Chris Owen: Bareback

Bareback by Chris Owen
From: Torquere Press

He was almost to River, had actually lifted the saddle and was about to settle it over the blanket when he heard it, probably the only groan on the planet that could make him freeze when heard out of context. With him in a stall and Tor not right there, naked and wanting with him, it was most definitely out of its proper context. He didn’t think, just turned and put the saddle over the stall wall and headed to the doors, not bothering with stealth. He stood in the open doors, knowing he was in full light and watched.

It wasn’t anything like what had happened two years ago at the auction. He didn’t feel the rush of anger, the need to run over and stop it, to stake his claim. Maybe because this time he knew for a fact it was Tor. Maybe because he wasn’t surprised. This time, when it mattered, he said nothing. Felt nothing.

He watched Tor in the shadows, leaning against the outside wall, his head thrown back as Travis finished undoing their jeans. Listened as Tor gasped when Travis started jerking them both off. Watched as Tor moaned and thrust and begged for more, told Travis to suck him off. When Travis grinned and went to his knees, less than ten feet away, Jake watched as Tor’s eyes closed, heard him hiss with pleasure as Travis took Tor in his mouth.

He noticed the way they were just outside the fall of light from the doors, the way Travis knelt with one knee in the dirt, the other leg bent so his boot was planted solid. Travis’s jeans were dusty, like he’d not had time to change after playing ball in the yard all afternoon. Tor had showered and changed, though; was wearing his good boots, and new jeans. The shirt wasn’t new, but it was one of Jake’s favorites–it was the same blue–gray as Jake’s eyes.

Jake noticed other things, too. The ring in Tor’s cock and the way Travis played with it. That Travis was noisy, his mouth soft and wet, his lips already swollen, probably from kisses. That Tor had no hesitation in using Travis’s name or telling him how nice it felt. That Tor’s breath was coming faster and faster, even though he seemed to be in no rush to finish.

He noticed how pale Travis was, how his hair seemed to shine in the less than half-light. How the lean muscles in his back flexed as he moved. How young he looked.

Jake didn’t turn and walk away until Tor was thrusting hard, fucking Travis’s mouth and Travis was stroking himself off, his hand in rhythm with Tor’s hips. Tor sounded like Travis was good at what he was doing.

Jake walked through the stables, from one end to the other, and out into the crowd. If anyone spoke to him he missed it. He didn’t feel anything yet, and that sort of worried him. He should feel something, after all. Anger. Hurt. Humiliation. Anything at all–but he didn’t.

He just felt empty, like nothing could touch him. Cold.

Ranch manager Jake Taggart, after two years of working together, against his better judgment of fucking around with someone who works for him, starts a relationship with cowboy Mark Flynn *aka Tornado or Tor*.

Did you read that excerpt? I want you to know I actually just finished re-reading this damn book to make sure what I felt about it was correct.

What can I say about a book that for 26 chapters gives you a sweet gentle Gay Cowboy Romance and then keeps going despite the fact the arc is complete and the characters are getting their HEA and by chapter 35 knifes you in the stomach with a scene that anyone with half a brain would walk away from silently and never, ever, want to talk to the guy who betrayed him so throughly, so personally, so tragically? How would you have the guts to ever label the damn book a Gay Romance after destroying the Romance?

I don’t have that nerve to do that to anyone. I have absolutely no problems in saying that the first 26 chapters I was reading a decent Gay Romance with a few problems… Love scenes that were slammed into the story in single sentence rapid fire sequences like…

“Fuck. Tor, please. Need you. Need to feel.”

Which is not only awkward to read, but it was the only way that Chris Owen could write a man on man sex scene and let’s face the fact that after a while it just gets bland and boring because it all comes out like B.A. Tortuga cut and paste sex.

But… I found enough meat between these sex scenes to see a love growing between two hard headed manly man characters that were interested in having something more meaningful.

After chapter 26 the Romance dies. The chapters get spliced and diced with silly things like headings of Winter, Spring, Fall, Summer and short little nonsense scenes that do nothing to forward the growth of the relationship and simply seem to be there to provide fluff and filler to show they had done something for two years.

Then Chris Owen suddenly wants the ongoing relationship to get REAL dramatic so she has Tor fuck around on Jake. Now this would not have been a problem in a certain sense because early in the relationship in chapter 4 she has this foursome sex scene where Jake watches Tor getting fucked by some other guys. So there was groundwork there for implying Tor likes to mess around with a little strange, every now and then, and Jake did not seem to mind at the time.

Unfortunately Chris has a scene much later at an auction where Jake sees Tor flirting with another cowboy and he clearly put his foot down and sets down some “limits” and “boundaries” in regards to how he wants a relationship with Tor.

Jake then tells Tor, with good reason, not to fuck around with the help on the ranch because they have to ALL work together and he implies that his relationship with Tor was a total exception to this rule.

The biggest problem I had was these were some of the few scenes that actually stand out among the ongoing sex and show them defining their relationship so they were very clear in my mind when Tor did what he did.

So this final scene… for me it was the final scene for the whole book… is the ultimate betrayal a Gay guy can do to another in any relationship. It is not a mistake, like Chris wants to write it, that Tor made, Chris never shows us any deep personal conversations that imply clearly the relationship is in trouble bad enough to justify Tor’s drastic actions. Tor’s point of view is never fully represented enough to not see him as a immoral flaming asshole that took Jake’s heart and purposefully ripped it all into little pieces for no good reason.

I personally felt she slammed this Tragedy into place and barely did anything to couch it in any way to make it work in a Romance story.

Tor walked over and passed him a bottle of apple juice without a word, then sat next to him, looking out over the field. Jake waited, but Tor didn’t seem ready to say anything, so he shrugged and opened the bottle, drinking a little less than half of it.

When Tor still didn’t say anything Jake turned his head to look at him and said, “Well?” Tor took a breath, then looked back. “I’m sorry, Jake,” he said quietly.

“I know.” And he did know, knew it from the way Tor looked as bad as he did, knew it from the way Tor’s eyes were always sad and self loathing. He’d never doubted that Tor was sorry–sorry he’d been caught, and even sorry he’d done it in the first place. “Just not sure it matters,” Jake added softly.

Tor looked at him, eyes searching, questioning his meaning, not the words.

“It’s just…” Jake paused, trying to decide how to word what he was thinking. “We were falling apart, anyway. If everything had been all right you would never have done it, you would’ve laughed, or walked away, or hit him. You wouldn’t have…done that, if we were okay.”

Tor nodded slowly. There wasn’t any point in denying it, Jake knew. “Want to fix it,” Tor said, his voice rough. “I want to fix us. I can’t–I can’t keep going like this. Looking at you, watching you. Know I did it to you, Jake, but I want to make it better.”

Jake felt something loosen, something he didn’t know was tied up in a knot inside him. Maybe. Maybe there was a way to get past it. But the roots were somewhere else, not in Travis.

“I just don’t know what I did,” Jake said. “I keep going over it, the whole day, and I don’t know what I did that made you so mad you didn’t walk away.”

If he hadn’t been looking right at Tor he would have missed it. The look in his eye, the flash of pain and regret. The guilt. But he was looking and he didn’t ever have to worry about what Tor would have done, if he would have kept lying, kept hiding. He saw Tor’s gaze slide away from him, the tightening of the jaw, the flash of panic. And he knew. He stared and waited for his heart to start beating again, watched Tor crumple into himself, burying his face in his hand for a moment before setting his hat back further on his head.

“How long?” Jake asked, his voice sounding like it was coming from inside a well.

Tor looked at the ground. “Jake–”

“How fucking long was it going on?” Now there was anger, white heat and noise crashing over him, filling the hollow inside him. Taking over. It hadn’t occurred to him that what he’d seen was anything more than a one-time thing.

“Almost two months.”

Jake closed his eyes and told his stomach that the apple juice wasn’t worth throwing up. Two months and he’d not had a clue, not a single suspicion. The idea that Tor could hide it that well for so long stung him, cut deeper than just about anything. Or maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t been paying enough attention to notice. It really didn’t matter; all that mattered was that it underlined just how finished they were, that they’d been done for a long time now and hadn’t even known it.

“Jake, it wasn’t–”

“Shut the fuck up. One more word right now and I’ll kill you.”

Silence, for a long time. Minutes passed and Tor sat next to him, not moving. Jake kept his eyes closed, trying to find something, anything, that had happened which would have clued him in. Any looks, any unexplained time away. Any hesitancy that Tor had had with him. Anything. Aside from the fights they’d had and the few hours of strain they produced he couldn’t remember anything. Not a smell, a taste…nothing.

Jake opened his eyes and looked at River. “Did you fuck him?”

Tor sighed. “Yeah.”

“Did he fuck you?”

“Jake–”

“Tell me.”

Another pause. “Couple of times, yeah, but–”

Jake stood up and threw the bottle at the next tree, watched Tor flinch when the glass shattered. He moved to River and took his reins in one hand. “I’m going to talk to the Boss.” Tor watched him as he mounted the horse and turned River toward home. “We’re done, Tor.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, Jake.”

“Too late for that.”

“I know.”

This is only on chapter 37 and this books goes on and on and on till chapter 50. I am so done by this point. It is all over for me.

I feel sorry for Jake that things got this bad but I HATE Tor so much I cannot ever want them together again. Tor BETRAYED Jake’s TRUST. Professionally; because Jake told him not to fuck around with the help. Personally; because Tor never came to Jake complaining about whatever it was that was failing in their relationship that he might be unhappy or unsatisfied or felt unloved. Then Tor goes further than that and betrays Jake Sexually; because he was fucking around for two months and there was no mention of condom use and there was no scene that showed what the hell Tor was saying to Travis (Since a one time suck or fuck, sure, but what would be said to make a guy think he would not get fired for keeping it going with Tor like that? Who else got BETRAYED?) and Tor let Travis fuck him. An explicit sexual boundary that Jake stated clearly, DO NOT DO THAT. For a relationship, that in this book consisted mostly of sex scenes, I do not know how much more Tor could have said “fuck you” to Jake or Travis for that matter. USER!

Chris Owen tries to save all this crap by showing this totally uncharacteristic , for this book, deeply personal conversation between the most stoic cowboy in the story Jake and a mutual friend of theirs called Hound. Hound accuses Jake of letting Tor go because of pride? Wow, that’s a big old “no” Chris Owen, no no no you do not seem to understand what you or Tor did to Jake.

There simply was nothing left between them that Tor could possibly BETRAY. No emotional blow that could cut Jake deeper. The relationship and the love was over because there could never again be TRUST. The fact Chris throws this surprisingly uncharacteristic private conversation in the book after all the fluff and filler we had to read through representing two years of their actual relationship shows to me she knows she did something that cannot be fixed by any amount of bad sex scenes.

Tor knew what he was doing and he knew Jake would figure it out, he knew that he and Travis would get fired, he knew what he did would destroy their relationship and probably even knew it would make Jake start drinking and put Jake in serious mental and emotional jeopardy. This is so OVER!

The fact you kept writing this story after destroying Jake’s trust with so much unspoken hate, it totally blows my mind.

F is for going way too far. F is for carelessly throwing infidelity into a story you want to sell as a romance no matter how tragic and painful it is to the characters but also to the readers who trusted you. F is for blatantly attempting to rip off Brokeback Mountain in spirit and totally missing the part where no matter how over they said they were with each other they never betrayed their love. F is for just not getting what Romance is about.

If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?

Tags: Chris Owen, Gay, Grade F, Torquere Press, Western Romance