Ain't So Awful Here
They decide, when they wake up well after dawn and following his discovery of that crust of blood under Bo's nose, just to hike on back to the Jeep he left at the parking area a few miles north of here. He's too old now to pretend he didn't spend a good chunk of the night awake, letting the cold air wash over half of his body while feeling the warmth of Bo's hand on his chest. And while his oversized cousin may never really grow up, he's too tender-footed to walk without a slight limp. Besides, though he claims to be fine, Luke knows from the many times that he's been on the wrong side of a fist, that noses tend to throb in time with a heartbeat the day after they've been hit.
Turkeys are safe from accidentally getting slaughtered by poorly aimed arrows that cause them unbearable pain before they die – if there's one thing their Aunt Lavinia taught them it was to make a clean kill or never to kill at all – and Duke boys are free to build a morning fire and sip at hot coffee. Warm water and the tail of Luke's shirt get after the smear of blood under Bo's nose.
"Ain't no swelling," Luke tells him. "You'll be all right."
"Don't hurt none," Bo assures him.
Oatmeal burbles as it cooks down to an edible consistency, and the sun starts to heat the land. The sky is that ridiculously clear blue that it gets up here; as if to mock two aging Duke boys, it's a perfect hunting day. Breakfast only bears but so much watching, what with it being grayish glop and holding no beauty in comparison to the world around them, so Luke lays back into the leftover dried leaves from fall, hands behind his head and staring off into the sky. It's going to take a lot more sun to warm the dirt below him back out of its near-frozen state, but the leaves are there providing a touch of insulation, and then there's Bo. Blanket wrapped around his shoulders just the same as it's been since they crawled out of the tent, he comes to settle next to him. Sitting, knuckles of his left hand grazing experimentally against Luke's arm. No surprise, it's been right there in his every gesture, how Bo wants to touch him. He's afraid, and it would all be easier if it was over a bloody nose, but it's not. Bo's been dragging around, letting his brain, of all things, get the better of him since yesterday afternoon. Waiting, apparently, for a fight that actually does come to blows.
Luke's a fool to reach for him, to let his fingers find the back of Bo's neck and give a little tug. A fool to kiss first, when Bo's lips get close enough, a fool to run his fingers through the knots in Bo's hair. Remembering how light it used to get by the end of summer, how much of it there used to be, how windy days wrought havoc with his vain cousin's attempts at achieving beauty – the boy never really did understand that he was at his best when he was windblown and wild.
One blanket covers them both as Bo relaxes there against his chest, close and warm. Lazy kisses with no ambition, tripping over each other in idle play. Long fingers there sliding between buttons on Luke's shirt, tickling at the skin he can find without putting any kind of real effort into it. All the same—
"Bo," he says, between this kiss and that one. Not that he gets taken seriously. Two tongues in his mouth, makes it harder to talk, harder to breathe, but easier to relax. Easier to let things go with the hand that comes off his chest to tip his chin, better angle now. Easy enjoy this leisurely morning ride with his cousin, until Bo nudges the accelerator. Might even be accidental how hips seem to pick up the rhythm of the kiss, rubbing tending toward grinding, but Luke has to slam on the brakes. "Bo," again, hand tangled in curls, pulling enough to free his lips and tongue. "We ain't alone in these woods."
Eyes finally open now, his cousin looks around. "Don't see no one," he drawls, hand trying to tip Luke's chin back to that place where he liked it so well.
"Bo." He could have snapped it in that same tone he always used when his cousin went ahead and dove into a fight against his advice. Would have really, except for how quiet voices seem more suited to being out here where the trees are trying to bud and birds are tending to their unhatched young. "Just because you can't see them don't mean they couldn't happen on us here. This—"
"Ain't Hazzard," comes out in unison followed by a sigh. Bo gives up the kiss that never quite managed to get started, but he doesn't go far. Chin on hands folded across Luke's chest, just quiet staring. Luke pulls his own hand out of Bo's hair, sticks it behind his head for safekeeping, in case it gets a notion to get into trouble touching parts of the man that will just start everything up all over again.
Comfortable, warm. Nothing he's in a real hurry to give up, and he reckons that if someone did come stumbling through this part of the woods – which though it isn't the depths of Hazzard in those nooks where they knew no one else had ever bothered to make their way out to, is still pretty remote – he can always explain how Bo tripped over the hem of the blanket and fell into him. Knocked him just about out cold, which is why it's taking him so long to get up.
"It ain't so awful here," Bo informs him, and that's good to know. Considering it was the man on his chest that wanted to come out hunting so bad. "If you wanted to stay. I'd get used to it, and you could keep your job." Oh.
"You figure you'd enjoy bowling on Saturday nights?" he asks. Feels his face pull into a wry little smile as Bo reacts without thought.
"That what you do?" Incredulous, then his unsubtle cousin catches himself, too late. Tries to present a neutral face when Luke already knows he's disgusted at the notion.
"Sometimes. The boys seem to like it." All right, so he hasn't done it more than a few times, but Bo might as well know just how fascinating a community this really is. "When I ain't driving around blacked out. Or looking at maps."
Squint to those dark blue eyes; Bo's not sure whether he's the butt of some kind of idiot's joke. "That really all you do?"
Hard to shrug with the solid, cold ground underneath him and the weight of a heavy cousin above, but he manages. "What do you do with your Saturday nights?"
Guilty shift of eyes, same nervous little boy Luke remembers being forced to confess to sticking gum in the Perkins girl's hair. "You know the circuit, Luke." Yeah, he does. It's not gum Bo's been sticking, and it's not hair he's been sticking it into. "Parties, bars. It ain't bowling." No, it's the extension of Bo's younger years, pursuing girls a little too zealously, trying to prove… well, it used to be a competition between Duke men, trying to accomplish a two girls to one ratio, maybe. And when Luke all but dropped out of the game, it became something else. A little frantic, somewhat self-conscious. Silly, giddy, embarrassing. That was when Luke began to drag him away by the belt, before he could make fools of them both. At least, that was the reason he gave himself. "Ain't there no bars here, cousin?"
"There's plenty of them." He's a Duke, he's got to be honest about these things. Not to mention how he's driven Bo down the bar strip of Commercial Avenue in both directions. It's not his fault that the man has no powers of observation. (Or maybe it is. All those times he told Bo which direction to turn the General's wheel, instead of letting the boy he once was learn the roads on his own.)
"Ain't you never go to none of them?"
More shrugging, more honesty. "Been to them all at one time or another, I reckon. Used to go regular to the Lamppost, but I ain't been there in a month of Sundays now." Or Thursdays, really, that was his night there. "Closest thing to the Boar's Nest, probably. Sometimes I'd get up on stage there and sing." With Anita.
Silence, Bo's digesting that one. "Where's your guitar, Luke?"
"Under the bed." There's a few things under there; some he likes to keep close and handy, others, the ones under where Bo's sleeping these days, those just got stored where they'd be out of his sight.
"You ain't played it since Anita left, right?" For all that he drove math teachers just about to killing themselves with his supposed lack of aptitude for the subject, Bo's plenty capable of getting four out of two plus two.
"Somewheres around there." He might have played it pretty close to nonstop right after she left, just alone and on his porch, his couch, and when it got worst, the bedroom. That's where he was the night he reckoned that the only way to move on was to pick up his chin from where it had gotten to resting low, watching the strings vibrate. Took a few days for his fingertips to heal over from where they'd split from pressing too hard or too often against the fret board, and after that, he'd never looked back. Much, anyway, not enough to hurt, not until the day he told Bo about her, back burning against the sun-heated metal of a car on a Los Angeles afternoon.
"What was she like?" They really need to get up out of these leaves. Two men kissing is only slightly more suspicious than two men sharing one blanket and the same six feet of ground. But not right now, not when Bo's real question is how much did she matter and am I still in some kind of competition with her? Payback he reckons he deserves for all but shoving images of their happiest days together under Bo's nose.
He shifts a little under the weight pressing down on him, away from that twig that's begun to dig into his shoulder blade. Hand comes out from behind his head, back of it caked in dirt, and he reckons his shirt and jeans look about the same. He smears the mess onto the blanket before letting his fingers run through that blonde hair again.
"She was different, I guess. Quiet and serious right up until the lights came on and the drummer counted eight. After that, she was a performer all the way." Bo nods, it's what he asked, but only half of what he wants to know. "Uncle Jesse would have liked her, I reckon." Then again, any girl that he thought worthy of bringing home would have made the old man happy in his declining years. The promise of the Duke line continuing, that was probably what the aging patriarch wanted most. He always acted like Daisy was the most likely candidate to accomplish it, but Luke figures that as the oldest, he was really the one who fell down on the job.
"I liked her," he admits, "plenty." Hand stroking through Bo's hair to keep him there against the tension he can feel rising in the body over his. Some instinct in Bo toward fight or flight, even if it is just a memory he wants to blacken the eye of. "If I loved her," fingers grasping just that much tighter, "I reckon I wouldn't have pushed her so hard to go." There's still a bit of conflict in the muscles of Bo's arms, deciding whether or not to push himself away from things he asked to hear, but might not want to know. "If I wanted to be with her, I could have gone on down to Nashville to live with her when she asked me to."
Like I'm going back to Georgia with you.
Bo's body is still rigid with effort to move, but not away. Hands off Luke's chest and onto his shoulders, pulling himself up, or shoving Luke down, maybe something in between. Whatever it takes for their lips to meet, right back where they were before he put a stop to this thing. He reckons that if anyone was near enough to see what they're doing now, there'd be some indication. Birds scattering, leaves rusting, the feel and scent of other humans. He's still a good enough hunter to recognize all of that. So he lets Bo take what he needs, reassurance that he steals straight from Luke's lips so that it never needs to be said out loud.
But—"Breakfast's burning."—he figures it's not particularly smart to push their luck. And just look how kisses get forgotten in deference to an empty belly. Bo, despite appearances to the contrary, is the same hungry little boy that he's ever been.