western cowboy boots.

“And I thought you lived in those little tennis shoes of yours.” Colt brayed in agreement with me. “You didn’t fancy a lie in on your day off?”

“Nah…” Hunter grinned, leaning back against his little car. “I kinda fancied a morning kiss.”

“Oh…” We hadn’t actually kissed, more than a peck on the cheek anyway, since our first date two weeks ago. I found myself blushing.

“You are too cute…” Hunter left the car and walked up to where I stood with the two horses. He petted them gently before stroking the side of my jaw and neck with his warm palm. “So can I get a kiss?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just pushed his elbows past my shoulders and kissed me full on the lips. He tasted like sunshine and oranges.

“Much better.” He took Blue’s lead rope from me. “Would you like some company Dev?”

“Yes please.”

We rode in the green fields, with the sky blue up above us, and chatted about everything and nothing.

“So go on, why did you move here from California?” I clicked to Colt as we started down the long field which would yield hay in the summer. “It wasn’t for the weather.”

“The weather’s not so bad.” Hunter smiled. “At least all those floods have gone away now. I gather you all had a bit of a rough winter?”

“You could say that.” I waited so Blue could ride up next to us. “So why did you come to England?”

“To work,” he shrugged, “to adventure and get away from my family and maybe find someone special…” Hunter smiled, biting his lip. “Because I realised I could do anything, I like working with plants and such and I wanted to go somewhere else and try something new.” He reached out for my hand. “And everyone I’ve met here is so nice.”

“Thanks.”

Hunter stretched in the saddle and something in his spine crunched.

“That hotel bed is killing me. I’ll have to find somewhere else to live pretty soon.”

There was a small silence in which my heart beat ridiculously loudly. And then Hunter smiled at me.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any space in that massive house of yours?”

Sunny and Seventy Five

“Catch!”

I turned, grabbed the baling twine automatically, and hurled the hay bale up off the trailer and further back into the hayloft. Dad was back there, taking his turn to push and stack the bales into their neat structure while Dillon threw hay at me with increasing velocity and power.

“Very funny. You aiming for my head bro?”

“Nah, I was after your ego. It’s a bigger target.”

“Jerk!”

“Hey there guys. You ready for a drink?”

“Mum!”

Whenever our mother arrived with drinks we all stopped to mug her for liquids, biscuits and a few moments not choking on hay dust. Bringing in the hay was always great fun, but storing it in the hayloft was a different matter – the close quarters and the increasing dust making it hard to breathe. We went through a box of paper dust masks every couple of days.

“How’s it going up there?”

“Six hundred bales in storage already. We’ll get the rest in tomorrow I reckon.” Dad smiled. “How many’s left on the trailer boys?”

“One layer?” Dillon smiled. “We’ll get it done.”

“Hey Dev?”

“Yeah?”

“Y’know he finished with the hedge a half hour ago?” Mum smiled. “Go on down.”

“Gotta finish the bales first Mum.” I necked my drink and jumped back onto the trailer. They were the fastest bales I had ever dealt with in my life.

I ran back down towards the house and the good garden, bits of chaff and hay stuck to my shirt and in my hair. It didn’t matter that I was dusty, because nothing mattered at all, except that Hunter was waiting for me in the garden.

I don’t know how he did it, but every time I saw him, it was like being at the beach. He tasted like citrus and sunshine and his hair always seemed to smell of salt sea spray. Every time he smiled, the sun seemed to shine a little bit brighter.

“Hey babe.”

“Hey!” I skidded to a halt in my dusty boots and smiled at him. “We going to the beach or something?”

A kiss like oranges.

“Or somethin’… C’mon!”

Sometimes I had to stop and wonder at how I got so lucky. Hunter had set up a couple of deck chairs by the edge of the lake, and there was a cooler with beer and soda. When he smiled, Ray Ban’s perched on his blond hair, it’s suddenly a holiday even though we’d both been working up a sweat all day. There was nothing better than the sight of my boyfriend in his cute yellow swim shorts, walking towards me out of the sun, smiling like he was back on some California beach.

Barefoot in the green grass, we snuggled up together on one deck chair, sharing a coke from the bottle and giggling between kisses.

“I’m sorry we don’t have a real beach.” I smiled at him, thumbing his pink lower lip.

“I kinda had my fill of beaches.” Hunter’s firm warm body against mine was the perfect mix of comforting and intoxicating. “The view here is way better anyways.”

“It’s hot today.” I placed the cold glass against his flat stomach and he hissed. “Gonna get hotter if you keep wriggling on me like that.”

Hunter looked back at the sparkling surface of the lake, our own little private not-a-beach in the middle of the green countryside. He smiled really wide in that confident, knowing, cocky way of his.

“I’m sure we can find some way of cooling you down babe.”

“And when the rain comes again?”

“I’m sure I can find some sun and bring it here for you. After all, they do say you take the weather with you.”