Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Levi had missed this. He couldn’t pretend otherwise. Couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t eaten at him, five years away from the ranch.
The animals were in his blood, in his bones. Had been ever since he had taken that job at Bud’s ranch. That experience had changed him. Given him hope for the future. Allowed him to see things in a different way. Allowed him to see something other than a life filled with pain, fear.
The other kids at school had always avoided him. He was the boy who came to school with bruises on his face. The boy whose family was whispered about. Whose mother always looked sallow and unhappy, and whose father was only ever seen at night, being pulled drunkenly out of bars.
But the horses had never seen him that way. He had earned their trust. And he had never taken it for granted.
The back of a horse was the one place he had ever felt like he truly belonged. And things hadn’t changed much. Twenty-three years—five of them spent behind bars—later, and things hadn’t changed much.
He looked back from his position on the horse, and the grin on Faith’s face lit up all the dark places inside him. He hadn’t expected to enjoy sharing this with her. But then, he hadn’t expected to share so much with her at all.
There was something about her. It was that sense of innocence.
That sense of newness.
A sense that if he could be close enough to her he might be able to see the world the way she did. As a place full of possibility, rather than a place full of pain. Betrayal. Heartbreak.
Yes, with her, he could see the scope of so much more. And it made him want to reach out to her. It made him want to...
He wanted her to understand him.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before. He hadn’t wanted Alicia to understand him.
He hadn’t cared. He’d loved her. But that love had been wrapped up in the life he wanted to build. In the vision of what they could be. He’d been focused on forward motion, not existing in the moment.
And maybe, there, Faith was right. Maybe that was where he had failed as a husband.
Though, he still hadn’t failed so spectacularly that he’d deserved to be sent to prison, but he could acknowledge that some of the unhappiness in his marriage had come down to him.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Faith said.
“This is actually part of the property for the new house,” he said.
He glanced up at the sky, where the dark gray clouds were beginning to gather, hanging low.
“It’s starting to look stormy, but if you don’t mind taking a chance on getting caught in the rain, I can show you where we might put the equestrian facility. ”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He urged his horse on, marveling at how quickly he had readjusted to this thing, to horsemanship, to feeling a deep brightness in his bones. If that wasn’t evidence this was where he belonged, in the woods on the back of a horse, he didn’t know what was.
They came through a deep, dark copse of trees and out into a clearing. The clouds there were layers of patchwork gray, moving from silver to a kind of menacing charcoal, like a closed fist ready to rain down judgment on the world below.
And there was the clearing. Overlooking the valley below.
The exact positioning he wanted, so he could look down on everyone who had once looked down on him.
“You think you can work with this?” he asked.
“Definitely,” she responded. She maneuvered her horse around so she was more fully facing the view before them.
“I want to make it mirror your house somehow. Functional, obviously. But open. I know the horses weren’t in prison for the last five years, but they had their lives stolen from them, too, in a way.
I want it all connected. And I want you to feel free. ”
Interesting that she had used that word. A word that had meant so much to him. One he had yearned for so much he’d traded cigarettes to have a symbol of it tattooed on his body.
It was a symbol he was deeply protective of. He wasn’t a sentimental man, and his tattoos were about the closest thing to sentiment he possessed.
“I like the way you think,” he said.
He meant it. In many ways. And not just this instance.
She tilted her head, scrunching her nose and regarding him like he was something strange and fascinating. “Why do you like the way I think?”
“Because you see more than walls, Faith. You see what they can mean to people. Not just the structure. But what makes people feel. Four walls can be a prison sentence or they can be a refuge. That difference is something I never fully appreciated until I was sent away.”
“Homes are interesting,” she said. “I design a lot of buildings that aren’t homes.
And in those cases, I design the buildings based on the skyline of the city.
The ways I want the structure to flow with the surroundings.
But homes are different. My parents’ house, small and simple as it is, could not feel more like home to me.
Nothing else will ever feel like home in quite the same way it does.
It’s where I grew up. Where the essential pieces of myself were formed and made.
That’s what a home is. And every home you live in after those formative years.
..is not the same. So you have to try to take something from the life experience people have had since they left their parents and bring it all in and create a home from that. ”
He thought of his own childhood home. Of the way he had felt there. The fear. The stale scent of alcohol and sadness. The constant lingering threat of violence.
“Home to me was the back of a horse,” he said. “The mountains. The trees. The sky. That’s where I was made. It’s where I became a person I could be proud of, or at the very least, a person I could live with. My parents’ place was prison.”
He urged his horse forward, moving farther down the trail, into the clearing, before he looped around and headed back toward the other property. Faith followed after him.
And the sky opened up. That angry fist released its hold.
He urged the horse into a canter, and he could hear Faith keeping pace behind him. As they rode, the rain soaked through his clothes. All the way through to his skin. It poured down his face, down his shirt collar.
Rain.
It had been five years since he had felt rain on his skin.
Fuck.
He hadn’t even known he’d missed it until now. And now he realized he was so thirsty for it he thought he might have been on the brink of death.
He released his hold on the reins and let his arms fall to his sides, spread his hands wide, keeping his body movements in tune with the horse as the water washed over him.
For a moment. Then two.
He counted the raindrops at first. Until it all blended together, a baptism out there in the wilderness.
He finally took control of the animal again. By then, the barn was back in view.
The horse moved with him as Levi encouraged him into a gallop. The rain whipped into his eyes now, but he didn’t care. He brought the horse into the stable and looped the lead rope around a hook, then moved back outside and stripped off his shirt, letting the rain fall on his skin there, too.
If Faith thought it was strange, she didn’t say anything. She went into the barn behind him and disappeared for a few moments. Leaving him outside, with the water washing over him. When she returned she was without her horse, her chin-length dark hair wet and clinging to her face.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I just realized,” he said, looking up above, letting the water drops hit him square on the face. “I just realized that it’s the first time I’ve felt the rain since before I was in jail.”
Neither of them said anything. She simply closed the distance between them and curved her fingers around his forearm.
They stood there for a while, getting wet together.
“Tell me about your family,” she said softly.
“You don’t want to hear the story.”
“I do,” she said.
“Maybe I don’t feel like telling it,” he responded, turning to face her.
She looked all around them, back up at the sky, and then back at him. “We’re home,” she said. “It’s the best place to tell hard stories.”
And he knew exactly what she meant. They were home. They were free. Outside and with no walls around them. In the exact kind of place he had found freedom for himself the first time.
“My very first memory is of my father hitting my mother in the face,” he said.
“I remember a bruise blooming there almost instantly. Blood. Tears. My home never felt safe. I never had that image of my father as a protector. My father was the enemy. He was a brutal man. He lived mean, and he died mean, and I’ve never mourned him. Not one day.”
“How did he die?” she asked softly.
“Liver failure,” he said. “Which is kind of a mundane way to die for a man like him. In some ways, it would’ve been better if he’d died in violence. But sometimes I take comfort in the fact that disease doesn’t just come for good people. Sometimes it gets the right ones.”
“Your mother?”
“Packed up and left Oregon the minute he died. I send her money sometimes. At least, I did before...”
“Obviously you couldn’t send money when you were in prison.”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t think you understand. She didn’t want anything from me after that. She didn’t believe me. That I didn’t have something to do with Alicia’s disappearance. She figured I was cut from the same cloth as my old man.”
“How could she think that?” Faith asked. “She was your mother.”
“In the end, she was a woman standing with another woman. And part of me can’t blame her for that. I think it was easier for her to believe that her worst nightmare had come true. That I had fully become the creation of my genetics. You can understand why she would have feared that.”
He had feared it, too. Sometimes he still did.
Because that hate—that hard, heavy fist of rage living in his chest—felt far too evil to have been put there recently. It felt born into him. As much a part of him as that first memory.
He swept her up into his arms then and carried her toward the house, holding her tightly against his chest. She clung to him, her fingers slick against his skin, greedy as they trailed over him.
“That’s who I am,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it against the scar left by the knife. “And that’s why I told you I wasn’t the right man for you. That’s why I told you to stay away from me.”
She shifted her hand, moving her fingertips along the scarred, raised flesh. The evidence of the day he’d been cut open and left to bleed. He’d considered lying down and dying. A damn low moment. He had been sentenced to life in prison, he’d thought. Why not let that sentence be a little shorter?
But his instincts, his body, hadn’t let him give up. No. He’d gotten back up. And hit the man who’d come after him. And then hit him again, and again.
No one had come for Levi after that.
She made a soft sound as she shifted, letting her fingers glide over to the edge of the bird’s wing. She traced the shape, its whole wingspan.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “This is who you are. This,” she said.
“This scar... You didn’t choose that. You didn’t choose to be born into a life of violence.
You didn’t choose your father. You didn’t choose that time in prison.
Didn’t choose to get in a fight that day and have your body cut open.
You chose this. These wings. This design.
Whatever it means to you, you chose that.
And it’s more real than anything that was inflicted on you could ever be. ”
He stopped her from talking then, captured her mouth with his and silenced her with the fierceness of his kiss.
He wanted everything she said to be real. He wanted her words to matter, as much as everything that had come before them. As much as every blow he’d witnessed, every blow he’d been subjected to, every vile insult.
He wanted her kiss to mean more than his past.
He smoothed his hands down her body, his touch filled with reverence, filled with awe.
This woman, so beautiful and sweet, would touch him. Would give herself to him.
Yes, he wanted to believe what she said. He did. But he could see no way to do that. Couldn’t find it in himself.
He could only be glad that somehow, he had found her.
He wanted to drown in her, as much as he had wanted to drown in the rain. To feel renewed. Clean. If only for a moment. She was like that spring rain. Restorative. Redemptive. More than he deserved, and essential in ways he wouldn’t let himself think about.
She moved her hands over his body, over his face, pressing kisses to the scar on his ribs, to the tattoo, lower. Until she took him into her mouth, her tongue swirling in a torturous pattern over the swollen head of his erection. He bucked up, gripping her hair even as a protest escaped his lips.
“Let me,” she said softly.
And then she returned her attention to him, this beautiful woman who had never done this for a man before. She lavished him with the kind of attention he didn’t deserve, not from anyone, least of all her.
But he wanted it, wanted her. He wanted this in a way he hadn’t wanted anything for longer than he could remember. He wanted, and it was because of her.
He wanted, and he would never forget her for it.
He wanted, and he would never forgive her for it.
She was hope. She was a promise of redemption he could never truly have.
She was faith, that’s what she was. Believing in something you couldn’t see or control. Until now, he had never wanted any part of something like that.
But here he was, drowning in it. In her.
A missing piece. To his life.
To his heart.
His vision began to blur, his body shaking, wracked with the need for release as Faith used her hands and her mouth on him. As she tempted him far beyond what he could handle.
He looked down at her, and their eyes met. He saw desire. Need.
And trust.
She trusted him. This beautiful angel trusted him like no one ever had.
And it pushed him right over the edge.
He didn’t pull away from her, and she didn’t stop, swallowing down his release before moving up to his mouth again, scattering kisses over his abs and his chest as she went.
He claimed her lips, pressing his hands between her thighs, smoothing his fingers over her clit and pushing two deep inside her as he brought her to her own climax.
She clung to him, looking dazed, filled with wonder.
Yet again, because of him. She was a gift. Possibly the only gift he’d ever been given in all his life.
But Faith should have been a gift for another man. A man who knew how to treasure her.
Levi didn’t know how to do that.
But he knew how to hold on.
She clung to him, breathing hard, her fingernails digging into his shoulders. “I don’t want to go home,” she said softly.
“Then stay with me.”
She looked up at him, her face questioning.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “Stay with me.”