Work Text
Braden had needed help around the barn, and maybe a spare pair of hands steady enough with a saw and level to refit the joists down at the south end. He did not need whatever this is.
“I’m sorry,” Tom says, time and again. “I let the fire go out; let the dogs out; spilled the feed, your tea, burned the laundry. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” And he doesn’t, mostly, do whatever it was again. But he fills the dry farmhouse up with little mistakes and things done different, and Braden resents the bubbling realization this is what it’s like to be kept company. He has dogs for that.
The dogs are warm unwanted weight across his feet when he settles in the sitting room in the evenings. He wants to keep moving, but there’s little enough to do when the light has gone, and after a long day out his legs won’t keep on under him anyway. Tom keeps going, no sign of trouble. Braden watches his long legs up the path and the porch steps ahead of him on their way in from milking, any sign of the shakes or ache in his own hips and thighs. But Tom keeps on, into the kitchen, and Braden has to sit and listen to whatever he’s getting up to in the other room with nothing in his hands.
Tom comes back with tea.
“I’m not that old,” Braden says, when he sets one mug just by his chair. Tom smiles down at the tabletop instead of him, and retreats without more.
Tom is a warm unwanted weight running through his days, presence pinning Braden down as well as the dogs. He’s too big for the cab of the pickup, for the kitchen table, for the trestle bed Braden had promised in that help ad. He sleeps on it anyway. Sometimes in the mornings when Braden passes the half-cracked door he sees him still sleeping, bare feet slipping off the end, broad curve of his back. Sometimes he sees him standing, matching up shirt buttons, and sometimes the sound of his footsteps in the hall outside brings Tom’s eyes to his. Sometimes it’s the only time Tom looks at him straight all day.
Without those times Braden could have gone until easily October without knowing his eyes are almost-green. In November he pads in and out and back into the sitting room and thumps down a full basket. He looks at it, and quick at Braden, and sits down to sew.
“You set your suit on fire now too?” Braden asks him.
“Nah,” Tom says.
Braden sits with that. “I can fix that,” he says after a long while, but he wouldn’t have. It’s been as good an excuse as any not to go in to town on Sunday after Sunday. Tom bends to his work, fire shadows across his face.If Tom’s own jacket’s not burned, he’s got no excuse for going around how he does in shirtsleeves, rolled up, even late into the fall. It takes Braden until he sees Tom’s knuckles streaked red, starting to crack in the cold, Tom hissing as he runs them under the tap on the way out the barn, to think he must not have a proper jumper in his trunk at all.
“Come on then,” Braden says, and doesn’t have to look to feel Tom follow, up the stairs to Braden’s bedroom, big in the door behind him. He finds a few of his grandfather’s folded away under his bed, sweet with cedar and maybe big enough. “You finish that suit coat yet?”
“Nah. I’m sorry,” Tom says. It’s clear he doesn’t even know why Braden’s asking that now, he just says so anyway.
“When you do you can take that then,” Braden says, glancing back and up at him. “For church, ’n all.” The trousers’ll hardly fit, but Tom’s own are alright and the sleeve’s are long enough around here. It’s not been hard to know Tom hasn’t been going either.
Tom’s eyes are bright, watching him, his lip real pink, pulled between his teeth. He puts his hands in his pockets, takes them out again. “Yeah,” he says. “That’d be real nice, I guess.”
That night Braden hears him saying prayer through the joining walls, and wonders, when he’s always saying sorry, what he thinks he needs forgiveness for now.
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He starts to take his showers on Sundays, save up the baking and small mending for when Tom heads off to town. When he catches himself at it he laughs and gets washwater in his mouth. But whatever he finds to fill his hands never seems quite enough for the time. He turns away from the clock and flicks the kitchen radio up, stalks out to the woodshop and works at the right angles for that joist. He starts to take longer showers.“Oh,” Tom says, when he comes carefully back through the front door to find Braden drying his hair by the stove, the week’s bread inside.“Water’s hot still, if you want it,” Braden tells him. Tom doesn’t say sorry, or anything.Sometimes Tom makes sounds at night. Braden doesn’t know if he knows. But then, maybe lots of folks do. Braden’s never slept with somebody but family so close in the house before. Most times he sounds like he’s running from someone or something in his dreams, rough gasps. Whatever it is doesn’t always catch him, though, and sometimes they slow to sighs, rumbling into deeper sleep.There’s little enough insulation in these walls. Winter comes on and Tom goes out every week, goes quiet at night. Tom smiles stiffly at him in the mornings, and Braden doesn’t think of it until he spills a bucket of feed down at the other end of the barn.Braden’s first thought at the sound is to worry, turning to look for him, because Tom had done that back in August, and he never makes the same mistake twice.“It’s fine,” Tom calls down to him. “Sorry, ’s fine.”
“It’s feed,” Braden says, slow, because of course it is. “If there’s dirt in it now it’s only shit the cows’d find to eat anyway. And you keep this way pretty clear.”“Yeah,” Tom says. “Yeah, I’ll sweep it, ’m fine.” He takes off for the door where he hangs the shovels now, quiet in his heavy way. Braden turns back to the engine he needs working soon, and then he turns back. Tom’s already bending to the floor.“Are you?” Braden asks him.Tom’s shoulders are more’ve a wall than he’s ever managed to build. “Of course,” he says.“You been quiet,” Braden observes.“Nah,” Tom says, quick to parry when he shies from talking first. “Not more’n I should be, anyway.”Braden considers that. He’s always been quiet himself, when most people who aren’t his mother seem to think he shouldn’t be, but he never had an opinion on whether Tom should be, and now he’s taken aback to uncover maybe Braden thinks he shouldn’t. He hadn’t thought Tom was thinking about it.“No reason for you to be,” he says slowly. “Nice to have the company.”Tom clatters the bucket, and laughs like he’s tossing that off too. “I’m only tired,” he says—and that slipped too close to something.“Yeah?” Braden says.Tom stands up. “It’s only cold,” he says, and makes back for the other end and the feed bins.If he wants his distance, Braden lets him be until supper. “You’re not sleeping,
huh,” he says, when Tom has a plate with several shepherds’ worth of pie to pin him down. Tom looks at his full knife and fork, betrayed, but his stomach is stronger than his shyness, so he gives in.“Yeah,” he says. “Well, it’s only…. Not like I can’t work.”“If that bad wheel on the tractor blew tomorrow you’d pull the plow yourself,” Braden says. “Of course you can work.”“Oh,” Tom says. He turns the knife over in his long fingers, and Braden thinks that even when they must be cold he carries them so cautiously.“I think you better let me look at that room, later,” he says, and lets Tom back at the potatoes.The insulation in one wall of the addition Braden’s grandad built is failing, right in the corner of Tom’s room, so the wind outside leeches heat. The old outer wall with solid insulation is between Braden’s room—and the chimney, and the stove below—and the tacked-on space, so he hadn’t noticed much of a loss. There would’ve been more if Tom left the door between the old and new sections open, but he’s always mostly closed himself off at night.“They really don’t teach you how a furnace works out east, huh,” Braden says, inspecting the weak spot. “Guess I should’ve guessed when you burned my shirt.”“Nah, that one was on purpose,” Tom notes. “It didn’t suit you.” It’s undeniably cold in the room but he’s standing steady beside Braden, a spot of color back in his cheeks. He leans in to look at the plaster too, hovering a hand across it to feel the draft and study the subtle signs of rot now it’s been pointed out to him.“Did too,” Braden says. He feels rattled, and worse when Tom looks up from tracing those long fingers over the plaster to show him a sharp white corner of a smile. “Anyways, that won’t be fixed this winter.”Tom withers just as quick as the smile bloomed. “Well, that'll be fine,” he says.“It certainly will not,” Braden says, his father’s tone of voice coming over him. Tom startles back to his real height. “I promised you a bed,” Braden reminds him. “Wouldn’t’ve if I didn’t mean for you to have one, and this—“ he points to the short bed, and then around the room, which Tom’s managed to make look emptier the longer he’s lived in it, “—doesn’t deserve the name. You’ll have to have mine.”“I can’t kick you out of your bed,” Tom says, maybe realizing all other protests are useless.“Don’t, then,” Braden says, and means to turn on his heel to close the conversation, but Tom’s still leaning between him and the door, and puts out a hand entreating him to slow. When Braden looks back to him, this close, Tom must not be able to help but meet his eyes.Braden would apologize for that. He doesn’t mean to oblige Tom to do anything that Tom seems to want to not do so much. But Tom’s eyes are the clearest color he’s seen all winter, like a little bit of summer sky’s taken shelter under his roof, and Braden never would have known. Braden hates not knowing, so he loses his senses long enough that Tom can beat him to one more “Sorry,” and move his hand. Braden beats a mortified retreat.
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They hunker down as far apart as they can in the house, Braden fixing something he forgets as he’s doing it in the kitchen until it's too late to do anything else. Tom’s in the sitting room, most likely. If the dogs aren’t bothering Braden, they’re begging for pets as he sits with a stack of mending, the way Braden can picture him from far too many evenings now.He heads upstairs to bed first, aware of every footfall on the stairs, splashes water on his face and starts undressing, leaving the little lamp on to spill pointed light through the open door. He’s down to his union suit and socks when Tom starts treading up the stairs, and Braden stops and stands stock still to listen until Tom turns the right way, then rushes to pretend he hasn't been standing here like some fool. He’s just alighting on the edge of the bed when Tom fills the doorway.Braden’s twisting his fingers in the quilt. Tom looks at him straight, with no sign of any more feeling than he’d give anyone he passes in town. Braden can’t imagine a name for what he was hoping for from Tom, some word of thanks, appreciation, if not affection, but it isn’t coming, so he shakes himself and shoves his feet under the blankets, breathing deep and settling down.Tom checks the door is cracked open wide enough in case the dogs want in, which makes Braden’s chest clench right back up again. Then Tom’s long hand goes to tug the collar of the borrowed jumper he’s got on, down to show sharp collarbones and a shock of dark curls just for a moment before he hauls it up and over his head. He makes quick work of his suspenders, slows as he follows his shirt buttons down. Braden isn’t looking, or only through his eyelashes. He shrugs out of it to just a white undershirt, like they give out in the Army. His hands falter again finding his fly, then draw it down, leaving him in the undershirt and thin boxers that give up barely halfway down his thighs, a remarkable length of leg bared. Army issue kit. No wonder he’s been cold.Tom glances back at Braden, or the bed, and flicks out the light.Braden squeezes his eyes shut against the sudden flaring dark, then feels Tom settle into bed beside him, just a silhouette of weight and heat. He punches the pillow twice and then lies still, not like the dogs at all.Braden opens his eyes again only to see dark on dark, faint shapes of the ceiling beams and plaster. When he turns his head Tom’s face is the closest thing worth seeing, a pale moon beside him. Braden can’t hope to see him clearly with his glasses folded on the nightstand, but he tracks the shadows of Tom’s short beard across his cheek, his eyelashes. His eyes stay closed.Braden pulls the quilt Tom had folded politely at his chest up over both their heads and then rolls over. He hears a huff behind him that might be Tom trying not to laugh. Both of them fall asleep like that.Wind wakes Braden, once or twice, eddying around the house on its way across the prairies. Later the moonlight through the window wakes him again. After that he doesn’t know why, only that he is awake with the midnight clarity after deep sleep. He almost startles when the wind brushes the back of his neck, before he thinks how warm this wind is, and then remembers Tom.Tom draws another breath, which catches, then flutters out in a sigh. The dragging draft and warm release rush over his skin, and when he tests out leaning back there’s the tip of Tom’s nose, then his cheek and chin.Maybe Braden didn’t let himself half freeze over like Tom did, but he hasn’t been this warm since summer left. He presses back and feels it like an earthquake as Tom stretches, then curls back around him. Tom searches out the nape of Braden’s neck and rumbles deep in his throat when he finds it, rubbing in. Braden hasn’t seen the need to trim his hair this winter when he doesn’t see much of anyone in any case, and it’s gotten easier to just tie up lately. He’s caught Tom looking at it sideways, Tom who had appeared in the driveway wearing a military crop and stolen clothes, like he got any room to judge. Mostly stolen, anyway. Maybe not that underwear.Tom shifts closer, Braden knows it’s Tom to blame because he couldn’t move if he tried, can’t remember how. It’s too warm, like he’s been out too long in the summer and just come wobbling in, sun drunk. Tom’s lips are on his skin now, Tom’s chest and belly on his back, Tom’s bony hips against his thighs.Tom’s hand is on Braden’s own hip now, and his fingers curl. His fingertips are rubbing the worn jersey of Braden’s union suit over the soft skin at the hollow of his hip, which is used to the protection of the bone.“Tom,” Braden says. Tom makes a sound against his neck. That’s not better. “Tom.”Tom goes stiff. The part of him that already was is still pressing against Braden’s back.“Oh,” he says, the smallest sound in a room whose walls might as well have fallen away entirely, leaving them alone surrounded by the moonlit quilt and floor, as wide and windy as the prairies.Braden hauls Tom’s hand free from his hip, and up to the level of his heart. He’s only thinking that if he doesn’t, in a moment Tom will pull back, or shove him away. Not that a hold like that would stop Tom, really, when Braden has seen how much he can carry, and how much he wants to get away. Maybe Braden’s only thinking nonsense. He always thinks faster than he speaks, and too often he acts faster than he thinks. He bows his head, and his lips brush Tom’s knuckles, which might still be red in the dark but aren’t frozen anymore.Tom’s arm spasms around him. Tom’s mouth is open over the length of his neck he’s just bared. Braden can feel the warmth of his breath but not the weight of his lips, not quite yet. “Tom,” he says again, just to be clear.Tom kisses his skin, this time for certain. Braden can feel his soft lips, and his breath, and his teeth, and Braden presses back into them, and into Tom’s chest, and into the heat of Tom’s hips. Tom starts to take his hand back, but Braden is too turned around to realize that’s what’s happening, or maybe Tom changes his mind, because he takes Braden’s hand with him instead. He touches Braden’s chest over the cotton, with his hand over Braden’s hand, and then they find the first button. They touch Braden’s ribs and his belly, more buttons coming undone, and then Braden’s hand balks. Tom’s hand keeps pushing down and then stutters.“I’m—” Tom starts, and Braden regains control of his own hand, enough to catch up to Tom’s, tangling together. “May I?” Tom says instead, so Braden undoes the last buttons for him.Ever since he came out to the farm Tom has broken up Braden’s life with all the little things that seem larger because he does them his own way, and he touches Braden like that too. He slows whenever Braden shivers from feeling more than he can handle, and when Braden loses his breath and lets out a sound instead, too, until Braden has to push back into him, hoping beyond hope that Tom will learn what he wants the way he has everything else.Tom’s voice is hot against Braden’s neck, and now the weight of him is between Braden’s thighs. If the sounds Tom makes are words, Braden can’t hear any sense in them. With two layers of cotton twisted between them he can’t feel Tom against him, until Tom grips him and moves both their bodies, together. Braden’s eyes might be closed against the thin pillow or the dark room; his mouth must be open against the mattress. His throat and everything he can see flood with sparks.He’d heard Tom breathe or cry out sometimes at night, enough for it to start to feel familiar, but it’s never been like this before. He’d gotten too used to Tom being steady, but Tom’s shaking against him now. He had thought Tom filled up all the space there was in the little farmhouse before, but maybe the truth is Braden has grown into him, reshaping himself to fit the circle of Tom’s arms and then just waiting for Tom to take him in them like this.He thinks to turn his face from the mattress and Tom finds him again, curving over Braden as Braden cranes blindly back searching for him. Braden kisses him, and Tom kisses back. When their lips part and Tom falls back he pulls Braden over from lying on his side to lying on Tom’s, and this time they fall asleep like that.