Chapter 1

Cole loved college. The difference between sixth form and secondary was such a big divide it may as well have been the damn-Grand-fucking-Canyon. School had been hell, a shit-fight every day of drama and hormones and his parents going off on him every time he put half a toe out of line. College was heaven. Cole also loved having such an early birthday. He had turned seventeen the day he'd started college, September 1^st, and while it meant that he was the oldest in his year, it also meant that he got to drive almost a year before most of his friends did. It also meant that he got to eighteen and legal that much quicker than everyone else.

Cole had spent the three years since he turned thirteen pretty much slap bang in the deepest closet he could find. Gay hadn't even been a word in his vocabulary. Cole Sathie played sports, went hunting, rode horses; helped out on the farm hauling hay and feed, dagged out sheep and learnt to shear and ride a quad bike when he was ten. Gay didn't really come into it.

There hadn't been a lot of time for parties at school. What between homework, the dogs, farm duties, the horses and more school Cole hadn't had a great deal of free time, which was why his parents blew a gasket every time he was late home. Now he could drive. Independence at last. Cole had saved every penny of birthday and Christmas money, every pound his parents had ever given him for chores and farm work, and spent it all on his car. He had bought a beat up rust-red Toyota Hilux pick-up, the world's most indestructible car according to Clarkson, fitted it out with a decent stereo and a heater that actually worked and bought a cover to go over the back in wet weather. He was the envy of his friends.

And things in Cole's life were pretty good until the day he had first run into Jared Parker.

Cole had jogged into the main hall and cast about for his friends, he was tall, so looking over everyone else was de riguer, and he hadn't noticed when he'd walked headfirst into a shorter second year student. The older boy was ... pretty was so the wrong word. Sort of chiselled maybe? He had a strong square jaw and messy brown hair and stubble and hard blue eyes.

"Hey, dude, sorry," Cole had reached out to help the boy, but he'd brushed him off, and without a word, got up and walked away.

And Cole hadn't really though much about it until he'd seen that same boy, smiling with his own friends, nodding sagely along at something that had been said. When Jared Parker smiled, something inside Cole's chest had lit up like a firecracker and snapped him in two.

After that, Cole saw him everywhere.

Cole would be going about his day and then, like a spirit or a ghost, Parker would just be there. After six months of having never seen the guy before Cole couldn't understand it. Jared would walk across his path, cross him as he walked the other way down corridors, be sitting in the café or standing in the line for the vending machines. He was everywhere. And after about a week of that, he started showing up in Cole head, in his dreams, and that drove Cole Sathie just a little bit mad.

It started small. Cole would wake up, knowing that he'd been thinking about Jared, then he would wake up having been thinking about Jared and have a stiffy that he couldn't shake off. Then one Friday morning he woke up and remember his dream. Jared Parker, naked, smiling in his bed and sucking him off.

Cole was a wreck at college, and his friends noticed. They were hanging out in the music common room, a dozen or so kids with guitars and picks, and Cole lounged off to one side with his best friend Wilton. They had English together and had met on Cole seventeenth birthday. They had almost nothing in common except a strange love for a band called The Hives, but got on like a house on fire.

"Dude what is with you today?" Wilton tuned his pride-and-joy, his pearl white Fender Telecaster and strummed a couple of chords, "It's like you're not even here."

"You ever have weird fucking dreams about people you don't even know that well?" Cole stared at the ceiling, blue eyes under floppy blond hair, picking at the hem of his ratty t-shirt. Wilton and his mum were always on at him to get some presentable clothes, he really did look like a Texas ranch hand, despite being as English as they come.

"Dude you had better not be talking about me!" Wilton flicked the plectrum at his friend and snaffled another from his pocket, he cut them out of old credit cards, "Please don't tell me you dreamt about my girlfriend..."

Cole punched him, sort of lightly.

"Wil," he shook his head and sighed, "It's nothing, just not sleeping great. Lot's to do back home, the ground is so fucking wet. Everything takes so much longer when it's mud everywhere."

Wilton went back to his guitar, his girlfriend often joked that she shared her man with the instrument, Cole had never seen him without it.

"There's something you're not telling me."

Too right, thought Cole to himself, but he chose not to elaborate for his friend.

Cole Sathie wasn't in the closet, but he wasn't out of it neither. The idea plagued him as he walked from the common room out to the land management classroom. At school, there had been no time for girls or parties and when men had arrived in his head when he masturbated he'd not really given it much thought. Now he was eighteen, he'd been at college for the last year and a bit, and he'd not told anyone he was gay. It had never come up. Cole was sure that if anyone had asked directly, he'd have told them the truth, but no one ever had. Girls asked him on dates, but he turned them down. And until now, there hadn't been any boys who inspired the kind of loin-swelling reaction that Jared Parker gave him.

The whole thing was most unsatisfactory.

He had theory that day, which was just as well since it hadn't stopped raining in weeks. Christmas this year was going to be a total wash out. Cole sat in the back of the class doodling on his notepad while his least favourite lecturer went on and on about irrigation techniques. Looking down at the sheeting rain outside, Cole thought the whole thing a bit of a moot point. From that they moved on to talk about the fundraiser. The idea had been to have an open air cinema thing in one of the farm fields, but since it had begun raining and never stopped that had been scrapped. Bill came up with a sponsored hunt, but that got shot down pretty quickly. A gig seemed the obvious thing. There were plenty of barns and things at the farm, and Cole, through Wilton, knew all the music kids.

Cole ran to his truck and leapt in, slamming the door shut behind him. The rain hadn't eased at all and he was soaked. He threw the pick-up into reverse, twisted to look out of the practically useless back window and reversed out of the space. Snapping forwards and into first gear he was about to move off when his foot slammed the brakes and he stalled the truck. Jared Parker was standing with his back turned in front of the truck like he didn't know Cole had almost flattened him. Cole leant on the horn. Parker didn't move.

Swearing to himself Cole hooted again, then wound down his window and shouted unintelligibly into the rain. Eventually Jared turned, saw him and wandered off. Cole fumed. He drove home at top speed, which was almost dangerous with the visibility so low, and got to work with the horses.

Cole like working with the horses. Regardless of how angry or upset he was, being with the big strong largely silent animals settled him down and made him happy, even when he didn't want to be. Black Rock Farm Equine Yard had ten loose boxes facing each other either side of the yard, and a tack and feed room at the far end. Cole's family had three horses of their own: a retired thoroughbred called Bray, who had been his father's favourite; a chunky black and white cob call Robin, who was super reliable; and Cole's own horse, a big broad shouldered warm blood hunter. He was almost palomino in colouring, with the soft sand-cream body and the darker mane and tail. Cole whistled to Dune as he walked into the stalls and the horse brayed back, accompanied by a host of whinnies. Black Rock also had four horses on half livery, and Cole earnt most of his money by being chief in charge of the yard. There were a pair of lovely quarter horses owned by a really nice couple from Canada, a high strung black Arab whose owner was nice, but Cole through she was too harsh with her horse, and a gentle, practical bay cob, whose mature owner often hacked out with his mother on Robin.

Cole feed, mucked out, brushed down and exercised all the livery horses as well as his own, though he didn't have to do it all the time. Half livery meant that the owners of the four guest horses were responsible for mucking out four out of seven days and exercising at least once a week. Cole would take out the horses at least once during the week, which meant that his weekends were free to ride his own horse.

Now he stood in the stable and de-rugged Dune, standing close to the big animal as he began to run his calloused hands over the horse's smooth coat. He brushed his horse down, running short fingernails over the horse's rounded muscles, itching and scratching, and all the time talking in a low voice. Dune kept an ear turned back to listen to his human, and Cole rambled on, not really paying attention to what he was saying.

"So Wilton said that he would talk to everyone about the fundraiser gig. I wish we could've had the cinema drive-in, that would have been so cool. Ah, that's it hey boy, a nice good rub huh?" he ran his hands down the back of the horse's legs in turn and snickered to Dune to inspect his feet, "I nearly ran someone over today, the rain was pointlessly heavy. At least you get to be in here uh?" Cole used the hook pick to clean out the horse's feet and inspected and conditioned the hooves, cradling them in the crook of his elbow, "That Jared kid. I so cannot believe he didn't hear me. He didn't say anything either. Not even sorry." Cole blew his hair from his eyes as he finished with the gelding's feet and came around to start brushing the thick flaxen tail, "He's never said two words to me, and I can't stop thinking about him," Dune whinnied and turned his head to watch his human with big liquid eyes, "Yeah, I know, I'm pathetic. Let's get you dressed."

Cole rode Western style with Dune most of the time, and today he went simply for blanket and girth, no saddle, and a bridle. Dune liked a copper-roller bit and it didn't take the pair long to get tacked up. Cole changed from his work boots to his old cowboy riding boots, not the grey leather pair he kept for best, and swung up into the saddle as Dune emerged into the covered sand school. The indoor school was smaller than the one outside which was currently masquerading as a lake, but on days like this it was a godsend. Cole rode one handed, toes tucked into the belly band, and clicked to his horse. The sixteen plus hand hunter had been bought for Cole's fourteenth birthday present and four years later the pair shared a symbiotic relationship built on years of trust, thousands of hours of contact, riding and grooming, and hundreds of miles of covered ground. Dune acted like he knew what was going on in Cole's mind, and Cole shifted his weight and flexed his strong thighs, guiding the horse with small movements around the school. He sang, snippets of sixties things he parents had grown up with.

"Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain/Telling me just what a fool I've been/I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain/And let me be alone again..."

Once they'd warmed up, Cole bunched his muscles, and his knees took Dune from trot to canter and back again. Cole lifted himself from the horse's back, leant over the neck of the beast he trusted with his life and urged the hunter faster and further. Dune moved like they were one, cantering around the school, almost skipping in his grace, taking a wide arc around the outside before Cole lined him up for the jump. They were only cross poles, Cole didn't want to be a proper jumper, but he loved to fly through the air with his horse below him. Cole knew he had other jobs to do, and homework, so he stopped their exercise after too-little time and led Dune back to the stalls.

He re-rugged the horse, rubbed him down and put the tack away. Then it was time to re-fresh hay for all seven horses, make up and soak the dinners, feed the horses and leave the radio on low for them. He would muck out later.

After that the litany of jobs went on and on. Dinner for the dogs, hoovering the ground floor of the house, washing up, laundry. By the time Cole went to collapse on his bed to try and look at his homework his mum was ringing the bell for dinner and Cole had to join the literal dog-fight meals at the Sathie household entailed. Cole was the eldest of four brothers, and one sister. Which was why he had the most chores, why his chores were the hardest and why his parents had been so hot on him when he'd been at school. Cole had been chief baby-sitter, and when his parents had needed to ferry him around things had been strained. Now he was independent and Clayton had turned sixteen things were easier. Watching the little ones had gotten passed down the line and apart from livery and chores, Cole was a free agent.

Cole was a bit lost in his thoughts when his dad plonked a bottle of fruit cider down in front of him. William Sathie was a big man, like the sons he produced, and they all shared the same blond hair. William wore his short to partly hide his receding hairline, having five children weighed heavy on the heart.

"You all right buddy? You're a bit quiet tonight."

Cole took the drink and swigged. Ice cold fizz buzzed in his throat, welcome after the length of his day.

"Thanks Pa, I'm fine. It's just the rain."

"I've never seen it so wet," Carla Sathie swatted at her two youngest sons, who instantly went back to kicking each other under the table, "It hasn't rained this long and bad since we bought the farm."

"How are the horses?" William asked.

"Fine. Bored." Cole thought that he could be describing himself, "We're having a gig for the college fundraiser. Wilton thought we might use the basement at the old brewery in town."

"Sounds good. You gonna find a date for this one? Some nice girl to take out?"

Cole sighed. His lack of dates hadn't gone unnoticed by his mother, who was as sharply perceptive as one might imagine in a woman who had raised five kids. At some point he was really going to have to come clean with his parents. Today was not that day.

Homework was a bust, Jared kept on turning up in his head. He drove Cole mad. He never said anything, not a by-your-leave, what's-the-time. Nothing, nada, zip. And he acted like Cole didn't exist, which made Cole really furious.

Cole had loved leaving his school, knowing that most of his senior classmates were staying on to attend the sixth form there, and he was one of only two kids from his school who had chosen the college on the edge of town. In a new place, his height and burly good looks got him noticed, but not by people he wanted to be noticed by. Jared Parker acted like he didn't exist. And it was that which lead to all the shouting.

"Hey Farm-Boy!"

Cole scowled. It was too damn early and he was too damn wet to deal with Jake Patterson. Jake had been resident-prick-dipshit at school and as luck would have it, was the only person from his school to attend his college. In the last year and a bit Jake had found he had less and less material to tease Cole with, what with Cole being taller, stronger and happy in his social circle, so he'd settled with the one thing that all the kids at primary school had cottoned onto.