Retreat to Eremenos

While Edward holed up in his suite with his writing by day, and with the young prostitute, Tom, at night, Alo spent the first three days settling into the ranch and building up to what he knew was coming. In a few days he was scheduled to accompany a hunting trip up into the Tetons. There would be just him and five of the older cowboys on the ranch – ones Edward made clear to him when they took their dinner together were of the Erastes category.

“You are going to come back from that two-night hunting trip well fucked,” Edward said, with a cheery note in his voice.

Alo wasn’t left entirely to his own devices. At Edward’s instructions he was given odd jobs around the ranch, mostly muscle-building work, as they had agreed. One of the jobs was to carry bags of feed out to the corral where Hal trained the horses.

The two inevitably struck up conversations while Alo filled the feed boxes, and Hal volunteered to show Alo around the ranch buildings. They ate lunch together the first two days.

On the third day, Alo arrived at the corral to find Hal holding a rope and having a horse trot around him in the center of the ring. Hal was shirtless and Alo felt tinglings in his crotch at watching the rippling of the young hunk’s muscles as he exercised the horse. Hal correctly gauged the “tongue-hanging-out” look Alo was giving him and walked over to the wooden-slat fence.