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“I’m… alive.”

“Excellent. I’ll call you in a couple of days,” he said cheerily. He didn’t disconnect the call, though. “How are you, really?”

Groaning, I rolled over until I could stare at the ceiling. “I don’t know.” Then, even though we both knew I knew the answer, I asked, “How’s my horse?”

“Why don’t you come and check him out yourself?”

I whined a little, making Ville laugh.

Then he sighed. “Look, for what it’s worth. He’s mostly at Yellow Ribbon right now. If you come over, you don’t need to see him too much.” I didn’t have to ask him who he meant. Before I had time to formulate an answer, let alone speak it out loud, he had more to say. “I don’t like you being alone there—and yes I know Kamon is there right now and James will take over from him, but that’s not what you need and we both know that. This has gone on long enough, Wren.”

He wasn’t completely wrong. I knew that, too. I just felt safer here. No. That wasn’t quite true. Physically safe, yes, because I had Kamon here. Not emotionally safe, because… well.

“I’ll think about it,” I murmured.

Ville sighed. “Okay. Call me if you need me. I love you.”

“Love you too.”

I stretched my hand out to put the phone on the bedside table without looking. Of course I missed the table just enough that it clattered to the hardwood floor.

Sighing, I just rolled back to my side and stared at the windows.

Safety was such a thing for me. It came from not feeling that way as a kid. Nothing bad really happened at home. My parents worked hard. They loved each other, at least I thought they did. They just hadn’t really wanted a kid and then there I was. They were… absent. That’s the best way I could describe it anyway. They forgot about me a lot. Not on purpose, but they didn’t know how to be parents and that colored my whole childhood.

I didn’t have any grandparents nearby. My folks were very much those people who worked and went home to stay in their couple bubble. I just didn’t fit inside that bubble much.

When I went to school, I met Bodhi. Everything changed.

I learned that he lived next door—not that it meant much, because his house was still far away given all the land between my house and the Harringtons’. Bodhi realized quickly that my parents were nothing like his. Jenn and Mike were young. They were in their early twenties but already had a few kids. Maybe four at that point?

Bodhi was the perfect big brother to his siblings. He was the eldest of them all, the one who protected and kept an eye on Crew when Mike was working the ranch and Jenn was tired with the first set of twins.

Somehow, Bodhi decided that I belonged to him, too. Then the rest of the Harringtons followed suit. By the time I was ten, I was spending more time at Blue Creek Ranch than I did at my so-called home.

The thing is, I could see the look in Jenn and Mike’s eyes whenever they had to send me back over to my parents’ house. They hated to do it, but I wasn’t legally their kid. Besides, they had their hands full, so sometimes I’d ask Russ to give me a ride when I felt like I needed to be gone.

There was a well-worn, long as hell path from the ranch house to my parents’ soon enough. Whether someone picked me up or dropped me off on a horse, or I got frustrated enough to just walk the distance without telling anyone I was coming, there was something to follow safely instead of going around to the roads.

I was thirteen when I realized I was different from a lot of other kids. What kickstarted it was something my Dad said when we were watching TV as a family. I wasn’t really paying attention to anything but my notepad I was scribbling into when suddenly his random rant about some queer celebrity kind of pierced my concentration on the rhymes I was trying to come up with.

“I just don’t get why they got to flaunt it, you know?”

My mother shushed him, but I got the impression that it was more about him talking over whatever she was trying to hear than the sentiment.

It struck me that while I knew what “flaunting it” meant, I didn’t really get what Dad was talking about. I knew better than to ask him, though. But I did ask Jenn the next day when I went to the ranch after school

“Oh, Wren, sweetheart,” she said as she gave me a sad little smile.

Then she explained to me that not everyone was as accepting as the Harringtons were. That while on the ranch it didn’t matter who you loved as long as you were a good person, there were still a lot of people who disliked or even hated those who didn’t fit their narrow worldviews. It was like she knew I was queer before I did, but then again she’s a mom. A great one.

A couple of years later, at the height of the summer, I was at the creek with Bodhi and his siblings. We had Crew, Demi, Emery, Fern, Gemma, and Hawk with us, just to give Jenn a bit of a reprieve while the toddlers were napping. Bodhi and Crew were swimming up the stream and then floating back, while I sat on a smooth rock below the surface and just enjoyed the cool water that came up halfway to my chest. Demi and Emery were sort of watching the younger kids, playing with them a little in the shallow spot that was appointed to them as their safe spot.

I found the twins fascinating. They were so alike and so different at the same time. I couldn’t wait to see how the little twins would end up being.

Bodhi was my best friend, and his siblings felt a little like they were my siblings, too. Not really, of course, the same way Mike and Jenn weren’t really my parents. But I did wish they were my family. All of them.

Except, when I saw Bodhi get out of the water to go check on his siblings, I realized that maybe I didn’t want him to be my brother after all.