Maybe sneaking out on him in the middle of the night after he’d rescued me, tended to me, and then been intimate with me had been the final straw for him.
Maybe he was done with me.
Seeing as that was what I wanted all along, there was no reason for that empty feeling in my chest as I went back to my hometown and faced the questions (and in the case of my male cousins—ridicule) of my family.
“Alright,” Kit, another of my cousins, said, dropping a cup of coffee down on the table in front of me. “Spill.”
“Spill what?” I asked, looking up at Kit in all her lavender-haired, goth-clothed glory.
“You’ve been crashing on my couch for a week.”
“So?”
“So, you could be staying at Willa’s little mansion. Or in your old childhood bedroom. Or, I don’t know, at the biker clubhouse. But you’re here. On my couch.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“You hate it here.”
“I don’t!”
To that, Kit rolled her eyes. “You do not have a country-living bone in your whole body.”
“That’s not fair. I like all the animals here.”
I did.
Kit and my other cousin Ariah had once been really successful van-life influencers. But when they got sick of the road, they decided to settle down into another niche. They bought a rare chunk of farmland on the outskirts of our hometown. Then they worked diligently to carve out their new path in life as homesteaders.
I loved watching their videos, seeing the progress of this place. From a raw chunk of land to two separate off-grid tiny homes, sprawling gardens, orchards, and numerous animal pens.
She wasn’t wrong, though.
I was a city type of girl.
I liked the chaos, the adventures, the inability to predict what the next day might be like.
The routines of farm life didn’t exactly appeal to me, no matter how much I loved that Kit and Ariah got to live their dream.
“You squealed at one of the pigs yesterday.”
“He was trying to eat my pants.”
“You’d wiped your hands on them after feeding the chickens grapes.”
“I didn’t realize he had a nose like one of these,” I said, patting the head of the massive Great Pyrenees who was half sprawled over me. His white fur was, no doubt, all over me. But he was good company.
“Come on, Layna. What’s going on with you?”
“I needed to unplug,” I admitted. Kind of literally. They had awful reception on the homestead. “This feels like a reset.”
“After the whole accidental marriage thing…”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Yeah, that.”
“Relax. I’m not going to tease you about it. But if you want to talk…”
