Seven
Logan
Somehow, Logan had never really allowed himself to think about what would happen if Derrick did come back. Even when he’d found out about John Hart, Malcolm and Derrick’s father, having cancer, he hadn’t even considered that Derrick would bestir his high and mighty self to come see him. After all, if Derrick had spent an entire week back home since he’d left, Logan would be stunned.
Derrick had moved on. Logan had seen the seeds of that their last night together in the hayloft. As the months had passed, and Derrick had rarely even come home for a visit, it had become completely, painfully apparent that Logan needed to move the hell on himself.
The last straw was when Derrick had dropped by this very year with a pretty girl in tow. He’d introduced her as Jessica, and with her wide, round blue eyes, strong, beautiful face, and curvy body, it had been all too obvious why Derrick would be with her. They were on a road trip, just passing through.
Derrick had a girlfriend. Maybe even the same girl that had been on the phone with Derrick before, the one who had convinced him to leave early. Not that it was any of Logan’s business. Not that he cared.
Actually, seeing Derrick with someone else, hearing the occasional things that Malcolm said about Derrick, it had helped Logan a little. And when Kyle had come to the ranch, Logan had seen something in his eyes that reminded him a little of Derrick.
They were completely different in looks, of course. But it was the expression on Kyle’s face, the sharp, restless, questing intelligence, that really got him. Kyle was a lawyer, and Derrick, apparently, was in pre-med, so even that wasn’t the same. But somehow, Logan found himself drawn in by that sexy brain of Kyle’s.
It didn’t hurt that the guy was flat out sexy as sin, either.
Kyle didn’t seem all that interested, but it was hard to tell. Kyle seemed to be the sort of guy who hid his feelings with sardonic, dark humor, but honestly, it wouldn’t even break his heart if Kyle were completely uninterested. It was just nice to feel something like this again.
He even got brave enough to do something that he wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to do even a few short months ago. At long last, he came out as bisexual to his best friend, who took it better than he would have expected. Though Malcolm seemed a bit distracted these days, but who could blame him, really?
He was moving on. Or so he would have thought until Derrick waltzed right back into his life without warning.
It didn’t end up making much difference, though. Derrick, just as he had done before on his brief visits home, did his best to stay away from Logan. Business continued on pretty much like normal, and there were whole periods where Logan didn’t think about the fact that Derrick was home at all.
Granted, they were periods of roughly six to ten seconds at a time, but still, it was progress, right?
A lot happened in a very short time, and that helped, too. First Derrick came home, and then the other Hart brother, Craig. John was still sick, but he didn’t seem to be getting worse, so while there was a lot of extra work to do, that was all for the best. It kept Logan busy, kept him from worrying about Derrick, or Kyle, or John, who had been like a father to Logan for as long as he could remember.
God knew that his own parents hadn’t been of much use to him. He had practically grown up on this ranch, and when his parents had moved away when he was just barely out of high school, there hadn’t even been any question of Logan going with them. They hadn’t wanted him, and he hadn’t wanted to go, so it had all worked out perfectly.
Logan helped out as much as he could. He was backup for Malcolm, helped with the care that John required now, and basically tried to do everything he could to forget that Derrick Hart even existed.
All that Logan had to do was wait out the summer. Derrick would be going back to school in just a few months. If not sooner. It wasn’t like Logan had exactly been asking the guy about his plans, and as far as Logan knew, Derrick hadn’t volunteered that information to anyone.
But Derrick didn’t belong here. Logan knew it now, even if he had hoped otherwise before. And Derrick definitely knew it. It seemed likely that Derrick would get bored and wander back off to civilization.
Until Logan heard, in the middle of the hottest part of the summer, in the hottest part of the day, the sound of shuffling in the hayloft overhead as he rode into the horse barn one afternoon. He would usually have been still working, but his horse had thrown a shoe, or he wouldn’t have been there at all.
Was it mice? Maybe they should look at getting a barn cat to help take care of those. But before he gave that bad news to Malcolm, one more thing on top of everything else that his best friend was going through, he wanted to make sure.
He had stayed away from this loft unless he had had a very good reason to be there. This small, cramped, sweet-smelling place had come to mean far more to him than just a simple place to store hay. He had given his heart to someone here, and the fact that Derrick hadn’t given his in return didn’t change that.
That was probably why his heart was beating so fast as he grabbed a ladder rung and swung himself up. Although even then, he felt like the movement was too loud to be mice, and not furtive enough. Even then, on some secret level that he didn’t even really acknowledge, even to himself, he wondered if it might be a person.
A very specific person.
There wasn’t much surprise, for instance, as his head poked up into the loft and he saw Derrick, sprawled out on a stack of bales of hay, his nose stuck in a book as it so often was. Derrick hadn’t noticed him, and at first, Logan wondered why, until he saw the earbuds resting in Derrick’s ears.
He had a second, which was all he would allow himself, to look. To gaze at this man who had meant so much to him. The man who had pushed Kyle right out of his head, although as time went on, Logan was getting the idea that that was probably a good thing. He couldn’t know for sure, and he wasn’t even sure that either man would admit to it, but he was getting the definite feeling that Kyle was interested in someone on the ranch, all right, but it wasn’t Logan.
There was this heat, this spark, between Malcolm and Kyle that Logan could almost swear didn’t have much to do with hatred. They had started off antagonists, but things had changed. Maybe. What did Logan know? Malcolm was notoriously a closed book about his feelings.
It should have mattered more than it did. He should have felt far more jealous looking at Kyle and seeing the other man’s dark eyes focused on Malcolm in a way that he wasn’t even sure that either man was aware of. But the jealousy which he would have expected didn’t twine through his body, not like it had when Jessica had shown up with Derrick before.
His gaze roamed greedily over Derrick’s body, the first time that he had allowed himself to do that since before Derrick had left him. Tall as ever, he’d maybe even gained an inch or two, and Derrick was a gorgeous, toned, giant of a man now. His hair had grown out and brushed his shoulders, but his cheekbones were as angular as ever, his chin as defined, his jaw as strong, his lips as sinfully full.
Derrick was, if anything, more beautiful than he had been before. And that, somehow, struck Logan as completely unfair. Of course, Derrick had never been his boyfriend, so he wasn’t really Logan’s ex now, but they had shared something. It had meant something to Logan even if it hadn’t to Derrick.
