“Homes are interesting,” she said. “I design a lot of buildings that aren’t homes. And in those cases, I design the buildings based on the skyline of the city. The ways I want the structure to flow with the surroundings. But homes are different. My parents’ house, small and simple as it is, could not feel more like home to me. Nothing else will ever feel like home in quite the same way it does. It’s where I grew up. Where the essential pieces of myself were formed and made. That’s what a home is. And every home you live in after those formative years...is not the same. So you have to try to take something from the life experience people have had since they left their parents and bring it all in and create a home from that.”
He thought of his own childhood home. Of the way he had felt there. The fear. The stale scent of alcohol and sadness. The constant lingering threat of violence.
“Home to me was the back of a horse,” he said. “The mountains. The trees. The sky. That’s where I was made. It’s where I became a person I could be proud of, or at the very least, a person I could live with. My parents’ place was prison.”
He urged his horse forward, moving farther down the trail, into the clearing, before he looped around and headed back toward the other property. Faith followed after him.
And the sky opened up. That angry fist released its hold.
He urged the horse into a canter, and he could hear Faith keeping pace behind him. As they rode, the rain soaked through his clothes. All the way through to his skin. It poured down his face, down his shirt collar.
Rain.
It had been five years since he had felt rain on his skin.
Fuck.
He hadn’t even known he’d missed it until now. And now he realized he was so thirsty for it he thought he might have been on the brink of death.
He released his hold on the reins and let his arms fall to his sides, spread his hands wide, keeping his body movements in tune with the horse as the water washed over him.
For a moment. Then two.
He counted the raindrops at first. Until it all blended together, a baptism out there in the wilderness.
He finally took control of the animal again. By then, the barn was back in view.
The horse moved with him as Levi encouraged him into a gallop. The rain whipped into his eyes now, but he didn’t care. He brought the horse into the stable and looped the lead rope around a hook, then moved back outside and stripped off his shirt, letting the rain fall on his skin there, too.
If Faith thought it was strange, she didn’t say anything. She went into the barn behind him and disappeared for a few moments. Leaving him outside, with the water washing over him. When she returned she was without her horse, her chin-length dark hair wet and clinging to her face.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I just realized,” he said, looking up above, letting the water drops hit him square on the face. “I just realized that it’s the first time I’ve felt the rain since before I was in jail.”
Neither of them said anything. She simply closed the distance between them and curved her fingers around his forearm.
They stood there for a while, getting wet together.
“Tell me about your family,” she said softly.
“You don’t want to hear the story.”
“I do,” she said.
“Maybe I don’t feel like telling it,” he responded, turning to face her.
She looked all around them, back up at the sky, and then back at him. “We’re home,” she said. “It’s the best place to tell hard stories.”
And he knew exactly what she meant. They were home. They were free. Outside and with no walls around them. In the exact kind of place he had found freedom for himself the first time.
“My very first memory is of my father hitting my mother in the face,” he said. “I remember a bruise blooming there almost instantly. Blood. Tears. My home never felt safe. I never had that image of my father as a protector. My father was the enemy. He was a brutal man. He lived mean, and he died mean, and I’ve never mourned him. Not one day.”
“How did he die?” she asked softly.
“Liver failure,” he said. “Which is kind of a mundane way to die for a man like him. In some ways, it would’ve been better if he’d died in violence. But sometimes I take comfort in the fact that disease doesn’t just come for good people. Sometimes it gets the right ones.”
“Your mother?”
