Archive of Our Own

Richie’s already out of bed by the time Carmy finds himself rolling out of it. 

His days start early, making breakfast by lamplight in the dark and squinting down at the fire of the gas stove. If he wanted to, he could probably go without the light, because there are few places Carmy knows better than the kitchen. He wrestles himself into his jeans, eyes bleary, fumbles with the buttons of his shirt, doesn’t bother with taming his hair. The smell of coffee and freshly baked biscuits fills the room, wafts out of the open windows and follows him through the door once he finally gets his boots on, taking the porch steps two by two. 

The ranch isn’t much, peeling paint and creaky floorboards and the occasional leak in the ceiling during the springtime, when the rain comes. They only have so much land and they only have so many cattle. They have exactly two horses, Carmy’s bay mare and Richie’s blue roan. It doesn’t matter, though, because the ranch is still his, and Carmy isn’t a stranger to having to work for things. 

The sun is a promise over the horizon now, a distant glow, the sky like blue velvet. By this time, Richie will be in the stables, tending to the horses, so Carmy’s tasked with taking their beat-up old Ford truck down out to the pastures. He passes the stone they keep in the garden for remembrance on the way. 

The truck groans with protest, but the engine starts. The road to the pastures is winding and the gravel crunches and pops beneath his tires. He leaves his windows open, left arm propped against the side door and wrist draped across the steering wheel. He keeps the radio off. There’s birdsong in the distance, a telltale sign that the rest of the world has finally begun to wake up with him. 

His days are relatively straightforward: he drives out to pasture, feeds the cattle, takes inventory. Goes back to the ranch to tend to the gardens or run to the market or prepares the fertilizer for the next field while Richie herds all the cattle, migrates them from field to field with the help of the dogs. It takes hours in all, eats up all the time in his day until he doesn’t have the time to think of much else. On a ranch, there’s always work to be done; Carmy is always working. They both are.

By noon the sun’s out in full force, hot at the back of his neck, dampening his shirt and making it cling to his shoulders. The clouds wane and drift past lazily. 

There’s a million other things he still needs to do, but Carmy takes the time to wander out to the fence at the edge of the field, anyways. Richie’s hat sits on one of the fence posts, and when Carmy looks out into the field he can see him as a blur in the distance, a thin line on top of the gray mass of his horse. 

He can hear Richie from here: hears him whistle and yell out from afar, hears the echo of the cattle dogs barking and sees them weaving through the legs of the cattle. Richie is surprisingly good with the animals. He’s mentioned something to Carmy before about them being easier than people; animals also crave routine, abide by instincts. 

There are some days where Carmy’s out in the field with him, and atop his horse he can see the full stretch of the pasture in the horizon, and though he knows objectively that it can’t be much, when he looks at it the land seems infinite: nothing but green hills, the clouds rolling overhead and sunlight dappled through the pattern of the trees, never seeming to end.

It makes Carmy feel small, but in a good way. It’s comforting. It grounds him, to be reminded that there are bigger things at play in the world, that there’s something more. It feels less like the land belongs to him and more like Carmy belongs to the land. They’ll stay out together until it’s near evening, the sun trading its brutal midday heat for the cool blanket of dusk, the sky pale blue and gauzy as the insects start to sing. “C’mon,” Richie will say, nudging his horse with a gentle foot, and then they’ll head back together.

The nights are long but the days always feel longer. When Carmy finally trudges up the front porch steps and shoulders open the rickety screen door to the house at the end of the day, the fall of his boots heavy on the hardwood as he makes his way to the living room, he finds it dark save for the glow of the gas lamps, filling the room with flickering shadows.

Richie’s waiting for him, of course, the long line of his body draped over the couch, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looks relaxed for once, body easy and open, the usual furrow of his brow gone, the lines in his face softened in the lamplight. 

Carmy doesn’t have to think before approaching him, toeing off his boots on the way; he collapses onto the couch, right on top of Richie, his whole body tired and aching and sore. Richie doesn’t hesitate to pull him in, and though there’s not much Carmy can make out in the low light he knows the familiar curl of Richie’s lip, the way his tired smile shapes his voice, low and gentle and gravelly in Carmy’s ear as he murmurs, “Hey, sweetheart.” 

The pet name originally started out as a joke, more or less. Something meant to antagonize him with. To hear it is a rarity, because the only other time Richie ever uses it is when he’s with the horses, brushing through their coats at the end of the day, spoken in that same low, soothing, hushed tone; one of Richie’s rare, quiet moments. He’s begun to reserve it for Carmy on occasion, too, and each time Carmy hears it he pretends that it doesn’t make his chest clench, because the name may be a joke but the affection behind it has become all too real. He’s long since conceded to it—just like how he concedes to Richie now, sinks into the solid, welcoming weight of him.

Carmy should be making dinner, really. The sun’s already set again and he knows he must be hungry but he can’t quite feel it through all the bone-deep exhaustion; he doesn’t really feel anything at all other than Richie’s hands on him, pressed skin to skin and wrapped in the warmth that always seems to emanate from the other man’s body. He shuts his eyes against it. He doesn’t want to move away from it, doesn’t want to be anywhere else.  

He lets Richie’s hands travel blindly over the body he already knows by touch. There’s no rush to it, no urgency, no purpose, running his hands over Carmy just to touch him. Some small comfort after a long day. They don’t speak to each other because they don’t have to. This is another one of their routines, too: something tender, something private, something sacred. 

The hands slip beneath the flannel of Carmy’s shirt and he feels familiar palms roam over the planes of his back, callouses that he knows like they’re his own, running down his sides and massaging circles into the base of Carmy’s spine with his thumb. Carmy noses into the crook of Richie’s neck, breathes in the familiar smells of musk, dried sweat and old leather and stays there, resting his cheek against Richie’s shoulder; he hears Richie laugh a little, feels the rumble of it beneath him deep in his chest. 

Maybe this is all he’ll ever have, Carmy thinks. The ranch is his now. A lifetime of routine, of rising long before the sun does and coming home long after it sets; days turning into weeks and the weeks blending into seasons, working, always working. A lifetime of laying down fodder and rotating the cattle through the fields and dragging water out of the well by the bucketful. Of visiting Sugar and her family during the holidays, of trading his meat for produce at the market, of fixing up the house whenever something caves in, of endless blue skies and rolling green pastures with Richie, of clutching mugs of hot cider in front of the bonfire during the cold months, curled into each other in the same bed in the dead of winter, waiting for the spring like a slow burn. 

And Richie. Carmy has him, too. Absurdly, inconceivably, Carmy has him, with Richie’s booming voice and his abrasive nature, his olive skin and rough hands and freckled shoulders, his stubble that’s always pushing past the limits of what defines a five o’clock shadow, his vulnerable moments that come few and far between but come nevertheless. 

Maybe this is all he’ll ever have, but in spite of it all, Carmy doesn’t feel the lack. There isn’t any room for it, not when Richie is loud enough, obvious enough to take up the rest of the space—intolerably, unmistakably, unapologetically filling out the gaps of his life. 

Just like how he fills out all the gaps of Carmy’s body, the spaces between his fingers, tongue filling out the spaces between his teeth during dark nights. Richie shifts beneath him on the couch and Carmy follows him, trying for a better position to accommodate them both, the two of them all long limbs and hard muscle, and there’s a moment where they accidentally meet in something almost like a kiss, chaste and graceless with their teeth clacking.

At that, Richie just laughs again before a heavy hand comes up to the back of his neck, pulling Carmy in for a real kiss, full and warm. His thumb traces the line of Carmy’s jaw, running over the stubble before traveling down the column of his throat, smoothing over the curve of his Adam’s apple, all too gentle, and if Carmy is doing all of this for any reason at all, then maybe this is what makes it worth it. Maybe this is all he and Richie will ever have, but they have it together.

If this is all he’ll ever have, Carmy thinks, then it feels like enough. 

. . .

There’s the blare of a horn somewhere, loud and jarring beyond Carmy’s window as the city announces itself coming to life; alone in his apartment, he blinks awake.