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Even at fifteen, he was taller and more built than me. He worked around the ranch a lot and had started puberty before me. I just stared at him at that moment. The golden boy in the sunshine, water glistening on his skin as he bent over to express fake enthusiasm at the cool rock Hawk had found.

Nobody else realized he wasn’t really into the rock, not even Crew who also got to his feet instead of letting the creek take him downstream again. He waded over to me, and I realized that I didn’t feel the same way about him as I did about Bodhi.

Like obviously not, Crew was thirteen and while he’d had a bit of a growth spurt this year, I just saw him as a little brother.

“You got music in your head again?” he asked as he sat next to me.

I liked the way he phrased that. “Yeah,” I lied, and turned my gaze to his big brother.

That was largely how the next twenty years of our lives had gone. Me looking at Bodhi with this helpless wonder. Him being the man who protected everything and everyone that was dear to him. Him not seeing me the way I saw him. I’d accepted that years ago, because the other alternative was somehow even more painful.

I’d put distance between us as soon as I could. I left home at eighteen to pursue my dreams in music after a record label’s scout spotted me at an open mic night in the Springs. Working hard had been instilled in me at the ranch, so that’s what I did. Until I just… couldn’t, anymore.

And that left me here. In the Smoky Mountains, in a so-called cabin that wasn’t mine. I had more money than I knew what to do with. So many awards and accolades. Someone might say that I had it all and what reason did I have to be depressed.

I knew I would never have Bodhi. I knew that. I should’ve been able to move on with my life, right?

I’d tried to. My gods had I tried. Nearly two decades of showing up at this or that event with some record label’s chosen suitable woman on my arm. Musicians, actresses, socialites.

There was mostly nothing wrong with them. They were tolerable company for one night or sometimes several. But I always let them know it was never going to be real because I was hung up on someone else.

Because let’s face it, these set ups were common in the industry. They knew what they were getting into, but sometimes even then you hope to make a real connection.

But I couldn’t. Not only because they were women—I was truly attracted to women incredibly rarely and that had never changed—but because none of them were Bodhi.

It was fucked up to be so hung up on someone. I knew that, too. I just couldn’t make my fucking messed up heart let him go.

When I’d gone to Demi and Luke’s wedding and I’d faced Bodhi after a long time of not seeing him face to face, it had truly hit me. He’d kept a secret from me. He’d been back home for a year, and I’d never known. He had left the Marine Corps and he hadn’t told me that, either, despite our pretty frequent, even if more shallow–in the last few years, at least–contact.

I felt like I didn’t know my best friend anymore.

So when I left Colorado again, I’d purged my soul by writing a song that had been forming in my heart for a very long time.

Dislocated Heart was the first single from my last album, and it became such a hit that people who knew me kept telling me they heard it everywhere.

There were goddamn jokes and parodies of it on various shows, just like there’d once been of Adele’s Rolling in the Deep, because people got so sick and tired of it being everywhere.

It was the song that I’d meant as a final reckoning with myself. A suicide note my heart sent to Bodhi, whether he ever would know it was for him or not. I wasn’t self-destructive, but my heart? It was done.

Instead of the numbness I’d hoped for, I’d gotten something else: an ache that just wouldn’t end.

On some level, the depressive state I was in did numb things. It was just the goddamn wrong ones, like my enjoyment and interest in anything at all.

I still dreamed of my best friend getting out of the creek, with water droplets running down his sun-kissed skin. Except now he was an adult. The sun making his hair glow with a red hue as he stood there, oblivious to the way I ached.

A couple of days after the call with Ville, I told Kamon to pack his stuff while I packed mine. I asked Abi to get us a plane to Colorado.

At least I could be miserable at home, right? I could go see my horse I hadn’t even named yet, although Gemma had told me she’d start to call him Ofwren soon, which… that woman had an interesting sense of humor.

I could go riding, I could work until my muscles ached. I could babysit the kids that seemed to be multiplying every time I blinked. Hell, they had dogs now, too. There was just so much life on the ranch that maybe it was time to go there and be around it, instead of staying where nothing moved except whomever was acting as my security and the critters in the woods.

If going home meant that I would be pressing into my aching, bruised heart every time something reminded me of Bodhi or I saw him somewhere, so be it. It couldn’t be worse than whatever I’d been trying to do since I quit music.

Chapter 3

Bodhi

When I walked into the main house, I was greeted with a wall of sound. That wasn’t surprising, given the sheer number of people that were crowded inside. Mom was even more fervent in her desire to have everyone present at Sunday brunch, now that all her ducklings were home. Or at least within driving distance. Isley and Jerrica had to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Boulder in order to attend, but unless he was on-call—and as the newest veterinarian at the practice he often was—they made the effort.