Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 73094 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73094 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
The first few days of my Atlanta trip had passed quickly after the night I’d been with Jesse, but then the rest of the trip had felt like a crawl. With every passing day, I felt like there were about a dozen other things I wanted to text or call him about, but I kept things fairly brief, with a few updates.
Truthfully, for the entire ten days, I’d been grappling with just how much the night with him had meant to me.
How long had I been searching for whatever I found on that night?
And why had it felt so terrifying to finally find it?
The night at his frat house felt like a distant mirage. It was as if I was one of the horses—alarmed by something that may or may not have been posing any real threat to me. Maisie had hated it when an empty bag had blown across the dirt path earlier. That was exactly how I’d felt for the past ten days.
Spooked. Out of nowhere, like an animal. And Jesse wasn’t stupid—he must have known it, too.
Doing the volunteer work in Atlanta had been difficult but rewarding, and Mary and I had even helped the group repair an entire patio for a kind old woman who had lost her husband last year. The people we helped were so grateful, and on the outside, everyone said I was so nice, so kind, so generous with my time or money. Even Mary kept thanking me profusely for going on the trip, and I kept steering every conversation to her life instead of mine. I asked about her work, her dating life, her parents, her sister.
It seemed nice, and it was nice.
But I was doing what I always did. Thinking about everyone else’s lives instead of my own.
I finally finished reading my self-help book in the hotel, too, but I sure as shit wasn’t any closer to knowing how to truly and fully love myself.
The book kept advising me to be as honest and true to myself as I could.
But what if my honest truth just didn’t seem to fit in the world?
“Whoa there, Maisie-girl,” I said, pulling at the weathered leather reins.
As Maisie rounded a corner on the far end of the dirt path, I guided her around. A little handwritten sign poked up out of the dirt near the edge. It was my dad’s scrawl, in all caps and with a few exclamation points:
WATCH THE CORNER!! HORSES HATE THE ROCKS :-)
I smiled every last fuckin’ time I saw that sign. Dad had written it after a rare incident where a fox had darted out of a cluster of bushes, scattering rocks along the path after it. At the time, I was on Chomp and Dad was on Hopper, and when Chomp saw a shadow coming from a rock the wrong way, he’d reared and nearly tossed me off.
“Oh, that’ll do it,” Dad had said, stopping and hopping off of Hopper. “Chomp isn’t going to like the rocks around here from now on.”
I laughed. “Pretty sure it was the fox running like a missile that scared him, not the pebbles.”
“It can be both!” Dad had said, holding up a finger as he kicked away the rocks back toward the bush. “It’s often both.”
My throat went tight as I passed the sign now, the letters half-faded by the sun.
Dad had been right, like he usually was. Ever since that day, Chomp had been wary of any rocks bigger than a quarter that ended up in his way on the path. It was annoying, sometimes, and I scanned for them every time we rode around this particular corner.
My dad really had been the kind of guy who could talk about anything. When I was a weird kid, who liked horses and riding as much as I liked musicals, he never batted an eye at it. And when I came out as gay one afternoon—also while we were out riding along this path—he had his usual, sunny and warm reaction.
“Well, shit! Whoever you end up with is going to be a lucky guy,” he’d said. “I think Hopper is gay, too. You see the way he cuddles up to Chomp?”
I snorted a laugh, relief flooding me. “It does seem like they’re a little bit in love, doesn’t it?”
Coming out had just been one of a million different conversations that were easy with him. There were others, like the first time I’d gotten drunk at fourteen years old, snagging a bottle of half-finished red wine, and he’d simply told me not to go wild with it but hadn’t been upset. Even when I threw a rager party at the house while he was out of town and I was newly eighteen, he hadn’t been pissed off when he returned home and saw the mess. He clicked his tongue, told me I was cleaning it up, then just set out about his day as normal.