With people, it’s harder.
The horse immediately relaxes under me.
The ranch hand from earlier whistles low.
I tip my hat to him without looking. “Don’t sound so surprised.”
“You look more at home in a saddle than half the men on this ranch,” he says.
I grin. “Half? That’s generous.”
Tex mounts up beside me, and we start toward the tree line. The snow crunches beneath the horses’ hooves. The air is cold enough to sting my cheeks, but the sun is bright, and the sky is that impossible winter blue that makes everything feel clean.
“You’re quiet,” Tex says after a few minutes.
“I’m absorbing.”
“Absorbin’ what?”
I gesture broadly at the landscape, at the pines, the snow, the fence line cutting through the field like stitches in white fabric. “This. All of it. It’s..." I search for the word. “Peaceful.”
He glances at me. “Not boring?”
I shake my head. “Boring is when your brain has nothing to do. My brain always has something to do. It just... usually has too much. This”—I wave at the quiet around us—“gives it room to breathe.”
Tex is quiet for a moment before he says, “I get that.”
“You do?”
He nods. “After I got out, everything was too loud. Cities. Crowds. Even normal conversations felt like being inside a drum. The ranch was the first place that didn’t demand anything from me.”
I turn that over in my mind. “So you built fences.”
“I built fences,” he agrees.
“And I ran.” I don’t mean to say it out loud, but there it is.
Tex looks at me. Really looks. “Different strategies. Same goal.”
“What’s the goal?”
“Surviving your own head,” he says simply.
And just like that, something slots into place.
Not attraction, though that’s there too, simmering under my skin every time he looks at me. Not gratitude, either, though I’m grateful he hasn’t tried to fix me.
It’s recognition.
He knows what it’s like to fight a brain that won’t be quiet. Knows what it’s like to need structure and space in equal measure. He knows, without me having to explain, that I’m chaos on the outside and desperate for calm on the inside.
“Tex?”
He tips his head toward me.
“Thanks for not trying to fix me.”
His mouth curves. It’s not quite a smile, but close. “You’re not broken.”
