It was the first time in months I fell asleep before sunrise. When I woke up, the drawing was still open, the impression of his handprint on the page where my palm had pressed against it all night.
Now, sitting in that same room two years later, I stared at the bracelet, the letters on the inside as familiar as my own name. I ran my thumb over the edge, feeling the echo of that old scar, that first collision.
Funny, how some things never really left you. They just burrowed in, waiting for the right moment to wake up. After that first night, I did what I’d always done best: faded into the background and observed.
The McKenzie farm was built for extroverts—people who liked to argue about the right way to clean a chicken coop, or who could spend three hours discussing the difference between "creek" and "crick."
I tried to keep my head down and stay invisible, but it turned out invisibility only worked if you were the least interesting thing in a room. Apparently, I wasn’t.
Especially to Quiad.
For two years I’d been terminally pathetic. At first I tried to avoid him, but the universe—or maybe just Grandma Minnie—kept engineering scenarios where we were stuck together. Fixing a fence, stacking hay, and even sanding endless boards in the workshop. At some point, pathetic turned into obsessive.
I dropped things on purpose when he was near, just to see if he’d catch them before they hit the ground. He always did. Sometimes he’d hold the thing—hammer, can of paint, sandwich—out to me and wait until I actually took it from his hand. The first time his skin touched mine I almost shorted out, like an appliance running on double voltage.
I asked him a million questions about wood, the kind of questions you could Google in two seconds, just to hear his voice. He’d answer every time, no matter how dumb the question, and sometimes I thought I saw his lips quirk up at the corners like he knew what I was doing and didn’t mind.
But mostly, I drew him. The other sketchbooks filled up fast: his hands working the lathe, the profile of his nose in the glow of the lamp, the way sunlight caught in his beard and made the scars on his jaw fade to almost nothing. I drew him angry, laughing, asleep on the porch after a long day. Sometimes I tried to draw what he looked like when he thought no one was watching—shoulders relaxed, eyes soft, mouth almost smiling.
Once, I left my sketchbook in the workshop by accident. I realized it in the middle of the night, and didn’t sleep a minute until I could sneak out at dawn and grab it. The pages weren’t how I’d left them—there was a little smudge on the edge, like someone had flipped through with hands that still had sawdust on them.
I’d wanted to die of embarrassment.
He never said a word. But sometimes after that, when I looked up from whatever I was doing, I’d catch him staring at me with an intensity that made me feel like I was the one under glass.
I tried not to hope for anything. Hope was a luxury I didn’t have and couldn’t afford. But it grew anyway, like weeds in the garden no matter how many times you cut them back.
Now, two years later, here I was, sprawled on my bed, my guitar at my feet and my wrist stamped with his name. I’d finally run out of reasons to pretend I didn’t want what I wanted.
I set the guitar aside and reached for the latest sketchbook. My hands still shook a little, but not from nerves this time. I thumbed through the pages—half-done landscapes, studies of the horses, a couple of failed attempts at self-portraits.
The last one was a quick, almost frantic drawing of the riverbank from earlier. I traced the outline of where he and I had sat, shoulders pressed together, the two of us indistinguishable except for the way his arm wrapped around my back.
There was blank space at the bottom of the page. I picked up a pencil and, without over-thinking, started to draw: the bracelet, wrapped snug around a wrist. Not perfect, but close enough that you could feel the grain of the leather just by looking. Then I added the name, careful with every line, making it bolder than I ever dared on paper before.
The pencil made a soft scratching sound, rhythmic, almost soothing. With every pass, I felt more like myself, or maybe more like the person I’d always been underneath all the armor. I wanted to get it right—not just the way it looked, but the way it felt to wear someone’s name like a shield.
When I finished, I looked at it for a long time. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was honest. It was me. It was him. It was us.
I flipped back to a blank page and pressed my palm to it, feeling the pressure of the bracelet dig into my skin. Then I drew a line around my hand, leaving a ghost of myself behind.
In the quiet, I finally let myself believe that this was real. That I could belong somewhere, and to someone, and that it didn’t have to hurt.
I closed the sketchbook, set it beside the bed, and let my hand rest above my heart. The sun had set, but the room glowed gold from the last gasp of daylight. I breathed in, slow and deep, andimagined that every molecule of air in this house carried some part of him, and now, some part of me.
Tomorrow would be the same as always—chores, meals, the rhythm of the farm. But tonight, I was more than a collection of old scars and borrowed names.
I was Levi Hardesty. I was the guy with the guitar, the sketchbook, and the band on my wrist that said: you’re mine now.
And for the first time, I wanted everyone to see.
Chapter Three
~ Quiad ~
I lay flat on my back, sheets wound around my legs like a restraint, my gaze locked to the cracked plaster above my bed. The moon outside the window was just a sliver, but its light cut a hard-edged line across the floor and landed square on my chest, bright enough to make the dark hairs stand up.
I should’ve been asleep hours ago, but the empty apartment pressed on my lungs like an old injury, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw Levi’s face: that unguarded look he’d given me when he snapped the bracelet shut on his wrist.
