Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 98643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 493(@200wpm)___ 395(@250wpm)___ 329(@300wpm)
“So what did you do when you knew you couldn’t stay there for good?” I asked.
“Okay, this is another ‘promise you won’t laugh’ moment,” Flynn warned. “I thought about when I was really, really young—like seven or eight—and remembered this dream I’d had for the longest time. I wanted to be a cowboy.”
“So you became a cowboy,” I said with a smile. How many people would have taken a risk like that? I knew now that cowboys still existed, but I doubted there were many people who deliberately chose the career if they hadn’t been born into the life.
“I did. Problem was that being a cowboy without a horse didn’t really work. That was when I thought of Titan and Frank and the relationship they’d had. I knew that was what I needed in a horse. A best friend. I decided to take a chance and see if I could locate any horses that were descendants of Titan. Since Frank had bred Titan to dozens and dozens of mares, I figured there had to be papers proving the purity of his bloodline. I just had to find them. Since Walers aren’t your everyday breed, it ended up being harder than I thought. It took me months to find the organization that held the documents for all the registered Walers in the country. When I saw BJ’s picture in the registry, I knew I had to have him. Titan turned out to be his grandfather.
“BJ was only three, so he was the perfect age for me to train him like Frank had trained his horses. The guy who owned BJ was this big corporate guy who didn’t really care about him; he just liked telling people he owned a prize-winning stallion. All I had to do was offer the guy a ridiculously high amount to sell him to me. I had and still do have plenty of money saved up from my banking days, so it seemed like some kind of weird twist of fate to me.”
“He was meant to be yours.”
Flynn tightened his hold on me. He’d wrapped the sleeping bag around me, so between the warm material and the heat coming from his body, I’d never felt safer in my entire life.
“Fate’s been kind to me,” Flynn murmured as he nuzzled my neck. “She gave me exactly what I needed not once but twice.”
Flynn’s observation had my insides dancing with joy. I kept expecting to wake up only to realize I’d dreamed up everything about my relationship with Flynn.
“Frank’s property never got sold because he had no next of kin and the state had no interest in the place, so it’d been for sale for years. It was run down, and the house had been condemned, but the barn was in decent shape. I bought the place for a steal and moved BJ there. I spent nearly all my time with BJ, getting him to trust me and building up the kind of relationship Frank had had with Titan. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of offering my niece and nephew naming rights because BJ only had a registered show name that I can’t even remember off the top of my head. My niece, Alicia, was big into bananas at the time because of some character on a TV show she loved. My nephew, Alex, chose jammies because he loved wearing jammies.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. Thankfully, Flynn hadn’t made me promise not to when he’d begun his explanation. “Okay, I get all that, and it was really sweet of you to let them name him, but if you were going to use the initials to refer to him, wouldn’t JB be a little less… on the nose?”
Flynn responded by tickling me until I shouted, “Uncle!”
The scuffle had left me partially exposed. Flynn’s tickles turned to caresses and I could feel my dick hardening. I forced myself to lean back against him again. He quickly covered me up with the sleeping bag.
“To answer your question, I didn’t get to decide that. The kids began arguing over which name should come first, so it ended up being my brother who made the call. He used a coin, but the bastard never even bothered looking at the result after he flipped it. He said Alicia won the toss, so while the kids were telling BJ all about his new name, I confronted my brother about cheating. West simply shrugged and said that using the initials BJ might be a good way to break the ice with a guy so I’d get laid.”
“Your brother knows you’re gay?”
“He knew it before I did. It was another secret he kept from my parents to keep me safe because my father would have killed me for sure. There was no such thing as an LGBT community in Muddy Fork and if there was, it was a secret, invisible one. Being gay in small-town West Virginia back then was one thing, but admitting it meant you were signing your own death certificate. I didn’t start exploring the idea of being attracted to guys until I got to New York and even then, it was ingrained in me to keep it a secret, so all I did was hookups with strangers or guys who were just as deep in the closet as me. I wasn’t anywhere near as strong as you.”