THE QUICKEN TREE

By Agt Ant

1965

Eric had been at the barn as usual, but it was the slow time, around eleven o' clock, when the track was closed while it was being prepped for the afternoon races. All their horses had been bathed, had their legs wrapped, and had been put away. They had nothing running that afternoon. A full net of sweet smelling timothy hung over each of the stall gates.

They were in the middle of a week long, brain-frying heatwave. The back stretch was nearly empty. Everyone had either slipped away for a cold beer and some lunch at the cafe or they were lying low around their barn trying to keep cool.

There was some activitiy in the shed row one lane over from them. A groom was showing a horse to a few people who had been wandering around the barn aisles.

He had them pegged as pinhookers and obviously ones that were unaffected by the heat. They were a common sight around the track. They were looking for big horses, over sixteen hands, that weren't paying their way. The owners would usually be glad to sell them cheaply just to get them off their feed bills and then they would be re-trained as show hunters or jumpers and resold for a nice profit.

He was sitting on a tack trunk under the eave of the barn oiling a pair of stirrup leathers on a well worn exercise saddle. He watched absently as the three men started walking slowly toward their barn.

His father came out of the stall right behind him and stopped, looking down the aisle at the three approaching men. "Will you look at that now," he muttered under his breath, not taking his eyes off of them. "Go get Rebel tacked up."

He looked up at his father as if he had lost his mind. "What for?"

"Just do as I say and be quick about it," Conor snapped. "I'm going to try and unload that son of a bitch on one of these fools."

He dropped the oily rag across the seat of the saddle and got up. In that blistering heat, that had been the last thing he had wanted to hear. "Why don't you do us a favor and give him away this time," he growled, but he was already moving toward the tack room.

He took down his old forward seat saddle, a martingale, and a bridle and trudged unwillingly to the end stall. Rebel was waiting for him as would be any morning, chest pressed against the gate and ears pinned flat back against his neck.

"Get back, you bastard," he said, setting the saddle down on top of the gate. He entered the stall cautiously, slipping the reins over the stallion's neck first before putting the bridle on.

He was a five year old steel grey, leanly muscled but big boned, and he didn't have a blemish on him. He was also the worst lugger he had ever sat on. His arms and shoulders would ache for days afterwards whenever he had to ride him. He was a joke around the track, a source of embarrassment for his father. Out of seven starts he had only completed one race and that was well behind the last placed horse. Everyone knew he had speed, but what nobody had yet figured out was what psychological trauma racing was to him. Whether it was the announcer, the crowds or the combination of both, his claim to fame was the fact that he had jumped the inside rail in the homestretch in six out of seven races hehad been in. He was never going to run again, the racing stewards had seen to that.

He saddled him, leaving the girth loose, and led him from his stall. His father was standing by the tack room talking with one of the men. The other two had stopped down by the end of the barn aisle.

The man his father was talking to was blond, tall and leanly built. He was wearing sunglasses and a pair of sixty dollar factory patched levis and a white polo shirt. Up close he didn't look like a pinhooker. He looked like old money.

They both stopped talking as he approached them leading Rebel. The man's eyes behind the sunglasses were on the horse. He was smiling.

"Jesus, what a brute," he said admiringly. "Have you had a stick on him?"

His father's smile was sardonic. He was no doubt thinking of all the time and money put into that horse. Money that would have done just as well to have been flushed down the toilet. "No, but I'd guess him to be around 16.3, though he looks a bit larger."

The man nodded in agreement. "Yes, he does."

They both moved out of the horse's way as Rebel crab stepped toward them, swishing his heavy tail. Despite his racing problems, he was not a nervous horse. He was just a well-fit animal that felt too good to keep still.

The man took his sunglasses off to get a better look at the horse. His pale blue- grey eyes were vivid against his tan skin.

"This is my son Eric, Mr." His father hesitated. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."

"Morgan Cleary." The man smiled, looking at him for the first time. Those intense eyes met his with a friendly directness as he offered his hand. "Nice to meet you, Eric."

Eric hesitated a moment, recognizing the name, then extended his hand, taking his. "Same here." His hand was strong, calloused and oddly dry considering how how hot it was. But this guy looked as if he was as comfortable in the heat as he would have been in an air-conditioned room.

Morgan looked back at the horse. Eric looked at him.

He was in his late twenties, as near as he could tell. His blond hair was streaked with silver, either sun-damaged or prematurely going grey and showed a tendency to curl even though it was trimmed short. He was lean and hard fit, no extra flesh on him. He had broad shoulders, a slim waist and narrow hips. The type of body they would call clean on a race horse. His hands and wrists were large, and he had the veined, muscled forearms and taut biceps of someone who had been riding horses all his life. He had been. Morgan Cleary was one of the top three day event riders in the world.

"The track's not open right now, but Eric can trot him around the aisle for you if you'd like." His father had a hard time hiding his dislike for the rich hunter/jumper enthusiasts. He usually had no time for them at all, they reminded him too much of the people he had left Ireland to avoid. But right then he wanted to off load Rebel so badly that he was actually being civil. Conor had no idea who Cleary was and Eric doubted he would have been impressed if he had. All his father saw was a man who had money, not unlike any he had worked for all of his life. He despised him.

Eric, on the other hand was impressed. He had seen Morgan ride before. He knew he had placed 4th in the Olympic games in Tokyo last year. His dressage test had been nothing special, but he was a machine in cross country. Eric had sat in front of the TV like millions of other equestrian fans and watched what little had been shown of the horse events in between swimming and gymnastics. Morgan had been the highest placed American in eventing. He had narrowly missed getting a bronze medal. If his father wasn't aware that they were way out classed here, he definitely was. They were cheap claimers. Morgan was a grade one stakes horse.

One of the other men had moved up the barn aisle closer to them. He was around the same age as Morgan and dark haired. He was trim but he didn't look like a horseman. His skin was too pale, like he spent most of his time indoors, probably behind a desk. "Morgan," he called to him. "We've got to go."

Morgan tore his eyes away from the horse to glance at him. "Okay, I'll be just a minute." He looked back at his father. "I'm sorry you went through all the trouble of tacking him up for me. I just came down here to have a look at him because the groom at the other barn said so much about him."

"Well, looking's cheap, Mr. Cleary," his father said, his blue eyes flattening with anger. "You just look away all you want. I have work to do." Conor stalked off in the general direction of the cafe, no doubt going to grab a beer.

Morgan watched him walk away and then looked back at Rebel and then finally at him.

"I made some real points there, didn't I?"

Eric shrugged, turning away to start unsaddling the horse. Some of the skepticism he had inherited from his father showing on his own face.

"What I was going to say, was that I would like to come back tomorrow and see him gallop in the morning."

Eric placed the saddle down on the tack trunk beside the one he had been oiling earlier. He straightened, looking at him.

"I can have him on the track by seven thirty, unless that's a problem for you."

Morgan smiled at him. He had no way of knowing it at the time, but Morgan would have been up and on his second horse of the day by that time.

"No, " he said amusedly. "That'll be no problem at all."

Chapter 2

The next morning Eric first noticed Morgan around six thirty, when he was coming off the track with his third horse. This time he had come alone.

Morgan was standing on the rail beside a handful of clockers, watching the morning work outs. In the morning haze, his blond hair looked almost white. Even dressed in a pair of plain navy blue sweats, he looked eerily out of place next to the old railbirds, like coming across something unexpectedly fine at a rummage sale.

As Eric walked his next horse onto the track, it blew up right in front of him, rearing and lunging forward as another horse breezed by a little too close. After he got him under control again, back into that mincing jog trot that needled him right to dressage rider's soul, he saw Morgan grinning comradely at him. Eric might have had a small inkling of what it took to ride a cross country course, but Morgan knew exactly what it was like to gallop 1200 pounds of half broke flesh and bone around a race track. And he looked like he would have given anything to have traded places with him at that moment.

His father walked down from the barn with him when he rode Rebel to the track at seven thirty. Conor left him to join Morgan on the rail and Eric jogged the stallion out onto the track.

Rebel was his usual high octane self that day, bucking and plunging forward playfully as soon as his feet hit the deep footing. He took in double wraps on the reins and sat deep, hoping this was going to be one of his more tractable days.

"Keep that crazy mutherfucker away from me," one of the exercise boys yelled jokingly at him.

"I'll give two to one odds he doesn't even make it around," another one said.

The rider that had come on the track right behind him laughed. "I'll take a piece of that action. How much you got?"

"Hey, Eric, you shoulda put your jumping saddle on that son of a bitch."

He left him behind. Rebel made the first sixteenth pole in a series of leaps and bounds, but after that, he got his long legs untangled and started to gallop. And he could gallop. In the mornings, without the distractions of the loud speakers and the crowds, he could burn up the track.

Eric kept him in the center away from the rail, just breezing him. It would be an easy half hour workout and then back to the barn.

A little while later he pulled him up, having caught his father's signal from the rail. He jogged Rebel back to where he stood with Morgan.

"Why don't you take Mr. Cleary with you back to the barn." Conor told him. "I'm going to find the horse shoer."

He watched his father walk away without even a backward glance at Morgan. Conor was good at that kind of dismissal of people he didn't like. He had a masters degree in the art of being an asshole. Morgan didn't seem to notice though, or care if he did. Eric sat on the horse waiting for him to walk over to him.

Morgan stopped at Rebel's head, his hands in the pockets of his sweat jacket. "He's quite a puller isn't he?"

"He's that," Eric agreed, taking off his helmet. The sun was already burning off the fog. It was going to be another blistering day. He pushed his wet hair back out of his face. "Did you want to see something else?"

Morgan smiled, looking at the horse. "No, that was fine. Thanks."

They headed back to the barn. Having cut the edge off his energy level, Rebel walked with his head down and swinging on a fairly loose rein.

"You've got a good clock," Morgan said as they walked past the long lines of shed rows. Horses were standing out in the aisles being sponged off. Others, draped in long flowing coolers, were being walked under the eaves. Radios were playing softly as grooms, pushing wheelbarrows filled with soiled bedding, cut back and forth across the aisles to clean stalls.

"What?"

"A clock." Morgan looked up at him, tapping a finger to his forehead. "I watched you earlier with your other horses. You were good."

"Oh." He meant an internal stop watch. Good exercise boys had them. If a trainer said to go out and ride a half mile in fifty and change, he got a half mile in fifty and change. "Thanks."

"How long have you been riding?"

"How long have I been alive?"

"That long?" Morgan said amusedly. "Your dad told me you were into dressage."

They had reached his father's barn. "Conor told you that?" He slipped down off the horse. "He must be half ploughed." He set his helmet down on the tack trunk. Since Rebel was his last horse of the morning, he had to sponge him off and walk him himself. He handed Morgan the reins and started unsaddling the horse. Rebel fidgeted, steam rising off of his sweaty back.

He set the saddle down on the tack trunk and went down the aisle to Rebel's stall to get his halter. Paulo, his father's groom, had already set out a bucket of warm water for him. He picked it up along with a clean sponge and walked back to where Morgan was waiting for him with the horse.

Morgan had taken his jacket off and was standing with his back to him in just a tee shirt and sweats. There was a dark line of perspiration on his tee shirt that started at the middle of his shoulder blades and ran down the middle of his back disappearing into the waistband of his pants. Following it down with his eyes, Eric noticed the hard tight curve of his ass despite the loose fit of his sweats.

Eric blinked, looking away. He had no more business looking at Morgan than if he had been on of his father's clients. He had conditioned himself a long time ago. Anyone or anything remotely relating to his father was strictly off limits. The conditioning had been so thorough he had to wonder if he could even get it up at the track.

He handed Morgan the halter and lead shank and set the bucket down. He watched him take the grey's bridle off and slip the halter on, pausing a moment to stroke the horse's head with one of his large hands. That small gesture of kindness made Eric like him.

"You spoil him, you've bought him," he told him jokingly.

Morgan looked back at him, his hand still rubbing the horse's face. "So, what's the story on him?"

He shrugged, picking the sponge out of the bucket. "You've probably gotten an ear full already." He started to sponge the horse of, starting right behind his ears. "He's okay in the mornings. Just a bit of a lugger like you saw. But he comes unglued in the afternoon as soon as he hits the homestretch."

Morgan's eyes were on the horse. "So he really did jump off the track."

He smiled, dunking the sponge in the bucket again. "Six time."

"How fast was he going at the time?"

He applied the sponge to the horse's withers and worked his way down. "A good clip. He didn't even touch it, didn't even shorten his stride. Just popped over it and galloped across the field."

"How high is that rail? About four feet?"

"Give or take."

Morgan whistled softly.

"Yeah," Eric agreed. "The stewards will never let him run again. He's considered a rouge. The only way Conor got stall space for him this time is that he told them he was using him for a pony horse."

"You think it's the grandstand?" Morgan asked. "All the noise?"

"It could be," he said. "It probably is. We tried him in blinkers and ear plugs. Nothing helped. Sometimes I wonder if it's not just the vibration coming from the stands." He dropped the sponge back in the water an picked the bucket up, taking it around to the other side of the horse.

"Do you have your horse here?"

He hesitated, looking at him, the sponge against Rebel's neck. "My horse?"

Morgan smiled at him. "Yeh, your dad did say you were into dressage."

"Oh, that," he said and squeezed the warm water out of the sponge, letting it run down over the horse's neck. "I have a full brother to this horse that I fool around with a little."

Morgan laughed.

Eric glanced over at him. "What?"

"Nothing," he said, his pale eyes sparkling in his tan face. "It's just he said you were into it and I've never met anyone who was into dressage just a little. It seems to be an obsession."

He shrugged. "I have to work. I don't have time for obsessions."

"Do you have a trainer?"

Eric gave a short laugh, shaking his head.

"What?" Morgan asked.

"My father," he answered him.

Morgan didn't get it. "Your father is a dressage instructor?"

He shook his head at him. "No, but he wasn't always a trainer at the track either. He used to be a steeple chase rider back in Ireland before he fucked his back up. A pretty good one." He rested his hand on Rebel's withers, looking at him. "But the reason I laughed is that my father thinks he's the final authority when it comes to training a horse. He'd shit his pants if I even suggested going somewhere else to take a lesson."

Morgan smiled at him. "I like you dad."

He raised his eyebrows, looking at him dubiously.

Morgan laughed. "Yeh, I know the feeling isn't mutual. That's okay. He reminds me a little of my own father. He was Irish too."

He nodded. "Cleary is a good Irish name."

"How long have you been here?"

He bent over, dunking the sponge back in the tepid water. "Around six years now."

"You miss Ireland at all?"

Eric thought about the small place he had come from and how everyone he met on the street had known he was Conor's son. And he tried to visualize into that small town, the last year and a half he'd spent here, cruising every theater, bar and alley way. He shook his head. "Not really. My dad talks about going back every now and then when he's had a few. But I think I'd stay here."

He finished sponging the horse and went over to the tack box to get a sweat scraper. Morgan was still looking at Rebel, oblivious to the fact that his sweats were splashed with mud clear to the knees from the horse's bath. He liked that about him. He even liked his upstate New York accent.

"I need another green horse like I need a hole in my head," Morgan said softly.

"I was surprised to see you this morning," he said. "I thought you would back out."

"No," Morgan said. "I did want to see him. He's certainly a good looking horse and a good mover. A little climby in front, but that's okay. Most jumpers are." He was looking thoughtfully at the horse. "Does he hack at all?"

He set the sweat scraper down on the tack box. "A little. Since Conor said he was going to make a pony horse out of him, I rode him around a bit so it would look like we were making the effort."

"Do you think he would hack over a fence or two?"

He smiled. "I didn't get that far with him. We never thought what he did naturally was an asset enough to encourage it."

Morgan nodded. "I don't suppose you did. Has he been sound?"

"He doesn't have a pimple on him."

"Then he wouldn't have any trouble passing a vet check?"

Eric shook his head. "No, not at all. Are you interested?"

Morgan looked reluctant. "God help me," he murmured. "Yea, I'm interested. I'll geld him right away if I get him. I'm a little surprised your father didn't do that."

"He didn't think it would help."

"Maybe not." Morgan knelt, running his hand down Rebel's front legs, his thumb tracing the back of his tendons, looking for old scar tissue. He glanced up at him. "How does he haul?"

He shrugged. "I've seen worse."

Morgan stood up again. "Can you haul him to Bridgehampton tomorrow so I can have a vet take a look at him?"

"Sure."

"Good." He handed him the lead shank and went over to the tack trunk to retrieve his jacket. He picked it up and took his wallet out of the pocket. "I've got to go home tonight and pick up my son, but I'll be back tomorrow afternoon. " He opened his wallet, looking for something, finally taking out a card. He handed it to him.

"That's the vet's number. You can call him if anything comes up and you can't make it."

Eric turned the card over and looked at it. It was for an equine veterinary hospital out in the Hamptons. He was loaded all right.

"Do you know where it is?" Morgan asked him.

"I've hauled horses over there before."

"Great," Morgan said. "Why don't you meet me around two."

Chapter 3

At around two thirty the next afternoon, Eric pulled their two horse trailer through an antique brick gateway that bore the inlaid sign, Fox Den. He had been there a couple of times before, hauling horses for his father's clients.

He drove along the oak lined entrance way. Dark stained wooden fencing enclosed the pastures on either side of the black top drive. It was a huge facility with two twenty stall cinder block barns, indoor as well as outdoor arenas, and a fair sized cross country course. In the centre of all of this was a veterinary hospital, probably one of the largest on the east coast. But what had drawn his hungry eyes when he had been there before was the immaculately raked dressage court. Having ridden Max for the past two years on any large piece of empty, hard ground he could find, the sight of that sand footed arena was enough to haunt his dreams at night.

The black top drive turned into gravel as he pulled in front of the hospital. Smelling the strange horses, Rebel let out a loud bellow from the trailer and scrambled, shaking both the truck and trailer. That started up a loud outcry of whinnying from the horses in the barn.

"I hope he uses a dull knife, you bastard," he muttered under his breath. He made the turn into the parking area, the gravel crunching loudly under the tires. He pulled in between two truck and trailers and cut the engine.

He got out, walking around the back of the trailer to get to the tack compartment on the other side. He stopped, seeing a boy around his youngest brother's age, maybe six or seven, standing up on the running board of the white pickup that was parked right next to him.

The boy had his arm slipped through the slightly cracked open window, trying to unlock the door. He wasn't having much success. His arm wasn't long enough.

"You want to watch it. I think that's called breaking and entering," Eric said to him, opening the tack compartment door. Rebel was shifting restlessly in the trailer making it rock.

The boy withdrew his arm from the window and looked at him solemnly. "It's my dad's truck."

"Oh," he said enlightenedly. "That makes it all right then." He reached inside the compartment, taking out a lead shank.

The boy's hazel eyes were studying him thoughtfully. He had a wild thatch of chestnut curls and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose. He was dressed in a tee shirt and jeans and a pair of high top sneakers. "You think you could get it open for me?"

Eric moved closer to inspect the window. "Sorry, kid," he told him. "My arm won't fit through there."

He watched him stand up on tip toe on the running board again, slipping his hand through the window. He stretched his short fingers as much as he could trying to reach the button, teetering there precariously.

"I think you better get down before you slip and break your arm."

The boy glanced back at him a second before doing what he was told and hopped down of the running board. He looked up at him. "Why are you here?"

Eric smiled. He was a cute kid. Precocious as hell. "I'm here to see the vet about a horse."

"So's my dad."

"Is that a fact?" He started walking toward the hospital, the boy tagging along behind him. As he approached, he could see Morgan's blond head at the front of the barn where he stood holding a chestnut horse. There was another man with him, kneeling down, examining one of the horse's front legs.

"Aren't you going to unload your horse?" the boy asked him, half jogging to keep up with him.

"As soon as I find out where I need to take him."

"I'll ask my dad." He ran ahead of him toward the barn, slowing down as he got close to the two men with the horse. He was obviously used to being around horses enough not to startle them. He watched him walk over to Morgan and reach up, laying his hand on his arm to get his attention.

Morgan looked down at him for a moment as the boy said something to him and then turned, looking across the gravel drive at him.

So that was the son he mentioned yesterday. Eric smiled. He should have known.

The other man stood up and went back inside the barn. Morgan watched him as he crossed the drive toward them.

"You're early," he said when he reached them.

"Yeah, I thought I'd give myself some time to get tacked up."

Morgan nodded. He'd obviously ridden earlier that day. He was wearing a blue and red polo shirt, rust breeches and a pair of brown Dehner field boots that must have set him back two hundred bucks. They were sweat stained on the inside of the calves. "How did he haul?"

"You didn't hear us drive in?"

Morgan smiled, small lines forming at the corners of his grey eyes. "I was actually hoping that wasn't you."

Eric shrugged. "He was okay." He looked down at the boy who was systematically going through his father's pockets, probably looking for the keys to the truck. Morgan was oblivious to the search. He obviously spent a lot of time with him. "What do you want me to do with him?"

The boy had found the keys. Morgan took them away from him, laying his hand on his shoulder to still him when he tried to take them back. "There's an arena behind the barn with a couple of jumps set up. You can take him around there. I left my tack on the gate for you."

"Okay." He smiled at the boy who was squirming under Morgan's hand, trying to get away. He couldn't help thinking that the father would have the same mass of curly hair if he let it grow out.

"Do you need help unloading him?" Morgan asked.

"No, I'll be fine. Besides, it looks like you have your hands full already," he said, nodding at the boy.

Morgan looked down at his son and smiled affectionately. "That I do," he agreed. "What do you want with the keys, Chief?"

The boy had both of his hands wrapped around his father's one large one, trying to get him to let go. "I want to get my Superman comic out of the truck."

"I think it can wait."

"Daaaad..."

Morgan looked back up at him. "I need to get this horse x-rayed, then I'll be right over. Just hack him around for a few minutes until I get there."

"Okay."

Chapter 4

Eric walked back down to where the truck and trailer were parked and unloaded Rebel. The big horse scrambled down off the ramp and raised his head, staring intently around at his strange surroundings. He let out another ear shattering bellow.

Eric walked down the ramp after him. "Hush," he crooned, threading the lead chain through his halter, over his nose, and hooking it to the opposite side. He walked the prancing horse across the gravel parking area toward the arena.

Morgan had left an all purpose saddle with a couple of pads and a loose ring snaffle bridle hanging on the arena gate. Eric led Rebel inside and started tacking him up, glancing around the arena. A couple of low, cross rail jumps were set up along the rail. Morgan, no doubt, wanted to see how Rebel handled himself over a couple of fences.

He tightened the girth, let his stirrups down and got on. Rebel bounced around a little to begin with in the strange arena but eventually he got down to business. He had a nice ground covering trot like his brother. After coveting an arena like this one for so long, he regretted that now that he had the opportunity to ride in one, it was on Rebel and not Max.

He'd been warming him up for about twenty minutes when he saw Morgan cutting across the grass on his way over to him. His son trailed behind him holding his comic book. The boy went up to sit in the gazebo at the end of the arena and Morgan came over to stand by the rail. Eric walked the horse over to him.

"I've been watching from the barn," Morgan told him. "He looks pretty good."

"He's not bad." Eric looked down at him, noticing that a gold chain had slipped out from the collar of his shirt. There was a small gold medallion hanging from it. He was pretty sure it was a St. Christopher medal. A nice Irish Catholic boy, he thought amusedly. "You want to get on?"

"Yeah, I do." Morgan climbed over the arena fence and he slipped off the horse. Morgan let the stirrups down a little. He was a couple of inches taller than him, around six foot. Eric watched the play of the muscles in his back beneath the thin cotton shirt as Morgan tightened the girth another notch. The rust breeches did nothing to hide his ass like his sweat pants had the day before. He was as hard and smooth as polished stone.

Eric held Rebel's head as Morgan got on. When he rode him away from him, Eric walked over to stand by the rail and watch him.

He looked good on a horse, not too tall. And he was lean and athletic so he moved cleanly with him.

He started trotting Rebel in a large circle at the other end of the arena. He was too green to do much else with him. Morgan just wanted to get a feel of how he moved.

About the time he had completed two circles with him and was returning to the rail, a couple of broodmares with foals came galloping up the hill in a nearby pasture. Rebel exploded, getting in four huge leaps before Morgan got him under control again.

"Dad?" Eric heard the soft, questioning voice behind him. The boy must have heard the commotion when Rebel took off and had looked up to see his father literally flying across the arena. It was the first word he had heard from him since he had climbed into the gazebo.

"He's okay," Eric told him, still watching Morgan as he made another circle at the end of the arena and then finally trotted the horse down the long side toward them again. Morgan had a big grin on his face. Eric had always thought that eventers were a little bit crazy. Now he knew for sure.

Morgan trotted Rebel by him, still grinning. "That was nice."

He watched him trot up the other long side, away from them this time. "Mad as a hatter."

Morgan rode around a few more minutes without any major blowups and then got off. He ran his stirrups up, and unbuckled the reins, passing them through the throat latch of the bridle before buckling them again around the horse's neck.

Eric went over to the gate and picked up a whip he had seen there earlier, then walked out into the middle of the ring to help Morgan.

Together, they blocked Rebel on the rail so that he would have to go over the two jumps that Morgan had set up. He jumped them easily, even after they raised them a couple of times. His knees were tucked up tight against his chest and his hocks almost touched his rear. He was a natural jumper.

Morgan watched Rebel, smiling. He was around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but he was a big kid out there. And this was his playground. It was easy to see why he was so good at his sport. He was in love with it. Completely. Head over heels.

Finished, they walked a slightly quieter Rebel up to the barn. The boy walked along with them, holding his father's hand. They walked the horse onto the rubber matted floor of the barn aisle and this time Eric held his head while Morgan unsaddled him. The boy walked over and sat down on a bag of shavings and promptly started reading his comic again.

A lab tech from the hospital came and led Rebel away to get him x-rayed. They settled down for the wait. He sat down on another bag of shavings and Morgan leaned against the wall next to his son. The kid had barely taken his nose out of the comic since he had gotten it out of the truck.

"Big Superman fan?" Eric commented.

Morgan looked down at the top of his son's head and smiled. "You don't want to get him started."

"I guess you have to watch that he doesn't put on a cape and dive off the barn roof."

"No," Morgan said, looking over at him. "He doesn't want to be Superman. He's more interested in being Perry White." He looked back down at his son. "Isn't that right, Chief?"

The boy looked up from his comic, putting on a convincing scowl. "Don't call me Chief."

Eric laughed.

Morgan smiled down at the boy indulgently. "See what I mean. He wants to be a newspaperman."

"You mean he doesn't want to be an eventer like his old man?"

"No," Morgan said quietly, somewhere else for a minute. "He takes after his mother's side of the family. His uncle is a writer." Something about the mother bugged him. Maybe he and his wife weren't getting along. Then he came out of his reverie as suddenly as he had gone into it. "Hey, I'm sorry. I haven't even introduced you," he said. "Eric this is Carl. Carl say hello to Eric Whelan."

"We already met," Carl said honestly.

"Don't be rude," his father prodded him.

The boy let out a dramatic sigh, putting his comic down and got up off the shavings, walking over to him. He put his small hand out. "I'm happy to meet you, Mr. Whelan," he said seriously, glancing back over his shoulder at his father for approval.

He took his hand, shaking it. "I'm glad to meet you too, Carl. But just call me Eric."

Carl looked back at his father. Morgan nodded. "Okay, Eric. You can call me Carl."

Morgan put his hand over his face, suppressing his laughter behind it.

Eric watched the boy go back to his comic, thinking about his two brothers and what rough young animals they were in comparison. "He's a nice kid," he told Morgan.

He smiled at him. "Thanks."

Chapter 5

The barn was a quiet orchestra of sounds. Horses eating in their stalls, the occasional blowing to clear the dust out of their nostrils. The soft clanking of the water buckets as they drank. It smelled sweet, of fresh hay and clean pine shavings. These were the lullabies of Eric's childhood, the safe aromas of his nursery. And for the first time, in a very long time, he had no where to go, no where he had to be. He felt a strange contentment settle over him, as warm and unstable as winter sunshine. He could have sat there forever.

Morgan and he had started out talking horses while they waited for the x-rays, swapping war stories, showing battle scars. They were from two entirely different worlds, but they connected here.

Morgan told him about the big chestnut gelding that he had been holding when Eric arrived that afternoon. That had been Catamaran, or Cat as he called him. He was one of Morgan's first string horses. Actually, his best horse, the one he had ridden to fourth place in the Tokyo Olympics. He had been riding him a couple of days before, at home, when he had felt there was something not quite right about him.

"He wasn't lame, he wasn't even really acting sore." Morgan had sat down on the bale of shavings next to his son while they talked. "He just wasn't as forward as he normally is. I got right off and made an appointment to bring him down here."

"What did it turn out to be?"

"He has a bone chip in his right knee. I can't really say when he got it." Morgan wasn't looking at him. He had picked up a lone stem of hay from the immaculately swept barn aisle and was threading it through his long fingers. Some part of him was always in motion. He had that high energy level, like most athletes. Up close it was like a live current of electricity that crackled off of him.

"What's the vet's prognosis?"

Morgan shrugged, but he could tell he was concerned. Pretty good after surgery. His joint looks clean which means it had to be a recent injury." Morgan glanced down at Carl, who was leaning against him sleepily, still holding his comic. He put his arm around him, and eased him down gently until the boy lay curled up on his side, with his head in his lap. Morgan left his hand on his shoulder. "After they remove the chip, he'll be off for eight weeks at the very least, which shoots down my plans for this fall. I was going to take him to Europe and try him at Burghley this year."

"That's too bad."

"It's a disappointment," Morgan agreed. "But as long as he comes back okay, that's what really matters. He's only an eight year old. What he's done already is incredible for a horse his age. I'm lucky to have him."

Eric smiled, looking at him, noticing he didn't wear a wedding ring. Morgan didn't wear any jewelry at all, except for the St. Christopher medal that was now back inside his shirt. He had a plain black faced watch strapped to his left wrist. The boots were clearly expensive, but that was all. There was nothing really flashy about him. But he exuded wealth like a fine thoroughbred. And he could talk about flying a horse to Europe as casually as Eric might mention a trip to the corner market. Everything in Eric's upbringing told him to distrust and dislike him for that, but he found he couldn't do it. There was a natural openness about Morgan, a genuine friendliness that drew him to him. "What about your horse, Eric?" Morgan asked him. "What are you doing with him?"

He shrugged. "Not much. I get to a show now and then to watch. I pick up some things and try to work on them with him. But most of the time we use him as a pony horse."

Morgan gave him a curious look, as if trying to figure out anyone who would use their dressage horse to pony thoroughbreds. "Is he a good mover?"

"I think so. He has three pure gaits." He had stressed the word pure without really meaning to do it and Morgan smiled broadly at him. Eric had to smile back inspite of himself. So much for trying to pretend that dressage was not an obsession for him. He gave himself away with one word. "If I had the time and the help, I think he could be pretty good."

Morgan nodded. "It would be very hard to be self taught in dressage."

"Yeah, I know," Eric said resignedly. "But lessons aren't really an option for me. I couldn't afford them."

"There are a lot of ways around that if you really want to do it," Morgan told him. "You could become a working student for someone in the afternoons. You could be a groom or even ride," he pointed out. "You're certainly more than qualified to do that. I'm sure you could work out a deal in exchange for lessons and board for your horse."

His comments no longer chafed him the way they had the day before. Knowing him a little better, Eric believed Morgan would have a hard time understanding how anyone could not do something that they really wanted. It wasn't in him. "I don't have the time," he explained. "I have two younger brothers that I take care of in the afternoons. They're six and eight. Too young to be leaving on their own."

"Oh," Morgan said enlightenedly, looking down at his son, who was sleeping soundly then, head still in his lap.

And Eric wondered if he really did understand. Morgan was close to his son there was no doubting that, but did he really know what it took to look after a child twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Right then the only reason he might have had the boy, was that his wife was at the hairdresser.

"What about your mother?" Morgan asked, looking back at him again. "Couldn't she help out? Or does she work?"

"She's gone," Eric said bluntly.

"I'm sorry."

He shook his head. "I didn't mean she was dead, although she might be for all I know. She went out to get my father a beer six years ago and that was the last we saw of her. My youngest brother was just an infant at the time."

"How old were you?"

"Eleven." Eric got up to stretch his legs, glancing down at the sleeping boy. He smiled. "He's really out, isn't he?"

Morgan looked down at his son again. "Yeah, he is," he said. "I had to get him up at five-thirty this morning. He's not a morning person."

"I guess it's a good thing he's going to be a newspaperman then, isn't it?" Eric moved away, up the barn aisle, stopping in front of a stall to watch a bay thoroughbred gelding eat. He must have been a colic surgery. He was swathed in support bandages from his withers to his flanks.

A short, stocky middle-aged man in a khaki shirt and pants came out to the hall way just a few stalls down from where Eric was standing. He had to be the vet. He was the same man he had seen examining the chestnut's knee when he walked up.

Eric followed him back down the barn aisle to where Morgan was still sitting with his son.

"Everything looks great," the vet said when he reached Morgan. "I don' think you're going to have any problem doing whatever you want with that horse."

That was a relief.

Morgan smiled up at him. "Thanks, John."

"Glad it worked out." The vet started to walk away, then stopped, looking back at him. "I had one of my guys take him out back to give him a bath. Do you want him cut while he's here?"

"No, I'm going to wait until I get him home. Thanks."

"No problem. I'll see you in the morning."

"I'll be here." Morgan looked back at him after the vet left. "He's doing the surgery on my horse first thing in the morning."

Eric nodded. That was going to cost him a piece a change

"I'd better get you a check." Morgan started untangling himself from the boy. "Hey, Chief," he said softly. "i'm going to lay you down here on the bag. I've got to go down to the truck and write Eric a check."

"Kay," the boy mumbled, still half asleep.

They walked down to the parking area together and Morgan unlocked his truck, getting a check book out of the glove compartment.

Eric reached inside his father's truck and took out Rebel's Jockey Club papers. He signed off on the back of them.

Morgan sat sideways in his truck, behind the steering wheel, check book in hand. "So, how much does your father want for him.?"

"Twenty-five hundred." He said it before Morgan barely had the question out of his mouth.

Morgan glanced up at him a second. He had to know that he was being clipped. He could have bought a green horse like Rebel anywhere for a thousand. His father had told him to ask for fifteen in hopes of getting that much. But Eric figured Morgan could afford the extra grand, and they could haggle for awhile. But Morgan just looked back down and started filling out the check.

It made Eric feel a little bit guilty. He watched Morgan sign the check, noticing he was left-handed.

Morgan tore the check off and handed it to him. "They hold dressage clinics here once a month," he told him. "Usually with top notch instructors. If you can't do weekly lessons, maybe you get in one of those."

Eric looked at him, thinking here he had just clipped the guy for an extra fifteen hundred and Morgan was still trying to figure out how he was going to get lessons. "Maybe I could do that," Eric said, handing him the registration papers.

Morgan got down from the truck and leaned back inside, putting the papers with his check book back into the glove box. He shut and locked the door, then turned back to him. "Who's got your brothers now?"

"A neighbor," he said. "I pay her to take care of them until I get home."

Morgan nodded, his grey-blue eyes going over his face thoughtfully. "Well, I hope you get to do something with your dressage, Eric," he said flatly. He offered his hand to him and smiled. "It was very nice doing business with you."

Eric took his hand, shaking it. "Same here."

Morgan headed back across the parking area toward the barn and his sleeping son.

Chapter 6

Eric drove back to the track and handed the check over to his father. He didn't expect a thank you or even a congratulations on a job well done. And he got no surprises.

Conor just stared down at the check made out for fifteen hundred dollars more than he had been expecting. Finally, he said. "Well, it looks like you've learned something about horsetrading from your old man after all these years."

Eric looked at him, still feeling guilty about the extra grand he had taken off Cleary. "Yeah," he said dully. "I guess the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree."

The next morning, still bolstered by the good afternoon he had spent there, Eric called Fox Den to get information on the dressage clinics. After going through a chain of people he finally got the woman who booked the clinics on the phone.

There was a lot of polite dancing. What was his name, who did he ride with, what level was he riding, what kind of show experience did he have. He had a name, the one he was born with. He rode with no one. He believed he was riding at second level, and no, there was no show experience.

The woman was quiet a long time on the other end of the line and he could imagine her thinking, who the hell gave this bloody idiot the idea he could ride in one of our clinics. Finally, she said. "How did you find out about them?"

That was easy. "I was there yesterday with Morgan Cleary, and he mentioned them. He said I should try to get in." As true as it was, it still tasted dirty coming out of his mouth. He had already taken a thousand dollars off the man, did he have to use his name a well.

But all of a sudden whistles blew and bells rang. "Well, you know they fill up fast," the woman told him, her whole tone completely changed. "I can't get you into the one next weekend unless there's a cancellation, but I will put you on the list for the one coming in July."

The easy part behind him, Eric waited until that night after dinner to break the news to Conor. They were sitting in the kitchen of their small two bedroom flat, a beer in front of each of them. Conor was going over his client's accounts. His brothers were in the next room, lying on the floor in front of the television.

Eric watched his father as he figured the bills. The big, raw-boned man would be sixty that year, but looked older. Life and his love for the bottle hadn't been kind to him.

"I need some time off," Eric told him.

Conor looked up, his blue eyes studying him. "What are you talking about?"

"The place I was at yesterday has dressage clinics one weekend a month. I want to start taking Max."

"Why would you want to throw away good money on that?"

Eric shook his head at himself, wondering why he still made the effort to talk to his father. He was a cold, bitter man who blamed everyone and everything for what had happened to him in his life. He wondered what Conor might have been like if he had never been injured and hadn't been forced to take a fob he was no good at, for people he couldn't stand. But the man who had carried him on his shoulders to watch a dressage exhibition when he was a child, and taught him to ride his first pony was dead. He'd been dead a very long time.

"It's my money to waste," Eric told him coolly. "And it's something I want to do."

Conor narrowed his eyes at him. "And who's going to be looking after your brothers while you're off all over the county doing this?"

"I'll take care of that, too."

"You'll take care of it," Conor said sarcastically.

"Like I always have," Eric said, meeting his father's cold flat eyes. "It's just one weekend a month, a couple of hours each day at that. That's all I'm asking for."

"And why?" Conor demanded. "What can you learn there that you don't already know?"

He didn't' even try to answer that question. "Conor, I work all the time. I look after Tim and Jackson every damn day of the week. I just need an outlet for myself."

"You need an outlet. A bloody fuckin' outlet." Conor stared at him incredulously. "You're out every other goddamn night of the week now, you greedy tom cat. I would think that that would be enough outlet for anyone."

That, Eric couldn't answer. They had never discussed what he did with his nights, though there couldn't be much doubt what it was when he came crawling in late, reeking of sex. And inevitably, when his father found out who he was really spending his nights with, that blind hatred that Conor was so good at, would turn on him as well. Eric had no doubts about that.

Conor took his silence for being angry. He wasn't often angry at his father, he had found out a long time ago that raging at him was not going to change anything. If anything, being angry at him revealed his own weaknesses, and Conor would go for the soft underbelly like a predator every time. Eric had always figured that when his resentment of his father became strong enough, he would just leave. And that was the fine line they had both walked carefully along for quite awhile.

"All right," his father said, backing down first this time. "Do whatever the hell you want. You'll do it anyway. You're just like that bitch mother of yours."

Eric walked out into the living room where his brothers watched television and a little while later he heard his father go out the kitchen door and down the back stairs.

He sat down on the floor between the two boys. Tim, the smart, funny one and Jackson, quiet and good hearted. Tim was the older at eight and the good looking one. When he'd been a toddler and Eric had taken him outside to play, women had come over all the time exclaiming what a beautiful boy he was. He was light and lean and agile as a cat. Jackson, at six, was steady and thoughtful. He would grow up to be a big strapping man like his father. All three of them were black haired and brown eyed like their mother. And if it hadn't been for those two boys, Eric would have probably left a long time ago.

Eric had never resented his mother for leaving him. He had never belonged to her anyway. From the moment he could sit his first pony, he had belonged solely to his father. A chip off the old block, by age six he could ride anything he could crawl up on. And what he couldn't get up on on his own, Conor put him on.

No, Eric didn't resent his mother. He couldn't imagine what kind of emotional wasteland she had lived in with Conor. She was probably lucky to get out intact. And he couldn't really even say that he missed her, he hadn't known her that well. But what he did resent was that she left those two babies alone with him when he was nothing more than a child himself. Tim and Jackson had deserved better than that. A feral cat took better care of her young.

"What's the matter with Dad?" Tim asked him.

"Nothing a pint of whisky won't cure." His brothers didn't even know their father. They had no contact with him. Eric had acted like a buffer between them for so long he had to wonder if they would even know each other if they met on the street. And that had been a mistake. They would have to deal with him sometime, because eventually he was going to have to leave. Eventually, Conor was going to find out what he'd been doing with his nights.

"Why don't you two get your shoes on and we'll go to a movie."

"Really?" Jackson asked, excited. They didn't go out much.

"Really," Eric said. "Popcorn, candy, and sodas, my treat."

They both got up and ran for the bedroom that he shared with them. His heart ached. If there was anything that he actually loved in his life, it was his brothers.

The next morning, his father handed him two hundred and fifty dollars. It was his commission for selling Rebel. When the track closed for prepping, Eric took his brothers with him to a tack shop and bought himself a pair of breeches and a decent pair of used riding boots. If he was going to crash the clinic, the least he could do was be dressed for it.

That evening, the woman from Fox Den called him back. There had been a cancellation at that weekends clinic. She wanted to know if he wanted to take the riding times on Saturday and Sunday. Eric jumped at it.

Riding Max for the first time in an actual dressage arena was a high he had never known before. He was as giddy as a young girl on her first date. The instructor that time was a short blond man with a thick accent who had ridden on the Hungarian three day team many years ago.

That first clinic went well. Eric got a lot of encouragement. Max got a lot of praise. The instructor worked on his riding position on the first day and on Sunday Eric came back with a better feeling of his horse and what he needed to do with him.

He went home on fire. He rode his horse for the next month and read everything he could get his hands on. At his second clinic, the instructor was an FEI judge from Germany. He helped him with collection and lengthening. Max felt like he could canter a circle on the head o a pin, and Eric was starting to get that nice rubber band feel in his hands from the reins when a horse was becoming very supple and light. He couldn't wait for his work day to be over with so he could ride his horse.

By the third clinic, Eric would have ridden over anyone or anything that had tried to get in his way. He had found what he wanted to do with his life and it had nothing to do with the race track. He was in his element and he was in love. Completely. Head over heels.

Chapter 7

In September, Fox Den sponsored a clinic with Guenter Hoehn. He was a former Olympic gold medalist with the German dressage team, a FEI judge, and was at that time a moderator for dressage judges' forums all over the world. The clinic drew a lot of interest from spectators, even from the non-dressage community of show jumping. Three day eventing was well-represented as well.

Hoehn usually only taught riders at fourth level and above at his clinics, but due to the fact that there was a lack of upper level horses in that area and that he had been a faithful participant at the last three clinics, Eric managed to get in. But he was way out of his league this time. He was riding with the big boys now.

Eric pulled in at 7:00 for a 9:30 lesson. He parked the truck and trailer in the area marked for participants behind the barn and unloaded his horse.

There was already quite a bit of activity around the barns for that early in the morning. Folding chairs lined one side of the dressage arena, three deep. Auditors were paying twenty dollars each to watch the clinic for the two days. Already people were filling the seats for the first lesson that was to start at 7:30.

It was a beautiful day for it. Sunny, with high white clouds and a nice breeeze that would keep it from getting too warm. A courtesy booth had been set up at the end of one of the barns. There was a commercial sized urn of coffee inside and two tables covered with trays of pastries.

Eric led Max down the shed row barn that faced the dressage arena and put him in a stall. He had made arrangements to keep him there overnight so that he would be able to watch most of the clinic. He walked down to the courtesy booth and got a styrofoam cup full of coffee and then headed back to the trailer to get his tack.

He had spent his afternoon the day before grooming Max. His dappled bay coat was gleaming and he spent extra time rubbing him down that morning with a soft cloth until he shone like patent leather. He was a huge horse, bigger than Rebel, around 17.1, and massively built. He had the feet of a draft horse.

Eric got his horse saddled by eight-thirty and got on him, riding him down to one of the jumping arenas to warm up. Max was good that morning, soft in his hands. Eric was looking forward to a good lesson.

At 9:25, he rode down to the dressage arena and when the rider from the previous lesson left the ring, Eric rode in. Hoehn walked out to talk to him in the center of the ring.

Guenter Hoehn was a tall, dark man in his mid-fifties. He had a wolf-like expression, sharply arched eyebrows and sharp teeth. He looked feral when he smiled, but he was actually a very nice man, soft spoken and very generous with praise.

Hoehn asked him how he had gotten interested in dressage. At second level, Eric was a new comer to the sport compared to anyone else riding that day. And having participated in only three clinics before that one, he was virtually an infant. Hoehn knew his background. He'd been interested enough to ask beforehand about each of his students.

Eric told him the story of how his father had introduced him to dressage as a child, by taking him to a dressage exhibition. And how he had first become interested in it because he believed it was something his father respected.

"So, do you still feel that it's something he respects?"

Eric smiled, thinking of what Conor's opinion would be of this place and everyone associated with it, including himself. "I'm afraid you'd have to ask him that."

There was some laughter from the side lines. Hoehn smiled up at him. "Do you think you made the right choice?"

"Yes, I do."

"That's unusual," Hoehn said. "Ireland doesn't normally produce many dressage riders. The main interests over there are show jumping and three day eventing. I'm surprised you stayed in dressage."

"I was never interested in anything else."

"So, you don't jump at all?" Hoehn asked.

Eric smiled at that question. "Oh, I can jump," he said. "My father was a steeplechase rider. I could jump my pony before I ever started school." He looked down at Hoehn, still smilng. "But I used to watch the steeplechasers when they were turned out at our farm, and we had some show jumpers around, too. I used to watch a horse that I knew could jump a seven foot puissance wall, that wouldn't jump a four foot pasture fence on his own even when he was upset that the other horses were leaving him." Eric paused for a moment thinking about what he wanted to say. "And then I saw a grand prix dressage horse turned out in a field once, and when that horse moved he used everything he had ever been taught. He was more balanced, more supple than any other horse I had ever seen. His training had actually made him better even for himself. I never forgot that," he said. "And after that, all the rest of the disciplines didn't seem to amount to a hill of beans."

Hoehn laughed softly. "I think there are one or two riders here today that are going to take that a little hard. And it's not going to help much that I happpen to agree with you."

Eric smiled down at him. "Thanks."

"Well, Eric," he said. "Why don't we go to work."

Eric started Max out on the rail at a working trot. It was during his second circuit of the ring that he saw Morgan for the first time. He was standing alone behind the seated auditors, watching him from behind his sunglasses.

His lesson went well. Hoehn went over some old issues with him and they covered some new ground. It made Eric look eagerly forward to his lesson the next day. He rode Max out of the arena on a loose rein.

Morgan had not moved during his lesson. He had stood outside the arena watching the entire forty-five minutes. And as Eric rode out of the arena, passing the next rider coming in, he saw Morgan turn and start walking along behind the auditors toward him. Eric stopped his horse outside of the arena and waited for him.

"Excuse me," Morgan said. "Was that a hill of beans? If I repeat it, I want to make sure I don't misquote you." He stopped in front of him. His hair had lightened up even more over the summer and had taken on platinum highlights above the darker blond under pelt, and he was deeply tanned. He had his shirt sleeves rolled back and his long, muscled, veiny forearms looked almost hairless because of the tan.

Eric smiled down at him. "I guess I got a little carried away."

Morgan smiled back. He was obviously going to ride too that day. He was dressed in a crisp, immaculately whte shirt, rust breeches and the brown Dehner boots he had seen him in before. And he had on wide, red suspenders that accented his shoulders and lean frame.

"You had a nice ride, Eric," he said, his smile warm, friendly. "It's good to see you again."

"Thanks. Same here." He was flattered that he had remembered him, it had been almost three months. And he was flattered even more that he had taken the time to watch his lesson.

Morgan took off his sunglasses, slipping them into his shirt pocket and looked up at him. It was like being hit by high beams. Against his tan, blond hair and the white shirt, his normally light eyes were brilliantly blue. "You know, I've had people coming up to me all morning, asking how I know you."

Eric was embaressed by that. "I'm sorry," he told him. "When I first called about getting into a clinic I mentioned your name. The woman I talked to assumed that I knew you."

"That explains that," Morgan said, smiling up at him, the same warm smile as before, tiny crows feet forming at the corners of his eyes. "And you do know me," he pointed out. "I'm just glad that you got in. You needed to do this. But I think you misunderstood what I meant."

He stared down at him, still not understanding.

Morgan was looking at Max then. "I think you were holding out on me before. You kept this one hidden in the barn."

Eric glanced down at his horse who was contentedly standing on a loose rein. "He's okay." He looked back at Morgan again, thinking that he had changed the subject. "How's Rebel doing?"

"Great," Morgan said. "He took the let down so well that I had him gelded last month. Then I turned him out to pasture."

"He must love that. He hasn't been turned out since he was a foal."

"Yeah, I think he does," Morgan agreed. "I'll leave him out until November, let him relax a little. And then I'll bring him in and start working him when I turn my other horses out. I'll have more time for him then."

"Has gelding him helped at all?"

Morgan smiled. "Well, he's a couple of pounds lighter anyway." He came closer, laying one big hand on Max's bridle, and the other hand rubbed the gelding's cheek thoughtfully as he looked at him. He had done the same thing to Rebel when he had come back to watch him workout at the track. "This guy reminds me of the horses they're riding in Europe. They're all big like this. Everyone over here thinks dressage and immediately thinks about the Spanish Riding School. That only a Lipazzaner can be a dressage horse."

Eric looked down at him, noteing the hard line of his shoulders beneath his shirt and the pronounced way that the veins stood out on his hands and arms. The same way the small capallaries would rise to the surface on the thin skin of a thoroughbred after a run. Morgan had been fit when he had first met him, but whatever he had been doing over the summer, he was thriving now. The sheer physicalness of him radiated off of him in a warm and vibrant glow. "I guess I'm lucky. All I've ever had were thoroughbreds to work with."

Morgan smiled up at him "Well, you were lucky with this one anyway." He patted Max again one more time before letting him go. "He's going to do real well for you."

"Thanks." Eric had forgotten how likeable he was. How he had still thought to tell him about these clinics after he had fleeced him for the extra thousand. He had no real reason to look him up today or watch his lesson for that matter. "What time do you ride?"

"Right after lunch," Morgan told him. "When you hear Guenter swearing, that will be me in the ring."

Chapter 8

Eric rode Max back to the barn, unsaddled him, and rinsed him off with a hose at the end of the aisle before putting him away. Then he walked back over to the arena to watch some of the clinic.

Eric saw Morgan on and off all morning when ever he came over to the arena to watch a little of whatever lesson was taking place before wandering off again. He got the impression that Morgan wasn't really interested in dressage, and that if it hadn't been a phase of his sport, he might have ignored it altogether. A lot of eventers were like that.

They got into their sport because of a love for cross country. Having to slow down and collect a hard fit animal in a sixty by twenty meter arena was not something they enjoyed doing. It made him curious about why Morgan had stood outside the arena to watch his lesson earlier that morning.

It was the first time he had ever really been around Morgan in more than a one-on-one situation. It was the first time he had ever watched him work a crowd, except work wasn't exactly the word for it. People seemed to be drawn to Morgan as if he gave off some direct gravitational pull. And except for that time that he had spent by the arena watching his lesson and the few minutes he had spent talking to him afterwards, he never saw Morgan alone. He was an interesting study.

Throughout the morning, Eric watched riders just walking over from the barn go out of their way to run into Morgan. He saw him signing autographs for a couple of female auditors back behind the rows of folding chairs. Once he had seen him standing with a couple of pony clubbers who must have just gotten finished with their own lessons in another ring, and had come up to watch some of the clinic. They were a couple of hero-worshipping, ten year old boys and Morgan stood between them patiently answering their questions as if there wasn't another place in the world right then that he would rather be.

But, Morgan was seldom still for very long, his blond head distinctly visible as he moved amid the crowds of people scattered over the stable yard. He appeared to be genuinely courteous to everyone, regardless of who approached him, always gracious and obviously more than generous with his time. And Eric couldn't help remembering how he had even made his son get up and shake his hand when he first introduced them. Just one well brought up Irish Catholic boy raising another.

Lunch was catered that afternoon, something that was also different from the other clinics he'd attended. Fox Den had a big spread laid out on tables at their clubhouse. At lunch break, Eric walked up with the rest of the horde, hungry and thirsty and ready to relax a little while in the shade. Picking up a sandwich from one of the trays, he saw Morgan sitting at a table on the veranda with a couple of other riders, relaxed, one elbow hooked around the back of his chair. The seat next to him was empty and if Morgan had been alone right then he might have gone over and sat with him and asked him what he had meant earlier when he said he had misunderstood him. But he wasn't alone. So Eric took a coke out of an ice chest and walked back down to the barn to eat by himself.

He sat on a bale of straw outside of Max's stall and ate his lunch in the shade of the eave. And afterwards, he smoked a cigarette, resting his head back against the cool cinder block wall of the barn, eyes closed, relaxed. This was the hard part about coming to these clinics. Each time it became even harder to go home again. Being able to ride, to enjoy what he was doing, was like a sweet escape that he had to come back from way too soon. And this would have to last him for awhile. Conor was packing up his barn and moving all of them to Florida in two weeks. He was going to miss it.

He sat there sunburnt and still a little high off of his lesson, and horny as hell. He hadn't been out for awhile. That night he promised himself that he would go out and find some guy that would help him get this load off and he would stay out all night with him. Conor and his barn and everything else be damned.

It was a nice thought, but finally, he had to pull himself back. He put his cigarette out in his coke can and got up to take care of his horse. He led Max out of his stall and hooked him onto the cross ties underneath the eave. He went back over to where he'd put his tack next to the stall gate and picked up his brush box and brought it back over to his horse and began to groom him. It was quiet around the barn. Everyone was still up at the clubhouse eating lunch.

He started out using a hard brush to break up the stiff way Max's coat had dried from being just hosed down and put away unbrushed. Then he switched to a soft body brush and began to strip away any last residue of dirt left on him. He was well into his job.

"You know, it's okay to take a break once in awhile."

Eric looked up from brushing his horse's tail and saw Morgan, alone, walking toward him under the eave. He had a half eaten apple in his hand. He took one last bite out of it and stopped in front of Max, feeding him the rest of it. The gelding munched on it appreciatively.

Eric straightened, letting go of Max's tail and looked at Morgan, resting his arm on the gelding's hip. "If you make a pet out of this one, I'll get no work out of him tomorrow."

Morgan smiled letting the gelding inspect his hand for more treats. "If you get anywhere near what you got out of him today, I think you should be pretty pleased." Morgan scratched the gelding's neck and then walked by both of them as he continued on his way down the barn aisle. He stopped three stalls down from them, taking a halter off a hook by the gate and went inside. He came back out again leading a chestnut gelding with a bald face. He hooked him on the cross ties.

Eric watched him as he knelt down beside the horse to take off his standing bandages. It was still quiet around the barn. Hoehn was takin an hour and a half lunch break between the morning and afternoon lessons. Morgan's lesson was the first one right after the break. He had to saddle his horse and warm him up before everyone else was back from lunch.

"How's Carl doing?" he asked him. Morgan glanced over at him.

"He's fine, thanks for asking."

"You didn't bring him with you?"

"Not this time. He's with his aunt and uncle in Virginia, visiting his grandmother." Morgan got up and went around to the other side of the horse and knelt down again to take the wraps off on that side.

Eric put his brushes back in his box and picked it up, carrying it around Max and setting it down by the rest of his tack."So when are you going to start showing your horse?" Morgan asked, standing again. He laid the pile of bandages on the bale of straw outside his stall and went to a tack trunk on the other side of the gate, opening it.

"I don't know," Eric said honestly. "I really hadn't thought about it yet." He walked over to where Morgan had put his wraps and picked them up. He sat down on the straw and started rolling them. It was a habit. It was something he did so often he didn't even think about it.

"Why not? You're more than ready." Morgan took a portable radio out of the tack trunk and set it on the ground beside it. He dug a little deeper and came up with a couple of brushes along with a couple of toy trucks. He shook his head a little putting the trucks back and then went back over to his horse. He looked over the gelding's back at him, taking in what he was doing. "You do plan on showing him don't you?"

Eric set the rolled bandages back down on the straw. "I suppose that would be the next step," he admitted. "It's just that getting into these clinics was a big deal a couple of months ago. I really hadn't gotten much farther than that." He watched as Morgan started brushing his horse using quick long strokes just to get the dust off. "Besides, we'll be leaving in a couple of weeks anyway, so there wouldn't be much point in making plans here."

Morgan had stooped down to run a brushover the geldings front legs. He stopped, looking over at him. "What do you mean, leaving?"

He shrugged. "Conor got a wild hair to go to Florida this fall, so like the tinkers we are, we're heading down south in two weeks."

Morgan straightened, looking thoughtfulfor a moment, then he shook his head and came around to the side of the horse where he was sitting. He started brushing him again, his back to him. "So this was just a spur of the moment decision or had he planned it?"

Eric watched him as he brushed his horse, taking in the hard, clean lines of him. "I guess you could say it was spur of the moment," he said distractedly. "We usually stay around New York, but Conor said he was tired of the cold weather, it was killing his arthritis. So he thought we'd go south this year for the winter."

Morgan shook his head again. "How do you feel about it.?"

"What do you mean?"

Morgan shrugged, not looking at him. "I don't know. I guess I was just wondering why now after you're doing so well here, suddenly you have to leave. Your father doesn't strike me as the type of man to do anything unless he's given it a lot of thought beforehand."

"What does that mean?"

Morgan shook his head. "Nothing really. I was just thinking out loud."

Eric narrowed his eyes at him. It was one thing for him to say something about his father or their lifestyle.

It was another thing entirely for someone else to do it. He looked down at Morgan's two hundred dollar boots, suddenly angry. "We move around. It's what we do. A couple of months here or there. Belmont, Aqueduct, Saratoga, and Finger Lakes. We go wherever the racing is. That's what life is, if you work at the track."

Morgan stopped brushing his horse andturned to look at him, obviously surprised by the anger in his voice.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that." His light eyes looked down at him, studying him a moment. "I know that moving around comes with the territory. I was just wondering how it was going to effect your riding, that's all."

Eric looked at him a long time trying to read him, not seeing anything in his expression but that same open friendliness he had always seen there. Slowly, his defenses relaxed. "I don't know," he said quietly. "I'll look around when I get there and try to find some clinics like these. And if I can't, I'll just have to put it on hold for awhile."

Morgan glanced back at Max. "And go back to using him as a pony horse?"

"I have to put him down as something useful. Dressage horse doesn't impress the barn managers when you're asking for stall space."

Morgan smiled at him, but Eric thought he saw something else in his eyes.

"What?" he asked him.

"You have no idea do you?" Morgan asked, still smiling.

He bristled again. "About what?"

Morgan put the brushes he'd been usingback in the tack trunk. He closed the lid and sat down facing him. " I told you earlier that people had been coming up all morning asking how I knew you. What did you think I meant by that?"

"I don't know," Eric said truthfully. " You said that I misunderstood you."

"Because you did," Morgan told him, meeting his eyes steadily."You've stirred up quite a bit of talk around here. People want to know where you came from, who you rode with."

Up close, without a horse between them, having all of Morgan's attention on him was a little disconcerting. Straight or not, Eric was attracted to him. Enough so, that his self imposed strict conditioning didn't seem to work around him. "I told you, I've never had a dressage instructor before."

"I know that," Morgan said. "But it's hard to see you ride and believe you've never had a lesson until recently. I watched you and I had a hard time believing it."

"Well, it's the truth," he said flatly. "What do they want to do, revoke my privileges to ride here? That's fine, I'm gone anyway."

Morgan smiled at him again. "Do you always wear that chip on your shoulder? I'm telling you good things here. I'm not trying to piss you off." Morgan looked at him awhile, trying to read him, finally shaking his head at the mask Eric knew he was wearing. "You are one talented kid," Morgan said softly. " Anyone watching you out there today knows that. You sure as hell impressed me. I can't believe that no one else has told you that yet."

Eric looked at him dubiously. "I just come here to ride. I don't pay attention to what anyone else might have in their head."

Morgan nodded. "That's good. Riding is all you should be thinking about. But I just thought I ought to warn you, that no matter how much attention you're drawing, your horse is drawing that much more. That is one incredible horse," he said, nodding at Max. "Do yourself a favor, Eric, don't sell him. You're going to get offers, but don't do it. You'd find it pretty hard to replace that one."

Eric looked at his horse standing quietly on the cross ties. "I guess you're trying to tell me I shouldn't be using him as a pony horse any more."

Morgan grinned at him. "Jesus no," he said. " But I know of a least three people here today that would have a coronary if they knew that was what you'd been doing with him."

"I'll have to break it to Conor then," he said. "That'll go over well."

Morgan was looking at him thoughtfully.

"Does your father watch you ride?"

He wondered at his interest in his father. "He can't help but watch me ride. I'm right there with him."

Morgan smiled a little, nodding. "I don't think your father's blind, Eric. He might be thinking a move to Florida right now would be a good thing."

Eric finally got what Morgan had been implying earlier. He couldn't believe he hadn't seen it himself. He could usually read Conor better than that, but he'd been blind-sided by the clinics and his riding. Morgan was probably right, the old bastard figured if he got him down to Florida he could get him to forget about all this 'crap' as he called it.

CHAPTER 9

When Morgan rode his horse down to the arena to warm up, Eric wrapped Max's legs and put him away for the day. He should have left right after that, but he wanted to watch Morgan ride again. So instead, he walked down to the arena with the returning auditors.

Dressage at the advanced level of three day eventing was equivalent to a third level test. Rule of thumb was, if a horse and rider were showing at one level, they were schooling at the next highest level at home. Morgan was competent at fourth level, would have probably had no problems showing at it, and at that level had had more of an education in dressage than Eric.

Hoehn greeted Morgan warmly. "Well, Mr. Cleary, it's good to see you again. After the way I filleted you at my last clinic, I was wondering if I would."

"My ego took a beating and I was on Maalox for a couple of days," Morgan admitted, smiling down at him. "But I got over it."

Hoehn smiled. "I'm glad to hear it. Let's see how much of my lesson you took to heart."

Eric stood outside the arena watching, admiring Morgan's toughness with what could have been a difficult horse. The gelding was a puller, and too much on the muscle like most thoroughbreds. He could see the effort it took for Morgan to keep him under control from the corded muscles in his forearms and the slight backwards tilt of his body. Holding a twelve hundred pound horse back that really wanted to explode, with no visible signs of control, involved that small area of the back just below the shoulder blades. That's where twelve hundred pounds of impact took place. That night under the shower head, every battle of that forty-five minute lesson was going to come back in painful detail. He could only hope for Morgan's sake, that his wife gave a good back rub.

But, Morgan's lesson for the most part, went well. It was the tightly controlled dressage of an event horse, not the supple, fluidness of classical dressage, but it wasn't bad. And Morgan's style of riding was very military, not unlike many of the best dressage riders of the world. He was good. He just didn't have a love for it. It was as confining to him as it was for the bear cat he was riding.

The only real rough spot came during an extended canter down the long side of the arena. Morgan's horse, glad to be let out after all the collected work, got up a head full of steam and took out the rail at the corner of the ring, sending it flying, before Morgan could get him back under control again. No real harm done. The fence around a dressage arena was usually no more than eighteen inches high and portable. It just took a couple of quick moving grounds keepers to move it back in place again. There was some comraderly laughter from the sidelines. Even Eric had to smile.

Hoehn looked on stoically. "You know, Mr. Cleary, we don't generally think of the rail of a dressage arena as having the same purpose as the catch line on an aircraft carrier. It's not there to keep you from dropping off into the ocean in case you've over shot your landing."

Morgan's response was the same big grin that he'd had on his face when Rebel had taken off with him.

His lesson over, Morgan walked his horse out of the arena and headed for the trail that ran around the cross country course to cool him out. Eric returned to the barn to pack up his tack, getting ready to leave for the day even though he would have much rather stayed and watched the rest of the clinic. He didn't want to go home. It was as if when he came to these clinics, some part of this world entered his bloodstream, and he couldn't seem to get it out again. It was something like being poisoned. But the poison being injected was meant for his other life, his real life, because the only thing being affected was that. His growing dissatisfaction with his life at home was slowly eating away at him.

Eric knew that he purposely avoided his father for days after every clinic. He knew that he didn't want to deal with his negativity. He didn't want to deal with the way he ran down something that had become so important to him. That was Conor's way and he should have been used to it. He just wished he had never had to let him know about the clinics in the first place, because telling him about them just brought it to Conor's attention how important they really were to him, and that was a foolish thing to do. And now, if the move to Florida really was an effort by Conor to get him to give up his riding for awhile, he didn't think he would be able to hide his resentment, the way he had hidden so many other things over the past few years. If it were true, Conor was walking pretty close to that invisible line.

Eric made one trip to the horse trailer with his tack and went back to the barn to get the rest of it.

Morgan had come back while he was gone. He had his horse on the cross ties and was unsaddling him. He had turned his radio on low and rock and roll was playing softly from a top 40 station.

The pungent aromas of wet horse hide and saddle leather hung heavy under the eave of the barn. The same smells Eric associated with the first time he had begun to notice the naked bodies of the other riders in the showers at the track and realized what feelings they aroused in him. Back before he had learned to separate anything having to do with his sexuality, essentially anything that had to do with his real feelings at all, from that environment that was his father's world.

Eric allowed his eyes to trail down over Morgan's back to his ass and then down to his tautly muscled thighs, scarcely hidden beneath the rust colored breeches, as Morgan took his saddle over to the tack box and set it down beside it. "I'm going to take off," he said quietly, to Morgan's back, but didn't make any move towards the rest of his gear. He was stalling, he knew, but what the hell. He really liked this man and after tomorrow, in all probability, he would never see him again. What would it hurt to talk to him for a few more minutes, if only just to feed his own ego. Morgan had been extremely nice to him earlier. He'd actually been nice every time he'd seen him. It was no wonder why he liked being around him.

Morgan straightened, turning around to look at him. "Oh," he said softly. He must not have heard him walk up. "Okay." Under the eave and out of the afternoon sunlight, his eyes looked grey, and Eric thought that this was probably the closest to their real color. They went over his face thoughtfully. "You can't stay for the rest of the clinic?"

"Not today," Eric said. "Our neighbor has had my brothers all day. If I don't get home soon there'll probably be a homicide."

"I hear that," Morgan said. He knelt down and started taking off his horse's splint boots. "What time do you ride tomorrow?"

He looked down at his blond head as Morgan unbuckled the heavily padded boots. His short, thick hair was wind combed and curling from his lesson. "Same time, 9:30. What about you?"

"At 3:00," Morgan said, getting up and coming around to his side. He knelt again, his back to him. The red suspenders outlined his shoulder blades, accenting his leanness.

Another rider came up then, on his way to the courtesy booth. He was in his early thirties, dressed in breeches, boots and a t-shirt. He was wearing a Yankees baseball cap. Eric recognized him. He was one of the owners of the farm.

"Morgan, how you doing?" the man greeted him warmly. "Saw your lesson. You left most of the arena up this time."

"I came out of it with most of my ass in tact, " Morgan agreed amiably, looking up at him from where he knelt. "Guenter must be in a good mood."

The man grinned, clapping him on the shoulder. "I'll catch you later," he said and walked on.

Morgan straightened, slapping the two boots together, knocking off some of the sand that they had picked up from the arena.

"You did have a good lesson," Eric told him. watching him clean off the boots.

"Thanks," Morgan said looking up at him, smiling a little.

Eric shook his head at himself. Here he was some dumb kid, who had gotten his head swelled a little bit, telling a world class rider he'd had a good lesson, like he knew what the hell he was talking about. Like he really did belong here with these people. Who was he kidding? Maybe his father was right. It was better that he left now before he really made an idiot out of himself. "I've got to go," he said brusguely.

"If you have to," Morgan said, shrugging. "But if you like, they're having a party up at the club house for Guenter after the clinic is over this afternoon. It's no big deal. You could even come back and bring your brothers with you if you wanted." He rolled the boots up together and buckled the outer one to keep them closed.

Eric thought about his brothers running wild across that pristine landscape and smiled. "Thanks, but I don't think I can."

"Okay," Morgan said simply, smiling at him. "But, I'd like to talk to you tomorrow...." He hesitated, looking past him.

Eric turned and saw one of the pony clubbers from earlier that morning standing behind him, holding what looked like a magazine.

"What do you have for me?" Morgan asked the boy, encouragingly.

The shy, skinny ten year old moved closer, holding out what Eric could now see was a program of a three day event. Morgan was on the cover, riding his horse, Cat, over a large, imposing bank. "I brought you that program to sign that I was telling you about."

"That's great," Morgan said, tucking the boots under his arm and taking the program from him. "Do you have a pen?" The boy handed him one. Morgan began to write on the cover. "You know, this was one of the easiest fences in Tokyo."

"Really?" The boy looked up at him, rapt, with hero worship plain in his round, blue eyes.

Morgan handed him back the program. "It looked tough when I walked it, but riding it was easy. It was almost like going over a cross rail." He looked at the program again. "The picture came out nice though."

"Yeah," the boy said, staring at what Morgan had wrote. "Thanks." He wandered off holding his treasure.

Eric shook his head, laughing softly at himself. He wondered if he stood there long enough, how many more of the people there that day would eventually make it over to Morgan. Most of them? All of them? Like bees to honey, he thought. And who was he to say anything? He was standing there, wasn't he? He laughed again.

"What?" Morgan asked him.

"Nothing," he said, smiling at him. "I was just wondering how you ever got any work done with the revolving door you have around you."

Morgan didn't understand. He wouldn't, he thought. He didn't have it in him. Morgan wouldn't have been able to turn anyone away that came up to him, anymore than he would have been able to be deliberately rude to someone. He was just a nice guy. And that made him an easy touch.

"He's a good kid," Morgan said. "He just joined a pony club group that I give clinics to every couple of months."

Eric just smiled at him.

Morgan looked at him amusedly. "You want to tell me what's so funny?"

Eric shook his head. "Nothing really," he said. "You were starting to tell me something when the kid walked up."

Morgan hesitated a moment, trying to figure him out. "Yeah," he began slowly. "I was just saying I wanted to talk to you tomorrow."

"What about?"

"I was thinking about something when I was cooling my horse out earlier," Morgan said, still considering him. "I just wanted to run it by you and see what you thought."

Eric looked at him curiously. "What is it?"

Morgan smiled at him. "Why don't we wait until tomorrow," he said. "I want to think about it a little more first."

Chapter 10

Eric drove home with his elbow resting out of the open window of the truck, the cooling afternoon air blowing in on his face. He had a raging sunburn despite his tan and a nice, warm tiredness in his bones. It had been a good day for him. He hoped this feeling of euphoria would last.

He picked up his brothers from the neighbors and then walked across the hall with them to their own apartment. He changed from breeches and a t-shirt, to levis and an old sweatshirt, and then loaded his brothers into the truck for the drive to the track. He had to help his father put his barn to bed for the night.

He pulled in through the barn gate and drove around to the front where the stable office and small cafe stood. During the slow time, around mid-morning, the cafe would be packed with trainers and exercise boys, but right then it was quiet. The afternoon racing was still going on. It was probably about time for the fifth race in an eight race card.

He let Tim and Jackson out of the truck in front of the cafe. He took a five out of his wallet and handed it to Tim. "Get you and your brother something to eat with this," he told him. "Don't let me come back here and find you've spent it on pinball."

Tim looked at the bill appraisingly and then back at him. "Couldn't we have a little more?"

"More?" Eric asked him. "What did you do with the money I gave you yesterday?"

"We spent it," Jackson said, standing outside beside his brother, his dark head barely visible above the seat of the truck. Tim nudged him with his elbow to silence him.

Eric held back an amused smile. "All right, I'm getting the both of you jobs in the afternoon walking hots and mucking stalls." He took another dollar out of his wallet, hanging on to it when Tim reached for it. "Food in both of you," he told him. "I'm not cooking dinner tonight."

Tim rolled his eyes at him. "Okay."

Eric let him have the money. "Be right outside at seven and don't go anywhere else," he warned them.

Tim smiled at him, folding the money up and stuffing it importantly into the pocket of his jeans. "We won't."

Eric leaned over and roughed the top of Jackson's curly head. "Mind your brother."

Tim shut the truck door and Eric watched the two of them until they went into the cafe and he could see them climb up onto the stools at the counter through the large pane glass window out front. And then slowly he drove the truck away down the narrow dirt aisle to his father's barn.

Eric parked at the end of the shed row and got out, walking down to his father's stable.

Conor had sixteen horses in training right then. It was the most he had ever had. He had been doing well since the beginning of summer. The move to Gulfstream had been a little surprise to Eric because of that, but then he fully believed most of the horses would be going with them.

Eric started going through the routine of his afternoon chores. Beginning at the end stall, he went inside each one, checking the horse over, making sure it was cool and comfortable. Thoroughbreds, like any athlete pushed to the edge all the time, were fragile creatures. They could run up a temperature in a matter of hours, or a leg could fill up from the stress of an injury or just a hard work out.

He checked leg wraps, slipping his fingers between them and the horse's leg, looking for problems. Then he took a pitch fork and picked up any fresh manure from the stall that the horse had done since the stalls were cleaned that morning. He tossed it out in the aisle to be picked up when he was finished with all the horses.

Conor had nothing running that day. All sixteen horses were in their stalls.

He was on his second stall when Conor walked up, looking in over the gate at him.

"So, you decided to grace us with your presence."

Eric looked cautiously at him over the back of the horse he'd been checking. He didn't like the sound of his voice. Conor didn't usually drink at the barn, but he might have had a beer too many during the mid-morning break. The buzz might have started wearing off a little, making his mood turn ugly. "I told you I'd be gone most of the day," he said, going back to running his hand over the horse's croup.

"Pardon me," Conor said sarcastically. "That you did." He hung around the stall gate watching him.

Eric felt the tiny pin pricks of unease on the back of his neck. He went through the motions of examining the horse, running his hand over its hock and then checking the leg wrap, making sure it wasn't too tight and there was no heat underneath it. Conor hadn't moved away from the gate.

Eric straightened slowly, looking at him again over the horse. He made his expression flat, unreadable. "What do you want?"

Conor's sharp blue eyes were on his face, looking for a way under the mask. "Since when do I have to have a reason to chat with my son? I was just going to ask you how the lesson went today."

"I'm touched, Dad," Eric said, with sarcasm of his own, meeting his father's eyes. "I really am. Now why don't you get off my back and let me do my work." He changed sides on the horse and started going through his routine again, this time with his back to his father.

Conor stood there a while longer, watching him. He could feel his eyes burrowing into his back. Finally he said. "The roan we got in last week came back this morning with a bit of filling in his left foreleg. You might want to put a sweat on it."

"All right, I'll take care of it," Eric said, never looking up from his examination of the horse.

Eric checked all of the horses, saving the roan gelding for last. He did his usual routine exam on him and picked the stall. Finished with that, he pulled the wrap off of the horse's left foreleg. There was some swelling, but it didn't look like a bow. He went over the surface area of the leg, looking for a cut of any kind. A thoroughbred's leg could blow up over just a pin prick of a cut. He didn't find anything like that. He picked up the discarded wrap and went out of the stall.

Conor was close by, filling out a training chart on a clipboard outside of one of the stall's. "How is it?" he asked, not looking up.

"Not bad," Eric told him. "I'm going to put a sweat on it just to be safe."

Conor nodded. "Good. I need him in top shape if we're taking him to Gulfstream."

Eric walked down to the end of the shed row to his father's office. It was in a group of four separate twelve by fourteen rooms, two up, two down. There was a set of them at the end of each barn aisle. Sometimes the grooms would live out of these rooms during a meet, using the communal bathrooms and showers. Most of the trainers used them for offices or tackrooms.

Eric went inside and opened up the trunk where his father kept all of his medications. He took out a bottle of a furason-DMSO concoction he used for making a sweat, along with a pair of latex gloves and a tooth brush. Then he picked up a tube of syran wrap and a roll of sheet cotton and headed back outside.

Eric put everything in a bucket along with a clean leg wrap and went back to the stall. Conor was still working on his training charts. Eric took the horse's halter off a hook by the side of the stall gate. "Are you hiring a van to ship the horses?"

Conor looked over at him. "No, we're going to go piggy back with a few other trainers heading down there. I've already checked around for empty trailer space. It'll save us some money."

"You got rides for all sixteen?" Eric looked at him in surprise. "What's going on? Is there some kind of exodus to Florida this year?"

"No," Conor said casually. "I got space for just nine. That's all we'll be taking."

He was dumbfounded. "Nine? What about the other seven?"

Conor shrugged. "The owners decided they wanted to keep their horses up here where they could keep an eye on them. Good bloody riddance to them."

"Why go at all then?" Eric asked him. "Couldn't you just stay up here and keep all of your horses? Wouldn't that make more sense?"

"I told you why," Conor told him sharply. "I'm not going through another cold winter and besides that," he said, glancing over at him. "I was thinking that maybe we'd just stay down south for awhile. Do the southern tracks for a change."

He stared at him in disbelief. What Conor was suggesting bordered on the insane. The southern state tracks were widely spread out, and just that, from state to state. Some of them were not much better than the bush tracks found at the local fairgrounds. When they had first come from Ireland, and Tim and Jackson were babies, they had followed the southern meet, even traveling as far as Tijuana, Mexico. It had been a hard couple of years until Conor had gotten enough experience in American flat racing, before they had headed up north to New York, where they had been more or less settled for the past four years.

Going back on that grueling southern circuit would make it nearly impossible for him to find any clinics, but the effect of it would be devastating on his two brothers. And it made no sense. "You can't be serious," Eric said.

Conor gave him a cool look. "Did I ask your opinion?"

"Those southern tracks are spread out all over hell and back," he argued with him. "You can't just yank Tim and Jackson out of school like that, every couple of weeks. It's one thing to take them down to Gulfstream for a few months over the winter and come back here where they're used to it. At least up here, when the meet closes, they move on with the other trainers' kids, to schools they already know. It's still a tinker's life, but it's got some security."

"You did it and you survived all right," Conor pointed out. "It made you tough."

"Yeah, I'm tough all right. I grew up in a fucking barn with no friends at all, Conor," Eric told him angrily. "And I barely got through high school. That's how I survived. Try to do a little better by your other two sons."

"You spoil the hell out of them. It's time they learned they live in a working family. And by the way, while I'm thinking of it," Conor said cooly. "I didn't get rides for the pony horses, so I sold mine. I'll buy another when I get down there. And I have a good offer for yours as well."

Eric stared at him, unable to take it in at first. He'd been so focused on Tim and Jackson, that he felt like someone had come up behind him and knocked the wind out of him. Now it all made perfect sense. "You did what?"

"I sold my pony horse," his father said again. "And I have a fifteen hundred dollar offer for yours. You'd better take it before they change their mind."

Eric believed Conor was capable of a lot of things, but he hadn't really wanted to believe that this move to Florida was a scheme to keep him away from the clinics. He had wanted to believe that Conor was better than that. But this...this was way beyond that. It was so far over the line, that he couldn't even respond to it yet. Finally, he found his voice. "If you think I'm selling my horse, you're out of your goddamn mind."

Conor's eyes narrowed at him. "Don't be a fool. That's good money for him. And you can always buy another when you get where we're going."

"I'm not selling him," he said flatly, unable to process the rage he was feeling. Resentment had been too soft a word for what he was feeling right then. Christ, how could he have been so stupid. Morgan had only met his father twice and he had him pegged for the bastard he was in two minutes.

This was not about his horse and they both knew it. Conor couldn't make him sell his horse. And it wasn't about the move either. It was about the clinics and it was about his brothers. And it was about how low his father would sink to get his way. Conor knew he wouldn't be able to stand seeing Tim and Jackson being drug from place to place, from school to school, the way he had been. Conor knew the weakest spot he had and he went for it. And he'd been so stupid. He hadn't even seen it coming.

Eric jerked the stall gate open and went inside with the gelding. He put a halter on him and tied him to the ring embedded in the concrete wall.

He could hear Conor outside hanging up the clipboard. And then he was in the stall with him.

"I want to know what the hell's been going on at these clinics you've been going to," Conor demanded. That was it. The cat was out now. "Every time you come home from one, you have your head so far up your ass nobody can talk to you. That's going to stop right here and now."

"You've got what you want. Just leave it alone," Eric warned him, his voice low. He set the bucket down at the front of the horse and knelt down to start working on its leg. He slipped the latex gloves on, and took the bottle of the DMSO mixture out of the bucket.

"Look," his father said, the sharpness gone from his voice, obviously believing the truth of what he'd said. "You have to watch these people, Eric. I know them like the back of my hand. They'll fill your head about how good you are, and how you'll be that much better if you'll just spend a little bit more of your hard earned money. And then they'll snatch it away just like that."

Eric looked up at his father angrilly. "And what do you think I am, Conor? Do you think I'm any good?"

Conor stood by the stall gate, his gnarled hands on his hips. "You know what I think," he said. "If you listened to me at all, you'd have your license already and you'd be riding steeplechasers and making good money."

They hadn't talked about that in a long time. Eric had thought that idea was dead and buried, somewhere along the lines of his father's drunken musings about going back to Ireland. Eric stared down at the bottle he was holding in his hand. That hadn't been the the answer he was looking for. "That's you, not me," he said softly. "That's what you've always wanted. I've never wanted that."

"Then what do you want to do? You want to ride show horses?" Conor demanded. "Go ring around the rosie with a bunch of pampered sons of bitches that don't even know which end of the horse bites." He looked down at him, his blue eyes hard. "That's a rich man's sport, Eric. You don't belong there. "

"I don't know what the hell it is I want," he said exasperately. "But I just have this one thing I do for myself. And I wish you could leave it the fuck alone. And goddamn you for using those kids against me."

Conor stood staring at him for a few minutes. "All right," he said finally. "You don't want to let this go. Then you find a ride for your horse to Gulfstream. And when you get him there, you find a place to keep him, because I'm not having him in my goddamn barn."

"Fine," Eric said flatly, not looking up. "I'll do that."

"You're goddamn right," Conor muttered. "And you miss a minute of work playing with him and I'll cut your wages. I thought I raised you to have more goddamn sense than this. I don't know what the hell is the matter with you."

"What the fuck is the matter with me?" Eric exploded, glaring up at his father. "You bastard. This thing I'm doing with Max. I'm good at it. That's what the fucking matter is, and you know it." He met his father's angry eyes. "And because of that you have to piss on it like an old dog. Because you're afraid I might just get out from under you long enough to see that there's something else out there. Something better than a pint to look forward to at the end of the day."

"You think I'm afraid of that, do you?" Conor asked him, raising his voice for the first time. "Well, let me show you the goddamn door."

"Don't bother," Eric said, his voice low again, lethal. "I know where it is."

They glared at each other, Eric kneeling on the ground beside the horse, his father by the stall gate. They'd had battles before, major ones. As much as Eric tried to keep to himself, there was a limit to how much he could take from Conor before he blew up. But nothing had ever been as bad as this. And even though all Eric wanted to do right then was walk out of there, he couldn't do it. And Conor knew that, because he had him tightly by the balls.

"Look, you want to play hard ball, all right, I'll play back. We both know you have me anyway." He looked up at his father, trying to read him. "I'll make you a deal. You stay here. You don't pull those kids away from their friends and school, and after tomorrow, I'll give it up for awhile. I'll keep my horse, but I'll stop going to the clinics."

"You really think this is something we're bargaining over?" Conor asked.

"Yeah, I do," he said coldly. "You want me to stop going to the clinics, then I'll stop. I'll do whatever it is you want me to do. But you have to leave those two kids alone. That's the deal."

Conor smiled, but that could be more dangerous than his bite. And Eric could already feel his sharp teeth at his belly. "Well now, let me think that over for a little while."

At seven o'clock, he drove the truck over to the cafe to pick up his brothers. He was alone. Conor had caught a ride earlier with one of his cronies. They would probably head over to a neighborhood bar and knock back a couple before going home. Conor was normally home by nine and in bed by nine thirty to get six hours sleep before the alarm went off at three thirty.

The cafe was busier now. Racing was over for the day. A lot of barns had just finished up the same way he had just gotten through with his father's. It was still light out, they were still getting the long days. But it was that time before twilight when it was really starting to cool off and the shadows were growing longer in increments visible to the naked eye.

The lights were already on in the cafe and he could hear country western from the juke box spilling out into the small dirt parking area. His brothers were nowhere in sight. Not surprised, he parked the truck and got out to go inside and get them.

The inside of the cafe was filled with cigarette smoke and the music was loud. Jackson grabbed him as soon as he walked through the door, obviously acting as a lookout.

"Tim's won three bucks," Jackson told him proudly.

Eric already located his other brother. Tim was in the corner of the cafe in front of one of the two pinball machines. He was standing up on a milk crate, his dark eyes following the ball he was playing with catlike ferocity. There was a group of men behind him, watching, and another man, standing alone by the side of the pinball machine, that Tim was obviously playing against, and beating soundly.

Eric smiled sadly at the total bewilderment on the man's face and the prideful shine in Jackson's eyes as he watched his older brother. Everything about his brothers was poignant right then. Eric was frightened for them. He wasn't going to be able to keep them in that protective cocoon very much longer.

Right then, Eric threaded his way through the tables of the half full dining area and picked up his protesting brother and draped him over his shoulder.

"Eric," Tim yelled. "I was winning."

Eric looked at the four dollars and change on top of the pinball machine and then up at the man Tim had been playing. He didn't recognize him, but he looked like an exercise rider. "Is this his?"

The man nodded, smiling at Tim struggling against his brother.

Eric picked it up and put it in his pocket. He looked back at the man. "Don't play him any more. You'll lose your shirt."

Chapter 11

Eric got his brothers home and put them in front of the tv with a couple of cheese sandwiches just in case they hadn't gotten enough to eat at the cafe. Then he went into the bedroom he shared with them and got some clean clothes out of the closet. He took the clothes into the bathroom with him where he could shower and change.

He had made a promise to himself earlier that day that he would go out tonight, and he hadn't changed his mind even after the fight with his father. He still needed to get laid. But it had become more to him than just being horny.

The sweetness of his success that morning had turned bitter after the argument with his father. And he needed some relief for that as well. Something as uncomplicated as having his cock sucked in a back alley behind a bar. Something that could take the edge off the smothering anger he felt toward his father right then. He felt like a rat in a maze. He just needed someplace to hide and someone to lick his wounds for him for awhile, until he could figure his way out.

A little while later, he stood in the nude in front of the bathroom mirror, splashing water on his face after he shaved. He picked up his towel from the top of the toilet tank and dried his face with it, staring into the mirror.

He looked like his mother, as all three of them did, dark with thick, black hair that hung shaggy over his collar, and dark brown eyes. But the expression in the eyes looking back at him was all Conor's. They were a little too guarded, even when looking at himself, as if he couldn't even quite trust himself. And they were hard. A lot harder than any kids his age had a right to be.

He had a straight nose, surprising since he had had it broken by a green horse a couple of years ago. The horse had freaked out when Conor and he had been training it to go in the starting gate and Eric had been lucky to come out of it with just a broken nose. The starting gate was one of the most dangerous places on a race track. Confined in that small space, there was no place for a rider to go if a horse panicked. That's why the horses were loaded so quickly before a race, and sent off just as quickly after they were all loaded. And a consistantly bad doer in the gate would be ruled off the track for life.

Eric continued to stare at himself in the mirror, measuring himself objectively like he was a marketable item.

His mouth was okay. A little wide with a full lower lip, but it fit his face. And his teeth were straight for the most part. He had a decent enough smile, that is when he chose to smile. But for the most part his expression was solemn. A little too guarded, like his eyes.

He had good hands, or so all of the instructors at the clinics had told him so far. They were workers hands, not that the shape or look of them was coarse, but that they were hard and calloused and leather-stained. And sometimes, he couldn't get the oil from the leather out of his skin no matter how hard he scrubbed. It lay stubbornly in the cracks and pores of his skin like it was a part of him. Like being his father's son.

His body was good, healthy and strong. And since he made a living with his back instead of his brain, that was fortunate. He was five ten and weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds. Maybe a little too thin for his size, but he was actually too tall and too heavy to be an exercise boy. But with the cheap claimers that his father had in training, none of the owners complained much. And when his weight crept up as it wanted to at his size, his father made him run to keep it down.

He was fit. He sometimes rode six hours a day. He rode for his father in the mornings and then he would pick up extra money breaking green horses for other trainers during the slow time when the track was closed. He could gallop a horse all day long, which was saying something. He had read once that some doctors in sports medicine had tested the cardio-vascular fitness of athletes to determine what sport gave the best and the toughest aerobic workout. Surprisingly, jockeys came in at the top of the list, along side of cross country skiers. He had seen many a rookie rider slip off a galloping horse's back when they had simply become too exhausted to stop it.

He was athletic; agile and fast. When he'd been in school, coaches had always tried to get him to go out for sports. He never had. He didn't have time to go out for extracurricular activities and the coaches had given up once they realized he wasn't going to be around long anyway.

He'd always been physically mature for his age, as if having had to do a man's job from an early age, nature had given him a man's body. He had hair on his chest that grew in that t-shape of a light pelt across his pecs and then a narrower stem that ran down his abdomen and became a dark brush around his cock. He shaved every morning, no peach fuzz, his was a man's beard. He was no smooth beauty. He was hard and tough. He did not attract the chicken hawks in the bars. He never had, even when barely sixteen, when he had first began to cruise. He looked too seasoned to be considered young meat.

But, he wasn't bad to look at. He'd never had trouble on the streets picking men up or being picked up himself. He'd even been offered money before and to his credit, he had never taken any, even when he'd sorely needed it. There were some things he couldn't do. Some things he wouldn't let another man do to him, and if he had taken their money, he would have had to give up something vital in himself. His self respect.

And maybe for that same reason, he had never been able to let another man fuck him. The idea of it went so far beyond the sexual act of it for him, that he didn't think he would ever be able to let a man put his cock up his ass. Being fucked by another man implied far more to him than he was willing to give up.

Eric heard his father come in as he was getting dressed. He heard him in the living room talking to his brothers. A few seconds later, the volume on the tv set went down. It was only eight o'clock, still early for Conor. Eric had been hoping to get out before he came home. He'd seen more than enough of his father that day.

Eric finished buttoning the thin flannel shirt he had put on and tucked it into his faded levis. He opened the bathroom door and walked into his bedroom to get his wallet, keys and cigarettes. Across the hall he could see Conor in his bedroom, standing by the dresser, emptying out his pockets in preparation of going to bed.

His father looked up at him as Eric stepped out into the hall way.

"What is it you're doing now?" Conor asked him irritably. "Going out?"

"Yeah," he said, eyeing him cooly. "I forgot there is one other thing I have for myself. I don't know what you're going to be able to do about that one though. I guess you could always have me castrated."

"There's a thought," Conor said, but there was no amusement in his eyes. He looked away, clearing the change out of his pockets. "I just want you to be careful, that's all."

Sometimes, he could surprise him, and those were the worst moments. It was easier when the hard shell stayed between them. "Don't do that, Conor," he said softly. "You almost sounded like a father. You scared me." He watched his father's twisted, arthritic fingers as they fumbled with the change, thinking that in thirty-five years those would be his own hands. "Don't worry, I won't be getting anyone pregnant."

"That's not what I meant," Conor said. "Paulo's son said he thought he saw you getting into a car around Sheridan Square a few weeks ago."

That's what he got for letting his guard down for a moment. Eric felt the hair on the back of his neck go up at what Conor had said. Sheridan Square was in a gay district. He cruised the bars over there all the time. He'd been there a couple of weeks ago. He didn't look at his father. This was his worse nightmare come true. Someone had actually seen him.

"If you're going to hitch rides, be careful where you do it," Conor went on. "Paulo was saying what kind of things go on around that area. A nice looking kid might find himself in a bit of trouble."

"Well, he must be mistaken," Eric said flatly. "I don't hitch hike." It was true. He accepted rides from men all the time, but it had nothing to do with hitch hiking. The walls to the maze were getting higher all the time and closing in on him at the top. He was suffocating. He had to get out of there.

Logically, he knew Conor had no idea what he was doing. If he did know or even suspected the truth, there would have been no argument at the barn earlier. He would be on the street right now, he had no doubt of that. In his father's world there was a straight line of what a man did or didn't do. A man might get down on his knees to worship god, but he did not get down on his knees to another man for any reason. He did not put himself in another's debt and he never backed down from a fight. A simple code really, but Conor lived by it, raised him by it. He wasn't much different from his father about those things. Maybe that explained even more his refusal to be fucked. To let another man fuck him. A man that did any of those things was no longer a man as far as his father was concerned, as far as he was concerned.

But a man who would get down on his knees to suck another man's cock....well, there would be no mistaking Conor's contempt for that one.

"Well, I'll be going," Eric said, still not looking at his father.

"All right," Conor said. "Just don't stay out all night. You still have to come with me to the barn in the morning."

That hadn't been his plan, but Eric didn't object. He just got out the apartment before his father could ask him any more questions.

That night he avoided his usual haunts, afraid of someone seeing him again. He moved several blocks up instead, investigating the area first, before he settled down enough to even think about cruising. His father had called him a tom cat before. Well, that night he really felt like one. A tom cat out of his own territory.

And Eric didn't like the unfamiliar. The New York City police department had declared open hunting season on gay bars. There was at least one bar raided and shut down every night in the village. It wasn't safe to cruise in or around them. Eric prefered to know the lay of the land where he prowled, just in case he ever had to out run the police. It was his greatest fear that he would be picked up in one of the NYPD 'queer' raids.

Outside a leather bar, Eric let himself be picked up by a kid a couple years older than himself. They had talked for a few minutes. The kid looked like a college student, probably from nearby NYU. He was tall and thin, with brown hair and a brown mustache. And more importantly, he did not look like a cop.

Finally, after they had talked for awhile, the kid said. "I've got a couple of joints in my car. It's parked not too far away."

It was better than he had hoped for. Eric nodded. "Let's go."

They walked down a couple of blocks to the kid's parked Chevy and got in. They drove about a mile to a quieter location and pulled into an alley to park. It was still dangerous, here they could get mugged, but the police might ignore them thinking they were just another necking heterosexual couple.

They smoked the joints and fooled around a little. Eric didn't smoke dope often, mostly because it seemed to take days afterwards until his head was clear again. And he couldn't afford to not have a clear head galloping horses. He didn't want to be responsible for getting anyone hurt. That would be too much guilt to carry around. But, he wasn't galloping in the morning and he thought he could handle his lesson all right. And what did that matter anyway? It was going to be his last one for awhile, maybe his last one for good. And who was he kidding? What was he going to do with it? At best he was going to end up, after five expensive years, with a high school pony horse. And for that reason alone he felt like getting loaded. He wished he could get so stoned, that he could forget everything that had happened since he had gotten home that afternoon and his life had turned to shit.

Finally, mellowed by the grass, Eric closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of the seat. The kid, although older, seemed inexperienced and he'd decided to give him a free rein to find his way. He'd managed so far to get Eric's shirt open and had his hand inside sroking his chest and his side and anywhere else he could reach.

Sex for Eric had always been hurried and anonymous, in stairwells, back alleys, and on the occasional good night like this, in the back seat of a car. Foreplay normally consisted of getting into each others' pants as quickly as possible, and sex began at the first contact with his cock and ended when he came. Touching for just the sake of touching, he firmly believed was a luxury for heterosexual couples alone.

Oh, he had seen it in the bars he cruised, men touching men. Men being openly affectionate with each other. But he had never experienced it with any of the nameless men he had sex with. He probably would have shunned it even if they had tried to go beyond the customary blow job. But right then, as stoned as he was, the feeling of that kid's hand on his bare flesh was incredible. He could have sat there all night.

After awhile, they got into each others' clothes and they became a tangle of cloth and legs and half shed jeans.The kid even tried kissng him and Eric, lulled by the sensation of so much bare flesh pressed against his own, let him at first before drawing away. That was another thing he didn't do, and being stoned wasn't going to change it. On occasion, he had had men try to kiss him, but to Eric having another man's tongue in his mouth was a far more intimate act than just sucking his cock He didn't know how he could maintain the anonymity he needed with a man if he had let him kiss him. And he had no intention of ever gettng any closer to any of these men than what it took to give a blow job.

They finished up, Eric on the seat, his levis in a tangled pile around his ankles. The kid had been kneeling on the floor of the car, pressed between his spread thighs, still working on as much of Eric's cock as he could get down his throat. Finally, in frustration at the kid's ineptness, Eric pulled him up so that he was now straddling his thighs instead of between them, and took the kid's cock into his mouth giving him a lesson in the fine art of giving head while he jerked himself off at the same time.

The touching at first had been nice. And having the comfort of a backseat compared to having to get down on his knees amid the trash and broken glass of an alley was always good. But the highpoint of the short drive had actually been the dope, definitely not the sex. And it wasn't the kid's inexperience that was to blame for that. It was more like his anger and resentment at his father could even ruin this basic pleasure for him.

They got their levis pulled back up and their shirts re-buttoned and the kid drove him back close to where he had picked him up. He wanted to kiss him again and Eric, grateful for the good weed if for nothing else, let him have a brief one before pulling away again.

"Do you hang out around here often?" the kid asked, his hand still cupped around the back of his neck.

Now that they were back on the street, Eric felt uncomfortable with even that much contact between them. The kiss had been a gift. He drew away, putting his hand on the door handle. "I'm around," he said noncommitally.

"Maybe I could see you again."

"Sure," Eric lied.

He got out of the car and watched the kid drive away, taking his pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his shirt. He stepped up on the curb and walked over to the entrance of an empty shop and sat down on the concrete steps outside the door way. He lit a cigarette and pulled off it deeply trying to get the bitter taste of the kid's cum out of his mouth.

He sat there a long time, chain smoking, watching the people that walked by him on the sidewalk. There was every walk of life here. There were the beat musicians, the runaways, the hustlers, and the slumming businessmen as well as leather clad men and the occasional flamboyant drag queen. He had to hand it to the latter two, as dangerous as it was around there, they wore their sexuality on their sleeve like a badge of courage. Sometimes he wondered how it would feel to be that open.

Eric got up and walked down the block and turned recklessy into the first bar he came to. He was thinking he would pick somebody else up. He wasn't finished for the night. He wondered if he would be finished for a long while.

The bar was dark inside and vibrating with rock and roll pouring out of some well hidden music system. It was actually two rooms in one. One half of the bar was just that, a long horseshoe shaped bar where patrons could hang out or just order drinks. The other side of the room was a dance floor, seperated from the bar by just a three foot high partition. The dance floor was circled by clusters of tables, pushed back as far as possible against the wall to give the dancers more room.

Eric squeezed in next to a man in a suit to get a coke from the bar and then moved onto the other side of the partition, staying pressed against it to keep from running into any of the grinding mass of human bodies that were dancing to the music. He stopped at the back of the bar, close to the rest room door, and leaned against the wall and watched the dancers.

It was the strobe lights that made Eric look first. It was the way they picked up the silver highlights in his blond hair.

There was a man in the middle of the floor wearing a dress shirt and slacks. He had his shirt sleeves rolled back and his gold watch flashed under the strobes. He'd lost his tie somewhere and his shirt collar was open, but he was still over dressed among the other flannel and denim clad dancers.

But he could dance. Nothing flashy, but he was loose and happily uninhibited, and there was something so suggestive, so overtly sexual, too in the way he moved to that driving beat that Eric couldn't take his eyes off of him. And then he turned and Eric saw his face for the first time and almost choked on his drink. It was Morgan.

Eric knew he should have left right then. He should have ran like hell. But he still couldn't tear his eyes away from him. He stared across the room with that odd lucidity of being stoned and watched him dance, slowly realizing for the first time that it was with another man.

Eric was still watching when the song ended and Morgan headed back across the dance floor to the bar alone, his partner disappearing into the crowd on the other side of the room. He watched as Morgan picked up a glass from the bar and took a drink, and then still holding the glass turned back around to watch the dancers. From where Eric stood he was less than fifteen feet away. It was definitely Morgan or a stoned image of him, but it was so vivid.

There was a man next to him at the bar, dressed similarly but still in his jacket and tie. And Eric realized that it was the same man that he had stood next to when he had ordered his coke. If he had been just a few minutes later, he would have ran into Morgan at the bar.

Eric watched the man lean toward Morgan, saying something into his ear to be heard over the music and saw Morgan smile. The intimacy between the two of them, suggested by that smile, jolted him, even more than seeing Morgan dance. He was gay.

The way both men were dressed made Eric think that they must have just come from the party for Hoehn that Morgan had told him about earlier that day. Or maybe they had just come from having dinner at one of those high priced restaurants that required a coat and tie. Whichever it was, Morgan looked comfortable standing there, more like he was working a room at a cocktail party than standing in a mafia run gay bar in the middle of the Village.

And still, Eric couldn't take his eyes off of Morgan, wishing like hell that his head wasn't so fucked up by the grass he'd smoked earlier.

The other man went back to talking to a guy on his left and Morgan set his drink down and stood watching the dancers for a few more minutes, his back resting against the bar.

Eric watched him, wondering why he had never picked up on anything that would have made him suspect Morgan was gay. Was it just the fact that he had met his son, and because of Carl, he figured there had to be a wife around somewhere? Would that have made him blind to the way Morgan looked at other men, or the way he reacted to them. It was possible, but he didn't think so.

And then, Eric remembered, that in the few times he had met Morgan, except for the one time when Carl had been with him, they had basically been alone together. It was very possible that he had never picked up anything from Morgan because Morgan had absolutely no interest in him. And even though it hurt his ego a little, that was probably the best explanation right there.

But, even right then, as Morgan watched the dancers, there was nothing about his expression that reminded Eric of the predatory look he'd seen on hundreds of cruising men in hundreds of different instances. Probably the same expression he'd been wearing himself when he'd first walked into the bar. And there was no hint of the sexuality in Morgan's expression that had been so evident in his dancing. Right then, he was simply into the music and into the dancing, relaxed, and enjoying himself. Eric could imagine any one of the men in the bar walking up to him and getting the same polite, friendly conversation he was so easy with at the clinic. That and nothing more.

If Morgan had come into that bar tonight looking to get laid, then Eric would have pitied anyone sitting down to a hand of poker with him. Morgan had mastered an impervious poker face. Eric began to suspect that for a man that had such an air of openness about him, Morgan might probably be one of the most guarded men he had ever met. More guarded even than Eric was himself.

Eric watched as Morgan rolled his shirt sleeves back down and then reached into his pants pocket to take out his cufflinks. He saw him put those back on and then straighten his cuffs. And then, Morgan turned back to the bar and picked up his jacket, slipping it on, turning himself into some kind of ivy league businessman instead of the sexy young dancer he'd been just a few minutes before or the world class eventer that Eric thought he knew.

Morgan took his tie out of his jacket pocket and draped it around his neck, under his open shirt collar, not bothering to re-tie it. And there was something about that loose tie that defined him, brought all those pieces of him together.

Morgan was still looking at the dancers but his expression had changed a little. It was distracted, as if he wasn't really seeing them any more, but thinking of something else entirely.

Eric looked away from Morgan to the other man in the suit. Eric could see him clearly in profile as he talked to the man in levis and a sweater beside him at the bar. He was at least ten years older than Morgan, closer to forty, maybe even a little older than that. He was around the same height, but heavier built with dark hair and an olive complexion. Eric wondered at the possibility of this man being Morgan's lover and maybe that was the reason he wasn't looking around. Maybe they had just stopped off here after Hoehn's party to get a couple of drinks, and shortly they would be leaving again for someplace to hit the sack.

That was certainly a real possibility. But judging from the animated conversation that the man in the suit was having with the other on his left, Eric couldn't help thinking that maybe he had other plans for the night.

Eric looked back at Morgan, still trying to figure him out. He examined him trying to see if there was some kind of body language he could pick up on that would explain Morgan's connection to the other man. But there was nothing obvious that he could see. And so, Eric looked back at Morgan's face, searching it for a moment, before realizing that his grey eyes were fixed back directly on him.

Eric froze, and in that brief instant their eyes met across the fifteen feet, and the three foot partition that was between them. And there was no way for Eric to go back and pretend that he just didn't see him. It was the pot. There was no way that Morgan would have caught him staring if he hadn't been so stoned.

Morgan smiled at him, and that's all it was, just a casual greeting between two people who knew each other. They could have been anywhere. They could have still been at the clinic for all that smile said. Morgan's expression when he looked at him, was that same one of open friendliness that Eric had begun to expect from him, nothing more and nothing less.

Eric looked away, putting his coke down on top of the partition, and walked out of the bar without ever looking back.

Chapter 12

The next morning at 4:00, Eric sat in silence beside his father in the truck on the way to the racetrack. He was still half stoned and his eyes felt like someone had removed them to scrub out his sockets with sand paper before putting them back in.

He hadn't slept. He'd lain awake after he had gotten home from the bar, staring at the ceiling in that tiny bedroom he shared with his two brothers, wishing like hell he had never gone out. It wasn't as if the sex had been worth it. Nothing was worth this. No matter how careful he had always tried to be, no matter how hard he had worked at hiding his sexuality from his father, it was only a matter of time now before his dirty little secret was out. Someone had seen him. Not just getting into a car in a questionable neighborhood, but actually cruising in a gay bar. And even though Eric knew that Morgan would never cause him any grief for that, he was really in no position to, he had still seen him. And that was more than anyone else had ever done. There was no taking that back. Paulo's son possibly seeing him get into a car seemed like such a vague threat in comparison. And that had shaken him up enough.

So much for his anonymity with the men he had sex with, as if he could put on blinders and they in turn could somehow make him invisible and keep the stigma of being gay from him. Because, after all, if he never let anyone know who he was, then nobody would ever be able to get close enough to him to label him, right? And wasn't that was the safest way to live anyway? Keeping everyone at arms length or better yet at the end of that proverbial ten foot pole. Travel light and don't pick up any unnecessary baggage on the way. And hadn't he been proven right about that?

Because in the long run, all it had really taken was just one stupid mistake. A simple error in judgement on his part. He'd been caught staring like some kind of infatuated, teenage girl because he had let his guard down for one moment and had naively allowed himself to really like this man, because he had thought, what harm could it do. Morgan was a nice guy. And instead of leaving, or actually running like hell, the way he should have done when he had first seen him, he had been caught flat-footed because of that like for him. Just a momentary weakness in character and depite all his carefulness it had been that easy to find him out. And if he was going to keep on making stupid mistakes like that, he might as well just go up to his father and give him a detailed description of what his boy did with his nights. Blow by blow, so to speak.

Eric propped his elbow in the open window of the truck and rested his head in his hand, tenderly rubbing his forehead with his fingertips to ease the jumble of half formed thoughts circling around in there. The rat in the maze, he thought, chasing his own tail. If he didn't get a grip on himself and get his head in order soon the rat was going to die of old age in that maze.

Maybe it would be all right. Maybe he could just go to the clinic, get it over with and head home early. His lesson was one of the first ones that morning, Morgan's wasn't until later in the afternoon. Maybe if he was lucky, Morgan wouldn't even turn up this morning. There was really no reason for him to be there at all until after the lunch break. It wasn't as though he'd even watched much of the clinic yesterday, except in bits and pieces. In truth, the only lesson Morgan had watched all the way through had been his. And as flattering as that might have been for Eric yesterday, surely today, Morgan wouldn't want to see him any more than he did him. At least he hoped that was the case, because if he didn't see Morgan today, he'd never have to see him again and maybe Eric could just pretend the whole thing didn't happen. And that he hadn't been so foolish. That just maybe, last night had been some kind of stoned aberration; fodder for some future wet dreams or jerking off sessions. And this man that he liked and was obviously attracted to, had not caught him staring at him across a crowded gay bar, and now knew things about him that Eric had never shared with anyone before.

If Eric could just get through his lesson and get Max loaded up right afterwards, he would gladly give up the clinics for awhile. He would drive off and disappear from the face of the earth as far as anyone connected with those clinics was concerned. He would come home, work his ass off, stay out of the bars and off the street and become a dutiful son and what ever else he had to do to make sure nothing like this ever happened again.

But for how long......He wasn't exactly the celibate type. How long before he'd go out again, because he would, that was a given. A couple nights alone contemplating his own stiff cock and he'd be out the front door, all good intentions left behind.

So, how long before he knelt in front of still another nameless trick and looked up into his face after he'd sucked him off and suddenly realize it was the new client that had just moved his horses into his father's barn. Would that be the final thing that gave him away? Or would his luck just run out, and it would be a cop he picked up one night. And if that happened, as far as his father and brothers were concerned, he would have just disappeared like his mother, because he would rot in jail before he ever gave anyone his real name.

Eric could handle Conor's sarcasm, he'd learned to turn it off when he was a child as a means of survival. He could even shut out the particulary viscious kind where Conor would just keep picking at him like some bastard form of Chinese water torture.

In his worst nightmares he had never been able to imagine how badly Conor would react if he ever found out that he was gay. Eric supposed the worst thing a father could do to a son was throw him out, and he had no doubt that Conor would do that to him. It was the inevitable shame and disgust that his father would feel for him that Eric feared the most and not just for himself. It was the fact that Conor, without him there anymore, would eventually have to turn it on someone else, and that would be his brothers. And it was the fear of how that would effect them and how they would think of him because of it, that had kept Eric up all night and made him want to run like hell now.

And so, he just kept coming back to the maze. And everywhere he turned he ran into a solid wall. And what Eric was beginning to suspect, that frightened him more than anything else, was that this maze he was in really didn't have any way out.

They reached the barn and Eric got out of the truck with his father and began to mechanically go through his morning routine. His father switched on the lights under the eave, but the fog was so thick that morning that Eric could barely see across the forty foot or so distance to the barn on the other side of the aisle. There were just the disembodied voices of the other trainers and grooms as they went about their morning chores.

Paulo showed up a few minutes after Eric and his father did, and pretty soon after that the catch riders, those riders that worked for no particular barn, started wandering down the aisles looking for mounts. Two stopped off at his father's barn. Eric had seen both of them around before and they were obviously the same two that Conor had used the day before since he wasn't galloping. Sixteen horses, five bucks a ride. That would be coming out of his wages and not his father's pocket, to be sure. The clinic aside, this had been a very costly weekend for him.

At seven o'clock, Eric slipped into his father's office to change into his breeches and boots. His father followed him inside.

"What time will you be back today?" Conor asked him.

Eric pushed back the sleeves of his washed-thin sweatshirt and reached down to pick his jeans up off the concrete floor. "Probably early," he said, without looking at him. "I don't know for sure."

"Good, I could use you this afternoon. I've got a couple of horses running and a couple more being picked up by their owners today. They want to get them out of here before we move."

Eric glanced sharply up at him as he picked his keys and wallet up off the folding table his father used as a desk.

"What?" Conor asked him.

He slipped his keys into the front pocket of his breeches and held his wallet in his hand. He picked up his cigarettes. "I guess that means we're still going to Florida."

"Did I ever say we weren't?"

Eric shook his head at himself. No matter how carefully he tried to follow the treacherous twists and turns of his father's mind he always managed to dupe him. "No, you never did." He started towards the door.

"Don't you want to know what I decided to do?" Conor asked him.

He stopped in the doorway, looking back at him. "Besides the fact that we're still going to Florida, why should I give a fuck.?"

His father met his eyes a long moment. "I've decided we'll just do the winter circuit the way I planned and then we'll come back up here."

After he had already accepted the fact that he would have to give up the clinics. No matter how much it had hurt, he had already accepted it for his brothers' sake. "Fine," he muttered, "Whatever." He started to leave again.

"And I'll look around for a ride for your damn horse," Conor added. "Maybe I'll just save some money and he'll be our only pony horse down there."

Eric stopped again, glaring back at him. After the fight they'd had yesterday after noon, Conor was back to this, where they had started, like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't really threatened to drag his brothers all over the country and wanted him to sell his horse and had made Eric, out of desperation, offer to give up the one thing he loved to do. This bitter, angry man who hated his own life so much, he had to make every one else in it just as miserable. The fight they would have over what Eric would allow his horse to be used for aside, what else was it going to be in two weeks? Or even tomorrow for that matter. When would he ever learn to stop letting him bait him like that? Aloud, he said quietly. "Would you please just stop jerking me around for a few minutes."

Conor glared at him. "What the hell is the matter with you now? I thought that would make you happy."

"What do you want me to do, thank you?" he asked sarcastically. "All right, thank you, Conor." He looked away from him. "Thank you," he repeated it, softly this time and walked out of the office.

His father followed him. "You know, I think the sooner we get out of here, the better. I don't know what's going on with you. What," he asked. " Did your girlfriend leave you last night or something?"

He laughed aloud, still walking away from him. "Sweet jesus," he muttered, still laughing. "Something like that." He wiped his hand over his burning eyes, trying to sober himself. He kept walking, passing Paulo, who was saddling their first horse that morning. "I'll see you later," he said. "I don't know when I'll be back. Maybe I won't be back. Maybe I'll take a fucking bus to goddamn who knows where." He turned around, looking at his father who had stopped beside Paulo to stare at him as if he'd lost his mind. Eric continued on towards the truck, walking backwards so he could still look at his father. "What do you think of that, Conor? What does it feel like not to know if I'm really telling the truth or not? Does that jerk you around a little, you son of a bitch?"

Eric tried to get rid of his anger on his way to the clinic. It wouldn't do him or his horse any good to be pissed off in his lesson. He couldn't see making it any more of a waste of money than it already was.

By the time he got to Fox Den and parked the truck in the back by the trailer, he had pretty much gotten his anger for Conor under control. Now all he had to do, was get through his lesson without seeing Morgan.

He unloaded his saddle, bridle and pads from the tack compartment in the horse trailer and stacked his brushes on top so he would only have to make one trip to the barn. Carrying his tack down the aisle to Max's stall, he saw that Morgan's tack trunk was open and his radio was on the ground beside it, playing softly.

Of course Morgan was there. bright and early, too. Eric had to wonder who it was he had pissed off in this life to be so fucked.

He put his tack down on the bale of straw outside Max's stall and opened the gate, going inside. His horse was nosing contentedly through his breakfast, unaware that he had been at least half the fuel for such a heated argument the day before.

Eric looked at the big horse. No matter what his papers said, there was no tempermental thoroughbred in Max. He was as cool and stoic as a plow horse. When it had become obvious to everyone that he was going to be too big to ever run, Eric had bought him from his father for a hundred dollars as an unbroke two year old. Eric had been thirteen at the time.

Anxious to do the best possible job in training his horse, he read everything he could get his hands on. He managed to get rides to shows so that could watch the professional horseman schooling their mounts, and committed everything he saw to his memory. Haunted by the memory of the dressage exhibition he had seen as a child, he had an ideal in his mind of what he wanted to do with his horse. Slowly the big, clumsy two year old had developed into something Eric had been proud of, even though it had been a rather solitary accomplishment at the time.

And then, these clinics had come along. Eric wondered now if they hadn't been a curse in a way. Before, he had just sort of bungled along, not particularly happy, but resigned to where his life would probably lead him. Working along beside his father, eventually training race horses himself, burying himself deeper into a closet with each passing year, as long as he could manage to keep his father ignorant of his other life. Raising his two brothers and making sure they got the education that he had never been allowed. Maybe even getting married in the natural order of things, even though he had no interest in women sexually or otherwise. And this had been the ideal image of what he thought his life might be. No particular highs or hopes or dreams, except maybe the ones for his brothers.

Eric had felt a little dead inside whenever he had really thought about it, but he didn't linger over it for any length of time. He was young and he had that young prospective that maybe he wouldn't even make it to thirty, so what the hell.

And then, these clinics had come along, he thought again.

Eric looked at his horse, seeing the subtle changes the more strict dressage training had already begun to show in his large frame. His musculature was higher on his body now as he had begun to use his back more. His haunches were round and powerful, not the typical sloping croup of a racehorse. If he were a human athlete, Max would look more like a gymnast than a runner. And that was more or less what a dressage horse was, half gymnast, half classical ballet dancer, and his rider was his partner. Max and he had enjoyed an amiable partnership together so far.

But Eric had to wonder at this point, if it wouldn't be easier to just sell him. Cut this one dream out of his life before it could cause him any more harm. He didn't know what the going price was for a second level horse, but Morgan had seemed to think that Max was worth some money. Maybe Eric would call the office here tomorrow and mention he was for sale and see what kind of offers he got before they left for Florida. Maybe that would be the best thing all around. He would pull his head out of his ass the way Conor had suggested he do, and he would just move on. This hungering for something, that he should have known all along he couldn't have, wasn't doing him any good at all.

Eric turned and looked out over the stall gate. The morning fog had lifted but it was still a hazy sunlight. It was going to be a little cooler than yesterday.

It was quiet by the barn. Everyone was over by the arena watching the clinic. The only sounds around the barn were the horses moving in their stalls and Morgan's radio down by his stall playing one old 'doo wop' song after another.

Eric looked towards the arena. The auditors' seats were full. The first lesson was over and Hoehn was standing in the middle of the arena talking with the rider for a few minutes before his next student arrived. Eric should have been tacking up for his own lesson, but he'd been hit by this lethargy as soon as he had arrived that morning, and having to actually ride his horse in a lesson right then just didn't seem fair.

Eric continued to stare out over the stall gate. And even though not consciously looking for him, it only took him a few seconds to find Morgan amid the other spectators. His distinctive blond hair stood out, appearing almost white in the absence of pure sunlight. He was standing at the far end of the arena between two women, listening politely to what looked like a one-sided conversation. He had his sunglasses on and was wearing the red suspenders again and even from a distance of over two hundred yards, his presence effected Eric like a hard punch in the stomache. Why couldn't he have just stayed away until after the lunch break? Eric had gone from euphoria yesterday afternoon, to some place this morning that had to be just up the block from hell. And he just didn't want to deal with anything else.

He took Max out of his stall and put him on the crossties to tack him up. At best he was only going to have a half hour to warm him up before his lesson.

Eric had taken off the leg wraps and was getting ready to give Max a quick brushing off when he looked up over his back and saw Morgan walking straight toward the barn. He might have just been heading toward his own stall, but he still had his sunglasses on and Eric couldn't tell if he was looking toward him or not. He dropped the brush he was holding onto the bale of straw beside his saddle and walked off in the direction of the courtesy booth.

He was surprised that it hurt. Turning his back on this man he barely knew actually hurt, as if Morgan and the clinics were somehow connected, and by turning his back on one, he had really turned his back on the other.

By the time he had gotten half way down the aisle, he felft like an ass. Morgan had never been anything but decent toward him every time he'd seen him. Why should he be any different about what happened last night? Not facing him wasn't going to change anything. He'd still seen him in a gay bar. What did he really think Morgan would do about that anyway? Say something to him about it? What was he so afraid of?

Eric got a cup of coffee and started back toward Max, but by that time it was too late. Morgan was already gone.

The first part of his lesson went badly. That was no surprise. In his state of mind he would have had a hard time chasing a cockroach off the kitchen floor, much less riding a thirteen hundred pound horse around a dressage arena.

Fifteen minutes into his lesson, after he had blown the instructions Hoehn had given him at least three times on how to ask for a proper change of lead, Eric stopped dead. He sat on his horse on the long side of the arena and just tried to clear his head.

"Why are you not listening to me?" Hoehn shouted at him from the center of the ring. "Are you having trouble distinguishing your inside rein from your outside rein today, Mr. Whelan? Should we tape different color paper to each of your wrists like when you were in kindergarten and I could just say red rein or black rein? Would that make life less confusing for you and your poor horse?"

Eric had seen a rider go off course once, during a grand prix test at a horse show. When the judge had blown the whistle to let him know he'd been off course, the rider had stopped for just an instant before confidently going back to complete the part of the test he had forgotten. When he had been part of the way through that and the judge blew the whistle again, he had just stopped and stared. And it was obvious at that moment, when the whistle had blown the second time, that every part of the test he'd ridden many times was completely gone. The rider would have been hard pressed to remember his own name.

That's what Eric felt like right then. And he was sure that everyone who was watching had just realized that he didn't belong there. That he was just a pretender that had crashed the sanctity of their clinic. To make matters worse, when he looked up, he saw Morgan standing by the end of the arena watching him. And right next to him was the man he had seen him with at the bar.

Eric looked down at the big lop ears of his horse. He had done many flying lead changes on Max before. They were the usual stumbling block between second and third level, but Max had a natural affinity for them. Eric had just been too stressed to be able to feel when his horse was in the correct position to do it and so he had over- steered and gotten an incorrect bend and Max had only changed behind. And that was when Hoehn had started shouting, because it had been the third time he had screwed up like that.

Re-grouped, Eric had Max pick up a left lead canter and went around the arena. Crossing the arena on the diagnol, still on the left lead, they nailed a clean change just before they went into the corner at the other end. And after that, his lesson began to slowly improve.

Every time he passed the end of the arena, he saw Morgan standing there still watching him from behind his sunglasses. He stayed until the end. The other man watched for awhile until they had gone on to work on something else and the next time Eric had passed by Morgan, he was alone again.

When his lesson was finished, Hoehn walked into the center of the arena to talk to him.

"I think you are a very talented rider, Eric," Hoehn said, looking up at him with that feral smile. "I would like to see you again in six months and see how you've improved."

"Thanks," he said cooly.

Hoehn turned his eyes on Max. "This is one very fine horse. He could go Grand Prix for you with no problem at all. It's you we have to work on."

The praise did nothing to help his mood at all. The lesson actually just made him feel more like shit than he already did. All he wanted to do was get out of there.

He walked Max out of the ring on a loose rein. Looking up as he passed the next rider, he saw Morgan standing about fifteen feet outside the arena, waiting for him. There was no way to avoid him. He had to walk either right by him or over him, in any direction he decided to take out of the arena.

Resigned, Eric stopped Max beside him.

Morgan smiled up at him. He couldn't see his eyes behind his sunglasses. "It was a good lesson today."

"Not from where I was sitting."

"You were just a little tense today, that's all. It transfered to your horse."

"Yeah, I guess I was," Eric admitted. He looked away from him, staring across the grounds toward the cross country course where a horse and rider were leisurely hacking. He couldn't look at Morgan. He kept seeing that image of him dancing under the strobe lights. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw him take off his sunglasses and slide them into the pocket of his breeches.

"You dodged me this morning," Morgan said quietly.

So he had been coming over to see him. There was no use hiding anymore. Eric made himself look at him. He was in a navy polo shirt and rust breeches and wearing the red suspenders. He could see the tight bulge of his biceps under neath the short sleeve shirt. And the large raised veins in his upper arms stretched down below his sleeves to his tanned fore arms. The hair on his arms was a pale gold. "I did," Eric said. "I'm sorry."

Morgan nodded, his grey eyes going over his face. "Was it because of last night?"

"What do you think?"

Morgan shrugged. "I think it was no big deal, Eric. Don't worry about it."

No big deal. Eric had laid awake all night just to see him shrug it off like that. No big deal. He stared down at him incredulously.

Morgan smiled up at him. "Why don't you get your horse put away and then come see me," he said. "I still want to talk to you."

Chapter 13

Eric sat on his horse watching Morgan as he walked back across the lawn to the barn. No big deal, he'd said, as casually as if he had just seen him walking out of a convenience store instead of out cruising in a bar. No big deal.

Eric sat on his horse, still staring after him, unable to move right then, unable to do much of anything but keep going over those words in his head, feeling as if part of a heavy weight had been lifted off his chest.

And he wondered if that was the truth, if it really wasn't a big deal for Morgan, and if he really was that casual. Or realistically, as casual as a man could be, dancing in a gay bar with another man when he had a wife and son at home somewhere. He wondered just how guarded Morgan was and what he was all about. He wondered if sex with men was just something he dabbled in while for all appearances he was leading a straight life at home, or if maybe he had just realized where his true sexuality lay and now he and his wife had come to an understanding.

He'd like to think it was the latter of the two because that would at least mean Morgan was honest with himself and that fit more of the image that he had had of him up until last night. Because Morgan had struck him from the first as a man who was extremely comfortable in his own skin and he would like to continue to think of him that way, even if it was only his wife that knew the truth, and not as someone who hung his other life in the closet like an alternate suit of clothes. Because he liked the image of that loose, slightly raunchy dancer last night, and it came closer to that impression he had of him, than the image of that other man in the suit. And somewhere between the two fell this obviouslly well heeled, world class rider who prowled around in his element like he had it all in the palm of his hand. Eric didn't see how Morgan could be so confident everywhere else if he was living a lie at home. Eric knew all about secrets and what damage they could do.

But, it was actually the image of Morgan at the barn yesterday with the young pony clubber that Eric liked the best. And that was probably because it had nothing to do with anything except what Morgan had to have intrinsically inside of him. And that was kindness and a genuine common decency. Morgan was just a nice guy. And it was probably just that inherent niceness of his that had made Morgan say what he had to him in the first place, and not an expression of how open he was about his sexuality or not. Because he'd obviously realized how shook he'd been this morning. So shook he hadn't even been able to face him. And this being nice and polite or doing the decent thing seemed to come as natural to Morgan as breathing. And it had been those simple gestures of kindness that he seen from him, that had made Eric like him in the first place.

It was his horse that made him realize how long he'd been staring this time. Max began to fidget underneath him restlessly, swinging a hind leg up under his belly to swat at a fly, and playing with the slack in his reins. Eric took one last look at Morgan over by his stall and then reluctantly moved Max off in the direction of the trail that ran through the cross country course.

Eric took his time cooling his horse out, his mind calmer and more clear than it had been all day. He rode him slowly over the meticulously landscaped grounds, taking them in as if for the first time, thinking it could very well be the last. But just the fact of being here at all would never cease to be a luxury to him no matter what happened.

Three months ago he had come here and had stared longingly at the sand footed arenas, thinking he would never be able to ride in one. Now at least he had done that much. And up until yesterday afternoon, it had been better than he had ever hoped for, and he was thankful for that. But it didn't make it any easier when he thought of the very real possibility of having to give it up.

It was just unfortunate for him, that even though he might not entirely belong in this world, he definitely didn't belong in his own any more. That poisoning or brainwashing or just plain seduction, that had begun the first time he had ever sat on his horse here, was now finally complete. And the idea of going back to actually live that image of what he'd always thought his life would be, before these clinics, was way too depressing to even think about right then.

What he needed to do was sit down and calmly go over his options and see if there really was a way out of this mess before he did anything he regretted. He needed to figure out if there was any way to reconcile what he wanted with what his father wanted, without all the anger and resentment he felt toward Conor getting in the way. Because what he had been doing wasn't exactly working so far. And he'd been running blind since he was eleven years old, when his mother had walked out, and he had started trying to take care of his brothers before he even knew how to take care of himself.

He knew now that that had been a big mistake. And it had been his first mistake on the long road that had lead him to where he was. He should have never let Conor off the hook for his own sons. And as much as he loved his brothers, he had allowed his father to make him a virtual prisoner because of them. And now he was to the point that he was so damn tired that he'd almost rather give in and give up this small taste of something he loved almost as much as he loved those kids, rather than to go on fighting with him. He'd do anything he had to do, even if that meant selling his horse, if it would buy him just a little peace and quiet for awhile. And so really it was his own fault he was in this maze. He'd done it to himself. And he was ultimately the only one who could get himself out.

A half hour later, Eric rode Max back to the barn and started unsaddling him, a little disappointed to see that Morgan was gone. Now that he had faced him once, he felt like he could talk to him. In fact, he would have liked nothing more than to sit here and talk to him the rest of the day. He didn't know why. Maybe it was just what he had said. Maybe it was because he had stroked his ego again by watching his whole lesson this morning even when it had started out so badly that he wouldn't have blamed him if he had left when his friend had. And maybe he was just so tired of listening to the sound of his own voice going around inside his head that he would have welcomed anything right then as long as it was a change.

But Morgan had closed up his tack trunk and turned off his radio when he left this time so there wasn't even the incessant sound of 'doo wop' in the barn aisle any more. Eric found he even missed that, though he hadn't been aware that he'd been listening to it before. The barn seemed very quiet now without it.

Eric pulled the saddle off of his horse's back along with the saddle pads. The sweat from the lesson had dried to a grey crustiness on the horse's dark coat except for that place on his back directly beneath where the saddle had been. Eric set his saddle down on the bale of straw outside of his stall, and draped the wet pads over the gate so they could dry. Then he walked Max down to the hose at the end of the aisle and rinsed him off.

After Max's bath was done, Eric drank from the hose, then cupped his hand under the tepid running water and washed the dried sweat from his own face and neck. He turned off the hose and wiped his face on his sleeve, leaving the water on his neck to drip down beneath his sweatshirt to his chest, cooling himself off. He combed his fingers back through his damp hair.

That stoned fuzziness from the night before had finally worn off leaving him just plain tired. Tired and hungry, he suddenly realized. He hadn't eaten since the sandwich he had had at the lunch break yesterday. And he felt like some angry caged animal was gnawing a hole through his stomach right then looking for a way out. Maybe he would just hang around until lunch time at least and get something to eat. Anything he got here was bound to be better than whatever he could pick up at the track later. And didn't that about say it all? Everything he had tasted here so far had been better than the diet he was used to getting. And he'd been so completely taken with it all, that the seduction had gone off without a hitch.

Eric walked Max out onto the grass and let him graze while he dried off.

In the arena, Hoehn was working on pirouettes with a whip-thin woman on a massive, dapple grey horse. While Eric was watching the lesson, Morgan wandered over from wherever he had been before and stopped behind the auditors' seats to watch also.

Eric's attention drifted slowly from the arena to Morgan. No big deal, he'd said. He didn't know why that had knocked him out so much, but it had. Maybe it was the implication of the words, more than the words themselves. It was no big deal. So just relax. Maybe that had been the reason he had just sat on his horse and stared after Morgan as he walked away, like he was some kind of magical guru who had just given him the answer to all of his problems. Because those few simple words had felt like balm against all those haywire thoughts he'd been having since he had left the bar last night, and he hadn't wanted to let go of that feeling just yet. Whatever the reason, he felt a whole lot better now than when he had arrived there that morning.

Eric walked Max back to the barn and put him on the cross ties. He cleaned his feet out to make sure he hadn't picked up any gravel on the trail and then took a hard brush and started going over his body with it. He was half way finished with one side when he saw Morgan walking across the lawn toward him. There was no doubt about this time, sunglasses or not, he was coming over to see him. And this time Eric waited for him, instead of running for the courtesy booth the way he had earlier that morning.

Morgan stopped just outside the eave, still in the sun, as if he didn't want to encroach too far into his private space, and possibly crowd him into running again. "I'm going to the clubhouse. Why don't you come up as soon as you're finished here?"

He looked at him over his horse's back. "Okay."

"Good." Morgan smiled at him, but he couldn't see his eyes behind the sunglasses. "I'll see you in a few minutes."

A half hour later Eric put his horse away and walked up to the clubhouse.

The tables were being set up on the veranda for the catered lunch. A couple of young women in white uniforms were putting linen table clothes on plain long, brown folding tables. A large decorative bowl of fresh fruit was in the center of each one.

Eric walked up the steps to the veranda, looking for Morgan and saw him sitting at a table at the opposite end of where they were setting up for lunch. But unfortunately, he wasn't alone. The man that had been at the bar with him last night was sitting next to him. He didn't know what he'd been expecting, he didn't know what Morgan wanted to talk to him about, but he hadn't figured on it including this other man.

They were talking. Morgan had his back to him sitting in one of the Shaker-style wooden chairs. The other man was in profile to his right, the back of his chair against the outer railing of the veranda. Outside in the daylight, Eric could see him a lot better than he had in the bar. He was older than he had thought at first, at the least forty, probably closer to forty-five, but he was in a lot better shape than he had been able to tell by the suit he'd been wearing last night.

He was dressed in a red polo shirt and Levi's then, and looked trim and toned, something more along the line of an aging tennis pro. And he could have been one for all Eric knew. He had that tanned leathery skin of someone who had spent most of their life outside, and even though his dark brown hair was trimmed short, it still showed the signs of being lightened by the sun.

A little disappoined that he wouldn't get this last chance to talk to Morgan alone, Eric slowly started to cross the veranda, having to wind his way through the other dining tables in order to get to them. "I don't know, Morgan, I just don't like the idea," the man was saying. "I think you could really be sticking your neck out on this one."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because one, you really don't know anything about him," the man said. He had a light New York accent. He picked a pack of cigarettes up off the table and shook one out. He picked up a lighter. "And two, he's a nice enough looking kid, but he gives off the impression of a damn street tough. He could be a hustler for all you know." He put the cigarette to his lips and lit it.

Eric hesitated half way over to them, hearing the comments and taking in the description, and felt a quick flash of visceral anger at the word hustler. Were they talking about him?

"Jesus, Martin." Morgan pushed an ashtray over to the other man's side of the table. "And so what if he was. It wouldn't be any of my business, would it?" he asked him. "And when did you get to be so judgmental anyway? It's not like you."

The man exhaled a long stream of smoke his face turned away from Morgan, then he looked back at him. "Probably the second time I got rolled in a hotel room."

"I think that speaks more for your taste than it does for anything else."

The man laughed at that, and at that same moment he turned his head a little and saw Eric for the first time, where he had stopped a little ways from their table. He had dark eyes and from that distance they looked black. They went over him slowly, appraisingly, as he took another drag off his cigarette no doubt picking up on the anger in his expression. He tapped Morgan on the arm with the backs of his first two fingers, gesturing toward Eric with a nod of his head.

Morgan turned in his seat and saw him, and smiled warmly. "Hey," he said, getting up. "I'd just about given up on you."

"Sorry," Eric said stiffly, glancing past him at the other man, who had picked up a briefcase from the floor and was going through it looking for something, dismissing him then in as much the same way as he had that morning, when he had walked away from his lesson. "I didn't mean to keep you waiting."

"I was just kidding," Morgan said, a little taken aback by the sharpness in his voice, if not for the expression Eric knew was on his face. "I'm glad you're here."

Morgan had taken his sunglasses off. They were lying on the table in front of where he'd been sitting. And looking at him, Eric could see nothing in those clear, grey eyes but the same open friendliness he had always read in them. If there was anything else behind them than that, then Morgan was one hell of an actor. Eric felt his anger slacken a little. Maybe they hadn't been talking about him after all. Besides, this other guy didn't even know him, why should he have anything to say about him one way or the other. He had to stop being so touchy. It was going to get him in real trouble one of these days.

Morgan clapped a hand down on the other man's shoulder, causing him to look up from his briefcase. "Eric, this is Martin Lehman. A very old friend of mine," he said in introduction. His friend gave him dirty look at his use of the word old, and Morgan took his hand away, smiling a little. "Martin, Eric Whelan."

Lehman put down his briefcase and turned in his seat, holding out a wide muscular hand. "Glad to meet you, Eric," he said in that flat New York accent. Up close his eyes were dark blue, not black, and they met his with no attempt to hide the frank distrust in them.

Eric took the offered hand reluctantly, only because of Morgan standing there, feeling some of the earlier anger returning. He wasn't sure anymore if they'd been talking about him or not, but this guy definitely didn't like him for some reason, and the feeling was fairly mutual right then. "Same here."

"Can I get you something to drink, Eric?" Morgan asked him.

He looked from Lehman back to Morgan, thinking at that moment he would rather just forget about the whole thing and leave. "I don't have much time. I really need to get going."

"Okay." Morgan nodded, his eyes going over his face, trying to read him, obviously picking up on some of his uncomfortableness "I'll make it quick. But, let me get you something. Water, juice....a coke?" He said the last as if he really had to think about it, almost as if it had been an after thought.

Eric looked at him for a moment, still trying to decide whether to just leave or not, and made the choice to stay solely from the warm, friendly expression he saw in Morgan's eyes. "Coke's fine," he said brusquely. "Thanks."

Morgan laid his hand on Lehman's shoulder again. It was a familiar gesture, affectionate really. And it was obvious from Lehman's responses to Morgan's verbal jabs, that they knew each other well. And it made Eric wonder again if they might not be lovers, despite the fact that Morgan had introduced him as a friend. If that were the case, Morgan's attitude around Lehman here made him seem completely casual about his sexuality, almost lax in fact. But then again, what did Eric really know about lovers, even friends for that matter.

"You want anything while I'm at it?" Morgan asked him.

"Scotch, with a coffee chaser." Lehman didn't look up. He was writing on a notepad that he had taken out of his briefcase. "And you better make the coffee a double, I don't know how much more dressage I can take."

Morgan smiled down at him with the same type of indulgence he might have shown his son, and then left them alone, going through the screen door into the clubhouse.

Lehman never looked up and Eric moved back closer to the steps and looked back toward the arena. It was the last lesson before lunch break and even the auditors were getting restless, a lot of them having already left their seats and making their way toward the clubhouse to beat the lines. Pretty soon this place would be crawling with people and he wouldn't just have Morgan's friend to contend with, but half a dozen of his fan club as well.

Eric glanced back at Lehman. He had taken what looked to be a stack of photographs out of his briefcase and set them on the table in front of him. He would look at a picture, turn it over and look at the back and then pick up his pen and write something on the notepad, his cigarette burning down between the fingers of his left hand.

The cigarette was a filterless. This guy didn't want anything getting between him and his nicotine fix. Eric looked at it longingly, wishing he had remembered to bring his own pack up with him from the barn. He would be wanting them even more in ten minutes or so, he was sure, but he would quit before he asked Lehman for one of his.

Morgan came back out, carrying a Styrofoam cup of coffee in one hand and a can of coke and a bottle of what looked to be apple juice in his other. He set the cup down in front of Lehman. "I hope that's strong enough, it's been brewing since this morning."

Lehman stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and picked up the cup. "It's not strong enough unless it can dissolve the bottom off of this cup." He took a sip and grimaced. "Now that is a good cup of coffee."

Morgan moved away from the table and walked over to Eric, holding out the can of coke.

Eric took it from him. It must have been sitting in a tub of ice for awhile. The can was wet and cold, and tiny splinters of ice melted into his palm when he wrapped his hand around it.

Morgan smiled at him, his grey eyes on his face. "You want to take a walk?"

As opposed to sitting down to talk at the table with his friend, and soon, having to beat off the auditors as well, Eric almost smiled at the absurdity of the question.

"Sure."

Morgan glanced back toward the table. "I'll be back in a few minutes." Lehman just raised a hand in acknowledgement, as he continued leafing through the stack of photos in front of him. Morgan gestured to the steps with a nod of his head. "Let's go."

They walked on a path around to the back of the clubhouse and then out toward the cross country course. Eric let Morgan lead the way, re-tracing some of the ground he had ridden Max over earlier to cool him out.

They walked in silence past the wide array of natural fences. It wasn't a very big course. It was something a competent novice rider could have gotten around without much problem, a lot of low banks and straight forward brush jumps. They walked down a slope to a water obstacle built into the shade of two old oak trees. It consisted of one solid, three foot timber fence and a drop into the water on one side and then a jump out over a simple rail on the other.

Morgan stopped at the bottom of the slope and climbed up onto the timber fence, sitting on the rough hewn log that served as the top rail. Eric did the same, sitting at the other end of the fence. It was dark and cool in that hollow. Fifteen feet past the jump out on the other side of the muddy water, everything was in bright sunlight again. There was a small pond not too far away where resident ducks and geese hung out. There was an occasional honking from them and the soft droning of bees around the water, but otherwise it was quiet. It was hard to believe that there was a clinc going on just a short distance away.

Morgan sat at the other end of the fence looking out toward the duck pond, sipping his apple juice. He looked relaxed, in fact, it was the most relaxed that Eric had ever seen him. For the past two days he had seen him around the clinic being pursued by his lionizing public. And although Morgan never seemed to be bothered by it, he had walked him out here to a place that they would very likely not be interrupted. Whether that was intentional and done for him, because Morgan had sensed the reason for his uncomfortableness back at the clubhouse, or not, Eric appreciated it.

Eric let his eyes roam down over him, while Morgan was looking away. He didn't see any harm in it, after all, in all probability after today, he would never see him again, except perhaps on television, if he made another Olympic team. And he enjoyed looking at him. Morgan was the most attractive man he had ever met. Maybe not handsome in the standard sense because his face was a little thin, and his fine bones probably showed too much for most tastes. But he had that kindness in his eyes and a wide, sensuous mouth, and there was a way his lips drew back over his teeth when he smiled, that made him want to look at him all day. He was easily the closest thing that Eric had ever seen to his idea of an erotic fantasy.

Morgan looked thinner than when he had first met him, but that was only due to his higher fitness level now. And he couldn't have worn anything that would have shown off the lean hardness of his body any more than the thin polo shirt and breeches he had on, unless he had opted for total nudity. These in effect were Morgan's work clothes, but Eric couldn't help thinking that if he had walked into the same bar that he was in last night, dressed just like he was here, down to the red, farm-boy suspenders, he would have had men all over him.

Eric wondered how many hours a day Morgan rode to stay in that kind of shape, eight, maybe ten, maybe even more. Eric rode six himself, and worked hard, and even though he was fit, he was nowhere near in that kind of shape. Of course he was young yet, and Morgan had just entered the age of a man's physical prime. He'd be there for another eight to twelve years, and just beginning to slow down when Eric would be entering his.

And Eric had to think that at Morgan's fitness level, the inactivity of that weekend of just riding one horse, must have been killing him. No wonder he had gone out last night. It was more of a wonder that he hadn't burned a hole right through the dance floor.

Morgan put the cap back on his apple juice and turned on the fence a little so that he was more or less facing him. "What kind of plans do you have, Eric?"

The question surprised him, probably because of all the thoughts that had been running around in his head all day, or more than likely because he had been so caught up in looking at him. It would have been such an ordinary question two to three months ago. Maybe Morgan was psychic as well as being a guru. Maybe he knew exactly how screwed up he was right then. "Plans as in what? Life in general or the next ten minutes?"

Morgan smiled at him. "As in your riding," he said, as if there could have been no doubt that it was about anything else. And, more than likely, in his world, there would have been no doubt. His life had probably been mapped out for him since he was born with that silver spoon in his mouth. All except for the fact that he was gay. Eric didn't think that part was planned.

"How serious are you?" Morgan asked him.

"It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do," he said honestly, but that hardly seemed enough to express how he really felt about his riding. "But after yesterday afternoon, I guess it really doesn't matter any more."

Morgan looked at him quizzically. "What happened yesterday afternoon?"

Eric took a sip of his coke, looking out straight ahead at the duck pond, wishing he had a cigarette. He wasn't about to air his family's problems to Morgan no matter how right he had been about his father. He didn't even know why he said what he did, except that there was something about his like for this man that made him loosen his tongue. "Just problems at home," he said vaguely. "In fact this morning, I was wondering if it wouldn't be a good idea for me to sell my horse."

"You're kidding me." Morgan sounded stunned.

Eric glanced back at him, surprised at the obvious look of concern on his face, and then thought about what Morgan had told him yesterday about not selling his horse. It was just another example of him saying aloud what was going on in his head without thinking of how it might sound, and he didn't want Morgan to think that he didn't appreciate his advice. And it wasn't as though he really thought he could sell Max. That would be too final. "I was just thinking it might make things a little easier at home, that's all," he explained.

Morgan looked at him, eyes narrowed, as if he was having problems taking in what he was saying to him. "Eric, is it for financial reasons...are you having money problems at home?" he spoke slowly, as if thinking it through as he spoke. "Because if that's the case, I'd be happy to give you a loan so that you wouldn't have to sell your horse."

"Why would you do that?" he asked him suspiciously. "You don't even know me."

"You're right," Morgan agreed, sensing his blunder. "And I guess I am getting a little ahead of myself. What I really wanted to do was offer you a job," he said frankly, his grey eyes meeting his. "I need someone to help me with my horses. To keep them going when I'm not home, " he went on easily. "I can pay you what your father does, probably more, we can work that out. And I have a three bedroom house on the property where two men that work for me already live, so you could move in with them if you like. And I'll give free board for your horse."

Eric stared at him as if he had never seen him before. "Why are you doing this?"

"What do you mean?" Morgan asked him.

He turned and got down off the fence on the land side, not looking at him, wishing he had just loaded Max up after his lesson the way he had planned at first. No big deal, all right. It didn't have to be a big deal if you had the money to take care it, and obviously, Morgan thought he did. He was being very classy about it, but he was no diifferent than anyone else. In fact it even made him more dirty. No fucking big deal. "You don't have anything to worry about from me," he said softly.

"What are you talking about?"

"You don't have to offer me a job, or pay me anything," he said flatly. "I'm not going to say anything to anyone about last night." He wasn't angry, he was more disappointed than anything else. Disappointed that he had been taken in so easily. That he believed so much that was obviously untrue about this man, just because he liked him, or thought he did. And now it was as if Morgan really had read his mind and was offering him the one thing he wanted more than anything else in the world, holding it out like a piece of candy. Some where for him to run. Some way out of the maze. But for what price?

His father had been right, these people would chew him up and spit him out. He was way out of his league here.

Morgan sat on the fence, his grey eyes looking at him steadily. "I know I started off wrong. But do you really think what I'm offering is some kind of pay off for your silence?" His voice was quiet.

"What else would it be?"

Morgan shook his head, the expression in his eyes almost sad. "I would never make deal like that, Eric. I'm sorry if you feel that way."

"Oh, come on," he said exasperatedly. Now that he knew the truth about him, he didn't want Morgan to lie anymore. At least he could do the decent thing now. "You have way too much to lose. And we both know what would happen if anyone around here found out that you were cruising gay bars. It would ruin you. Your life wouldn't be the same."

"For one thing, I wasn't cruising," Morgan said quietly. "I just wanted to clear that up, but that's beside the point."

"Are you saying you're not gay?" Eric asked him. "You just like dancing with other men."

"I'm not saying that at all," Morgan said. "I'm saying if you feel the need to tell someone you caught me in a bar, go right ahead. I'm not going to try and stop you."

He looked at him disbelievingly.

"Eric, you'll find if you stay in this business long enough, that memories are very short lived," Morgan said, fixing him in that clear gaze. "I might find it a little sticky at first, especially if there were any impending selection trials. But five minutes after they were over, nobody would remember who or what I wanted to sleep with. And I'm certainly still going to ride. Nobody is going to stop me from doing that." His eyes went over his face, no sign of anger in them. "And I've been through enough to know that life is way too short for me to be looking over my shoulder all the time worrying about what people think of me."

"But what about your wife?" It came out as an accusation. He had not meant to say it at all.

"My wife?" Morgan looked at him oddly. "Eric, my wife has been dead for over five years. I seriously doubt that anything I do is going to hurt her any more. The only one who could get hurt by any of this, is my son. And that, I would regret very much."

Chapter 14

Morgan looked at him a long time, as if trying to read him, and then he smiled a little, his expression open, and amazingly still friendly. "I really don't think you want to hurt me, Eric. If I did, the last place I'd want you to be is anywhere near my son. So what do you say about my offer? Would you like to come to work for me?"

Eric was beginning to feel pretty ashamed of his accusations. No matter what he thought the offer was, he had no right to bring up Morgan's wife. It was none of his business how he lived his life. And despite it all, this man continued to treat him decently even though he had re-paid him by treating him like shit. "You mean you still want to offer it to me?"

"Why not? You're obviously more concerned about my welfare than I am. How often do you find that in an employee?"

"But you don't know anything about me," he said, realizing as soon as it was out of his mouth, that Morgan and his friend had probably been talking about him when he had walked up to their table earlier. He'd just repeated what Lehman had said about him, and the man had been right. Morgan should have listened to him. In fact, maybe the guy had him pegged altogether. He'd acted no better than a street thug the way he had jumped on Morgan just now, and there were other ways of hustling that had nothing to do with selling himself. Things like using Morgan's name to get into the clinics in the first place, and taking that extra fifteen hundred dollars off of him when he'd sold him Rebel.

And who was he to judge Morgan anyway. He'd been the one to run out of the bar last night, and the one to run away again this morning. If anyone had looked like they were ready to make a deal this morning, it had been him, hands down, not Morgan.

Eric was disgusted with himself.

Morgan had turned slightly on the fence, so that he was more or less facing him again, his back to the water, thighs apart, the heels of his boots hooked on the third rail of the jump. He looked as comfortable sitting there as he might have in his own living room. "What do you think I need to know about you?"

Eric shrugged. "That I can be a real asshole sometimes."

Morgan laughed, those fine sun lines deepening around the corners of his grey eyes. "Well, it's not like I'm offering you any gravy job," he said, still smiling. "I've had people tell me that I'm hell to work for, but I've met your father. I'm pretty sure you can handle me."

He looked up at him sharply.

"Come on, Eric," Morgan said. His voice was quiet like he was speaking to a balky horse. "It's okay. Lighten up."

Eric looked away, and then he laughed too, mostly at himself, despite the remaining doubts he had, despite the fact that the same ribbing yesterday would have probably really pissed him off. But he figured the way things ended with Conor that morning he didn't owe him a whole lot of loyalty right then, and that he was still standing there at all was proof of how close this man had managed to get to him. So easily and in such a short amount of time. And because Morgan had seen him more naked last night than any of those nameless tricks that had swallowed his cock over the last two years. Even more naked than his own family ever had.

And it wasn't like his still standing there was voluntary by any means. Eric felt a little like a feral cat caught inside a petting zoo. Given half a chance, he'd have made a run for it again.

A warm, soft breeze went through the hollow, stirring the branches lazily above their heads and letting scattered patches of sunlight into the otherwise cool shade. It was pristinely quiet. There was no traffic on the frontage road that ran along the farm's fence line. There wasn't even the occasional blast from the bull horn Hoehn sometimes used while he was giving his lessons. Lunch break must have started and everyone else was at the clubhouse, piling up their plates from the trays on those lavishly laid out tables.

Eric felt that large predator or whatever it was that had been eating a hole in his stomach all morning, wake up and start in on him again with a fresh appetite. He took a drink of his coke hoping he could hold it off a little while longer. He wished now that he had bummed a cigarette off Morgan's friend when he had had the chance.

"So what do you think," Morgan asked him. "Does the job interest you at all, or would you like to hear a little more about it first?"

He was one tracked, Eric had to hand that to him. He finished his coke, and set the empty can down on top of the thick timber. "What makes you even think I can do what you want me to do? I'm not an eventer, you know that." He looked up at him. "The only thing I've ever known is the racetrack. That and galloping horses, and I'm pretty sure that's not what you're looking for." He was trying to give him a graceful way out of this mess if Morgan was looking for one. Eric hoped that he would take it.

"Actually, it's a lot closer than you think." Morgan said. "Eventing is just as much about getting a horse in condition as it is about jumping, but you told Guenter yesterday that you could even do that. And if I remember correctly, you have a pretty accurate clock in that head of yours," he said. " So if I were to send you out on a horse to do an hours worth of three minute interval canter work, I think I could be fairly certain that's exactly what you'd give me." Morgan was studying him thoughtfully. "And we both know dressage wouldn't be a problem for you."

He'd given it a lot of thought, and that surprised him, even though he wanted Morgan to be telling the truth. Morgan had said that he had a good clock in his head the morning he had come back to the track to watch him gallop Rebel. And Eric had thought at the time that it was just a throw away compliment, something to get the conversation going. That Morgan remembered it at all, surprised him, too. Maybe he was serious. Maybe there really was a job, and not just some bribe to shut him up. He'd really like to believe that anyway.

And Eric knew enough about eventing to know that what he'd said about conditioning was true. It was a physically tough sport for both horse and rider, especially at the advanced level, the Olympic level. There was good reason why they called the second day of competition, the day that included cross country, the endurance phase. He'd heard it compared before to going into battle, and in fact the three day had once been a military test for horse and rider, back in the days when the calvary had still been part of the armed forces.

And suddenly, the prospect of galloping a horse around an open field again instead of a dirt racetrack took Eric back to the happier times of his childhood when climbing on the back of a horse or two before school every morning had been something that he loved to do, instead of something connected to too much responsibility too soon. And he wondered what it would be like to do that again, just getting up and riding, even if it was still for someone else. At least it wouldn't be for his father, with all the complications associated with him. "I haven't jumped in years," he confessed, a little bit of what he'd been feeling coming out in his voice. "At least not much, not since we've been here. But even when I did, it was never over the big fences you're talking about."

Morgan smiled, obviously picking up on something from his voice. "It's just like riding a bicycle, and it's not like you've ever given up riding. It'll come right back to you. Besides," he said. "I very seldom school over anything that big at home. It's too much wear and tear on the horses." He glanced down at the fence he was sitting on. "Do you think you can handle something like this?"

It was a fairly straight forward fence, just the three foot solid timber with not much of a drop into the water on the other side. Then maybe two strides through the water to hop out over a simple three foot rail on the other. He would have been all over it as a kid. He'd been fearless, something to be reckoned with, Conor Whelan's son back at a time when that had meant something, a chip off the old block. Of course he could handle it, he was from three generations of steeplechase riders. He had been bred to handle it.

"Yeah, sure," he said offhandedly, dismissing Morgan's question. What the hell was he thinking anyway? He couldn't believe that he was actually standing there discussing the job like it was really an option for him. This place and the clinics were like some kind of seductive quicksand, drawing him in deeper all the time, just when he had thought he had finally managed to dig his way out.

"Good," Morgan said easily. "You shouldn't have any problems then. And I won't ask you to do anything you feel uncomfortable with. I don't believe in over-facing horses or riders. It's a good way to get one or the other of them hurt."

Eric shook his head. "Don't you have working students or something like that?" He looked up at Morgan and thought that had to be as transparent to him as when he had run for the courtesy booth that morning. But at that moment it seemed easier to just dodge the whole issue the way he had physically dodged Morgan earlier. He knew he couldn't take the job. He had his brothers, and maybe he did have some loyalty left for his father, although he couldn't understand why anymore. And even though he had thought of nothing else but getting away since he'd left the bar last night, now given the means and opportunity to actually pull it off, it felt cheap and sordid and whatever the hell else you called the act of dumping on a couple of kids who'd been dumped on enough already.

Morgan was looking at him steadily, those keen grey eyes trying to see into him, no doubt trying to figure out where this 180 turn of his had come from.

"It is working students, right?" Eric asked him again cooly, putting on his most impervious poker face. "That is what you call them, isn't it?"

There was a loud explosion of honking from the direction of the duck pond as a few outsiders tried to fly into already occupied territory.

Morgan looked at him a long time. "Yes, that's what you call them," he said finally. "And no, I don't have any." His voice was a little flat. "I teach a lot of clinics each month. And I work with a couple of pony club leaders and do some clinics for their groups because I like working with the kids. But I don't teach at home."

"Why not?"

Morgan shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, I think that it's a great program, but one, my farm isn't a business, it's my home. More importantly, it's my son's home. And two, I like my privacy," he added, meeting his eyes. "And if I had a lot of students wandering around, I would have to give some of that up."

Eric thought how odd those words sounded, coming from a man who seemed to be so willing to share himself everywhere else. But then again, what did Morgan's public graciousness have to do with his privacy. He could be anything on the outside and still be intensely private at home. And he could certainly understand his need for it.

"Do you mind if I ask you a question?"

Eric wondered what else he could possibly want to know now that the job interview had to be over. Forfeited due to lack of response. "No," he said. "Go ahead."

"Does any of this have something to do with last night? Do you still think I'm trying to make some kind of deal with you?"

A few of those errant splashes of sunlight, had filtered through the branches overhead, and flickered on Morgan's face, chest, arms and legs, making him look eerily like a figure on a piece of double exposed film. It reminded Eric a little of how the strobe lights had flashed on him in the bar last night when he'd been dancing that raunchy boogie with another man. He had a hard time shutting that image out.

"No, it's not that." He should just tell him he couldn't take the job and get it over with, but the words got hung up like some kind of a log jam at the back of his throat. The problem being, of course, that he wanted to take it, if it was real, and he was almost sure now that it was.

"Are you sure?" Morgan looked at him dubiously. "What did you think I meant yesterday when I said I wanted to talk to you?"

Eric stared up at him a minute before he actually took in what he was saying to him. After so many years of battling Conor it was hard for him to see what was plainly in front of his face anymore. Every piece of bait had to have a hook it. Morgan had told him yesterday afternoon that he wanted to talk to him and that had been long before he had ever seen him in the bar. And that had somehow completely skipped his mind. So, there never had been any ulterior motive for the job offer. It was just as usual his own fucked up slant on reality. If he'd been drowning and Morgan had offered him a hand, he would have probably slapped it out of the way until he could have figured out if he had an angle for wanting to save him.

"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it, feeling like a bigger ass than he had before, but oddly relieved as well. At least he hadn't been wrong about Morgan. And if given a choice, Eric much preferred feeling foolish to believing he couldn't trust his instincts anymore. "To tell you the truth, I didn't remember you saying that until now. I wish to hell that I had. But I guess it just goes to prove how much I really had on my mind yesterday."

"That's okay," Morgan said quietly. "I didn't say it to rub your nose in anything. I just remembered it myself. And if by having a lot on your mind, you mean having to sell your horse, I can understand that." He looked down at him curiously. "But why did you dodge me this morning? Was it because you thought I might say something to someone?"

"No, I never thought that."

"Why not?" Morgan asked him.

Eric looked away, shame-faced. If this was Morgan's way of retaliating, it was a good one. "Look," he said. "I've never talked to anyone about being gay before." It wasn't easy for him to do then, but he figured he owed Morgan that much. "Up until last night, nobody even knew that I was, and I guess this morning I just wasn't ready to deal with the fact that now somebody did." He glanced back at him to see what he thought about that, but there was no change in Morgan's expression.

Morgan was quiet for awhile, mulling over what he'd just said. He was rolling the bottle of apple juice slowly back and forth between his palms, not looking at him anymore, but at the torn up ground just a few feet in front of the fence. All the restlessness, that inability to keep still for very long, that Eric had seen in him for the past couple of days, was telescoped back into that simple motion.

Eric stood there, still feeling like that feral cat, but a little more relaxed now that he'd made his confession. He watched Morgan's hands. He had nice hands, clean and manicured, lean and long fingered. Rich man's hands, but hard and calloused as well. Contradictory, like the man himself. He would've liked to have gotten to know him better. It would've been almost worth taking the job to do that.

"I don't know how to say this without being blunt," Morgan began slowly. "So I'm just going to come out with it." He looked at him. "Obviously if you're going into bars, you've been around. What do you mean that nobody knew you were gay?"

Eric smiled a little at Morgan's careful choice of words. He wondered how he could explain the vacuum that was his sex life to a man who had just tried very hard not to allude to it at all. Not that he thought Morgan would get it anyway. Not the man who was so openly affectionate with his friend or possibly lover in public. "I don't exactly go out looking for conversation. I was cruising last night." he said dryly. " I just go out, get my business taken care of and go home."

Morgan was looking at him steadily, something that looked like sadness, or a close relative to it, in his eyes. "That's a hard way to live, Eric," he said. "Sex is great, but sooner or later you have to have someone to talk to, otherwise it can get pretty lonely. I guess I've been lucky, I've always had Martin."

Eric shrugged it off. The last thing he wanted was Morgan's concern. "So, are you out at home?" he asked cooly.

"Would it bother you if I was?"

"Why should it bother me? I was curious that's all. You sounded pretty casual about it a few miutes ago."

"I said that I wouldn't make deals with anyone to keep them quiet and I won't. But that doesn't mean that I'm casual about it." Morgan looked straight ahead, up the hill at the short approach to the water obstacle. "I have my son," he said simply. "And I have a mother-in-law that doesn't like me very much, probably for good reason. So I'm discreet." He looked back at him again. "But that doesn't mean that I think the people that work for me are stupid. I think the ones that have been with me for awhile have it all figured out. My house keeper has even met the man I've been seeing, whether she knows it or not, but then I don't make the woman change my sheets in the morning either."

He could accept that, it better fit the image he had of Morgan than the one he though he saw a few minutes ago. And Eric hadn't considered what pressures he might have on him because of his son. A gay man raising a child alone. And he had a lover. That did figure. Since last night Eric had thought about what signals Morgan didn't seem to be sending out, even then, out there alone with him, he was almost chaste in what another man might have turned into a sexual situation. Maybe the reason he had never picked up anything from him, was the fact that Morgan was only sending out one strong signal, and that was simply that he was unavailable.

"Is it Lehman?" he asked.

Morgan stopped, the bottle of apple juice half way to his mouth. "Excuse me?"

"Is Lehman your lover?"

"Martin?" Morgan smiled and the affection he felt for the man was plain on his face. "No," he said. "He's just an old friend like I said before." He took a drink of apple juice, finishing it up, then lowered the bottle again, putting the cap back on.

"So, Eric," he said lightly, "Now that you know more about me than I'm really comfortable with, what do you think about my offer?"

And he was right back on that single track again. Eric laughed softly, shaking his head at him.

"You did bring up a good point before," Morgan said. "Mine isn't a dressage barn and you would probably be better off in one, so I'd be willing to throw in a little extra incentive." He set the empty bottle up on the post beside him. "There's a trainer about a half hour's drive from my place," he said. "He's semi-retired, just keeps a few horses in training and a few students. But he's very good. He rode with the German dressage team twenty years or so ago." He was studying him, his light eyes going over his face, trying to judge if he'd peaked his interest yet or not. It was a good thing for him that Morgan wasn't a mind reader. "Anyway, if you were interested, I'd be willing to pay for you to take a couple of lessons a week from him. I'm fairly certain that he'd want to take you on once he saw you ride." Morgan paused a moment, still regarding him. "But I guess all that would depend on whether you still had your horse or not."

Eric could feel it, that quicksand, creeping up around his ankles, starting to take a gentle hold on him again. This whole conversation wasn't fair. Morgan knew more buttons to push than Eric had ever known he had. And then there was the attraction, something that had always been there, but that had become full blown with the knowledge that Morgan was gay. Something that Eric had never had to deal with before because of the strict rules he had always managed his sex life by. He smiled up at him weakly. "I'm beginning to wonder if you're not more interested in my horse than you are in me."

Morgan gave him an odd look at first and then he laughed. It was a good laugh, warm and good natured. "Can he jump?" he asked him.

Eric laughed too.

Morgan shook his head, sobering, still smiling a little. "No, I'd hire you even without your horse, Eric," he said. "Because I really need someone to work for me. But I don't think you'd be very happy if you sold him, that's all. Don't do it." He was serious again. "Just take that as some free advice."

Eric looked away from him uncomfortably. He wished like hell that he had never said anything to him about Max.

"So, tell me," Morgan asked him. "Last attempt, I swear, then I'm going to leave you alone. Is there anyway I can sweeten this offer to make you take me up on it? I keep getting the feeling you're interested but something is holding you back. Talk to me," he said. "Maybe it's something we can work out."

Of course Morgan knew he was interested. He would have to be a fool not to have been. And so Morgan had walked him down here, probably cocksure of himself, figuring he would jump at his offer, only to have him jump to the wrong conclusion and tear into him instead.

And if Eric had any sense at all, he would jump at it. Eyes closed, feet first, to hell with thinking about it. If ever in a weak moment he had dared to have any hopes or dreams about his riding, or about his future in general, Morgan's offer would have been very near to it. Working with someone of Morgan's calibre would be a huge opportunity for him, it would be the equivalent to getting a college education in this profession. A few years with him and he could be on his way, working at something he enjoyed and living his own life, instead of continuing on this collision course with his father. A road where eventually Conor would find out that his oldest son, the chip off the old block, was a faggot and throw him out anyway. And all his good intentions for his brothers would be for nothing unless they were old enough to leave when he did. Or even wanted to after Conor was through with them.

"I'll tell you," he began slowly. "You said before that you'd give me a place to live and board for my horse. And now even lessons too." He looked up at him. "If you threw in a meal now and then, you wouldn't have to pay me another thing."

Morgan smiled, but the expression in his eyes was solemn. "You need some work on your negotiating skills. But what?" he prompted him.

"I have to take care of my brothers," he said flatly. "So I'd love to take you up on it, but I don't see how I can."

Morgan's eyes narrowed as if he were puzzled and he started to say something but then stopped himself. Instead he looked away, straight ahead and up the hill, nodding to himself. "You've told me all of this before." He ran a hand back through his thick, barbered curls, then let it slip down to rub back of his neck. "And your mother's gone...walked out, or something like that."

"Yes," Eric said. "I didn't really expect you to remember. I told you that a couple of months ago."

"No," he said. "I should have remembered when you told me that you had to pick up your brothers yesterday." He lowering his hand again. "But I'd just started thinking about offering you the job, and that's what I had on my mind at the time." He looked back at him again. "But you say, that you have to take care of them. I don't get that. What about your father? I know it's not easy being a single parent. Does he have to work two jobs?"

"No, nothing like that," Eric said, but wondered if Conor's nights at the neighborhood bar could count as a second job. He sure worked at the bottle like it was a second career. "It's just that he pretty much left them to me to take care of after my mother left. He's never had much to do with them. He barely knows them." He left it at that. Conor didn't sound any different than a lot of men that were more wrapped up in their jobs than they were their own kids. Somehow Eric had enough blind loyalty left that he wasn't going to tell Morgan exactly how big a prick Conor was.

He didn't need to. He'd forgotten for a moment that Morgan was a father himself. He could tell from his expression that what he'd said had bothered him.

Morgan was quiet awhile. "You know it's none of my business," he said finally, "But maybe it's time you introduced them to him."

"Yeah, well," Eric said uncomfortably. "I wish it were that easy."

Morgan stepped down off the fence and stood beside him. "I don't know, I was probably way out of line for even asking you to come to work for me. I knew you worked for your father. It's just after watcing you ride yesterday, I thought you might be looking for something else pretty soon." He picked up his empty bottle from the post. "It's too bad though," he said, looking at him. "I was looking forward to working with you."

They were standing only a few feet apart. Close enough that Eric could almost smell the warm, musky scent of him. "Yeah, it would have been nice," he said softly. "Thanks for thinking of me." He was a fool, he thought. There was probably a long line of applicants somewhere that would've given anythig to have been in his shoes a few minutes ago, and he had just pissed it away.

He picked up his can from the jump and they started walking slowly back toward the clubhouse, out in the sunlight again.

"It's not like Florida is a wasteland," Morgan said as they walked. His was a relaxed, leisurely prowl, he seemed in no hurry to get back. "There are some good barns down there. I know they have a helluva good hunter/ jumper circuit. I showed on it for a couple of years as a junior, and I'm sure it's even better now than it was then. If you look around you should be able to find someplace to keep going with your lessons."

And that was it, Morgan had dropped it, and it left Eric feeling worse than he had when he'd first gotten there that morning. It was one thing to want something, it was entirely different to have it handed to him on a silver tray and have to turn it down. His resentment for his father had a new coat of paint on it and he was beginning to feel a resentment toward his brothers as well. And that was something he had never wanted. None of this was their fault.

"So you used to ride hunters?" he asked dully. He wished for the second time that he had loaded Max up right after his lesson like he'd originally planned, and then this whole regrettable conversation would have never happened. And he would have never known what he was giving up.

"Mostly jumpers," Morgan said. "I was a hyper-active kid, I didn't have the temperament for hunters. I wanted to tear around and hunters were just a little too quiet a pace for me."

Eric remembered the big grin Morgan had had on his face after Rebel had taken off on him, the day he had trailered the big horse over here to be vetted. If Morgan was like that now, he could imagine what he was like as a kid. Probably a lot like watching a road runner on speed. "What got you into eventing, besides being able to tear around all you wanted?"

"That's a little like asking someone why they fell in love. Who knows." Morgan said. "I think the realization came to me when my riding instructor let me out of the arena for the first time to jump some natural obstacles. The bug bit pretty hard that day. I was what," he said. "Maybe five, six at the most."

"Late bloomer," Eric said.

Morgan looked at him and smiled. "So from there I went up through all the levels in pony club and I spent every summer from ages thirteen through seventeen as a working student for some top notch riders. Then as soon as I graduated military school and was going to college, I spent every summer in France at Saumur until I got married."

Saumur was legendary as a riding school. Some of the best riders and trainers in the world, legends now themselves, had come out of its arenas in France. With his background, it was no wonder that Morgan had achieved so much, at a relatively young age.

They were walking back the same way they had come, passing the same fences. The grass under their feet was dry and warm and sweet smelling. A couple of pony clubbers, teenaged girls this time, met them on the path. They each had a plate of food and slowed down when they saw Morgan, looking like they wanted to hide. The catered lunch was was intended only for the auditors and riders in the clinic. The two girls must have snuck in line somehow. Morgan just gave them a knowing smile and the girls had exploded into fits of giggling the moment they were past them.

Eric shook his head. He wondered if every kid on the place, male and female alike, had a crush on this man.

"You've been doing pretty good," Eric said after they had walked a little further. "And you've already been in one Olympics. That must have been a nice feather in your cap."

"It would have been even nicer if I'd medalled, but actually I've been in two," Morgan said. "I rode in Rome in 1960. I was seventh there which wasn't too bad considering everything that was happening at the time." He was quiet for awhile and Eric wondered if he meant his wife's death. He'd said she'd died five years ago. He wondered if he'd loved her at all or if Morgan had just done what a lot of gays did, and married because it was expected of them.

"My long range plans are to win every major three day event in Europe at least once, especially the two big ones in England, Burghley and Badminton, I really want those," Morgan said. "No American rider has ever won them." He looked over at him as they walked, smiling. "And I'd like an Olympic gold," he said. "If I can manage all that, I'd happily retire at fourty and give somebody else a crack at it for awhile."

Eric laughed. No rider had ever accomplished what Morgan was talking about. Equestrian events were different from regular athletic events where only a human athlete was involved. In equestrian sports everything that could go wrong was multiplied by two right at the start. And horses could be fragile partners. "You're not too ambitious, are you? How old are you now?"

Morgan laughed too. "I'll be twenty-nine in November," he said. "I figure that gives me eleven years. And I still have three years left until the games in Mexico City. I could have it all done by then if I'm extremely lucky. And I have good horses," he added.

They were getting close to the clubhouse. The veranda was over crowded with auditors and quite a few more of them had gotten their food and were sitting in groups out on the sunny lawn. There were a few umbrellas up. It looked like something out of a painting or a scene from a Fitzgerald novel. Eric had that same feeling of being the infidel crashing the gates of heaven that he'd had from the very first clinic. No matter how much the clinics and his riding meant to him, this wasn't his world. He would always be a visitor here.

He slowed down, not ready to enter it again. He would've liked to have stopped right where they were and talked with Morgan the rest of the day, but he knew that he had to get back to the track soon, no matter how angry he'd been at his father that morning.

"If you take my horse, Cat, for instance," Morgan said. He was talking about the chestnut gelding that had had surgery at the beginning of summer. "If I get anywhere in the next few years, it'll be because of him." They were walking past some of the auditors eating on the lawn. Eric was aware of curious pairs of eyes watching them. "The British team went as far as offering me a blank check for him right after Tokyo."

Eric glanced over at him. "Why didn't you take it?"

"I don't need the money," Morgan said as casually as he might have said he didn't need a drink of water. "And it was a psych job anyway. They were telling me that if I sold him to them, they would make something out of him. And that I never would. And that just reaffirmed everything I already knew, that he was a great horse, and that I was lucky to have him."

They walked around the side of the clubhouse, past where Morgan's friend was still sitting. Morgan stopped right before they went up the stairs to the veranda.

"And that's what I was trying to tell you about your horse earlier, Eric," he said facing him again. "I've seen people go their whole careers and not find a horse as good as you have right now. If you're as serious about your riding as I think you are, don't sell him. You'll regret it the rest of your life."

Morgan had been pounding that against his head since yesterday, and it had taken that long to actualy get through. He wasn't just saying that Max was good, he was saying that the two of them together had world class potential. And that took a little time to go down. Morgan had actually been looking at him for the past two days as a peer.

He'd lived with Conor's negativity for so long that he'd never allowed himself to have any real ambitions. The big dream for him would've been that he could support himself doing what he loved to do. That he was good enough at it not to embarrass himself was just icing. Listening to someone who was as positive and had as much drive as Morgan did, was almost enough to make him believe he could do anything, too. And that was the worse kind of seduction.

He raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, I give in," he said. "I won't sell him."

"Good," Morgan said, smiling. He made no move for the stairs. "Do you mind if I ask you another question?"

Eric laughed, shaking his head. "Go ahead."

He was looking at him squarely. Out in the light again , his eyes were that peculiar grey-blue color of old blue jeans. "If you knew from the beginning you couldn't take the job, why did you let me keep on talking?"

Eric stared at him, starting to feel like that feral cat again. "I don't know." That wasn't exactly the truth. "Maybe I was hoping if I didn't say anything that you could talk me into it." And he realized that was so close to truth that it scared him.

Morgan studied him for awhile as if trying to make up his mind about something. Finally he said. "When do you leave for Florida?"

Eric looked at him curiously. "A couple of weeks. Why?"

"Why don't you come to work for me for a week before you go."

Eric laughed.

"I'm serious. I shouldn't be doing this at all. It's probably not even ethical," Morgan said. "But why don't you come to work for me for a week, and try it out - you might not even like it, but at least you'd know that. And maybe you could figure out what you really want to do in the meantime."

Eric searched his face, trying to find his angle, but he suspected now that if there was one, it was just the job itself. "You mean that?"

"Yeh, I do," Morgan said, smiling. "Bring your horse and I'll even take you over to Franz so you can take a lesson or two. But I'll warn you, I'll work your ass off while you're with me. I wasn't lying before, it's no gravy job. In a week you might be begging to go back to the track."

"Hard work doesn't scare me," Eric said, thinking if Morgan could have looked inside his head right then and seen how much he wanted to get away from his life, he would have never said what he did.

But maybe he had read something in his expression because Morgan was looking at him with that same sadness in his eyes that had been there before. "I didn't think it would," he said. He shrugged. "And who knows, maybe if you take a couple of days, you could work things out between your father and your brothers. Sometimes it just takes a fresh look to figure a problem out."

Morgan didn't have a clue, he thought, but a week to himself seemed too good to pass up. Even if Morgan made him ride twelve hours a day and muck stalls too, it would be a vacation. "So, let me get this straight. I can work for you for a week, check things out. And at the end of it, I can leave, no hard feelings, no strings attached?"

"That's it," he said. "I hope you'll be considering my offer while you're there, but at the end of the week, I'll haul you home if that's what you want. No questions asked."

Eric narrowed his eyes at him. "Why?"

Morgan laughed, shaking his head at him. "Why not?" he asked. He clapped him on the shoulder, squeezing it a little. "Eric, I think you must have a helluva lot of drive to have gotten where you have, almost completely on your own. And that's probably half of the reason I'm offering you the job in the first place," he said, taking his hand away again. "Because of that, I think you and I would get along together just fine."

Eric looked at him, still feeling the warm ghostly sensation of what had just been Morgan's hand. And Eric who didn't hug his brothers because it had never been part of his own upbringing, and rejected anything more than what it took to get him off from the men he had sex with, found himself responding involuntarily to that simple human touch.

He shook his head. "Conor'll shit a brick." He hadn't even thought that far yet. He had no idea what his father would do if he told him he wanted a week off to decide what he wanted to do with his life. He'd probably really need a job after that. "When do you want me to start?"

Morgan smiled. "You better give your father a little notice," he said. "How about Thursday? I'm going to be here until Wednesday anyway. I'm taking a couple of days off while Carl's still with my in-laws," he said. I've been told I don't do that often enough."

Eric shook his head again. He must be out of his mind.

He wondered what his mother had felt like that afternoon she had walked away. He wondered what kind of incredible survival instincts she must have had to have been able to walk away from those two kids like that and never look back. And he wondered what piece of herself she'd had to chew through in order to get free of the trap he was in now.

He looked at Morgan who was looking at him curiously, waiting for an answer. He felt like Judas, but he'd gotten a second chance to get away, even if it was only for a week, and he wasn't going to be stupid again.

"Thursday's fine," he said.

End part 14

Glossary:

dressage tests- training level thru fourth Prix St. George, Intermediaire, and Grand Prix. Each group of tests becoming more difficult as a horse and rider move up the levels.

3-day eventing- consists of a dressage test on the first day, speed and endurance the second day, and stad jumping on the third.

splint boots- protective leg wear for the horse