Jacob, the cowboy - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Author’s note: All my characters are consenting adults (18+). All sexual acts depicted are consensual between the adult characters.

Chapter 1

Coming home for the summer is always bittersweet. College wrings you out and the farm is supposed to be rest. It never is. Rest would mean my mother and Jacob in the same week, and Jacob does not do rest.

Home is horses, pigs, chickens, cattle. After my father died, Jacob took the work. Caretaker on paper. Boss everywhere else. His parents had the job before him. They’re buried behind the north pasture. He stayed. Twenty-nine. Walks like the dirt answers to him.

I never got along with him. Ten years between us. Mom says he used to carry me around the yard. I remember him calling me soft and making me haul water until my hands split.

He rides. He drinks. He smokes cigars down to the wet end with a glass of whiskey that never empties the same way twice. No girlfriend who lasts. In town they say he’s had every waitress who would let him.

I got in near dark. Plane, bus, dust in my teeth. One backpack. The closet still had the old shirts you can ruin.

“Son, you’ve gotten so skinny.”

My mom, Linda, hugged me too hard. Plump, blonde, food is how she loves people. Jacob eats for three. That keeps her happy.

He was in the doorway. Cowboy hat indoors. Short dark hair. Sunburned skin. Stubble that wasn’t lazy so much as unbothered. Twice my width through the chest. Black shirt open two buttons. Gold buckle catching the kitchen light.

“Linda, what do you expect from a kid who thinks he’s an intellectual,” he said. “Bet he skips dinner to buy weird books with the money this house sends him.”

He didn’t say hello. He went past me to the porch. The screen slapped. A match scratched. Cigar.

“Nice guy,” I told Mom.

She gave me the look that meant don’t start.

My room was the same movie posters and the same bed that still sagged. I lay down ten minutes and then I showered because I could still smell the plane.

Dinner was Jacob listing what was wrong with me. 

No beard. Hair too long. Shirt too feminine. The way I held a fork. He talked about it like he was grading cattle.

“You sit at this table like you’re visiting,” he said, pointing with his knife. “You grew up in that room. You still eat like a guest. Finish what’s on the plate. Linda didn’t cook for a show.”

Mom set more bread down and tried to turn it.

“How are classes, baby? You look tired.”

“He’s tired because he doesn’t work,” Jacob said. “I been up since six with a mare that won’t take the farrier. He’s tired from a seat.”

“Jacob, let the boy eat in peace.”

“I’m talking.” His boot found my ankle under the table and stayed there. Not a kick. Weight. “This house sends him money every month. I sign half those tickets. He can sit here and take a comment.”

I ate. The steak was good. I hated that it was good. He talked fencing, a horse that threw a shoe, a man in town who still owed him two hundred. Mom asked him to stop twice. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. The hat was on the chair beside him like a second person. When she went to the sink he leaned in without looking at me.

“You walk tonight, you end up where I can see you. I’m not chasing a college boy through my own dark.”

I said I was walking the property. Mom said don’t stay out late. Jacob didn’t look up from his plate.

The horse barn had a light on. Heat still coming off the day, trapped in wood and hay. I went in because I have always liked the horses. Leather. Manure. Sweet feed. A radio on a nail playing country low.

Jacob was at the tack wall. Toothpick. Whistling through it. Cleaning a saddle like the saddle had insulted him. Hat still on. When he saw me he didn’t smile.

“Hey. You. Don’t turn around. Come here.”

I came. Head down. The dirt floor stuck to my shoes.

“Jacob, I’m tired.”

“You think I’m not.” He set the rag down. “I been on since six. You sat on a plane with your little bag full of books and your opinions. Time you earned the money Linda wires you for that college life.”

“I didn’t ask—”

He had my collar before I finished. Cigar and whiskey in my face. Close enough to see the sweat in the stubble and the dark hair at his throat.

“I make the rules this summer. You sleep in that house. You eat at that table. That makes you my problem. Say you understand.”

“Let go.”

He didn’t. He looked at my mouth.

“You got a reputation in town, college boy. You think I don’t hear it? Guys at the feed store laughing about the boy from this farm who gets on his knees. Who opens up. I have to stand there and listen because I work here and your Mom is someone I appreciate a lot. Because this place has my name in the dirt even if the deed has hers.”

He let go. I sat down hard in straw.

He didn’t step back. He just stood there with his belt already in his hand and the hat cutting his eyes in half, and I hated how the barn smelled like him — leather, horse, the cigar he’d left on the rail. I had wanted this man since I was old enough to know what wanting was. The caretaker. The one who used to make me haul water. The one who filled a doorway. I had thought about his hands in lecture halls. I had thought about the buckle. I had thought about being put on my knees in this exact dirt and I had always called it a joke in my own head so I wouldn’t have to call it a prayer. Sitting in the straw with my collar stretched I could see the thick line of him behind the jeans and my mouth went wet and I thought do it and I did not say it. If I said it he would own that too. So I sat. I looked at the gold buckle. I waited for him to be cruel enough to start without asking, because that was the only way I was going to get what I came home for.

“Do you want this, soft boy?” He asked me with dark eyes.

“Yes…” I was ashamed to admit it but the word got out.

He stood over me and unbuckled. Gold. Slow. No underwear. He pulled himself out — long, soft, heavy against the open jeans — and he didn’t ask again. He pissed.

Hot. Sudden. Shirt first, then my throat, then my mouth when I gasped. The smell was sharp and animal and him. I jerked back. His boot came down next to my hip.

“Stay.”

The stream was strong. It soaked the old shirt to my skin. Ran into my hair. Hit my cheek and my lips. I should have crawled. I sat there with my hands in the straw and took it because some stupid part of me had wanted a straight man to do exactly this and the straight man in front of me was Jacob.

He shook the last of it onto my chin.

“Look at you. Already wearing me.”

He didn’t put it away. He was filling out from the act of it, from me sitting there wet. He slapped my face with it. Soft still, then not. 

The wet head painted my right cheek. A pause. The left. He watched it land. Country leaked out of the radio on the nail — a voice I knew, Morgan Wallen, something about small town and bottles. Jacob didn’t turn it down. He used the music like cover.

“Again.”

He slapped my mouth. I tasted him. He was filling out against my face now, long, getting heavy, the head leaving a shine on my lower lip every time it bounced off.

“You keep your teeth out of this. I feel teeth I piss on you again and I don’t stop at the shirt.”

“I won’t.”

“You won’t what.”

“I won’t use my teeth.”

He tapped the head on my tongue, three times, like he was knocking on a door. Then he slapped my cheek hard enough that the sound went up into the rafters. A horse shifted in the stall. Jacob smiled with one side of his mouth.

“That’s for the comments at dinner. That’s for thinking you’re too good for this dirt.”

He dragged the shaft across my nose, my forehead, back to my mouth. I was breathing him. Straw stuck to my wet shirt. My own cock was doing something stupid in my shorts and he saw it and huffed.

“Figured. Town was right about you.”

The wet head painted my cheek. Again. The other side. A sound like a hand but warmer.

“Open.”

I opened. He dragged the head across my tongue and slapped my mouth shut with it. Then open again. He was getting hard against my face, slapping in a rhythm, the way he’d slap a horsefly, except he was watching my eyes.

“This is the other job,” he said. “You work fences until your hands hurt, or you work this. Ten seconds. You say whore or you say hired hand. Ten. Nine.”

My pulse was ugly. Piss cooling on my shirt. His cock tapping my lip on every number.

“Eight.”

I could taste him. Salt. Skin. Piss.

“Seven.”

“I want to be your whore.”

He laughed. Mean. Pleased.

“Course you do. Those arms can’t hang a gate. Linda can quit asking why I’m hard on you. And I don’t pay town girls if I got a college mouth and ass in the house.”

He slapped me with it again, harder, now fully heavy, and left it against my cheek.

“Lick the piss off it. You wear it, you clean it.”

I licked. Base to head. The taste was what he’d just put on me. He hummed like a man checking a tool.

“Hands behind you. I slap, you count.”

He slapped my right cheek. I said one. Left. Two. Across the mouth. Three. He was grinning under the hat now, cigar forgotten on the rail. Country still playing. He put the head on my tongue and held it there, not thrusting, just occupying, while I breathed through my nose and stared at the big cowboy cock.

“That’s enough for a first night in the barn,” he said. “I ain’t coming in the straw. That’s for your room. You shower. You wait. Half an hour. You leave the door unlocked. You sit on the bed. You don’t text your little college friends about the caretaker.”

He tucked himself away with the same calm he used on a bridle. Buckle. Hat brim tipped down.

“And Harry.”

I looked up. Wet. Straw in my hair.

“You chose it. Don’t go crying to Linda that I’m mean. I’m the man on this farm. You’re the hole that said yes. We clear?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what.”

I swallowed piss-taste and pride.

“Yes, Jacob.”

“Get.”

I got. The yard was dark. The house windows yellow. Mom’s show on in the front room. I went around back so she wouldn’t see the shirt.

In the shower the water ran yellow-brown off me and I was hard the whole time, which I hated and didn’t. I cleaned myself the way you clean yourself when a man like that has told you to wait. I sat on my old bed in a towel and listened to his boots on the porch, then in the kitchen, then on the stairs.

In the barn, before the door shut behind me, his radio was still going on the nail. Morgan Wallen. That bright, dumb chorus about blue ribbon bottles and small town freedom. Jacob whistled a piece of it through his teeth while he buckled the gold belt, like he hadn’t just pissed on the college boy.

I heard the same song through the floor while I sat on the bed in a towel. He was in the kitchen. Glass. Cigar. Boots. Then the stairs.

Half an hour.

The door wasn’t locked.

The song ended. Another one started. Same man. Same country. I waited.