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I shook my head. “This hasn’t been easy for me, West. I’ve been… well, I’ve been fuckin’ miserable since the eighth grade.”

“Miserable how?” he asked, his voice gone soft, careful, like he was afraid the wrong tone might make me clam up.

“I mean, hidin’ who I was every single day. Watchin’ everybody else pair off and go to dances and hold hands in the hallway, and knowin’ the second I let myself want any of that, I’d be finished in this town. My whole life I been told, one way or another, that what I am is somethin’ shameful. Somethin’ to bury.” I took a long pull off my beer, the condensation cool against my palm. “And now you’re tellin’ me there’s a whole church full of people who coulda told me otherwise, and nobody ever did. That just makes it worse, somehow. Like I went through all that for nothin’.”

Westley didn’t say anything right away. He just sat there with his arm still around me, thumb tracing slow patterns against my shoulder, letting me get it all out.

“I ain’t sayin’ it to make you feel bad,” I added, quieter now. “I’m glad Mike and Cash have each other. I’m glad there’s more people like us out there than I ever knew. I just... I don’t know what to do with bein’ angry about somethin’ I can’t change now.”

“You don’t gotta do nothin’ with it,” he said finally. “Don’t gotta forgive the town for it, don’t gotta be grateful about it neither. You can just be mad. That’s okay, Rhett.”

I looked up at him, a little surprised. “You sure you didn’t get some kinda crash course on this from Pastor Mike today?”

“Nah.” He smiled, small and lopsided. “Just figured, if I spent twenty-five years not knowin’ somethin’ about myself, seems fair you spent that long knowin’ too much about yourself and hidin’ it. Both of us got robbed of somethin’, just in opposite directions.”

His words landed somewhere deep in my chest, truer than I wanted to admit. I set my beer down on the railing and leaned into him instead, letting the warmth of his side soak into me, the crickets getting louder as the sun went down.

“I don’t hate that they’re out there,” I said after a while. “The others, I mean. I think I just need some time before I go shakin’ hands and actin’ like it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

“Take all the time you need.” He pressed a kiss to the top of my head, easy as anything, like he’d been doing it for years instead of a day or two. “Ain’t nobody rushin’ you into a damn parade.”

I snorted despite myself. “A parade. In Sagebrush. Can you imagine?”

“Dolly’d probably cater it,” he said. “Fried chicken floats and everything.”

“Rainbow pie,” I added, laughing now, the tightness in my chest finally starting to loosen.

“What flavor would that be?”

I shook my head. “No clue.”

I let my head rest against him, watching the last of the daylight bleed out of the sky over the rooftops of Sagebrush. It was pretty, just like it had always been. And now, something about it seemed a little bit warmer than it had before, more welcoming. But that didn’t negate a lifetime’s worth of feelings. This place was still full of bad memories, close calls, and years of bullying. It wasn’t where I wanted to be. But it was still too soon to ask Westley to leave the only place he’d ever known.

“You gettin’ cold?” Westley asked, feeling me shiver a little against him even though the night was still warm as anything.

“No,” I said. “Just thinkin’ too much again.”

“About what?”

I opened my mouth, about to tell him the truth. But then I decided against it. “Just about all this. It’s a lot to take in.”

Westley pulled me close, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Want to go down for dinner? Might take your mind off things. Or we could just go walk through town like we did as kids.”

“Walk through town, I think,” I said, pushing myself up out of the chair before I could talk myself into staying wrapped up in his arm all night. “Feels better to move around a bit when my head’s like this.”

Westley nodded and stood, stretching until his back popped, then grabbed both our empty bottles and set them just inside the door for Dolly to deal with later. We took the back stairs down, walking past the diner and the chattering regulars inside.

The streets of Sagebrush had gone quiet the way they always did once the sun dropped low enough. There were just a handful of porch lights flicking on one by one, followed by somebody’s screen door slapping shut somewhere down the block. Westley fell into step beside me, close enough that our arms brushed with every other stride, and neither one of us moved to put distance between us.

“We used to ride our bikes down this street all the time,” I said, nodding toward the old feed store, its windows dark now, a faded OPEN sign still hanging crooked in the door. “Remember when you crashed into Mrs. Abernathy’s mailbox?”

“I did not crash into it,” Westley said, sounding genuinely offended even after all these years. “It jumped out in front of me.”

“Mailboxes don’t jump, West.”

“That one did.”

I laughed, and it felt good and easy. I wanted it to always be like this. We kept walking, past the hardware store and the little laundromat that had been there since before either of us was born, then past the church where Westley had spent his whole day working, dark now except for a single light glowing in the window of the parsonage house out back.