Something Wilder

The rest of the money allowed Leo and Lily to buy Wilder Ranch back from Jonathan Cross, but it was the media attention that already had it booked solid for the next three years. And just because she was wise enough now to know what she wanted didn’t mean she wouldn’t still honor her dad’s wishes—however misguided. The interest was what they would use to travel. First up: a trip with Cora to Japan to meet relatives she and Leo had never known.

“What a crazy story,” Walt said.

He could be talking about Butch, or Duke, or what they’d all gone through in May. But when Lily looked at Leo, she thought the craziest story might be this one—that she fell in love when she was nineteen and lived through a decade of loneliness and scrabbling only to wind up right back here, saved by the history she’d figured was her curse, living blissfully with the man she’d convinced herself was lost forever.

They finished the bottle, and another, and then the beer came out—along with the playing cards. There was shouting (Nicole) and wrestling (again, instigated by Nicole), and it all devolved into laughter and chaos and drunken pledges of lifelong friendship. They planned their first new-group trip, and Nicole teased Walter for claiming to be wearing his “dressy” T-shirt. They harassed Nic and Walter to just kiss already—and they did, Walter’s cheeks turning the color of a sunrise over red rock as their lips met under the celebration of their friends’ obnoxious cheering.

But when the small hand on the clock hovered around the two, Leo gave Lily that look, the one that told her he was done sharing for the night. He stood and pulled her up off the floor, guided her to their bedroom.

Back down the hallway there were hoots and hollers—which weren’t wrong. Lily would tell them to shut the hell up, but secretly she liked showing it off: this ranch and this man and this bright, insatiable love she’d once thought was only for other people. Leo told her happiness was her best accessory. Security didn’t come easily—she was a work in progress, and that meant she spent just as many days wondering when it would all fall apart as she did realizing the dream was real—but tonight, she wanted to skywrite this feeling, wanted to shout her euphoria into the serpentine echo of the Maze.

Leo peeled away her clothes in the pitch black of their middle of nowhere paradise and kissed his way up her body, from knees to mouth, arriving over her with a smile he fit against hers.

“Did you give Bonnie the grain?” he asked. “I left the bag on the barrel in the tack room.”

She nodded. “As if she’d let me forget. Did you put away the leftovers?”

He laughed. “What leftovers? Nic ate everything.”

Leo asked if she’d closed the side gate—she had. Lily asked if he’d called his sister back—he had; she was coming for a visit before her first term started. Did he set the coffee maker to brew at five in the morning? Yes, Lil.

The horses wouldn’t care how hungover they were tomorrow.

And then he came back to her, focused, hands hungry and roaming, body moving over her, then into her in the darkness.

And on that night in mid-July, with their best friends down the hall and their horses fed and sleepy out in the pasture, there was nothing else they needed to do. All there was to think about was this version of their forever. Leo paused at the quiet sound of happiness that escaped her. He pulled the blankets over their heads, and they made love right there, right back where they started.