First Chapter: As the Tallgrass Grows
About As the Tallgrass Grows:
No matter how many times Johnny starts over, things eventually fall apart. Like they did when he left the family ranch he loves in Nebraska, or in his fledgling acting career in L.A., or with his arguably perfect ex-boyfriend. Then he meets pretty, prickly, captivating Owen Galeo. A man who loves fiercely and protectively. A man Johnny is helplessly drawn to, and who inspires him to finally build a life that he won’t burn down. But every idyllic summer comes to an end, and Johnny has never been able to resist his urge to run when things get hard.
Owen’s safe haven has always been his godfathers’ farm. When they need help, he drops everything and moves in for the summer. To his surprise, they already have one house guest—Johnny, their long-lost nephew. Johnny’s beautiful, charismatic, and worst of all, famous...everything Owen’s celebrity parents taught him to hate. Owen resists their instant chemistry, but as the summer works its magic, he falls for Johnny anyway. Even though he can practically hear the clock ticking until Johnny takes off with no regard for who his leaving will hurt.
As the Tallgrass Grows is a stand alone novel in the Wild Ones series.
AMAZON (US) | AMAZON (UK) | AMAZON (AU) | AMAZON (CAN)
CHAPTER ONE
Johnny wasn’t sure what to wear to meet a long-lost relative. But since the great-uncle he hadn’t known existed for the first twenty-nine years of his life lived on a small horse farm, he had a pretty good guess.
Before moving to California, Johnny had a standard daily uniform back home on the ranch in Nebraska. He’d still hung on to a few sets over the past couple of years living here on the West Coast. Jeans—two pairs of Wranglers—and a belt to hold them up because he liked a looser fit. Boots, a decent pair, cared for but worn. An old T-shirt and a denim jacket, even if it was blazing hot outside.
Putting on these clothes felt like shrugging into an old skin—familiar, but not quite right. He hesitated, fingering the sleeve of his jacket, then shoved it in the duffel bag instead. There were more clothes in the dresser and some hanging in the closet that he’d have to leave behind.
“Let’s keep moving,” came a gruff voice from the doorway. The motel manager was standing guard but had the decency to turn his back while Johnny changed.
“Yeah,” Johnny muttered. “I’m moving.” Doing up the buttons on a long-sleeved shirt that had been a gift from his ex, Johnny felt a small flare of satisfaction, imagining how horrified Trent would be if he knew Johnny was wearing a three-hundred-dollar shirt to a farm.
He sat on the edge of the bed to pull on his boots, and his gaze snagged on the cluster of cigarette burns on the thin carpet. Over the course of his stay in this shithole, Johnny had all but memorized the pattern of the dark circles. Every night he’d imagined that prior guest in this room, dragging themselves through their own rock-bottom. He’d imagined a dozen different faces—old, young, grim, sneering—blowing smoke at the ceiling, then eventually rolling onto their side, arm dangling over the edge of the bed to snuff out the smolder against the floor.
Whoever they were, they’d come and gone so long ago that the smell of smoke had faded almost completely. Almost. Smoke was one of those things you never got out completely. After the house fire that had taken Johnny’s family home, he swore he’d smelled it in the grass and air for months. He’d be digging for a tool or a shovel in one of the sheds, and he’d catch a whiff of ashes, like a vestige of the fire had pooled in the undisturbed corners. Here in this little closed-off room, there might never be enough air and light to banish the last traces.
The motel manager cleared his throat pointedly, and Johnny veered away from his strange, meandering thoughts and took a last look around. If someone had told him a few years ago that a dump like this cost six hundred dollars a week, he wouldn’t have believed them. But after his grand tour of Los Angeles, from its penthouses to its gutters, he knew better. Nothing came cheap in this place.
He hadn’t had enough to make rent for the past two weeks, and it had only been a matter of time before he couldn’t dodge the manager anymore. His time was up tonight, apparently.
A half-hour before, when he’d returned from his nightly routine of wandering the parts of town within walking distance, he’d come up the exterior stairwell and found the manager waiting outside his door. For a moment, dread had made his heart turn to stone. What the fuck am I going to do? he’d thought.
Then, he’d remembered the bus ticket in his wallet and shoved aside the looming despair.
For months, he’d been thinking of going up to Arroyo Grande. For weeks, he’d even had the ticket.
The idea had taken root the previous year, after he’d raced back from Nebraska to California to be at Trent’s hospital bedside, only for Trent to wake up and tell Johnny to fuck off.
Johnny had done as told, setting off on an increasingly humiliating round of couch surfing with a combination of friends and strangers, until he got tired of keeping up the act of being “between places” or happening to crash with someone after a night out.
On the worst of those nights, he’d browsed on his phone for the bus route from LA to Arroyo Grande, north a couple of hundred miles along the coast, and bought a ticket.
The next morning, though, he’d sobered up and counted the purchase as a waste. And then he’d gotten to the motel, where he’d coughed up most of his remaining cash to prepay for his stay.
Back when he’d had steady acting and stunt work, he’d had plenty of money. But money spent fast in LA, and though that kind of work paid well, it didn’t pay as well as most people thought. And after he’d abruptly left the business for Trent a little over a year before and lost his agent in the process, he’d found that it was even harder to break into the industry the second time around.
Rock-bottom never felt good, but Johnny had been here before. Things would look up again. He repeated that to himself as he stepped out into the weak predawn light, pretending not to hear the manager mutter, “Cheapskate asshole.” Johnny jogged down the cracked concrete stairs into the parking lot that smelled like piss and old cigarettes, adjusted the strap of his duffel on his shoulder, and struck off toward the bus station with nothing but a half-charged phone, an overdrawn debit card, and twenty-two bucks in his pocket.
In the back of his mind was a niggling thought: What if he tells me to get lost? It could happen. There was always the possibility that he couldn’t win someone over. But his track record was almost perfect.
For winning people over at first.
They tended not to stay won over.
But that was a problem for the future. Right now, any doubts about his welcome when he knocked on Dylan Chase’s door succumbed to the part of him that lived to meet new people. That part of him was clamoring to get on the bus. The other part, whispering that it was only a matter of time before he was alone again, was almost quiet enough to ignore altogether.
***
Johnny stared out the bus window, wishing he was more interested in watching the shift from city to the West Coast version of countryside as they left LA. There were still buildings and plenty of traffic, just not quite as much of it.
He’d shoved his phone to the bottom of his bag so he wouldn’t be tempted to mess with it and burn the rest of its battery. He was intensely jealous of the man one seat over, who was reading from a short stack of paperbacks he’d pulled out of his backpack. Judging by their worn covers and the smile on his face, Johnny bet they were old favorites.
When he heard the phone chirp, he couldn’t resist digging for it. After he’d moved into the motel, too broke and feeling too sorry for himself to go out with anyone in the wide circle of friends he’d made over the years in LA, his previously steady contact with everyone had dwindled too. Now it was pretty much occasional check-ins that he didn’t always respond to. Still, his text message inbox was like a tiny, virtual emotional vortex that he couldn’t resist. He only hesitated for a breath before opening it now.
The message was from Larabee. She and her girlfriend, Van, had been two of Johnny’s closest friends in the city. He’d met them when he first came to California and was truly a nobody, without even his first acting gig to his credit. Eventually, they’d of course become Trent’s friends too. There was a dusty old group chat between the four of them from when they’d been two couples, and now he had a less dusty group chat with just him, Larabee, and Van.
The text read: We still on for 9 p.m.? Trent, don’t forget to bring your better half.
She’d obviously sent it to the old group chat by accident. That made him feel guilty, along with the stab of resentment at seeing what she’d written.
He closed his eyes and rubbed them, opening them again to peer down when the phone vibrated in his hand with another message, this one from Van.
Wrong group chat, Lar.
And then in a flash, he had a message from Larabee in the newer group: Fuck, sorry about that, JC. How are you? And I’m not just asking because I fucked up. Call us.
He dropped his phone back into his bag. “Don’t forget to bring your better half,” Larabee had said. He hadn’t seen anything in the media about Trent seeing someone, but Trent was good at keeping things quiet when he wanted to. Or maybe there had been something and he’d missed it. Not like he had a search-engine alert on Trent or anything. And though his fingers itched with the urge to look up whether Trent had been seen with anyone, at least this part wasn’t too difficult to resist.
He’d rather not think about Trent. If he was happy, Johnny was glad. But he couldn’t completely contain his morbid curiosity. A small, self-loathing part of him wanted to compare himself, the guy Trent hadn’t wanted, with the new person he apparently did.
“Hey, Johnny Chase, right?” an eager voice asked from the pair of seats across the aisle.
He took a deep breath and turned in that direction. Usually he wasn’t bothered by being recognized, but he wasn’t sure he had the energy to spare to put on a happy act at the moment. The young man—he was maybe around twenty—had tucked the small stack of paperbacks into his backpack and was leaning toward Johnny, his eyes bright behind smudged acrylic-framed glasses.
“It is you!” the stranger exclaimed happily when Johnny was facing him.
“Yeah,” Johnny said. “How are you doing?”
The guy looked surprised to be asked. “I’m pretty good.”
“How far are you taking this bus?”
“Sacramento. I can’t believe I’m meeting Johnny Chase on a Greyhound bus,” the guy said, as though to himself. He scooted out of his window seat and into the one closer to the aisle and Johnny. “If I didn’t have to, I’d never take the bus.”
Fortunately, they were pulling up to their stop. “Arroyo Grande,” called the driver.
Johnny stood up and shouldered his bag with a wry smile. “I wouldn’t take it if I didn’t have to either. Take care, and be safe in Sacramento.”
Johnny knew from his research that Arroyo Grande had a charming downtown somewhere, just far enough from the nearest major cities to retain some of its small-town charm, but where the bus had left him, there was nothing but a nondescript concrete building across the street from a car dealership, all simmering in the midday humidity.
He pulled out his phone to double-check the walking directions to the Big Star Ranch. Then he bought a bottle of water from a vending machine, drained it, and stuck a second in the side pocket of his duffel bag before arranging it over his shoulder and settling in for the five-mile hike.
As he left town, the sloping two-lane road straightened out and became a small highway. On the other side of its rock-studded shoulder, he was startled to see the blue seam of the ocean. He’d lived in California long enough that the water shouldn’t take him by surprise, and yet it always did. When he looked in the opposite direction, taking in the grass and trees, a wry smile tugged at his mouth. If it weren’t for the ocean, he might have been in Nebraska.
Then he spotted a glittering mansion in the trees beyond the next property’s custom-welded fence, and grimaced. No one built houses like that in Nebraska. At least not in the middle-of-nowhere Nebraska county where Johnny came from.
Fortunately for Johnny’s nerves, when he reached the hand-painted sign for the Big Star Ranch, he didn’t find an overbuilt monstrosity at the end of its driveway. Instead, the narrow, paved lane led to a white farmhouse, traditional red barn, and a few sheds. The stretches of board fence looked to have had a recent coat of white paint. In the nearest pasture, one of the horses noticed him and lifted its head briefly from grazing. Then it wisely decided Johnny wasn’t nearly as interesting as the grass, and got back to business.
The sight of the horses dotting the pastures eased the muscles that had drawn tight in his shoulders, and a sigh escaped him at the physical relief. Though he didn’t know these particular animals at all, horses gave him the feeling of home, no matter how alien the place.
Thoughts of home led to thoughts of his brothers, naturally, though he slid around the subject of Robbie to remember he hadn’t texted his little brother, Danny, in a few days. He had a rule for himself where he didn’t let the lines of communication between them go silent for more than forty-eight hours. When he realized he’d gone well past the bounds of his rule, he took out his phone right there, the heels of his boots on the paved road and his toes on the driveway asphalt, and punched out a text.
All is well. Changing locations for a bit. Will be good to be out of the city. How’s school?
Usually he’d give Danny at least some details about his location, sometimes even a physical address. Not that his brother was going to send him care packages or anything, but Danny was a worrier. He always imagined worst-case scenarios, and probably wanted a starting place for a manhunt if Johnny failed to keep in touch for too long.
Even when he wasn’t feeling particularly proud of his address, which was most of the time, he knew Danny wouldn’t judge him. His little brother was that rare person who never felt self-righteous about other people’s fuckups.
But Johnny hadn’t told Danny about the bus ticket. He hadn’t told Danny about the name that Trent had passed to him more than a year ago. He hadn’t told Danny about the long night he’d spent scrolling through search results on his phone, a lump in his throat every time he found a grainy picture or a brief mention of Dylan Chase in an article.
Whatever Dylan Chase was to Johnny, he was the same thing to Danny—and to their older brother, Robbie. Johnny hadn’t gone looking for Dylan. His name had turned up during a background check that Trent’s people had run on Johnny when they’d gotten together—a consequence of dating a politician. The first thing Johnny had thought about when Trent gave him Dylan’s name was calling his brothers. But instead, Johnny had kept the discovery of Dylan to himself. He wasn’t sure why, and he shied away from thinking about it too carefully, sure he wouldn’t like the answer he’d find.
How and when he’d tell them was a problem for later, if it ever came up at all. Right now, he zeroed in on the immediate challenge, and took his first step up the driveway.