Page 55 of The Only Seconds that Matter
“What?What bee got into your bonnet?”
“Now, Johnny.Go.”
“But, Taylor—”
“You can pick her up later.You just need to go.Now.”
“You’re ridiculous.”Johnny stood, grabbing his hat and shoving it down on his head.“I ain’t said nothin’ outta line.You’re the one actin’ unreasonable.”
“I don’t care what you think.Just leave.”
“Mother fuckin’ unbelievable,” Johnny grumbled as he strode toward the door.“Youda thought I called your mother a whore.”
Victor said nothing, just followed Johnny to the door and watched him walk toward the barn entrance.Halfway there Johnny turned to look at him, as if expecting Victor to change his mind.Victor didn’t—he kept his scowl on and his arms crossed.With a few swearwords, Johnny left the barn behind, and Victor returned to the office.He closed the door behind him and sank onto the couch, rubbing his hands over his face.He wanted to cry, but nothing came, not like it used to.He craved the release that came after tears.Instead, he had to hang his head in abject misery and resist the urge to tear his office apart in rage.
Maybe he was being unreasonable.Maybe he had some kind of feminine yearning for love that cis men didn’t have.Maybe he was trying to play ball in a league he wasn’t fit for.There were a lot of men he’d loved deeply and dangerously, and there were a lot of men who had hurt him, especially Diego—the first, the blueprint.By now, Victor should have gotten used to this feeling, the one in which you let yourself hope you’d be surprised before experiencing the devastation of there being no surprise after all.Johnny was exactly the kind of man Victor had assumed he was, and Victor drew no comfort or joy in being right.
* * *
Victor didn’t talk to anyone or do anything but work for the next week.Johnny texted him, but Victor didn’t answer.He may have answered if Johnny apologized, but he didn’t do that.He just wanted to know if Victor was still mad at him.What a childish idiot.Did he really think that time would fix this?Maybe they could go back to being friends, but Victor didn’t want to look at or hear him right now.What he wanted was to wallow in the misery of rejection and lick his wounds.
In the middle of his terrible mood, he received an invitation to his brother’s wedding in Los Angeles.Judging by the girly, loopy fonts and careful handwriting on the inside, Victor figured it was Oscar’s fiancée who had put it together.The wedding was going to be the first week of January.Maybe he could turn it into a visit with family and friends.
He was happy for his brother.At the same time, Victor was jealous.Victor had been the romantic, the kid so eager to settle down, have babies, and make a home for them all to live happily ever after in.Oscar had been the wild child chomping at the bit to see the world.Yet here he was, settling down and getting married, living the life Victor had imagined for himself over a decade ago.
Victor pinned the invitation to the fridge and went out to the barn, which was settling down as the sun sank low in the sky.Blitz had developed an abscess in his left hind, so he wasn’t given turnout for the night like the others.Instead he was on stall rest, so he and Cyclone (there to keep him company) were the only ones left in the barn.Blitz sniffed Victor when he entered his stall, hoping for treats, and Victor gave him the core from the apple he’d consumed earlier that day.As Blitz chewed, Victor sank down against the wall of a clean corner of his stall, his head thudding back against the wood.Blitz stepped over to sniff him, and Victor ran a hand down his white blaze, using the other to cradle his jaw.
“I don’t know why everything has to be so hard,” he whispered to Blitz.“Sometimes I wonder if it was worth it.I could have just… I don’t know, toughed it out as a woman.Had my dream life.”Victor felt his body clench, and thankGod, the tears finally rose, like drawing water from a very deep and dry well.“It sucks that I chose this life to be happy and I still feel like shit.”He sniffed and rubbed his face with an arm as Blitz flicked his tail and listened.“Maybe I just make bad decisions.”
Victor thought back to that moment in the bridal shop, staring at his reflection in the mirror as his mother and the shop employee plucked and pulled at his first choice of dress so that the skirt fanned out perfectly.He remembered his mother’s face glowing with a small slip of joy he hadn’t seen on her since before his father’s death.The dress made her so happy, but it made him feel like a rabid animal in a tiny cage.He wanted to tear off his skin and crawl out of it.Maybe his mother saw a beautiful blushing bride, but he saw a lifeless marionette being tugged along by its strings.I’d rather die than go through this, he’d thought.The only other time he’d felt that way was when his father was in and out of surgeries in an effort to save his life.There was no way a wedding dress made other women feel that way, not when they were marrying the loves of their lives.
No matter how miserable he felt now, he couldn’t have stayed in the closet and suffered through that, not even for Diego.He’d tried his hand at city living.Two years in Los Angeles taught him many things, but one was that he couldn’t live without his horses.He’d been raised on their backs with his hands intertwined with their manes.Plato had theorized that humans were split into two and spent their whole lives finding their other half.For Victor, that was him and horses.When it came down to choosing between them and the life surrounded by his own in the city, he had picked horses.Was it the right choice?He still didn’t know, but he also couldn’t imagine a life without Blitz, Cyclone, Saturn, or any of the rest.
Blitz rubbed his lip along Victor’s hair, and Victor chuckled wetly, pushing him away.He picked up some hay that had fallen from its manger and held it up for Blitz to eat.Twenty years later, the horse was still the goofball that ten-year-old Victor had frolicked with in the paddock.He’d been the first one that Victor came out to.Needless to say, Blitz did not care if Victor identified as male or female.He only cared that Victor brought him sweet feed and chest rubs.
After crying for a few minutes, Victor felt better, but he still didn’t know what to do about Johnny.He cared about Johnny way too much to bother with a friends with benefits situation.
Victor pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at Johnny’s last text.
I still want to be friends.
Victor sighed.He made it sound so simple.Victor knew it wasn’t.
CHAPTER 16
By the time October rolled around, Victor’s relationship with Johnny was still strained, at best.They’d share some minor chit-chat during the times that Taylor was passed between them but Victor was still bitter and heartbroken, and Johnny was unrepentant, so no strides were made toward reconciliation.Victor felt some resentful thrill in seeing Johnny’s disappointment whenever Victor rejected any of his attempts at making amends.He wanted Johnny to feel the pain Johnny’s rejection had caused, and so far Victor remained unsatisfied.Instead of apologizing, Johnny withdrew, enough that Mike started delivering Taylor instead.The man was a black void of personality, so Victor only spoke to him as much as he had to in order to conduct business.
In the meantime, there were still horse shows to attend and two-year-olds to break, so Victor focused on that instead.He drove out to Norman, Wichita, and Joplin for clinics and shows, and he brought whatever students had the time and money to join him.No matter how men treated him, Victor could rely on horses to provide an uplifting distraction.
While in Wichita, he grabbed a glance at Grindr to see what the prospects were.A few guys messaged him, and a couple had decent photos and acceptable introductions, but Victor’s heart wasn’t in it.None of them got his breath racing or his palms sweaty, and he knew from experience that mediocre sex with strange men was probably going to damage more than it was going to fix.So he closed out of the app and tried not to think too much about how he missed Johnny.Of course, that didn’t work that well, so as he laid in his living quarters at the showgrounds in Joplin one night, he looked upJohnny Stearns rodeoon YouTube.The results included a slew of clips from Johnny’s professional career, including a few interviews conducted afterward.One of the interviewers was a pretty slim blonde woman with a cowboy hat, and Johnny was unerringly charming, so much so that she seemed open to flirting a bit on camera.It made Victor sick to watch, so he moved onto another clip, this time of younger Johnny climbing into the shoot with his heavily fringed chaps, protective vest, and pale cowboy hat.When the shoot opened, out exploded a paint draft-type horse, probably at least 1200 pounds of rage.Victor found himself holding his breath as he watched, and he only released it when the horse dumped Johnny and Johnny hauled himself to his feet without hesitation.When he saw his score, the camera caught his huge gap-toothed smile and clenched fist of victory.Apparently this was the ride that rocketed him into notoriety on the professional circuit.
The most popular clip was the one Victor avoided until he could no longer resist.This was the recording of the ride that ended Johnny’s career, and if Victor had better self-control, he would have avoided it altogether.But he had to tap it.The clip started as they all did, with Johnny preparing himself in a shoot as the horse beneath him twitched and shifted nervously.Then the shoot flew open, and out the horse leapt, this one a huge gray with feet the size of plates and a neck and face obscured by a tangled, unkempt mane.The ride lasted all of three seconds, because the horse twisted and bucked to one side with supernatural speed, unseating Johnny just before lashing out with its rear legs and catching Johnny’s face on its way down to the ground.The horse took off upon landing, bucking with abandon.Meanwhile, Johnny was spread eagle in the dirt, and when he lifted his head, his whole face was dripping with blood.He staggered to his feet, then immediately fell to his knees, holding his gushing head with a hand.The medical team rushed to him, which seemed to be the time he passed out, because he didn’t move at all after that.
Victor turned off his phone and set it aside, gut twisting.He shouldn’t have watched it.If he’d seen it without knowing how it ended, he would have thought he witnessed someone’s death.Johnny mentioned having to learn to walk again.It was incredible and stupid that he was still willing to climb onto a horse’s back.How could he be so stubbornly committed to this thing that nearly got him killed, but any attempt at a life with Victor was too much struggle?
He looked at Johnny’s last text to him, which was just a notification that he was bringing Taylor by.Victor didn’t have many photos of him, let alone photos of them together.His words were most of what he had.They bounced around his skull like a song he could only half-remember.He wrote out a text knowing he wouldn’t send it.
Watched some clips of your rides on YouTube.I don’t know why you would voluntarily do that to yourself, but there are a lot of things I wish I knew better about you.I wish…Victor paused, tongue pressed between his lips.What the hell.He wasn’t going to send it anyway.I wish you cared about me as much as I care about you.
