Chapter Text
It was raining when Ben stepped off the plane. He insisted on carrying his own bags—wincing as the curl of his fingers into fists tugged at the frayed edges of fresh wounds.
Holdo frowned in obvious disapproval as he carelessly tossed his duffel into the trunk, but for once, she refrained from commenting on Ben’s apparent lack of concern for his own welfare. Ben folded himself into the passenger side of the rental car and stashed his backpack down between his feet. He drew in a deep shuddering breath.
It took Holdo a few minutes to finish speaking with both the pilot and the bodyguard his mother had insisted accompany them before she finally slid into the driver’s seat alongside him. She pulled the hood of her coat down to reveal her pristinely styled lavender curls, miraculously unaffected by either the long flight or the bad weather.
“It’s a pretty long drive,” she told Ben as she slowly steered the car out of the hangar and onto the narrow road leading out of the executive airport. It was pitch black out, aside from the brief flashes of suburban streetlights. “I can wake you up when we get to the ranch, if you want to sleep for a bit.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion; the plane they’d taken from Detroit had taken off just before midnight. It was nearly one in the morning now—almost four back home—and Ben hadn’t slept a wink on the plane. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep in the car, either, not without his meds, and the thought of pulling out the bottle of sedatives he had tucked into the front pocket of his backpack right in front of Holdo turned his stomach.
“I’m fine,” Ben rasped. He’d been awake for several days now, but it still felt weird sometimes—to talk. He rubbed absently at his throat and watched as miles and miles of labyrinthine beige neighborhoods with orange and white porch lights passed them by.
It was at least half an hour before they even made it out of the city. Ben caught a glimpse of the lights downtown during a brief stint on the interstate, but Holdo exited the freeway a few miles south of all the glitz and glamor, and then they headed west, into the looming darkness.
The rain steadily increased in volume as they ascended into the mountains along a winding, desolate road. On the other side of the pass, Ben could see lightning in the distance, illuminating the clouds overhead in shades of violet. There were only a few scattered patches of light throughout the valley indicating a human presence in the dark, but a quick glance at the built-in GPS made it clear that they were a good thirty miles from the next major town. Ben was glad it was still night—the thought of that much open country ahead of them made him feel distinctly uneasy. The last time he’d spent much time out of the city like this was back in Georgia. Ben didn’t like to think about Georgia.
Ben’s relief when they finally reached something that might generously be called civilization was short-lived. Holdo swerved unexpectedly onto the side of the road just past the turn indicated on the GPS and swore quietly under her breath.
“Sorry,” she said, glancing over at Ben with a reassuring smile. “We’re almost there.”
That statement turned out to be wrong in the truest way possible. As soon as they pulled onto the dirt road that led away from town and into the foothills of the mountains separating this sprawling wasteland from the glittering city on the other side, it became abundantly clear that the luxury sedan Ben’s mother had secured for them was only just barely up to the task. With the rain turning a mix of gravel and sand into thick, slippery sludge, Ben watched impassively as Holdo’s features went taut with stress, both hands glued to the wheel as she tried to steer them around the puddles of standing water as the car slowly struggled up the canyon.
Their only real measure of progress in the blackness of the night, with flashes of lightning casting only momentary illumination on their desolate surroundings, was the estimated mileage on the GPS slowly counting down in increments of tenths as they inched closer and closer to the marker on the lefthand side of the road.
When they rounded the last bend and the headlights shone on what appeared to be nothing more than an atypically dense clump of trees, Holdo breathed out a loud sigh of relief. She didn’t say anything to Ben as she pulled the car around to the front entrance, which consisted of a simple iron cattle-gate held at a precarious angle between a disparate collection of rustic wooden fence posts that disappeared into the trees and looked to have been erected long before Ben’s father was even born.
Holdo parked the vehicle there for a moment and dashed out into the rain to pull the gate open before quickly jumping back inside to drive them onto the property. It was hard to get a good read on the place from what little Ben could make out within the narrow scope of the high beams, but he was surprised to find that the ranch seemed far bigger from inside the fence than it had looked from the road.
Apart from that, Ben couldn’t glean much from the building’s relatively unremarkable exterior. The façade was a dark, ruddy brown, the oiled wood slick from the rain, which was coming down now in sideways sheets. The shape of the house was odd, like it had once been several out-buildings later cobbled together into a sprawling polygon. The front porch was adorned with an excessive amount of hanging ornaments and charms, but between the wind and the rain, it was near impossible to make out any further details about the choice in décor.
Holdo was once again out of the car before Ben had a chance to ask her anything about his new prison. He watched patiently through the rain-streaked windshield as she sprinted up to the front door and then stood there for a second, huddled in on herself in her overly large fuchsia puffer coat, before the porch lights flicked on and a grizzled old man came lumbering out to greet her. The owner, Ben presumed. He’d made a point of not looking up any details about Skywalker Ranch online after being informed that his parents—finally managing to agree on something for the first time in twenty years—intended for him to spend the next seven weeks at an equine therapy center in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Holdo conversed for a minute with Skywalker, who looked none too pleased to see her, judging from the sour expression marring his wrinkled features. Something about him reminded Ben rather unpleasantly of a professor he’d had his first semester of college who had once called Ben a spoiled trust-fund brat with unrealistic expectations of success. The unveiled look of distaste on Skywalker’s face when he turned to glare directly at Ben through the sheets of rain sliding down the glass did little to disrupt the comparison.
Ben remained in the car until Holdo finished speaking with Skywalker, at which point she dashed back over to the car, giving a sharp rap against the window on the passenger side with her knuckles before disappearing from view to retrieve Ben’s duffel from the trunk. She’d acted more like a glorified babysitter than a social worker throughout much of this process, and Ben quietly resented her for it.
Ben’s jacket did little to shield him from the rain. He gingerly slung one of the straps on his backpack into the crook of his elbow and followed Holdo to the relative shelter of the front porch. Skywalker then turned the full force of his gaze on Ben, and there was nothing behind his eyes except seething malcontent.
Ben looked at Holdo instead.
“Ben, Luke,” she said breathlessly, setting Ben’s duffel down at her feet. “Luke, Ben.” A gust of wind roared through, drenching them all in a torrent of mist that curled beneath the porch rafters like ocean spray. “Jesus. I thought the desert was supposed to be dry.”
“It’s monsoon season,” Skywalker—Luke said matter-of-factly.
Holdo nodded, but her mouth twisted in an unpleasant way, as though she would have liked to personally blame Luke for the bad weather. “The plan is to be pretty hands-off,” Holdo confirmed with Ben as she cinched the collar of her coat tighter around her throat to keep the wind at bay, “but I’ll check in on things in a few weeks, okay?”
Ben indicated his assent non-verbally, and then, when Holdo’s eyebrows threatened to climb up into her hair, he added, “Sure.”
Goodbyes were brief. Ben watched the car disappear down the driveway and then turned to take in Luke’s perpetually sour expression.
“Come on,” Luke told him as he pulled the screen door open to let Ben inside. “I’ll show you to your room.”
The house was quiet; dark. There were the occasional lamps lit throughout: amber bulbs dimmed so low they didn’t even cast a shadow. Luke didn’t turn on any additional lights as he went, leaving Ben to stumble blindly along behind him as they moved through the house in silence, apart from the low rhythm of Luke’s haggard breathing. Luke didn’t say a word to Ben until they turned the next corner, moving out of the central collection of rooms into an adjacent wing on the eastern side of the house.
“So,” Luke said flatly as they slowly proceeded down the hall. “Seven weeks, huh?”
Ben’s affirmation came in the form of a low grunt.
Luke didn’t seem fazed by Ben’s reticence. “Well, here we are,” he announced as they reached a door at the end of the hallway. “Home sweet home.” Luke turned the knob for Ben, whose arms were laden with his bags, but he wandered off into the darkness just as soon as Ben shouldered his way into the room.
Ben immediately set his bags down on the floor and groped at the wall for a light switch. Once the room was illuminated—again with a dim, orange-hued glow that Ben was beginning to suspect was supposed to serve some sort of therapeutic purpose—Ben immediately realized that he wasn’t bunking alone. There was a person-shaped lump piled high with blankets on the bed in the corner to the left of the door. Ben was not pleased by this discovery. He was even less pleased when he turned to take in the rest of the room only to realize that there were three other beds—the rest thankfully unoccupied. For now, at least.
Ben rolled his eyes as he turned away from the snoring heap and set his bags down at the foot of the bed in the opposite corner, directly below two windows placed perpendicular on each wall.
The room wasn’t small by any measure, but with four twin beds crammed into every corner, it felt suffocating. The dark brown, almost black, paint on the walls only served to enhance the claustrophobic effect, though Ben supposed it was probably intended to feel safe, reassuring. The floor was hardwood the same ruddy brown as the house’s exterior, and although there were shelves and hooks mounted on each wall, all except the ones occupying the space immediately surrounding his new roommate’s bed were bare.
Ben turned to peer through the windows above his bed. He couldn’t see much with how dark it was outside, but they seemed to look out onto the rear of the property, and he could just make out the vague outlines of other buildings off in the distance.
Ben didn’t do much more than shed his rain-soaked jacket before turning out the lights and perching himself on the edge of the mattress. He rifled through the front pocket of his backpack, procuring the pill bottle he’d been reliant on since the day he regained consciousness in the hospital back in Detroit. Two would do the trick, he decided.
He was asleep within minutes.
Rey had already been awake for well over an hour by the time Finn walked into the kitchen and threw himself down onto one of the bar stools at the island. His eyes were half-closed, which was par for the course, as Finn had never been much of a morning person, but the pained expression on his face coupled with a hand clutched to his jaw pulled Rey’s attention away from the bacon sizzling on the stove.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Did you know we got a new guy last night?” Finn asked, without answering her question.
Rey shook her head with a frown. “Luke must have forgotten to mention it.” It wasn’t like Luke to overlook details like that, however, and it was the sort of thing that Rey needed to know, especially with Poe out on vacation all week.
“What happened?” Rey asked again, indicating Finn’s jaw with a nod.
“Oh, I tried to wake the new guy up just now, and he clocked me,” Finn said with alarming nonchalance. Seeing Rey’s eyes go wide, he quickly added, “I don’t think he was even awake when he did it.”
Rey pursed her lips as she spun back around to manage the bacon, which was now spitting grease all over the range. Luke had some explaining to do. “I suppose we’d better let him sleep, then.”
Rey didn’t have much of a natural affinity for cooking, but Din had been diligent in teaching her as a teenager how to manage in the kitchen by herself, and by the time she’d become the de facto breakfast chef for Skywalker Ranch, she could handle anything from pancakes to omelets. Cooking for a gaggle of wayward young adults was a sight easier than providing catering to an entire Scout troop, at least, even if Kaydel was infuriatingly picky.
Everyone was already seated in the dining room when Rey emerged from the kitchen a while later bearing a tray laden with pancakes, bacon, and fresh fruit—and a single bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch for Kaydel. There was no sign of the newcomer that Finn had mentioned.
Luke didn’t say a word to her about the new arrival as they ate, nor did he bother to make an announcement to the others. Rey frowned, wondering at the reason for his silence. It wasn’t like Luke to keep things from her. She didn’t like it one bit.
Rey waited until after breakfast, when the others had dispersed and it was just her and Luke loading everything into the dishwasher and wiping down the countertops, to finally confront him about his lie of omission.
“When were you planning to tell me about the new guy?” she asked directly, her eyes laser-focused on Luke’s face as he bent down to retrieve a fallen fork from the kitchen floor.
“Today,” he replied without missing a beat.
“When did he sign up?”
“He didn’t.”
Rey didn’t know what the hell that meant, but she could tell that she wasn’t about to get the answers she wanted out of Luke anytime soon.
“It’s not exactly a great time,” she pointed out, raising her voice a little to be heard over the sound of the faucet as she washed her hands in the kitchen sink. “You do remember approving Poe’s vacation request, yeah?”
“I remember.” Luke turned on the dishwasher and turned to lean against the island, facing her with a guarded expression that Rey had long come to associate with bad news. “It was a last-minute thing. A favor for an old friend.” Whoever this “old friend” was, Luke certainly didn’t seem happy to fulfill the obligation. “You can handle a couple extra lessons this week?”
Rey nodded. She considered Luke carefully, still not convinced he was telling her the whole truth. “Well,” she said, “is there anything else I should know?”
Luke opened his mouth—then hesitated just slightly. When he finally answered, Rey had the sense that he’d decided not to say whatever it was he’d been planning to tell her. Instead, he said with a growing smirk: “Yeah, you’d better get Whisper’s saddle out. That kid’s huge.”
When Ben woke up, he didn’t know where he was. It took several minutes to calm the racing of his heart, to quash down the same sense of visceral wrongness that had seized him when he’d suddenly come to his senses in a hospital bed a week prior.
Ben sat up and took in his surroundings. The bed which had been occupied by his infuriatingly loud roommate the night prior was empty, the pile of blankets pulled back haphazardly and bunched up at the foot of the bed. Ben’s own bed, which was significantly shorter than his six-foot-three frame, was awash in orange light—not from the amber-hued bulbs that seemed to be a staple in every room at the ranch, but instead from the setting sun outside his windows.
Ben extracted his phone from his backpack and checked the time. It had been nearly eighteen hours since Ben had landed in Las Vegas; close to sixteen that he’d been asleep. He desperately had to pee.
Ben quietly slipped into the hallway, intending to find the bathroom without attracting any attention from the other residents of the house. The first door he tried, the one almost directly across the hall from the room he now supposed he should think of as his own, opened into a darkened bedroom with thick, patterned curtains drawn over the windows.
Ben closed the door to that room immediately and moved back down the hallway towards the door that led back into the central hub of the ranch house. There was another door just before it, on the same side of the hallway as the other bedroom. Ben tried that one first, but when he reached for the knob, the door flung itself inward to reveal a small dark-haired girl with rounded features, whose jaw dropped when she took in the sight of Ben looming above her.
“Oh,” she started to say, “I—um—”
“Bathroom?” Ben barked out gracelessly.
The girl nodded and jumped out of the way, gesturing abortively to the aggressively coral pink room she’d just vacated before skittering off toward the main house.
Ben checked his phone again as he stepped into the bathroom, which was spacious compared to what he’d become accustomed to back in Detroit. There were no messages, emails, or missed calls, either from Holdo or his dad, but then he realized he had absolutely no signal to speak of.
Right. Middle of fuck all.
He supposed he could switch on roaming, but what was the point? Holdo had said this was supposed to be a hands-off approach. That suited Ben just fine. He shut off his phone entirely and tucked it back into his pocket before taking a serious evaluation of the toilet.
It was small. Too small, in his opinion. He aimed carefully as he pissed, not wanting to be that guy, and washed his hands in the sink—also small, at least by Ben’s standards. The shower was similarly disappointing; he predicted at least three weeks of smacking his chin into the showerhead before his spatial memory kicked in. It was modern, at least, he noted with a small measure of satisfaction. Detachable, even.
Ben probably could have used a shower, if he was being honest, but this seemed like the type of place that had all sorts of rules in place about who could shower when and for how long, so he decided to forego it for the moment and instead ducked back into his room to grab a change of clothes. He dressed in the dark, managing to bang both elbows and knees into the bathroom cabinet in the process, and then decided to bite the bullet and finally emerge from his place of refuge.
The main house was quiet when Ben poked his head through the doorway. That suited him just fine. He took the opportunity to freely explore, the lights bright enough now to actually take in the details of his surroundings.
The décor seemed dated: mostly pastel relics hearkening back to the mid-1990s. There were botanical prints of desert plants on the walls; a mounted jackalope bust over the stone fireplace; a grand oil painting of cowboys on a red rock plateau with billowing clouds overhead hanging in pride of place above the largest of the chestnut-brown leather sofas. Ben supposed he should find the place homey, but the kitsch grated on him for reasons he didn’t want to give voice to. He still vividly remembered moving boxes of antiques from house to house as a kid—everything was a treasure, everything had a home.
The dining room was decorated similarly to the living room, though the detail that stood out the most to Ben was the fact that the distressed wooden table taking up nearly the entirety of the room was large enough to seat close to twenty. Ben really, really hoped there weren’t twenty other people whose names and faces he would be expected to learn by the time he left here. His singular roommate was already bad enough.
He'd have to take solitude where he could get it, he supposed. A peek through the window shutters revealed that a fire had been lit in the backyard. Ben could see several shadowed figures huddled around it. He didn’t linger, instead moving on to the next room.
It wasn’t until Ben wandered into the spacious, sage green kitchen that he realized he wasn’t alone in the house after all.
“Ben, right?” said the man leaning against the counter, a glass of wine in his hand. He looked a little older than Luke in the face, even though his silver-shot hair was still quite full and dark. There was a softer give to his features. None of the malice Ben had seen in Luke’s eyes was present on this man’s face.
The man waited until Ben gave a tiny nod before continuing. “I’m Din. Amilyn Holdo told you about the therapy requirements for your stay before you arrived, I assume?” His voice was soft, measured. Disconcertingly neutral.
Ben nodded again.
“I’m the therapist,” Din said with a little smile, seeming to realize that Ben had no context for this man’s presence at the ranch. “And Luke’s husband. We own the ranch.”
“Oh.”
“You’re welcome to join the others outside,” Din said, punctuating the silence that followed with a sip of wine. “Or not.”
Ben didn’t know what to say to him.
“Did you eat yet?” Din asked. “I was working late this evening, so Rey put some leftovers in the fridge. I could heat up something for you as well, if you’d like.”
Ben nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” He took a seat on one of the bar stools at the kitchen island, thinking it was a less absurd prospect than the two of them sitting together at the outrageously long dining room table. He watched Din pull a foil-covered tray out of the fridge. Two ceramic plates came out from one of the upper cabinets. The enchiladas in the tray were divided between them equally.
“I get the impression you didn’t read the brochure, so to speak,” Din said as he set Ben’s plate down in front of him a few minutes later. His own was still in the microwave, the slow rotations drawing Ben’s eye away from Din’s placid smile. Ben knew psychiatrists like the back of his hand. That smile wasn’t anything new. “I can explain how things work around here if it would make you feel more comfortable.”
Ben shrugged and tucked into his dinner. He half-listened as Din gave him an overview of the intention behind the ranch’s operations: to provide a place for struggling LGBTQ young adults to gain confidence in navigating the world with a greater understanding of themselves—and the general schedule: horsemanship lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays, individual therapy sessions with Din Tuesdays and Thursdays, group activities and group therapy on Friday. Most of it mandatory, which was what Ben had expected.
“How are you feeling about everything so far?” Din asked at the end of his spiel. He was doing that thing therapists always did, alternating aggravatingly tiny bites of his enchilada with alarmingly earnest eye contact.
Ben shrugged again. “I’m not really here voluntarily,” he pointed out.
“It’s not a prison, Ben.” Same difference. “We really do want you to be as comfortable as possible during your stay here.”
“I’d be more comfortable if I wasn’t sharing a room with a guy who snores so loudly it rattles the picture frames on the wall.”
Din laughed unexpectedly. Ben was more accustomed to his smartass comments being met by disapproving stares; he found himself almost smiling in return, despite his overriding misgivings about Din.
“It’s part of the program for residents to have a roommate,” Din explained. “We’ve found it’s helpful for everyone to have that level of social connection while they’re here. But I know you’ve had trouble sleeping in the past—”
“Understatement,” Ben muttered under his breath.
“—so if Finn’s snoring is causing problems for you, we can try to figure something out.”
Ben pushed the remnants of his half-eaten enchilada around with his fork. His appetite hadn’t been the same since he’d stopped sleeping through the night, even after he’d gotten out of the hospital. He’d lost some muscle mass already. He was on his way to losing more. “It’s fine,” he lied. He didn’t want Din or Luke calling up Holdo and telling her he was becoming a difficult patient. She’d probably tell his mom. “The medication they gave me—at the hospital—it’s been helping.”
There was a sharp squeak from the living room. Ben turned his head to peer through the archway into the other room as a gangly girl with braided hair came traipsing in, a laugh still fading on her lips. She froze when she caught sight of Ben, a startled look on her face that she quickly schooled into a friendly smile.
“Hi, I’m Rey,” she said to him as she hurried over to the fridge.
Ben watched her rifle through the contents of the fridge for a moment before remembering he was supposed to introduce himself as well. “Ben,” he said, with more grace than he’d afforded anyone else at Skywalker Ranch so far. He pretended to himself that the reason for that wasn’t sickeningly apparent.
She was pretty. And she smiled again at Ben as she pulled an aluminum can from the door of the fridge before heading back out to the open sliding glass door. “Nice to meet you,” she called over her shoulder, and then she was gone.
“Rey will be the one handling your horsemanship lessons this week,” Din explained when Ben turned his attention back to the other man. “We’d normally have you working with Poe, but he’s out on vacation until next Monday.”
“She works here?” Ben asked.
“Yes,” Din said with a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “She’s also my daughter.”
Ben went a little red. Evidently his gawking had not gone unnoticed. He was tempted to remark on the lack of a family resemblance, but remembered just in time that Din had told him he and Luke were married. Adopted, then. Or Luke’s kid from a previous relationship, but she didn’t look much like him either.
“You’ll have the rest of the weekend to settle in,” Din said. He’d finished eating and was moving toward the sink with a questioning look on his face. Ben nodded, sliding Din the rest of his dinner. “Sometimes Rey will take some of the others into town on Saturdays, but I would advise waiting until the next weekend before you leave the ranch. Take the time to relax for now.”
Not that Ben was even interested in gallivanting around town with a bunch of twenty-somethings who still thought the world was all puppies and rainbows. His brain supplied him with an image, unbidden, of Rey’s flushed features as she’d come in from outside. Maybe he was a little tempted. Maybe.
As Din finished cleaning up, Ben realized he still had a question. “Can I shower whenever I want, or…?”
Din laughed a little. “Yes, Ben, we don’t mandate when you take showers. It’s not a prison, remember?”
Ben flushed again. He didn’t like being made to feel stupid. “I just thought…since there’s a bunch of us….”
“It’s just you, Finn, and Rey sharing a bathroom for now,” Din informed him. “Rose was using it, too, for a few weeks, but now that the numbers have evened out a bit, I’ll have her switch to the bathroom in the other wing.”
“Okay.”
“Anything else?” Din asked, once again radiating that same infuriatingly effusive sincerity.
“Nope,” Ben said tightly, hoping Din would take the cue to leave. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Din said in parting, and then he disappeared, following Rey out the backdoor and leaving Ben blessedly alone again.
Ben spent the new few minutes poking around in the fridge and the pantry, trying to get a sense of whether he was going to have to spend the next seven weeks eating chia seeds and organic juice. There was, in fact, a bag of chia seeds sitting on one of the pantry shelves, but there were also boxes of Pop-Tarts, Kraft Mac n’ Cheese, and an unholy amount of sugary cereal. The fridge appeared to be stocked with a decent amount of fresh produce and deli meat and what Ben would have described as far too much cheese.
After satiating his curiosity and coming away satisfied with the ranch kitchen’s protein availability, at least, Ben trekked back into the wing of the house where his bedroom was located and began preparations for showering in a brand-new environment.
Ben didn’t like showering with the lights on. He hadn’t had much choice in the matter in the hospital, when he’d had nurses hovering over his shoulder twenty-four hours a day. He hadn’t been able to get his arms wet until the stitches had come out, and the single shower he’d taken back at his apartment before the flight had been hurried, with Ben right up against the clock as soon as he’d stepped out the front doors of the hospital thanks to his mother’s machinations.
Ben planned to relax this time.
The frosted window at the back of the shower made it a little easier to navigate in the dark. Ben managed to lower himself down into the tub without much trouble, though it was a tight fit, both side and longways. He turned the water on with his foot, wincing when the spray hit his arms and flowed over newly mended flesh.
In the dark, Ben didn’t have to face the evidence of who he was. What he’d done. There was only the water.
When Ben crawled into bed nearly an hour later, cheeks pink from the steam, his long-sleeved cotton shirt clinging to still-damp skin, he allowed himself to sit at the window and watched the group gathered around the fire. Sketchbook in hand, he started to block out the scene, his strokes a little bolder as he filled in the outline of one particularly coltish figure, silhouetted by the flames.
Ben took two pills once the figures began to disperse and slipped dreamlessly into sleep.
Rey knew she was lucky in that she enjoyed her job more thoroughly than most, but even she couldn’t deny the fatigue threatening to overwhelm her by Monday afternoon. Mondays were usually chore days, where she’d dig out part of the corral, replenish the hay in the feeders, and take care of any other busywork that needed to get done around the ranch. With Poe gone, she not only had extra chores, but extra lessons on top of that, and even though Rey enjoyed spending time with Finn and his horse, by the time she’d finished his lesson around three, she was already wiped.
But she still had Ben’s lesson on the docket for that afternoon. And the first horsemanship lessons were always the worst.
Adding to Rey’s displeasure about her upcoming obligation was the fact that she’d barely interacted with Ben all weekend, only catching glimpses of him as he flitted in and out of the kitchen to grab the occasional meal before vanishing into his room again.
Even Finn didn’t have much to share with Rey and the others about his new roommate. When Kaydel asked about him, Finn shrugged and told them that Ben just seemed to sleep a lot.
Rey felt an uncharacteristic frisson of anxiety coursing through her as she glanced up from her notebook to catch a glimpse of Ben slinking out the back door. She hopped down off the fence, busying herself at the entrance to the tack shed while casting furtive glances at Ben as he walked across the yard towards the corral.
Ben carried himself in a manner ill-befitting his height, his shoulders rounded and hunched in like he was trying to make himself smaller. He was bizarrely proportioned, with features that seemed like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles forced together to make a semblance of a human face. It wasn’t until he got a little closer that Rey realized he was also significantly older than her—certainly older than was indicated by the ‘young adult’ aspect of their client profile. Why was he even here?
Rey would have asked Luke just that if she’d thought she’d get a straight answer out of him, but it was clear she was going to have to piece this one together herself.
“Hey,” Rey called out to him with a warm smile as Ben slowly made his way over to the tack shed. He was already wearing long pants and boots, but the long-sleeved shirt was a bit much for mid-August. Maybe he’d gotten mixed up about the wardrobe requirements. She’d have to remember to tell him that he didn’t need to wear sleeves on Wednesday. “So, I’m not sure how much Din told you—”
“Not a lot,” Ben interjected flatly. His expression didn’t change, his wide mouth still pulled into something distinctly morose.
“Okay,” Rey said, endeavoring to maintain a buoyant tone. She’d worked with plenty of angsty teenagers before. A depressed man in his thirties was something she could easily handle. “Well, normally you’d have Poe teaching you, but since he’s out this week, I’ll be helping you get comfortable today.”
Something crossed Ben’s face, but it happened so quickly that Rey couldn’t tell what the fleeting emotion had been, or what she’d said to cause it. “Anyway,” she continued, “we’re gonna grab our halters from the shed, and then we’ll go out to the corral, and I’ll show you the horses we’re gonna be working with.”
Ben nodded, his expression still inscrutable.
After some prompting, Rey learned that Ben didn’t know much about horses and had only ridden once, on a beach in Mexico when he was a kid. Surprisingly, he seemed far less wary in the corral than the newbies typically were, and Rey found herself smiling at the way his face screwed up in concentration as she showed him how to loop the halter around Bebe’s neck to catch the horse.
Bebe, endlessly patient, stood perfectly still with softly blinking eyes as Rey first demonstrated how to slide the halter on before taking it off again so that Ben could try. “You won’t be riding Bebe,” Rey explained, “but he’s a great horse to practice on, and I’d rather have you comfortable haltering before we try with Whisper.”
There was a flash of apprehension in Ben’s eyes. “Which one is Whisper?” he wondered.
Rey moved over to take Bebe’s lead from him and then pointed toward the massive blue roan draft-cross standing leisurely at the feeder. “He’s a gentle giant,” she reassured Ben. “The only thing you have to worry about is getting him to move more than four steps in any direction. He’s just a big ole lazybones.”
Rey watched as Ben carefully assessed Whisper from a distance. “You can go try to catch him now, if you like,” she told him. She was usually more hands-on in the first lesson, but Ben seemed so at ease around the horses that she wanted to see how he handled himself. “Just remember what I told you about their blind spots, okay?” she reminded him. The last thing she wanted was for Ben to get himself kicked.
Ben approached Whisper with surprising confidence, only flinching once, when Whisper suddenly turned to dash across the corral to put himself out of reach of the halter in Ben’s hands. Rey smiled to herself as she watched Ben carefully work to get close enough to the horse to loop the lead around his neck. When he finally succeeded, Rey had to resist the urge to cheer.
Instead, she calmly led Bebe over to where Ben was standing with Whisper, a bit sweaty and breathless, as he waited to be told how to proceed.
“Good job,” Rey said, “now just keep the lead tucked into your elbow like I showed you and slide the halter up his nose. Yeah, make sure it goes past the nasal bone—right there. Okay, now just buckle it around his neck like that and you’ve caught him.”
There was something resembling a smile on Ben’s face when he turned to follow Rey out of the corral, and she pretended not to notice the way her heart suddenly skipped a beat.
“We won’t do any riding today,” Rey explained as she held open the gate for Ben to lead Whisper through. “We’ll just practice tacking up for now, and then on Wednesday we’ll ride for a bit in the barn.”
Ben was unrelentingly attentive as Rey showed him how to groom Whisper’s coat and feet, a process that took them about ten times longer than it would have with any of the other horses at the ranch just because Whisper was so goddamn stubborn.
“You can be more assertive with him,” Rey encouraged after watching Ben try and fail to pick up Whisper’s back right foot at least four times. “Tapping the bone won’t hurt him, it’s just uncomfortable.”
Ben seemed hesitant about following Rey’s advice but finally managed to get Whisper’s foot propped up against his thigh. His incredibly large thigh. Rey blinked a few times, trying to clear the fog that had descended over her brain the second she noticed the way his quads strained against his black denim jeans when he planted himself against Whisper’s flank.
When Ben straightened up again after finishing picking Whisper’s feet, he was dripping with sweat. Rey quickly busied herself in the tack shed, taking a moment to catch her breath before emerging with the only saddle that would fit both Whisper and Ben, as well as Whisper’s modified bridle.
“I’ll have you watch me bridle Bebe on Wednesday so you can get a sense for how the browband and the throatlatch work,” Rey explained as she went over the tack with Ben at the hitching post. “This one’s a bit different because Whisper doesn’t like it when we touch his right ear.”
Rey helped Ben get the blanket and saddle in the right position and then explained how to buckle the cinches, watching carefully as he worked. She quickly noticed that he struggled more than he should to push the prong through the hole in the latigo, his fingers shaky and stiff, especially in his left hand.
Rey didn’t have the patience to watch him wrestle with it for very long. She stepped forward almost immediately, her fingers smoothly replacing his own, and it was only when she stepped back to have him check the stirrup length that she realized Ben had gone bright red with embarrassment.
Rey pretended not to notice and had Ben measure his arms against the leathers so she could make the necessary adjustments in the stirrups for his absurd height. Rey pretended not to notice the way Ben flinched every time she got close enough to touch him too.
“I’ll show you how to do the bridle,” Rey said once she was satisfied with the state of Whisper’s saddle. “It’s a bit tricky, like I said before. You need to get your thumb up into the corner of his mouth, like this—and then once the bit is in you pull the crown piece all the way up and over his ears before adjusting the buckle, like this, see?”
Ben nodded, his eyes tracking the movements of Rey’s fingers with such intensity that she felt her own face start to flush.
After bridling, Rey had Ben lead Whisper by the reins around the back of the ranch, with Rey playing tour guide as they went.
“That’s the barn where we’ll ride on Wednesday,” Rey said, indicating the larger structure to the east of the corral. It wasn’t much of an arena, only big enough for her or Poe and one of their students, really, but a good chunk of the riding they typically did with the residents was on-trail, anyway.
“The garden,” pointing to a mazelike assortment of overgrown plants that Luke rarely allowed anyone else to touch.
“The pond,” which seemed to intrigue Ben, who likely hadn’t noticed it before—the dense growth of mesquites and cottonwoods surrounding the edges made the path leading to the little wooden gazebo extending from the far shore almost invisible. It was a large enough body of water to get some decent laps in, and it was spring fed, the natural movement of the water and the filtrating plants Luke had put in around the edges keeping the pond a clear, crystalline blue. Rey spent every July mostly underwater; it was always too hot to do much else.
“The casita is where Din has his office,” Rey explained as they moved back toward the ranch. “So you’ll do your sessions with him in there, but it’s also where Din and Luke live, instead of in the main house with the rest of us.”
She caught the briefest flash of a grimace on Ben’s face at hearing Luke’s name, but then it was gone, and Rey decided not to spoil the rest of her afternoon by trying to work out why Ben already had beef with Luke. Knowing Luke as well as she did—it could have been anything.
They finished walking along the perimeter of the backyard and led Whisper back over to the hitching posts to untack. Rey had Ben do everything on his own this time—including removing Whisper’s bridle—but she occupied herself while he worked by slowly breaking a carrot into chunks and feeding them to Whisper, in hopes that Ben would feel less pressured to move more quickly than he was able.
Rey couldn’t help but wonder what had caused Ben’s poor dexterity. Usually, it was the sort of thing Din or Luke would have warned her about before his lesson. There was a laundry list of medical conditions that Rey had become accustomed to working around during her time at the ranch. It was odd that Ben’s hadn’t been disclosed.
Rey had almost gathered up the nerve to ask about it when Ben finished pulling the saddle and blanket off Whisper’s back and she found herself suddenly distracted by Ben’s sweat-slick visage, something akin to a smile pulling at his mouth.
“Nice,” Rey said encouragingly as she helped Ben carry the tack back to the shed. “You did awesome with him.”
And just like that, the smile was gone. Once again, Rey found herself floundering, not sure what she’d said to upset Ben. The exhaustion flooded in again. She felt herself closing off automatically in response, the need to spend five minutes alone rapidly eclipsing the pleasant enthusiasm that had boosted her energy levels for the duration of Ben’s lesson.
“You can head back to the house,” Rey told Ben as he swung the saddle up onto wall with the others. “I can put Whisper back into the corral.”
He nodded, giving no indication he’d noticed the shift in her mood. And then he was gone, his massive frame blocking out the sun streaming in through the doorway of the shed for one brief moment before he hopped down and headed back to the house.
Rey watched him go and then pulled out her notebook with a sigh. Usually, she’d sit out on the fence at the corral while she made notes for Din on her pupils’ progress, or she’d go to the little gazebo by the lake and spend some time in quiet reflection before noting her observations.
But today? Rey just wanted to be done.
Ben’s roommate—whom he had at some point learned was named Finn, though they were yet to be formally introduced (and it was looking increasingly unlikely that they ever would)—poked his head into their bedroom sometime around sunset, a guarded expression replacing his typically sunny expression.
“We’re all eating dinner soon,” Finn said, almost as if it were a question. “Rey and Rose made spaghetti. Garlic bread, too.”
“Cool,” Ben replied tonelessly. He didn’t bother to look up from his sketchbook, where he’d been attempting to draw Whisper’s unusual proportions from memory.
He heard Finn sigh from the doorway. “Look, man, I just think it would help if you at least made an effort to be part of the group—”
Ben’s head snapped upward. “Listen, man,” he interjected, voice dripping with venom, “I’m not looking to be anyone’s friend, okay? So just leave me the fuck alone.”
Finn threw up his hands in surrender and backed out of the room, shaking his head with a loud scoff. “Unbelievable,” Ben heard Finn mutter to himself as he left. He didn’t close the bedroom door behind him.
Ben initially decided to ignore it, trying to focus his attention back on his sketches, but now that his solitude had been unexpectedly invaded, the bedroom no longer felt like a refuge.
Ben found himself tiptoeing through the house several minutes later with his sketchbook tucked under his arm. He navigated the main rooms with care to avoid being spotted by any of the others through the archway that led from the living room into the dining room, his feet following the trail of plush, patterned rugs to avoid making any sound, though there was little chance of being heard over the raucous chatter emanating from the dinner table.
Ben slipped out the front door to minimize the risk of detection and skirted the empty east wing of the house. It took him a few minutes to locate the path that led around the edge of the pond in the dark, but once he’d located it, Ben followed it to the gazebo on the other side. He parked himself there, on the little wooden platform that overlooked the pond, and then he propped his sketchbook in his lap again and began to draw.
It had been months since Ben had picked up a pencil.
The inclusion of the fresh sketchbook and pencils had been Holdo’s idea; she’d done a walkthrough of his apartment with his dad while Ben was still unconscious in his hospital bed and had come away with plenty of observations for his file. The same file she’d sent to Din after Ben’s mother had decided that the key to his recovery was being locked up with a bunch of queer kids with stars in their eyes who had no idea what real life was actually like. Ben’s pencil dug into the page a little harder.
So—he was drawing again. It was a new development. Something about the novelty of his environment—or maybe it was just the fact that he was sleeping again—had triggered the itch. None of it was particularly good, and the limited range of motion in Ben’s fingers was preventing him from fully relying on muscle memory.
Worse than that, though, was the fact that the connection between Ben’s brain and hands felt like a cut wire: nothing was getting through. He could still draw what he’d seen, but the things he felt, the things he dreamed—none of that was ending up on the page.
Maybe that was the problem. The nightmares were finally gone, but now Ben didn’t dream at all anymore.
Soon even the moon dipped below the mountains, and it quickly became too dark to draw much of anything. Ben packed up his sketchbook and set off toward the house, intending to sneak back in the same way he’d snuck out.
Ben’s plan fell to pieces the second he set foot on the front steps. The light flipped on, the lone bulb above Ben’s head illuminating Luke, who was reclined in the rickety wooden rocking chair by the door, his feet propped up on the porch railing.
“You shouldn’t be going off alone,” Luke said in a disturbingly even tone. It was hard to judge his expression; it seemed to hover somewhere between fury and smugness. “What would your mother say?”
Ben felt his face twist into something ugly and desperate. “My mother doesn’t get a say,” he replied through gritted teeth. “I’m not a problem she can just throw money at until it goes away.”
“You think that’s what she’s doing?” There was something infuriatingly knowing in Luke’s eyes.
“I think it’s what she always does,” Ben spat out, his fists clenching and unclenching with the rhythm of his racing pulse. “If she wanted me to feel differently, then maybe she shouldn’t have shipped me across the country instead of dealing with me herself.”
Luke, evidently, didn’t have anything more to say on the matter. His eyes followed Ben as he stormed through the front door, no longer caring who saw him as he marched back to his bedroom with single-minded purpose.
Finn was there when Ben flung open the door, sitting cross-legged on the mattress with a journal in his hands. His eyes widened in surprise at Ben’s entrance, but he didn’t get a chance to say a single word before Ben turned out the lights, grabbed two more pills from the bottle on the nightstand, and dove fully clothed under the covers.
Ben was aware of the door opening and then closing again behind him, and then he was out.