Page 93 of Cattle Stop

“Coop.” Drew lets out a breath. “The fuck? C’mon, we’re your best friends.”

“No, I know.”

“And you love it here.”

“Course I do.”

“Say one nice thing about goats. Hell, say one nice thing about Oregon.”

Cooper eyes the window. “It rains plenty.”

“Coop.”

“C’mon,” Cooper says softly. “Let it go.”

“No, I won’t. You’ve made this farm into what it is. And all the years you put in, everything you did this summer, you know as well as I do that you should be here for when things are finally going well. I can’t believe you’re not already on your way back, thinking you’re sneaky and pulling into the barnyard to try to surprise me.”

Cooper rubs his hand across his eyes. “Drew…”

“And it’ll be all the better if you jump back into things now and help us get through the winter so we’re rocking and rolling come spring or whenever you’re gonna come visit.”

Drew pauses.

Maybe Cooper should’ve had something more for dinner. His stomach hurts.

“You are coming back to see us at some point, right?” Drew asks.

“Yeah, at some point.”

“Some point…some point when, exactly?”

Cooper forces out a laugh. “Well, you know me, I have no idea.”

“But like…this spring? Or summer?”

“I’m all the way out west, Drew. I don’t know.”

“Cooper.”

“I don’t,” he says, though it sounds weak even to him.

Cooper misses even just the sounds of the kitchen and the picture he has in his mind of Drew standing over the sink. He tips the phone away from his mouth and blows out a breath. Whit’s there too, somewhere. Out in the barn, working with that new bull. Of course Whit would think he could manage to get a stubborn bull to stay put in its pen all by himself. If Cooper were there…he shakes his head at his own reflection in the window.

It doesn’t bear thinking about. Cooper’s not there, no matter that he can imagine it so clearly, leaning against the fence in the barn and giving Whit a hard time for trying to take on the project by himself, before he hops over the fence to help. The two of them could get it done easily enough, though they’d bicker the entire time.

And then what? Spend the rest of the evening fucking each other, with no future waiting for the two of them? Or Cooper would silently go back to his room and Whit would close the door to his own, and they’d play at ignoring how they spent all summer rolling around in bed together?

Maybe that’s what he was missing all those years: the clarity that if anything ever did materialize between him and Whit, it’d be just sex and absolutely nothing more.

Ass, Cooper wants to think, but his throat feels thick and he closes his eyes.

“Cooper?” Drew asks.

“Whit and I slept together.”

Silence. He can hear Drew breathing. He hunches his shoulders, hoping Cheryl and Kathy aren’t listening.

“Oh.”