Chapter 3 – Chapter 3

Jess didn't remember much from the rest of the cattle drive. His thinking was consumed with the man who had fucked him on the banks of the Platte. They did camp again near North Platte on the way back to Colorado, and Jess returned to the Buckhead ranch—this time on a Wednesday evening. The visit wasn't all that satisfying, however. The session with Ned this time seemed seedy and unfulfilling in relationship to the cocking he'd gotten from the tall, dark stranger. Jess wondered if a visit to the Buckhead ranch would ever be the same again.

So preoccupied was he with both the humiliation and glory of the night on the banks of the Platte that Jess almost missed what was happening in a field at the back of the ranch house, a field his wife had been after him for a couple of years to have planted to vegetables and fruit to augment their needs, as they approached their ranch. It was James who keyed him in.

"My god, who is that? Look at how big and muscular he is, father."

Jess looked up to see the field half plowed—by a tall, muscular man guiding a plow behind two horses. The man was stripped to the waist. His torso muscles rippled and bulged from the effort. He was dark-headed and his torso and forearms were matted with curly black hair. So hard-bodied was he and so much was the exertion of his work that the veins running through his torso and arms popped out on his tanned skin.

The man looked up; it was the man. The man who had fucked Jess on the banks of the Platte. He stopped plowing momentarily and turned and gave a nod to the owner of the ranch, his two sons, and the three cowboys returning from the Omaha stockyards. Then he returned to the plowing.

Jess hoped that his gasp wasn't audible.

James was just staring hard at him. John asked his father, "Who is he, Father?"

"I have no idea. He ain't from around here."

"Perhaps Mama will know," John said.

"Indeed, maybe she will," the father answered. But he had the sinking feeling that it was his own babbling in the postcoital cooling off from sex that had led the man here. Panic set in—but so did the reaction of Jess' body. His skin was crawling with the memory of the touch of the man's strong hands on him, and his ass was twitching—also with the memory of a special touch of another kind.