Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
That first time I found this place, I was wearing a white dress. It was a Sunday, so there'd been church, and the dress was the kind my mother would've photographed from six different angles—eyelet cotton, smocked across the chest, the sort of thing that photographs like innocence and irons like a penance.
But that afternoon everyone had somewhere else to be, and the ranch was as close to empty as 47,000 acres can get, which is to say there were cowboys in the east pasture, and hands in the equipment barn, and probably someone movin' cattle somewhere I couldn't see, but not a single one of them was in charge of my afternoon.
Nobody's eyes on me. Not one lens pointed in my direction.
That was a rarity so complete it felt almost physical, like the pressure in the air had changed.
So I saddled Bucky—my fat little buckskin pony—and I took off.
I wandered and wandered, and I wasn't afraid of getting lost because every horse girl worth her boots knows that when a pony leaves the herd, they carry a constant, bone-deep itch to go home.
The barn is always north on their compass.
You cannot lose yourself on a pony's back, not really—they will always take you home, whether you ask them to or not, and so I was entirely, purely, catastrophically carefree that day.
Carefree in a way I don't think I've been since. Not once. Not in all the years that followed with their cameras and their follower counts and their carefully curated proof-of-living—none of it has ever touched what that afternoon felt like.
Just me and Bucky and 47,000 acres of nobody watchin'.
I'd found the silo by accident the way you find all the things that matter most, which is to say I wasn't lookin' for it. I'd ended up in the loft somehow, the way a child does, climbin' because the ladder was there and I was twelve years old and the view from the top of anything is always worth the effort.
I was sittin' up in the dust and the gold light, feet hangin' over the edge, and I was singin'. Ave Maria. The whole thing, slow and sure, the way Sister Catalina had taught us at chapel, because the acoustics in here do something holy to a voice—they hold it, round it out, give it back to you a little better than you offered it.
And then this beautiful blond boy walked through the door like something the song had summoned. Like Ave Maria was a kind of prayer and the silo had answered it.
I didn't stop singin'. Just kept goin'. Because it felt like the music had called him here, and to stop would be to break whatever spell had opened that door.
A rumble of a motorcycle cuts through the silence. Low, but thundering, and unmistakably sexy.
My heart stops. Just skips a whole beat.
He came.
Doesn't he always, Savannah?
Yes. He does.
But I will never take it for granted.
The rumble gets louder, closer. And my whole body breaks out in chills.
He still does this to me.
He still lights me up like the sun.
I don't know what special thing I did in some past life to deserve a love like this, but I've got it. And it's such a precious thing.
The engine stops, he knows I'm here. Cassia is nickering at him like Legion's her long lost friend.
He says something to her, and this touches me in such an honest way, tears well up in my eyes.
And then, there he is. Standing in the cut-out doorway. A shadow and nothin' else. I'm sitting in the dark like a creep.
He says, "You look pretty."
I laugh a little and stand up. "It's darker than midnight in here, Legion. You can barely even see me."
He approaches, then his hands are on my face. His mouth pressing against my mouth, and he's whisperin' to me, "I don't need to see you. You're always pretty."
And then we're kissing.
His mouth is warm and tastes like cigarettes and something else underneath—something that's just him, something I have never been able to name and have stopped trying to.
His hands are still on my face. Both of them. Big and rough and holding me like I'm something he's been thinking about all day, which I know he has because he always has, the same way I've been thinking about him.
The kiss goes slow at first. Almost careful.
And then it doesn't.
His fingers slide into my hair and takes the kiss deeper, and I make a sound I'm not embarrassed about because there's nobody here but him and the silo and the stars and this has always been the one place where the sounds I make are entirely my own.
I get my hands inside his jacket. His leather jacket, the Badlands cut, worn and heavy and warm from the ride. I curl my fingers into the front of it and pull him closer like I'm afraid he'll change his mind, which is a fear I cannot seem to reason myself out of no matter how many times he shows up.