Windsong Read online

  "Are you still close with them?" he asked.

  Shaking my head, I tried to figure out just how to tell Albert how very not close to my family I was. "If they were on fire, I'd probably add more kerosene to them and sit back with a smile."

  He cringed, and I shrugged. I wasn't going to be pretty about how much I did not like the people who had kicked me out of their lives so easily. "Did they abuse you?"

  "No. Just hated me because I'm gay." And because my tattoo told them all exactly what I thought of them.

  His expression brightened considerably at that little revelation, and I had no idea what he was up to. "Maybe it's time to go back and see how they feel about you now. I bet they've changed."

  I put my beer down with a thud against the table. "What do you really want?" I asked him. Albert didn't care about our personal lives at all, not unless they started being a problem for him while he was filming. If we came in bitching about some recent break up, or if our boyfriends came onto the set and started throwing a fit, then we were gone. It was that simple, and I loved that about his company. There was no drama because we all knew the score, and my life was far easier, and simpler, because of that.

  "Fans want to know where their favorite stars come from. Their back stories, their first loves, what they did when they were eighteen and barely legal and these guys couldn't have had a chance with them in a million years."

  I snorted. "But probably for a million bucks." Easily. I remembered being eighteen. I would have readily sold my soul for that kind of financial security. "Okay. So what are you thinking? An interview? A magazine article?"

  Albert shook his head. "I don't think that'll be enough. Not this time. Let's go bigger. Better. I want pictures of you on your family's farm doing the things you normally would have done back when you lived there. Let's pretend you went home, they loved you, and then you went right back to work. Cowboy hat on, dirty jeans, scuffed boots. No shirt, of course."

  "Of course," I replied sarcastically. With a sigh, I leaned over the table toward him. His idea was good and it had merit… just not for me. Any of the other guys, sure. But I couldn't go home. it wasn't nearly as easy as he wanted to make it out to be. And I hated disappointing him. "Albert… Look. I can't. I just can't. That's not how my family is. It's a good idea, but not for me. I'm sure some of the other guys here have a farm or something we can all go take pictures on for you. That would be so much better than me being back at Windsong."

  "Is that the name of the farm?"

  I nodded.

  "It even sounds beautiful. Jamie, you're doing this. I don't care what you have to do to make it happen, but this shoot has to take place and it has to be at the farm. Do it. I know what it means to you to go back there, and this is important."

  I shook my head. I couldn't. "Albert…" I wanted to argue with him, but when he stared at me like he was I pretty much knew it was over. I'd been a homeless kid, and I would have been suffering on the streets if it wasn't for him and everything he'd done with me. I felt like I owed him this. I gave it up with a sigh. "Sure. Whatever. Fine."

  "I knew you'd see how good this idea was. Text me when you have a time. We'll only need about four hours." He looked practically giddy as he got up and started heading back to the door.

  "Yeah. Yeah. Leave the beer." I was going to need those drinks before I went back to the farm. He laughed and put them in the fridge in the room for me. I sat back to think about what I was going to do. I'd be doing it tomorrow though. There was no way that I'd be going back to Windsong today. I needed at least a day to wrap my head around talking to my family again. And, for starters, I had no idea what I was even going to say to them to begin with.

  *~*~*

  I was at Windsong by eight the next morning. I'd been up since three, and had spent a good deal of time in the hotel's twenty-four-hour hot tub while I'd been trying to get my head on straight and think happy thoughts and all that other bullshit. But there were no good thoughts in coming back home. That country song about always being able to go back home no matter what? Yeah, that was crap. At least it was for me.

  I sat there in my Jeep for a while, just listening to my radio and coming up with a hundred reasons why this was the stupidest idea I'd ever had. Well, maybe never ever. That was probably stretching it some. But I hadn't been this stupid in a long, long time.

  Eventually, I had to get out of my vehicle. Not because I wanted to or anything like that. But just for the simple fact that eventually someone would notice me parked there across the street from the farm and, knowing my family as well as I did, sooner or later someone would either call the police or come out to see what I was doing. They would likely do both and when my dad came out I expected him to be carrying his old shotgun on his shoulder, just like he had when I was a kid, and he'd thought someone might be making trouble for his family back then.

  I went up to the front door, which was still the same shade of pale blue that it had been before. Now the paint was peeling around the weather-roughened edges.

  I raised my hand to knock but didn't get a chance to before a rail-thin woman in her sixties opened the door and stared at me.

  It took her a few moments in which we simply looked at each other for her to get to the point where she was able to recognize me. "Jamie?"

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd been so sure that she'd forgotten what I'd looked like in the last decade. "Hi, Mom."

  My mother promptly slammed the door in my face. I sighed. I hadn't exactly expected this to go well, but I'd assumed I'd at least be allowed to say something to her.

  This time I did get to knock.

  "Go away!" she screamed at me through the door. It sounded like she was right on the other side of the thick wood.

  I knocked again, harder this time. "I need to talk to you!" I yelled back at her. Five minutes into seeing each other again, and we were yelling. It was just like old times before I'd run as far away from the farm as I possibly could. After I'd been thrown out though, of course.

  "I just need two minutes!" I kept yelling at her.

  "You aren't getting it!"

  My stubbornness came from her. "Mom!"

  The door swung open, but not by my mom. Instead, a man I hadn't thought I'd see again was standing there in front of me. "Tom."

  He looked just as shocked to see me as I was to see him, and for a long time we just stared at each other across the threshold of my childhood home.

  "Jamie?"

  He didn't sound happy to see me again at all, which pissed me off because I was the one who had been screwed over by him and everyone else in my life, not the other way around.

  "Hi." I tried to sound friendly, but it was hard to do when I was halfway between grabbing him and kissing him against the wall for old times' sake, and yelling at him for abandoning me when I was just a kid and needed him most. We'd been practically children. We'd been best friends, and we'd been innocent as could be as we'd figured out what it meant to care about each other. We'd done things, but comparing what I did now to how I'd been with him then, I knew how innocent we'd been.

  It had been one perfect summer, and he'd ruined everything by saying he hated me and what we'd done together. I hadn't understood why he'd said those things about me, or us, and as I stood there in front of him I was sucked back to that hot summer night when my life had imploded.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked me gruffly.

  I was instantly on the defensive. This was my family's home. Not his. He didn't have the right to demand answers from me like that. He wasn't one of my parents. "I'm here to talk to my mom or dad."

  He came forward and leaned against the doorway. "Your neck says you have more to say. Thought you would have gotten that removed by now. You here to make trouble at all?"

  "No more than you already are," I snapped back at him, already too fed up with the interaction that I was having with him, as short as it had been. He'd been there with me when the fae had cursed me. He knew how awful having ever
ything I was feeling spelled out for people actually was. And he also knew that it couldn't be removed. Because he'd sat there next to me holding my hand when the guy with the spell book had tried.

  Surprisingly, Tom laughed at that. "Come on in, can't say anyone will be happy to see you though. Or that they'll even recognize you. I barely did. You've changed a lot over the years."

  I didn't expect people to like me being there, but the way he'd said that I changed, that almost sounded like a compliment. I smirked and knew that he still liked me, maybe even wanted me, on some level.

  I followed Tom into my family's dining room. It was odd that he was leading the way as if I didn't know the layout of the only house I'd ever lived in. Since leaving Montana, I'd stayed in apartments and condos. Houses were for families to be in, I figured, and I didn't have one of those. Not anymore.

  "I need a favor," I started out as I sat down across from my mom at the dining room table.

  My mother snorted. "Well, that's rich." She wouldn't look at me, but I figured that maybe just getting her to talk to me was progress in and of itself. It was better than ignoring me completely, at any rate.

  I spread my hands out in front of me. "My boss wants to do a photoshoot here, so that fans can see where I grew up. I'm a…" There really was no good way to tell my mother that I did gay porn.

  "I know what you do. That filth. That disgusting—"

  "Yes, I do porn. So sorry I'm not perfect," I said sarcastically. "Let's not do the niceties anymore then. My boss wants to take some photos of me here. Shirt off but nothing more than that. No one else here either. Just him and a camera guy. We can stay in the barn or around some of the horses and not soil up your home at all with our disgusting filth as you want to call it. I'll pay you for the inconvenience and then I'll be gone again. I didn't want to come back here in the first place."

  "Ten thousand," my mother said, surprising me.

  I rolled my eyes and my neck burned as the words changed. I wondered if they were calling her names like they used to when I was a teenager. "Five hundred." There was no way in hell I was going to be paying ten thousand to be able to be in a place I couldn't stand again. That was insanity.

  She looked up at me and gave me a shrewd glared with her icy, pale blue eyes. Age hadn't dulled her at all, which I was glad to see. "Two thousand, and you can't use anything that would identify the farm. No one else can be in the pictures and no one will be doing any interviews."

  "Done."

  My mother nodded. "Good. Then, after this unpleasantness is over, you won't ever come back here again."

  Of course I wouldn't. Hadn't she heard me when I said I hadn't wanted to be here in the first place? "Sure. Whatever you want."

  "What I wanted was a good son who wasn't tainted by such blatant disrespect for God's will," she shot at me.

  Ah. That old argument again. Where I was supposed to go make babies. Because I was gay, and perfectly happy not having little people depending on me, that was not ever going to happen for her.

  "I'll be back tomorrow with the crew."

  "And the money," my mother snapped, as if I had that short of a memory.

  I sighed. "Yes. And your money. You'll get your two thousand. I'm making more than that just from the shoot." I didn't know why I'd tacked that last bit of information on. She didn't need to know how much I made. It wasn't like me having money would have changed anything between us. But maybe it was a power thing for me. She obviously needed money or else she wouldn't have let me come back to do the shoot.

  I wondered, for a few seconds, if the farm was in trouble or something like that. And if there was some way that I could help too. But this place wasn't my home. Not anymore. And these people hadn't been my family since I'd been eighteen. I didn't need to worry about them since they obviously hadn't cared about me in what felt like a lifetime. I was good and done with them. That was all there was too it.

  I let myself out. Once I was outside, I should have gone straight to my Jeep and then right back to the hotel room. I could have found some lunch and watched a movie. Or I could have spent the afternoon in the pool. There were probably some guys there that I hadn't met yet, and it was good to make connections in this industry.

  But what I did was go to the fence and lean my elbows over the railing while watching Tom brush out a foal in one of the big pens that were for mares whose foals were still nursing but were old enough not to need to be in the barn with them anymore. He was a cute little horse, but it was Tom's smile that got to me most. He looked just as happy as he'd been in our last summer together, and I was a lot more miserable being back there than I had been in years.

  *~*~*

  Once I was back at the hotel, I did shots at the bar with the guys before going into the pool and sinking up to my neck in the shallow end while I hovered over the bottom. There were a lot of guys from Albert's company in the hot tub, but I knew better than to think that six shots would mix well with spending time in the heat. That would have made me a mess for sure.

  The cool water helped clear away some of the haze of the alcohol, but I stayed at a nice level of buzzed well into the afternoon while I laughed away the stress my family had caused me.

  *~*~*

  The next morning, I was ready to get down to business. I handed an envelope full of cash to my mom, who I'd found sitting on the porch when I pulled up with the crew. None of them said anything to me, which was perfectly fine by me.

  "Where do you want to start?" I asked Albert as I walked back to them.

  He gave me a once over. "Lose the shirt first. Then get over by the fence." I cleared my mind and tried to think happy thoughts or some bullshit like that so that my tattoo wouldn't say anything horrible for the shoot. If that didn’t work, I had plenty of makeup slathered over my neck to fade out the ink anyway.

  I did as he'd told me to, tossing my shirt through the open window of my Jeep. I leaned back against the rough, weathered wood and, after a few shots had been taken by the crew, I lifted my arms onto the fence as well. A bit of smiling, some pouting, and even some smirking and I was given the thumbs up by the guy with the camera.

  Then we were moving on. I was in the zone and just focused on giving my fans what they wanted as I leaned over hay bales, carried a saddle on my hip, and posed with an old cowboy had I'd found in the barn. This was easy work, and I was being paid well for it. I was still a bit uncomfortable just because I was back in the place where I'd grown up, but the more I thought about it as just a set, the more I started to believe that.

  "Can we get a few with you and the horses?" Albert asked me.

  I shrugged. "Sure." I didn't see any reason that we couldn't. I let myself into the nearest mare pasture. These were the mares that had been given the year off from breeding. Over a decade of not being at Windsong, and I still knew the layout.

  "What are they?" Albert asked me as he and the cameraman stayed on the other side of the fence.

  "Paint horses. They're like quarter horses, only flashier."

  The horses were well socialized and came up to me easily. They were looking for treats, those handouts that I used to come out and bring them when I was a child. Today had nothing but love for them, and they ate that up easily.

  The cameraman was taking photos behind me, but I was focused on the mares coming up to me and rubbing against me. I gave them each pets and scratches over their beautifully colored coats. They were each unique with their wildly varying coats and patterns.

  "How long has your family raised horses?" Albert asked me.

  I'd almost forgotten that he was there since I'd been so wrapped up with the horses and giving them attention. "Four generations," I told him.

  I trailed my fingers through their long manes and thought back to endless summers where I'd stood in the pastures just as I was now. Everything had seemed so perfect then. I'd lived in a bubble that I'd thought was unbreakable, but in the end my perfect summers had been made of the most brittle glass.

  "Jam
ie?"

  I looked over my shoulder at the sound of Tom's voice. He was standing away from the photographer and Albert, on the west side of the paddock. "Hi." I smiled at him, and he, miraculously, smiled back at me.

  "I know that look," he said, still smiling.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew I didn't have time to socialize while I was working on a shoot. "What look?"

  "You still love the horses."

  He was right. I really had never stopped, apparently. But that didn't change anything. "Can't talk right now. I'm working."

  Tom gave me a nod and moved away from the fence. "Maybe later?"

  This was a drastic change from what I'd expected to find with him. Maybe not having all of my family around to get in the way meant that I might get to catch up with him. There'd never be an 'us' again. He'd betrayed me too badly for that. But we did have over a decade to talk about and catch up on, if he was interested. And if I could swallow back my hurt long enough to stand to be around him for that long. He'd been my best friend back then, and since I really hadn't let anyone close enough to hurt me like he had again, in some ways he'd been the best friend I'd ever had.

  "Sure," I told him quietly. I was trying not to get my hopes up, but I was also trying to fight back the need to snap at him and hurt him just as much as he'd hurt me. I was confused, and a big part of me wished that he hadn't come out to check up on us to begin with.

  He moved away from the fence and Albert cleared his throat. "Who was that?" Albert asked me.

  "His name's Tom." The guy wasn’t taking pictures anymore, so I came away from the horses. Maybe we were done for the day. I really hoped that we were.

  Albert was still staring off in the direction Tom had gone. "He's good looking. Do you think—"

  I snorted and shook my head. "I'm going to stop you right there because I know for a fact that there's no way in hell that Tom would ever be interested in anything you're offering."

  Albert gave me a sour look. "Everyone has a price."

  He was right about that, but Tom's would be astronomical.