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That night for the first time, Bubba came to sleep in my bed with no better reason than because we both wanted it that way. It just felt like the right thing to do, like we were boys again, sleeping in the same bed because there was nowhere else for us to be. But I also felt a connection growing between us, a common thread that was being spun thicker day by day as we added to our store of shared experiences.

When we were both settled in I turned out the bedside light, burrowing into my pillow until it was just the right shape. For a few moments I couldn't get comfortable, and then I realized what was wrong. I surprised both of us by turning and pulling my cousin's arm around me. He didn't have time to pull the covers between us, and I felt his chest fur pushing against my back. I could feel the tension in his arm for a second, but when we settled into position he relaxed, and was soon snoring away in peace and contentment. I lay for a few moments thinking about how wonderful it felt to be so accepted and wanted, then the hard work of the day caught up with me, and I quietly slipped beneath the surface of consciousness to swim with my dreams.

The next morning I awoke with Bubba's arm still wrapped around my upper body and his face buried in the crook of my neck. His breath was warm on my shoulder, and I did a fast mental double-take, not certain I was really awake. 'Damn,' I though, 'Damn, damn, damn.' The best, hottest man I've ever known was holding onto me, I was horny as hell, and I can't do a damned thing about it. With a sigh of resignation, I grabbed Bubba's wrist and pulled his arm up. Or rather, I tried to. He mumbled something in a sleepy voice that I didn't quite catch, and he pulled me back down with unexpected strength. Not that I fought him, but it seemed an odd thing for him to do.

I settled my head back down into my pillow and l leaned my body back into his. He took up the slack with the arm wrapped around me and pressed himself more firmly into my body. He touched the back of my head with his face in what could almost be described as a kiss, then settled back down. Jesus, I thought,this is getting weird. Very, very pleasant, but for all the reasons it shouldn't be happening, still weird.

I relaxed back into my pillow and felt the weight of Bubba's arm growing lesser and greater as he breathed in and out. The fur on his chest and belly rubbed against my back, and his breath tickled my neck. His left hand was positioned just underneath my right chest muscle at the edge of my vision. Moving my head slightly, I looked at it in admiration. The thick fingers were heavily callused from years of hard work, but I could remember the gentleness they were capable of when the situation called for it. Short, black fur covered each finger, fading away on his finger pads and palm. I'd been with my share of manly men in bed before, but Bubba was different. The others seemed like they were acting out a role which Bubba played naturally. They were "straight acting", Bubba was "straight".

Yet here he was, holding another man in bed, his nose buried in the soft hair at the bottom of my neck between my shoulder blades. Wouldn't he have to be at least a little gay to do that? The thought was so subversively dangerous it scared me. It was thinking like that which would get me thrown out of here on my ear, should I ever choose to act on it.

But hell, I told myself, hadn't I acted on it the night before when I pulled his arm around me? And wasn't that arm still where I'd put it? He hadn't pulled it back, even after a few minutes. Even after a few hours. Six hours later, he had not only left his arm in place, he'd actively pulled me back into the bed when I'd tried to get out. What did that say?

I quickly realized that this line of thinking was idiotic. It was a way to imagine that something more might be building between the two of us, and encouraging me to act on that fantasy. I already HAD my fantasy. Here I was, waking up in a comfortable bed with the man of my dreams snuggled up next to me. I had a rewarding job, working with someone I cared about and could work well with, I had a church family who respected and liked me, and it occurred to me that for the past four months, I hadn't spent five minutes being bored. There had been uncomfortable situations, painful discomfort and hard work, but never boredom. Thinking about it, there was only one thing missing from our relationship that put it outside the bounds of perfection. Sex.

Was it so important that I be the person who made Bubba orgasm? That's really what it all boiled down to, a ten second wave of pleasure that I could never give him. Did sex have to be so important? We already communicated better than most married people, and we certainly had a level of emotional intimacy that exceeded all but a few. How many straight men would feel comfortable telling their wives about their fantasy women, or the girls they'd slept with in high school?

No, I decided, It wasn't worth the substantial risk for the minimal gain that might be had from trying to escalate the relationship. In this case, the brass ring was too far away from the carousel, and I had little to gain and everything to lose by reaching for it. I moved my hand over and put it on top of Bubba's, feeling his sleeping warmth all around me. That was enough.

Spring didn't just come along like the bastard child of summer and winter like it did back home. In Texas you wore a coat on Monday, you forgot it at the office when you came home on Tuesday, then on Wednesday and for the next seven months, you had sweat trickling down your back. Summer was the bully of the year, completely eclipsing the other seasons. Winter was simply the lack of summer, and the other two seasons were pitiful stepchildren who occasionally came to visit, rarely seen and never heard.

On the farm, spring was a happy young woman who had time to weave garlands in her hair. It was a puppy eager to lick your face, and the warm, gentle kiss of an old lover. The grass grew green seemingly overnight, and the explosive budding of the trees was miraculous in its flagrant optimism. One day there it was cold and gray, the next, skies were blue and birds were singing.

"This is when the work really starts," Bubba told me on our walk to the barn that first spring morning without our coats. The air was crisp and cool, the sky clear and promising. "Pretty soon we'll have to mow the grass. And once the ground's warmed up a bit more, we'll put in the garden behind the house."

"Garden? I thought we got our vegetables from Kimball up the street?" I asked.

Bubba chuckled and took a sip from the huge coffee mug he cradled in one big paw. "Not all of them. I don't mess with squash or okra, because one's pretty much like another to me. Kimball plants a hell of a lot bigger crop than I do, and he doesn't have time to put in some of the more oddball varieties that taste better, but need more work to keep 'em going. He doesn't have time to mess with them, but they're worth the trouble to me."

"Like what?" I asked, interested despite my lifelong disinterest with gardening.

"Sugar baby watermelons, for one thing. Their skin is too thin to ship well, so Kimball doesn't bother with them. And I like Heirloom tomatoes, which don't grow fast enough to suit him, but they do taste better."

Teasingly, I said, "You'll work like a dog to get what you want instead of bending over and picking up something off the ground that's ninety percent as good."

"Yeah, something like that," Bubba said, then he surprised me by going on. "The way I see it, life out here is about making it the best you can. I've got nothing but time out here. I can invest that time by doing things that last a long time, like painting the barn or building something. I can spend that time doing something short term, like raising vegetables that make our quality of life better, or I can waste that time doing something that doesn't change my world at all, like watching a television sitcom."

"I never thought of it in those terms," I admitted, chewing over what he'd said. "It makes a lot of sense, when you think about it that way."

"Well, one thing's for certain," Bubba said, unlatching the big door on the front of the barn and throwing it open for the first time that season, "We're about to be spending a lot of time working, so get ready for it!

And he was right, too. We had become a smooth team working with the cows in the morning, and all the chores that used to take a good three hours barely took two. Our speed was fortunate, because instead of heading back into the house to escape the cold once that work was finished, we now headed toward the back of the barn to pick up tools and work the soil.

Most amazing to me was the sense of organization. We did indeed have only a certain amount of time to spend a day working, and that time was apportioned out in carefully measured quantities. There was never a lack of something to do on the farm, yet everything seemed to get done without rush and without a fuss. It was as if the schedule had been worked out years in advance, and Bubba ran through the motions like he had all his life. He'd been doing it so long, he knew exactly how much time each task would take to perform, and what order to do them in so as to be most efficient. It was a carefully choreographed dance that he ran through without having to really think about it, one he knew so well that he could perform its intricate steps while holding a conversation with his partner.

Our schedule was strict, but not burdensome. We always put down our tools at eight in the morning for breakfast, then at noon for lunch, then at three for a coffee break. At six we put our tools away and made dinner, and by ten we were in bed getting rested for the next day. I was amazed that I didn't find the regularity boring at all. How could you possibly be bored when you were kept busy from the time you got up in the morning to the time your head hit the pillow? There were young men and women at church who dreamed of nothing more than escaping the dull country life to go live in the city. How shortsighted and foolish of them, I thought. Everything they needed was right here under their noses, yet they turned their backs on it. I marveled at the innocent arrogance of youth, and I had compassion for their elders. I saw the eyes of the parents and grandparents when the children did not know they were looking. I saw the pain, the hope, the love that the children could not.

I saw despair, too. I think that some of what I saw in their eyes was the possibility that there would be nobody to carry on the family farm after the children had left. I saw disappointment that everything the parents had worked so hard for would be lost because their children didn't care about it as much as they had. What price, the independence of your child? But in the end, these were people who were used to sacrifice, and most of them, when the time came, would gladly sacrifice everything they'd worked so hard for all their lives to build in order to fuel the dreams of their children. For eighteen years they had been the primary force in their children's lives. Like the booster section of a rocket, they burned with all their might until they were no longer needed. Then, once used up, they were discarded to fall back to Earth, watching silently as the upper section of the spacecraft rocketed away from them under its own power. That was their job - it's what they did.

When you looked at it that way, it seemed rather sad. You work all your life to propel your children into adulthood, then once they're there, they have the legitimate and understandable option to fly away in their own direction and never return should they so choose. You can do everything a parent can do, and still fail your child. That's the double-edged sword of free will.

Gay men and women, I thought, usually didn't have the "child factor" to contend with. Your energies weren't spent lifting someone else, they could be used to move you in the direction of your choice. If you were fortunate enough to have a life partner who you could rely on, you could both use your energies to fly wherever you wanted in life. I have known gay people who have taken that ball and run with it, going places in life that never would have been possible had they had the stabilizing anchor of children to contend with. I have also known far too many who have taken that ball and, having no one else who relied on them to do otherwise, sat down in the middle of the playing field and frittered away their God-given talents shamelessly. Which was, I'm embarrassed to admit, precisely where I was headed before I walked through Bubba's doorway.

The mower throbbed underneath me as I revved it up to full throttle, working my way around the lawn surrounding the house. The house was situated in the middle of an acre of land, and until I started mowing it, I'd thought it rather idyllic. The large, old trees that shaded the wooden house from the sun looked beautiful and majestic. Until, I thought, you had to mow around them. Then, they seemed to have been randomly planted, making it impossible to set up an efficient pattern around them. They were lovely, but they were also a pain in the ass. Once finished mowing around the trees, I sped up the process considerably and ripped through the rest of the lawn in record time. This was the fourth or fifth time I'd done this chore, and by now I was getting pretty good at it. Bubba was busy going around the trees and the perimeter of the fence line with a gas powered weed eater, and right about the time he was finishing up, I'd follow behind him and let the mower blades chew up the trimmings. It was a good system, and I enjoyed the feeling of the sun shining on my shoulders as I worked. I have to admit that I also enjoyed the sight of my cousin working whenever I happened to catch sight of him, which I was careful not to do too often.

I was in shorts, and I'd stripped my shirt off for the first time weeks ago. By now, I had a good tan going, and looked healthy and relatively fit bumping around on the old dinosaur of a mower. When he'd first seen me shirtless, Bubba had looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, but said nothing. After a few weeks of being out in the sun and seeing me comfortably riding around, he bowed to the logic of the situation and took his own shirt off. It did feel better, and who was going to see us all the way out here? My cousin, the prude. It seemed odd that a man with such a hot body would be so shy to show it to the world at large.

I came around the corner of the house and caught sight of him trimming the back corner of the property. He was facing away from me, and I slowed the lawn tractor shamelessly to take in the view. The muscles in his shoulders gathered up as he lifted the trimmer over an obstacle, making twin humps next to his neck that swelled and bunched whenever he lifted the head of the trimmer. His torso was thick and muscular, sweat darkening his fur in a path between the humps of muscle. The fur in the middle of his lower back had a growth pattern to it that sparkled with sweat droplets as it disappeared into his blue jeans, a few inches from the white tee shirt that had been stuffed in his back pocket.. Although the denim of his pants was tight around his thighs, they were loose at the bottom, extra material tucked into his tan Red Wing work boots. The sight of that much fur and muscle exposed above that perfect butt and huge thighs hit me like a baseball bat to the head.

Jesus, I thought, If I had a video camera right now, I could sell this footage. It's better than porn! I put the tractor back in gear and did the math in my head. I could sell the video for twenty bucks a pop to just fifty thousand gay men, and I'd be an overnight millionaire. Then I thought better of that strategy. I'd rather have the sight all to myself and not make a dime!