Between Two Promises

Copyright

Published by

Dreamspinner Press

382 NE 191st Street #88329

Miami, FL 33179-3899, USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Between Two Promises

Copyright © 2011 by Shelter Somerset

Cover Art by Catt Ford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 382 NE 191st Street #88329, Miami, FL 33179-3899, USA

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

ISBN: 978-1-61372-162-9

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

October 2011

eBook edition available

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61372-163-6

Dedication

To Candice

Chapter One

D
ANIEL
S
CHROCK
stepped out of his garage-converted woodshop and pulled the overhead door shut with a rusty screech. He adjusted his wide-brimmed straw hat to prevent the sun, hovering above the crowns of the hemlocks and cottonwoods, from scratching his eyes. Gravel crunched under his heavy boots as he made his way down the driveway. He caught the whiff of spaghetti and meatballs drifting from the rustic cabin he shared with his boyfriend. Supper would be ready by the time he returned from collecting the mail at the bottom of the lane.

Lofty trees leaned into the steep lane and allowed only a slim view of the Swan and Flathead Mountain Ranges. The first dusting of snow had already fallen on the higher elevations. Although hot and muggy in the Flathead River Valley, mid-August above ten thousand feet meant early winter. He headed down the steep lane carefully, mindful of the loose gravel. In winter, he figured trekking to the mailbox would be easier with the snow. He wondered how his brand new Chevy Suburban would handle the snowy terrain. A reliable horse pulling a buggy might have an easier time. He hadn’t driven a buggy since he’d lived in Illinois. That was about two months ago. An entire lifetime seemed to have passed since.

Most of that Amish world he’d left behind, ever since he and his boyfriend, Aiden Cermak, had set up housekeeping together in northwestern Montana. They rented the cabin from a middle-aged Missoula couple who had used it as a vacation home. Aiden had wanted to be truly rugged, to live in the woods without any public utilities. But Daniel knew his modern-raised boyfriend would have a harsh time surviving the winters without at least gas heat. In some ways, the plucky Englisher embodied the plain life more than he.

He realized Aiden was frustrated Daniel had yet to—what was the term Aiden always used?—“come out” to his family and explain that they were a couple. Things were far too complicated in the Amish world to toss tradition aside, like oat sheaves into a threshing machine. Daniel’s family knew he was living in Montana, but Daniel never mentioned to them anything about Aiden Cermak living with him.

Aiden’s parents, visiting from Maryland for a week during the Fourth of July, had only stoked Aiden’s desire for openness. Easier for him, having grown up in the modern East Coast suburbs. Aiden had been out to his parents since college. Daniel, unaccustomed to anyone knowing the intimate details of his life, had counted the days until Mr. and Mrs. Cermak’s departure. If they had found their only son living with a man improper, they had done a wunderbar goot job concealing their uneasiness.

Daniel could never invite his own family for a visit. Not in a million years. Couldn’t imagine any of them being accepting of his lifestyle. He did miss them though. His large family was on the verge of expanding, with his mother expecting her eighth child any day. Maybe there would be a letter informing him of the baby’s entrance into the world. He picked up his pace to the mailbox in anticipation of good news.

But he slowed. Most likely someone would call him from the phone shack down the lane near the family farm. Such news warranted more than a sluggish post. Aiden had given him a much needed cell phone for his twenty-seventh birthday last week, and he’d made his first call to his parents’ Mennonite neighbors, where he had left them instructions to give the family his new number. No one had yet called him. Perhaps they were troubled he was embracing so many of the modern ways.

No, impossible for him to tell his family he was gay and living with Aiden Cermak like any married couple.

Twelve mailboxes formed a haphazard row in a turnoff by the junction with the paved county road. They rarely ran into their neighbors. Their cabins were spread out, about one hundred yards apiece, yet sometimes a chance encounter by the mailboxes would force a simple, uncertain greeting. Most of the people living up in the hills, away from the expanding city of Kalispell, were loners, aiming for a life apart from others. Just as good. Daniel sought refuge away from the prying eyes of society too.

He found four pieces of mail. Two were from his Uncle Eldridge, with more orders for furniture, he speculated. Things were picking up from the lackluster past few years. He already had five pending orders for his handcrafted furniture he sold through a website set up and administered by his uncle’s Englisher friend. Another was a water bill. He shook his head. Bills. No matter how semi-subsistent a person lived, few people could escape bills. The last piece of mail surprised him. There was no return address, but he recognized the sloppy handwriting. It was from his nineteen-year-old brother, Mark.

Mark had never written him before. Only his mother and twenty-four-year-old sister, Elisabeth, a teacher back in Illinois, wrote him regularly, sometimes twice a week. Surely one of them would have written him about his new sibling’s birth, not his brother. Curious, he opened the envelope with his thumb while he hiked back up the hill.

The heat rising from the hot white gravel of the sloping lane stung his eyes, but the letter’s contents smarted more. Worry and anxiety wrenched in his throat. He slipped a bit on the gravel, collected himself. He reread Mark’s letter twice more before stopping at the bottom of the driveway.

Tugging at his beard, he gazed at the log cabin, ironically built twenty years ago by the Amish from a nearby settlement. Made from the surrounding red cedar, the nine-hundred-square-foot cabin fit him and Aiden perfectly. Inside, Aiden was probably already setting the table, the spaghetti steaming on plates. Their lives were good. They had made a comfortable existence for themselves in the live-and-let-live culture, thirty miles south of Glacier National Park. No reason to invite any unnecessary trouble.

He refolded the letter, slipped it into the envelope, and shoved it deep into the front pocket of his broadfall pants. Best to keep the letter from Aiden. No point letting him know Mark had written at all. Yes, that was the proper decision. For everyone. He would dispose of Mark’s letter next chance.

“
J
UST
in time,” Aiden said when Daniel stepped inside the cabin. He hung his hat on the rack by the door and plopped down the mail on the end table by their secondhand sofa. Aiden stood in their no-frills kitchen shredding chilled lettuce into a bowl and adding diced tomatoes and cucumbers. “Getting the salad ready now,” he said. “Spaghetti and drinks are already on the table.”

Watching Daniel sit at the white pine table he had made for Aiden three weeks after they had moved into their cabin, Aiden suppressed a groan. Daniel’s strapping build and striking looks never failed to seize him, especially in his Amish clothes, which he had refused to completely forgo. He wore them mostly around the cabin, and sometimes to the lumber yard in Kalispell. Aiden supposed his sturdy, plain dress had a practicality for their life in the rugged Montana hills.

A heavy sigh seemed to come from deep within Daniel’s breast. Anxiety weighed on his strong, broad shoulders, Aiden judged. Many changes had come to his life the past few months, more than to Aiden. He had abandoned much of his world for Aiden—his way of life, his family, his friends, his community. Sometimes Aiden feared he’d wake in his old bedroom at his parents’ mid-century rancher back in southern Maryland, and Daniel and the Rocky Mountains would be gone. Nothing but an illusion. Or worse, he’d come home from running errands down in the Valley to discover Daniel packing for Illinois, to return to his Amish roots—and leave him for good.

Aiden wished he didn’t have to push Daniel to be more open, but they had to face the issue sooner or later. He and Daniel were a couple, for what he assumed would be the rest of their lives, and he considered it foolish, even destructive, not to open up about their love for one another. He had wanted to convince Daniel that it might be easier to live candidly than to hide in a hermetic closet. But of course, coming out meant facing the notorious Amish shunning.

Aiden knew Daniel was not ready for that.

Daniel hadn’t officially left the church, and said he didn’t plan to, at least not for now. A wobbly bridge connected him to the small local Amish community in Rose Crossing, about five miles west of Kalispell. He never attended their church gmays but had gone to a few of the community’s social gatherings. Daniel hadn’t asked Aiden to go with him. Aiden feared the day the Rose Crossing bishop would show at their front door and ask Daniel to partake more in the community.

Would Daniel oblige? If so, what would happen to Aiden?

The little things he’d learned about Daniel during their short time living together—shaving his upper lip in the chrome of the toaster, showering in lickety-split two minutes, always needing to do something with his hands—he found adorable. But his taciturn nature often left Aiden speculating about what thoughts churned inside his head.

Daniel was a gift. Placed in his lap by unseen hands. Their discovery of each other in Glacier National Park two months ago had restored an awe for the world Aiden had thought he’d lost. Things were good, but secrets still lurked between them. Sometimes getting Daniel to open up was like prying open a pesky pistachio nut.

What was he thinking? Did he worry he had made the wrong choice when he had left Illinois and settled down with Aiden?

Brushing aside his worries, Aiden carried the salad to the dining area on a breath of a smile. Once he sat, Daniel lowered his head and shut his eyes.