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Nothing shifts, nothing fades. On the fourth day, I’m as bewitched by Oscar as I was when he left.

I didn’t want him to go.

I’ve looked for him on the horizon ever since. And it’s a weird place for me to be. I’ve seen this man three times in my entire life. We’ve kissed and had a couple of casually intense conversations. That’s all. But those conversations, they’re wedged behind my ribs. Oscar’s hot mouth keeps me up at night with more than my dick on my mind, and I’m confused.

I don’t do obsession.

Yearning.

Repeat encounters.

I fuck people and move on and I’ve never thought about it enough to wonder why. Finch is a-romantic. She talks about attachment like it’s an affliction and I’ve always understood that instinct better than the soul-bond affection that flows between Folk and Seth. It’s always suited me better, like a second skin.

Until Oscar.

I want to cook him dinner again. I want to know what mood he wakes up in. If he’s grumpy in the morning or that rumbling voice of his gets rougher with sleep. Or deeper, so I can catch the timbre and float in the sheer connection of it. I want to walk the fields with him again. At dusk, this time. Toss him ripe berries from the hedgerows and watch the juice stain his lush mouth while he leans against the oldest tree on my land, unfairly alluring in the golden light of the setting sun. And what on earth is that all about? Maybe I’m not sleeping enough.

A thought that expands into picturing Oscar in the bed I don’t have yet, all inked skin and labour-carved muscle, lashes fanned out as he sleeps beside me, and it’s an image that stops me dead in the middle of hammering a fence post. I’ve shared beds, obviously. But sleeping is different. Sleeping is staying beyond the thrill of a hook up, and I’ve never wanted that.

Never.

But if Oscar had stayed three nights ago, if we’d lain together on the bed I don’t have, the storm battering the roof above us, talking until I couldn’t see his mouth in the dark anymore…

I could’ve slept with him.

I wanted to, even if I didn’t know it yet, and I think I’d have liked it. I think I’d like anything with Oscar and it unsettles me enough I miss the post entirely on my next swing and smack the mallet into my own thigh.

A curse escapes me. I rub the throbbing muscle as I stare out over the fields as though he might appear just because I’m thinking about him. It worked three days ago. Today it conjures up a motorcycle instead, and there are any number of people it might be. Any number it’s already been this week: every Rebel King I can think of except the one who really is my brother.

He’s staying away on purpose.

Folk.

I know he is.

Instead Cam O’Brian comes to see me. Rubi Matherson. And today it’s Saint Malone, but he has more reason to be here than the others. He owns the percentage of my land I couldn’t afford without tapping my parents for money. My silent partner. Literally. He rarely asks me questions, just wanders the farm on his own. His presence has never failed to settle me and it’s the perfect relationship, business or otherwise. So why does my chest ache more than the bruise I’ve hammered into my own leg?

I have no answers. So I go back to work. More fence posts—the task that never ends. Then I plough my biggest fields, turning over compacted soil for winter wheat and late brassicas in the hope I’ll restore the exhausted soil in time to nurture a crop as sturdy as the summer grains on the neighbouring farm. Their wheat is already high, green turning gold, heads weaving to the tune of the wind rolling in off the sea. I catch myself watching it too long from the tractor seat, dirt on my arms, sun beating down on my neck now the clouds have passed.

It reminds me of home.

Not the land. Cornwall’s too jagged around the edges for that. Too much salt in the moody wind. But the sight of crops bending to the summer skies calls to me before I can stop it, and I find myself thinking of Moondust Farm. Of long evenings in the fields before our family evolved and scattered. Jekka shouting us in for dinner. Folk waist-deep in barley. Finch reading in the combine with her feet up on the dusty console.

The nostalgia of it throws me.

I finish the pass. Kill the engine and sit in the sudden quiet even I can hear, lost to the land that’s finally beginning to feel like mine.

Then I dig my phone from my pocket and text my mum back for the first time in days.

Poet: still alive. i love you xxx

Dots appear almost instantly.

Mum: We love you too. Stop ignoring your brother! xx

I sigh and put my phone away, aware I’m the problem but lacking the bandwidth to fix it. I’m tired, and not just because sleeping on the ground is starting to get to me. My dad was right when he said responsibility was the heaviest load I’d ever bear. A weight he’s carried my entire life. I refused his money, and Folk’s, to fund this place, but making it work feels like a debt. To the earth. To my roots. To things I probably haven’t thought of yet.

You will.