Frey was excited to see us. He bugled, then did a head nodding stunt until I walked over and took his whole face in my arms and hugged him. What a baby! When I gave him a big loud, smucking kiss right above his muzzle, Frances made a face and said, “Yick. He’s not your boyfriend.”
Where had Frances gotten such a thought? It wasn’t like I was doing the stop breathing and suck on a tongue business with Frey. That would be disgusting. I mean, not when I’d done that with Frank. Oh, my. Where had that thought come from?
I wiggled my mind away from that memory and focused on how it might just be a little strange to be kissing a horse. Probably nobody else did such a thing, but Frey was my baby. I’d raised him. Didn’t that count for making him half-human and deserving of kisses? Mothers always kissed their children.
The kids continued to watch, probably hoping I’d do something else utterly ridiculous, but then Carlo wanted to know if he could feed Frey the apple, and Frances chimed in about giving the horse the bread treat he was holding. Okay, time to move on. I couldn’t get lost in my thoughts, especially not when Frank was staring at my lips, almost as if he was thinking the same thought about the kiss we’d shared back at deserted house in the middle of a dusty corral.
I shook my head figuratively to stop such musings, or any other reveries that involved one extremely handsome, highly muscled and very firm-bodied officer, who was still staring at me with an attentive look on his face, only a few feet away . . . and showed the boys how to do flat hands for safe horse feeding. Frances went first with the slightly mushed piece of bread I’d given him. (Not that the piece of bread had been flattened and mauled when I’d given it to him.)
Frances’ hand was perfectly flat but kind of shaky, especially when Frey opened his mouth. The teeth of a horse are not only numerous — a stallion can have as many as 44 teeth — but they’re big. They make a young child’s teeth look like play toys. A horse’s teeth never stop growing, a fact that I didn’t offer up to young Frances as he shut his eyes and hoped he’d still have fingers after Frey took the bread.
I soothed Frances, telling him how brave he was. Of course, I didn’t inform him that a horse can’t actually see someone’s hand stretched out like that. A horse truly can’t see directly in front, so Frey is more or less almost blind at the point where he’s lapping up a treat.
But horses have other senses. Frey lipped at Frances’ stretched out hand, took the piece of bread in his big yellow-green teeth, flipped it out of Frances’ hand and waved it up and down like a toy he was shaking. Then my sweet stallion handed the half-broken piece of bread back to Frances.
“Why did he do that?” Frances asked, his small face wrinkling up with confusion.
“He’s playing with you,” I explained. “Hand him the bread again and see if he’ll eat it this time. If not, I’ll give you one of my carrot sticks.”