Page 33 of Bones and Ashes

Not gone, exactly. But quiet is enough.

Shelved somewhere I don't have to look at for a little while.

We kiss for longer than is necessary. Which is the whole point, I think—that it isn't necessary at all, and we do it anyway.

His hands settle on my hips and mine stay flat against his chest, fingers spread wide over the leather, and I can feel his heartbeat underneath all that armor. Steady and unhurried. The way everything about him is unhurried when it comes to me.

I like this about Legion. I have always liked this about him.

He is never in a rush to pull away, never checkin' over my shoulder to see if someone's watchin', never calculating the cost of another thirty seconds with his mouth on mine.

He just stays.

Present and warm and tasting like wind and road dust and whatever gum he was chewin' on the ride over.

And I stay too, because there is nowhere else in the entire state of Montana where the noise in my head goes this quiet, and I am not fool enough to walk away from that on purpose.

But eventually, we do part.

And it's tellin', I think, that we both part smilin'.

Not the careful kind.

Not the kind I've been trained to produce since I was old enough to hold still for a camera.

The real kind. The kind that just happens because your body remembers what happy feels like before your brain can talk you out of it.

"What are you doin' here?" I ask him.

He swipes a piece of wind-blown hair out of my eyes. "I just needed you."

"You did? Problems back at paradise?"

He chuckles. And his eyes go a tiny bit serious. Not enough to erase the smile, though. "Fuckin' Badlands. It's a crisis factory, that place."

"Anything you need to get off your chest?"

"Nah," he says. "It's all good. I'm just done for the day so I thought I'd come by."

His words are interesting. Because "done for the day" implies goin' home.

"Are you gonna stay at the trailer tonight?"

"Well." He shifts his weight. "I was hopin' to stay here."

And then he holds his breath. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to notice, which means it's long enough to matter.

Like he's actually afraid I'll say no.

Like the answer isn't written all over my face already, hasn't been written there since I was fifteen years old and climbin' a condemned ladder in a grain silo because the boy at the top was worth every rung.

And this is when it hits me.

Really hits me.

Things have changed.

The Ashby ranch used to be a place where Legion was not.